I do not know how there could be any such necessity unless it was the case that labour and capital, like land in some countries, had entered on the stage of decreasing returns, and had, moreover, gone so far on that down grade that the additional returns grew more slowly than population--and no one has even suggested such an idea. I have already tried to point out the fallacy that low prices explain low wages. It is, however, perhaps advisable to note that they do not even, to any great extent, condone, much less justify them. Probably we are all familiar with an argument like this: Consider, it is said, the great fact that calico is twopence a yard. Every woman in England may now be clad in cotton fabrics which, a century ago, were beyond the purchasing power of a queen. Beware how women are encouraged to ask and to stand for higher wages, or calico will again be put beyond the reach of any but queens. I confess I never heard this caution without remembering Carlyle's indignant reply:--"We cannot have prosperous cotton trades at the expense of keeping the Devil a partner in them." The weakness of it will become obvious if we carry the matter a little further and argue that if we can succeed in reducing women's wages still more, say, to 5s. per week, we shall have a considerable reduction in calico, and bring it within the reach of still poorer people. It is Dickens, I think, who speaks of a horse that was fed on a system which would have reduced his cost of upkeep to a straw a day, and would, no doubt, have made him a very rampageous animal at that if, unfortunately, the horse had not died! The idea that cheapness of goods makes up for everything in the workers' circumstances is, perhaps, the most deplorable of current fallacies. It is no less than that of mistaking the whole end and aim of industry. The goal of economic effort is not accumulation of wealth, but the support of wealthy human beings--not "goods," as Aristotle told us long ago, but the "good life." True economical cheapening of production is cheapening of natural powers _outside_ of man--not cheap labour, but cheap machinery, cheap organisation, cheap transit. This is a kind of cheapening of product which can go on indefinitely. From the dawn of civilisation man has been turning a hostile or indifferent environment into a rich and friendly one. For ages, indeed, constant war hindered this conquest of nature. It is only in this century that comparative peace among nations has allowed the majority of men to give all their time and thought to the economical life, and even yet the locusts of standing armies eat up great part of our harvest field. But the changes which have been made on the earth, as we know it, the natural resources of matter and force now under our control, the complex and sensitive organisation which knits the world together, all point to possibilities of wealth beyond the wildest dreams of last century. There is some fatal leak in our