monotonous repetition of destruction, then the greater the cost and waste of human labour the more irresistibly comic should the situation appear; and the management which provided Worcester or Dresden china for its low-comedy wits to play upon would have logical grounds for considering that it was thereby supplying its audience with livelier entertainment more satisfying to its taste.[1]
Now what I want you to see is that such a production would not be entertaining to an audience which had not come to regard the labour of man's hands with a licentious indifference—which had not developed the gambler's contempt for the true relations between labour and value. And here I want to put before you a proposition which may at first shock you, but which I hope to prove true. And that is that labour in itself, apart from its justification in some useful result, is bad and degrading; the man who is put to work which he knows is to have no result comes from that work more degraded and crushed in spirit than the man who merely "loafs" and lives "naturally."
Perhaps the readiest example of that is the old treadmill system which was once employed in our prisons, where the prisoner was set to grind at a crank artificially adjusted to his physical strength, but having no useful result; and I believe that the main reason why prisoners
- ↑ By that reckoning we in Europe are to-day the best comedians the world has ever seen. Out of peace-conditions nations produce their wars.
