To-day the minimum wage, like so much else of Ruskin’s teaching, is a commonplace of the industrial system. No Government or municipality to-day issues a contract which does not contain a fair wages clause which is drawn up irrespective of the demand for labour, and every healthy organised industry has a fixed scale which is dependent on prices, it is true, but which is wholly independent of the demand and supply of labour. The whole teaching of modern industry is that cheap labour is dear labour, and that it is as important for successful competition to have a well equipped human instrument as to have well equipped machinery. To take the example of the cotton trade. Sixty years ago the condition of the Lancashire trade was deplorable. It was based largely on sweated labour, including the labour of wretched little slaves drafted in groups from the workhouses, and kept alive on porridge, their compound a shed or barn on the premises. To-day there is no industry more highly organised, and no class of worker—certainly no class of female worker—more adequately paid. Trade unionism with its fixed wage has made the Lancashire cotton trade the most wonderful industrial organism in the world. Four thousand miles from its raw material, ten thousand miles from its greatest market, it yet dominates the cotton industry as completely as our shipping trade, with all its relative advantages in regard to raw material and geographical situation, dominates the shipping industry of the world. Not least important is the peace which this high state of organisation has produced in the trade. It is many years since there was a serious conflict in Lancashire. The cotton trade in a word has had this enormous success not because labour is cheap, but because labour is dear—and good; because the human machine being kept at the highest point of perfection is the most productive instrument of its kind in the world. It has succeeded, above all, because the standard wage has removed the competition of low class, sweated labour, which is not only iniquitous in itself, but which has the effect of depreciating the whole currency of industry. And in depreciating the currency of industry it lowers the general standard of the community. Where wages are low, there the poor rate is necessarily high, and the general trader shares in the universal impoverishment. For it must be remembered that the working classes are the bedrock of commerce. Their condition reacts immediately upon society. The money they receive comes back instantly in a fertilising stream to the grocer, the bootmaker, and the clothier. These get nothing but bad debts and insolvency from the operations of the sweater, whose poor instruments, moreover, in falling upon the public purse, still further depress the shopkeeper.