it. With Morris there is no such detraction. Ever and ever again he dwells upon the idea that work is the greatest boon of life, not simply because work is necessary for the sustenance of life—what is necessary may yet be painful and irksome—but because it is in itself a good and joyous thing; because it is the chief means whereby man can express his creative powers, and give to his fellows the gifts of his affection and diligence.
Underneath much of the prevalent teaching of Socialism, especially that of Marxist propagandists, as in the teaching of the Book of Genesis, there lurks the notion that work is from its very nature an oppressive and hateful obligation, to be borne at least as a burden, as a price to be paid for the privilege of life. One feels when reading many of the leading expositions of Socialism that we should want, were such a thing possible, to free the workers not only from the present conditions of work, but from work altogether. In other words, there clings to Socialist teaching the idea—the Capitalist idea, it might be called—that work is in its nature a servitude and oppression, and that the ideal of complete social emancipation would be that we should all be able to live without work—live, that is to say, as 'ladies and gentlemen' without having to do any work at all!
So far from regarding work in that light, so far from looking upon work as being in itself an evil, an undesirable or penitential task, Morris held work to be the highest, the most God-like of all human capacities. Without work life would cease to have any meaning or yield any noble happiness at all. Hear him:
'The hope of pleasure in work itself: how strange that hope must seem to some of my readers—to most of them! Yet I think to all living things there is a pleasure in the exercise of their energies and that even the beasts rejoice in being lithe and swift and strong. But a man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and
