In Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic countries, where people have fallen most completely under the influence of machine production and business enterprise, and where they have lost by the way their conception of their creative potentiality, work is universally conceived as something which people endure for the sake of being “paid off.”  Being paid off, it seems abundantly clear, is the only reason a sane man can have for working.  After he is paid off the assumption is his pleasure will begin.  A popular idea of play is the absence of work, the consumption of wealth, being entertained.  Being entertained indeed is as near as most adult men in these countries come to play.  Their Sundays and holidays are depressing occasions, shadowed by a forlorn expectancy of something which never comes off.

The capacity of the French people for enjoying their holidays is much the same as their capacity for enjoying their work.  This, no doubt, is a matter of native habituation.  But however they came by it, it has had its part in determining the industrial conditions of France.  The love of the people for making things has resisted in a remarkable way the domination of machine industry and modern factory organization.  The French work shop, averaging six persons, is as characteristic of France as the huge factory organization with the most modern mechanical equipment is characteristic of American industry.  As the workers in these shops participate more intimately in the fabrication of goods they come more nearly to a real participation in productive enterprise.  This close contact with the actual processes of production gives the workers a sense of power.  A sense of their relation to the processes and their ability to control them engenders courage.  Indeed it is the absence of fear, rather than the absence of work, that determines the capacity of men for play.

It was not accidental that the movement of the French workers for emancipation emphasized a desire for control of industry.  The syndicalism of France has expressed the workers’ interest in production as the labor movements of other countries have laid stress exclusively on its economic value to them.  The syndicalists’ theory takes for granted the readiness of workers to assume responsibility for production, while the trade unionists of England, Germany and the United States ask for a voice in determining not their productive but their financial relation to it.

It is the habit of these other peoples to credit the lack of interest in work to physical hardships which the wage system has imposed.  But the wage system from the point of view of material welfare has borne no less heavily on the French than on other workers.  It is also difficult to prove that the physical hardships of modern methods of production are greater than the hardships of earlier methods.  The truth is that neither hardships nor exploitation of labor are new factors; they have both, through long centuries, repressed