Most of all we deify capital, which never rests, but goes on producing day and night.
We are so occupied in getting ready to live that we have lost the art of living.
With us a man is a fool if he sets about to enjoy himself before he has laid up a fortune. We count the woman happy when she has married money, and the child accursed when he has no inheritance.
Every morning we arise from our beds and charge bloodthirstily into the struggle. We all do it, millionaires and paupers. In his office the trust magnate sits at his scheming until his nerves are loosed, his arteries hardened, and his soul caked. The slaves of Rome never worked so hard as many of our laborers in mines and factories.
“After the Semitic fashion,” says Remy de Goncourt, “you make even the women work. Rich and poor, all alike, you know nothing of the joys of leisure.”
There ought to be two leisure classes, yea three: all children under twenty-one, all women, and all men over sixty.
The work of the world could be easily done by males between the ages of twenty-one and sixty. To accomplish this, all that is needed is to abolish militarism, that insane burden of men in idleness, abolish all piled-up wealth-units that keep husky males workless, and abolish our worship of activity.
Then there would be plenty of work for every man to keep him from want, and plenty of leisure for every man to preserve in him a living soul.
If I were czar of the world, no woman should work except as she might elect for her amusement; no child should do aught but play.
Among savages the women do all the work. In the coming civilization they shall do none. The progress of the race is the progress of the female from toil to leisure.