As for the effect of wealth, great wealth in private hands is not an advantage; it, too, is a morbid condition, and under its evil influence the scum of society is steadily and increasingly produced. It is perhaps as hard for a great nature to overcome the difficulties of our illegitimate wealth as those of our illegitimate poverty. Still some do it. We have but to study the biographical dictionary to find that the proportion of great men to rich and poor is about the same as the proportion of those two classes, that is all.
Meanwhile the healthy truth under this is the physiological law that exercise develops function. Whatever power you have is increased by exercise to a certain extent. But you must first have your power. A punching bag helps develop your muscles if rightly used, but it does not make them. Your daily food is the prime factor.
To get the best results from people they must first be born in good condition—starved mothers and exhausted fathers are not advantageous; then kept in good condition;—good air, good food, good clothing. Does anyone wish to claim that poor air or poor food or poor clothing is advantageous? When you have good stock, and give it all the advantages of true education, bringing out and correlating all its powers, then the strong and active creature can maintain and develop those powers by exercise. But dumbbells in place of dinner do not strengthen.
One more very common attitude of mind with regard to work, not as fundamental as the foregoing, and not founded on any law whatever, but on arbitrary and evil conditions, is our general contempt for it.
Regarding it, as we must under the Want theory, as done only to gratify a want; regarding it, as we must under the Ego concept, as done by the individual for the individual, it does seem a poor thing enough. Why should we honour and approve the never-so-ingenious efforts of a person to keep himself alive, so scornfully described in a poem of Robert Buchanan:
“Struggle, speculate, dig, and bleed,
Reap the whirlwind of Venus’ seed,
O senseless, impotent human breed!”
But beyond the legitimate scorn of a social creature for what he estimates as an individual activity, comes our illegitimate scorn based on lamentable, evil conditions.
The work of the free mother in the matriarchal period was never despised; when men enslaved women their work became contemptible. So when the despised captive was made to labour, his work also was held contemptible. And then, as Veblen shows so irrefutably, this primitive attitude was retained through all the centuries in the stagnant pool of leisure-class life, that singular medium wherein the active modern world may find preserved a sedimentary deposit of most ancient times. This class and its customs and habits of mind, being revered by us, we have made permanent and constantly reinforced the scorn of work which else would have been contradicted long since by every fact of progressing civilisation.