The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 11: AntepenultimataBierce, Ambrose
General
The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 11: Antepenultimata
Bierce, Ambrose
American essays; American literature
If labor is so good and great a thing let all be thankful, for all
can have as much of it as may be desired. The eight-hour law is not
mandatory to the laborer, nor does possession of leisure entail
idleness. It is permitted to the clerk, the shopman, the street
peddler—to all who live by the light employment of keeping the wolf
from the door without eating him—to abandon their ignoble callings,
seize the shovel, the axe and the sledge-hammer and lay about them
right sturdily, to the ample gratification of their desire. And those
who are engaged in more profitable vocations will find that with a part
of their incomes they can purchase the right to work as hard as they
like in even the dullest times.
Manual labor has nothing of dignity, nothing of beauty. It is a hard,
imperious and dispiriting necessity. He who is condemned to it feels
that it sets upon his brow the sign of intellectual inferiority. And
that brand of servitude never ceases to burn. In no country and at
no time has the laborer had a kindly feeling for the rest of us, for
everywhere and always he has fancied that he heard in our patronizing
platitudes the note of contempt. In his repression, in the denying him
the opportunity to avenge his real and imaginary wrongs, government
finds its main usefulness, activity and justification. Governments
are evolved out of the necessity of protecting from the hand-worker
the life and property of the brain-worker and the idler. The first
of the trio is the most dangerous because the most numerous and the
least content. Take from the science and the art of government, and
from its methods, whatever has had its origin in the consciousness of
his ill-will and the fear of his power and what have you left? A pure
republic—that is to say, no government.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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