ation of the Trust system, primarily a financial operation,[24]
has involved the whole market in a network of interdependent industries.
The sale of the finished product is controlled and restricted by the
vendors of the raw material. Corn is imported by shipbuilders; ships are
built by iron merchants; iron furnaces are controlled by coal owners,
and coal mines are secured by money-lenders.

The system of the tied house, originally an indigenous corruption of the
liquor trade, is being extended to every industry in the land. We can no
longer buy the bread we like, but have to eat whatever by-product least
interferes with the miller's profits.

The consumer's loss of any power of effective demand would not
necessarily be of national importance, if at least there were any
guarantee that the unique commodity offered by the average trust system
were genuine and of good quality. One of the State's most elementary
rights is that of ensuring to its citizens a pure supply of elementary
commodities. Yet Commerce has taken no steps, even in its own
interests, to suppress the horrid arts of adulteration, in which the
motives of the thief usurp the methods of the poisoner, with results
which may be inferred from the meagre chronicles of the analyst.[25]

Education is the life of the State.[26] It is therefore of the gravest
importance that Commerce should in no circumstances whatever be allowed
to interfere with the education of the future citizens. Yet, before the
war, in spite of the legislation of the last fifty years,[27] no less
than a quarter of a million children of school age were exempted from
school attendance for employment in various occupations.[28] Even apart
from such improper exemptions the "School Age" fixed by law in itself
gives quite insufficient protection. The brain of a girl hardly begins
to wake up, or take any natural interest in the acquisition of general
ideas, before she comes to puberty. But all over London girls of
thirteen or fourteen leave school and are sent by their mothers to earn
half a crown a week matching patterns or sewing on sequins.

More generally, the State is entitled to demand from Commerce that it
should co-operate sincerely with the other elements in the State in
pursuing the real objects of civilisation, inspired by an altruistic
regard for the whole of which it is a part, that is by what is really
"enlightened self-interest"; by what Plato has called Temperance[29] and
Mr. H. G.