I

When Socialists declare that a society, emancipated from Capital, would make work agreeable, and would suppress all repugnant and unhealthy drudgery, they get laughed at. And yet even to-day we can see the striking progress made in this direction; and wherever this progress has been achieved, employers congratulate themselves on the economy of energy obtained thereby.

It is evident that a factory could be made as healthy and pleasant as a scientific laboratory. And it is no less evident that it would be advantageous to make it so. In a spacious and well-ventilated factory work is better; it is easy to introduce small ameliorations, of which each represents an economy of time or of manual labour. And if most of the workshops we know are foul and unhealthy, it is because the workers are of no account in the organization of factories, and because the most absurd waste of human energy is its distinctive feature.

Nevertheless, now and again, we already find some factories so well managed that it would be a real pleasure to work in them, if the work, be it well understood, were not to last more than four or five hours a day, and if every one had the possibility of varying it according to his tastes.

Look at this factory, unfortunately consecrated to engines of war. It is perfect as far as regards sanitary and intelligent organization. It occupies fifty English acres of land, fifteen of which are roofed with glass. The pavement of fire-proof bricks is as clean as that of a miner’s cottage, and the glass roof is carefully cleaned by a gang of workmen who do nothing else. In this factory are forged steel ingots or blooms weighing as much as twenty tons; and when you stand thirty feet from the immense furnace, whose flames have a temperature of more than a thousand degrees, you do not guess its presence save when its great jaws open to let out a steel monster. And the monster is handled by only three or four workmen, who now here, now there, open a tap, causing immense cranes to move by pressure of water in the pipes.

You enter expecting to hear the deafening noise of stampers, and you find that there are no stampers. The immense hundred-ton guns and the crank-shafts of transatlantic steamers are forged by hydraulic pressure, and instead of forging steel, the worker has but to turn a tap to give it shape, which makes a far more homogeneous metal, without crack or flaw, of the blooms, whatever be their thickness.

We expect an infernal grating, and we find machines which cut blocks of steel thirty feet long with no more noise than is needed to cut cheese. And when we expressed our admiration to the engineer who showed us round, he answered —

“It is a mere question of economy! This machine, that planes steel, has been in use for forty-two years. It would not have lasted ten years if its component parts, badly adjusted, lacking in cohesive strength, ‘interfered’ and creaked at each movement of the plane!”

“And the blast-furnaces? It would be a waste to let heat escape instead of utilizing it. Why roast the founders, when heat lost by radiation represents tons of coal?”

“The stampers that made buildings shake five leagues off were also waste! It is better to forge by pressure than by impact, and it costs less — there is less loss.”

“In a factory, light, cleanliness, the space allotted to each bench, is but a simple question of economy. Work is better done when you can see and you have elbow-room.”

“It is true,”; he said, “we were very cramped before coming here. Land is so expensive in the vicinity of large towns — landlords are so grasping!”

It is even so in mines. We know what mines are like nowadays from Zola’s descriptions and from newspaper reports. But the mine of the future will be well ventilated, with a temperature as easily regulated as that of a library; there will be no horses doomed to die below the earth: underground traction will be carried on by means of an automatic cable put in motion at the pit’s mouth. Ventilators will be always working, and there will never be explosions. This is no dream. Such a mine is already to be seen in England; we went down it. Here again this organization is simply a question of economy. The mine of which we speak, in spite of its immense depth (466 yards), has an output of a thousand tons of coal a day, with only two hundred miners — five tons a day per each worker, whereas the average for the two thousand pits in England is hardly three hundred tons a year per man.

If necessary, we could multiply examples proving that Fourier’s dream regarding material organization was not a Utopia.

This question has, however, been so frequently discussed in Socialist newspapers that public opinion might have been educated. Factory, forge, and mine can be as healthy and magnificent as the finest laboratories in modern universities, and the better the organization the more will man’s labour produce.

If it be so, can we doubt that work will become a pleasure and a relaxation in a society of equals, in which “hands” will not be compelled to sell themselves to toil, and to accept work under any conditions? Repugnant tasks will disappear, because it is evident that these unhealthy conditions are harmful to society as a whole. Slaves can submit to them, but free men will create new conditions, and their work will be pleasant and infinitely more productive. The exceptions of to-day will be the rule of to-morrow.

The same will come to pass as regards domestic work, which to-day society lays on the shoulders of that drudge of humanity — woman.