Common-Sense CountryBevington, L. S. (Louisa Sarah)
Philosophy
Common-Sense Country
Bevington, L. S. (Louisa Sarah)
Anarchism; Utopias
In Common-sense Country there was a job for everyone, and everyone was
merrily, ardently, or placidly doing that job. No one was doing mere
“business” and calling it work. No one was doing real work and feeling
it “toil”. Dull jobs were done in short spells by an immense number of
people; delightful jobs were worked at for the pleasure of the thing, in
longer spells, and by a fewer number of people. It fell out so,
naturally, and because of common sense; nobody had to be at the trouble
of enforcing the arrangement. The man with the dullest or most fatiguing
job, as a matter of course, got the longest leisure for re-creation of
his naturally flagging zest for the job. The man with the pleasurable
and healthy job hardly knew leisure from job. The kindliest and most
able-bodied and jolliest of the people had common-sense reasons for
attending to the least appetizing tasks. Everybody knew they wanted
doing; and these kindly, vigorous, and jolly folks were those who cared
most about getting them done, and cared least about minor disagreeables.
They also liked the peculiar way in which other people shook hands with
them for it, and more than made it good to them in the way of respect
and hospitality wherever they went.
You never saw any feet without shoes in cold weather in Common-sense
Country. And you never saw any shoes heaped up thousands thick in
warehouses with no feet to put into them. Common-sense citizens had
grave objections, not only to cold, discomfort, and disease, but also
grave objections to the enormous expense of thought, time, material, and
goodwill, necessarily involved in any and every measure for keeping
empty shoes warm indoors, and human feet cold outside in the street. You
never came to a place in any Common-sense city where, by turning your
head to the right, you could see one horn of a dilemma in the shape of a
lot of grain or fish being destroyed on the lunatic excuse that it could
not be sold for more than it cost, while by turning your head to the
left the other horn of the dilemma became visible in the shape of men
and women (with their children) hungry, worried, and constantly at their
wits’ end, only because they could not buy back the comestibles they had
ploughed, reaped, milled, fished, and otherwise laboured to bring within
human reach.
[Illustration: -ooo-]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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