ours of
busmanship shall count, say, as five of statesmanship."[1236] Equal
wages should logically be followed by equal treatment for all. "An
anti-Socialist will say, 'How will you sail a ship in a Socialist
condition?' How? Why, with a captain and mates and sailing-master and
engineer (if it be a steamer) and A.B.s and stokers, and so on, and so
on. Only there will be no first and second and third class among the
passengers, the sailors and stokers will be as well fed and lodged as
the captain or passengers, and the captain and the stoker will have
the same pay."[1237]

So confused are the minds even of the leading Socialists with regard
to the important question of the remuneration of labour that Mr.
William Morris, one of the founders of British Socialism, in a poem
first recommends individualistic Socialism and pay according to
results:

_For that which the worker winneth shall then be his indeed_,
Nor shall half be reaped for nothing by him that sowed no seed.

Two lines later in the same poem he recommends Communism and equal pay
for all, regardless of the work done:

_Then all Mine and Thine shall be Ours_, and no more
shall any man crave
For riches that serve for nothing but to fetter a
friend for a slave.[1238]

The above extracts show that confusion reigns in the Socialist camp
regarding the settlement of the Wage Question.

Wage-earners are not philanthropists. Highly skilled men will not be
content with wages equal to those of unskilled labour, not even in the
name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. In the absence of a free
demand and supply, which automatically graduates wages in accordance
with the social value of the work done, its attractiveness or
unattractiveness, &c., it cannot scientifically, though it can perhaps
autocratically, be determined how wages should be graduated. When it
comes to the fixing of differential wages in the Socialist State of
the future, quarrels will immediately arise, which will lead to strife
and rebellion, for all workers will use arguments such as the
following ones recently put forward by Mr. Smillie, President of the
Lanarkshire Miners' County Union. In reply to the reproach that
miners, by unduly high wages, increased the cost of coal to the poor,
Mr. Smillie answered: "Miners are being blamed in some quarters for
the high price of coal. Their wages at present range from _6s. 6d._ to
_8s._ per day, or from _30s._ to _2l. 5s._