Selected Essays by Eric Gill
The Devin-Adair Company

CHAPTER XV

WORK

As usual it is necessary to begin at the beginning. Work, as the dictionary says, is "the exertion of energy, physical or mental." In common speech, however, we distinguish between the exertion of energy for the sake of pleasure or recreation, and the same exertion. when it is made for the sake of or as a means 'to the earning or procuring of the means of living. The former we commonly call play; the word work we commonly reserve for those occupations by means of which we get food, clothing, and shelter - the necessaries of life.

It is clear, therefore, that work is a good thing, for that which enables us to live must be good. We must assume that to live is good and that therefore to work is good. And we may freely agree with the Apostle when he says: "if any man will not work neither let him eat," for to eat what the labour of others has produced is, unless freely given, a form of robbery and, as the same Apostle says elsewhere: "he that stole, let him now steal no more; but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good. ..."

God has made the world and he has made man such that labour, that is to say, work, is necessary for life, and God cannot have made necessary that which in itself is bad. Moreover, as Solomon, inspired by the Holy Spirit, said: ". ..nothing is better than for a man to rejoice in his work, and this is his portion."

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Now it follows from these things that nothing which truly subserves our life can be bad, and therefore there can be no form of necessary work which is in itself degrading. In these latter days we have to be more than usually clear in our minds about this. The idea is prevalent that physical labour is a bad thing, a thing to be avoided, a thing from which we may rightly seek release. We cannot discuss the question of work, the question of the factory system, of the machine, of the arts, until we have right notions as to the nature of physical labour itself. For there can be nothing

made, either for man's service or for his pleasure, which is not, at bottom, dependent upon some amount of physical labour for its existence. Even in the most highly organized industrial world, with all the necessaries of life made by machines minded by machines, there will have to be at least the makers of machines and the machine overseers, and there will have to be designers of machines and designers of machine products. Further, there will have to be all the army of officials and administrators, and all the doctors, lawyers, and school teachers, and all these professional persons will be dependent upon a subordinate army of clerks and typists. Then there will be the transport workers of all kinds, and in .all these occupations there will be a basis of actual physical labour. So the question remains as before: is physical labour good or bad? Is it a thing to be reduced to a minimum because it is in itself a bad thing, unworthy of "the mystical mug called man," or is it in itself a good thing and only bad when it is done under bad conditions, conditions physically or hygienically unhealthy. or morally bad, or when the product is inferior or unsuitable for human use?

Now, as we have seen, according to Christian doctrine, physical labour is not in itself bad, but, on the contrary, because it is necessary for the preservation and continuance of human life, it is in itself good and may be and should be holy and sacred. We have to start with this doctrine. At every turn our object must be to sanctify rather than to exclude physical labour, to honour it rather than to degrade it, to discover how to make it pleasant rather than onerous, a source of pride rather than of shame.

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And we have to begin by realizing that, in itself and in a Christian society, there is no kind of physical labour, no kind whatsoever, none, which is either derogatory to human beings or incapable of being sanctified and ennobled. There is no kind of physical labour which is at one and the same time truly necessary to human life and necessarily either unduly onerous or unpleasant. This is the first thing to grasp, and it is perhaps the most difficult to-day. For considering the conditions of industrialized life in Europe and America, and according to the special kind of town mind which industrialism has begot and fostered (if we may thus, though unwillingly, ennoble a mechanism by speaking of it in such terms), there is nothing to be said about physical labour except that it is to be avoided as much as possible.

In sports and pastimes physical exertion is delighted in, but in the things we do to earn our living we regard the elimination of physical exertion as desirable in itself and a mark of good civilization. We regard physical labour as barbarous. We regard the sight of hundreds of men and girls doing simple repetitive operations requiring the minimum of strength and the minimum of intelligence as a sign of advancement from the primitive life of savages to the full stature of man made in God's image.

We are not concerned in this article to discuss the historical causes of our industrialism, its origin in the greed of manufacturers and merchants and its development under the sway of banks and financiers. The one and only point here is the nature of work. in itself, and our object is to rebut the common belief, which industrialism must necessarily encourage, that, as an eminent Catholic writer has recently said: "such manual work is, of itself, subhuman drudgery." This is not only untrue but subversive of the whole Christian doctrine of man. Unfortunately, in the circumstances of our industrial world, nothing could seem more obvious common sense. When we consider the working life of the millions of factory-hands, of shop assistants and clerks, of transport workers, and of the agricultural labourers on our degraded farms, it is obvious that much of the work is, indeed, sub- human drudgery and it cannot but seem a good thing that, by the use of machinery, at least the physical pain has been eliminated.

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So it has come about that we have come to believe that physical labour is in itself bad. We seek to reduce it to a minimum, and we look to our leisure time for all enjoyable exercise of our human bodies. We do not notice the contradiction. For if physical labour is a thing rightly to be eliminated from work because it is derogatory then it should rightly be eliminated from play also, which is absurd.

It should be obvious that it is not physical labour which is bad, but the proletarianism by which men and women have become simply "hands," simply instruments for the making of money by those who own the means of production, distribution, and exchange. And those who argue in favour of the still further elimination of physical labour on the ground that much manual work is, of itself, subhuman drudgery are either playing into the hands of those for whose profit the mechanical organization of industry has been developed, or they are playing into the hands of the communists and others who look to the Leisure State as the summum bonum.

We must return again and again to the simple doctrine: physical labour, manual work, is not in itself bad. It is the necessary basis of all human production and, in the most strict sense of the words, physical labour directed to the production of things needed for human life is both honourable and holy. And we must remember that there are no exceptions. It is frequently said in extenuation of industrialism that, for instance, modern sanitary engineering has not only lessened the danger of disease, but has done away with much unpleasant and degrading labour in the disposal of sewage. It is said that with sawing and lifting machinery we have done away with the unduly arduous; that with the power-loom we have done away with the slave labour of the old weavers. And in the domestic world we claim to have released the housewife and the mother from many or all of those labours known as "domestic drudgery," thus setting her £ree £or "higher things."

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In all these cases we forget that we had, first of all, by the conditions of town life or commercial exploitation so degraded these various kinds of labour that they were no longer capable of being viewed as pleasant and still less as sacred. And having thus degraded labour, making men and women into mere "hands" and beasts of burden, instruments of profit-making, having allowed, and even encouraged, the growth of the monstrous conglomerations we still call towns and cities, we turn round and curse the very idea of labour. To use the body, our arms and legs and backs, is now held to be derogatory to our human dignity. This then, is the first thing, and it is at the very base of the Christian reform £or which we stand, that we return to the honouring of bodily labour.

We have said nothing about the spiritual and creative and personal side of human work. Greatly as we have dishonoured and corrupted and destroyed the arts and crafts of men, reducing the workman to a "subhuman condition of intellectual irresponsibility," the root of the matter is in the dishonouring of physical work, and until we have eradicated the prevailing notion that some kinds of work are, of their nature, subhuman drudgery, all discussion of human labour is futile.

But it is relevant to note that in what are generally agreed to be the "highest" forms of human production, "the fine arts," those of painting and sculpture, £or example, physical labour is still honoured. In spite of the tendency in recent centuries for sculptors to relegate the actual job of stone-carving to hired labourers (and among painters the grinding of pigments and the preparing of the material to be painted on is now generally done in factories by machinery) nevertheless, it is still recognized that if the thing to be made is to be as good as it can be, the artist himself must use his own hands to do the work. With regard to this the supporters of industrialism say, of course, that in the fine arts the thing made depends £or its quality upon the actual personality of its maker, while in ordinary objects of human use this is not so.

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But apart from the fact that in a normal society "the artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist," and that, therefore, there is no such hard distinction between the fine arts and others, the point here is this: "that certain kinds of work which, in other circumstances, we regard as drudgery, which could be done by machinery if we so chose, are not so done. In fact, when the nature of the work demands it we willingly endure what our mechanistically-minded reformers find derogatory to human dignity and even delight in it and honour it, and it is only dullness of mind and lack of imagination which prevents the said reformers from seeing that all things made could be, and should be, regarded as we regard the products of artists."

It is impossible in a short article to show how these contentions apply throughout the whole world of labour. We can but repeat that in all those cases where it seems that mechanization has brought release from "sub-human drudgery," the drudgery is not inherent in the nature of the work, "of itself," but in the sub-human conditions consequent upon commercialism, industrialism, and the abnormal growth of cities. Whether or no we continue the present mechanistic trend or decide to deliberately restrict machinery (though the possibility of so doing is doubtful) depends ultimately upon the line we take with regard to the ownership of land and workshops. In a later article we shall see how the ownership of property is the chief means to the resuscitation of the dignity of physical labour and also of the quality of things made.

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PRIVATE PROPERTY

Jacques Maritain, Freedom in the Modern World

LEO XIII, Rerum Novarum

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At the very root of all our arguments for the institution of property is the fact that man is a person, and he requires, therefore, not merely food, clothing, and shelter as such, but that particular food, clothing, and shelter which is conformed to his unique personality. And parallel, as it were, with that fact is the fact that the material world into which he is born is such that only by his personal deliberate manipulation can material be made conformable to his needs.

There is only one necessary thing which is obtainable without deliberate labour, the air we breathe; all other necessities are in one degree or another the product of labour. If men were not persons, possessing proprietary right over themselves, mastery over themselves and over their acts, it would be possible to feed, clothe, and house them in herds and regiments and hives, and the claim to personal and private ownership of the means of production would have no rational ground. The present inclination to live in large conglomerations of identical apartments and the mass-production of food, clothing, furniture, building materials, and even houses indicates a widespread degradation of personality. The communist and other political systems which postulate the abolition of private property are products of the same degradation, and all alike are the consequence of the decay of personal ownership which industrialism has caused. For though the owners of industrial enterprises are given to boasting their close attachment to the institution of property, the effect of their politics has been the proletarianization of the masses of workers, and in the minds of the majority of persons today the idea of property is not ownership of the means of production, but simply ownership of a share of the money profits of industry and of the mass-produced furniture and pleasure-things (cars, wireless sets, etc.) which money can buy.

Now, physical and mental labour upon the earth and upon raw materials is the primary necessity for the preservation of human life. We may now go farther and we may say that as the object of human life is man's sanctification, labour being the means of life is the appointed means to holiness and thus to beatitude.

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It should be clear, therefore, that of all kinds of ownership, that of the means of production is the most important, and so important is it that, as Pope Leo XIII says, it is a natural right, natural, that is to say, in accord with the will of God; it is God's will for man. We have, therefore, two things to bear in mind: the necessity of labour, and the consequent natural right to property. The one follows from the other; for it is man, a person, who must labour and "the very essence of this activity, is to imprint on matter the mark of rational being." (Maritain, loc. cit.)

The root principles of private property being thus understood, we have next to consider the conditions of ownership in our society, and then we should consider possible remedies for the ills we discover. It is, of course, true that there are many ways in which property is held today in England, and it is held by many different classes of persons; but it is also true to say that tile thing we call proletarianism is the special and peculiar mark of our time. A proletarian is one who owns nothing but his power to labour and that of his children; children are his only "real property." At all times and in all countries there have been proletarians, but in no previous society has the propertyless man been politically free! The Roman or American slave was by law incapable of owning anything; the industrial slave is only debarred by the economic circumstances in which the owners of industrial property have deliberately contrived to place him; for it was to the great advantage of industrialists that there should be large numbers of men economically powerless. Cheap labour was essential to them, and no labour is so cheap as that of men who own nothing but their bodily strength.

But as man has a natural right to property, so he has a natural necessity to live in social collaboration with his fellow men. "The State is bound to protect natural rights. ...If it forbids its citizens to form associations it contradicts the very principle of its own existence. ..." (Leo XIII, loc. cit.)

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Therefore, in spite of the desperate opposition of owners of land and factories, the Trades Unions, after much bloody and cruel proscription, established themselves and were able to force upon the owners better conditions of labour and better pay. But the result was that a very great impetus was given to the development of machinery. The inventive ingenuity of men has always been available, but never be£ore was it thus used £or the exclusive service of men whose main concern was not the improvement of things made, still less the convenience of the workers, but primarily the monetary aggrandizement of themselves. The rising cost of human labour which Trades Unionism brought about made it necessary, from the point of view of those whose main concern was {and is) profits, to seek every possible means of substitution. Thus, first of all men were enslaved by proletarianization, then they were degraded by factory employment {"for from the factory dead matter goes out improved whereas men there are corrupted and degraded" {Pius XI, Quad. Anno) and, as the present Pope has said: "in this age of mechanization the human person becomes merely a more perfect tool in industrial production and a perfected tool for mechanized warfare"); and lastly, they are, as far as possible, deprived of occupation altogether. That is the logical culmination of the mechanization of industry, whether under capitalism or any other form of society, for the main object of machinery is the elimination of human labour.

Now it is clear that no remedy is possible unless, in the first place, we desire it, and, particularly, unless those who use and mind machines desire it; and in the second place, unless those who desire a remedy have the necessary power to effect it. As to the first thing, in order to inculcate a desire for a remedy we must, impossible though it sounds, difficult though it be, regain in ourselves a true conception of the nature of man and of the nature of human work, and we must succeed in converting our fellow men and women. In this endeavour we should be assisted by the growing misery of our times and the palpable breakdown of the materialist society in which we live.

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But this misery and that breakdown will not be sufficient in themselves; for there are other diagnoses of our disease besides the Christian one, and unless we are prepared and active a fascist or communist remedy will be applied, and neither the subordination of man to the State which is essential to the fascist theory nor the materialist interpretation of history which is essential to modern communism is compatible with Christian doctrine.

That is the first thing, the reconversion of England to Christianity and to Christ. But in respect of the matter which we are specially concerned in this article, the conversion of England will not suffice unless we understand that this implies much more than Sunday attendance and obedience to the Commandments of the Church. It implies also a clear knowledge of the essentials of a Christian society and a determination to recreate it.

.In addition to desiring a remedy we must know what the remedy is and understand its nature. The ill from which we are suffering is the decay of personality. The remedy is the revival of personal property. Under industrialism the majority of the people are deprived of personal control of their work, and such control is impossible without ownership. What you do not own you cannot control. What you do not control you are not responsible for. If you are not responsible you cannot be either praised or blamed. Christian doctrine lays it down as a first principle that man has free will and is, therefore, a responsible person - master of his acts and the intended consequences of his acts. This doctrine is flouted and denied in our society. In all but name England is a servile state.

The irresponsibility of the workman is the first and simplest way in which to see our evil condition. It is the first because the exercise of work is the formal reason of individual appropriation. It is the simplest because the exercise of work is within the experience of all but a small class of persons. But though it is the first reason the exercise of work is not the only reason of personal and private ownership. The second, and depending on the first, is the security and dignity of the family.

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The proletarian is insecure, that is his first misery. He lives in perpetual fear, Thus, all decency and dignity in human life is destroyed. "They do not know that they have renounced normal and natural responsibilities which even savages enjoy, they do not own their homes, their tools or the choice of trade; the power to bring up children, and the means to keep their aged and infirm have been surrendered to a malignant bureaucracy. ..from revolution they hope to gain not more responsibility, but (simply) a greater hold on the pipe line supposed to exist between ourselves and plenty." Therefore it is that Pope Leo says: "The right to property must belong to a man in his capacity of head of a family." Thus and thus alone can the principle of responsibility be brought to bear not merely upon the works of our hands (which, in any case, will be ''as straw" on the last day) but upon the fruit of our loins.

But ultimately the most important fruit of individual appropriation, of private property, is the exercise of charity. We are responsible persons, responsible for what we do and for what we make. To what end is this doing and making? The greatest happiness of the greatest number, says the politician (forgetting for the moment that he lives under the shadow of the whip); my own greatest happiness and enjoyment, says the individual (forgetting altogether that he is "standing in a perpetual queue waiting for a dole which is dependent for its coming on distant workers and an elaborate system of transport"); "that he may have something to give to him that suffers need," says the apostle; "to share them without hesitation," adds the Pope.

"Something to give" - that is the primary thought and the last word. In the word "give" we have the key to the whole problem. Whether it be the workman who must give himself for the good of the work to be done, or the parents who must provide for their children, or all of us who must live in love and charity with our neighbours, in every case economic freedom is necessary to support and make materially effective the precepts of the Gospel, Only upon this basis can a Christian society be built - a Christian society, that is to say, a society of free men united in and by

the love of Christ - free men, that is to say, men who enjoy the ownership of land and workshops, who own not merely themselves but the means of production.

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For you cannot give what is another's. You cannot give yourself if you are a slave. A proletarian

cannot even provide for the proles from whom he derives his name. Organized state "charity" is no substitute for the love of our neighbours. "Faith without works is dead," but our works; cannot be good works unless they are our own.

The discussion of the political means which must be employed to give effect to the demand for property and responsibility (should we succeed in reviving it) is not within the scope of this article. In any case, the revival of workers' ownership, if it is to be a real, personal ownership and not a mere state capitalism, or bureaucratic socialism, must be gradual, as gradual, indeed, as the spread of a desire for it. At the present time there is hardly any desire for responsibility and, at the most, the only desire for ownership is a for an equitable share of industrial profits, for more money, shorter hours, more amusement, and fewer babies. Among all classes, among the poor no less than the rich, the quantitative advantages of industrialism are held to outweigh all its evils, and they cling desperately to the hope that the evils can be removed without loss of the pleasures and conveniences. In these circumstances ownership is still the first necessity. It is futile to preach the Christian doctrine of responsibility to people who, by the nature and conditions of their work, can have none. "As many as possible of the people should be induced to become owners," that is all that can be said at present - induced, persuaded, encouraged, helped - with this qualification: that it be understood that ownership means control and responsibility and not merely a share of the profits. An immediate return to small workshops is impossible; the first step must be that the workers gain, in whole or in part, a real ownership of existing industrial enterprises - the workers; those who do the work, of whatever - grade, and not the anonymous and irresponsible investors of money.

CHAPTER XXI

THE LEISURE STATE

The Leisure State is the grand climax of the industrial world. The two things are obverse and reverse of the same medal; you cannot have one without the other, and you cannot want one and not want the other. The industrial world leads to the Leisure State. The Leisure State is the only possible excuse or palliation of industrialism. If there were no Leisure State looming out of the murky clouds of nineteenth-century industrialism this world would be hell indeed, and everyone would agree that it was so. But with, the promised land in sight men forget the pains and miseries of the road and the cruelties of the wild beasts besetting it. The haven is near, heaven on earth, the earthly paradise, in which by a reasonable organization of machine facture, transport, and distribution, a reasonable state control of money and credit, "the life blood so to speak of the entire economic body," the great resources of the earth will be available to all, and food, clothing, shelter, and amusement will be as plentiful actually as they are now potentially. Then at last men will be free from the curse of Adam. No more shall it be said "by the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn bread." No more shall it be true that "he that does not work, neither shall he eat." The lie shall be thrown back in the teeth of Genesis and St Paul. In brief: machinery will have re leased men £or "higher things," and, instead of the weary toil of the slaves of Rome or Egypt, or the no less weary toil of our modern factory slaves, all men, high and low, will be free to spend their long leisure hours in contemplation of the divine mysteries, and in the pursuit of all those fancies and games of which the lark night of primitive and savage labour has deprived the sons and daughters of men.

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And all this paradise, so longed for, through so many centuries of centuries, will have been the gift of those few men of genius who saw the possibilities of mechanical invention, and those others who, viewing the world through their telescopes and microscopes, saw it as a giant storehouse of unused and unlimited powers, and had the vision of the rational application of science to industry.

And though these men of genius, scientists, engineers, were supported in the first place by men driven by less worthy motives, the traders and merchants and the successors of traders and merchants, the men of business pure and simple, the money-lenders, and financiers and controllers of credit, nevertheless, we do not need to "scorn the base degrees by which we did ascend," good

comes out of evil, and the selfishness and greed and avarice of our first merchants and adventurers, and the even more monstrous greed and avarice of our Victorian and Georgian financiers need not blind us to the blessings which a benign nature had been using them to promote. The young airman throws his bombs on he indefensible slums. The resulting slaughter seems sad and even horrible. But good comes from evil. The Empire is preserved, and justice can again rule the minds of men. So it is in many affairs, and in this matter of the commercial and financial appetites which were the motive power in the first springing and later development of the mechanical and scientific method of production, we ma see again the holy triumph of good over evil; we may see the evil appetites as having been instrumental in the conception, birth, childhood, and adolescence of the earthly paradise which is the due and appropriate setting for rational animals; we do indeed "rise on stepping stones of our dead selves to higher things." The commerce- and finance-ridden mind is even now lying; the death-rattle may even now be heard in its abominable throat. Thus we shall emerge and the watchwords of Communism, as indeed of Christianity, "Each for all and all for each," will sound in our hearts without any necessity of a passage through either blood or tears, even tears of repentance - save only that blood and those tears through which we, in our long pilgrimage from our ape-like ancestral home, have already passed.

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Science! Machinery! blessed words, and yet more blessed things. All necessary work, as such is understood by Science, shall be done by Machinery, and, it is not too much to predict, the machines themselves shall be minded by machines. Science! Machinery! - and thus Freedom! We have not yet quite arrived; but Science and Mechanics have shown us the way. Nothing remains to be done but to destroy the stronghold of the robbers who have for so long beset our path - and, if possible, convert (why not?) its inmates. The talents which, with so much skill and daring, so much courage and, so to say, self-sacrifice, they. have defended themselves, will be of even greater use in the earthly paradise, and will bring them even greater glory among men - the glory of saviors, and the love and devotion of their fellows. As organizers of the scientific knowledge and its application to engineering and machine facture they have shown their prowess. It only remains for them to devote such great gifts to the common good instead of their private aggrandizement. Statesmanship has not been wanting among men, and, as in ancient Petra, rose-red city, the highway robbers became princes and governors, so let our captains of finance become our honoured leaders and directors.

But, alas! the whole of the foregoing paragraphs is nothing but romantic nonsense. Romantic, that is untrue to the facts of life and of man, untrue to the facts of man's nature, untrue to the nature of the physical world, and to the nature of man's spiritual being. Nonsense, complete nonsense! The world is not like that

For quite apart from the extreme unlikeliness of any conversion of our commercial and financial over-lords, or even of the millions of small men (ourselves, in fact) to the view that the only true function of machines and of science is the amelioration of man's earthly life and his release from the thraldom of physical labour so that he may spend his time in pure enjoyment and in

the contemplation of holy things -

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quite apart from the fact that the hard won fruits of our industrialism are more likely to fall from our grasp and the world, our world, go down in the "war, pestilence, and famine" to which the service of riches inevitably tends - quite apart from all that, such a way of life is clean contrary to the nature of this physical world, to man's physical nature, and to the nature of his desires.

Moreover, and above all, it is clean contrary to all we know and all that has, been revealed as to man's ultimate destiny and Last End. We are not spirits inhabiting, perforce and against our wills, a sort of inanimate motor-cars which we call our bodies, So that the more automatic these cars can be contrived to be, the fuller and richer and more untrammeled will be our spiritual life. We digest our food without any conscious exercise of intelligence and will, and we are glad to be able to do So, and rightly consider ourselves unwell when we do otherwise. But it does not follow that it would be a good thing, therefore, if all the growing and preparation of food, the making and adorning of clothes and houses and town halls and churches, were in like manner reduced to

being automatic and unconscious operations, if all the arts of living were reduced to the sphere of the drains. It quite obviously does not follow, and it cannot be made to follow, by any process of .logical reasoning even if ordinary people were prepared to accept conclusions So arrived at. It is, on the contrary, quite obvious that not only are all the arts of life-farming and preparing food and eating it, making woven or other fabrics for clothes and furnishings, building all sorts of buildings from the lowliest and most simple sheds and cottages to the most elaborate and ornate palaces and shrines, the whole affair of transport both on land and sea - not only are these occupations the very ones which, for thousands of years, and even now, today, in spite of their mechanization, are man's chief means to the enjoyment of life, his chief pride and delight, the things we treasure and which we travel far to see and share-not only this, but they still are, and always have been, the chief means available to him for the expression and manifestation of his spiritual composition.

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For man is not an angelic and unembodied spirit; his is a composite nature, material and spiritual, both real and both good; and his pleasures are not simply the pleasures of the mind. He is not altogether incapable of such - logic, metaphysics, mathematics, such things enthral some persons no less than the job of building with stone enthrals others. But, such, in general, is not man; and even your mathematician or your monastic ascetic enjoys and promotes the other arts of men; he likes his food and drink; it does not seem inappropriate to him that good wine should adorn his table or that weavers should give as much disinterested love to the fabrics of his clothes as he himself does to his research into the nature of things

The Leisure State is founded upon a false angelism? a false notion of the fitness of men to enjoy themselves without the direct responsibility of each one to earn his living and that of his wife and children by his own work. This false angelism was, fifteen hundred years ago, called Manicheeism. It is the same illusion today. It is the notion that matter is essentially evil and therefore work essentially degrading. No one would express it like that today; we do not like such religious-sounding terms. But that is the basis of our Leisure State - the release of man from his entanglement with the matter. The highbrow exponents see it in highbrow terms - higher things, high art, beauty, contemplation. ...Ordinary people are not thus constituted. For them it means simply a release from drudgery and insecurity, from slum-life and overcrowding, from underfed and unhealthy children. It means more travel in motor-cars, at greater speeds, more racing, more football matched; in fact, more of everything but of that dreary business which industrialism has made of work - of which no one could be expected to wish anything but to see the last of it.

And this modern Manicheeism has no foundation in a generous spirituality. It is not the product of an overwhelming love of God, as though one should say with St Paul: "I long to be dissolved and to be with Christ." Far otherwise! Here is no desire for the pure bliss of some beatific vision; here is nothing but a desire for release from drudgery and privation.

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Here is no desire for the time when men will have better food and better drink, better and lovelier clothes and clothes more suitable to adorn and protect the darling bodies 0£ men, better houses, and, above all, better places for the worship of God and His proper praise; here, alas! is commonly no more than a desire for release from the pains thrust upon them by a selfish capitalism and, otherwise, no idea more noble or even more human than to have a good time. For, don't you see, in the Leisure State people won't really love the "good things" they will enjoy in such plenty. They won't love them in the sense that they will see them and use them as holy things in which and by which God is manifest. In reality they will despise everything. Things will be made only for passing enjoyment, to be scrapped when no enjoyable. Hence and awful problem, even now of the dumping ground for old motor cars; hence the problem of discarded razor blades ... It is all a great illusion; the release from work does not and will not mean the love of a good life and of good things; it does not mean the City of God; it means, at the best, an impossible angelism and, at the worst, an impossible aestheticism, the worship of the pleasure of sensation.