“I think more than that,” I replied.  “It sets women free to compete with men, and beat down men’s wages.”

“Oh, what a puzzle!” she exclaimed, and then:  “Is there any way of helping the poor that wouldn’t be open to the same objection?”

That brought us once more to the subject I had put aside at our last meeting.  She had not forgotten it, and asked again for an explanation.  What did I mean by the competitive wage system?

My purpose in this writing is to tell the story of Sylvia Castleman’s life, to show, not merely what she was, but what she became.  I have to make real to you a process of growth in her soul, and at this moment the important event is her discovery of the class-struggle and her reaction to it.  You may say, perhaps, that you are not interested in the class-struggle, but you cannot alter the fact that you live in an age when millions of people are having the course of their lives changed by the discovery of it.  Here, for instance, is a girl who has been taught to keep her promises, and has promised to love, honour and obey a man; she is to find the task more difficult, because she comes to understand the competitive wage-system while he does not understand it and does not wish to.  If that seems to you strange material out of which to make a domestic drama, I can only tell you that you have missed some of the vital facts of your own time.

I gave her a little lesson in elementary economics.  I showed her how, when a capitalist needed labour, he bought it in the open market, like any other commodity.  He did not think about the human side of it, he paid the market-price, which came to be what the labourer had to have in order to live.  No labourer could get more, because others would take less.

“If that be true,” I continued, “one of the things that follows is the futility of charity.  Whatever you do for the wage-worker on a general scale comes sooner or later out of his wages.  If you take care of his children all day or part of the day, he can work for less; if he doesn’t discover that someone else does, and underbids him and takes his place.  If you feed his children at school, if you bury him free, if you insure his life, or even give him a dinner on Christmas Day, you simply enable his landlord to charge him more, or his employer to pay him less.”

Sylvia sat for a while in thought, and then asked:  “What can be done about such a fact?”

“The first thing to be done is to make sure that you understand it.  Nine-tenths of the people who concern themselves with social questions don’t, and so they waste their time in futilities.  For instance, I read the other day an article by a benevolent old gentleman who believed that the social problem could be solved by teaching the poor to chew their food better, so that they would eat less.  You may laugh at that, but it’s not a bit more absurd than the idea of our men of affairs, that the thing to do is to increase the efficiency of the workers, and so produce more goods.”