government offices at Whitehall and in municipal offices in the town halls there is a certain proportion of workers who find pleasure in putting forth their best energies at high pressure. But the majority take care that work shall be carried on at low pressure, and that the output shall not exceed a certain understood minimum. They ensure this by making things uncomfortable for the workers who exceed that minimum. The gravity of this evil is scarcely yet realized. It could probably be counteracted by so organizing promotion that the higher posts really went to the officials distinguished by the quantity and the quality of their work. Pensions should also be affected by the same consideration. In any case, the evil is serious, and is becoming more so since the number of public officials is constantly increasing. The Council of the Law Society found some years ago that the cost of civil administration in England had increased between the years 1894 and 1904 from 19 millions to 25 millions, and, excluding the Revenue Departments, it is now said to have gone up to 42 millions. It is an evil that will have to be dealt with sooner or later.
Max Stirner wrote his work, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (The Ego and His Own, in the English translation of Byington), in 1845. His life has been written by John Henry Mackay (Max Stirner: Sein Leben und Sein Werk), and an interesting study of Max Stirner (whose real name was Schmidt) will be found in James Huneker's Egoists.
In the introduction to my earliest book, The New Spirit (1889), I set forth this position, from which I have never departed: "While we are socializing all those things of which all have equal common need, we are more and more tending to leave to the individual the control of those things which in our complex civilization constitute individuality. We socialize what we call our physical life in order that we may attain greater freedom for what we call our spiritual life." No doubt such a point of view was implicit in Ruskin and other previous writers, just as it has