As we look back across millennia, we see a social structure that is largely agricultural. Although many males from fourteen to fifty fight in the emperor’s army or climb the rigging of the emperor’s ships, the remaining males together with children and women plough, dig, plant seed, carry water, weed, and harvest. Thus in the suburbs we rake leaves together; thus we trim the forsythia; thus we arrange a sprinkler on the suburban lawn, edge the grass neatly against the sidewalk, mow, and mulch. If we could look from outer space down on North America on an August Saturday, we would watch a suburban nation of farmers tending tiny plots. Canceling time, or standing at a telescope further out in space, we would watch multitudes in 1000 B.C. growing wheat in Mesopotamia. In the city apartment when we raise African violets in the window we plant wheat beside the Nile. In Connecticut the millionaire in his modern house with a swimming pool spends one day a week driving his tractor—he could hire it done a thousand times over—to mow the smooth acres of his estate. He is never so happy—not playing bridge that night drinking Chivas, not reading the Journal over coffee or estimating his net worth at the market’s close—as he is while he bumps over lawn on his Farmall, master of his lands gathering his weekly harvest.

Who is worst-off, for work, in human history? When I read Studs Terkel’s Working I choose our nomadic Mexican farm laborers, laboring in the fields from early childhood until death, days sometimes elongated to seventeen hours. When I read Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast I switch to sailors in nineteenth century merchant fleets: They never spent more than four hours in bed and usually worked a sixteen-hour day (longer in danger; and don’t forget the danger) often seven days a week, away from land for months and from home for years at a time. Then I think of the soldier, legionary or hoplite marching all night to fight at dawn, hardtack and salt beef and what you can loot. I have not mentioned slavery, and the history of humanity is the history of slavery. Mind you, in some cultures or historical eras slaves were better off than gentleman soldiers. But the chattel slavery of the Americans, perpetuated until late in the Christian era, I propose as the nineteenth century’s equivalent to Hitler’s and Stalin’s exterminations. Or read Das Kapital— or any objective history of the same period—and compare the labors of miners or factory workers in England—often women and children—with labors of the felaheen in the Old Kingdom.