Leisure, or freedom, is stronger when the work is not pleasurable in itself. 24 THE TYRANNY OF NATURE The very first lesson that should be taught us when we are old enough to understand it is that complete freedom from the obligation to work is unnatural, and ought to be illegal, as we can escape our share of the burden of work only by throwing it on someone else’s shoulders. Nature inexorably ordains that the human race shall perish of famine if it stops working. We cannot escape from this tyranny. The question we have to settle is how much leisure we can afford to allow ourselves. Even if we must work like galley slaves whilst we are at it, how soon may we leave off with a good conscience, knowing that we have done our share and may now go free until tomorrow? That question has never been answered, and cannot be answered under our system because so many of the workers are doing work that is not merely useless but harmful. But if by an equal distribution of income and a fair division of work we could find out the answer, then we should think of our share of work as earning us, not so much money, but so much freedom. And another curious thing would happen. We now revolt against the slavery of work because we feel ourselves to be the slaves, not of Nature and Necessity, but of our employers and those for whom they have to employ us. We therefore hate work and regard it as a curse. But if everyone shared the burden and the reward equally, we should lose this feeling. Nobody would feel put upon; and everybody would know that the more work was done the more everybody would get, since the division of what the work produced would be equal. We should then discover that haymaking is not the only work that is enjoyable. Factory work, when it is not overdriven, is very social and can be very jolly: that is one of the reasons why girls prefer working in weaving sheds in a deafening din to sitting lonely in a kitchen. Navvies have heavy work; but they are in the open air: they talk, fight, gamble, and have plenty of change from place to place; and this is much better fun than the sort of clerking that means only counting another man’s money and writing it down in figures in a dingy office. Besides the work that is enjoyable from its circumstances there is the work that is interesting and enjoyable in itself, like the work of the philosophers and of the different kinds of artists who will work for nothing rather than not work at all; but this, under a system of equal division, would probably become a product of leisure rather than of compulsory industry.