Of its own nature work is altruistic. The more generally industrial a society is the more we find the higher social feelings developed. But the instincts of the pre-human beast, the powerful and ingenious self-feeder, still find expression, and the more so as society becomes more finely organised. Thief catches thief very promptly where all are thieves by profession and there is little to steal! But a large, sensitive, finely organised society offers splendid opportunities to these mischievous left-overs of ancient times. The first step is mother labour, the next, slave labour, so up through serfdom to contract, to our present system of wage labour. The last step, one we are but just learning, most of us, though some entered upon it long ago, is man working for mankind; not under any primitive coercion, but from the action of social forces as natural as breathing. For whom should he work? What “market” is worth his highly specialised ability but this? Can he make bricks or compose dramas solely for his own family? To associate in the complex discharge of our vast energies, and to be amply nourished by their countless products, is Social Life. It is true that work is essentially feminine in its origin, but not permanently. As it develops it frees itself wholly from sex limitations and becomes a social function in which men and women take part as members of society. “Women’s work” in one stage of our life meant every kind of work. “Man’s work” is now generally supposed to include the harder and rougher, the higher and more difficult. There is no real foundation for either term. Either sex can do either kind. Work, modern work, has no sex connotation whatever. Moreover, modern science has shown that the female, instead of being inferior, is, if anything, the more important of the sexes. In no way need the association of women with work degrade either. A highly entertaining contortion of popular thought is seen in our local and temporary idea that women ought not to work! We have bred in certain classes a sort of parasitic female, most painfully aborted. It is more agonising and more ridiculous for a woman not to work than for a man, because of her initial sex-tendency and her historic habits; but we have bred this pitiful enormity and admire it as a Chinaman admires the “golden lilies” on his wife’s shrunk shanks. But this absurdity is already passing. One of the effects of sex-distinction, falsely and needlessly associated with work, is seen in the general fighting attitude of the male towards labour. In current literature and current life we continually hear man’s economic activities described as a struggle—a battle—with some vague opponent called “the world.” He is described as “going out” (“out” meaning elsewhere than at home, the assumption being that he would prefer to be “in” all the time!) “to battle with the world for his wife and little ones.”