The evils we commonly attribute to business life belong to the continued survival in it of anti-industrial instincts, not to the industrial ones at all. Where an individual enters the generous, munificent, kindly field of human industry with the equipment of a beast or savage, merely to get for himself all that he can, great evil results; but the same evil is found unbroken in preindustrial times.
Of its own nature work is altruistic. The more generally industrial a society is the more we find the higher social feelings developed. But the instincts of the pre-human beast, the powerful and ingenious self-feeder, still find expression, and the more so as society becomes more finely organised. Thief catches thief very promptly where all are thieves by profession and there is little to steal! But a large, sensitive, finely organised society offers splendid opportunities to these mischievous left-overs of ancient times.
The first step is mother labour, the next, slave labour, so up through serfdom to contract, to our present system of wage labour. The last step, one we are but just learning, most of us, though some entered upon it long ago, is man working for mankind; not under any primitive coercion, but from the action of social forces as natural as breathing. For whom should he work? What “market” is worth his highly specialised ability but this? Can he make bricks or compose dramas solely for his own family?
To associate in the complex discharge of our vast energies, and to be amply nourished by their countless products, is Social Life. It is true that work is essentially feminine in its origin, but not permanently. As it develops it frees itself wholly from sex limitations and becomes a social function in which men and women take part as members of society. “Women’s work” in one stage of our life meant every kind of work. “Man’s work” is now generally supposed to include the harder and rougher, the higher and more difficult. There is no real foundation for either term. Either sex can do either kind. Work, modern work, has no sex connotation whatever. Moreover, modern science has shown that the female, instead of being inferior, is, if anything, the more important of the sexes.
In no way need the association of women with work degrade either. A highly entertaining contortion of popular thought is seen in our local and temporary idea that women ought not to work! We have bred in certain classes a sort of parasitic female, most painfully aborted. It is more agonising and more ridiculous for a woman not to work than for a man, because of her initial sex-tendency and her historic habits; but we have bred this pitiful enormity and admire it as a Chinaman admires the “golden lilies” on his wife’s shrunk shanks. But this absurdity is already passing.
One of the effects of sex-distinction, falsely and needlessly associated with work, is seen in the general fighting attitude of the male towards labour. In current literature and current life we continually hear man’s economic activities described as a struggle—a battle—with some vague opponent called “the world.” He is described as “going out” (“out” meaning elsewhere than at home, the assumption being that he would prefer to be “in” all the time!) “to battle with the world for his wife and little ones.”
Katherine, the reformed shrew, makes an eloquent description of this prowess of the husband. This is held to be a noble effort on his part, and quite his place as a man, while if she, owing to loss of male provider, is obliged to go “out” to “battle” similarly, that is held to be unfeminine and a real misfortune.
The word “out” in this connection we should dismiss completely from our foggy minds. We are in the world once and for all. We are not planted in a lot of private holes, with the rest of the broad earth for a mere battlefield, a place to sally forth into and grab something. Can you conceive of a world of human beings contentedly staying at home all the time if their supposititious booty could be handed in at the door without “battle”? We don’t go “out,” we go “in” to the world for our natural and necessary activities, without which we should cease to be human.
What we do in the world is not, or should not be, fighting. Those who insist on fighting instead of working should be promptly locked up and taught better; they disturb the peace, interfere with legitimate industry, and dishonestly run off with the products of other people’s labour.
An oversexed male, full of belligerence, actuated by his primitive masculine tendency to scatter and destroy instead of the later-developed, feminine-based race-tendency to construct, goes forth like a savage to hunt and fight. He finds what he wants, someone else has made it, and he seeks to get it away from that person by exercising the same traits as those used by any hunting animal, force or fraud. We have an immense number of predatory individual animals, both male and female, all included and maintained by the social organism, yet merely feeding on its tissues; we have a still greater number, indeed the vast majority of our workers, who, though in reality engaged in productive labour, imagine that their business is to get something from other people, and so strive to restrict their output and enlarge their intake as far as possible.