d of going to work?" And almost every one of them
answered "Yes".' Why were they unhappy at home? Let Professor Taussig
reflect on the answer. Not because they had 'rough' or 'coarse' or
'humdrum' work to do, as in a factory or laundry, but because they had
nothing to do, and they had found idleness unbearable. 'One said that
work "took up her mind", she had been awfully discontented'. Another
that 'you were of some use'. Another thought 'it was because the hours
went so much faster. At home one could read, but only for a short time,
there was the awful lonesome afternoon ahead of you.' 'Asked a little
girl with dyed hair but a good little heart. She enjoyed her work. It
made her feel she was worth something.' And Mr. Wallas concludes that it
is just because 'everything that is interesting, even though it is
laborious, in the women's arts of the old village is gone': because
'clothes are bought ready-made, food is bought either ready-cooked, like
bread and jam and fish, or only requiring the simplest kind of cooking':
in fact just because physical exertion has been lightened by books and
machinery, that 'there results a mass of inarticulate unhappiness whose
existence has hardly been indicated by our present method of
sociological enquiry'.

It would seem then that the task of associating modern industrial work
with happiness is not impossible, if we would only set ourselves to the
task. And the task is a two-fold one. It is, first, to make it possible
for people to follow the employment for which they are by nature best
fitted; and secondly, to study much more closely than heretofore, from
the point of view of happiness, the conditions under which work is done.
The first task involves a very considerable reversal of current
educational and social values. It does not simply mean paving the way
for the son of an engine-driver to become a doctor or a lawyer or a
cavalryman. It means paving the way for the son of a duke to become,
without any sense of social failure, an engine-driver or a merchant
seaman or a worker on the land--and to do so not, as to-day, in the
decent seclusion of British Columbia or Australia, but in our own
country and without losing touch, if he desires it, with his own natural
circle of friends. The ladder is an old and outworn metaphor in this
connexion. Yet it is still worth remembering that the Angels whom Jacob
observed upon it were both ascending and descending. It is one of the
fallacies of ou