When the worker has a living wage guaranteed him by the State it will be necessary to make him a new bankruptcy law so that the living wage cannot be attached and converted to the use of the Shylocks of this world. The law protects the infant and the idiot from the results of their own foolishness, and we shall find it advisable in the future to extend similar protection to the grown-up idiots and infants who are all too prevalent in the world. Antonio was a normal business man, but he was no match for Shylock, and, though no lawyer can approve of the way in which the Courts treated Shylock, the real lesson of the story is that laws are necessary to protect Antonio, the fool, from Shylock, the knave. In order, then, that the full blessings of bankruptcy may be made available to the poor, we must certainly tackle the problem of the living wage, which to my mind is the most urgent social question of our time. So many things seem to hang upon it. Rent, taxation, education, physical and moral improvement, eugenics, all the social discussions of the time, land you back on the question of the living wage. Sometimes, I think, we are on the eve of a new era when every capable honest citizen will have the same right to a living wage that he now has to free board and lodging and stone breaking in the workhouse. I would rather have a legal right to a living wage than a vote, unless I was clear that I could use the latter to obtain the former and many better things to boot. As a matter of dull, dry, literary history all the prophets and singers and poets, from King David, Isaiah and Jeremiah down to Carlyle, Kingsley, Ruskin, Dickens and Tom Hood, have said or sung the praises of the living wage. There are many who regard Jeremiah as a kind of gloomy dean, but for my part I find him most encouraging. When he says: "Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness and his chambers by wrong; that useth his neighbour's service without wages and giveth him not for his work," I think that he is absolutely right on the spot. I cannot believe that it was his view that woe would providentially descend upon the man who paid sweating wages and that it would come in the shape of lions and bears or lightning and earthquakes; on the contrary, I read it, that, in Jeremiah's view, it was the duty of citizens to see that their fellows did not behave like this. The prophet intended to tell us that our first duty was to persuade our fellow citizens employing labour to give their workmen a living wage, but if we could not achieve this by reasoning and exhorting them, then it was our duty to give such anti-social churls statutory woe, just as we mete out statutory woe to the naughty ones who get drunk and beat their wives, and, indeed, for the same social reasons.