First, the production and distribution of the necessities of life should be definitely placed outside the sphere of competition. The British Labour Party in its memorandum on reconstruction, proposes that the coal-supply shall be so organised that the ordinary householder shall be able to have his coal delivered at his door, at a uniform price all over the country and all through the year—just as he buys postage stamps. But the principle should be extended to all the essential commodities. Flour, milk, coal, meat, wool, cotton and their immediate derivatives should be withdrawn from the circle of competitive commerce, and be no more subject to the fluctuations of a market manipulated in the interest of profit-making than the water-supply is. There is no reason why the supply of these primary articles should not be so regulated as to bear a reasonably constant proportion to the demand. For those who argue that this would dislocate the customary economic processes, a two-fold answer may be returned. First, that the customary economic processes deserve to be dislocated; and second, that the only possible justification of the customary economic processes is derived from an economic theory which is no longer relevant to the facts of life. In point of actual fact, the standardisation of prices has become in recent years increasingly common—the elimination of competition by the formation of trusts and combines has had the result of fixing prices with a considerable rigidity; and during the war, it has been done on a very large scale. In neither case is it suggested by any one that it has had a deleterious effect upon commerce. In this proposal for the standardisation of prices, there is nothing new; it is simply a revival of the mediæval custom of the _justum pretium_—according to which buyers and sellers and market authorities together determined a price for each commodity which should be equally fair to the producer and the consumer; and a return to this practice—with such modifications as modern conditions require—is opposed only by those who still hold to the curious illusion that Adam Smith spoke the last word upon this subject.[14] Footnote 14: Revelations of after-war profiteering in Great Britain and America are creating a definite demand for standardisation of prices. And if we are to have Wages Boards, why not Prices Boards?