ABSTRACT
Most of their leisure is accompanied by profuse consumption, involving thus from the standpoint of society a double waste, a waste of time and of substance. Where does all this leisure come from? The answer to this question seems tolerably simple. It has often been observed that labour-saving machinery and other devices for abridging human toil have done very little to lighten or shorten the work-day for the workers. What then has become of the labour that is saved? Most of it has gone to enlarge the leisure of the leisured class, or perhaps we should say, of the leisured classes. For we saw that there existed a lower as well as an upper leisure class, a necessary product of the same mal-distribution of resources as sustains the latter. For an industrial system that grinds out unproductive surplus breaks down the physical and moral efficiency of large numbers of actual or potential workers as a by-product of the overdriving and underfeeding process. The reckless breeding of the class thus broken down furnishes a horde of weaklings, shirkers and nomads, unassimilated, unassimilable by the industrial system. These beings, kept alive by charity and poor-laws, have grown with modern industrialism and constitute the class known as ‘unemployables.’ They are often described as a ‘standing menace to civilisation,’ and are in fact the most pitiable product of the mal-distribution of wealth.
