If anything is certain in this world, it is that the mass of the community will not rest satisfied with these guaranteed minima.  All those possible legislative increments in the general standard of living are not going to diminish the labour unrest; they are going to increase it.  A starving man may think he wants nothing in the world but bread, but when he has eaten you will find he wants all sorts of things beyond.  Mr. Hartshorn assures us that the worker is “not out for a theory.”  So much the worse for the worker and all of us when, like the mere hand we have made him, he shows himself unable to define or even forecast his ultimate intentions.  He will in that case merely clutch.  And the obvious immediate next objective of that clutch directly its imagination passes beyond the “guaranteed minima” phase is the industry as a whole.

I do not see how anyone who desires the continuing development of civilisation can regard a trade union as anything but a necessary evil, a pressure-relieving contrivance an arresting and delaying organisation begotten by just that class separation of labour which in the commonweal of the Great State will be altogether destroyed.  It leads nowhither; it is a shelter hut on the road.  The wider movement of modern civilisation is against class organisation and caste feeling.  These are forces antagonistic to progress, continually springing up and endeavouring to stereotype the transitory organisation, and continually being defeated.

Of all the solemn imbecilities one hears, surely the most foolish is this, that we are in “an age of specialisation.”  The comparative fruitfulness and hopefulness of our social order, in comparison with any other social system, lies in its flat contradiction of that absurdity.  Our medical and surgical advances, for example, are almost entirely due to the invasion of medical research by the chemist; our naval development to the supersession of the sailor by the engineer; we sweep away the coachman with the railway, beat the suburban line with the electric tramway, and attack that again with the petrol omnibus, oust brick and stonework in substantial fabrics by steel frames, replace the skilled maker of woodcuts by a photographer, and so on through the whole range of our activities.  Change of function, arrest of specialisation by innovations in method and appliance, progress by the infringement of professional boundaries and the defiance of rule:  these are the commonplaces of our time.  The trained man, the specialised man, is the most unfortunate of men; the world leaves him behind, and he has lost his power of overtaking it.  Versatility, alert adaptability, these are our urgent needs.  In peace and war alike the unimaginative, uninventive man is a burthen and a retardation, as he never was before in the world’s history.  The modern community, therefore, that succeeds most rapidly and most completely in converting both its labourers and its leisure class into a population of active, able, unhurried, educated, and physically well-developed people will be inevitably the dominant community in the world.  That lies on the face of things about us; a man who cannot see that must be blind to the traffic in our streets.