We have to recognise that the best workmanship requires two conditions; first—that the worker shall have a direct interest in the thing he produces, second, that he shall enjoy the freedom which comes from a sense of guaranteed security. To the former we shall have to return at a later stage in the argument. Concerning the latter, we have seen how the present system exposes the worker to a grave and vexatious insecurity. It is stupid to suppose that men will habitually put their best into their work under such conditions as these. The whole system is intrinsically demoralising to all whom it touches. It is demoralising to the employer because he comes to regard the worker as a mere “hand,” a tool; and that is a frame of mind which saps his own manhood. It is demoralising to the worker because it treats his physical energy as a thing to be bought and sold at a price, the highest price he can extort; and since a man’s labour is actually inseparable from his person, it reduces him to a condition of servility, which, within a certain limit, is as real as that of a chattel slave. He has neither independence nor security. Over against this state of things, we must affirm that a man’s subsistence shall be guaranteed to him as a customary practice, in good weather and in bad, in sickness and in health, in work or unemployment. The British Labour Party’s proposal of a national minimum standard of life universally enforced is certainly one of the cornerstones of a wholesome social order. The cynic will probably say that this will be the paradise of the slacker; and no doubt there would be some persons base enough to evade their share of productive labour. But we can count upon the public opinion of a society in which freedom has created a new sense of social obligation and a new quality of fellowship, to make a slacker’s life not worth living. It may very fairly be doubted whether at the worst the slacker who remained incorrigible would constitute so great a tragedy—either in number or in kind—or constitute so clear evidence of the bankruptcy of a system as do the innumerable and increasing derelicts of the present industrial order.