It is the business of business people and their apologists to make believe that without money we should all starve. That this is not so is so simple a proposition that people refuse to believe it. Yet no one will deny that if all the gold and diamonds in the world could be gathered together with their owners and placed on an uninhabited island, these valuables would not produce a single atom of food. Men and women will always, I imagine, desire to possess rare and precious stones and minerals for ornaments and personal adornment, but they will not for ever allow the possession of these things to be used as a means for impoverishing and starving one another. In addition to what I have already said, there is the further fact that so much of our business to-day is unnecessary. In every direction we can see overlapping and competition. Each new invention appears to create an increasing number of those who do not produce, and makes more of us mere handlers of other people’s labour. In almost every village, certainly in every town, large and small, there are people cutting each other’s throats, often in what appears to be a vain endeavour to grow rich and prosperous. Every day of the week multitudes of commercial travellers cover the country striving to sell the same kind of goods in competition with each other. All the great combinations of capital strive to eliminate this kind of waste, and the justification urged in defence of great monopolies is that by combination economy is effected. So it is; but those who benefit from this economy are the owners of the combined concern. They combine in order to make more money, and it is worth while noticing that those who most glibly denounce the workers because they combine are the most ready themselves to enter into a combination if by so doing they may amass more money. The capitalist class is rapidly learning that co-operation amongst themselves is much more profitable than competition. The mass of the people will one day discover that it is better for them to co-operate, and, when they do make the discovery, business, as we understand it to-day, will be cast away into the limbo of forgotten things. In the meantime let us all strive to realise that for all business men, except the very rich, life is one long weary fight against conditions which tend to kill the good there is in us; that, just as the poverty-stricken conditions of life under which the poor are doomed to exist rob them of all the beauty and joy of living, so the mad scramble to get rich, the struggle to rise in the social scale by means of money and money’s worth, robs those engaged in it of everything of real worth, and makes them become just sordid and money-grubbing beings, whose sole idea of value is whether a thing will pay, not in service to the community, but in pounds, shillings, and pence.