in which work is a punishment and a curse. In avowed prisons, hard
labor, the only alleviation of a prisoner's lot, is treated as an
aggravation of his punishment; and everything possible is done to
intensify the prisoner's inculcated and unnatural notion that work is an
evil. In industry we are overworked and underfed prisoners. Under such
absurd circumstances our judgment of things becomes as perverted as our
habits. If we were habitually underworked and overfed, our notion
of heaven would be a place where everybody worked strenuously for
twenty-four hours a day and never got anything to eat.

Once realize that a perpetual holiday is beyond human endurance, and
that "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do" and it will
be seen that we have no right to impose a perpetual holiday on children.
If we did, they would soon outdo the Labor Party in their claim for a
Right to Work Bill.

In any case no child should be brought up to suppose that its food and
clothes come down from heaven or are miraculously conjured from empty
space by papa. Loathsome as we have made the idea of duty (like the idea
of work) we must habituate children to a sense of repayable obligation
to the community for what they consume and enjoy, and inculcate the
repayment as a point of honor. If we did that today--and nothing but
flat dishonesty prevents us from doing it--we should have no idle rich
and indeed probably no rich, since there is no distinction in being
rich if you have to pay scot and lot in personal effort like the working
folk. Therefore, if for only half an hour a day, a child should do
something serviceable to the community.

Productive work for children has the advantage that its discipline is
the discipline of impersonal necessity, not that of wanton personal