—- =” 
f.—ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 177 
Price. And I by no means suppose that all the pleas for particular 
tariffs in order to keep up the workmen’s standard of living have been 
well founded. All that I wish to say, after such a survey of a past period 
as we have been engaged upon, is that economic life has ceased to be as 
simple, if it ever were as simple, as those two great men, Adam Smith and 
Cobden, seemed to think it. It has not been so clear to the last half- 
century as it was to them that human well-being can be achieved by the 
application of one symmetrical cycle of principles. By the whole current 
of its industrial legislation the civilised world has protested against the 
all-sufficiency of cheapness. It has now embarked upon the double task 
of making a Living Wage a first charge upon the community and of giving 
Security a larger place in industrial life. This will be a harder business 
than to abolish old and often outworn restrictions on ‘ natural liberty.’ 
Society has been so sorely disappointed in the hope that, if it sought first 
cheapness, all other needful things, like social peace, would be added to it, 
that it is in the mood to ‘ explore other avenues,’ as the phrase goes— 
avenues as yet imperfectly charted. 
1924 N 
