"My child, you are entering through laziness into the life most laborious of existences. Ah! You declare yourself a loafer! Prepare to labor. Have you seen a terrible machine called the rolling mill? Beware of it, it is a cunning and ferocious thing; if it but catch the skirt of your coat, you are drawn in entirely. This machine is idleness. Stop, while there is yet time, and save yourself! Otherwise, it is all over. Once caught, hope for nothing more. To fatigue idler! No more rest. The implacable iron hand of labor has seized you. Earn a living, have a task, accomplish a duty, you do not wish it! To be like others is tiresome! Well! You will be different! Labor is the law; he who spurns it as tiresome, will have it as a punishment. You are unwilling to be a workingman, you will be a slave. Labor releases you on the one hand only to retake you on the other… you have refused the honest weariness of men, you shall have the sweat of the damned. While others sing you will rave. You will see from afar, from below, other men at work; it will seem to you that they are at rest. The laborer, the reaper, the sailor, the blacksmith, will appear to you in the light like the blessed in a paradise. What radiance in the anvil! To drive the plow, to bind the sheaf is happiness. You idler… drag your halter, you are a beast of burden in the train of hell! To do nothing, that is your aim. Well! Not a week, not a day, not an hour without crushing exhaustion. You can lift nothing but with anguish. What will be a feather for others will be a rock for you. The simplest things will become steep. Life will make itself a monster about you… behold your future. Idleness, pleasure, what abysses! To do nothing is a dreary course to take, be sure of it. To live upon the substance of society! To be useless, that is to say, noxious! This leads straight to the lowest depths of misery.”
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