Page:Tyranny of Shams (1916).djvu/154

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
138
THE TYRANNY OF SHAMS

new enlistment of the great forces of nature or of the cunning of science in the service of man would enrich a few and impoverish many. In order to meet all these grave difficulties—in order to do more than secure certain advantages for the better equipped workers—a Labour Power would be forced radically to alter its principle and undertake the organisation of employment.

This organisation of industry seems to be the only device which will gradually restrict, and finally abolish, poverty. The opposition to it of middle-class workers and of so many artisans is unintelligible. It is time that we ceased to confine the term “workers” to the poorer and less cultivated caste among those who work: time that the lawyer and actor and housewife claimed that honourable title no less than the carpenter or navvy. In restricting the term to manual and badly paid workers we have concealed from ourselves the real community of interest of all who work. All of us, except those who live on the labour of others, have an interest in the proper organisation of the work of the world and the removal from our shoulders of this intolerable burden of the irregular workers and the idlers. The middle-class has an even greater interest than what is narrowly called the working-class, because the tendency of Labour legislation is, and will increasingly be, to put the heavier charge, not on large employers, who easily evade it, but on the middle-class generally. Here again the war has luminously illustrated our