(Last week, Dr. Frank Crane urged us to be active, to sell ourselves, to take command of our lives and expand our future opportunities. This week, he suggests there’s another side to the story as he ponders—-)
IDLENESS: THE MOTHER OF PROGRESS_
Idleness is the mother of progress. So long as men were busy they had no time to think of bettering their condition.
Idleness is the mother of art. It was when men had leisure from the chase that they decorated the handles of their hunting-knives and the walls of their cave-dwellings.
Idleness is the mother of religion. It is in the relax and rebound from toil that men think of God.
We talk of all men’s right to work. There is a deeper right than that. It is the right to idleness.
The value of what we put upon the page of life depends upon the width of the margin.
The great, useful, redeeming, and lasting work of the world is that work which is a reaction from idleness. The continent of labor is barren. It is the little island of labor that is green and fruitful in the sea of leisure.
The curse of America is its deification of labor. Our little gods are the men who are ceaselessly forthputting.
Most of all we deify capital, which never rests, but goes on producing day and night.
We are so occupied in getting ready to live that we have lost the art of living.
With us a man is a fool if he sets about to enjoy himself before he has laid up a fortune. We count the woman happy when she has married money, and the child accursed when he has no inheritance.
Every morning we arise from our beds and charge bloodthirstily into the struggle. We all do it, millionaires and paupers. In his office the trust magnate sits at his scheming until his nerves are loosed, his arteries hardened, and his soul caked. The slaves of Rome never worked so hard as many of our laborers in mines and factories.
“After the Semitic fashion,” says Remy de Goncourt, “you make even the women work. Rich and poor, all alike, you know nothing of the joys of leisure.”
There ought to be two leisure classes, yea three: all children under twenty-one, all women, and all men over sixty.
The work of the world could be easily done by males between the ages of twenty-one and sixty. To accomplish this, all that is needed is to abolish militarism, that insane burden of men in idleness, abolish all piled-up wealth-units that keep husky males workless, and abolish our worship of activity.
Then there would be plenty of work for every man to keep him from want, and plenty of leisure for every man to preserve in him a living soul.
If I were czar of the world, no woman should work except as she might elect for her amusement; no child should do aught but play.
Among savages the women do all the work. In the coming civilization they shall do none. The progress of the race is the progress of the female from toil to leisure.
Every woman is a possible mother. She should have only to grow and to be strong. She should be the real aristocracy, the real Upper Class, to give culture and beauty to life. She should have time to attend to the duties of her eternal priesthood.
As for man, little by little, he also would lift himself from the killing grind of monotonous exertion. For he would make Steam and Electricity, and other giants not yet discovered, do the dirty work.
To bring all this to pass, you do not need to devise any cunning scheme of government, nor to join any party or specious ism. You need do only one thing.
And that is to establish Justice.
The end of fraud and wrong is fevered toil. The end of justice is the superior product of skill and genius, and their mother, leisure.