" There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and complacently about 'the working classes,' and satisfy themselves _ that a day's hard intellectual work is very much harder than a day's hard manual toil, and is righteously entitled to much bigger pay. Why, they really think that, you know, because they know all about the one but haven't tried the other. But I know all about both; and so far as I am concerned there isn't money enough in the universe to hire mc to swing a pickaxe thirty days, but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as ne<ar nothine: as you can cipher it down—and I will be satisfied, too. Intellectual ' work ' is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer, is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the magician with the fiddle-bow in his hand, who sits in the niidst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him—why, certainly he is at work, if you "wish to call it that, but lord, it's a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair—but there it is. and nothing can change it; the' higher the pay_ in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash also. And it's also the very law of those transparent swindles, transmissible nobility and kingship."— Mark Twain.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/MW19100915.2.21
Bibliographic details
Maoriland Worker, Volume I, Issue 1, 15 September 1910, Page 6
Word Count
261Untitled Maoriland Worker, Volume I, Issue 1, 15 September 1910, Page 6
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