even a world socialist commonwealth would find it necessary to maintain them. It was not suggested, and most certainly it must not be thought, that a world socialist commonwealth, or even a more modest remodeling of the social order would not effect great changes, possibly for good, and possibly for ill. The same economic laws might be made to bear very different fruits, but they themselves would remain unchanged. What is true in all these other fields--this should be our predisposition--is not likely to be quite untrue in the field of labor. §2. _Ideas and Institutions_. Another point is worth noting here. We are sometimes advised to distinguish sharply between "What should be" and "What is"; often two very different things. The advice is pertinent and useful, particularly in the sphere of sociology. But our incorrigible habit of confusing the two things together is not without justification, or at least excuse. For, in fact, they gravitate towards one another with a force which is just as strong as the capacity of man for understanding and controlling his environment. When we have a system which is clearly bad, _and_ when we see our way to make it better, we generally make the change however tardily. Our sense of "What should be" thus reacts upon "What is." Meanwhile, until we can make the system better, our appreciation of "What is" affects our sense of "What should be." And the more so, as we are sensible. For "What should be" is pre-eminently an affair of relativity. A man may hold very strongly that equal pay to every individual is desirable, as he puts it, as an ideal. But this will not prevent him, in a world in which managers are paid far more than manual workers, from maintaining hotly (at any rate, if he is sensible) that to pay the manager of a particular concern a manual worker's wage would be monstrously unfair. He would also argue that it would be highly inexpedient. Equity and expediency are, in fact, intricately intertwined in our sense of "What should be"; and our sense of "What should be" in the particular is governed by our knowledge of "What is" in the general.