And it must be remembered that in America as in England there are few manufacturing industries in which wage earners are in full work throughout the year. Thus it appears that, in the two great English speaking empires, a considerable proportion, even of the upper working classes, do not receive remuneration that allows to them and to their families that minimum of space, food, clothing and recreation which at the present day are esteemed essential to civilised life. The reason of this state of things is a fairly simple one. Wages, in a state of free competition, are determined not by the intrinsic cost of the work performed but by the relative needs of the worker to sell and of the paymaster to buy. Where there are many workers able to offer the same service and comparatively few buyers, the work will be paid for at a low rate, however excellent; where would-be buyers’ workers are few and would-be buyers many, the work will be highly paid, however ill done. Among ourselves the numbers competing for manual work are very large, and the need of each particular workman for employment far greater and more pressing than the need of any employer for any particular man. Consequently, the wages of the manual worker are low in proportion to the cost of livelihood; and the individual worker is absolutely powerless by himself to increase them. These facts are so familiar, and, when definitely stated, so universally admitted, that it almost seems necessary to apologise for reiterating them. Yet they are continually ignored by ordinary middle class people in conversing upon labour questions, and not infrequently even by writers of some standing. Categorically, they are not—and doubtless would not be—denied; but whole volumes are founded upon the basis of their falsity. The entire constructive argument, for instance, of Mrs Bosanquet’s “The Strength of the People,” a book which, having gone into a second edition, may be supposed to have influenced a good many readers, rests upon a tacit assumption that payment is determined by quality of work: an assumption masked by the ambiguous character of the word “earn,” which at one moment is used in the sense of “deserve” and at another in the sense of “receive.” Mrs Bosanquet—except indeed when dealing with the old Poor Law—cheerfully ignores the painful law that wages are determined by the conflict of needs, and writes, throughout, as though the manual worker who does good work were sure of being well paid. From this assumption she goes on, very logically, to suppose that the cure for a man’s poverty is to make him do good work. Many persons who are not themselves exposed to the pinch of competition may be found expressing the same view, which obtains apparent support from the fact that the very ill paid are observed not to be producing good work. For, although it is unfortunately not true that good work always “earns” good wages, it is true that bad pay, sooner or later, but quite inevitably leads to bad work.