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."