A Treatise on Parents and Children

It will be said here that, on the contrary, heaven is always conceived / as a perpetual holiday, and that whoever is not born to an independent / income is striving for one or longing for one because it gives holidays / for life. To which I reply, first, that heaven, as conventionally / conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, / that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though / plenty of people have described a day at the seaside; and that the / genuine popular verdict on it is expressed in the proverb "Heaven for / holiness and Hell for company. " Second, I point out that the wretched / people who have independent incomes and no useful occupation, do the / most amazingly disagreeable and dangerous things to make themselves / tired and hungry in the evening. When they are not involved in what they / call sport, they are doing aimlessly what other people have to be paid / to do: driving horses and motor cars; trying on dresses and walking up / and down to shew them off; and acting as footmen and housemaids to royal / personages. The sole and obvious cause of the notion that idleness is / delightful and that heaven is a place where there is nothing to be done, / is our school system and our industrial system. The school is a prison / in which work is a punishment and a curse. In avowed prisons, hard / labor, the only alleviation of a prisoner's lot, is treated as an / aggravation of his punishment; and everything possible is done to / intensify the prisoner's inculcated and unnatural notion that work is an / evil. In industry we are overworked and underfed prisoners. Under such / absurd circumstances our judgment of things becomes as perverted as our / habits. If we were habitually underworked and overfed, our notion / of heaven would be a place where everybody worked strenuously for / twenty-four hours a day and never got anything to eat.

Once realize that a perpetual holiday is beyond human endurance, and / that "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do" and it will / be seen that we have no right to impose a perpetual holiday on children. / If we did, they would soon outdo the Labor Party in their claim for a / Right to Work Bill.