He simply picks his food off trees, or hunts and fishes for it, even fights for it. But he does not work for it at that stage of social evolution, much preferring starvation. Later on, being no longer a free agent, the food being forcibly detained until he worked, why, work he did, under the action of such pressure as he could then feel. In that period of evolution when only cruel slavery made men work, the thought that they would ever work in the comparative freedom of the contract system would have been scouted as wildly visionary and Utopian. We can see something of this among our own freedmen, members of a much earlier social status, forcibly incorporated with our advanced body and failing to respond at once to the same stimuli. Under compulsion they worked. Free, and under no compulsion save self-interest, they do not work as industriously as further advanced races. This does not prove that self-interest is less powerful than compulsion, or that slave labour is better than wage labour, but merely that the negro race is less socialised than the Anglo-Saxon. And we, in order to aid in his social development, are learning to supply him with the social stimuli he needs. Wage labour was a useful stage in economic evolution, just as slave labour was, but the incentive of self-interest is no more final than that of compulsion. A man will work if you make him, but also, being further developed, he will work if you do not make him, but merely pay him. A man will work if you pay him, but also, being further developed, he will work if you do not pay him; that is, if he is not “paid” individually, through personal advantage, but collectively, through social advantage. We must remember that in the way of relating effort to result collective man must “work for his living” as actually as individual. But it is _their_ living which they work for; the effort and the result are in common, and to the individual is supplied the great organic energy to work with. The normal goal to labour for, in a highly socialised race, is the common interest, a far stronger attraction than the personal interest. See how our misbeliefs affect the course of a single industrial process. Here is the wheat crop, for instance, one of the world’s most important products. The human race, collectively, produces an enormous amount of wheat. The same number of workers, without the support of a large organised society, could not produce that crop, or in any way distribute it. This amount of wheat, produced collectively, is for our collective consumption. The individual producer raises a large surplus beyond his own needs for the social needs. The line of economic advantage is plain: To produce the most wheat with the least expense of social energy, and to distribute the most wheat with the least expense of social energy to the largest number of consumers. The social advantage lies in the food-value of the wheat, in the ensuing increase in the productivity of the race.