se who
do not. The distinction between rich and poor does not serve: to the
laborer the rich man who works with his hands is not objectionable; the
poor man who does not, is. Consciously or unconsciously, and alike by
those whose necessities compel them to perform it and those whose better
fortune enables them to avoid it, manual labor is considered the most
insufferable of human pursuits. It is a pill that the Tolstois, the
"communities" and the "Knights" of Labor can not sugarcoat. We may prate
of the dignity of labor; emblazon its praise upon banners; set apart a
day on which to stop work and celebrate it; shout our teeth loose in its
glorification--and, God help our fool souls to better sense, we think we
mean it all!

If labor is so good and great a thing let all be thankful, for all
can have as much of it as may be desired. The eight-hour law is
not mandatory to the laborer, nor does possession of leisure entail
idleness. It is permitted to the clerk, the shopman, the street
peddler--to all who live by the light employment of keeping the wolf
from the door without eating him--to abandon their ignoble callings,
seize the shovel, the axe and the sledge-hammer and lay about them right
sturdily, to the ample gratification of their desire. And those who are
engaged in more profitable vocations will find that with a part of their
incomes they can purchase from their employers the right to work as hard
as they like in even the dullest times.

Manual labor has nothing of dignity, nothing of beauty. It is a hard,
imperious and dispiriting necessity. He who is condemned to it feels
that it sets upon his brow the brand of intellectual inferiority. And
that brand of servitude never ceases to burn. In no country and at
no time has the laborer had a kindly feeling for the rest of us, for
everywhere and always has he heard in our patronising platitudes the
note of contempt. In his repression, in the denying him the opportunity
to avenge his real and imaginary wrongs, government finds its main
usefulness, activity and justification. Jefferson's dictum that
governments are instituted among men in order to secure them in "life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is luminous nonsense. Governments
are not instituted; they grow. They are evolved out of the necessity of
protecting from the handworker the life and property of the brain worker
and the idler. The first is the most dangerous because the most numerous
and the least con