This is indeed the old, old theory. It has the sanction of many venerable authorities. But, like almost everything else that has come down to us from the ignorant far past, it will not stand examination.
There was a time when work undoubtedly was both a curse and a degradation. When the many labored under the lash that the few might reap, when the toilers got only the toil and the idlers got all the results, when the highest ideals of the human race were a full stomach and fine raiment and the gratification of other crude desires and appetites--then work was justly regarded as degrading drudgery. But not now, hard though laziness and cheap vanity strive to keep alive such fictitious distinctions as are given an air of actuality by phrases like “master and servant,” “employer and employé,” “capital and labor,” “gentleman,” “lady,” et cetera, et cetera. The truth of the dignity of labor, the dishonesty and degradation of every form of parasitism, however gaudily tricked out, appears despite the subtleties of snobism.
The political ideal of a barbarian is to rule others; the political ideal of a highly civilized man is to rule himself and let his fellow-men alone. The industrial ideal of a barbarian is to live in empty-headed and ambitionless idleness upon the labor of others. The industrial ideal of a civilized man is to work, and work incessantly in conditions that permit him to reap the full reward of his efforts and to make those efforts in the direction best suited to his capacities. And he has a deepening scorn of all the tricks by which some men live, taking all and giving nothing. Nor is his scorn the less when those tricks happen to be made “respectable” by law or by custom.
Is it any wonder that a man with the brain of an Æsop or an Epictetus should have revolted against compulsory labor that could much better have been performed by an ox or an ass? On the other hand, is it not amazing that any man with a thinking machine in his skull and vital force flowing along his nerves can be content to lead a life that would bore a grasshopper? The “curse and degradation” theory of work adapts itself to climates. Man began in the tropics, where idleness is least difficult; therefore for a long time absolute idleness was the ideal of this theory. But when man moved up into the colder parts of the earth, where to idle was to be physically miserable, the theory was slightly modified. The curse and the degradation of work were thought to lie in the doing of useful work. To tilt with iron-pointed sticks, to stab and jab and cut, to spend days and weeks chasing little foxes that could not even be eaten if by chance they were caught, to hit little balls with little sticks, to sit all night matching monotonous picture cards--all such “amusements,” the hardest kind of work, work at which the thinking part of any human being might well balk, were regarded as “worthy of a gentleman.” To plough, to sow, to reap, to manufacture something that might be used, to perform any kind of useful labor, mental or manual, was “low” and “menial.”