The foregoing chapters will have been written in vain if they have not succeeded in showing that there is no necessary connection between high wages and high selling prices; but that, on the contrary, high wages, in the great majority of cases, actually conduce to cheap production. Were this invariably the case, it is obvious that a general rise of wages, far from encouraging foreign competition, would rather form a barrier against it. And this, in fact, would be—as it is in some instances already—the case in many trades. It may be well briefly to consider the various groups of cases that would arise in consequence of a general rise in the remuneration of labour. There exists, in the first place, a considerable group of trades in which, for similar work in respect of goods sold at the same price, different employers pay very different rates of wage. A very remarkable instance is furnished, in one of the worst paid trades, by the shirt factory of the Scottish Wholesale Co-operative Society. In that establishment, turning out goods for working class customers, women have for years received about double the wages of the average home working shirt maker, they not providing, as does she, the sewing cotton used. In October 1906 the average wage paid to workers in this factory was 18s. 3d. per week, and their week was one of 44 hours.[98] Yet the factory pays and has done so for many years.[99] It is therefore clear that even in the ready made shirt trade it is possible to pay reasonably good wages, to compete with the “sweater,” and yet to make a profit. Thus the enforcement of a minimum weekly wage very near the level of Mr Maxwell’s 18s. 3d. would neither kill the trade nor stimulate the importation of foreign shirts. It would merely impose upon other employers that standard of management and methods which Mr Maxwell has chosen voluntarily to adopt. Those employers who lacked intelligence or flexibility to carry on a factory on these terms would, it is true, be driven out of business; but their customers would not cease to buy nor to be supplied at the old price. The only change would be that none of us would, any longer, be buying shirts at which some woman had sewn, as Hood said, “with a double thread At once a shirt and a shroud.”