It is this: Work is an expenditure of energy by Society in the fulfilment of its organic functions. It is performed by highly specialised individuals under press of social energy, and is to them an end in itself, a condition of their existence and their highest joy and duty. The difference between the two positions is best seen in studying organic action in lower forms. Consider, for instance, the action of the heart in our bodies. Here is a small muscular machine, which keeps up a violent and continuous activity for some seventy years. Why? and How? Why should this organ work so hard and so incessantly? My stomach gets some rest—my legs get more—but this member is always at work. What want does he gratify by it? Is he any better paid than leg or stomach? If the heart were an individual, and were pulsating for pay, he might conceivably stop when he got what he wanted. “Why continue to beat?” he might naturally ask. “I have what I was beating for!” And if, further, you supplied this independent creature with all it wanted, free, it would quite naturally cease beating altogether. But as an Organ, which is quite a different thing from an Individual, the heart does not act on any such basis. It has been slowly developed through long ages of physical evolution, to perform a function of _no use to itself_, but of primal use to the body to which it belongs, the body which made it, the body without which there would be no such thing as a heart. This function being so absolutely essential, the heart is fitted to beat steadily on from birth to death; when it ceases beating the body goes out of business altogether. Now a separate animal the size of a heart could not keep up any such long-continued regular exercise, it could not furnish sufficient energy; but the large body which needs a heart can run one, it has a supply of energy on which all its organs draw. The work of a living organ is not at cost of its own energy, but of the energy of the entire organism. Society, as an organism, has a vast, a practically unlimited supply of energy, and the human being, as a member of that society, is supplied with it. The discharge of this energy is so far from costing the individual anything that, on the contrary, any prevention of his normal work causes him acute suffering. And as in the physical body, each special organ, in order that it may devote its entire life to the physical service, is by the circulation of nutrition saved any necessity for caring for itself; so in the social body, each man, in order that he may devote his entire life to the social service, is similarly provided for by the distribution of economic products; our social nutrition. Here we are at once met by existing beliefs, loud-voiced. “Men are not ‘organs,’ they are conscious individuals. Men are not—oh! palpably not—provided for by any such beneficial process of social distribution of nourishment; each man must take care of himself or starve!”