the Board should determine wages, but the Board has necessarily in mind
on the one side the requirements of the worker, and on the other the
economic position of the trade. The workers' representatives naturally
emphasise the one aspect and the employers the other, but the appointed
members and the Board as a whole must take account of both. They must
consider what the trade in general can afford to pay and yet continue to
prosper and to give full 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