The first step to be taken was to start some enterprise in which every class of workmen should find employment—the skilled mechanic and the unskilled labourer; the inventor, the man of brains, and the mechanical clerk; the spinner, the weaver, the tailor; the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker—all would be required. Their banner would bear the homely legend, ‘Willing to work,’ and no man or boy who enlisted under it should ever again have a right to say: ‘I have got no work to do.’
There would be no drones in the hive; for every man would reap the full reward of what he produced according to its market value. No man should be paid for spending so many hours daily in a fixed place. That was an erroneous system—the incubator of strikes and of the absurd rules of trades-unions, by which the dull sluggard was enabled to hold down to his own level the quick-witted and industrious. Every man should have a direct interest in doing the best he could, and the most he could or the most he cared to do. Hear him!—the young heart beating with the fond hopes which others have proved so futile; and Madge listening with a smile of joyful conviction and confidence.
‘Another thing we shall sweep away altogether—the petty deceits—the petty strivings to overreach another by lies and tricks of trade, as they are called.’
‘And how may you be going to do that, I’d like to learn?’ was the sceptical query of the yeoman.
‘By making men feel that it isn’t worth while to tell lies or invent tricks.’
‘Seems to me you want to invent a new world,’ said Uncle Dick, a placid wreath of smoke encircling his brow, and a contented smile intimating that he was pretty well content to take things as they were.
‘Not at all,’ rejoined Philip. ‘I only want to bring the best of this world uppermost.’
‘But doesn’t the best find its own way uppermost?’ interposed Aunt Hessy; ‘cream does, and butter does.’
‘So does froth, and it ain’t the best part of the beer, mother,’ said Uncle Dick with his genial guffaw; ‘and for the matter of that, so does scum.’
‘They have their uses, though, like everything else,’ was the dame’s prompt check.