The Soul of Man Under Socialism | Page 8

and is not interfered with by
his neighbour, it will not be an object of any interest to him to interfere
with anyone else. Jealousy, which is an extraordinary source of crime
in modern life, is an emotion closely bound up with our conceptions of
property, and under Socialism and Individualism will die out. It is
remarkable that in communistic tribes jealousy is entirely unknown.
Now as the State is not to govern, it may be asked what the State is to
do. The State is to be a voluntary association that will organise labour,
and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities. The
State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is
beautiful. And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot help
saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked
nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing
necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is
absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do
anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour
are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To

sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is
blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or
physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy
would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing
dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.
And I have no doubt that it will be so. Up to the present, man has been,
to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic
in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work
he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our
property system and our system of competition. One man owns a
machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men
are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work
to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the
produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as
much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more
importance, a great deal more than he really wants. Were that machine
the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an
immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all
monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and
involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery
must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the
stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days,
and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery
competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve
man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and
just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while
Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure--which,
and not labour, is the aim of man--or making beautiful things, or
reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with
admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and
unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The
Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly,
horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost
impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On
mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the
world depends. And when scientific men are no longer called upon to
go down to a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and worse

blankets to starving people, they will have delightful leisure in which to
devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own joy and the joy of
everyone else. There will be great storages of force for every city, and
for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat,
light, or motion, according to his needs. Is this Utopian? A map of the
world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it
leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And
when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country,
sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.
Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of
machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things
will be made by the individual. This is not merely necessary, but it is
the only possible way by which we can get either the