The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays: 1909Bierce, Ambrose
Philosophy
The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays: 1909
Bierce, Ambrose
Essays
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 from their employers 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 brand 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 has he heard in our patronising 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. Jefferson's dictum that
governments are instituted among men in order to secure them in "life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is luminous nonsense. Governments
are not instituted; they grow. They are evolved out of the necessity of
protecting from the handworker the life and property of the brain worker
and the idler. The first 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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