It seems to happen when the peasant suddenly leaves his home and becomes
a workman. Then an entire change comes over everywhere. Life is now a
matter of selling oneself to slave-work, building roads or labouring in
quarries or mines or on the railways, purposeless, meaningless, really
slave-work, each integer doing his mere labour, and all for no purpose,
except to have money, and to get away from the old system.
These Italian navvies work all day long, their whole life is engaged in
the mere brute labour. And they are the navvies of the world. And whilst
they are navvying, they are almost shockingly indifferent to their
circumstances, merely callous to the dirt and foulness.
It is as if the whole social form were breaking down, and the human
element swarmed within the disintegration, like maggots in cheese. The
roads, the railways are built, the mines and quarries are excavated, but
the whole organism of life, the social organism, is slowly crumbling and
caving in, in a kind of process of dry rot, most terrifying to see. So
that it seems as though we should be left at last with a great system of
roads and railways and industries, and a world of utter chaos seething
upon these fabrications: as if we had created a steel framework, and the
whole body of society were crumbling and rotting in between.
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