That is practically
the present arrangement, and that, with a quickened sense of the need of
breaking people in to such a life, is the ideal of the bureaucratic
Servile State to which, in common with the Conservators, we are bitterly
opposed. And here I know I am at my most difficult, most speculative,
and most revolutionary point. We who look to the Great State as the
present aim of human progress believe a state may solve its economic
problem without any section whatever of the community being condemned to
lifelong labour. And contemporary events, the phenomena of recent
strikes, the phenomena of sabotage, carry out the suggestion that in a
community where nearly everyone reads extensively travels about, sees
the charm and variety in the lives of prosperous and leisurely people,
no class is going to submit permanently to modern labour conditions
without extreme resistance, even after the most elaborate Labour
Conciliation schemes and social minima are established Things are
altogether too stimulating to the imagination nowadays. Of all
impossible social dreams that belief in tranquillised and submissive and
virtuous Labour is the wildest of all. No sort of modern men will stand
it. They will as a class do any vivid and disastrous thing rather than
stand it.
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