'But,' I asked, 'what will prompt men to struggle in the cause of progress when want has lost its sting?' 'Singular question! You show very plainly how difficult it is to understand things which contradict the views we have drunk in with our mother's milk, and which we have been accustomed to regard as the foundation-stones of order and civilisation, even when those views most manifestly contradict the most conspicuous facts. As if want had ever been the sole, or even the principal, spring of human progress! The strife with nature, in which the disproportion between the needs of civilisation and the ability to satisfy those needs led mankind through a long period of transition from barbarism to a state of culture worthy of human nature, had, it is true this result--viz. that the struggle for existence assumed not only its natural forms, but also forms which were unnatural, and which did violence to the real and essential character of most of nature's offspring; yet these latter forms never attained to absolute dominion. In fact, as a rule nature has shown herself stronger than the human institutions which were in conflict with her. During the whole of the history of civilisation we owe the best achievements of the human intellect not to want, but to those other impulses which are peculiar to our race, and which will remain so as long as that race dominates the earth. Thrice blind is he who will not see this! The great thinkers, inventors, and discoverers of all ages and all nations have not been spurred on by hunger; and in the majority of cases it may be asserted that they thought and speculated, investigated and discovered, not _because_ they were hungry, but _in spite_ of it. Yet--so it may be objected--those men were the elect of our race; the great mass of ordinary men can be spurred on only by vulgar prosaic hunger to make the best use of what the elect have discovered and invented. But those who judge thus are guilty of a most remarkable act of oversight. Only those who are strongly prejudiced can fail to see that it is just the well-to-do, the non-hungry, who most zealously press forward. Hunger is certainly a stimulus to labour, but an unnerving and pernicious one; and those who would point triumphantly to the wretches who can be spurred on to activity only by the bitterest need, and sink into apathy again as soon as the pangs of hunger are stilled, forget that it is this very wretchedness which is the cause of this demoralisation. The civilised man who has once acquired higher tastes will the more zealously strive to gratify those tastes the less his mental and physical energy has been weakened by degrading want, and the less doubtful the result of his effort is. For all unprejudiced persons must recognise the most effective stimulus to activity not in hopeless want, but in rational self-interest cheerfully striving after a sure aim. Now, _our_ social order, far from blunting this self-interest,