Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/236

222 virtue for the poor man, is from his point of view, a disgrace and a sign of social inferiority. The millionaire pats the laboring man on the shoulder, but excludes him from his social intercourse. Society which has accepted and adopted the morality and views of the band of capitalists, glorifies labor in its most choice terms, but at the same time, assigns the laborer to the lowest rank. Society kisses the gloved hand and spits on the horny hand of the son of toil. It looks upon the millionaire as a demi-god, upon the day laborer as an outcast. Why? For two reasons. Firstly, because the prejudices and ideas imbibed in the Middle Ages have been perpetuated to the present time, and secondly because manual labor in our civilization is synonymous with lack of education.

During the Middle Ages idleness was the prerogative of the nobility, that is, of the higher race of conquerors, labor, the compulsory performance of tasks by the people, that is, by the lower race of conquered and subjugated beings. Consequently the man that labored betrayed the fact that he was a son of the race which had given proof on the field of battle that it had less virile manhood and strength, while the lord, the man of leisure, receiving his means of livelihood from his estate or by conquest, looked down upon the working-man with the contempt of a white man for a Bushman or Papuan, which is founded on the appreciation of his anthropological superiority. Today leisure and labor have ceased to be tokens of race. The millionaires are no longer the descendants of the conquering tribe, the proletaires are no longer the sons of the subjugated people. But in this as in so many other cases, the historical prejudice has survived the conditions under which it originated. The rich man still considers his employé, who works for him and supplies him with his luxury, merely as a kind of domestic animal,