Labour generally may be referred economically to the two heads of productive and unproductive. It is productive if it produces more than the cost of the labourer’s maintenance (taking his past maintenance preparatory to his work into consideration), and unproductive if it produces less. And in general there is an objection to employing labour in a less productive manner than it might otherwise be employed. A great author or a great statesman might be able to earn more than his bread by breaking stones on a road, but everyone would regard forcibly employing him in this manner as a waste of labour. Horse-labour and even dog-labour may be similarly regarded; or, to put it otherwise, the labour of every horse and every dog represents a certain amount of human labour which must be regarded as usefully employed or as wasted, according to the work which the horse or dog does. If I set a horse to draw a big stone to the top of a hill and then down again, everyone would regard this amount of horse-labour as wasted; but it would be different if the same horse were employed in drawing stones to the site of a building where they were required. And in estimating the productiveness or unproductiveness of labour in any given case, we must have regard to the value of what it produces to society in general, and not merely to the amount which the labourer receives for producing it. One might earn £100 by walking a mile in the shortest period on record without producing anything of the slightest utility to mankind. Human labour, however, in a country like this, is capable of producing more than is required to feed and clothe the population and to supply them with fire and shelter. There remains a surplus which may be devoted to mental improvement or to any innocent recreation. Recreation must be regarded as a good thing, and labour employed in producing recreation cannot be regarded as absolutely unproductive. It may, however, be unproductive in the wider sense in which I have used the term--viz., the value of the product does not suffice to pay for the maintenance of the labourers. I mean, of course, the value of the labour _to society_. Those who employ it, I presume, consider it worth what they expend on it--_to themselves_. But they might be of a different opinion if they had less money to expend.