These three measures, the standardisation of the cost of living, the limitation of profits, the institution of a minimum standard of life are necessary to the redemption of commerce. For to redeem commerce, we must in the first instance, take away from it the power and the opportunity of exploiting life for the ends of private gain. But this process secures another result. It ensures for the mass of the people a reasonable security and sufficiency of physical subsistence, so that the pre-occupation with self-preservation need no longer arrest their spiritual development. We establish the foundations of freedom—freedom from fear, from anxiety, from the autocracy of the employer or his agent—and confer upon the ordinary man a new status, in which we may with good hope expect to find him susceptible to a social vision powerful to evoke his devotion and to bring his will into captivity to its obedience. Commerce and industry will then no longer be a vast scramble of competition and exploitation, but a generous social co-operation. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Chapter IV. THE REDEMPTION OF WORK. “And the men of labour spent their strength in daily struggling for breath to maintain the vital strength they laboured with. So living in a daily circulation of sorrow, living but to work, and working but to live, as if daily bread were the only end of a wearisome life, and a wearisome life the only occasion of daily bread.”—DANIEL DEFOE. “And perfect the day shall be, when it is of all men understood that the beauty of holiness must be in labour as well as in rest. Nay! more, if it may be, in labour; in our strength rather than in our weakness; and in the choice of what we shall work for through the six days and may know to be good at their evening time, than in the choice of what we pray for on the seventh, of reward and repose. With the multitude that keep holiday we may perhaps sometimes vainly have gone up to the House of the Lord and vainly there have asked for what we fancied would be mercy; but for the few who labour as their Lord would have them, the mercy needs no seeking, and their wide home no hallowing. Surely goodness and mercy shall _follow_ them all the days of their life, and they shall dwell in the House of the Lord for ever.”—JOHN RUSKIN.