We shall not have secured a more equal dis-
tribution of property, because everybody, but
the official, will be propertyless. Above all,
we shall have lost the right that we have now
— to choose our own occupation, to work at
the calling which we ourselves select, to fix
within limits the development of our own
career as our individual tastes and predilec-
tions may determine. We shall become slaves
of the State, disciplined, controlled, super-
vised at every point in our lives, and compelled



A NATION ON PIECE WORK 69

to work, to play, to marry and to live, not as
free men but as automata — slaves of the State.
To that I oppose another ideal. Instead
of letting the average man become more and
more dependent upon the State aid in order
that he may eke out his insufficient earnings,
my programme is to place him in the position
of earning for himself and for his family a
sufficiency and a surplus. There is nothing
Utopian or visionary about that. As I have
pointed out, the whole world is at the present
hungry for our goods. Never has there been
such a demand, not only for raw materials
but for finished articles, as exists to-day.
At the very time when half a million men and
women are in receipt of unemployed pay
all the peoples of the earth are short of the
very commodities which they might produce.
Something like paralysis has overtaken our
industrial machine at the very moment when
its free and full operation is most needed, and
I do not hesitate to say that the main cause
of that paralysis is to be found in the restric-
tion of output, which is itself a direct result
of the present system of remunerating Labotu".
