Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/508

 488 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

ical, recurrent, and re-recurrent performances which we call labor for the uncertain, perilous, and vicissitudinous relations and activities of primitive life, the ends become less fascinating, the stimuli less intense, the reactions less pleasurable and painful. The organism functions without interest, and the performance is irksome. This principle applies to both sexes, for the females participate socially in the activities of the males ; and exhibit, indeed, more vivid emotion than the men. In social and sexual rivalry, also, the women participate without hindrance. The root of the irksomeness of labor is, therefore, the fact that the race was used to habitually more exciting performances, and got its type of pleasurable reactions fixed by these. Play repro- duces in principle and often in very faithful detail the situ- ations and the movements which meant life or death to primi- tive man : and we are not so completely weaned from the old ways but that in intervals of the routine of a work-a-day world we turn for pleasure and recreation to hide and seek, foot- ball, golf, or cards, seeking reinstatement of the situations with which emotional reactions have been historically associated, or an imitation of such situations. Or we resort to the theater, where others imitate and reproduce emotional situations in imagination instead of action. Mr. Veblen has traced the irksomeness of labor' to the recognition by the laboring classes that the non-laboring classes do not work, the dis- tastefulness lying in the comparison. No doubt the comparison may make the labor more disagreeable, but there is an aversion to routine performances in children before they recognize that labor has any caste meaning. If you take chil- dren from their animal play and propose some form of work as a new game, they will enter it eagerly, but very shortly they are pitiably bored, unless an element of rivalry is skillfully intro- duced. Different forms of labor retain in varying degrees the conflict element, and where doubt, rivalry, risk, judgment, reward, or disaster is involved, the labor is still as fascinating as a fight or a game. W. I. Thomas.

The University of Chicago.

'American Journal of Sociology, September, 1898.