"Certainly of the good of the State; but you mistake the true meaning
of the wishes of the individual. The apparent wish of the individual
may be to follow some other course than that which the State, with its
fuller knowledge and deeper wisdom, directs; but the real inward wish
of all Meccanians is to serve the interests of Meccania. That is the
outcome of our system of education. We must talk about that some other
time, but just now I want you to see that our system produces such
wonderful fruits that it never enters the head of any Meccanian workman
to question its wisdom."
We entered a gigantic engineering works, full of thousands of machine
tools. Everything appeared as clean and orderly as in the experimental
room of an engineering college. Some of the workmen wore grey-coloured
overalls, showing that they belonged to the Sixth Class, but most of
them wore the chocolate uniform of the men of the Fifth Class. These
were evidently performing highly skilled work. Even the moulding shops
were clean and tidy, and the employment of machinery for doing work
that elsewhere I had been accustomed to see done by hand astonished
me. The workmen looked like soldiers and behaved like automatons.
Conversation went on, but I was informed by Lickrod, again in a tone
of pride, that only conversation relative to the work in hand was
permitted. Here and there I saw a man in a green uniform, applying some
mysterious instrument to one of the workmen. I asked Lickrod what this
meant.
"That is one of our industrial psychologists, testing the
psycho-physiological effects of certain operations. By this means we
can tell not only when a workman is over-fatigued, but also if he is
under-fatigued. It is all part of our science of production."
"What happens if a man is under-fatigued persistently?" I asked.
"He will have to perform fatigue duty after the usual hours, just as he
would in the army," he answered.
"And do they not object to this?"
"Who?"
"The workmen."
"Why should they? The man who is guilty of under-fatigue knows that
he is justly punished. The others regard the offence as one against
themselves. It is part of our industrial training. But we have indeed
very few cases of under-fatigue in Mecco. You know, perhaps, that all
our citizens are, so to speak, selected. Anyone who does not appreciate
his privileges can be removed to other cities or towns, and there are
thousands of loyal Meccanians only too eager to come to live in Mecco."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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