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When Nature gives an order there is no appeal to a higher court, and the excuse that a man has not the time to obey, or is doing something that his country most urgently needs, has no weight in that court. When Nature touches a man on the shoulder and says, "Stop!" he stops. The penalty of frayed nerves, overworked brains, and underworked bodies is failure of body and mind.
Now you may fancy that Tom was quite good, when he had everything that he could want or wish: but you would be very much mistaken. Being quite comfortable is a very good thing; but it does not make people good. Indeed, it sometimes makes them naughty, as it has made the people in America; and as it made the people in the Bible, who waxed fat and kicked, like horses overfed and underworked.
In the busy life of to-day how much more is this the case! Overworked brains and stomachs, underworked muscles and limbs, soon derange the balance of supply and demand. We waste faster than enfeebled digestion can well repair. We feel always a little depressed; we restore the equilibrium temporarily by stimulation, some with alcohol and tobacco, others with coffee and tea.
What brotherhood can exist between the wealthy receiver of interest, profit, and rent and the struggling worker who sees his wife dragged down by poverty and overwork, and his children stunted and dwarfed physically and intellectually between the underworked and overfed commercial or industrial magnate and the underfed, overworked denizen of the slums? ... The Church is put on trial in the minds of men.
And generally he wanted to see Europe. As an interesting side show to the excursion he hoped, in his capacity of the rather underworked and rather over-salaried secretary of the Massachusetts Society for the Study of Contemporary Thought, to discuss certain agreeable possibilities with Mr. Britling, who lived at Matching's Easy. Mr. Direck was a type of man not uncommon in America.
For I knew that the rock was old when man was young, and that it had braved all the washings of the sea." The men congratulated Ben; and Ben came home and he stood at a mirror, and shaping his body put out his arms. "How's this for my maiden speech in the house?" he asked his wife. Presently he paused. "You're a fine one to be an M.P.'s lady," he said. "You stout, underworked fool."
Each man seemed to take his own point of view, without any regard to the opinions of the particular religious denomination to which he belonged. All were grossly ignorant of science and chemistry, and all were very much overpaid. Here, I think, lay the sting of his envy, and it is part of the general jealousy of England, a country where everybody is supposed to be underworked and overpaid.
Nor do they, perhaps, interfere with the comfort of their dependents, by any undue or onerous exactions of service; for their establishments, being for the most part calculated for show, are more numerous than is required for use, and are therefore necessarily underworked, except, perhaps, in the case of some poor drudges at the bottom, who slink up and down the back stairs unseen, and whose comfort, therefore, does not engage the attention of a family of this class; and even these will not be oppressed with their labours, unless when some impoverished people of fashion may find it necessary to dock the tails of their establishments in order to keep the more prominent portions entire.
I knew nothing whatever of horses and donkeys, or of what their poor legs could bear; but I very much liked passing swiftly through the air. I do not think Neddy suffered, however, though we went back at a pace marvellously different from that at which we came. We were very light weights, and Master Neddy was an overfed, underworked gentleman, with the acutest discrimination as to his drivers.
But if the majority in every society were not overworked and underfed and meanly housed, why, then the minority could not be underworked and overfed and housed luxuriously. But this is talk to which no respectable reader can be expected to listen. They are one babel of bargaining, these markets. The purchaser selects a cauliflower.
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