ABSTRACT
In a great number of ways, and for a great variety of reasons, poor people in civilised countries are given help, in the main through some State agency, at the expense of their better-to-do fellow-citizens. A person who, by saving in the past, has become possessed of a competence, is enabled to work for less than one who has not. A millionaire is enabled to work for less even than a relieved pauper. So far from this ability making it probable that he will strike a worse bargain in the higgling of the market, it is likely, in general, to have the opposite effect. It is not the fact that the wife of a man in good work is likely to accept abnormally low wages. On the contrary, the woman who, for this or any other reason, can afford to “stand out,” is, in general, among those who resist such wages most strenuously.
