“The question,” the Memorandum continues, “of the retail prices of household commodities is emphatically the most practical of all political issues to the woman elector. The male politicians have too long neglected the grievances of the small household, which is the prey of every profiteering combination.” And this brings us to the answer to our question how far the present orientation of labour satisfies the conditions we have laid down as necessary to worthy social progress. The rigid fixing of the retail prices of household commodities,—the primary necessities of life—plainly substitutes the principle of production for need and use for that of production for profit; and while this of itself does not eliminate the profiteer altogether, it tends so to limit the area of exploitation as to bring the small household, which is after all the unit of society, within reasonable distance of a healthy security of material circumstance. Moreover, the principle of the National Minimum virtually dissolves the connection between work and the means of subsistence, so that the worker gains security of maintenance and a large accession of freedom and independence. Still further, the principle of democratic control brings to every worker complete immunity from exploitation by those upon whom an antecedent economic advantage has conferred power and enables him to graduate to the dignity and responsibility of partnership. But what then? Having achieved this new status, it is certain that he will not be satisfied. For the thing that is stirring in the mind and heart of organised labour to-day is something much deeper than a desire for a more satisfactory physical life or for economic independence. Labour is indeed unable to make articulate more than the margin of the new desire of which it is aware; but the phenomenon which we have called “labour unrest” properly understood, is the result of a craving, imperious and not to be denied, for a larger life. Of this larger life the worker instinctively feels that economic security and independence are the indispensable pre-requisites. According to the measure of his intelligence and insight, he is aiming for these things. That is the inwardness of the present stirrings of organised labour. The worker knows that while he is compelled to hire himself out at a price in order to provide himself and his children with bread, under conditions which make a sufficiency of bread permanently uncertain, and which virtually deny him the opportunity of being anything more—from his first working day to his last—than the tool of interests from which he is powerless to detach himself, he can never become the man he might be or experience the joy of life which his intuitions declare to be his rightful inheritance. The greater part of life, and especially of the worker’s life, is an unredeemed and unexplored tract; and the possibilities hidden in those regions beyond, eye hath not seen neither hath ear heard.