ht
to suffice for the maintenance of an average family, providing for all
risks. It ought, we think, to cover not only the food and clothing of
wife and children, but the risks of sickness, accident, and
unemployment. It ought to provide for education and lay by for old age.
If it fails we are apt to think that the wage earner is not self
supporting. Now, it is certainly open to doubt whether the actual
addition to wealth made by an unskilled labourer denuded of all
inherited property would equal the cost represented by the sum of these
items. But here our further principle comes into play. He ought not to
be denuded of all inherited property. As a citizen he should have a
certain share in the social inheritance. This share should be his
support in the times of misfortune, of sickness, and of worklessness,
whether due to economic disorganization or to invalidity and old age.
His children's share, again, is the State-provided education. These
shares are charges on the social surplus. It does not, if fiscal
arrangements are what they should be, infringe upon the income of other
individuals, and the man who without further aid than the universally
available share in the social inheritance which is to fall to him as a
citizen pays his way through life is to be justly regarded as
self-supporting.

The central point of Liberal economics, then, is the equation of social
service and reward. This is the principle that every function of social
value requires such remuneration as serves to stimulate and maintain its
effective performance; that every one who performs such a function has
the right, in the strict ethical sense of that term, to such
remuneration and to no more; that the residue of existing wealth should
be at the disposal of the community for social purposes. Further, it is
the right, in the same sense, of every person capable of performing some
useful social function that he should have the opportunity of so doing,
and it is his right that the remuneration that he receives for it should
be his property, _i. e._ that it should stand at his free disposal
enabling him to direct his personal concerns according to his own
preferences. These are rights in the sense that they are conditions of
the welfare of its members which a well-ordered State will seek by every
means to fulfil. But it is not suggested that the way of such fulfilment
is plain, or that it could be achieved at a stroke by a revolutionary
change in the ten