Our little egoistic scheme of ethics, while it is big enough to grasp and blame an interpersonal fraud or theft, is incapable of comprehending this great field of social injury; and, if the social traitor keeps up the personal ethical standards we are acquainted with, we do not condemn his larger sin,—we don’t know how. Here it is simply indicated that the initial error lies in looking at the world as a place to go out to and get things from by any necessary means, whereas in plain fact it is a place to go into and give things to—to labour in, to create in, to produce and distribute in, to exercise those social faculties which constitute our human life. To work is to make something or distribute something; it has nothing to do with taking or fighting. The fighting and grabbing attitude comes from primitive animal egoism, a low rudimentary condition, and the morbid overplus of sex-energy in the male. The association of shame with work on account of the slave will pass when we see the orderly progression of human association and the place held in it by that early social functionary. The Social organism requires a close and permanent connection between its myriad constituents. These constituents first began to combine sporadically, on lines of natural attraction, as in the family, and through the woman’s industry. For men to be drawn into the social relation,—men, whose whole nature was individual and combative, whose whole idea of exertion was to fight something,—required force. Only on pain of death, as the unkilled captive, did the slave learn to work, to apply his energy to the service of others. Most of the conscious associations of slavery were unpleasant, slavery and work were held as identical, and the slave hates work as he hates slavery. But they are not identical. Slavery is a transient, superficial relation, one of our telic processes, useful in its place, but soon outgrown. Work is a permanent, essential relation, a genetic social process increasing with our growth. Men were first held together in exchange of labour by the force of the slave system as they are now held together in exchange of labour by the force of the contract system, an equally transient and superficial device. The real economic process going on is the gradual evolution of highly specialised and smoothly interrelated workers, with an abundant, easy circulation of their products, and the more arbitrary methods of developing this condition came first as more arbitrary political methods came first. The Owner was a primitive despot, the Employer is a constitutional monarch, and democracy is now working out a higher, subtler, freer relation—that of the true Co-operator—in economics as in politics.