payment on any intelligible scale beyond the bare subsistence rate. Neither from the side of cost of production nor of utility of consumption does our economic system work with equity, rationality, or economy. As between one class or grade of workers and another, wage-rates and salaries are determined by strength of 'pull.' A skilled farm labourer gets less than a dustman, a builder's labourer, or a postman; employees in the textile and metal trades, exposed to the full brunt of foreign competition, are worse paid than most grades of railwaymen or routine workers in the printing trades. Strength of organisation, shelter from foreign or other distant competition, command of markets in key industries—these conditions, severally or jointly, are the main direct determinants of wage-rates. A 'strong' trade union can force up wages, often paid not out of surplus profits but out of higher prices paid by other workers, i.e. by reducing the real wages of their 'comrades.' In a word, the term 'fair wages' has no ascertained meaning, and, if it had, the present 'system' affords no means of ensuring such a payment.
2. While the material capital (plant, raw material, etc.), managerial and technical ability in their various grades are essential co-factors in a business, the owners of the share capital are the sole legal owners of that business, which is operated with a single object of making dividends for them. If a business prospers, the whole measure of its prosperity usually goes in profits to the owners, though the activities of brain and hand of the employees, together with the
