These words were written 140 years ago, but, as we all know, they are still true of the working of the system to-day. Indeed the war has served to emphasize their truth by showing us how deeply entrenched are the habits of bargaining and of latent antagonism which the working of the wage-system has engendered. It is the defect of the wage-system, as Adam Smith makes clear to us, that it lays stress on just those points in the industrial process where the interests of employers and workpeople run contrary to one another, whilst obscuring those far more important aspects in which they are partners and fellow-workers in the service of the community. This defect cannot be overcome by strengthening one party to the contract at the expense of the other, by crushing trade unions or dissolving employers' combinations, or even by establishing the principle of collective bargaining. It can only be overcome by the recognition on both sides that industry is in essence not a matter of contract and bargaining at all, but of mutual interdependence and community service: and by the growth of a new ideal of status, a new sense of professional pride and corporate duty and self-respect among all who are engaged in the same function. No one can say how long it may take to bring about such a fundamental change of attitude, especially among those who have most to lose, in the material sense, by an alteration in the existing distribution of economic power. But the war has cleared away so much of prejudice and set so much of our life in a new light that the dim ideals of to-day may well be the realities of to-morrow. This at least we can say: that no country in the world is in a better position than we are to redeem modern industry from the reproach of materialism and to set it firmly upon a spiritual basis, and that the country which shall first have had the wisdom and the courage to do so will be the pioneer in a vast extension of human liberty and happiness and will have shown that along this road and no other lies the industrial progress of mankind. BOOKS FOR REFERENCE 1. _Economics_: H. Clay, _Economics for the General Reader_. 1916. Ruskin, _Unto this last_. Smart, _Second Thoughts of an Economist_. 1916. 2. _Man and his Tools_: Marvin, _The Living Past_. 1913. F. W. Taylor, _The Principles of Scientific Management_. 1911. Hoxie, _Scientific Management and Labour_. 1916. 3. _Industrial Government_: Aristotle, _Politics_ (Book I, chapters on Slavery). Zimmern, _The Greek Commonwealth_ (chapters on Slavery). 1911. Ashley, _The Economic Organization of England_. 1914. Unwin, _Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries_. S. and B. Webb, _The History of Trade Unionism_. Macgregor, _The Evolution of Industry_ (Home University Library). Wallas, _The Great Society_. 1914. G. D. H. Cole, _The World of Labour_. 1915.