Unskilled labour is high social service, and social sacrifice. It is not so interesting and developing to the individual as the activities of savagery, but it is more essential to the country’s good, to the power and peace of the world. This noble service could be rendered without its present awful penalty. I do not speak of its low wages, but of its heavy punishment. Here is work done for the service of humanity; not for any low and primitive service either, but to maintain our highest social grade of development. This work, subtle, elaborate, important, only simple in its extreme subdivision, we have chosen in our ignorance to consider “low.” The people who do it we first compelled by force; we now compel on pain of starvation; they are “low” too, and cannot help themselves. When we understand the real grades of labour, we shall see this to be of the highest, and as such, to have its limits and dangers. Such highly specialised work cannot be followed for long hours, that is a cruel injury; and never needs to be followed for long hours, because the very law of its development is the saving of time and energy. Society, as a whole, loses the major part of the advantage of its specialised development, by ruthlessly degrading and defrauding the very functionary through whom that development is attained. XII: PRODUCTION _Summary_ _Work is production and distribution. Joy of production. Transmission again. Pleasure in expression more than impression. Social stimulus. Arrested distribution. Increase in production. Shoes. Collective pride. “Owned” machinery. Effect of false concepts. George Eliot’s “Stradivarius.” Art recognised as world-service. The “Pot-boiler.” “Saving” and “serving” one’s country. Traitor and coward. Line of evolution in a productive industry. Effect of errors. “Duty to employer,” etc. Payment not the right incentive. Reactive effect of production. “Greeking.” Effect of great work on society. Physical heredity, social heredity and transmission. Bicycle. Benefit of making, of using. We “exhaust the soil” of humanity by denying it right use of its product. Want theory. Degraded press. Object of production. False production. Individual is society—feels and represents it. Social consciousness mistaken for self-consciousness. “Self-expression” and social service. “The songs of a people.” Position of the artist. Expression is also transmission. “Poor Jones!” Art a social function. Depravity in highly specialised function. The presumptuous eye. Art for humanity’s sake._ XII PRODUCTION Work is in two main lines, Production and Distribution; to make something, or to hand it about, is human industry.