NOT a few economists have undertaken to investigate the relation of work to pain, and they have concluded, often on grounds of etymology and comparative linguistics, that work is essentially painful, essentially an affliction.

But this time we need have no hesitation in asserting that the exact opposite is the case. Work is essentially a joy—the joy of living; or rather, living, the joy of living, is nothing else than work. If we ever stop working we are bored, we are smothered, we die. Even children “work,” for their games to their minds, and therefore in reality, are “work.” Even people who make a profession of amusing themselves work, and work hard in their way; as any one may verify by watching them busily and diligently attentive to things which the rest of us call trifles.

Now if this be true, if labour is a joy and not an affliction, how in the world did it occur to any one to consider it an evil? Evidently—the answer suggests itself—evidently because there is such a thing as painful work—work that distresses us. And how can work distress us? What can such work be?

Painful work is the work we fail to make our own; the work that does not harmonise with our inclinations and aspirations, does not become an inclination and an aspiration with us, does not engage our whole being. Such work tears us, more or less violently but always with violence, from our work, the work that is dear to us. And it pains, it distresses, quite as much by what it deprives us of as by what it imposes upon us.

Examples are within reach all around us: those little “jobs” that wait for us every hour and day of our lives—the attention we must give to domestic details, let us say, or the task of patiently answering all the questions that people ask us, interrupting our own work, meantime; or the big “jobs” and the longer ones, which oblige us, since we have to make a living, to fill some position we should never in the world have chosen, or which drag us away from our comfortable homes at sunrise to spend the day in factory or office.

Can the world ever be rid of this work that is pain? Entirely, radically, in its “idea,” its universality, no, as may be seen from the fact that in the course of labours we have begun with joy, moments of difficulty, annoyance, pain, inevitably come, moments when we have to urge ourselves to carry on till the enthusiasm returns again. Poets know such moments well, as do all artists. They would never get very far if they always waited for their “inspiration,” as people call it, to catch their sails in its gladsome winds and send them merrily forward.

Inspiration is not peculiar to the artist. It comes to all of us, whatever our walk in life. And it is not a substitute for will, but depends on will. It is a sort of grace from on high that descends upon those who allure it, inviting it by daily effort, preparing themselves to welcome it, and sustaining it when it has come by new efforts. Nor, beyond the sphere of the work we do for the joy of working, can we suppress the questions which the march of life puts to the individual and which he is obliged to answer. Rebellion against this necessity would be not only vain but harmful (for the very idea of necessity presupposes rationality).

And harmful to us as individuals! Who can say that a question put to us by the larger world is not for our good, as it is certainly good for society and for humanity? People who evade such questions, who shirk their duties because of the annoyance those duties bring, miss many grand occasions for growing bigger and better. In their anxiety to preserve their own capricious freedom, they gradually lose their power to utilise and enjoy their freedom. They decay inside, and there comes a day when they find themselves unable to do even the work that was once their love and their fondest ambition.

We cannot escape from this law of life. A world offering nothing but congenial and inspiring tasks, tasks without constraints and without disagreeable or painful aspects, is a Utopia such as anarchists fancy, or other dreamers equally confused in their minds or equally innocent of practical wisdom. We cannot altogether abolish the work that is pain.

But if we cannot abolish it, we are not for that reason excused from doing our best to reduce its quantity to the advantage of congenial labour, which, because it is congenial, is all the more productive. And in fact we do so reduce it. Each of us tries to bring his life into harmony with his own natural tendencies, eliminating, as far as he can, occasions and causes for interrupting congenial labour with work that is “hard,” and making the latter less hard and more endurable by a variety of attractions and hopes of reward. We all strive for happiness, or at least for a little happiness; and happiness, in this practical sense of the word, means conditions that make work easy. Such happiness is a legitimate thing to desire. It is even our duty to strive for it, since it is less an end in itself than a means to productive effort and to spiritual growth. Lawmakers and economists properly concern themselves with this problem, continually suggesting expedients and creating institutions to combat the hardships of labour and make toil more attractive and tolerable.

Legislation, social reform, individual effort, may succeed in removing some of the forms and some of the causes of unpleasant or painful labour; and any measures that promise such relief deserve approval and encouragement. But such measures will never be able to attack directly, much less effectively combat or destroy, the element of pain that forever recurs as a necessary phase of all work. For economic measures solve economic problems; and the problem here is not economic but intrinsically ethical.

Removing the causes and the forms of objectionable labour, we shall never succeed in removing the fundamental principle of pain which is present in work whenever work comes to the individual as a moral duty. In this case there is no remedy unless we change our task from something that is external to something that is internal, from something that is imposed upon us to something that springs from within us, from a charge laid on us by others to a creation reflecting our own will, accepting it, devoting ourselves to it in the conviction that through it we are giving a deep satisfaction to our best being. If we can accomplish this, the most distasteful labour brings a smile to our faces, a smile of resignation, perhaps, not untouched by sadness but also brightened with a certain noble light. And afterwards, as we go back to the work that is the congenial and spontaneous interest of our lives, we feel as though we had been relieved of a burden—especially of the burden of remorse!

The labour problem, which is giving so much concern to men of our time, is essentially a problem of moral education. For no society which must work, no human society, in other words, can endure without inner discipline, and without a moral enthusiasm to sustain that discipline and make it effective. There will always be need of resignation. There will always be need of sacrifice.