determines the capacity of men for play.

It was not accidental that the movement of the French workers for
emancipation emphasized a desire for control of industry. The
syndicalism of France has expressed the workers' interest in
production as the labor movements of other countries have laid stress
exclusively on its economic value to them. The syndicalists' theory
takes for granted the readiness of workers to assume responsibility
for production, while the trade unionists of England, Germany and the
United States ask for a voice in determining not their productive but
their financial relation to it.

It is the habit of these other peoples to credit the lack of interest
in work to physical hardships which the wage system has imposed. But
the wage system from the point of view of material welfare has borne
no less heavily on the French than on other workers. It is also
difficult to prove that the physical hardships of modern methods of
production are greater than the hardships of earlier methods. The
truth is that neither hardships nor exploitation of labor are new
factors; they have both, through long centuries, repressed in varying
degree the inspirational and intellectual interest of workers in
productive effort. It is not the economic burdens which followed the
introduction of machinery and the division of labor that distinguish
these new factors in industry, but the discredit which they throw
around man's labor power. They have carried the discredit of labor
in its social position further than it had been carried, but this
is merely a by-product of the discredit they cast on the skill and
intellectual power which is latent in the working class. In this
connection the significant truth for civilization is that while
exploitation of labor and physical hardships induce the antagonism