Page:Philosophical Review Volume 20.djvu/267

253 themselves. When this aspect is exclusively emphasised, we get at once the view of labour as slavery. Because labour is a means, those who are solely labourers are means to the ends of those who are not. Labourers are not ends in themselves. But the life of man in society is the life of beings who are ends in themselves; the citizen is a freeman living with his fellows in freedom. Only those who can and do live this life and can exercise all its privileges are citizens, only those can form a state. Those human beings, therefore, who are merely means are not citizens; they are instruments for securing ends for the human beings who are. They are slaves. Hence, e.g., in the Greek view of the state, the mere labourer was a slave, and slaves had no share in the life of the state. They were property, not persons. Here again we have a very one-sided view of the nature of labour. Such a theory fails to notice that the dependence is really mutual; the citizens proper are as much dependent on the slaves as the slaves on the citizens; the service is just as real, though different in kind, in each case. Moreover, it is a false view of freedom. No one is an end in himself in the sense of not being in some way a means to the ends of others. Detachment from toil is only possible in a social whole which includes the toilers; and occupation with toil does not detach the individual from his fellows but unites him to them by their dependence upon him. His toil is just his way of making himself necessary to the whole society and society necessary to himself. This principle was really admitted, since through the very fact of his toil the slave was permitted to purchase his freedom, i.e., to enter into full citizenship. Again, while we may admit that man is higher than physical nature, and that therefore those who are occupied with the resources of physical nature (the labourers) are in a sense on a lower plane than those who are not, yet it is mere confusion of principle to look upon a lower class of society as no class at all, and still greater confusion to identify those who are occupied with physical nature with physical nature itself. For to transform nature, which the labourer does, is ipso facto to rise above it, and so to justify a claim to share the higher life of man which he has in society.