Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/226

206 on those machines were not allowed to grind their own bread or put their strength to any self-supporting industry was because it was "bad for trade" and brought them into competition with the contractors who supplied food to his Majesty's prisons. It was not the monotony half so much as the consciousness that it was without result which made that form of labour so degrading and so utterly exhausting to mind and body. You might think it was the compulsion; but I am not sure that compulsion to work may not sometimes be very moral and salutary. At any rate, here is an instance of the same thing presented under voluntary conditions. A man out of work applied to a farmer for a job; the farmer had no job for him, and told him so; but as the man persisted he started him at half a crown a day to move a heap of stones from one side of the road to the other. And when the man had done that and asked what next he was to do, he told him to move them back again! But though that man was out of work, and was on his way to earn the half-crown, rather than submit his body to the conscious degradation of such useless labour, he did as the farmer had calculated on his doing, and threw up the job.

That same quality of outrage and degradation attends on all labour that is subject, within the worker's knowledge, to wanton destruction, or is obviously of no real use or of "faked" value. And the finer the skill employed the greater the anguish of mind, or else the hard