In some ways we have recognised the mischievous results of this method of distribution, and have begun to supply some of the necessities of life on a wiser plan, as in our system of public education, where we frankly reverse the position. We therein say: “Children are members of Society. The maintenance and progress of Society require that its members be educated to some degree. This degree of common education the individual earning power of the parent cannot provide, but the collective funds of the community can.” So we publicly distribute education, and even enforce it—or try to—on the clear ground that the output of the future citizen depends on his income in youth, and that Society cannot afford to leave that income to be measured by a fraction of a low-grade worker’s output. Some strictly logical and scientific-minded thinkers do indeed object to this free public education, maintaining that since effort is only made to satisfy wants, therefore, if you satisfy any of man’s wants, you decrease by so much his efforts, you lower the output of Society. The advocates of free public education, though still clinging to their idols in other departments of life, maintain that education is a different matter, and point with honest pride to the results, showing that a publicly educated community does produce more and behave better than one wherein each man must provide as he can for his children. But in spite of this patent proof they still refuse to fairly admit the new principle involved, and to fairly give up their fallacious old one. The Want theory assumes that a man has a supply of energy which he may or may not discharge, but that he will not discharge it unless forced to by necessity. If you supply his needs he will discharge no energy whatever, he will not work. This does apply, fairly enough, to an animal’s effort to take things, but does not apply to man’s effort to make things. The fact is that a man has energy according to (_a_) his physical well-being, and (_b_) his access to social stimulus; and that, having it, he must discharge it or suffer in the forced retention. The practical question before existing Society is how to supply the most energy to its members and direct it to the most use. In free education we do supply the young social factor with both energy and direction, so that he grows up better able to work and to work rightly than if left to the degrading influence of this pitiful theory, that the way to make a man work is not to give him anything until he does.