e
part of recorded history, this generalization about the proclivity of
able and energetic people to make other people do things. One ignores
what is being done as if that mattered nothing, and concentrates upon
the use and enslavement of men.

One sees that enslavement to labor progressing from crude directness to
the most subtly indirect methods. The first expedient of enterprise was
the sword and then the whip, and still there are remote and ugly corners
of the world, in the Mexican Valle Nazionale or in Portuguese South
Africa, where the whip whistles still and the threat of great suffering
and death follows hard upon the reluctant toiler. But the larger part of
our modern slavery is past the stage of brand and whip. We have fallen
into methods at once more subtle and more effective. We stand
benevolently in front of our fellow man, offering, almost as if it were
food and drink and shelter and love, the work we want him to do; and
behind him, we are acutely aware, is necessity, sometimes quite of our
making, as when we drive him to work by a hut-tax or a poll tax or a
rent, that obliges him to earn money, and sometimes not so obviously of
our making, sometimes so little of our making that it is easy to believe
we have no power to remove it. Instead of flicking the whip, we groan at
last with Harriet Martineau at the inexorable laws of political economy
that condemn us to comfort and direction, and those others to toil and
hardship and indignity....

And through the consideration of these latter later aspects it was that
I came at last to those subtler problems of tacit self-deception, of
imperfect and unwilling apprehension, of innocently assumed advantages,
of wilfully disregarded unfairness; and also to all those other problems
of motive, those forgotten questions of why we make others work for us
long after our personal needs are satisfied, why men aggrandize and
undertake, which gradually have become in my mind the essential problems
of human relationship, replacing the crude problems of labor altogether
in that position, making _them_ at last only questions of contrivance
and management on the way to greater ends.

I have come to believe now that labor problems are problems merely by
the way. They have played their part in a greater scheme. This phase of
expropriation and enslavement, this half designed and half unconscious
driving of the duller by the clever, of the pacific by the bolder, of
those with weak