"But isn't work a good thing?" I asked; for here he seemed to be denying one of the basic principles of Upsidonian philosophy.
"It is not one of the best things in itself," he said, "although for the great mass of mankind it is necessary. Freedom and knowledge are the best things; and freedom is even better than knowledge."
"I shouldn't have thought that all the people about us here were remarkable for their love of knowledge," I said.
"Not perhaps of knowledge to be learnt from books," he said, "though a good many of them are not lacking in that. But in knowledge that comes from going about in the world, and seeing human nature denuded of all its trappings, there is hardly any one of those you see around you who is not superior to the most learned scholars of the universities. They know the simple facts of life, as none who do not enjoy the freedom of extreme poverty can possibly know them; and the simple facts of life are the great facts of life."
"Do you consider poverty to be an end in itself?" I asked, mindful of the criticisms I had heard directed against the dirty set.
"It is so near to being an end," he said, "that there is no harm in considering it so. It is only by denuding yourself of everything that you can possess everything—beginning with yourself, which is the only possession really worth anything, and the only one which those foolish people who cannot make up their minds to do without some form of property never can attain to. Why should I want more than the whole earth? It is mine, if I do not shut myself up in one little corner of it and put a fence round me. The moment I do that I lose all the rest. I have exchanged the world for a building plot. With every possession I permit myself, I gouge out a weak place in my armour; I am vulnerable at that point. Possessing nothing, I am impervious to attack."
"You can't possess absolutely no thing," I said. "You must have clothes, for instance."
"You must, as society is at present constituted; and you are vulnerable, as I said, at that point. If anybody takes away my clothes, I lose my freedom. I cannot go about till I have found some more. And if anybody takes away my tinker's barrow, I lose the work that my training has unfitted me to be without. It is not, strictly speaking, the barrow that I am vulnerable over, because if I could do without it I should have practically my only burden removed; it is the habits I have acquired that are the unfortunate possession there. And that is why book-learning would be considered an evil in a purer state of society. Books themselves are, of course, the most odious form of bondage, and even in my tied-down days I never would acquire them for myself, but borrowed those I could not do without, and committed what was necessary to memory."
"Why should book-learning be considered an evil?" I asked.