Where there is no such public provision our economic concepts act to crush and degrade the worker. That increasing specialisation with its mechanical adjuncts, which should make it possible for a man to discharge his social obligations in an hour and then be free to contribute to progress by larger growth, we have taken advantage of to compel an amount and grade of labour alike ruinous to the individual in his immediate sacrifice and to the society composed of such sacrificed individuals. Men dying of thirst have been known to bite madly into their own flesh and suck the blood, but for a prosperous, growing society, rich, powerful, safe, intelligent, to make a steady diet of its own meat, is unreasonable. “The social sacrifice” is a very real and noble thing. It sometimes requires the lives of some of its members to preserve the life of the whole body. This sacrifice is always cheerfully made in war. It also requires the surrender of individual freedom of action to that complex interaction and unswerving duty which makes up the social service. But this sacrifice is more than compensated by the advantages given the individual in the life of the whole. A member of a big, complex society has not only a far better and happier personal life than his freely individual savage ancestor, but he has also share in the large, glorious, common life of that society. That is, he should have these things. As it is—owing to our antediluvian errors—he has to make the sacrifice, and in return he is reduced to an individual life far less gratifying than that of a healthy savage, yet knows no more of the splendid social consciousness belonging to his position than if he were that savage still. There is one feature in social specialisation so prominent and so important as to call for more detailed explanation. This is the relation of what we call “unskilled labour” to social evolution. Our ideas of justice in payment, of the necessary “cheapness” of certain low grades of work, our patient tenderness or impatient contempt for this immense class of humanity, rest on the assumption that human beings are widely unequal in ability; that most of them are of this low and cheap order, and that social progress lies in the advance of superior individuals, assisted in a humble way by the inferior. For these we must “furnish employment” of a simple character suited to their powers, and pay them with a modesty equal to their other limitations. Because there are so many of them, their competition for the humble tasks allotted keeps the price of unskilled labour very low indeed. Through organisation they have forced the price up a little, but most of us consider this as unjustifiable in strict economic law.