There are two ways in either (or both) of which any worker may lose upon his work, and the names of them are Long Hours and Low Wages. For instance, a railway company or an omnibus company that keeps a man at work for sixteen hours out of the twenty-four uses up more of that man’s vitality than the other eight hours can restore. Though he were to be paid, like Miss Edna May, at a salary of £200 a week he would still lose on the bargain. At no price can his employers repay him. They have consumed some of his capital, and capital of that sort when once spent is spent for ever. Or the worker may receive for each hour’s work, even though the stretch of hours be not unduly long, too little money to pay for those necessaries by which alone his outlay can be made up. On each transaction he pays out a little more than is returned to him. He becomes, at each step, a little poorer in bodily resources; he is never quite sufficiently fed, never quite sufficiently clothed nor healthily housed, and he never has that reasonable certainty of to-morrow’s provision which goes so far towards giving peace of mind and health of body. Finally, like other persons who spend more than they receive, he becomes bankrupt; that is to say, he either dies several years earlier than the average of men who are better paid, or he sinks into the invalid condition of the pauper. “Labour,” says Mr Schoenhof, “is an expenditure of vital force. Unless this is replaced by wholesome nutrition (air, light, sanitation and even cheerful surroundings are part of wholesome nutrition) the frame will work itself out and the labour will become economically of smaller and smaller value.”[67] The cost, then, of labour as a commodity is the cost of the worker’s existence, a cost paid by the worker not in money, but in exhaustion, in hunger, in actual flesh and blood. This is the point in which labour differs from every other commodity, and the reason for which it should not be treated in the same way as other commodities. In regard to all commodities, the tendency of free competition is, as we all know, to bring down the selling price to a figure very little above the cost of production; and in regard to all commodities other than labour, it is easy enough to see that this result is advantageous to the buyer. It is less easy to see, but is probably no less true that, in the long run, it is advantageous also to the seller, and that every hindrance to free competition in goods tends to diminish the volume of production and consequently that of human enjoyment.