personal growth and his ultimate social efficiency are organically bound up. To complete our heritage of freedom, it is essential that the worker should receive a guarantee of economic security. His mind and his conscience mud be delivered from the fear of starvation; for to-day it is only at the risk of exposing himself and his children to hunger that he is able to assert his liberty within the industrial region.[20] Footnote 20: Upon the broader effects of the economic factor of property rights upon liberty, see pp. 246f. It is further to be noted that industrial conditions circumscribe the mind in another more subtle and probably more dangerous way; for a man may assert—and indeed men have often done so—his liberty of thought, and so save his mind even at the risk of starvation. The evolution of the machine industry has been in a direction which continually decreases the activity of the mind. It requires no more than habituation to a routine process which makes no demand for initiative and independent judgment on the part of the worker. This is apt to lead to a mental inertia which accords well with that bondage of the person which the wage system entails; and this is no doubt the reason (at least in great part) of the general apathy of large masses of the workers in the past to progressive industrial movements. And so long as there is ample and easy opportunity for those parts of the physical and nervous organism which have laid inert through the working day to strike a balance of expenditure with the rest—in the drinking-shop or elsewhere—there seems to be no reason why a large proportion of the workers should not sink into a permanent helot class. We are apt to forget that the progressive elements of the labour movement have not hitherto constituted or represented by a great deal the total mass of the working population; and there has been a real menace to the growth of liberty involved in the possibility that the apathetic elements of the working class might be hardened into a virtual serfdom. For the presence in any society of a permanently unprivileged and disabled element which is condemned in perpetuity to do its menial work is the undoing not only of liberty, but at last of the society itself.