national standard of living can by no human ingenuity be maintained under to-day’s conditions of output. What Production Depends on Lord Weir has truly pointed out[21] that there are only four methods of improving the volume and efficiency of our national production: (1) An increase in intensity of effort per operative hour; (2) An increase in the number of operative hours per individual per day; (3) An increase in the number of operative individuals; (4) A perfecting of methods, processes and organizations, by which waste of operative hours is eliminated. Accepting this as an accurate statement, which it is, of how alone output can be increased, I wish to point out the immediate obstacles to an achievement of these four objects. They are these: In regard to (1)—the workman’s low conception of work, his tendency, in many trades, to lose time, his inveterate belief in restriction of output. In regard to (2)—the conception of organized Labour that the present 47- or 48-hour ordinary working week is a social reform with which no tampering will be permitted, and that if in times of trade prosperity more hours are necessary, they ought to be worked as overtime. In regard to (3)—the insistence of the Trade Unions, in this country, on their rigid lines of demarcation of work—in other words, on certain work being always reserved for certain Unions, without reference to the prevailing industrial or commercial conditions. In regard to (4)—the opposition of the workers to the introduction of time- and labour-saving appliances, or of payment by results—and Lord Weir adds: the killing of the spirit of enterprise among employers, as the result of the taxation policy of the Government; the lack of reciprocity and co-operation on the part of the Trade Unions, amounting to active obstruction; and bad statesmanship on the part of the employers’ organizations. To state these four methods in their order of relative practicability, they run (1), (4), (3) and (2). All the obstacles enumerated above to securing greater production by methods (1), (4) and (3), are the fruit of unsound economic theories that have for many years past been sedulously instilled into Labour, and are now accepted by it as part of its everyday rule of life and conduct. The Workers’ Notion of the Secret Fund