The task before us, therefore, is the deliverance of life from the ascendency of the economic motive; and at bottom this means the redemption of commerce from the obsession of profit-making. In other words, commerce must be conceived and conducted as a social service. It is true that in the early days of modern commercialism, the principle of competition was regarded as the heaven-sent panacea for human ills. Men became dithyrambic about _laissez-faire_, and though they perforce admitted that the growth of the commercial system had caused certain glaring evils, yet they maintained that these were no more than the inevitable accidents of a process of readjustment. Let the system only work out its inherent logic to the end, and there will be a golden age for everybody. The system has had a fair trial; and so far from achieving the results confidently predicted by its advocates, it has failed hopelessly to provide even a tolerably secure and sufficient subsistence for the great mass of men. It is indeed difficult to see how it could be otherwise or how those who uphold it could have expected a different result. There is no doubt that the system has stimulated the production of wealth; and this its protagonists accurately foresaw; but they apparently supposed that the distribution of wealth would look after itself. It had indeed done so, in a fashion which has deprived the mass of toilers of that security of physical subsistence which is a necessary condition of liberty and of the liberation of the spiritual impulses. So far from adequately fulfilling the elementary services of providing men with a steady and reasonable supply of the necessities of life, it has made life itself insecure and precarious. How this situation has come about may be stated summarily in a few words: (_a_) The pursuit of profit tends to lower the cost of production, while it raises the price of the product. Chief among the costs of production is the payment of labour,—that is to say, wages. The result of this tendency is to depress the income of the worker and at the same time to raise his expenditure and since there is no limit fixed at either end the standard of life is in constant danger of being lowered beneath the point of reasonable subsistence. It often happens that wages show an increase over given periods of time; but it is an increase of money-wages and not of real wages; since the period of wage-increase is generally also a period of a disproportionate increase in the price of commodities. Some check has been placed upon the decrease of wages by Trade Union action; but this is offset by the partial elimination of competition in the markets through the growth of Trusts and Combines, and the consequent upward tendency of prices.