work, they would perform their task perfectly, and they certainly would not put up with the horrible conditions in which men toil nowadays without reforming them. If a Huxley spent only five hours in the sewers of London, rest assured that he would have found the means of making them as sanitary as his physiological laboratory.
As to the laziness of the great majority of workers, only philistine economists and philanthropists say such nonsense.
If you ask an intelligent manufacturer, he will tell you that if workmen only put it into their heads to be lazy, all factories would have to be closed, for no measure of severity, no system of spying would be of any use. You should have seen the terror caused in 1887 among British employers when a few agitators started preaching the "go-canny" theory—"for bad pay bad work"; "take it easy, do not overwork yourselves, and waste all you can."—"They demoralize the worker, they want to kill industry!" cried those who formerly inveighed against the immorality of the worker and the bad quality of his work. But if the worker were what he is represented to be—namely, the idler whom you have continually to threaten with dismissal from the workshop—what would the word "demoralization" signify?
So when we speak of a possible idleness, we must well understand that it is a question of a small minority in society; and before legislating
