Between the time a man saves by having machinery and the time he saves by having the brains of great men and geniuses to work with, it will be possible for men to do enough work for other people down in the basement of the world in a few hours to shut the whole basement up, if we want to, by three o’clock.  Every man who is fit for it shall spend the rest of his time in planning his work himself and in expressing himself, and in creating hand-made and beautiful, inspired and wilful things like an artist, or like a slowed-down genius, or at least like a man or like a human being.

Every man owes it to society to spend part of his time in expressing his own soul.  The world needs him.  Society cannot afford to let him merely give to it his feet and his hands.  It wants the joy in him, the creative desire in him, the slow, stupid, hopeful initiative, in him to help run the world.  Society wants to use the man’s soul too—­the man’s will.  It is going to demand the soul in a man, the essence or good-will in him, if only to protect itself, and to keep the man from being dangerous.  Men who have lost or suppressed their souls, and who go about cursing at the world every day they live in it, are not a safe, social investment.

But while every man is going to see that he owes it to society to use a part of his time in it in expressing himself, his own desires, in his own way, he is going to see also that he owes it to society to spend part of his time in expressing others and in expressing the desires and the needs of others.  The two processes could be best effected at first probably by alternating, by keeping the man in equilibrium, balancing the mechanical and the spiritual in his life.  Eventually and ideally, he will manage to have time in a higher state of society to put them together, to express in the same act at the same time, and not alternating or reciprocally, himself and others.  And he will succeed in doing what the great and free artist does already.  He will make his individual self-expression so great and so generous that it is also the expression of the universal self.  Every man will be treated according to his own nature.  Doubtless some men have not brains enough in a week to supply them for one hour a day of self-directed work.  It would take them five hours a day to think how to do one hour’s worth of work.  Men who prefer, as many will, not to think, and who like the basement better, can substitute in the basement for their sons, and buy if they like, the freedom of sons who prefer thinking, who would like to work harder than their fathers would care to work, up on the ground floor of the world.  But as time goes on, it is to be hoped that every man will climb up slowly, and will belong less and less of his time to the staff that borrows brains, and more and more of his time to the staff that hands brains down, and that directs the machinery of the world.  The time of alternation in dealing with different callings