The miser merely robs society to a certain degree, the employer of much labour for his own gratification robs it by so much more, and beyond that comes the steady deterioration of an illegitimately directed product, a true poison, with the progressive breakdown of the tissues ensuing. This effect on Art is quite plain in history. The artist doing great work for the public grows and serves the world. The artist catering to an employer does not grow, but deteriorates. The work is not only withheld from Society, to which it belongs, but is lowered in kind. Art is always corrupted and lowered by the patronage of luxurious wealth. So is manufacture. No plea of “furnishing employment” to the artist can cover this injury to the world. The artist should be working for the world which made him instead of putting his social product in one man’s hands, and the work he does should be noble and should improve, as it cannot in that position of personal dependence. The value of an artist to the world is that he shall do as good work as he can for as many people as he can reach; it is of no use to the world that he be “employed” on other lines, nor is it good for him. Every worker stands in this same social relation. The value of a workman to the world is that he do the best work for the most people, not that he be “employed” to make clothes for dogs, or to wear an ostentatious livery behind a mutilated horse. Every human being is to be measured by his value to society, and the value is in his work, not in his being “employed”—or paid. Our non-productive consumer, therefore, is unable to return to a healthy place in the world. He cannot work because he “does not have to,” and his efforts to re-distribute the wealth for his own gratification form merely a “vicious circle” of futile and injurious activity. Now see the pitiful results. Cut off from normal connection with the living world by failure to produce, and only generating disease in his efforts to consume, the unfortunate ex-human begins to die. He may, if sufficiently wise and self-restrained, keep his body alive; members of the leisure class frequently live to a great age; but this well-preserved animal existence only allows more time to suffer from the unnatural exile. He is not part of the living world, and so falls victim to various hideous abnormalities. He dwindles and shrivels in social usefulness till, instead of a vigorous, valuable man or woman, you have the futile, inadequate creature which cannot even wait upon its own wants; or, keeping up animal health by caring for the body, he shows the deformity of his position in furious and senseless activities.