To have a really precise understanding of this matter you must distinguish not merely between labor and leisure but between leisure and rest. Labor is doing what we must; leisure is doing what we like; rest is doing nothing whilst our bodies and minds are recovering from their fatigue. Now doing what we like is often as laborious as doing what we must. Suppose it takes the form of running at the top of our speed to kick a ball up and down a field! That is harder than many forms of necessary labor. Looking at other people doing it is a way of resting, like reading a book instead of writing it. If we all had a full share of leisure we could not spend the whole of it in kicking balls, or whacking them about with golf clubs, or in shooting and hunting. Much of it would be given to useful work; and though our compulsory labor, neglect to perform which would be treated as a crime, might possibly be reduced to two or three hours a day, we should add much voluntary work to that in our leisure time, doing for fun a huge mass of nationally beneficial work that we cannot get done at present for love or money. Every woman whose husband is engaged in interesting work knows the difficulty of getting him away from it even to his meals; in fact, jealousy of a man’s work sometimes causes serious domestic unhappiness; and the same thing occurs when a woman takes up some absorbing pursuit, and finds it and its associations more interesting than her husband’s company and conversation and friends. In the professions where the work is solitary and independent of office and factory hours and steam engines, the number of people who injure their health and even kill themselves prematurely by overwork is so considerable that the philosopher Herbert Spencer never missed an opportunity of warning people against the craze for work. It can get hold of us exactly as the craze for drink can. Its victims go on working long after they are so worn out that their operations are doing more harm than good. 25 THE POPULATION QUESTION The second of the two stock objections to equal division of income is that its benefits, if any, would soon be swallowed up by married couples having too many children. The people who say this always declare at the same time that our existing poverty is caused by there being already too many people in the world, or, to put it the other way round, that the world is too small to produce food enough for all the people in it.