Altruism, due to other causes, may be felt and manifested by the domestic worker, but the work does not conduce to it. Conversely, when this stage of labour is at last abandoned; when we have socialised these antiquated industries; an immense increase of altruism will appear. We are so accustomed to think of men as egoists, and women as altruists that it will be a blow to many to advance this position, but seeing that altruism, the social spirit, is but the essential condition and result of our social co-activities; that only men take part in these activities, and that women have been arrested in this natural development and forced to remain as they began, working in solitude and utter disconnection, for their own families solely; it is plain that the world’s growth in altruism comes through men as a class, and that women as a class contribute to the social spirit only an exaggerated familism and egoism. That animal instinct shown in “the maternal sacrifice,” or the devotion to one’s mate of exaggerated sex development, have nothing to do with the larger human love—with omniism. The two are constantly blended through heredity, but the industrial influence of the sexes is as above stated, and it is through industrial development that our altruism comes. Observe that the nations most “humane” are those most advanced in industry, and those least “humane” are those most primitive in industry, down to the savage who has only the rudiments of either industry or humanity. Altruism is recognised by religion as a virtue and urged upon us, but it appears in us only in proportion to our social progress in interrelated service. Our own principal religion, Christianity, is altruism incarnate—but it is not altruism understood. It preaches altruism as a virtue and a duty, but it does not show altruism to be a natural product of certain industrial relations and urge upon its followers their entering upon those relations as the chief means of developing altruism. Religion has not showed us the _naturalness_ of altruism. It has taught that it was natural for man to be selfish, and that to be unselfish was a continual struggle, needing the grace of God to attain it. When we learn at last that the social instincts are as natural as the personal, that they are evolved under the same biological laws, that our failure to manifest them in due proportion is due to unnecessary social conditions quite within our power to change—the burden on man’s conscience will be lifted forever. We shall learn to lay no false stress on altruism as a lofty and difficult virtue, but see it to be the spirit of civilisation; and the lack of it, the uncivilised egoism still so prominent and evilly active, we shall perceive to be merely an anachronism, which needs only to be recognised to be despised, and only to be despised to be outgrown.