A gives a sack of wheat to B and D each if they will dig a well for him. All three parties are cognisant of the risks and accept them in the contract. B, holding the rope on which D is lowered, lets it slip. If they were all three men of exactly equal status, obviously D's action would be against B. But they are not of equal status in England to-day. B and D are _employees_, and are therefore in a special and inferior position before the law compared with their employer A. D's action is, by this novel principle, no longer against B, who accidentally injured him by a personal act, however involuntary, for which a free man would be responsible, but against A, who was innocent of the whole business. Now in all this it is quite clear that A has peculiar duties not because he is a citizen, but because he is something more: an employer; and B and D have special claims on A, not because they are citizens, but because they are something less: _viz. employees_. They can _claim protection_ from A, as inferiors of a superior in a State admitting such distinctions and patronage. It will occur at once to the reader that in our existing social state the employee will be very grateful for such legislation. One workman cannot recover from another simply because the other will have no goods out of which to pay damages. Let the burden, therefore, fall upon the rich man! Excellent. But that is not the point. To argue thus is to say that Servile legislation is necessary if we are to solve the problems raised by Capitalism. It remains servile legislation none the less. It is legislation that would not exist in a society where property was well divided and where a citizen could normally pay damages for the harm he had himself caused.[10] This first trickle of the stream, however, though it is of considerable historical interest as a point of departure, is not of very definite moment to our subject compared with the great bulk of later proposals, some of which are already law, others upon the point of becoming law, and which definitely recognise the Servile State, the re-establishment of status in the place of contract, and the universal division of citizens into two categories of employers and employed. * * * * * These last merit a very different consideration, for they will represent to history the conscious and designed entry of Servile Institutions into the old Christian State. They are not "origins," small indications of coming change which the historian will painfully discover as a curiosity. They are the admitted foundations of a new order, deliberately planned by a few, confusedly accepted by the many, as the basis upon which a novel and stable society shall arise to replace the unstable and passing phase of Capitalism. They fall roughly into three categories:-- (1) Measures by which the insecurity of the proletariat shall be relieved through the action of the employing class, or of the proletariat itself acting under compulsion.