The great issue for human welfare was then, and is now, whether there is a supply price for wages above the merest starvation line. Labour, so far, like commodities, has its price determined by the reciprocal action of the buyers and sellers of it. On the side of demand the buyers cannot give more than the value of the product of the last labourer they engage. On the side of supply the labourer would change his trade, or not have children, or not bring up his children to that trade, or he would starve and die, unless he received what he considered a maintenance. This is the supply price. And in any given trade, wages are fixed at the point where demand and supply are both satisfied. Enough labourers are employed to make the least valuable worth the required maintenance and no more. Now the economists, arguing from the phenomena they saw believed, with Malthus, that there was no decent supply price for labour in practice, that people would multiply to the very limit of subsistence. Hence they deduced the terrible doctrine of the Iron Law of Wages, that wages tend to a starvation level, because they thought first that food,[74] and afterwards that capital,[75] was fixed at any time, or increased very slowly. Finally, J. S. Mill taught that fluid capital or the Wages Fund, that famous centre of controversy, being fixed, the total capital available for wages had to be divided between an ever multiplying number of wage earners, some of whom were therefore always starving. This treatment of Labour as governed by the same law of supply and demand as commodities, is the only way it can be treated as subject matter of a science dealing with the production, distribution and exchange of wealth. But no one would stop there, shutting his eyes to the fact that behind the labour stands the labourer, a human being, with all the spiritual and emotional gifts and needs of a man. Only military authority treats men so. Even an economist, writing on labour as a commodity, proceeds to explain how it differs from material commodities--how slow is its reaction on the side of supply--how high wages up to a point produce a still higher quality of labour, and so forth. Business management, also, is a commodity subject to the same law, but I have never heard that the General Managers of Railway Companies feel degraded for that reason to the mere level of slaves. Unluckily the economists, influenced by the poverty that followed the last great war, which ended in 1815, concluded that the unskilled labourer would multiply till his children starved. They saw in fact starvation rampant in England.