really, vital breach in its system. Much the greater part of the work that needs doing could be rendered agreeable, if thought and care were given to this object. Even now, it is often only long hours that make work irksome. If the normal hours of work were reduced to (say) four, as they could be by better organization and more scientific methods, a very great deal of work which is now felt as a burden would quite cease to be so. If, as Kropotkin suggests, agricultural work, instead of being the lifelong drudgery of an ignorant labourer living very near the verge of abject poverty, were the occasional occupation of men and women normally employed in industry or brain-work; if, instead of being conducted "by ancient traditional methods, without any possibility of intelligent participation by the wage-earner, it were alive with the search for new methods and new inventions, filled with the spirit of freedom, and inviting the mental as well as physical co-operation of those who do the work, it might become a joy instead of a weariness, and a source of health and life to those engaged in it. What is true of agriculture is even more true of industry. If the great economic organizations which are now managed by capitalists, without consideration for the lives of the wage-earners beyond what Trade Unions are able to exact, were turned gradually into self-governing communities, in which the producers could decide all questions of methods, conditions, hours of work, and so forth, there would be an almost boundless change for the better: grime and noise might be nearly eliminated, the hideousness of indus-
