[Footnote 3: "Nor does the Anarchistic scheme furnish any code of morals to be imposed on the individual. 'Mind your own business,' is its only moral law."] [Footnote 4: This would of course be largely practicable under a Collectivist system.] [Footnote 5: English readers need not baulk themselves here because of the late fall of agricultural rents in this country. Rent, in the economic sense, covers payment for the use of land for any purpose, agricultural or otherwise; and town rents have risen oppressively. A much more puzzling discrepancy between the facts and the theory is presented by the apparent absence of any upward tendency in the prices of general commodities. However, an article may be apparently no less cheap or even much cheaper than it was twenty years ago; and yet its price may have risen enormously relatively to its average cost of production, owing to the average cost of production having been reduced by machinery, higher organization of the labor of producing it, cheapened traffic with other countries, etc. Thus, in the cotton industry, machinery has multiplied each man's power of production eleven hundred times; and Sir Joseph Whitworth was quoted by the President of the Iron and Steel Institute some years ago as having declared that a Nottingham lace machine can do the work formerly done by 8,000 lacemakers. The articles entitled "Great Manufacture of Little Things," in Cassell's _Technical Educator_, may be consulted for examples of this sort in the production of pins, pens, etc. Suppose, then, that an article which cost, on the average, fivepence to make in 1850, was then sold for sixpence. If it be now selling for threepence, it is apparently twice as cheap as it was. But if the cost of production has also fallen to three-halfpence, which is by no means an extravagant supposition, then the price, considered relatively to the cost of production, has evidently risen prodigiously, since it is now twice the cost, whereas the cost was formerly five-sixths of the price. In other words, the surplus, or rent, per article, has risen from 16 2/3 per cent. to 100 per cent., in spite of the apparent cheapening. This is the explanation of the fact that though the workers were probably never before so monstrously robbed as they are at present, it is quite possible for statisticians to prove that on the whole wages have risen and prices fallen. The worker, pleased at having only to pay threepence where he formerly paid sixpence, forgets that the share of his threepence that goes to an idler may be much larger than that which went out of each of the two threepences he paid formerly.] [Footnote 6: Written in the 1887-92 period, during which Trafalgar Square was forcibly closed against public meetings by the Salisbury administration.]