The individual worker whose skill is but the dexterity born of constant practice—the worker, that is to say, who has no sort of monopoly—is no more able to regulate the payment of his services than an apple or a sack is able to regulate its market price. Nor, at a certain stage of the downward course, is any individual employer able to regulate it. It is, for instance, probable enough that at the present moment not the Brothers Cheeryble themselves could sell safety pins at a profit if they paid a living wage to the women who “cap” them.[68] For, in the long run, the process of competition generally succeeds in filching from the employer that unfair profit which he had originally filched from the worker. It is now the public at large which, by paying for safety pins a fraction less than they really cost, pockets the balance of the worker’s living wage. For the manufacturer who desires to pay his workers better there are now two courses open; he must either, if he can, find out some improved method, which, by diminishing his other expenses, will allow him to pay higher for labour, or must combine with his fellow manufacturers to raise the selling price. In practice, he generally does neither of these things, but continues to take advantage of his workers and to say—not without some show of justification—that he cannot help it, and that they would be worse off if he gave up business. The public at large, meanwhile, though it automatically pockets the unfair profits, does not, in the long run, gain by the transaction. For the underpaid worker who fails to be wholly supported by the proceeds of his own labour is inevitably supported in part out of the pocket of some other person or persons. Moreover, both the health and the work of the underpaid worker presently deteriorates. He contributes less than he might and ought to the general wealth, and, by and by, when his health fails sufficiently, he becomes a charge upon the public. Finally, he dies before his natural time, so that his country fails to receive the full natural return for those costly and unproductive years of childhood during which he was supported. Furthermore, his working life is one of continued hardship, fatigue and suffering. His existence is not an addition to, but a deduction from, the total general happiness, the rather that underpayment is a burden not only to its victim but also to the onlooker. No person of ordinary sensibilities can fail to be depressed by the knowledge that large numbers of his fellow citizens are struggling, to their physical, moral and mental detriment, in hopeless poverty. Yet this state of things arises inevitably if labour is left, like any other commodity, at the mercy of unrestricted competition.