proved the least contagious of practices. And Hawthorne did not find
bodily toil anything more than the curse the Bible says it is, at
Brook Farm. [Footnote: The Blythedale Experiment, and see also his
Notebook.]

If toil is a blessing, never was blessing so effectually disguised,
and the very people who tell us that, hesitate to suggest more than
a beautiful ease in the endless day of Heaven. A certain amount of
bodily or mental exercise, a considerable amount of doing things
under the direction of one's free imagination is quite another
matter. Artistic production, for example, when it is at its best,
when a man is freely obeying himself, and not troubling to please
others, is really not toil at all. It is quite a different thing
digging potatoes, as boys say, "for a lark," and digging them
because otherwise you will starve, digging them day after day as a
dull, unavoidable imperative. The essence of toil is that
imperative, and the fact that the attention _must_ cramp itself to
the work in hand--that it excludes freedom, and not that it involves
fatigue. So long as anything but a quasi-savage life depended upon
toil, so long was it hopeless to expect mankind to do anything but
struggle to confer just as much of this blessing as possible upon
one another. But now that the new conditions physical science is
bringing about, not only dispense with man as a source of energy but
supply the hope that all routine work may be made automatic, it is
becoming conceivable that presently there may be no need for anyone
to toil habitually at all; that a labouring class--that is to say,
a class of workers without personal initiative--will become
unnecessary to the world of men.

The plain message physical science has for the world at large is