'Nothing is perhaps more notable in the average workman than his
surprising idleness, and the candour with which he confesses to the
failing. It has to me been always something of a relief to find the
poor, as a general rule, so little oppressed with work. …
'The other day I was living with a farmer in America, an old
frontiersman, who had worked and fought, hunted and farmed, from his
childhood up. He excused himself for his defective education on the
ground that he had been overworked from first to last. Even now, he
said, anxious as he was, he had never the time to take up a book. In
consequence of this, I observed him closely; he was occupied for 4
or, at the extreme outside, for 5 hours out of the 24, and then
principally in walking; and the remainder of the day he passed in
sheer idleness, either eating fruit or standing with his back
against the door.
'I have known men do hard literary work all morning, and then
undergo quite as much physical fatigue by way of relief as satisfied
this powerful frontiersman for the day. He, at least, like all the
educated class, did so much homage to industry as to persuade
himself he was industrious.'