There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and
complacently about "the working classes," and satisfy themselves
that a day's hard intellectual work is very much harder than
a day's hard manual toil, and is righteously entitled to much
bigger pay. Why, they really think that, you know, because they
know all about the one, but haven't tried the other. But I know
all about both; and so far as I am concerned, there isn't money
enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pickaxe thirty days,
but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as
near nothing as you can cipher it down--and I will be satisfied, too.
Intellectual "work" is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation,
and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect,
engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate,
legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven
when he is at work; and as for the musician with the fiddle-bow
in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the
ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him--why,
certainly, he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord,
it's a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly
unfair--but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher
the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall
be his pay in cash, also.
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