There will be time enough, therefore, to produce what is requisite for
the satisfaction of less urgent wants. "When one has done in the field
or the factory the work that he is under obligation to do for society,
he can devote the other half of his day, his week, or his year, to the
satisfaction of artistic or scientific wants."[584] "The lover of music
who wishes a piano will enter the association of instrument-makers; he
will devote part of his half-days, and will soon possess the longed-for
piano. Or the enthusiast in astronomy will join the astronomers'
association with its philosophers, observers, calculators, and
opticians, its scholars and amateurs; and he will obtain the telescope
he wishes, if only he dedicates some work to the common cause--for there
is a deal of rough work necessary for an observatory, masons' work,
carpenters' work, founders' work, machinists' work--the final polish, to
be sure, can be given to the instrument of precision by none but the
artist. In a word, the five to seven hours that every one has left,
after he has first devoted some hours to the production of the
necessary, are quite sufficient to render possible for him every kind of
luxury."[585]
"The separation of agriculture from manufactures will pass away. The
factory workmen will be at the same time field workmen."[586] "As an
eminently periodic industry, which at certain times (and even more in
the making of improvements than in harvest) needs a large additional
force, agriculture will form the link between village and city."[587]
And "the separation of mental from bodily labor will come to an
end"[588] too. "Poets and scientists will no longer find poor devils
who will sell their energies to them for a plate of soup; they will have
to get together and print their writings themselves. Then the authors,
and their admirers of both sexes, will soon acquire the art of handling
the type-case and composing-stick; they will learn the pleasure of
producing jointly, with their own hands, a work that they value."[589]
"Every labor will be agreeable."[590] "If there is still work which is
really disagreeable in itself, it is only because our scientific men
have never cared to consider the means of rendering it less so: they
have always known that there were plenty of starving men who would do it
for a few pence a day."[591] "Factories, smelters, mines, can be as
sanitary and as splendid as the best laboratories of our universities;
and the more perfectly they are fitted up the more they will
produce."[592] And the product of such labor will be "infinitely better,
and considerably greater, than the mass of goods hitherto produced under
the goad of slavery, serfdom, and wage-slavery."[593]
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