These things, to speak shortly, are chiefly machines for carrying on the competition in buying and selling, called falsely commerce; and machines for the violent destruction of life—­that is to say, materials for two kinds of war; of which kinds the last is no doubt the worst, not so much in itself perhaps, but because on this point the conscience of the world is beginning to be somewhat pricked.  But, on the other hand, matters for the carrying on of a dignified daily life, that life of mutual trust, forbearance, and help, which is the only real life of thinking men—­these things the civilised world makes ill, and even increasingly worse and worse.

If I am wrong in saying this, you know well I am only saying what is widely thought, nay widely said too, for that matter.  Let me give an instance, familiar enough, of that wide-spread opinion.  There is a very clever book of pictures {4} now being sold at the railway bookstalls, called ’The British Working Man, by one who does not believe in him,’—­a title and a book which make me both angry and ashamed, because the two express much injustice, and not a little truth in their quaint, and necessarily exaggerated way.  It is quite true, and very sad to say, that if any one nowadays wants a piece of ordinary work done by gardener, carpenter, mason, dyer, weaver, smith, what you will, he will be a lucky rarity if he get it well done.  He will, on the contrary, meet on every side with evasion of plain duties, and disregard of other men’s rights; yet I cannot see how the ‘British Working Man’ is to be made to bear the whole burden of this blame, or indeed the chief part of it.  I doubt if it be possible for a whole mass of men to do work to which they are driven, and in which there is no hope and no pleasure, without trying to shirk it—­at any rate, shirked it has always been under such circumstances.  On the other hand, I know that there are some men so right-minded, that they will, in despite of irksomeness and hopelessness, drive right through their work.  Such men are the salt of the earth.  But must there not be something wrong with a state of society which drives these into that bitter heroism, and the most part into shirking, into the depths often of half-conscious self-contempt and degradation?  Be sure that there is, that the blindness and hurry of civilisation, as it now is, have to answer a heavy charge as to that enormous amount of pleasureless work—­work that tries every muscle of the body and every atom of the brain, and which is done without pleasure and without aim—­work which everybody who has to do with tries to shuffle off in the speediest way that dread of starvation or ruin will allow him.

I am as sure of one thing as that I am living and breathing, and it is this:  that the dishonesty in the daily arts of life, complaints of which are in all men’s mouths, and which I can answer for it does exist, is the natural and inevitable result of the world in the hurry of the war of the counting-house, and the war of the battlefield, having forgotten—­of all men, I say, each for the other, having forgotten, that pleasure in our daily labour, which nature cries out for as its due.