If you were in a _Capitalist State_ (as we are in England) the men you would see working would, as a rule, be earning what are called “wages,” that is, an allowance (actually of money but immediately translated into food and clothes and house-room and the rest), which allowance would be paid to them at fairly short intervals, and without which they could not live. The ploughs and horses with which they would be working, the seed they would be sowing, the houses they lived in would be the property of another man owning this _capital_, and therefore called _The Capitalist_. If you asked any one of these men who were working whether he were _compelled_ to work by law he would indignantly tell you that he was not. For he is a free man; his wages are paid him as a result of a contract; he has said: “I will work for you for so much,” and no one could compel him to work if he did not choose to work. But in this state of society a man without capital must make a contract of this sort in order to live at all. He is not compelled by law to work for another, but he is compelled by the necessity of living to work for another. Lastly, if you were travelling through a _Distributive State_ (Denmark is the best example of such a state in modern Europe) you would find that the man working on the land was himself the owner of the land, and also of the seed and of the horses and the houses, and all the rest of it. He would be a free man working for his own advantage and for nobody else’s. He would also have a share in the factories of the country and be a part owner in the local dairies, sharing the profit of those dairies where the milk of many farms is gathered together, turned into butter and cheese, and sold. This is what we mean by the three types of State. In each you would find many exceptions, but each has its _determining number_--of slaves in the one case, wage earners in the other, and independent men in the third. * * * * * We will now take each of these three kinds of State separately and see the good and evil of them and what the consequences of them are. THE SERVILE STATE The Servile State is that which was found among our forefathers everywhere. It is the Servile State in which we Europeans all lived when we were pagan two thousand years ago. For instance: In old pagan Italy before it became Christian, or in old pagan Greece--both of them the best countries in the world of their time and both of them, as you know, the origins of our own civilisation--most of the people you would have seen working at anything were slaves, and above the slaves were the owners: the free men. Since we are talking of the political applications of political economy, we have to consider _human happiness_, which is the object of all human living; and when we talk of “advantage” or “disadvantage” in any particular economic state we mean its greater or less effect on human happiness.