Arthur Machen

“ Men are not much affected by danger and risk and hazard nor even by horrible physical discomfort; in fact, many men incur all these things voluntarily and joyfully and call it sport and adventure and exploration and the Army and so forth. If the manufacture of china were a dread adventure, with the risk of poison always and certainly present, but always a tremendous uncertainty as to what might happen any day, any hour: then we should have Expeditions to Hanley and Stoke, and heroes insisting on lead-glazing vegetable dishes and sauce-boats ”

“ That was a great moment indeed; but Egyptian exploration is a sport beyond the means of most of us, and out of the question where factory hands and miners are concerned.
No; Egyptology is no solution for Labour Unrest, and writing books—another way—is more a vice than a sport. Let the Labour Party bring in a Co-partnership Bill instead of that Capital Levy nonsense, while their followers "spot winners" and buy tickets in all the Ballots going. ”

“ We are bound on the industrial wheel, and that wheel must revolve remorselessly till—the end of our era. So far as we can see, boots are going to be made by mechanical processes and not by individual craft and thought and labour up to the very end of anything that we can conceive. ”

“ Sometimes there enters suddenly one with high importance in his air; he beckons to his friend, he whispers in his ear secrets, sure secrets that come by devious ways from the very stable itself; there is deep conference ”

“ Why, I believe that every factory would get up a sweepstake as to the amount and so add sweetness to sweetness.
Meanwhile gambling in all its forms should be encouraged, if life is not to become intolerable for the wage-slaves. I am delighted to see that ingenious persons have succeeded of late in driving a tunnel right under the Lottery Acts. ”

“ I believe that they are discontented, and rightly discontented, because the work that most of them do is entirely unfit for humanity, because, in consequence, they are bored to tears, angry, sullen, in an ill humour. ”

“ And the worst of it is: there is no remedy, no possibility of a remedy. Let us have a benevolent despot who would abolish all machinery invented after the seventeenth century. The result would be that in a few months, a very few months, we should all be starving in tattered clothes and bare feet, and rather worse off than the Russians are to-day. ”

“ Of course, there are other ways of palliating the boredom of modern existence. There is the interesting case of the sporting nobleman, confronted every winter with the cessation of racing on the flat. ”

“ Well, it has gradually filtered into my intelligence, which knows little and cares less about politics, that there has been a General Election, and that the Labour Party is the second largest party in the house, polling, by the way, a huge number of votes, which under other electoral systems would have secured them many more seats than they actually hold. ”

“ If money were the root of this sad evil: then the working-man would not find his chief delight in "finding winners"; which are mostly losers and cost him dear. For, I believe there is very little doubt amongst those who know that backing horses is distinctly unprofitable for the backers. Peers have come to horrid grief over it, and so have plasterers. There are streaks and flashes of luck, of course; but from the practical point of view it is the baddest of all bad business. The bookies grow to be shiny men with red, prosperous necks; the backers go groaning as far as money is concerned. ”

“ And then the other people, the people who are above ground. I remember once, when I was strolling about England, being roused early in the morning at a place called Farnworth, not very far from Manchester. ”

“ It is said that the condition of the common, average man in Russia is not noticeably better now than it was in the days of the Little Father, though that was by no means a golden age. Then, the Swiss, a solid people who have run the Commonwealth of the Common Man with very considerable success for some hundreds of years ”