Now what I want you to see is that such a production would not be entertaining to an audience which had not come to regard the labour of man’s hands with a licentious indifference--which had not developed the gambler’s contempt for the true relations between labour and value. And here I want to put before you a proposition which may at first shock you, but which I hope to prove true. And that is that labour in itself, apart from its justification in some useful result, is bad and degrading; the man who is put to work which he knows is to have no result comes from that work more degraded and crushed in spirit than the man who merely “loafs” and lives “naturally.” Perhaps the readiest example of that is the old treadmill system which was once employed in our prisons, where the prisoner was set to grind at a crank artificially adjusted to his physical strength, but having no useful result; and I believe that the main reason why prisoners on those machines were not allowed to grind their own bread or put their strength to any self-supporting industry was because it was “bad for trade” and brought them into competition with the contractors who supplied food to his Majesty’s prisons. It was not the monotony half so much as the consciousness that it was without result which made that form of labour so degrading and so utterly exhausting to mind and body. You might think it was the compulsion; but I am not sure that compulsion to work may not sometimes be very moral and salutary. At any rate, here is an instance of the same thing presented under voluntary conditions. A man out of work applied to a farmer for a job; the farmer had no job for him, and told him so; but as the man persisted he started him at half a crown a day to move a heap of stones from one side of the road to the other. And when the man had done that and asked what next he was to do, he told him to move them back again! But though that man was out of work, and was on his way to earn the half-crown, rather than submit his body to the conscious degradation of such useless labour, he did as the farmer had calculated on his doing, and threw up the job. That same quality of outrage and degradation attends on all labour that is subject, within the worker’s knowledge, to wanton destruction, or is obviously of no real use or of “faked” value. And the finer the skill employed the greater the anguish of mind, or else the hard callousness of indifference which must result. Call upon men to make useless things, or things which you mean wantonly to destroy the day after to-morrow, or to which by the conditions you tolerate you make a fair length of life impossible--call upon labour to do those things, and you are either filling its spirit with misery and depression, or you are making it, in self-defence, callous and hard.