Page:The Conquest of Bread (1906).djvu/180

 from newspaper reports. But the mine of the future will be well ventilated, with a temperature as easily regulated as that of a library; there will be no horses doomed to die below the earth: underground traction will be carried on by means of an automatic cable put in motion at the pit's mouth. Ventilators will be always working, and there will never be explosions. This is no dream. Such a mine is already to be seen in England; we went down it. Here again this organization is simply a question of economy. The mine of which we speak, in spite of its immense depth (466 yards), has an output of a thousand tons of coal a day, with only two hundred miners—five tons a day per each worker, whereas the average for the two thousand pits in England is hardly three hundred tons a year per man.

If necessary, we could multiply examples proving that Fourier's dream regarding material organization was not a Utopia.

This question has, however, been so frequently discussed in Socialist newspapers that public opinion might have been educated. Factory, forge, and mine can be as healthy and magnificent as the finest laboratories in modern universities, and the better the organization the more will man's labour produce.

If it be so, can we doubt that work will become a pleasure and a relaxation in a society of equals, in which "hands" will not be compelled to sell themselves to toil, and to accept work under any