But whether slave labour be more or less productive is not so important as the two points mentioned above, of advantage and disadvantage. The _disadvantages_, as we have seen, are (1) that it offends our human love of honour and independence, degrading the mass of men, and (2) that it is so terribly liable to abuse in the hands of cruel or stupid owners, or in conditions where great gangs of slaves grow up under one owner who can know nothing about them personally and is therefore indifferent to their fate. The _advantages_ are security and stability, running as a note throughout society and showing themselves especially in the leisure of the owning classes, with all the good fruits of leisure in taste, literary and artistic. It was a society based on slavery which produced what is perhaps the best fruit of leisure, and that is the profound and fruitful thinking out of the great human problems. All the great philosophy and art of the ancients was worked out by the free owners in the slave-owning states, and so was the best literature ever made. THE CAPITALIST STATE The Capitalist State is that one in which though all men are free (that is, though no one is compelled to work for another by law, nor anyone compelled to support another), yet a few owners of the land and capital have working for them the great mass of the people who own little or nothing and receive a _wage_ to keep them alive: that is, a part only of the wealth they produce, the rest going as rent and profit to the owners. The Capitalist State is a recent phenomenon compared with the great length of known recorded history. It is a modern phenomenon produced by our white race alone, by no means covering the whole of that race, nor the most of it, but of great interest to us in England because we alone are, of all nations, an almost purely capitalist society. Here again we can tabulate the advantages and disadvantages. The chief moral advantage of Capitalism as compared with the Slave-owning State is that _every man, however poor, feels himself to be free and to that extent saves his honour_. He may be compelled by poverty to suffer a very hard bargain; he may see himself producing wealth for other men, of which wealth he is only allowed to keep a portion for himself. To that extent he is “exploited,” as the phrase goes. He feels himself the victim of a certain injustice. He remains poor in spite of all his labour, and the man for whom he works grows rich. But, after all, it is a contract which the free workman has made, and he has made it as a citizen. If those who own nothing, or next to nothing, in a capitalist state (this great majority is technically called in economic language “the _proletariat_”) organise, they can bargain, as our great Trade Unions do, with the few owners of their means of livelihood and of production, and be fairly certain, for some little time ahead, of a reasonable livelihood.