The World's Last Night: And Other Essays

Culture is a bad qualification for a ruling class because it does not qualify men to rule. The things we really need in our rulers--mercy, financial integrity, practical intelligence, hard work, and the like--are no more likely to be found in cultured persons than in anyone else. Culture is a bad qualification in the same way as sanctity. Both are hard to diagnose and easy to feign.

"But we think thus because we keep on assuming that we know the play. We do not know the play. We do not even know whether we are in Act I or Act V. We do not know who are the major and who the minor characters. The Author knows. The audience, if there is an audience (if angels and archangels and all the company of heaven fill the pit and the stalls) may have an inkling. But we, never seeing the play from the outside, never meeting any characters except the tiny minority who are ‘on’ in the same scenes as ourselves, wholly ignorant of the future and very imperfectly informed about the past, cannot tell at what moment the end ought to come. That is will come when it ought, we may be sure; but we waste our time in guessing when that will be. That is has a meaning we may be sure, but we cannot see it. When it is over, we may be told. We are led to expect that the Author will have something to say to each of us on the part that each of us has played. The playing it well is what matters infinitely."

Of one sort a man can truly say, "I am doing work which is worth do

Of one sort a man can truly say, "I am doing work which is worth doing. It would still be worth doing if nobody paid for it. But as I have no private means, and need to be fed and housed and clothed, I must be paid to do it." The other kind of job is that in which people do work whose sole purpose is the earning of money; work which need not be, ought not to be, or would not be, done by anyone in the whole world unless it were paid.

We may thank God there are still plenty of jobs in the first category. The agricultural labourer, the police-man, the doctor, the artist, etc., are doing what is worth doing in itself. Of course jobs of this kind need not be agreeable. Ministering to a leper settlement is one of them.

In a rational world, things would be made because they were wanted; in the actual world, wants have to be created in order that people may receive money for making the things. This is why the distrust or contempt of trade which we find in earlier societies should not be too hastily set down as mere snobbery. The more important trade is, the more people who are condemned to - and, worse still, learn to prefer - what we have called the second kind of job. Work worth doing apart from its pay, enjoyable work, and good work become the privilege of a fortunate minority.