THE SOUL OF THE WORKMAN

New Zealand Herald, Volume LVI, Issue 17110, 15 March 1919, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE SOUL OF THE WORKMAN

THE REAL LABOUR PROBLEM. BY MATANOA. Much has been written in praise of work. J- has been hailed as the parent of health : Burton's famous " Anatomy" has a chapter filled with the wisdom of the ancient* on the need for labour as a means to bodily and mental fitness. It has been acclaimd the mother of beauty, its exertions giving roundness to muscle and radiance to feature. Men know it as the sanctifier of rest: W * e jth I&3t dawns ale fallen ° n B'**. And all life's toils and ease complete, ■iney know who work, not those who play, It rest is sweet. Carlyle, its hot gospeller, phrases the obverse of the aphorism about Satan and idle hands: "Labour, wide as the earth, has its summit in heaven; in all true labour, were it but true hand labour, there is something of divineneos." The sages are right, as usual. They are, at all events much nearer the truth than the gay prophets of Utopias whero work is unknown and the social prigs— they are met in all classes—who measure' a man's exaltation by his idleness. But there is a grave assumption in the sages' wisdom. It is that man's work is the work of a man, not of a mere animated machine. It must be done .under conditions and in a spirit befitting human life, : else it will have no ministry for its doer's happiness or benefit. It must needs involve effort and at times even pain and risk; by such experiences skill grows and self-consciousness of power develops: but these hardships must not be so great in their demands as to appall or to overwhelm. And on occasion tasks not to one's liking must be tackled, in a spirit of adventure and of self-discipline: but these tasks, if they preponderate, will rob the worker of zest, instead of bestowing it on him. The toiler may not, even for nis own good, always and everywhere be busy at just the work he likes most; but his work, if it is to bring him the most real of all real wages, a joy in its doing, must allow of his doing it with interest and zest.

The Happy Workman. " There is a Gothic church lately built at Rouen," says Ruskin in his "Seven Lamps," "vile enough in its general composition, but excessively rich in detail; many of the details are designed with taste, and all evidently by a man who has studied old work closely. But it is all as dead as leaves in December; there is not one tender touch, not one warm stroke, on the whole facade. The men who did it hated it, and were thankful when it was done." His words were written chiefly about ornarfent, but they apply to all handicraft, to work of brain, indeed, as well as muscle. The right question to ask about work, he says, is simply this: Was it done with enjoymetit—wa3 the worker happy while he was about it? It may be the hardest work possible, and the birder because so much pleasure was taken in it; but it must have been happy too, or it will not be living. His conclusion is that "we are not sent into this world to do anything into which we cannot put our hearts." Thai is to make ' our work serve us; instead, as things go, it often enslave] us.

Conditions Hostile to Happiness.

When our daily tasks are wholly irksome, when their fulfilling leaves us atterly spent and jaded, (when the conditions under which they must be performed make impossible any satisfaction in their results, we may be certain that all is not well.

Of course, there are here and there those to whom any work is repugnant. They are best represented by the man who consulted the doctor: " I eats well," said he, " and I drinks well, and I sleeps well, but when I hears of at job I gets all of a tremble." Suoh a constitutional bias against work is abnormal. Most of us like -to be employed, and it is natural to us to try to do our work in the best way possible. May we so do it! The few of us who may choose our occupations without let or hindrance, who are not under masters, and are not the playthings of industrial circumstance, are able to put our whole hearts into our work. But those who are the mere "hands" of industries are not always so fortunate. Here is a tailor's "hand," under instruction* to finish a garment in a certain way—the quickest rather than the Jbesfc He knows it is not the best, and lays down the finished task with no more satisfaction than he undertook it. A little more time, a little more thought, and it. would bavo been a satisfaction to worker as well as wearer. But, what would you? His employer, competing for trade with other tailors, must take these short-cuts' or be jostled off the road of business. A boot operative, under similar instructions, turns out work in which he can take no pride; he knows that the first real downpour of winter will reveal the poverty of his work. But he must follow the custom of the factory, of the trade; and he knows that his employer ie well-nigh as helpless to change, that cus-. torn as he ia. If that employer tried he might be beaten in the competitive race in six months. i A Spiritual Question. Perhaps there is no handicraft like the builder's to eqgage the soul of a man, and, trade for trade, a mason or a carpenter is as .intelligent a fellow as you will find anywhere in a town. There should be a happiness in making good dwellings, stout and stately, with honest workmanship, out of earth's prime products. But the contract system demands that many things be done in the speediest and cheapest fashiona little less material here, a makeshift there, a trick of the trade somewhere else. In that way the lowest tenderer meets the demands made upon him by the conditions under which he had to compete for the contract. He is a smaller man in consequence; and his workmen suffer also. Is it any wonder that there is no soul in their work? Compelled to work under such conditions, they are dwarfed and made insensate. In all such work material is wasted; but, in the words of Ruskin, j "Of all wastes, the greatest waste that . you can commit is the waste of labour." It is inevitable that there should be discussion about wage 6 and material conditions of employment. But at heart the industrial problem is a spiritual one. The task before us is not merely the readjustment of remuneration to cost of living, but the restoration to the toiler of an interest in his work itself, so that it may minister to his own good— a word, that he may find his soul in his work. The achievement of this end demands much radical reorganisation of industry, and will fully test the capacity of those setting- out to rebuild society after the shriek of war. But the task has the attractiveness of all good work, and its doing will make eternally easier the solution of the surface problems of wages and hours und security of employment.