ous figure, the worker who "took pleasure in his
work." If there ever have been such people, they ought, as Wilde
says, to be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Any person who
enjoys being turned into a machine for the best part of his days and
regards it with pride, is no better than a blackleg or a scab--not a
"scab" in regard to a little company of strikers, but a "scab" in regard
to the human race; for he is one who denies that life in itself, life
with all its emotional, intellectual and imaginative possibilities, can
be endured without the gross, coarsening, dulling "anaesthetic" of
money-making toil.

This is the word that the social revolution wanted--the word so much
more to the point than discourses upon justice and equality and
charity. And it is precisely here that the wage-earners of our present
system are in harmony with the "intellectuals."

The "wage-earners," or those among them who have in them
something more than the souls of scabs, despise and loathe their
enforced labour. The artist also despises the second-rate tasks set
him by the stupidity and bad taste of his middle-class masters.

The only persons in the community who are really happy in their
life's work, as they fantastically call it, are those commercial
_ruffians_ whose brutal, self-righteous, puritanical countenances
one is swamped by--as if by a flood of suffocating mediocrity--in
the streets of all our modern cities.

Oscar Wilde is perfectly right. We are living in an age when the
world for the first time in its history is literally under the rule of
the stupidest, dullest, least intelligent and least admirable of all
the classes in the community. Wilde's "Soul of Man" is the
condemnation--let us hope the effective condemnation--of this
epoch in the journey of the race.

The odium which France--always the protector of civilisation--has
stamped upon the word "bourgeois" is no mere passing levity of an
irresponsible Latin Quarter. It is the judgment of classic taste--the
taste of the great artists and poets of all ages--upon the worst type of
person, the type most pernicious to true human happiness, that has
ever yet appeared upon the planet. And it is this type, the
commercial type, the type that loves the money-making toil it is
engaged upon, which rules over us now with an absolute authority,
and creates our religion, our morality, our pleasures, our pastimes,
our literature and our art.

Oscar Wilde must be forgiven everything