Incommunicado
Though it savours of ideological cant, the dignity of labour is something (unlike parity of esteem) in which I am prepared to believe. But it is a nebulous and delicately poised concep- tion, and it has not (in my own mind, at any rate) been strengthened by the decision of workers in various factories to send to Coventry those of their comrades who did not take part in the token strike. Small children, thus exiled in silence by their contemporaries, are sometimes distressed or enraged; at best they must make a tremendous and painfully self-conscious effort to show that they do not mind. But I should have thought that for a grown man this particular form of martyrdom was comparatively easy to endure, while upon those applying the sanctions of ostracism there must surely, with the passage of time, dawn the suspicion that they are making asses of themselves. The gift of speech was granted to us to enable us to express our feelings about each other; to try to express them by silence is regarded, even in the nursery, as a rather feeble gambit, and one which quickly palls.
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