pplication of the
subject will now appear. We have to look into those cases in the moral
and spiritual sphere in which the functions of nutrition are either
neglected or abused. To sustain life, physical, mental, moral, or
spiritual, some sort of food is essential. To secure an adequate supply
each organism also is provided with special and appropriate faculties.
But the final gain to the organism does not depend so much on the
actual amount of food procured as on the exercise required to obtain it.
In one sense the exercise is only a means to an end, namely, the finding
food; but in another and equally real sense, the exercise is the end,
the food the means to attain that. Neither is of permanent use without
the other, but the correlation between them is so intimate that it were
idle to say that one is more necessary than the other. Without food
exercise is impossible, but without exercise food is useless.

Thus exercise is in order to food, and food is in order to exercise--in
order especially to that further progress and maturity which only
ceaseless activity can promote. Now food too easily acquired means food
without that accompaniment of discipline which is infinitely more
valuable than the food itself. It means the possibility of a life which
is a mere existence. It leaves the organism _in statu quo_, undeveloped,
immature, low in the scale of organization and with a growing tendency
to pass from the state of equilibrium to that of increasing
degeneration. What an organism is depends upon what it does; its
activities make it. And if the stimulus to the exercise of all the
innumerable faculties concerned in nutrition be withdrawn by the
conditions and circumstances of life becoming, or being made to become,
too easy, there is first an arrest of development, and finally a loss of
the parts themselves. If, in short, an organism does nothing, in that
relation it is nothing.

We may, therefore, formulate the general principle thus: _Any principle
which secures food to the individual without the expenditure of work is
injurious, and accompanied by the degeneration and loss of parts._

The social and political analogies of this law, which have been casually
referred to already, are sufficiently familiar to render any further
development in these directions superfluous. After the eloquent
preaching of the Gospel of Work by Thomas Carlyle, this century at least
can never plead that one of the most important moral bearin