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.
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