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I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.
Foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are. Possibly he does not like his fellow-rich very much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.
A PLONGEUR is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work.
It don’t follow that because a man’s on the road he can’t think of anything but tea-and-two-slices.’
But you don’t NEED to get like that. If you’ve got any education, it don’t matter to you if you’re on the road for the rest of your life.’
‘No, not necessarily. If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, “I’m a free man in HERE”’ — he tapped his forehead — ‘and you’re all right.’
He had managed to keep his brain intact and alert, and so nothing could make him succumb to poverty. He might be ragged and cold, or even starving, but so long as he could read, think, and watch for meteors, he was, as he said, free in his own mind.
Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no ESSENTIAL difference between a beggar’s livelihood and that of numberless respectable people.
It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course — but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless.
Money has become the grand test of virtue.
By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised.
He has not, more than most modem people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.
It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.
A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor
The problem is how to turn the tramp from a bored, half alive vagrant into a self-respecting human being.
Here is the world that awaits you if you are ever penniless.
