"Yes," said I. "I was expecting Dick and Clara to make their appearance
any moment: but is there time to ask just one or two questions before
they come?"
"Try it, dear neighbour—try it," said old Hammond. "For the more you
ask me the better I am pleased; and at any rate if they do come and find
me in the middle of an answer, they must sit quiet and pretend to listen
till I come to an end. It won't hurt them; they will find it quite
amusing enough to sit side by side, conscious of their proximity to each
other."
I smiled, as I was bound to, and said: "Good; I will go on talking
without noticing them when they come in. Now, this is what I want to ask
you about—to wit, how you get people to work when there is no reward of
labour, and especially how you get them to work strenuously?"
"No reward of labour?" said Hammond, gravely. "The reward of labour is
life. Is that not enough?"
"But no reward for especially good work," quoth I.
"Plenty of reward," said he—"the reward of creation. The wages which
God gets, as people might have said time agone. If you are going to ask
to be paid for the pleasure of creation, which is what excellence in work
means, the next thing we shall hear of will be a bill sent in for the
begetting of children."
"Well, but," said I, "the man of the nineteenth century would say there
is a natural desire towards the procreation of children, and a natural
desire not to work."
"Yes, yes," said he, "I know the ancient platitude,—wholly untrue; indeed, to us quite meaningless. Fourier, whom all men laughed at, understood the matter better."
"Why is it meaningless to you?" said I.
He said: "Because it implies that all work is suffering, and we are so
far from thinking that, that, as you may have noticed, whereas we are not
short of wealth, there is a kind of fear growing up amongst us that we
shall one day be short of work. It is a pleasure which we are afraid of
losing, not a pain."
"Yes," said I, "I have noticed that, and I was going to ask you about
that also. But in the meantime, what do you positively mean to assert
about the pleasurableness of work amongst you?"
"This, that all work is now pleasurable; either because of the hope of
gain in honour and wealth with which the work is done, which causes
pleasurable excitement, even when the actual work is not pleasant; or
else because it has grown into a pleasurable habit, as in the case with
what you may call mechanical work; and lastly (and most of our work is of
this kind) because there is conscious sensuous pleasure in the work
itself; it is done, that is, by artists."
"I see," said I. "Can you now tell me how you have come to this happy
condition? For, to speak plainly, this change from the conditions of the
older world seems to me far greater and more important than all the other
changes you have told me about as to crime, politics, property, marriage."
"You are right there," said he. "Indeed, you may say rather that it is
this change which makes all the others possible. What is the object of
Revolution? Surely to make people happy. Revolution having brought its
foredoomed change about, how can you prevent the counter-revolution from
setting in except by making people happy? What! shall we expect peace
and stability from unhappiness? The gathering of grapes from thorns and
figs from thistles is a reasonable expectation compared with that! And
happiness without happy daily work is impossible."
"Most obviously true," said I: for I thought the old boy was preaching a
little. "But answer my question, as to how you gained this happiness."
"Briefly," said he, "by the absence of artificial coercion, and the
freedom for every man to do what he can do best, joined to the knowledge
of what productions of labour we really wanted. I must admit that this
knowledge we reached slowly and painfully."
"Go on," said I, "give me more detail; explain more fully. For this
subject interests me intensely."
"Yes, I will," said he; "but in order to do so I must weary you by
talking a little about the past. Contrast is necessary for this
explanation. Do you mind?"
"No, no," said I.