Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/199

Rh is liable. Effects visible in modern society verify the Mosaic prognosis. Modern men are less than men because so many of us possess things only by proxy, and because such wealth as we have as proprietors is merely the partial usufruct of other people's lordship over things. I buy the thing I cannot produce. Another masters nature and produces the thing which I buy. He lords it over things. I am powerless over the same things until he masters them for me. He is the man in this relation, and by so much I am less than man.

The only adequate demonstration of the "dignity of labor" is to be reached in this connection. The phrase in our civilization is, on the one hand, an instinctive and indignant claim to more credit than society concedes, and, on the other hand, a form of cajolery which carries little genuine appreciation. The dignity of labor, as labor, resides in the prerogative of mastery. Not all labor is dignified. Courage is dignified, and the man who, for the sake of biding his time and meanwhile feeding his family, bravely digs ditches or carries a hod while aware that the work is beneath his powers, is dignified in his courage, though menial in his toil. There is no dignity in drudgery, though there is dignity in endurance. Dignified labor is masterful and creative labor. A treadmill is a slave-pen. A forge or a carpenter's bench may be a kingdom. That labor is dignified in which mind molds things. Labor is dignified in proportion as it is mental mastery of materials or conditions. The wealth produced by mental mastery is the regalia of the real man. The initial dignity of labor, then, is its realization of a portion of the process of manhood, not its mere seizure of the means of partial manhood.

We repeat, therefore, that the modern vice is not too much devotion to wealth, but too little. Modern life drowns the wine's bouquet in the very mass of the wine. We literally lose our lives in the business by which we plan to find life. Our social inventions for the administration of things have spoiled their administrators for the lordship of things. The pseudo-wealth which we have ennobled to equality with real wealth has degraded us in return. We have gained the Midas touch, but we have forfeited the full franchise of wealth. While we handle the