Page 142 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

only a cheap, shoddy imitation of it. Nearly everyone hates
hotels. Some restaurants are better than others, but it is im-
possible to get as good a meal in a restaurant as one can get,
for the same expense, in a private house. No doubt hotels
and restaurants must exist, but there is no need that they
should enslave hundreds of people. What makes the work
in them is not the essentials; it is the shams that are sup-
posed to represent luxury. Smartness, as it is called, means,
in effect, merely that the staff work more and the customers
pay more; no one benefits except the proprietor, who will
presently buy himself a striped villa at Deauville. Essential-
ly, a ‘smart’ hotel is a place where a hundred people toil like
devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose
for things they do not really want. If the nonsense were cut
out of hotels and restaurants, and the work done with sim-
ple efficiency, PLONGEURS might work six or eight hours a
day instead often or fifteen.
Suppose it is granted that a PLONGEUR’S work is more
or less useless. Then the question follows, Why does any-
one want him to go on working? I am trying to go beyond
the immediate economic cause, and to consider what plea-
sure it can give anyone to think of men swabbing dishes for
life. For there is no doubt that people—comfortably situated
people—do find a pleasure in such thoughts. A slave, Mar-
cus Gato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It
does not matter whether his work is needed or not, he must
work, because work in itself is good—for slaves, at least.
This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains
of useless drudgery.

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