The Magical Chance

by Dallas Lore Sharp

An eight-hour day will not save that man. And he is typical of all men to-day. Only by his acceptance of the duty to dig can he be saved, and society with him. The principle of the division of labor has been misapplied: instead of specialization and the narrowing of each man’s portion, it should be applied broadly, multiplying his labors. Work is creative; it is self-expression; and I should let no man do for me what I can do. He robs me of living who robs me of doing.

The theory of present-day society—specialization, organization, combination, quantity production—is a fatal application of a perfectly sound principle. Six automobile combinations which in a year can destroy a hundred lesser combinations, can in another year destroy all but one of each other; and that remaining one, having nothing now to destroy, must turn and destroy itself.

IV

But I am concerned with life and literature. How does the organization of society affect books, admitting that it affects life? What is a book but a life?—and a more abundant life? Everybody who has lived has a book to write. But only those who have lived abundantly should write their books. Starve a nation spiritually, as ours is being starved; reduce its life to a mechanical routine; rob its labor of all creative quality, and how shall it write?

The duty to dig applies first to the spirit. There is sound economy in it if one’s political economy is sound. I do not say money. Economy and money are not equivalent terms. I digged as a duty last year; and as a result I did not buy a potato from the “combine” in Maine; I nearly got on without a pound of beef from Chicago; and could have made my honey serve for Cuban sugar. The same amount of time spent putting left hind wheels on automobiles might have brought me more money, and so, more beef and potatoes and sugar, and so, more gout and rheumatism. The duty to dig comprehends a great deal more than ordinary economy.

I would not imply that I can handle the Beef Trust and the potato pirates and the sugar barons with my humble hoe; or snap my fingers in the face of Standard Oil, and say, “Go to, I’ll have none of your twenty-eight-cent gas!” I do say that several million bee-keepers and potato-patchers, and hen-coopers, keeping busy in their back yards, as I keep busy in mine, could mightily relieve the railroad congestion, and save gasoline, and cut in on the demand for Chicago beef and cold-storage eggs, and generally lower the high cost of living.

It is not because there are “millions in it” that I would have the banker plant his back yard to beans. Thoreau planted two acres and a half to beans and potatoes (on a weak market, however), with a “pecuniary profit of $8.71½.” Here is no very great financial inducement to a busy banker, or to a ward boss. Still, who better than the ward boss or the banker could afford a private beanfield?

I say it is not for the sake of this $8.71½ profit of Thoreau’s that we must dig; but rather for that chapter on the bean field in Walden Pond, which proves the real worth of digging.

There can hardly be a form of labor so elemental, so all-demanding, so abundantly yielding of the fruits of life, as digging. Yet there are those who doubt the wisdom of digging because things can be bought cheaper at the store; and those who question their right to dig when they can hire a man to dig for them; and there are those who hate to dig, who contemn duty, who, if they plant, will plant a piece of fallow land with golf-balls only, and hoe it with brassies, niblicks, cleeks, and spooners, saying with Chaucer’s Monk: