Labour

“ But the true doctrine that labour should be a real tangible blessing in itself to the working man, a pleasure even as sleep and strong drink are to him now: this one might think it hard indeed for him to understand, so different as it is to anything which he has found labour to be. ”

“ What energy of the personal soul is exercised in a mill-hand, a tea-packer, a slop-tailor, or the watcher of a thread in a machine? How can a man or woman engaged in such labour for ten hours a day at subsistence wage enjoy a fully developed life? ”

“ I was living now among people to whom labour was obligatory, inevitable, and who worked like cart-horses, often with no idea of the moral significance of labour, and, indeed, never using the word "labour" in conversation at all. ”

“ One gets the sense that the labour, with its multiplied incidents and opportunities, is just unlimitedly inspiring to the keen spirit or the sympathetic soul, the recruit with energies and resources on hand that plead with him for the beauty of the vivid and palpable social result. ”

“ Human labour one talks of, as the thing that, together with capital and the nature-basis of industry, goes to the creation of economic values, and through which the worker becomes conscious of his social position. ”

“ There will be simply labour and the necessary conditions of labour,—the sun which warms all, the air which they breathe, water which they drink, land on which they labour, clothes on the body, food in the stomach, stakes, shovels, ploughs, machines with which they work. ”

“ This is, I am now convinced, the true philosophy of life—that labour is a man's only riches, and food, shelter, rest, and the satisfaction of appetite his means whereby to grow rich. In other walks of life the practice is reversed, and labour is looked upon as the means, appetite and comfort as the end. ”

“ The reader must always bear in mind the definition given of Labour, as that kind of industrial exertion which is applied to one task at a time only, and while so applied begins and ends with that task; as distinguished from Ability, which influences simultaneously an indefinite number of tasks. ”

“ We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking; the labour that is divided; but the men:—Divided into mere segments of men—broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; ”

“ The economic fundamental is labour. Labour is the human element which makes the fruitful seasons of the earth useful to men. It is men's labour that makes the harvest what it is. That is the economic fundamental: every one of us is working with material which we did not and could not create, but which was presented to us by Nature. ”

“ The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour. ”

“ and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers, and miserable workers. Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity. ”

“ Labour will be thought honourable—idleness a disgrace. Productive activity will be deemed a glory, and riches its result, the greatest of all mere outside and personal distinctions. The tools must be for whoso can handle them. ”

“ The wages of labour are the encouragement of industry, which, like every other human quality, improves in proportion to the encouragement it receives. ”

“ In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations ”

“ It is a calculation of this admirable author, that all the conveniences of civilized life might be produced, if society would divide the labour equally among its members, by each individual being employed in labour two hours during the day. ”

“ The essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave labour, and one based on wage labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus-labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer. ”

“ That though all that can must labour, yet there is great diversity of labours; and all men are not to do the same work. Magistrates, and pastors, and lawyers, and physicians, must labour diligently; but they are not all bound to plough, and thrash, and use the more servile labours of their inferiors. 2. That every man must labour in the works of his own calling, "and do his own business," 1 Thess. ”

“ Stone; “but they would be sadly out of place here, and very ridiculous. All labour must be directed by the circumstances of the state of society in which it is employed; and all labour, so regulated, is equally respectable.” ”

“ Labour was the first price, the original purchase money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased; and its value, to those who possess it, and who want to exchange it for some new productions, is precisely equal to the quantity of labour which it can enable them to purchase or command. ”

“ In general, the greater the productiveness of labour, the less is the labour-time required for the production of an article, the less is the amount of labour crystallised in that article, and the less is its value; ”

“ The division of labour, however, so far as it can be introduced, occasions, in every art, a proportionable increase of the productive powers of labour. ”

“ The necessity of labour may, indeed, be regarded as the main root and spring of all that we call progress in individuals, and civilization in nations; ”

“ As the labour which confers productive powers, whether of hand or of head, may be looked upon as part of the labour by which society accomplishes its productive operations, or in other words, as part of what the produce costs to society, so too may the labour employed in keeping up productive powers ”

“ But besides this general difference in the hardness or repugnance of work, there are individual differences in the feeling towards [134] different kinds of labour which make the repugnance or attraction of one person for a particular kind of labour quite different from that of another. Labour is repugnant or otherwise, therefore, more or less, according to the individualities of persons. ”

“ And those who taste not, yet behold her store,
}
Are as the slaves that dig the golden ore,
}
The wealth around them makes them doubly poor
140 Or will you deem them amply paid in health,
Labour's fair child, that languishes with wealth? ”

“ A few words now as to the differentiation of reward of labour, as I know my readers are sure to want an exposition of the Socialist views here as to those who direct labour or who have specially excellent faculties towards production. And, first, I will look on the super-excellent workman as an article presumably needed by the community ”

“ The employment of these different sorts of labour power, an employment which is, in its turn, made necessary by the mode of production, makes a great difference in the cost of maintaining the family of the labourer, and in the value of the labour-power of the adult male. ”

“ To labour is the lot of man below; And when Jove gave us life, he gave us woe.” ”

“ To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture; but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of the pin-maker; a workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade) , nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion) , could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. ”

“ But in directing the employment of labour, they would find room for the exercise of all the powers of their minds, of their best affections, and of whatever was worthy in their ambition. p. 35Their occupation, so far from being a limited sphere of action, is one which may give scope to minds of the most various capacity. ”

“ The annual produce of the land and labour of any nation can be increased in its value by no other means, but by increasing either the number of its productive labourers, or the productive powers of those labourers who had before been employed. ”

“ Accordingly, you must work, that is you must produce what you need to live upon from the earth by your labour or you must produce something which other working men need and these other men will give you in exchange for it something they have produced which you need. ”

“ But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it. ”

“ You must, however, be aware that the reward for labour, and quantity of labour, are quite disparate things. ”

“ He had expected labour, and he found it, and did it and made the best of it. In this, his prosperity consisted. ”

“ By far the greatest part of those goods which are the objects of desire, are procured by labour; and they may be multiplied, not in one country alone, but in many, almost without any assignable limit, if we are disposed to bestow the labour necessary to obtain them. ”

“ What has been said above will have given the reader some idea of the conditions of life which created a great demand for labour in the last two centuries B.C., and of the circumstances which produced an abundant supply of unfree labour to satisfy that demand. ”

“ The agricultural labourer found that out when he returned from the factory at 15s. per week to farm labour at 12s. I am positive that the morality of the country compares favourably with that of the town. ”

“ Here the working mechanic is sure of employment; he can calculate with certainty on his earnings, and by being indispensably necessary he acquires a personal independence, totally unknown where labour is scarce, or population excessive. ”

“ This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature, which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. ”

“ Wherever practicable, the labours of agriculture and manufacture to be so mingled and the variety of fabrics and materials to be wrought upon also so assorted as to make short periods of labour on each alternately with others produce that satisfaction and freedom from tedium and weariness which an unbroken round of monotonous occupation so frequently occasions, and because also variety of employment develops the mental as well as physical faculties much more perfectly than any single occuption. ”

“ As the chosen people bore in their features the sign manual of Jehovah, so division of labour brands the manufacturing workman as the property of capital. ”

“ The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production. ”

“ But it is fortunate for us that all this seraphic language, reduced to the vulgar tongue, will become, though fallen in dignity and reduced in dimension, perfectly intelligible. The Greatest Thinker in England means by these beautiful words to tell you that Productive labour is labour that produces a Useful Thing. ”

“ And note here the great value of the presence of one or two intelligent employers, who understand some of the conditions of labour apart from actual farm operations, and know the relative value of a good and an indifferent workman. ”