We may seek the development of our trade along either of two lines—we may aim either at underselling our competitors or at surpassing them. If we elect to take the line of cheapness, and also determine to seek that cheapness by paying very low wages, we must confine ourselves to goods that demand neither very high skill nor very elaborate machinery. But these are precisely the sort of goods that can best be produced by nations upon a lower level than ourselves, by peasants and by dwellers in genial climates where comparatively little food and clothing and practically no heating are required. With workers such as these we can never compete on equal terms, and we should be wiser not to try. We can never bring down an Englishman to the standards of the Chinaman or of the Hindoo. But we can, in making the attempt, create among ourselves a class of helots, degraded labour slaves, living on a level that shocks our national conscience. To do this is to keep open a sore in our midst and to run a constant risk of those revolts and disturbances which are the greatest possible danger and interruption to the regular course of trade—a greater danger perhaps than that of being undersold by foreigners. For the long-suffering of the English poor, though amazing, is not probably quite unlimited. No national life can be stable while large numbers of the people live in great misery. The best safeguard of national peace is a general distribution of comfort and independence. And the safest paths towards this state of security are good education and good payment for the workers. Low wages lead by a path of intolerable suffering to an inevitable downfall. On the ascending path too there may be dangers—but they are the less dangers, and they will be faced by citizens fitter to meet them. After all, even Great Britain cannot expect to hold all the trade of the world. What she may expect, what she can have if she will, is the commercial leadership of the world. She may show in other departments, as she has shown in cotton and in iron, that her race can produce the best workers living, and the best organisers of work; and she can continue the great lesson which others have learned from her history, but which she herself does not always remember, the lesson that, other things being equal, that nation becomes wealthiest which pays its workers best. Health, skill, intelligence: these are the true bulwarks of national prosperity; and the price of these is liberal payment for labour. Nor does the prosperity which rests upon these things injure those neighbouring nations amid which it develops. Rivalry upon the up-grade educates and improves all alike; rivalry upon the down-grade injures and degrades all, but not all alike. In that competition the nation suffers most whose standards are highest.