employment to the workers.  They must also consider the rate at which the worker can pay his way and live a decent, civilised life.  Mere subsistence is not enough.  It is a cardinal point of economic justice that a well-organised society will enable a man to earn the means of living as a healthy, developed, civilised being by honest and useful service to the community.  I would venture to add that in a perfectly organised society he would not be able—­charitable provision apart—­to make a living by any other method.  There is nothing in these principles to close the avenues to personal initiative or to deny a career to ability and enterprise.  On the contrary, it is a point of justice that such qualities should have their scope, but not to the injury of others.  For this, I suggest with confidence to a Liberal audience, is the condition by which all liberty must be defined.[1]

[Footnote 1:  I may perhaps be allowed to refer to my Elements of Social Justice, Allen & Unwin, 1921, for the fuller elaboration of these principles.]

If we grant that it is the duty of the Boards to aim at a decent minimum—­one which in Mr. Seebohm Rowntree’s phrase would secure the “human needs” of labour—­we have still some very difficult points of principle and of detail to settle.  First and foremost, do we mean the needs of the individual worker or of a family, and if of the latter, how large a family?  It has been generally thought that a man’s wages should suffice for a family on the ground that there ought to be no economic compulsion—­though there should be full legal and social liberty—­for the mother to eke out deficiencies in the father’s payment by going out to work.  It has also been thought that a woman is not ordinarily under a similar obligation to maintain a family, so that her “human needs” would be met by a wage sufficient to maintain herself as an independent individual.

These views have been attacked as involving a differentiation unfair in the first instance to women, but in the second instance to men, because opening a way to undercutting.  The remedy proposed is public provision for children under the industrial age, and for the mother in return for her work in looking after them.  With this subvention, it is conceived, the rates for men or women might be equalised on the basis of a sufficiency for the individual alone.  This would certainly simplify the wages question, but at the cost of a serious financial question.  I do not, myself, think that “human needs” can be fully met without the common provision of certain essentials for children.  One such essential—­education, has been long recognised as too costly to be put upon the wages of the worker.  We may find that we shall have to add to the list if we are to secure to growing children all that the community would desire for them.  On the other hand, the main responsibility for directing its own life should be left to each family, and this carries the consequence, that the adult-man’s wage should be based not on personal but on family requirements.