Thus efficiency, however desirable upon other grounds, is no economic remedy for underpayment. Not inefficiency but poverty is the real disease, and since poverty is an inevitable result of unlimited competition in labour, the disease can only be cured by some interference with the free course of competition. How to apply such interference effectually is the real problem which organised society has to solve. Towards its solution Mrs Bosanquet, able though she is, offers no assistance, because she never acknowledges the character of the problem. For her there are only inefficient people to be taught better, not underpaid people to be paid better. In this respect she represents a considerable school of thought and therefore it has seemed worth while to examine her thesis at some length; especially since any writer is pretty sure of welcome who preaches a doctrine so soothing to the general conscience. Much sympathetic distress would be spared to all of us, and much racking of anxious brains to a few, if it were but possible to believe with Mrs Bosanquet that the poor are themselves the architects of their own poverty and that they must themselves be its physicians. Unfortunately this is not the case. The process of cheapening described above is, in a state of unlimited competition, absolutely inevitable; and neither talent nor industry can exempt from it any isolated worker whose qualifications do not create for him some sort of monopoly. CHAPTER VIII LABOUR AS A COMMODITY What is a “fair wage”—Two meanings of “worth”—What work costs to the worker—Work done below cost price—How the worker may lose upon his work—The effect upon commodities in general of free competition—The effect upon labour—The robber employer—Eventual powerlessness of the single employer—Cost to the nation of the underpaid worker—Difference in essence between labour and other commodities—Ambiguity of word “law”—Recognition of the true cost of labour the basis of reform. There are few phrases more current than those which include the expression “a fair wage.” All workers conceive that they have a right to it; and I never met an employer who did not maintain that he paid it—although I have met more than one who admitted that his “fair wage” was one upon which the worker who received it could not live. To any enquirer venturing to point out this peculiarity, the reply is given: “But the work is not worth more,” and the reply generally silences the enquirer for the moment—whereby the employer comes to believe it unanswerable. In the enquirer’s mind two questions eventually arise: “Can a wage be fair upon which the worker cannot live?” and: “Has labour a worth measurable otherwise than by the market price?”