Holidays with pay is an idea which performs the almost impossible—it pleases everybody. The only people who really ought to object to it, on their own principles, are a few Catholic Distributists who display an excessive veneration for work and thrift and a rather puritanical hatred of the very words “leisure” and “plenty.” But even these, I feel sure, will not have the heart to be too consistent in this case.

We who preach the new economics naturally welcome the holidays-for-all-with-pay movement as a sort of miracle that confirms the truth of what we say. It is not consumer-credit, to be sure; essentially it is no more than an increase of wages with a shortening of hours. But it does prepare the way for consumer credit, and it does mean more purchasing-power in the pockets of the consumer as such. It does distribute money through some channel that is not exactly production. Above all it does make a beginning of a psychological break between the idea of work and the idea of a living or income. Or (to put it another way) it educates people towards the idea that work is something to be desired for its own sake, not because a living has to be earned by some drudgery or other.