In each district the amount of wages should be based on the price of perishable articles--food, fuel, household necessities--in that district.[1] It is an easy matter to record the prices of these necessities: and if an annual revision of wages be made, the employer cannot complain about excessive increases, because between one year and another prices do not vary sufficiently to cause any great difference, and all manufacturers would be affected the same way. [1] What is necessary in the way of food, clothes, fuel, household articles, rent, etc., in order to keep an average family in reasonable comfort can easily be determined. I have worked this out in detail, but it is hardly a subject for these notes. Fixed items, such as rent, should be revised every five years or so. Such an arrangement would mean basing wages on what may be termed "reasonable comfort" instead of on necessity. This alteration of the basis of wage calculation, together with the payment of a reward for efficiency, would have a remarkable effect in lessening the difficulties between Capital and Labour, and would make for a permanent and progressive industrial peace. (_e_) THE ACTUAL AND THE IDEAL. Whenever scientific management is criticised, there seems to be a tendency to avoid a comparison between the conditions of work under scientific management and other _existing_ conditions. The comparison generally drawn is between scientific management and some non-existent, more or less ideal, condition imagined by the critic. But we have to deal with immediate practical problems; with prevailing conditions; with a non-producing investing society which is constantly seeking profits; with masters who are in open or veiled antagonism to the workers; with workers who have no chance of obtaining a real education, and whose minds are so confused by the contradictory statements made in the Press--their only means of becoming acquainted with the broader aspects of citizenship--that they can rarely exercise a balanced judgment on any subject. Any scheme of work and wages must take into account these things as well as the present-day desires and ambitions of the average worker, if it is to be of any real use or if it is to assist the worker, consciously or unconsciously, towards the attainment of what are considered better things. The worker cares more for money than for anything else. In this he is singularly like most other people. The aesthetic nature of his surroundings when at work make little appeal to him, and no appeal at all if two or three shillings a week are in the balance against it. He does not know how his health improves and his efficiency increases when he is in pleasant surroundings, and he will have no hesitation in leaving a pleasant factory for a dismal one if he receives a slight increase in wages by doing so.