If we take our “Society Columns” as medical bulletins, they have some value perhaps; but vulgarly to enlarge on our forms of disease is at least bad taste. What we commonly call “Society” is a morbid growth in the real social structure, developed to meet the artificial needs of these misplaced women; and such a society, influencing as it does, through widening ranks of imitators, the markets of the world, has a most evil effect on our habits of consumption. If we saw clearly on these lines, recognising production as a law of Human, _i. e._, Social Nature, then our women, as our men, would take part in the healthy processes of real social life. If we saw that this constantly increasing expression of a constantly increasing fund of social energy was limitless happiness, we should turn our competition another way, cease this painful effort to show who can get the most, and begin to run races to show who shall do the most, with the result that there will be more for everyone to have. Meanwhile, under the action of this special delusion about consumption, we continue to fill the world with false products, and to spend strenuous lives trying to get them away from one another. Can we not recognise this one thing, that consumption is but a means to an end; that production, Work, is the end to which a legitimate consumption is a necessary means, and that the only natural and practical measure of consumption is the need of the consumer. XV: CONSUMPTION (II) _Summary_