y, the real political economy, are the
questions of the birth-rate and the wheat supply--the relations not
between man and man, or class and class, or sex and sex, but mankind,
living and dying and being born, and the world in which he has to live.
The time is near at hand when the first conditions of national life will
be recognized as they have never been since the dawn of modern
industrialism. The products of men's labour and women's labour will be
appraised and paid for in proportion to their _real_ value, their
strength or availableness for life.

In "Unto This Last" and "Munera Pulveris," Ruskin has laid down, on what
are really unchallengeable biological grounds, the foundations of the
political economy of the future. We are going to have done with the
industries which eat up men. We cannot much longer afford to grow whisky
where we might grow wheat, for there are ever more mouths to be fed, and
wheat is running short. Cheap and dear mean nothing when we get down to
realities. Is a thing vital or is it mortal?--that is the only
question. It may be vital and costless, like air, or mortal and dear,
like alcohol. The question is not how much money can you get from
another man for your product, but how much life can mankind get from
Nature for it. Thus we shall return to a sane appreciation of the
primary importance of agriculture as against manufacture, of food as
against anything else,--for unless one is fed, of what use is anything
else? And as nations gradually begin to discover that the means of life
are the really valuable things, they will go on to learn, what primitive
races, hard-pressed races, races making their way in the world against
heavy odds, have always known--that at all costs the insatiable
destructiveness of Death must be compensated for by Birth. If the means
of life are the real wealth, the life itself is more real still, and
unless we abolish death, the makers and bearers and nourishers of life
are at all times and everywhere the producers, the manufacturers, the
workers of the community above and beyond all others. And these are the
women in their great functions as mothers and foster-mothers, nurses,
teachers.

The economics of the future will be based upon these elemental and
perdurable truths. No writer in his senses will then be guilty of such
immeasurable folly as to place the "natural industries of a human
creature" _in antithesis_ to "the primal physical functions of
maternity." The s