Life & Wisdom Quote by Alexander Smith

Smith’s promise of a “fair day’s wage” lands like a handshake that turns, mid-grip, into a wink. The first half borrows the moral language of the work ethic - steady labor, steady reward - a Victorian comfort blanket for an industrial age that loved productivity and distrusted idleness. But the line doesn’t stay pious. It swerves into the deliberately odd pairing of “praise or pudding,” collapsing the grand and the trivial into the same pay packet. That’s the joke and the critique: reward is not a single moral currency, and “fairness” is often whatever the powerful can frame as fair.

The subtext is a quiet demotion of cash. Smith doesn’t deny wages; he sidesteps them, suggesting that what you “get” for your work might be social approval (praise) or mere sustenance (pudding). In a culture where workers were routinely told to be grateful, the quote exposes how easily compensation becomes symbolic, even infantilizing: perform virtue, receive dessert. “Whichever happens to suit your taste” adds a slippery consumerist twist, as if the worker’s preferences control the terms of reward, when the era’s economic reality was that preferences rarely mattered.

As a poet, Smith is working in doubles: he offers a maxim that can sit comfortably on a sampler while embedding a skeptical aside about how societies manage labor with sentiment. It’s less a guarantee than a portrait of compromise - the way aspiration gets bartered down into applause or calories, depending on what you’ll accept.