SIR,—When people "damn the profit motive without qualification" which seems,
quite rightly, to "Janus" "neither sound sense nor, for the matter of that, sound religion," is it not from a certain confusion of mind? And is not the commonly heard phrase "Production for Use and not for Profit" based on the fallacy of offering false alternatives? The opposite to use is, surely, waste, and the alternative to profit is loss. What is needed in industry and in commerce is production for profitable use and the elimination •of waste and consequent loss. If no profit is made a business collapses, and if the things produced are useless there will be no profit since no one will buy them. Profit must be the first charge on industry in Time. Use must be the ultimate aim in Value.
What, then, do people really mean by the phrase? Though Profit and Use are inseparable in fact, one or the other may be first in men's minds. If a worker thinks chiefly of his wage he will do bad work, or at least only that which will pass muster with the foreman. His wages will be inevitably low, since the wealth he produces is small. In proportion as the mass of men think chiefly of their own gains a nation will be de- cadent. On the other hand, if a man thinks chiefly of the ultimate use of what he is making he will do his best and so will produce more wealth. From this better wages at least can be drawn, even if he does not get his fair share of it, and in proportion as the mass of men do this a people will be prosperous. But the clear issue, and the duties involved, are obscured by the clap-trap phrase.—Yours, &c.,
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