The individual consciousness of men is not denied, it is that, misconstrued, which has made these common social functions work so ill, and hurt so in the working. To that same individual consciousness this book is directed, urging reconsideration of the facts, readjustment of the industrial activities. But however conscious, men are none the less “organs,” their labours serve our common ends; not their own. It is not that each man has some exact analogue in physiological type, like the heart, but that each industry holds organic relations with all other industries, and that the use and purpose of each depend on the others. The need to be supplied is a social need, the growth to be attained is a social growth, of no more value to an individual, detached, than beating would be to a heart, detached. Work is an organic function, incontrovertibly. As to the lack of social provision of nourishment, this again is but an error. The provision is there, the whole of society contributing to it; the circulation is there, our food and other goods flowing merrily across land and sea; but there is some trouble with the final distribution of this nourishment to the workers, which will be considered later. Admitting the imperfections, it remains true that the social circulation is now in action—the shoemaker of Massachusetts eating the beef of Nebraska, and the beef-raiser of Nebraska wearing the shoes of Massachusetts. No man could work, which is a social function, if he had at the same time to “take care of himself,” which is an individual function. As a worker in society, he is taken care of, but he does not do it himself. To repeat our definition—normal human work is a discharge of social energy along lines of special development. The social organism lives in the fulfilment of its organic functions, that fulfilment is work; to work is to take part in the vital processes of Society, to be socially alive; not to work, not to take part in these vital processes, is to be one of three things: First, mere dead matter, Waste; second, a Parasite, active as a thief, passive as a pauper; or third, a Disease, of which in time Society must die. With the waste products of society we are painfully familiar, the great army of defectives, people who cannot work, yet whom, as part of ourself, we must support, a drag upon the Social resources. The active parasite we know in his crude form, as the little thief, and are beginning to detect in his highly developed form as the big thief. The passive parasite we know also in his crude form as the idle poor, and are beginning to suspect in the idle rich. But the disease is still beyond our diagnosis, though many Societies have died of it, those morbid processes engendered by the presence in the social body of any matter not alive and healthily active. These features of the abnormal working of Society come later. Let us now study the evolution of Work.