

S ;" 



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EOOT MATTERS IN SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC PROBLEMS. 



to obtain commodities where he can buy them on the 

 cheapest terms, and to sell them where he can realise the 

 highest price. 



Shoemaker. — It is easy for theorists to write such things. 

 I am unable to understand exactly what you mean by suffer- 

 ing a temporary loss, or what the process may be which you 

 euphoniously term a tendency to smoothe down any temporary 

 inequality. I and my fellow-workmen are now unemployed. 

 Many of us with our families are in great distress. Without 

 instant employment or relief from some source many of us will die 

 of starvation. We have no means, and if we had we do not 

 know where to go to better our miserable condition. Do you 

 mean if many oi us succumb and die from want and misery, 

 thereby thinning our own ranks as competitors for the 

 existing small field of employment still remaining— that this 

 is the smoothing down process to which we are referred for 

 comfort. Good Heavens, surely not this f Remember 

 that we are human beings, not machines ! The machine 

 may _ stand idle for a time and live ; men cannot. 

 Friction in inanimate machinery means dissipation of power 

 in heat. With men friction means distress, misery, and 

 death. Men arc not machines, and loose analogies based 

 upon the laws of physical processes cannot be grimly applied 

 to men fighting for life and exposed to suffering. You say 

 that Government is not bound to protect its own workmen, 

 and that there can be no right having a juster claim than 

 that every individual should have the most absolute freedom 

 in buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest, 

 irrespective of any local claims of sympathy, or national or 

 racial ties of common interest. Such a commercial 

 law, not bond, cannot be consistent with the conditions 

 which necessitate the maintenance, defence, and in- 

 dependence of disconnected individual nationalities. To 

 be logical, it would necessitate the breaking down of all indi- 

 vidual States, all individual race conglomerations, and the 

 fusing of all human elements into one grand State of the world. 

 Until that time arrives there must of necessity be localised 

 interests governed by the same local general conditions which 

 maintain separate nationalities. All the social organisations 

 of the State, such as Railways, Eoads, Bridges, Harbours 

 Post and Telegraph, Schools, Defence and Protection, Poor 

 Laws, etc., can only be logically maintained upon the 

 admitted necessity of some common local national interest, 

 having special concern for the general welfare of the par- 

 ticular nation ; and these special local interests are so inter- 

 twined by so many bonds more precious than mere questions 

 regarding absolute cost of products in money, that it seems 

 absurd to say that the destruction or suffering of any of its 





