F.— ECONOMICS. 105 
any given industry should be the financial prosperity of that industry, 
that wages should bear some definite relation to profits and presumably 
to losses, although this fact is seldom emphasised. Profit-sharing may, 
or may not, form a valuable adjunct to the wages system, but no form 
of co-partnership or of the co-operative movement can ever replace the 
wage system, for the simple reason that you cannot keep body and soul 
together on a minus quantity of food; there must always be some 
guaranteed minimum. ‘The essence of the wage system is that the 
employee is assured of his wage whether the business makes a profit or 
a loss, and the fundamental wage on which those of all higher grades 
are based—namely, the wage of the unskilled worker—must be deter- 
mined by the cost of living, not solely by considerations of profit and 
loss. I can see no other. practicable basis for a wage system, and 
even under Guild Socialism or State Socialism this principle must 
_ be operative—however much the pill may be gilded by high-sounding 
phrases. 
Wages, of course, do tend to rise in any industry when trade 
conditions improve, and in that sense profits are shared, but the 
exclusive enjoyment of the improvement does not remain ‘for long. 
If, for example, the tinplate industry is prosperous, the workers 
in that trade are the first to feel the benefits of improved 
conditions. But soon the miner who supplies the coal on which 
the industry depends, the railway worker who transports it, the 
butcher and the baker who feed the tinplate worker, and so on, 
will also require a share. Moreover, the coal-owner and the railway 
company will expect consideration, so that in the end the prosperity 
_ of one industry tends to become generally diffused. And this tendency 
is natural, partly because of the dependence of one trade on another, 
and partly because the wages of one trade or employment tend to bear 
a definite relation to those of other trades. Hence there are strong 
_ forces always at work in the direction of equalisation, both as regards 
wages and profits. Again, labour, in this country, is organised on 
a craft, not an industrial, basis. There are fitters, turners, carpenters, 
joiners, boilermakers, employed i in a number of different industries, 
and their wages are those of their craft; they are not fixed in relation 
_to the industry for which they happen to be working. It is one of the 
cardinal principles of craft unionism that there should be a uniform 
_ wage for all able-bodied members of the same craft. A railway porter 
on the London and North Western Railway, for example, claims the 
same wage as his brother on the Great Central, and the latter would 
_ be outraged at the suggestion that he should accept a lower wage than 
the former merely because the London and North Western Railway 
happens to be more prosperous than the Great Central. 
I think that the importance which the workers themselves attach 
to the maintenance of a definite relation between the wages of different 
“classes of employment has been underrated by those “who advocate 
profit-sharing as a panacea for all our industrial troubles. Mr. Cramp 
put the case very well last year when presenting the demand of the 
railway men for increased wages before the National Wages Board. 
“So far as the workers are concerned,’ he said, ‘ their status is 
1921 K 
