MANUAL WORK. 407 



medicine would trust to hygiene, and how much 

 less to prescriptions, if the young doctors were 

 the nurses of the sick and the nurses received 

 the education of the doctors of our time ! And 

 how much the poet would gain in his feeling of 

 the beauties of nature, how much better would he 

 know the human heart, if he met the rising sun 

 amidst the tillers of the soil, himself a tiller ; 

 if he fought against the storm with the sailors 

 on board ship ; if he knew the poetry of labour 

 and rest, sorrow and joy, struggle and conquest ! 

 Greift nur hinein in's voile Menschenleben ! 

 Goethe said ; Ein jeder lebfs nicht vielen isfs 

 bekannt. But how few poets follow his ad- 

 vice ! 



The so-called " division of labour " has grown 

 under a system which condemned the masses to 

 toil all the day long, and all the life long, at the 

 same wearisome kind of labour. But if we take 

 into account how few are the real producers of 

 wealth in our present society, and bow squan- 

 dered is their labour, we must recognise that 

 Franklin was right in saying that to work five 

 hours a day would generally do for supplying each 

 member of a civilised nation with the comfort 

 now accessible for the few only. 



But we have made some progress since Frank- 

 lin's time, and some of that progress in the hither- 

 to most backward branch of production agri- 



