Page 143 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is,
at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought
runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if
they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.
A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he is
questioned about the improvement of working conditions,
usually says something like this:
‘We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is
so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the
thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do
anything about it. We are sorry for you lower classes, just
as we are sorry for a, cat with the mange, but we will fight
like devils against any improvement of your condition. We
feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of
affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of set-
ting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers,
since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy,
sweat and be damned to you.’
This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated
people; one can read the substance of it in a hundred es-
says. Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four
hundred pounds a year, and naturally they side with the
rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the
poor is a threat to their own liberty. Foreseeing some dismal
Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers
to keep things as they are. Possibly he does not like his fel-
low-rich very much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest
of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of
people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by them.

1 Down and Out in Paris and London