like a day's work: it can begin early and leave off early or begin late
and leave off late, or, as with us, begin too early and never leave off
at all, obviously the worst of all possible plans. In any event we
must finally reckon work, not as the curse our schools and prisons and
capitalist profit factories make it seem today, but as a prime necessity
of a tolerable existence. And if we cannot devise fresh wants as fast
as we develop the means of supplying them, there will come a scarcity
of the needed, cut-and-dried, appointed work that is always ready to
everybody's hand. It may have to be shared out among people all of whom
want more of it. And then a new sort of laziness will become the bugbear
of society: the laziness that refuses to face the mental toil and
adventure of making work by inventing new ideas or extending the domain
of knowledge, and insists on a ready-made routine. It may come to
forcing people to retire before they are willing to make way for younger
ones: that is, to driving all persons of a certain age out of industry,
leaving them to find something experimental to occupy them on pain of
perpetual holiday. Men will then try to spend twenty thousand a year
for the sake of having to earn it. Instead of being what we are now, the
cheapest and nastiest of the animals, we shall be the costliest, most
fastidious, and best bred. In short, there is no end to the astonishing
things that may happen when the curse of Adam becomes first a blessing
and then an incurable habit. And in that day we must not grudge children
their share of it.




The Infinite School Task

The question of children's work, however, is only a question of what the