With this as a text, Stenhouse drew a picture of the industrious man who is limited by the very nature of his industry. He is not limited by his own desire, but by the use society wishes to make of him. Serving a turn, he is schooled to serve that turn, and to serve no other turn. This schooling takes him unawares. He doesn’t know it has begun before waking to find himself drilled to a system from which only a giant can escape. Few men being giants, the average man plods on because he doesn’t know what else to do. There is rarely anything else _for_ him to do. Having taken the first ill-paid job that comes his way, he hasn’t meant to give himself to it all his life. He dreams of something bigger, more brilliant, more productive. The boy who runs errands sees himself a merchant; the lad who becomes a clerk looks forward to being a partner; the young man who enters a bank is sure that some day he will be bank president. "Sometimes, gentlemen, these early visions work out to a reality. But in the vast majority of cases, the youth, before he ceases to be a youth, finds himself where the horse is when he has once submitted to the bridle. He can go only as he is driven. Life is organized not to let him go in any other way. Needing him for a certain purpose, it keeps him to that purpose. Work, taken as a great corporate thing, is made up of hundreds of millions of tiny tasks each of which calls for a man. The man being found, he must be trimmed to the size of his task." Stenhouse had no quarrel with methods universally followed by civilized man. To criticize them was not his intention, as it was not his intention to complain because man had not yet brought in the Golden Age. "But I do claim that the smaller the task to which a man is nailed down, and the smaller the pay he is able to earn, the greater the responsibility of collective society toward that individual." There was a time, he declared, when much had been said to the discredit of slavery; but one thing could be urged in its favor. The man who had been kept throughout his life to one small job was not thrown out in his old age to provide for himself as he could. Having worked for society, as society was constituted then, society recognized at least the duty of taking care of him. Stenhouse disclaimed any comparison between free American labor and a servile condition; he was striving only for a principle. Men couldn’t be screwed down during all their working lives to the lowest wage on which body and soul could be kept together, and then be judged by the same standards as those who had had opportunity to make provision for themselves and their families. The same interpretation of the law couldn’t be made to cover the cases of the full sack and the empty one.