Dr. Simon Patten contended that the present productivity of the world was such as to free mankind from any fear of general dearth and cause all our prospects to be potentially in terms of abundance and not of want, to rescue us from the old “pain economy” of insufficiency and give us a “pleasure economy” on a safe margin of sufficiency. Under these circumstances, he said, “world riches may replace the living sacrifice and become the social contrivance that lowers human costs and we must cease to think that the anguish of the sentient creature is compensated by the development of moral qualities which merely reconcile man to repeating the experience of suffering.”[44] Social work has already ceased to think in that fashion and is working in the spirit of a pleasure economy so that the terminology of need is no longer pre-eminent. “There are times when self-sacrificing zeal is demanded and all honor to those who then devote or lose themselves in service. That is only one side of it. The need of sacrifice is always a reflection on the men or circumstances calling for it.”[45] That is the view of modern social work, the frame of mind in which it sets about its work. It talks about what has to be done as a matter of course and is chiefly concerned with the best way of doing it. It is beginning to outgrow “sob stories” even in asking support from an indifferent public--they set too low a standard of toleration and there are some modern social workers who turn from them abashed, as from dallying with an outrage beneath endurance. The battle ground of reform must be on another plain where the initiated see danger but the complaisant still need convincing. “When once the worst is gone the second best becomes intolerable.” Gray, the historian of English philanthropy, describes the effective philanthropist as the ideal agitator, “It is his to discover those larger ends of common welfare which reach beyond the moral perceptiveness of ordinary men in their ordinary moods. He is, as it were, an explorer in the unmapped world of the ideal life from whence he brings back news of an unreached good, such tidings as sound like travelers’ tales in our ears, but which haunt the mind of men until they seek to verify the story by a practical policy calculated to transform the actual. Only it must be observed that the most daring speculator cannot move very far from his base and the wildest Utopia is determined by the conditions of its year of publication.”[46]