Today's Random Wilde is from "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," and is reprinted in Richard Ellman, ed., The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 268.
"[A] great deal of nonsense is written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labor at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labor are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine."
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The Not-So-Random Mill: "No longer enslaved or made dependent by force of law, the great majority are so by force of poverty; they are still chained to a place, to an occupation, and to conformity with the will of an employer, and debarred, by the accident of birth both from the enjoyments, and from the mental and moral advantages, which others inherit without exertion and independently of desert. That this is an evil equal to almost any of those against which mankind have hitherto struggled, the poor are not wrong in believing." (Chapters on Socialism, 'Introductory')
It may be noted that Oscar did not seem to hold John Stuart in high esteem. In a lost piece entitled 'To Read or not to Read' and published in a Paul Mall Gazette on February 8, 1886 (or so says the 12th volume of my self-styled "Connoisseur's Edition" of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde [New York: DOubleday, Page & Company, 1907]), he proposed a tripartite categorization of book types: books to read; books to re-read; and books "not to read at all, such as Thomson's Seasons, Rogers's Italy, Paley's Evidences, all the fathers except St. Augustine, all John Stuart Mill except the essay on Liberty, all Voltaire's plays without any exception..."
For my part, I happen to read both authors with much delight.
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