Work is in two main lines, Production and Distribution; to make something, or to hand it about, is human industry.

To create is an intense satisfaction; to combine elements and produce new results, whether it be a bridge, a basket, or a loaf of bread—to make is in itself a joy. But so is it a joy to give something to somebody, whether at first-hand, or in a combination with many; to spread, to disseminate, to feel the current of human good flow through you; both functions are happy.

The universe is an everlasting production, force taking form, energy embodied, disembodied, re-embodied—this is the game of living. Our little mid-station of consciousness feels the pressure of natural forces on both sides, pushing in through the sensory nerves; pushing out through the motor nerves. Owing to our early mistake about the superior pleasure of impression, and our perverse insistence that expression is only a guarded outlay of limited force, by which to secure desired impressions, we have never understood the nature of human production.

The pleasure of right impression is not to be denied. Every sensory nerve should have its proper stimulus. And man, with his immense collective sensorium, with his highly developed personal sensations, due to social evolution, and his power of feeling with and for other people, has enormous capacity for the reception of pleasure. But what is all this pleasurable stimulus for? The brain is not merely a reservoir for stored sensation. A sensation is a certain amount of energy going into the human battery. Once in, it must be discharged in commensurate activity.

Most interesting experiments in psychology are being made to-day, proving this, even in some immediate result of a strong mental impression in unconscious bodily motion; as shown in studies among school children. As the brain develops it has increasing capacity to receive impressions, to retain and to arrange impressions; but nevertheless sometime that mass of impressions must come out in commensurate action, else disease ensues. The human brain, socially developed, and socially stimulated, has great power of expression; that expression is in work, and work is in Production and Distribution. The productivity of the human race, even with its past and present checks and perversions, is the wonder of the ages. Guaranteed the swift and easy satisfaction of those “wants” our economists build so much on, the steady increase of impressed energy has resulted in as steady an increase of expressed energy, necessarily.

Man receives stimulus from a thousand sources. Since we made mental impressions permanent and exchangeable “in book form,” knowledge and emotion bottled, preserved, and distributed broadcast; there is practically no limit to human stimuli; and, since with this increasing stimulus we have steadily reduced the difficulties of execution, our real problem is, how to provide right outlets for the productive energy of humanity. This normal increase of power and execution we have managed to check, however, quite materially. We have gravely interfered with the natural distribution of stimulus up to the present time; but now our rapid multiplication of free school and free library, with similar tendencies in other educational and recreative lines, is producing its natural result in increased energy.

Even with what stimulus was open to us, our production should have been very great; but we have interfered with that also, in more ways than one. The principal obstacle here is the basic error of the Want theory. Holding that man works only to satisfy desire,—i. e., produces merely to consume,—we prostitute our share of the social energy to a factitious personal advantage; and try to govern the productive processes of society by the dictates of self-interest. Here you have a factory in which a hundred men turn out ten hundred pairs of shoes a day. What for? Why, for the feet of ten hundred people, of course—to shoe the world. “Not so,” they protest. “We are making these shoes for ourselves.” “But you cannot wear ten pairs of shoes a day, my man!” “No, but I only do this work for the pay—and I can easily consume the pay for ten pair of shoes a day.”

This poor man never understands his position as a social functionary with all its honour and pleasure. The Ego concept and the Want theory becloud his mind. Even his personal pride in his personal work has lowered since the machine made his work collective, and his mind failed to keep pace with the machine, and make his joy and pride collective too. His pleasure is only in what he gets back from society in return for his labours, and he gets very little. As part of this same ancient misconception of what work is, we find the incredibly multiplied machinery of production “owned” by individuals; and manipulated by them under the same befogging ideas that lead the workman to “limit his output.”

Never were any of the gross and childish superstitions of remotest savagery more injurious—or more ridiculous—than these rudimentary errors under which our economic development so blindly labours. We have our alleged “overproduction” on the one hand—though a full supply of the good things of life is obtained by scarce one-tenth of the population of the world; and we have the ensuing and even more colossal absurdity of the restricted output—whether of the man who stints his day’s labour, or the group of financiers who “corner” some social product, and say how much the world shall have.

These muddy follies of our common mind—for if we did not all, or nearly all, believe in these principles of action, we would not for a moment allow such economic treason and misrule—together with allied fallacies of a similar nature, most seriously interfere with production. Nevertheless, as the laws of nature are somewhat stronger than our evanescent misconceptions, we do see the tremendous increase in our productivity; and, in favoured instances, its grandeur and delight. As good an expression of this feeling as I know in literature is in George Eliot’s poem of “Stradivarius.”

Here is a man, developing an extremely specialised line of production, and clear of brain enough to see the joy and dignity of it.

Our best known instances of normal or nearly normal production are found in art and science. Here you have a product which the world recognises as its own—not that of the individual maker. “He has given to the world” such and such a picture, or statue; discovery in science or composition in music; to this world-service we give some, though an imperfect, honour; and we pity and even blame the man who “prostitutes his art” to the level of “the pot-boiler.” Art is world-service, truly, but so is manufacture or commerce. A man should no more prostitute his “trade” than his “art.” It is as base to make a “pot-boiler” of your day’s work as of a book or a picture. No soldier is more actually “serving his country” in his occasional fighting, than is the workman in his continual working. One’s country sometimes has to be “saved” in sudden emergency, at considerable cost of immediate exertion and sacrifice; but one’s country has to be kept alive all the time, at considerable cost of unceasing labour and some sacrifice too. Our patriotism, which rushes madly forward to “save the country” when it is in visible danger, and, having saved it, proceeds to exploit it for personal advantage all the rest of the time, is on a par with love for one’s family, which would risk life to “save” it, from flood, or fire, or injurious attack, and then mercilessly cheat it, starve it, keep it cold and dirty and ignorant and sick and vicious—when not “in danger.” The danger to our country from our general neglect and misuse, and our frequent positive injury, is far greater than that of occasional war. We need a patriotism that will operate all the time.

The human worker, whether a captain of industry or in the ranks, who puts his personal safety and advantage before that of his country is exactly the same traitor and coward that the officer or private in the army would be who did the same thing. He does not know it, we do not know it, therefore no odium attaches to these public offenders. But the mischief they do is apparent in every branch of our economic processes.

We have seen that human production is checked in amount by our lack of knowledge. It is injured in kind from the same cause. Normal production has an evolution of its own. Follow the development of any one trade, and you will see as natural a growth as in a physical organ, marred of course by our errors, but there under all. Take the building trades as an example. At the beginning we find primitive man enlarging a cave somewhat, or, lacking that retreat, putting up some shelter of boughs to screen him from the wind and rain, or spreading a hide for the same purpose. The act, repeated, develops skill, and the mind, dwelling over and over on the same problem, develops too, and sees better ways of accomplishment. The shelter of hide becomes the teepee or wigwam, and, cloth superseding leather, the tent in all its forms; but its growth is limited by mechanical conditions. The shelter of boughs is more open to improvement; and evolves slowly into hut, cabin, house. The materials used depending on the environment, the Eskimo builds of ice, the Chaldean of clay, and, slowly, by proof of superiority, stone was used wherever found. The principle of specialisation acting steadily upon this widening current of functional ability, we have now that group of allied trades required to construct for modern man the material form in which he lives and works—without which he cannot live and work.

A genealogical tree could be made, showing just where each branch diverged, the workers in wood, clay, and stone dividing early; the gradual appearance of the system of pipes and conduits which vitalise a house; the development of windows in all forms, of doors and their particular line of improvement, of interior finish, from daubed mud to artistic decoration; and so on and so on, until we have now the house which stands knit to the city by waste pipe, water pipe, gas pipe, and electric wire; a house which represents the slow fruition of a thousand centuries, the contributed intelligence and skill of a million men. The evolution of this “social form” is as natural and orderly as the evolution of any physical form. To the men through whom it grew the whole course should have been a pleasure and a pride, and in large measure it has been, in spite of all our misbeliefs.

To feel within one’s self the tendency toward a certain line of production, to “learn the trade,” i. e., submit the brain to the accumulated stimulus of that line of production—to feel the racial skill begin to flow through one’s fingers—to do the thing well—better—best!—and then, still unsatisfied, to relieve the pressure by new invention of ways even better than the best—that is the natural sensation of the producer. Against this have operated at every step the weight and darkness of our leaden lies. The child is not so watched and trained as to develop the fine sense of special “calling” which shows the best path in life. Only the extreme case, the boy who would be a sailor, or a mechanic, or whatever he was meant to be, has the advantage of being where he belongs in the world’s work. But the average boy, with no special aptitude or pleasure in his trade, is put to work under the dominant idea, drilled in from infancy, that he is to work only because he has to—he has to in order to get the pay. The whole outlook of his position is lost. He has his head in a bag. All he sees is the week’s wage, and the work is merely to be gotten through in order to get the wage.

We have known all along that this was a wrong attitude, and have tried to inculcate upon the worker a sense of “the nobility of labour,” of “duty to his employer,” of the “common interest of capital and labour.”

It does not ennoble the labourer to enlarge his selfishness to the size of his employer’s. The employer is in exactly the same boat. He has no more sense of what his work is for than the “hand” has. He too is looking only at his wages,—salary, income, profits, rent,—looking only at what he is to get from society, instead of what he is to do for it. The common interest of employer and employee, which is merely an interest in their common income, does not lift the cloud from labour. No interest is large enough to satisfy the human mind, except the social interest; the thrilling glory of working with and for the whole world at the trade you love best, and can do best.

The workman should have such education as shall give him for a background the full knowledge of social evolution; and the special place of his own trade in that evolution. He should know just where it first appeared, how it grew, and why, the importance of its place to-day—and here there would, no doubt, be warm differences of opinion, debates and competition. The payment for his service should no more be the point of ambition with the workman, than with the pen-man, paint-man, or rifleman. The producer is entitled to feel the full power and pride of production; and, in spite of our errors, this power and pride is felt by the well-placed workman, whose life is better than his belief—as human life always is.

One of the most important features of this great social function is the reactive effect on the functionary. The maker is inexorably modified by the thing made. If the thing made develops along normal lines, the maker develops with it. If it does not—if it is checked or perverted in its growth, so is the worker. Working is humanity’s growing. In the act of working the individual is modified, and by the work accomplished humanity is modified. Also the accomplished work remains, like coral, the record of the height of those who did it.

In the case of those who do not work, who consume copiously, and produce nothing, they have no chance of normal development, add no step to human progress. See in conspicuous instance the Grecian marbles and literature. Those who gave the work were themselves developed by doing it; the society which received the work was developed by using it; and by the work as it remains to us, we know and judge Greece. But the possession of these works does not make us Greeks. To be able to do them was to be Greek. Many causes combined to make the Greek; and the Greek blossomed into that kind of work—he was, so to speak, merely Greeking in the doing of it. We have the result as we have fossil bones. From it we may learn what the Greek was, but not how to make him.

A person, or a race, is something, owing to antecedent conditions. Then they do something by virtue of being what they are, as an apple tree bears apples. (“By their fruits ye shall know them.”)

The thing done does have some reactive effect, however—else we should have no power to modify each other, and this is one of humanity’s chief advantages. The modifying effect of the work accomplished is indeed large, it is no wonder we so long to create the things whereby we can thus progressively serve each other. See, for instance, the endless effect upon society of such work as Plato’s, Angelo’s, Stevenson’s, Edison’s; all work counts in both ways; in the doing it affects the doer; when done it affects the user.

But it is more blessed to give than to receive. In animals the modification of species is effected only in the direct line of heredity. A change of condition modifies his action—the change in action modifies him—and the modification is transmitted in his single line. But there is no means of widening the effect—it has to be filtered down through direct heredity. With man, in his organic connection, there is a race modification through our transmission of energy in work, which multiplies his progress million-fold. Some local change of condition modifies the action of one person, the change in action modifies him, and the modification is transmitted in his single line. Thus far we are even with the animals. Then we pass them; man’s action is work; it is not mere putting something in his mouth; it is making something. And the thing made holds and transmits his energy, passing it on forever to all who use it, making the growth of one the growth of all.

One man, or some few men, make a steam engine. They personally are by so much developed as makers, and their children after them. That is so much gain. But if we had waited for our inventors to modify the race through physical heredity, we should be still in the Bronze Age. The engine, being made, becomes part of the social structure, and proceeds to modify the society it serves.

The bicycle is perhaps a better instance. The effect of the making is not materially different from the effect of making watches. But the thing made has modified society by the reactive effects of its use. It has modified the dress, the activity, and so the physique and character of women, to their great improvement. It has modified roads—to the great material benefit of the regions affected. It has modified inn-keeping, livery-stabling, tailoring, the relative distance of residence—the effects of the bicycle on society are great, even upon the most superficial survey. But this is no reason why the maker of bicycles should be a better man than the maker of chronometers, or that either of them should be paid more than the maker of pianos, or less than the maker of poems.

The first effect of work, its result, return, or payment, is to the maker in the quality and quantity of his effort. No one can measure his pay or deny it. The second is to the user in the fulness of his use. This, alas! can be measured and denied, and has been, to our racial injury. No tyranny was ever able to prevent the steady development of man through the work he did. If he laboured faithfully and generously, he grew in the outputting of his strength, and his growth ultimately overthrew the tyranny. But tyranny of various sorts has withheld from the workers the reactive benefits of using the product of their work; and so hindered race development.

The builders of beautiful houses, working well, are necessarily benefited by their own working; but if they are forced to live in poor, ugly, unhealthy houses, they are not benefited by the results of the work. This is a grave limitation of a man’s income; and if his income is checked, his output is checked also. As an unwise farmer exhausts his soil in greedy harvesting without due fertilisation, so we have drawn upon the creative energies of humanity and denied the rich replenishment which would have made the product so much more prolific.

Here the mischievous effect of our Want theory comes in plainly. The man who is working merely for pay must cater to the purchaser. He must please existing tastes. Looking at his product, not as an end, to benefit society, but as a means to benefit himself, he must so produce as to secure a buyer. This is the “pot-boiler” again. The artist who paints to suit his patrons and get their money is not the true artist, and through him art does not grow. The maker of coats or hats or houses or dishes submits to this degrading pressure, and the result is seen in our debased and vulgar forms of manufacture everywhere.

The evil effects to the consumer are more manifest in some trades than in others, as, for instance, in the liquor trade. Here we have human beings producing what they know people will buy; and then, not content with the existing demand, using all possible means to excite and maintain a further demand—simply that they may make money.

Again, in our degraded press, we have a most conspicuous instance of this prostitution of a great social function to private ends. Under the mistaken idea that the distribution of news is a process for feeding owners of papers, and thus being led to arrange their news so as to please the most buyers, they rapidly descend along lines of least resistance to a wholesale catering to the worst tastes of the most people; and supplement that by elaborate efforts to foment and spread the low appetites they so obsequiously serve.

Naturally there is no growth and grandeur in a trade like this. To spread knowledge, sympathy, instant information of the world’s movements good and bad, is to take part in one of society’s chief functions; in the general nervous system of the world. But to ascertain that society enjoys certain sensations, and to force the general presentation of news into a special arrangement to give those desired sensations, is to turn healthy action into a loathsome disease. In any form of human production, the object is to serve the consumer by the best development of the product, not to use the consumer as a means of profit for the producer. The producer must, of course, be provided for; as must the soldier, artist, physician; but self-interest is not the object of the work.

In the production of shoes, again, the object should be a constant improvement in material, shape, wearing quality, and general utility and beauty. Deliberately to change the shape and size, the proportion and make of human footwear, merely to cater to low tastes, is the degrading “pot-boiler”; the prostituting of a social function to a private end.

All forms of cheap and dishonest production, of adulteration, of an artificially forced market, are directly traceable to our Want theory; to our persistent superstition which still crudely imagines this vast and intricate world of interservice to be a primeval forest, where beast and savage hunt for prey. The mistake in object degrades the product, and the degraded product degrades the man. Thus our immense field of production is not only checked in output and arrested in distribution, but weakened through and through by adulteration and bad workmanship; with evils in result, unending. The natural trend toward a wider, fuller, easier, and ever better production, accompanied at every step by growing pride and power and pleasure in the producer, is hindered and perverted to large degree by our prevalent economic fallacies.

Another conspicuous point where our errors touch production is seen in the arts especially; the particular mistake here being in the persistence of the ego concept; our confusion of self-expression with social service. The social consciousness, unrecognised, presents itself to our minds as a huger self-consciousness.

We have often wondered at the inordinate selfishness of man, compared to which the innocent egoism of the beasts is angelic. This tremendous range and depth of selfishness is because of that essential enlargement of self which comes with socialisation—the individual of a given society is that society—feels it as a “self.” The Roman, to the limits of his capacity, is Rome. The socialised individual carries in him the enlargement of his society. He has a wider soul, perforce, that is our human quality. This larger self, a thing frankly essential to social existence, enabling the individual to so think, feel, and act with and for his society, comes into action long before it is recognised by the “local office”—the mind of the individual. The mind has to learn its own contents as well as its outside environment. Our traditional labelling of those contents is no more correct than our primitive misconceptions of geography or physics.

What we personally call a quality does not affect its nature, but does affect our own conscious behaviour. The ability we display to mistake and miscall our own qualities and those of other people, is apparently immeasurable. So we feel this social soul, this larger aliveness; a power of caring for millions, of wanting for millions, and of doing for millions; and, since we ourselves feel it in ourselves, we call it self-consciousness.

A man, joining a regiment of old and splendid fame, comes to feel and act strongly from the regimental consciousness. He feels it with his own mental machinery; but it is not an enlargement of his personal self-consciousness—that is forever limited to his personality. This larger self—society, and its accompanying social consciousness—we calmly appropriate as a personal quality, and proceed to act on it. Having the capacity to think, feel, act for a thousand, we proceed to think, feel, and act a thousand times more for ourselves. Therefore we are naturally appalled at the limitlessness of “human selfishness.”

The whole mistake is natural enough—the conscious mind always lagging behind our unconscious growth; but to-day the social consciousness is finally forcing itself on the perception of the individual; and that which we have called selfishness, and which is really socialness misused, will be lifted from vice to virtue as we re-name it. Once properly recognised, we have quite ability enough to measure the man who uses a public power for a private end; to measure and condemn. But while this misconception still exists we have a minor confusion as to “self-expression” and “social service.”

The artist feels this more perhaps than other workers. He feels it because his feelings are more prominent, and more often handled, than those of the workman in the more mechanical trades. A man may make tremendous engines or run them; and never “feel himself work” so much as the maker of very inconsiderable poems. This is because the poet is so highly socialised a product. His power to be a poet is a social power. What he feels is the heart of his people, and he, poor man! thinks it is his own. He thinks his heart is far more exquisitely sensitive than theirs, whereas it is their hearts he is feeling! His capacity for pain and for pleasure is their capacity; it is greater because he is more people, or at least is the specialised point of sensation and expression for more people.

“Let me write the songs of a people and let who will make their laws.”

The songs of a people—not his songs forced down upon them, but their songs forced up through him. “The proof of a poet shall be sternly deferred until his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”

Artists, of all men, are most exquisitely specialised to the social service. Their work, of all men’s, is least valuable to themselves, most valuable to others. They are absolutely for other people to so extreme a degree as nearly always to warp and injure their personal relations, even under the fairest conditions. They must do the work for which they are built, cost what it may, and this compelling power, this insistent force from within which will out through whatever medium is at hand, this they call “self-expression”! An artist, they say, must not consider social service in the least; he must express himself.

It is a true recognition of the kind of work he must do; he must indeed express that which is good in him quite regardless of whether the people around him want it or not; will pay him for it or not; will kill him for it or not. But that unfaltering expression is his social service, his true function, what he was built for. And it is not “himself” that he is expressing, it is “themself.” He is, of that people and that time, a voice, an eye, an ear, a hand to do. Holland made the Dutch painters, not they Holland. They in return in their accomplished work made Holland Hollander, so to speak, but the lives of many generations of Dutchmen and Dutchwomen went to form those painters first.

There is no necessary conflict between the two conceptions of the artist’s duty—to express himself, or to serve society—as far as the special performance goes: but the misconception carries wide error and evil with it none the less. It makes the artist morbid in what he fancies a vast self-consciousness, whereas he might remain as free and unassuming personally as any child, once he recognised that it was not he who was doing all this, but they. It would save him too from the common mistake of applying his splendid range of social sensitiveness to his own personal affairs as he too commonly does. Had Carlyle, for instance, seen truly what was the nature of his place and power, he would have been less haughty and less irritable—also less lonely.

The individual must needs suffer under the isolation of his strange overdevelopment, unless he is able to detach himself from it, and be a person among other persons freely. The power to separate the man from the office, to come down from the throne and play ball, is a healthy one. On the other hand, much true artistic service is lost to the world through this misconception about “self-expression” when the power is not overwhelmingly great, and the individuals are strong in their sense of duty as they see it. This is especially true among women. To such, the inner impulse demanding expression is considered “selfish,” and a thing to resist; and their energies are forced into other lines because thereby they imagine they are best serving. If they recognised this inward propulsion as the call for social expression—not self’s—it would stand differently in their scale of duty.

A question rises here of large importance, and not easy of answer. Suppose the social expression actuating the individual be a bad one—visibly a bad one—resultant from wrong conditions and tending to promote others as wrong—should such a tendency be followed? Is that the social service? How far may the individual judgment give check to such social tendency?

As, for instance, certain wrong economic conditions, say in France, before the Revolution, tended to produce many social phenomena, including a tendency to debased literature and art. Should the artist, in such case, say to himself, “Why, dear me! This is a vicious and reactionary social impulse. I am out-Heroding Herod—this stuff shows how bad we have been, and doesn’t help us to be any better. Now I will not indulge my inclination to paint these torture-chamber scenes, or these subtle indecencies. I like to—but what of that? It is a social tendency, but society is not always right, she goes backward and sideways by spells; it will not do her any good to let out this stuff. No, I’ll choke it off, and, if I can’t paint better things, I’ll take to pottery or weaving.”

Whether this is best, or whether it is the artist’s duty humbly to voice that which is in him—saying, “Well, this is the way you feel, is it? Better let it out then. Perhaps you’ll change quicker if you see your badness,” this is a very large question.

Perhaps the truly morbid and vicious tendencies, thus recognised by the artist, would cause him as much shame as if he had unfortunately inherited some scrofulous disease, and he would be unable to proceed. This, at least, should be held steadily in mind, that human work is not mere expression, of self or of society, but is transmission, and therefore to be watched.

If speech were merely a relief to one’s own feelings, poured forth into empty air and earless waste places, then foulness and profanity would be merely indications of how the speaker felt, and hurt no one. But where speech goes to other ears, it must be measured, not merely by the speaker’s emotions, but by theirs. So the artist is not merely an unconscious spring bubbling over with fair water, or foul, according to its hidden sources, but is a conduit, taking the water to something as well as from something. And as a conscious intelligence bound to act “up to his lights,” if he judges the water to be bad in its effects, he has no right to convey it to others. This would leave an easy alternative to the artist. Let him, if he must, write his decadent literature, paint his decadent pictures; and then, having so relieved himself of these foul secretions, let him decently destroy the product, lest it prove contagious. Some friend, having seen, would say compassionately—“Poor Jones! He has to write about so much of it in a year—he cannot help it, it is better to come out, I suppose. But don’t look as if you knew—he is very sensitive about it.”

In a more advanced civilisation we may have Public Health ordinances as to these expressions, like the signs in our street cars. The assumption of the artist that his form of production is beyond all social responsibility or control, that “there is no ethics in art,” is a very interesting instance of the ego concept at its most insane height.

If ever there was a “social function,” it is art. As a civilisation advances, there is more and more development of art; as we look back along the path of social progress, there is less and less of it. In its inception it was more or less common to all workers, a little of it; as it grew, it demanded more wholly the work of a whole life. No ultra-specialised social servant is more removed from self-support than the artist, whose work is of no faintest possible use to him as an individual. He must absolutely depend on the advanced society which made him, which feeds, clothes, shelters, and defends him, and whose highest needs it is his duty to serve.

Higher than kings or captains, higher even than the giant producers and distributers of wealth, comes this delicate, sensitive, exquisitely specialised organ of society. For true service he deserves all the love and honour society can give, as well as the support due all of us—nothing can overestimate his value. For true service,—but what service does he give?

The more highly developed the organ, the more open to disease. No feature in human production is marked with worse depravity than is found in art. Because of the extreme pleasure found in the transmission of his peculiar power, because of the special sensitiveness involved in his form of service, we too often find the artist sunken in a sublimated selfishness and arrogant to a degree beyond comparison. It is as though an eye should plume itself loftily on its power of sight. “You poor, blind body! You cannot see, but I can! I only can see, and I like to see. It gives me pleasure. I will see only what gives me pleasure. It is my pleasure to see things pink—all things pink. And round—all things are round.” The poor blind body cannot deny that things are pink—if the eyes say so; but it has hands at least, to tell it that some things are flat and others sharp; so it works on, sadly misled by its servant.

And if we reason with the servant, saying: “Are you so sure that things are pink? It does not seem reasonable—it does not seem right,”—the servant loftily and unapproachably replies: “The Eye does not reason! There is no right or wrong to the Eye! I am an Eye, and I see as I like. If you differ with me, go blind!”

When we recognise production as a social process, for the social good, all work will change its standard of measurement. The worker, artist or scientist, inventor or teacher, must often differ with the purchasing public; must modify his work by his own reason and conscience, not by that of the other people; but the purpose to which he modifies it is social service. It may cost him his life at the time; he may have to set himself and his views against those of the past and present; but he should do so with unfaltering devotion to what he believes the social good; not in this lunatic position that he and his work are unique in the universe—that he owes no responsibility to anything—that “art is for art’s sake.”

When we are alive to the nature of our social processes, when we see that production is both duty and pleasure, personal good and social advantage, we shall bend our tremendous powers to develop and educate the productive energy in all our children, and provide the best conditions for its free exercise.