Page:Labour - The Divine Command, 1890.djvu/33

Rh their sermons to explain this first commandment, and if all men should accept the holy law of labor. What would be the result?

All the world would labor and eat the fruit of their labor, and bread, being an object of necessity, would neither be bought nor sold. What then? No one would die of hunger. If a man could not earn enough for himself and his family, his neighbor would help him. He would do so because he would have no other use for products that he could not sell. It would follow that man would have no more temptations; he would have no occasion to obtain by ruse or violence the bread he could not otherwise procure.

Violence and deceit would not then be necessary as they are now; and he who resorted to them would do so from evil impulse, and not, as now, from want or privation.

Those who are weak and cannot earn their bread would no longer need to sell their labor, and perhaps their souls, to obtain food.

No one would then, as now, seek to escape from the burden of labor or to throw it on others; nor endeavor to crush the feeble with it, while on the strong they heap all manner of work. We would no longer find men devoting all their intellectual forces to facilitate, not labor for laborers, but idleness for the idle.

In taking part in the labor for bread, and in recognizing it as the principal human occupation, we act as one who, seeing a carriage drawn