The persistent survival of lower social forms, becoming more injurious with each advancing age, is one conspicuous feature in the case. That we, the foremost industrial nation, should have preserved that early status of labour, chattel slavery, past the middle of the nineteenth century is a historic anomaly; that we still preserve the yet lower status of female domestic labour is a worse one. That we should maintain side by side, in the same age, a democracy for men and a patriarchate for women is a brain-splitting anachronism. Taken generally, the confusion and irregularity of social progress furnish some ground, at least apparently, to those who assume it to be extra-natural, and who postulate direct interference by Spirits of Good and Evil to account for the peculiar facts. We need no such childish hypothesis, the facts in the case are quite sufficient. Our painful and irregular social development is due merely to the presence in a highly organised body of the artificially maintained egoism of a previous unorganised condition. The “old Adam” in us is simply the individualistic animal, still protesting that he is an individual in the face of centuries upon centuries of socialisation. Perhaps the most conspicuous feature of our position to-day is that of the strangely distinguished “Leisure Class” and “Working Class.” Here is a social body whose existence requires mutual service. Here is that service performed by that majority of mankind known as the “Working Class.” The Working Class is the world. However he prospers, the man who works is he who keeps the world going. His labours are the social processes, he is Society. The Leisure Class deliberately cuts itself off from Society, refuses to take part in its processes, yet continues to live on its products. This is parasitism, pure and simple. That it is not so pure nor so simple as would render it easy to handle, or as would warrant us in ruthless excision of a diseased mass, is due to the resistless law of social relation which holds us still connected even when we think ourselves separate. Your wealthy social traitor, refusing social duty and absorbing social gain, is no more to blame than the workman, _who would do the same thing if he had the chance_, because he believes in the same false principles of economics. But as they stand the leisure class is doing incomparably more harm.