Katherine, the reformed shrew, makes an eloquent description of this prowess of the husband. This is held to be a noble effort on his part, and quite his place as a man, while if she, owing to loss of male provider, is obliged to go “out” to “battle” similarly, that is held to be unfeminine and a real misfortune. The word “out” in this connection we should dismiss completely from our foggy minds. We are _in_ the world once and for all. We are not planted in a lot of private holes, with the rest of the broad earth for a mere battlefield, a place to sally forth into and grab something. Can you conceive of a world of human beings contentedly staying at home all the time if their supposititious booty could be handed in at the door without “battle”? We don’t go “out,” we go “in” to the world for our natural and necessary activities, without which we should cease to be human. What we do in the world is not, or should not be, fighting. Those who insist on fighting instead of working should be promptly locked up and taught better; they disturb the peace, interfere with legitimate industry, and dishonestly run off with the products of other people’s labour. An oversexed male, full of belligerence, actuated by his primitive masculine tendency to scatter and destroy instead of the later-developed, feminine-based race-tendency to construct, goes forth like a savage to hunt and fight. He finds what he wants, someone else has made it, and he seeks to get it away from that person by exercising the same traits as those used by any hunting animal, force or fraud. We have an immense number of predatory individual animals, both male and female, all included and maintained by the social organism, yet merely feeding on its tissues; we have a still greater number, indeed the vast majority of our workers, who, though in reality engaged in productive labour, imagine that their business is to get something from other people, and so strive to restrict their output and enlarge their intake as far as possible. The plain thief and pauper we recognise as social parasites, active and passive, and seek to remove; but our frank, general attitude of parasitism and predacity we do not recognise as an evil, the evil which necessarily tends to these ultimate forms. An individual animal has no productive power and skill, he simply takes what he wants when he finds it, if he can, and cheats, fights, or kills to get it. The collective animal produces wealth by co-ordinate labour. There is no faintest element of combat involved in the economic processes of society. The only “competition” legitimate in social life is the beneficent competition between constantly improving methods of service. For any collective animal to take advantage of his safe place in the broad-based social life, and from that vantage-point to take what he can from the social product without himself producing anything, is a treason so colossal as quite to paralyse our moral judgment.