Moreover, the payment of high wages to working people has, in itself, a beneficial effect upon the home market. Some people write and speak as though money when it once passed into the hands of a wage earner passed out of existence. But in fact it almost always returns very quickly into active circulation and thus quickens the national turnover. As a general rule a workman, when his wages rise, spends his extra money upon additional comfort for himself and his family; buys more and better food, more and better clothes, more and better furniture; often he moves to a better dwelling and almost always he extends his recreations. The chances are that he will spend something in belonging to a club or a friendly society. He will not, however, as his enemies are fond of asserting, generally drink more; it is to the man who lives with his family in one room, not to the man who has a comfortable parlour, that the public-house looks so attractive. We may say without much doubt that these will be his modes of expenditure because we have among us plenty of well paid artisans, and observation teaches that these are in fact the ways in which they spend their money. Now, many of these channels of expenditure are practically not open to foreign competition. Bread for English eating must be baked in English bakehouses: milk is not yet imported: the retail shopkeeper, the bricklayer, the omnibus driver and the railway servant must follow their avocations on the hither side of the sea. The better paid worker thus, without any premeditation or patriotic design, tends, by the mere process of buying what he wants, to set his fellow countrymen working. It is quite possible that the increase of demand thus created would more than counterbalance the loss of any trade the retention of which depends upon the continuance of underpayment. Nor is this all. It is a question whether any trade in such a condition is either worth keeping or capable of being kept. An experienced employer who is at the head of a large and successful enterprise writes to me: “Broadly speaking, I am convinced that an occupation which does not admit of a decent living wage is an occupation we are better without and one which in due time will die. I mean that the requirements of the Factories and Workshops Act must kill it. A trade which can only live by means of inadequate wages and cheap squalid unhealthy buildings is doomed.” Such a trade while it still endures is not really a source of national profit. The workers whose lives it drains, not being supported by the price paid for their labour, must come eventually to be partly or wholly supported by other people. They are, in fact, a national burden, whether the charge is nominally borne by the State or by private citizens. Poverty, dirt and disease are very costly to the country in which they prevail; and they are inevitable results of underpayment.