Increased benefit will also be a stimulus to better work.
For a crowded country like ours to maintain a leading position in industry is obviously a necessary condition either of welfare or progress.

It is of first importance to secure work of high quality.

A highly civilised and trained nation must hold its own by the superior quality of the articles produced as well as by being able to supply both its own needs and to compete in prices with others by the quantity of output.

It may be possible, for example, to hold the market for fine spinning when other countries are well able to supply coarse yarns from their own factories.

Hitherto this country has been able to maintain a lead in industry largely through causes which are no longer operative.
Thus, we had (1) a settled Government when Germany and Italy were divided into a number of small and inefficient and often very badly governed States, when France was exhausted and unsettled, and when America was only in its infancy; and (2) the advantage due to the fact that the great discoveries and inventions which advanced industry were mostly made in Britain, when industry was developing at the close of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century.