which lie latent under an "economy of low wages." The satisfaction of new good human desires, by endowing life with more hope and interest, will render all intelligent exertion more effective, by distributing demand over a larger variety of commodities will give a fuller utilisation both of natural and human resources, and by redressing the dislocated balance of production and consumption due to inequality of purchasing power, will justify high wages by increased fulness and regularity of work. But it must be clearly recognised that however desirable "saving" may seem to be as a moral virtue of the working classes, any large practice of saving undertaken before and in preference to an elevation of current consumption, will necessarily cancel the economic advantages just dwelt upon. Just as the wise individual will see he cannot afford to "save" until he has made full provision for the maintenance of his family in full physical efficiency, so the wise working class will insist upon utilising earlier accesses of wages in promoting the physical and intellectual efficiency of themselves and their families before they endeavour to "invest" any considerable portion of their increased wages. Mr. Gould puts this point very plainly and convincingly: "Where economic gains are small, savings mean a relatively low plane of social existence. A parsimonious people are never progressive, neither are they, as a rule, industrially efficient. It is the man with many wants--not luxurious fancies, but real legitimate wants--who works hard to satisfy his aspirations, and he it is who is worth hiring. Let economists still teach the utility and the necessity of saving, but let the sociologist as firmly insist that to so far practise economy as to prevent in the nineteenth century a corresponding advance in civilisation of the working with the other classes is morally inequitable and industrially bad policy. I am not sorry that the American does not save more. Neither am I sure but that if many working-class communities I have visited on the Continent were socially more ambitious, there would not be less danger from Radical theories. One of the most intelligent manufacturers I ever met told me a few years ago he would be only too glad to pay higher wages to his working people, provided they would spend the excess legitimately and not hoard it. He knew that in the end he should gain thereby, since the ministering to new wants only begets others."[237] If there are theoretic economists who still hold that "a demand for commodities is not a demand for labour," they may be reminded that a paradox is not necessarily true. In fact, this particular paradox is seen to be sustained by a combination of slipshod reasoning and moral prejudice. The growing opinion of economic students is veering round to register in theory the firm empirical judgment from which the business world has never swerved, that a high rate of consumption is the surest guarantee of progressive trade.