Man receives stimulus from a thousand sources. Since we made mental impressions permanent and exchangeable “in book form,” knowledge and emotion bottled, preserved, and distributed broadcast; there is practically no limit to human stimuli; and, since with this increasing stimulus we have steadily reduced the difficulties of execution, our real problem is, how to provide right outlets for the productive energy of humanity. This normal increase of power and execution we have managed to check, however, quite materially. We have gravely interfered with the natural distribution of stimulus up to the present time; but now our rapid multiplication of free school and free library, with similar tendencies in other educational and recreative lines, is producing its natural result in increased energy. Even with what stimulus was open to us, our production should have been very great; but we have interfered with that also, in more ways than one. The principal obstacle here is the basic error of the Want theory. Holding that man works only to satisfy desire,—_i. e._, produces merely to consume,—we prostitute our share of the social energy to a factitious personal advantage; and try to govern the productive processes of society by the dictates of self-interest. Here you have a factory in which a hundred men turn out ten hundred pairs of shoes a day. What for? Why, for the feet of ten hundred people, of course—to shoe the world. “Not so,” they protest. “We are making these shoes for ourselves.” “But you cannot wear ten pairs of shoes a day, my man!” “No, but I only do this work for the pay—and I can easily consume the pay for ten pair of shoes a day.” This poor man never understands his position as a social functionary with all its honour and pleasure. The Ego concept and the Want theory becloud his mind. Even his personal pride in his personal work has lowered since the machine made his work collective, and his mind failed to keep pace with the machine, and make his joy and pride collective too. His pleasure is only in what he gets back from society in return for his labours, and he gets very little. As part of this same ancient misconception of what work is, we find the incredibly multiplied machinery of production “owned” by individuals; and manipulated by them under the same befogging ideas that lead the workman to “limit his output.” Never were any of the gross and childish superstitions of remotest savagery more injurious—or more ridiculous—than these rudimentary errors under which our economic development so blindly labours. We have our alleged “overproduction” on the one hand—though a full supply of the good things of life is obtained by scarce one-tenth of the population of the world; and we have the ensuing and even more colossal absurdity of the restricted output—whether of the man who stints his day’s labour, or the group of financiers who “corner” some social product, and say how much the world shall have.