to holding society together; but that after a while they will find
that there is not so much work to do as they expected, and that then
they will have leisure to reconsider the whole subject; and if it
seems to them that a certain industry would be carried on more
pleasantly as regards the worker, and more effectually as regards the
goods, by using hand-work rather than machinery, they will certainly
get rid of their machinery, because it will be possible for them to
do so. It isn't possible now; we are not at liberty to do so; we are
slaves to the monsters which we have created. And I have a kind of
hope that the very elaboration of machinery in a society whose
purpose is not the multiplication of labour, as it now is, but the
carrying on of a pleasant life, as it would be under social order--
that the elaboration of machinery, I say, will lead the
simplification of life, and so once more to the limitation of
machinery.

Well, I will now let my claims for decent life stand as I have made
them. To sum them up in brief, they are: First, a healthy body;
second, an active mind in sympathy with the past, the present, and
the future; thirdly, occupation fit for a healthy body and an active
mind; and fourthly, a beautiful world to live in.

These are the conditions of life which the refined man of all ages
has set before him as the thing above all others to be attained. Too
often he has been so foiled in their pursuit that he has turned
longing eyes backward to the days before civilization, when man's
sole business was getting himself food from day to day, and hope was
dormant in him, or at least could not be expressed by him.

Indeed, if civilization (as many think) forbids the realization of