companies will favour the growth of trusts. In so far as these make for economy, they are clearly useful; but no doubt they will be tempted to use their monopoly to dictate arbitrary prices. When, however, the workers have a majority-power, they can either slay the trusts or draw their teeth. On the other hand, a beneficent or labour-saving trust will not afford any advantage to the less skilful workers, who make up the great army of the poor, and it will reduce prices only by an unimportant fraction. The chief significance of trusts is that they tend to annihilate the individualist employer, who was once considered an indispensable institution, and they may thus dispose obstinate admirers of the older industrial order to welcome a radical change. They are more deadly to the middle-class than to the working-class.
The really vital question is whether the raising of wages and reduction of hours, accompanied by a large amount of secondary legislation to the advantage of the worker, will solve the social problem: which is not the problem of the existence of a few thousand prostitutes, but the problem of the existence of, in every country, several million people who live in privation and squalor, and cannot develop human personalities. On this I offer two or three observations.
Does the price of commodities rise in proportion to the rise of wages? If it does, the securing of a nominally higher wage is clearly a delusion. This seems, however, to be our experience. In England,
