Nor is industrial co-operation the only part of the nation’s business carried on, in part at least, upon non-competitive principles. The whole civil service of any country, the army, navy, hospitals, museums, prisons, endowed schools and municipal undertakings of all kinds are examples of enterprises established on a non-competitive basis, although often influenced as regards internal management by competitive methods. In many of these cases, the payment of workers is fixed otherwise than by competition. Military and naval officers are not asked what is the lowest figure at which they will consent to serve their country; nor do we find in advertisements for town clerks or borough surveyors that preference will be given to candidates willing to accept a reduction of salary. Even in the wider labour market, competition has not entirely a free course. It is checked by trade organisations, by Factory Acts and by Sanitary Acts. It is even checked in some slight degree by an uneasy feeling that it is not decent to let people work for us in return for obviously inadequate payment. The avowed aim of trade unions is to check freedom of competition, with the object of obtaining or maintaining for the workers a high level of pay and of comfort. Their attempted method has been, almost invariably, the establishment not of a fixed wage but of a minimum wage. A misconception upon this point is so deeply engrained in the mind of the ordinary middle class Briton that I entirely despair of being believed when I make this statement. If I should live to celebrate a hundredth birthday, I should expect still to hear in the last year of my life the words: “What I really can’t bear about trade unions is that they insist upon all men being paid alike.” Let it be repeated, once again, however vainly, that trade unions do not so insist. I have never known, nor heard of, any trade union that objected to any of its members getting paid as much above the minimum rate as they possibly could. What the union does forbid is the taking of wages below the minimum; and the reason of this prohibition will be clear to any person who has read the chapter: “How Underpayment Comes.” The means employed by trade unions for securing a minimum wage is the combined refusal of all members to work at any lower rate. In trades of skill, as distinguished from trades of mere practice—trades that is to say which possess in some degree a natural monopoly—unions have often attained considerable success; and wherever they have done so, poverty has been in a measure checked. Not only have the members of the union themselves been comparatively well paid, but the fact of their being so has helped to raise the level around them. Thus, since national poverty is the greatest enemy of trade, the unions have almost invariably, and indeed inevitably, been promoters of trade and prosperity.