Here as always Rousseau is romantic. This is all very beautiful--until you try it. I am inclined to think that most men who entertain this view have never worked for a living. The happy few amongst the toilers of earth may here and there have enjoyed this independence. It is certainly not the experience of the rank and file in our present industrial system. With the development of the system, and the consequent organization of labor, the idealization of work is supplanted by the idealization of the labor movement and its aims. In the writings of Marx, labor as work is represented merely as so much homogeneous effort-filled time which is measured and reckoned in strictly numerical terms, as if its qualitative or personal elements could be ignored or were non-existent. Skill and artistic genius are represented as the mere telescoping or contraction of a number of labor-time units into a given period--a speeding up, as it were, not something inherently superior in kind. This point of view might satisfy one who was concerned only with the number of hours of employment and indifferent to what he did or how he did it. But it takes little account of that pride in achievement without which those who assert the dignity of labor are making a virtue of necessity. Marxians assert with much truth that pride in achievement is crushed by the methods of machine production and by the exploitation of labor under a system of “wage slavery.” But this is to abandon the older idealization of work and of workmanship. Labor is now viewed _realistically_ as an irksome servitude. Marxians argue that labor creates all wealth and is therefore justly entitled to it all. It is beside our point to enter into a discussion of this proposition. I am merely seeking to show that in this philosophy, emphasis is shifted from the idealization of work to the idealization of the labor movement itself. A Marxian could agree with Aristotle that mechanical toil is debasing, only he would add “under the present system.” Emancipate labor, give it its rights, reward it justly and force all to do their share of it, and then work will be ennobling. Which is to say, work will be ennobling only in an ideal society. This position is an attempt to restore with one hand what is taken away with the other. Work is robbed of its dignity when excellence in it is not thought worthy of consideration, when superiority of workmanship is represented merely as a greater quantity of abstract labor-time. Advocates of the cause of labor do not say much about the distinction between superior and inferior workmanship. And here we have an example of the mass-psychology of which I spoke earlier. In the degree that you consider men as mass, you ignore individual worth.