The intimate psychology of work is a thing altogether too little considered and discussed.  One asks:  “What keeps a workman working properly at his work?” and it seems a sufficient answer to say that it is the need of getting a living.  But that is not the complete answer.  Work must to some extent interest; if it bores, no power on earth will keep a man doing it properly.  And the tendency of modern industrialism has been to subdivide processes and make work more boring and irksome.  Also the workman must be satisfied with the living he is getting, and the tendency of newspaper, theatre, cinematograph show and so forth is to fill his mind with ideas of ways of living infinitely more agreeable and interesting than his own.  Habit also counts very largely in the regular return of the man to his job, and the fluctuations of employment, the failure of the employing class to provide any alternative to idleness during slack time, break that habit of industry.  And then, last but not least, there is self-respect.  Men and women are capable of wonders of self-discipline and effort if they feel that theirs is a meritorious service, if they imagine the thing they are doing is the thing they ought to do.  A miner will cut coal in a different spirit and with a fading zest if he knows his day’s output is to be burnt to waste secretly by a lunatic.  Man is a social animal; few men are naturally social rebels, and most will toil very cheerfully in subordination if they feel that the collective end is a fine thing and a great thing.

Now, this force of self-respect is much more acutely present in the mind of the modern worker than it was in the thought of his fathers.  He is intellectually more active than his predecessors, his imagination is relatively stimulated, he asks wide questions.  The worker of a former generation took himself for granted; it is a new phase when the toilers begin to ask, not one man here or there, but in masses, in battalions, in trades:  “Why, then, are we toilers, and for what is it that we toil?”

What answer do we give them?

I ask the reader to put himself in the place of a good workman, a young, capable miner, let us say, in search of an answer to that question.  He is, we will suppose, temporarily unemployed through the production of a glut of coal, and he goes about the world trying to see the fine and noble collective achievements that justify the devotion of his whole life to humble toil.  I ask the reader:  What have we got to show that man?  What are we doing up in the light and air that justifies our demand that he should go on hewing in narrow seams and cramped corners until he can hew no more?  Where is he to be taken to see these crowning fruits of our release from toil?  Shall we take him to the House of Commons to note which of the barristers is making most headway over Welsh Disestablishment, or shall we take him to the Titanic inquiry to hear the latest about those fifty-five third-class children (out of eighty-three)