The most conspicuous feature of our leisure class is the elaborate round of purely arbitrary and unnatural activities in which they ceaselessly whirl. The only natural activities open to them, the physical, become abused and perverted in vicious excesses, and their other activities are a series of arduous games and sports, changing from age to age and year to year, the purposeless and hopeless spasms of social energy misused. The working class, on the other hand, suffer differently. That they are underpaid is plain, that they are overworked is plain; we hear much of this of late years; what we do not hear so much of is that they suffer most from the same misunderstanding of what work is. Looking always at the Pay as the end, the Work only as a means, they labour drearily on like a blind horse in a treadmill, never seeing their real position in Society, their real duties, nor their real power. That the unproductive consumer should believe the absurdities on which his absurd position rests is comprehensible; but that the producer, not properly supplied with social nourishment, and overtaxed in the production of the very supplies he does not get enough of, should accept the basic fallacies which hold him in his even more absurd position,—this is not so comprehensible. Perhaps what does account for it is this: that with all his labour and suffering the worker after all _is_ Society; he is in the main performing great service; he has a right to be more contented than the ex-man who does not work. He is in the more normal position, though he does not know it; and the sociological laws are always stronger in their action than our notions. As a matter of fact the working class, which does not mean merely the “labouring class” of our present terminology, but which includes all workers with hand and brain, is the world. They are the acting factors in those processes which constitute social life. Through all these centuries of unbelief and misbelief they have done the things which kept the world alive. They have clothed the world, fed the world, housed the world, taught the world, beautified and improved the world; yes, and have lifted it from savagery to its present level. To-day in our democracy they need only enlightenment to see a further duty to the world in a better organisation of its economic processes. Thrilled as they are by the swiftly growing current of social consciousness, conscious as they are that things are wrong, anxious as they are to set things right, they are still hindered by these economic errors of us all.