the people in the new epoch of Rest work without special reward for their labour:
'No reward of labour!' exclaimed Hammond. 'The reward of labour is life. Is that not enough? The reward of creation. The wages which God gets, as people might have said long time agone. If you are going to be paid for the pleasure of creation, which is what excellence in work means, the next thing we shall hear of will be a bill sent for the creation of children.'
But the visitor objects that in the nineteenth century it would have been said that there is a natural desire towards the procreation of children, and a natural desire not to work. Whereupon Hammond scouts that as an ancient platitude, and wholly untrue, and explains that in the Communist Commonwealth 'all work is now made pleasurable either because of the hope of gain in honour and wealth with which the work is done, which causes pleasurable excitement, even when the work is not pleasant; or else because it has grown into a pleasurable habit, as is the case with what you call mechanical work; and lastly (and most of the work is of this kind) because there is a conscious sensuous pleasure in work itself; it is done, that is, by artists.'
And this exaltation of work from being, as in the old world, a servitude and an irksome toil, into a pleasurable creation and art, Morris speaks of as being a far greater and more important change than all the other changes concerning crime, politics, property, and marriage which Socialism will achieve.
He was not, as is commonly thought, opposed to the use of machinery or labour-saving inventions. On the contrary, he strongly urged that all merely laborious and monotonous work should, as far as possible, be done by machinery.[1] He even denied that machinery was necessarily distasteful from an Art point of view. 'It is,' he said,
- ↑ See particularly his lectures on 'How we live, and how we might live' and 'Useful Work versus Useless Toil' in his Signs of Change.
