For most men and women there is, of course; no alterative; they must work or live a wretched, comfortless life, with the actual risk of starvation.  A few may prefer the precarious existence of the tramp, or pauper; but they must pay the price in homelessness and hazard.  Except for abnormal social conditions, the vile housing of the poor, the hopeless monotony and overlong hours of most forms of unskilled labor, the lure of drink, and the deprivation of the natural joys of life, there would be few of these voluntary idlers among the poor.  The aversion to work, when it is decently agreeable, in decent surroundings, and not carried to the point of fatigue, is abnormal; and it is by the improvement of the conditions and remuneration of labor that we must seek to cure that unwillingness to work, in the poor, which Tolstoy came to believe was their greatest curse. [Footnote:  See his What Shall We Do Then? (or What to Do?)]

Much more difficult to cure is the curse of idleness among the rich.  The absence of the need of working, and the possibilities of pleasure seeking which money affords, are a constant temptation to them to live a life of ease.  The spectacle is not unfamiliar of rich young men traveling about the world, living at their clubs, spending their energies in gayeties and sports, with hardly a sense of the responsibilities which their privileges entail.  Fortunately, however, there is, in America at least, a pretty widespread sense of shame among men about such shirking, and the idler has to face a certain amount of mild contempt.  Upon women the pressure of public opinion has not yet become nothing upper-class ladies who spend their time at cards, at teas, at the theater, who think of little but dress and gossip, or of the latest novels and music, who evade their natural duties of motherhood or give over care of home and children to hired servants, that they may be freer to live the butterfly life, are still too little rebuked by their hard-working sisters and by men.  We must impress it upon all that the inheritance of money does not excuse laziness; if the pressure to earn a living is removed, there are numberless ways in which the rich can serve, privileged ways, happy ways, which there is far less pretext for avoiding than the poor have for hating their grim toil.  In Carlyle’s words, “If the poor and humble toil that we have food, must not the high and glorious toil for him in return, that he may have light, have guidance, freedom, immortality?” The rich commonly point the finger of scorn at the poor who turn away from honest work; we may well wonder if they would work themselves at such dirty and dangerous occupations.  Many a charity visitor who preaches the gospel of toil is herself, except for some fitful and ineffective “social work,” a useless ornament to society who hardly knows the meaning of “toil.”  If idleness is a mote in the eyes of the poor, it is a beam in the eyes of the rich.  Neither blood nor rank nor sex excuses from