In such work as this, there is a continuous waste of nerve force. Compelled attention, and action that is not led by interest and fed by the natural discharge of energy along preferred lines, are suicidally wasteful. In Nature’s effort to reduce this steady leakage of life force, she transfers the action to the domain of habit as rapidly as possible; and the sufferer experiences that much relief. Dislike, the exhausting effort of enforced attention and the plunging and kicking of more normal impulses toward other activities, give way at length to a dull contentment, a patient submission to monotonous routine, and some pale pleasure in its monotony. There are three large distinct evils to Society in such an artificial misplacement of its members. First, the work done is not as good nor as plentiful as if it were done on lines of true organic relation, by the men specialised in power and preference for that work. In the second place, the man is weakened and worn out prematurely by the unnatural effort to do what he does not like, what he is not fitted for, what is not his own special work; thus further reducing the output. And in the third place, the overtaxed and unhappy worker requires all manner of extra inducements and palliations to keep him at his unsuitable task. He has to have rest, more and more vacations and changes, or breaks down sooner. He has to have various fictitious excitements in his work—making it a game, a race, or a fight; to make up for its lack of normal interest. And he has to have “amusement” and “recreation” also of an unnatural, morbid kind—heavy doses of social stimulus coarsened and concentrated to suit his exhausted nerves. All this beyond the prominent well-known evil of the resort to physical stimulant and solace, such as alcohol and tobacco. These last rapidly deteriorate the physical stock of the race; again injuring Society in the stuff it is made of; but the degraded and excessive amusements injure the very soul of Society; lowering every kind of art which caters to them, and so demoralising the highest lines of advancement. A thousand minor lines of injury may be traced, such as the increase in defective children, owing to exhausted parents, and its accompanying tax upon Society’s resources; but these main lines stand forth clearly: The limitation and degradation of the social output, and the deterioration of tissue in the constituent members of Society.