When one man contracts to sell a horse for a certain price, and another man to pay that price for it, the price in question is agreed to because the buyer says to himself on the one hand, “If I do not consent to pay so much, I shall lose the horse, which is to me worth more than the money”; and the seller says to himself on the other hand, “If I do not consent to accept so little, I shall lose the money, which is to me worth more than the horse.”  Each bases his argument on a conscious or subconscious reference to the situation which will arise if the bargain is not concluded.  Similarly, when any nation submits to a foreign rule, and forbears to revolt though it feels that rule distasteful, it forbears because, either consciously or subconsciously, it feels that the existing situation, whatever its drawbacks, is preferable to that which would arise from any violent attempt to change it.  The same thing holds good of the labouring classes as a whole, as related to those classes who, in the modern world, direct them.  By implication, if not consciously, they are partners to a certain bargain.  They are not partners to a bargain because they consent to labour, for there is no bargaining with necessity; and they would have to labour in any case, if they wished to remain alive.  They are partners to a bargain because they consent to labour under the direction of other people.  It is true that, as regards the present and the near future, they are confronted by necessity even here.  This is obviously true of countries such as Great Britain, in which, if the labour of the many were not elaborately organised by the few, three-fourths of the present population would be unable to obtain bread.  Nevertheless, if we take a wider view of affairs, and consider what, without violating possibility, might conceivably take place in the course of a few disastrous centuries, the mass of modern labourers might gradually secede from the position which they at present occupy, and, spreading themselves in families or small industrial groups over the vast agricultural areas which still remain unoccupied, might keep themselves alive by labouring under their own direction, as men have done in earlier ages, and as savages do still.  They would have, on the whole, to labour far harder than they do now, and to labour for a reward which, on the whole, would be incomparably less than that which is attainable to-day by all labour except the lowest.  Moreover, their condition would have all the “instability” which, as Spencer rightly says, is inseparable from “the homogeneous.”  It could not last.  Still, while it lasted, they could live; and, in theory, at all events, the mass of the human race must be recognised as capable of keeping themselves alive by the labour of pairs of hands which, in each case, are undirected by any intelligence superior to, or other than, the labourer’s own.  In theory, at all events, therefore, this self-supporting multitude would be capable of choosing whether they would continue in