Hardly less certain is it that before the beginning of the twenty-first century all manufactures and all commerce will be co-operative, the workers in every industry being paid, not by fixed wages, but by a share in the produce of their labour. Instead of the profit of all trade and manufacture being secured to the managers and owners of lands, machinery, transport and other commercial utilities; while labour, the equally necessary and indeed the preponderant element of production, is reckoned as a mere element of cost, in the form of wages; the profit will be shared all round. The more prosperous the enterprise, the more money the workers will receive. No man will be able to grow rich by sweating his workmen. Neither will the present degrading temptation for every workman to perform his task as perfunctorily and as lazily as he can, so long as he does not get dismissed from work altogether, survive this reform. On the contrary, it will be directly worth every man's while to do his work as well as he possibly can. The dignity of labour--a phrase now justly mocked--will become an elevating and delightful practicality. A great many articles of everyday use will be better made than it is possible to get them made to-day. The spectacle of the producers of wealth herding in squalid cabins, clothed in the rags of cast-off clothing, eating garbage, enjoying nothing but intoxication, will give way to a more wholesome and natural state of affairs. Nor will the owners of machinery, of factories and the like long oppose this development. What are called labour-troubles will cease to exist when the interest of employer and employed is identical. The problem of the unemployed will solve itself. Leisure, and an opportunity to employ leisure wisely, will have been bestowed upon the poor as well as we have seen that it will be bestowed upon the rich. A man will have no need to spend practically all the unfatigued hours of every day at the bench, the loom, or the lathe. He will want recreation. While one batch of men is seeking this there will be an opportunity for other batches to work. And work itself, once it is work for an intelligent objective, once it is work that there is a comprehensible reason for trying to execute as well as it can possibly be executed, will lose much of its irksomeness--to the vast improvement alike of the product and the producer. CHAPTER IV THE CULT OF PLEASURE