There are three kinds of things only ever bought and sold in this good world of ours. In the preceding chapter we have conned carefully the first kind, material commodities, in their three subdivisions of land-parcels and products of such parcels and products of free land and sea. In the present chapter we come to study the second kind of valuable things, personal services, which we shall also find subdivisible into three classes. We have treated of Commodities first, because their value in its grounds and changes is more easily understood than that of the other two kinds, while in point of time Services might well enough have been considered first, since it is these that manipulate into value the originally rude forms of Nature. The main difference between the two is this: in Commodities the attention is naturally drawn to tangible things offered for sale, such as lands and wheat and fish; while in Services the attention is strongly drawn to persons offering them for sale, such as the common laborer and the skilled artisan and the professional artist. This distinction, though obvious and useful as between commodities and services, is not after all radical; because Economics is a science of Persons from beginning to end; inasmuch as the services precede and are merged in the commodities, and inasmuch as the Desires (personal) of some men for the renderings of other men antedate and underlie all exchanges whatsoever.

Personal Services are technically named Labor in the science of Political Economy. This nomenclature is old and familiar, and will probably always persist on that account, but it is not of itself of the happiest, and it gives birth to some ambiguities and many fallacies. Let us look at these for a moment, before we pass to the definition and discussion of what is commonly called Labor, but what is better described by the term, Personal Services.

Contrast will help us a little here. Commodities can always be measured by some Standard outside of themselves: for example, land-parcels are measured into acres and fractions thereof by a surveyor's compass and chain; metals and cereals are weighed into centners and parts thereof by scales of some sort; and sugar is not only weighed at the custom-house, but tested as to other qualities by the polariscope. Now land, wheat, sugar, and all other commodities, have an existence separate from the standards that measure them, and whether they are bought or not they continue for a time essentially the same. They exist per se. They were indeed brought into existence on purpose to be sold, and if they cannot be sold, similar things additional will not then and there be brought into the market, but these things themselves are there separate from the seller and separate from the buyer. Not so with personal services. They do not exist per se. They are not separate from the seller, and they cannot come into existence without a buyer. Skill is something the artisan cannot part with, nor can he sell the service to which the skill gives rise till the buyer be present with the return-service in his hands. The Laborer of any class cannot put his "service" on exhibition, and then wait for a buyer, as the commercial drummer sells goods by sample. The doctor, for example, must have his patient before he can show his skill. The buying and selling of personal services, accordingly, is more intimate and ultimate than the buying and selling of commodities: it brings people more closely together: it depends much more on traits of character and on acquired skill.

Right here we may see clearly the main objection to the term, "Labor," as commonly used, and the bad fallacy to which it gives birth. "Labor" is indeed in form and origin an abstract term as much as "service" is, with this difference, that the word "service" radically implies the person serving and another person served at the same instant; but the term "Labor" has long been taking on itself in the mouths of men a concrete meaning, as if it might be something separate from the laborers, as in the common phrase "Labor and Capital," which has already done a world of mischief and is likely to do a good deal more, because it seems to imply, that the two are alike in independent self-existence, and that they stand over against each other on equal terms for a fair bargain or for a free fight. This is not the case, as we shall see more fully later; since capital is something separable from the capitalist, always a commodity or a claim, always transferable, always valuable or else it will not be "Capital." Some of the German economists, and particularly John Conrad of Halle, have avoided this difficulty by a clean nomenclature. They say "Labor-givers" and "Labor-takers," instead of Laborers and Capitalists, and especially instead of "Labor and Capital," thus emphasizing the personal element in both terms, and also leaving themselves free to define and use the term "Capital" as distinct from any particular capitalist, while the term "Labor" cannot be defined and used as distinct from any given laborer. This precise point, though probably new, is of very considerable consequence in the true doctrine of Wages.

We are compelled by the exigencies of the English language and the still stronger fetters of economical custom to continue to use the terms "Labor" and "Laborers" in their technical sense, and in connection with the scientific terms "Capital" and "Capitalist"; but we shall always use each of these words in the same meaning, and free them as far as possible from the fungous accretions that have fastened upon them in the course of time.

Personal effort of any kind put forth for another in view of a return-service and for the sake of it is labor.

Laborers are persons rendering their peculiar services to other persons for a commercial reward.

The valuable received by a laborer for his service rendered is Wages.

These definitions exclude from our circle of view all Efforts of anybody put forth for other than commercial reasons; and they include all Efforts of everybody, from the President to the scrub, put forth under the inducement of a return-service or Wages. No good end seems to be reached by trying to distinguish, as Francis Walker does in his "Wages-Question," between the "Wages-class" and the "Salary-class," because there appears to be no scientific or other economical difference between Wages and Salary. Each is a return-service for another service rendered, and that is all there is to it. The whole class of Laborers, accordingly, in any civilized and progressive country, is immensely large and becoming constantly larger. Excluding, of course, from this class all persons in so far as they render so-called moral services to others, which are in their very nature free, such as those that spring from duty and courtesy and benevolence, and these happily are also an immense and fast-augmenting class, though our Science has nothing to do with them directly, the number of those persons in every community and in every rank of every community, who sell personal services of some sort in distinction from commodities and credits, is pretty nearly as large as the per capita population of adults and competents within that circuit. It must be borne in mind, that the same persons whose primary business it may be to sell commodities or credits, often sell services also in some subordinate or incidental way; and also, that the same persons, who are dispensing on the one hand their gifts and moral renderings freely, are frequently of the busiest in selling on the other hand their personal services for pay. In other words, the sellers of Services cannot be discriminated as to their persons from other sellers, or even from downright givers; but the action itself, and the law of it, is quite distinct in the three cases of selling, and utterly diverse in the one case of giving.

Now, can we sub-classify within this vast class of service-sellers, so as to help us understand better the class as a whole, and so especially as to help us understand better the Law of Wages within the entire class? We have just criticised Walker in a friendly spirit for attempting to draw lines of demarcation within this wide field: can we draw any useful ones ourselves less open to criticism than his, and such as rest back upon fair differences in nature and form? Walker makes his distinctions turn on certain peculiarities in the return-services: can we make ours turn better and clearer on certain peculiarities in the services themselves? We can at least try. Hard and fast lines cannot be drawn here, we admit. The exterior lines around Commodities and around Services and around Credits are each sharp and firm; and so is the deep-fixed circle that includes all three of these alike as Valuables; but within the smaller circles the lines of needful division are somewhat more shadowy, though we leave with confidence to competent Economists the triple lines but just now drawn within the sphere of material Commodities.

A rude classification among "Laborers," then, yet one useful and indeed indispensable, may be made into (1) Common Laborers, (2) Skilled Laborers, and (3) Professional Laborers.

Common Laborers are those, whose services may be acceptably rendered by an ordinarily competent person after a little patient practice and instruction, without anything corresponding to an apprenticeship as a preliminary to their selling their service. Farm hands, teamsters, porters, waiters, miners, 'longshoremen, railroad laborers, and many more belong to this first class. Owing to the ease with which this class can be recruited at any time from growing boys and emigrating foreigners and from those who may have essayed the class above and fallen back, the Supply here is kept constantly large relatively to the Demand for such services, and consequently Wages are always the lowest and steadiest in this lowest class of Laborers.

Skilled Laborers are those, who have had to pass through something equivalent to an apprenticeship in order to be able to offer their services for sale. These, as a class, present some considerable points of difference from common laborers. Their numbers are fewer, for the reason, that relatively few parents can afford to give their children the time and money needful for them to learn a trade, or to become skilful in any art requiring prolonged education; as a result of this lessened press of competition among themselves, and because being intelligent and consequently mobile they are able to insist better on their claims and distribute themselves to points where their services are in more demand; and because they are likely to be subject to a stronger Demand than common laborers, on account of the close connection of their services with special accumulations of Capital; the Wages of skilled laborers will infallibly rule higher than those of common laborers. Artisans in general constitute this second class of laborers.

Professional Laborers are those, who have received a technical education,—something more than an apprenticeship,—expressly to fit them to render difficult and delicate services to their fellow-men for pay, and who possess besides the requisite character and talents and genius to enable them to succeed. Clergymen, physicians, lawyers, literary men, artists, actors, and many more, render professional services loosely so-called. The obstacles at the entrance of this path occasioned by the lack (1) of appropriate natural gifts, or (2) of the requisite industry and character, or (3) of the means of suitable education and training, practically exclude so many persons, that the competition in the higher walks of professional life is not such as to prevent a very large remuneration for services rendered. The demand for these is often peculiarly intense, as well as the supply peculiarly limited. When great interests of property, of reputation, of life, are at stake, it is felt that the best men to secure these must be had at almost any price. Fees and rewards for services of great delicacy, of great difficulty, of great danger, are paid by individuals and corporations and nations without grudging. Comparatively few men reach the highest points of excellence in their respective professions, and they have in consequence a natural monopoly in these fields of effort, and receive for their labor a very high rate of Wages. For example, Daniel Webster often took a fee of $1000 for a single plea in court; Paganini, a like sum for an hour's playing on a violin; and Jenny Lind, at least as much for an evening's singing in a concert, because there was in each case a strong demand for a peculiar service and only one person in the world who could render that service in the circumstances to the same perfection. But the objections which lie with such force against artificial monopolies, cannot be urged at all against a natural monopoly; for, if the road to excellence be open to all, and no artificial obstructions thrown in the way of any, there is no blame but rather praise for him who distances all competitors, and asks and receives for services of peculiar excellence a large remuneration. Exchange rejoices in all diversities of advantage that are the birth of freedom, but reprobates with all her force advantage that is gained by artificial restrictions, because artificial restrictions always infringe on somebody's right to render services for a return; and the right to render services for a return is the fundamental conception in the Right of Property.

Is it open for us, to gain a somewhat deeper and clearer sense of what that is exactly that is rendered in these three classes of personal Services, before we pass to the considerations which determine in all cases their Value? It is plain, that what common Laborers sell for the most part, if not exclusively, is muscular exertion of some kind, guided by the mind as trained in habit, and aided by appropriate implements, all designed to meet the desire and so call forth the return-service of the purchaser; it is equally plain, that skilled Laborers with scarcely any more exceptions than before sell the same sort of physical exertions, or motions, this time guided by mental action of a higher grade and wider scope, and aided also by more elaborate tools working towards the desires and consequent returns of a set of buyers more scrupulous and exacting than the first set; and it is plain enough, that some of the highest professional services, for instance the surgeon's, though not by any means the mass of such services, are essentially of the same kind as the two former, namely, muscular motions, guided by the most intimate and exact knowledge of things, and aided too by instruments the most scientific and expensive. In many of the professional services the physical element sinks to a minimum, while the intellectual and moral factors come to the front and take up the chief attention; it will be found, however, that the physical factor is always present in some degree, as, for example, in the counsel's plea before the court, and in the physician's visit on his patient; and in almost all cases, if not in all, some implement or other plays its part in the process of professional service before it ends, as Cicero used a pitch-pipe or tuning-fork to gauge his voice in his great pleas for Roman clients.

Precisely what is rendered, then, in all cases of Personal Services in each of their three loose kinds, is muscular motion conjoined with mental effort and both these assisted by habit and by some form of what we call Capital. The Services are therefore Personal in the highest sense. The Mind and Body of the Laborer conspire to render them. The most sagacious animal can never be trained to render one of them. They are wholly human. Nevertheless the muscular part in the rendering—motion and resistance to motion—is just what tools and machinery can be made to take the place of in large measure but never in whole measure, because tools may not be taught to think. It may seem sometimes as if machinery were about to take the place of human hands in some classes of Production; but it will be found in the ultimate issue, as it has been found in every stage of the process, that human hands and human minds in action are absolutely essential at every point of the Exchanges among men. Men are so made and Society is so organized, that they need increasingly for their comfort and progress the personal services of their fellow-men, and can render their own in exchange for these; and consequently, there never can fail (under freedom) a Market for Personal Services of the three kinds.

Having now seen as closely as possible what that is which is rendered in personal services, let us pass to the principles which determine their remuneration. That is, we will now inquire carefully into the Value of personal services. We have learned already, that Demand and Supply in their action and reaction upon each other determine in all cases the value of Commodities for the time being; and we shall find it to be equally the dictate of all reason, and the outcome of all experience, that Demand and Supply decide too in all cases on the value of all Services and all Credits then and there. Shall we look first at the considerations that issue in the Demand for personal services, and then at those other considerations that limit the Supply of them?

1. Demand is never the mere desire for anything, but desire coupled with the ability to pay for it at rates satisfactory to the present holder. The Demand for Services, therefore, is made by the prospective purchasers of them; and the purchasers, of course, are those who desire them and are willing to pay for them at current rates. It will be easiest and surest for us to study the Demand for Services in each of the three classes of them in succession.

(1) The Demand for Common Laborers has several points of difference from that for Skilled, and from that for Professional, Laborers. It is scarcely ever intense. It is mostly disconnected from large accumulations of Capital. The desire is usually for immediate gratification, without any other end in view. It is frequently for such a service, as, if a renderer may not be conveniently and cheaply found, one is inclined to do for himself. For instances: if the barber be not accessible and reasonable and tolerably skilful, a man will certainly shave himself, provided he have not yet attained the independence and the luxury of wearing a full beard; and the ordinary housewife, if the cleanly and tractable domestic does not come into sight, will do her own work with casual assistance. It is this important fact, that common services among men and women in common life may in many cases be dispensed with altogether, and in many other cases substitutes be found for them, in connection with the other important fact, that common laborers learn their art quickly and easily, and consequently are present everywhere in large numbers, that makes the Wages of such laborers uniformly low. The Demand is moderate and the Supply is large.

(2) The Demand for Skilled Laborers is steadier and stronger than for Common, because in general the desire for these is not for immediate gratification, but for an ultimate satisfaction to arise from the commercial coÖperation of these laborers with their employers, who are capitalists, in connection with accumulations of capital, the end in view being the production of commodities for sale at a profit. Here comes in a new motive on the part of capitalists to buy the personal services of laborers. The motive is simple and intelligible and commendable, but its nature and operation is popularly and grossly misapprehended.

Capital is the result of Abstinence from the present use of a Valuable in gratification, for the sake of a future increase of it through Production. But Abstinence is always irksome in itself. It must have its prospective reward in an increase, a profit, or it will never transform itself from a mere valuable into a capitalized product. Now, the owner of the valuable, having transformed it into capital from this motive, is under a commercial necessity to hire laborers, in order by their help to make his capital yield a profit. Capital lying idle decreases in value even, to say nothing of its yielding no increase to itself; and the motive of the capital-owner, accordingly, is strong and constant to buy the services of laborers, to marry these services with his own capitalized products, and thus to produce commodities for sale, whose value shall be greater than the present value of the capital and the services combined. Here we reach in the minds and motives of a large class of men an ultimate Demand for laborers, and specially for skilled laborers, which is as true and constant to its legitimate end of Profit as the needle is true and constant to the pole.

At this point it is very evident, that, if the fair expectation of the capitalists be realized in a steady profit, and the larger the circle of capitalists and the more of capitalized products to each the better for all concerned, the Demand for laborers will become steady, and will be likely to steadily increase, because there will then be a constant motive on the part of all capitalists as such to put back a part or all of their yearly profits into capitalized products, and thus the Demand for laborers will become more intense, and the rates of Wages so far forth must be enhanced. The steady Demand for the services of the laborers hinges upon the steady Profits of the capitalists, and there is no antagonism between the interests of these two classes of buyers and sellers, but rather a complete identity of interest between them.

We are looking now solely at what constitutes the Demand for laborers of the second class. As always, so here, there is Desire first and then a ready Return-service. The Desire of employers of this class is for a Profit on their capital, and the return-service for the laborers is present as a part of these capitalized products. This part of the capital we call Wages-Portion. It is already in hand or provided to be in hand when the wages fall due. Of course it is expected, that the current wages will ultimately come out of the current joint-production of the laborers upon the capitalized products set apart for that purpose by the capitalist. But if the profits fail to the capitalists at the end of that industrial-cycle, whether it be two months or twenty-four, then Desire will fail or be weakened to hire laborers for the next cycle, and the return-services or Wages-Portion with which to pay them for another cycle will be lessened of necessity. Both elements in Demand are curtailed by the falling-off of Profits. There is at the same instant less desire to buy services and less ability to pay for them. It is of the very nature of capitalized products to wear out in the process of production; if there be not net profits at the end of the cycle for the capitalists, it shall go hard but there will be less wages for the laborers during the next cycle. This is not a matter of sentiment or of philanthropy, but of eternal law, which God has ordained and the devices of men cannot frustrate. Capitalists and laborers are joint partners in the same concern. Under industrial and commercial freedom their interests are identical. Both are buyers and sellers to each other at the same instant; and, as always when both parties are alike benefited and satisfied with a trade, both will cheerfully and profitably continue the connection. The Demand of each class for the product of the other will continue unabated. Profits and wages reciprocally beget each other.

But still it is not altogether true, what has sometimes been stated by economists, that capitalists are under the same sort of pressure to buy their services as the laborers are to sell them. Capital is a Valuable already created by the mutual desires and efforts of two persons, and is now the exclusive property of one of them, and has also been set apart by him through an act of will to be thereafter an aid to some future production under the motive of a new value to accrue thereby. The capital has now become secondary to and separated from the person who owns it. He very seldom understands the real nature and operation of it. He commonly imparts to it in his imagination a more substantive and persistent existence than it actually possesses. He is frequently more or less stuck up as towards his neighbors and employees in consequence of his possession of it. The very fact that he has capitalized it for future operations shows that he is independent of it as a means of present livelihood. The personal services of the laborers, on the other hand, stand in very different relations to them. Their personal services may indeed be valuable, but they cannot be capitalized. As laborers they have nothing else to sell. Unless they sell their services now, these have no existence even, still less can they have any value. It is only by a mischievous figure of speech, that the skill of laborers is sometimes spoken of as their "Capital." Therefore, the laborers are under a certain remote yet inherent disadvantage as sellers of their personal services, when compared with the capitalists as buyers of them. This disadvantage, however, though apparent in the nature of things, and under certain circumstances disastrous to the laborers, may disappear practically under another and natural state of things; and it is every way to be desired by both classes alike that it should disappear in practice.

Whenever there is a broad and constant and profitable market for all the commodities the capitalists and the laborers can jointly produce,—that is to say, whenever profits are steady and remunerative and wages are high and growing in their purchasing-power,—the Demand for skilled laborers must always be such as puts the laborers on a footing of equality as over against the capitalists, because under such circumstances the purchasers of services are many and eager, two bosses will be likely to be bidding for one skilled laborer, and then wages are always growing in dollars and each dollar growing in effective purchasing-power.

It is of the last importance in this connection to notice, that everything in Profits and Wages turns in the last resort upon the breadth and freedom of Markets. It is out of the return-service received from the sale of the commodities produced jointly by the capitalists and laborers, that both wages and profits must ultimately be paid. There is no other possible source of them. When the Market fails, everything fails that leads up to a market. Particularly fails the Demand for laborers for the next industrial cycle, and of course drops also the prospective wages for that cycle. The public folly and universal loss of shutting off foreign markets for our own commodities by lofty tariff-barriers, as has been conspicuously done by the United States for thirty years past, follows of course from this radical truth; and the Wages of laborers, instead of being lifted by tariff-taxes, as has been so often falsely and wickedly asserted, are inevitably depressed by them, because they effectually forbid to capitalists and laborers their best and freely chosen markets for the sale of their joint products.

Another vastly important matter, constantly affecting the Demand for laborers of the second class, is the Competency or otherwise of the practical managers of the Capital invested in industrial enterprises. Capital cannot manage itself. It is of itself wholly inert. It is always either a Commodity or a Credit. Conscious of their inability to handle wisely their own bits of Capital, or else taught it through a bitter experience, by far the larger number of individual owners of it loan it to others to manage; they invest it in some industrial corporation, in a bank or a mill or a railroad. Some one person, or at least a small body of persons, must practically manage now all specific accumulations of capital. It is they in their capacity of manipulating-capitalists, who constitute in large measure the Demand for laborers. But such managers, who are at once skilful and long-headed and honest, do not grow upon a chance bush. They are rare. Most of them in this country at least have been those, who started in a small way in the control of their own earned or small-inherited properties, and rose through practice and knowledge and conscience to the ability to handle profitably to all concerned large masses of Capital. In the hands of such men, given a tolerable chance by public law and private circumstances, both Profits and Wages are sure to come in satisfactorily. They are Captains of Industry. They are an honor to human nature. They are a blessing to the whole community. They have no need and no will to ask to be bolstered up in their business by unjust taxes enforced upon a whole people.

Such men sometimes have sons or protÉgÉs, who possess similar capacities and similar integrity, and these by experience become able to carry on the business to similar successful issues. This is happy, but it is unusual. More commonly, in the second, and pretty certainly in the third, generation, the line of royal succession fails. There comes in a lieutenant rather than a captain of Industry. Likely enough he mistakes the nature of capital, and thinks that it will go along of itself without that eternal vigilance that is the one price of its maintenance and increase; likely enough he lacks the touch and rule of men, and his laborers become demoralized and refractory; more likely still he thinks he sees other operators around him getting quicker rich by speculating in enterprises outside the legitimate business, and takes some of his own and of what is not his own and throws it out of its proper channels; and, as the result of one or all of these, things soon go wrong, profits and wages fall off, poor work is done and finds slow sale, and Demand for laborers (which is their life-blood) slackens or goes out in that establishment. No wonder the Paper-makers in their annual gathering at Saratoga of 1889, resolved as the main outcome of their meeting, that they would bring up their sons (or somebody's sons) to succeed them in their business by a thorough practical training in the paper-mill itself, beginning early and continuing long. Industrial higher education in this or some other form is the secondary hope of manufacturing business in the United States, the primary hope being in a decent commercial liberty to buy their supplies and to sell their products in the best markets wherever these are to be found.

There is one other important item that bears directly upon the Demand for laborers of the second class, and consequently upon their Wages, namely, the constant introduction of more and better Machinery. At first blush it would seem, and it has often been stated so, that the use of machinery takes just so much work from human hands, reduces by so much the Demand for laborers, and tends to lessen by so much their wages. All this is the opposite of the truth; but before we explain why it is the opposite of the truth, let us attend carefully to the truth itself, as stated in 1889 by the highest living authority on these special points, Sir Edwin Chadwick, the octogenarian pioneer in sanitary and economic reforms. Fifty-six years ago Chadwick joined with his colleagues of the English Factory Inspection Board in recommending reduced hours of labor and other improvements which have now become general in England. In a paper recently read before the Political Economy Club, he calls attention to the greatly increased production which follows improved machinery and shortened hours.

He says: "Spinning machines which formerly turned 8000 in a minute, now turn 11,000; and in Lancashire not more than half the hands are now employed to produce the same amount with new machinery as were employed on the machinery of 1833. As an example of the extent of the reduction of hands by these improvements, it may be mentioned that one large family of cotton spinners in Manchester, which 40 years ago employed 11,000 hands, could not now muster one half that number. Yet the mill population has increased, as well as the general population, the hands discharged being absorbed in other employments. At the beginning of the century the cost of spinning a pound of yarn was a shilling. The pound of that same yarn is now spun for a half-penny by hands earning double wages for their increased energetic attention and skill. It is now found, however, that the strain of the increased responsible attention cannot be so long sustained as the slow, semi-automatic pace by the old working of the old mills with the long hours. Hence there is a tendency to a further voluntary reduction of the working hours in the best mills, first to nine hours. In one mill, in which 2000 men are employed a voluntary reduction has been effected to about eight hours with a more equable production; and I have heard of other examples. As showing the cost of working with inferior hands and loose regulations, a recent report from the Manchester Chamber of Commerce states that 20s. worth of bundled yarn may be produced at a cost of from 2d. to 3d. per pound less in Manchester than in Bombay, notwithstanding the hours of working are 80 hours per week, while in Manchester they are only 50. At the present time Lancashire, with its short hours, will meet Germany or any other country, in neutral markets, in the world. In Germany the spinners and weavers still work 13 hours a day as they once did in England; France has only come down to 12 hours; whereas the English rate has long been 10 hours, and may soon be 9 or even 8. And this reduction improves the health of the wage-workers, while the reduced cost of production allows them higher wages; yet Germany with its long hours and high tariff maintains a system of low pay, dear production, high cost of distribution, and limited sales."

The accuracy of these important statements of fact is confirmed on every hand. Committees of British spinners and weavers have repeatedly visited the United States, and then reported to their fellows at home, that wages, all things considered, were equal for spinners and weavers in Great Britain and the United States, and in some cases and respects higher in the former. Many times before his late lamented death, John Bright publicly testified that wages in England during his parliamentary life had risen in general 50%, and in some of the manufacturing lines 100%. A few months before these statements of Chadwick were made, Sir Richard Temple reported to his section of the British Association, "That the average earnings per head in the United Kingdom, taking the whole population without division into classes, is £35, 4s., and exceeds the average of the United States, which is £27, 4s., and of Canada, which is £26, 18s., and of the Continent, which is £18, 1s.; while it falls below that of Australia, which is £43, 4s. per head."

According to this, the average earnings in Great Britain per head of the population are 30% higher than in the United States, and 81% higher than on the Continent of Europe. Truly, Britain is a prosperous and profitable country so far as average earnings of the whole people by the year is concerned. Sir Richard goes on in the same statistical paper to show, that the average annual profit on British Capital is 14%, and that Capital yields about the same rate for the United States.

Now, can we easily give the grounds on which the introduction of more and better machinery, instead of displacing laborers, tends to lift and actually does lift the wages of those concerned, who continue to work with their hands and heads? We will try it.

(a) It takes the hands and heads of laborers to invent and construct and keep in repair the machinery itself, that is often supposed to displace laborers, and so far forth opens a vent for the more profitable employment of some of the laborers, who before performed the cruder and more repetitive and automatic parts of the processes, which parts alone machinery can be made to perform.

(b) Machinery always lessens the cost of a given amount of production, otherwise there would be no motive for its introduction. But, other things being equal, the lessened cost of a commodity broadens the market for its sale. The cheaper a useful commodity is offered, the more the buyers of it the world over. The more and the better the machinery brought in, the more and the cheaper the commodities produced and the broader and better the markets to be supplied; and, therefore, the more and the more skilful the hands needed to tend the machinery and to market the products.

(c) The more commodities thus created by men and machines, and the wider the markets found for them over the earth, the more laborers are required to extract and prepare and transport the raw materials for the now augmenting commodities, and also to ship and distribute the finished products. As Chadwick says, notwithstanding the strictly factory hands have diminished one half in one place, "yet the mill population has increased, as well as the general population, the hands discharged being absorbed in other employments."

(d) These improvements in machinery, and the consequent refinements in the skill of the laborers, cheapen also of course the commodities consumed by the laborers themselves, and therefore a given rate of wages, to say nothing of a rate sure to enlarge under these circumstances, now secures for the laborers a higher grade of comforts.

More and better and more durable machinery, consequently, so far forth, tends at once to enhance the rate of laborers' wages and increase the purchasing power of the unit in which wages are paid.

To return now to the main line of discussion under the present head, we have shown by proof positive that there is nothing either in new machinery introduced, or in higher wages paid in connection with such machinery, or in shortened hours made possible by these two, to lessen the Demand of Capitalists for the personal services of Laborers; because, there is nothing in all these, commercial and industrial freedom being presupposed, to lessen the Profits of the Capitalists, which profits are the sole motive actuating them as such. That high wages and short hours are rather an advantage to Profits in connection with skilled laborers and fine machinery, than a disadvantage when compared with long hours and low pay and poor implements, is clearly shown by Chadwick in the passage quoted comparing England with English Bombay, where the working hours are 60% more and the wages greatly less and the cost of the machinery very little; "twenty shillings' worth of bundled yarn may be produced at a cost of from 2d. to 3d. less in Manchester than in Bombay"; call it 2½d. less; that is, it costs the Bombay spinner more than 1% per pound of yarn more to spin it than it costs the Manchester spinner! For truth and decency's sake, then, let us have done with the gabble in this country about the advantages of "pauper labor" over skilled, of low wages over high, of cheap machinery over dear!

The penetrating reader will perceive, that the root of this whole matter lies in the breadth and quickness of the Markets, in which the commodities produced by the laborers and capitalists may be sold against other commodities, and against Services and Credits; if the markets of the world are free to all to buy in and to sell in, which seemingly two things are precisely one and the same thing, then the Demand of Capitalists for the services of laborers to create and market salable commodities wherever these may be wanted, can apparently never slacken on the whole; because, the desires of men which the efforts of other men may satisfy commercially, are indefinite in number and unlimited in degree; and, therefore, the Wages of the skilled laborers, the commercial freedom of the nations being presupposed, are likely to be on the whole on a steady rise throughout the world; and the amount and excellence of the machinery on a similar rise, since Capitalists can always under these circumstances see their Profits looming up ahead of them,—the profits of an endlessly diversified and marketable Production.

The chief reason at any rate, and almost the only reason in common sight, why little England has surpassed in commercial prosperity of every sort every other nation on the globe during the past forty years, as evidenced by these statistics of Sir Richard Temple and other abounding proofs on sea and land, is in the fact, that her statesmen of the last generation came to perceive clearly, and then helped the people to see, that a market for products is products in market; that her traditional tariff-barriers to keep foreign goods out kept in equally domestic goods that wanted to get out for a profit, and so down went the tariff-barriers little by little, accursed alike by God and Englishmen, never to be set up again around the shores of the land of Cobden and Bright and Elliott; and to-day we read, that the average annual Earnings per head of the entire population of the United Kingdom, men and women and children, English and Irish and Scotch, are $176, while the annual average Profits of Capital within the three kingdoms is 14%.

(3) In the last place here, we must now look at the Demand for the personal services of Professional laborers. These are persons, who have done something more with reference to their life-work than serve an apprenticeship to a trade, or acquire some mechanical skill in connection with some kind of machinery. An Education rather than an Apprenticeship is implied in Professional laborers. Knowledge of the bodies and of the minds of men; acquaintance with some one section at least of the general laws that pervade the universe; some confidence (the more the better) in God, who created and governs the world; are all requisite to a reasonable success on the part of Professional laborers. The Demand for their services, and of course also the Return made to them for such services, will largely depend on such superior knowledge and confidence acquired by such persons, and involved in their services. Clergymen, physicians, lawyers, statesmen, literators, actors, teachers, and scientific experts, may serve as our chief examples of Professional laborers.

(a) "All that a man hath will he give for his life." When men fall sick, or those fall sick who are dear to them, they send for the doctor. Scarcely any trait of human nature is more universal than this. And the trait puts honor on human nature, because it implies a relatively high estimate of the worth of life in the mind of the patient, and also a relatively high confidence in a certain class of one's fellow-men. As Society progresses, and as Christianity deepens the sense of the worth of the individual life, and knits a stronger tie of confidence between man and man, a change is slowly coming over the relations between physicians and their patients; people do not wait to fall sick before they send for the doctor, so much as they formerly did; some individuals and families are establishing connections with a medical adviser, who studies their constitutions and habits of life beforehand, guides them in general sanitation, and thus both he and they are better ready for curatives in times of illness. Gladstone has long had such an attendant, with the best of results as he thinks, and strongly commended such action to John Bright, but too late to save the latter from what was thought to be premature death in consequence of imprudent and ill-advised handling of his health. In a few cases in England and the United States an annual salary is paid a physician for general care of the family's health, whether sickness befall or not, instead of the more usual fees on consultation and attendance. Dr. Munn of New York receives such an annual salary from Mr. Jay Gould. But in whatever way medical services are paid for, the Demand for them is constant and intense. The motive to buy them is immediate and personal, not mediate and remote, as in the case of capitalists and laborers of the second class.

It is to be noticed further in respect to physicians, and indeed in respect to all professional laborers much more than in respect to other laborers, that much knowledge has been gained by them for its own sake, out of pure love for it, rather than for the sake of merely selling their services as laborers; while this does not diminish in the least the commercial character of their services, it tends to beget on the part of the buyers of them a stronger confidence in the men who render them, so that the Demand for such services and consequently the pay for them is enhanced by the trust reposed in the laborers on the ground of something acquired by them for other than selling purposes, and which indeed cannot be sold; and superior character also, as well as superior knowledge, which is wholly moral in its basis and not mercantile at all, affects the Demand for the services of the possessor of it to increase it, on the ground of a naturally stronger trust in him as a professional laborer, and at the same time tends to increase his Wages by limiting the circle of those who can offer in competition such services on the background of such superior knowledge and character.

(b) Lawyers do not meet such a universal Demand in the nature of things as do physicians. Said Jonathan Smith of Lanesborough in the Massachusetts Convention of 1788: "We have no lawyer in our town, and we do well enough without." Still, one hundred years after that time there were about 70,000 lawyers in the United States, and Lanesborough itself had had in the meantime at least three distinguished ones. The interests of property and of reputation, and the constitutional rights of individuals as over against the claims of Government, so far as these may be conserved through the agency of lawyers, are by no means so constant and imperative as are the interests of life and health. Yet lawyers are in legitimate request in all civilized countries. A Latin legal maxim announces the obvious truth: It is the interest of the Commonwealth that there should be an end of disputes and litigations. Beyond question courts and counsel are wholesome on the whole for the individual and for the commonwealth. But the extremely complicated and unsatisfactory condition of American Law at present, owing to the fact that we have a none too simple United States Law with its three grades of courts and judges, and considerably divergent bodies of Law in each of 42 States, and owing also to the fact that our law in general is drawn almost at random from two pretty distinct Sources, the Common Law of England and the Civil Law of Rome, multiplies the number of lawyers relatively to the population out of all proportion to such ratio in other countries, and tends to make the lawyers as a class too conservative of old and drawn-out processes to the extent of opposing obvious betterments and simplifications. Said David Dudley Field, President of the American Bar Association, in August, 1889, at Chicago: "So far as I am aware, there is no other country calling itself civilized where it takes so long to punish a criminal, and so many years to get a final decision between man and man. Truly we may say, that Justice passes through the land on leaden sandals. One of our most trustworthy journalists asserts that more murderers are hung by mobs every year than are executed in course of law. And yet we have, it is computed, nearly 70,000 lawyers in the country. The proportion of the legal element is, in France, 1:4762; in Germany, 1:6423; in the United States, 1:909. Now turn from the performers to the performance. It appears that the average length of a lawsuit varies very much in the different States; the greatest being about 6 years, and the least 1½. Very few States finish a litigation in this shorter period. Taking all these figures together, is it any wonder that a cynic should say that we American lawyers talk more and speed less than any other equal number of men known to history?"

Mr. Field then repeated his well-known argument for Codification, ascribing the law's delays to the chaotic condition of the law, and maintaining that it is the first duty of a government to bring the laws to the knowledge of the People. "You must, of course, be true to your clients and the courts, but you must also give speedy justice to your fellow-citizens, more speedy than you have yet given, and you must give them a chance to know their laws."

Owing to the immense difficulties in the way of any one person mastering the various branches of the law in this country, it is falling more and more into specialties, and lawyers are devoting themselves to some one of its many branches, the main division line being between "Law" and "Equity" technically so-called; and whenever one becomes eminent along any line, his compensation is apt to be very large owing at once to a large Demand and to a small Supply at that point, while the average compensation of the lawyers as a whole class is meagre enough, because there are too many of them, and the people have become very suspicious of the law's meshes and delays.

(c) The grounds for the unabating Demand in Christian countries for religious teachers and preachers, let us rather say, for spiritual guides, lie deep down in the nature of man. If there be one proposition about men more incontestable than another, it may be this, that men are made in the image of God, and that there is among men in general an irrepressible striving to maintain and deepen this image. The touch between man and man and between man and God is such at this point, that men can help each other in this striving, and that they feel that they can help each other. This is the chief reason why some men are constantly consecrating themselves to the Christian ministry, and other men as constantly soliciting these to become their pastors and teachers. Those more enlightened in divine things and more spiritually minded offer themselves, as it were, not commercially but morally, to the unenlightened and less advanced as guides and helpers. It is, as it was with Wolfe and his men at the Heights of Abraham: those who got first to the top tarried a little to help those up who came after. And the most striking thing about it is, that the masses of men at bottom are as desirous to be uplifted as the choicer spirits among them are desirous to help the work forward. Ministers are still, and always will be (human nature is unchangeable), eagerly called; chapels and churches and cathedrals are still going up all over the earth; worship and petition and aspiration are ever ascending on the great world's altar stairs towards heaven, guided and inflamed by the chosen and choosing men of God,—"when priests on grand cathedral altars praise!"[5]

It is a monstrous perversion of language to maintain, that a clergyman in rendering such services as these is selling his religion. It is true, that he is selling under Demand services to the appropriate rendering of which his own personal piety contributes one large element, and thorough confidence in him on the part of his people as a good and earnest man contributes another large element; but the piety and the spiritual power and the worthy example are not nourished for the sake of selling the services, but for their own sake in personal worth and worthiness, and these things must not be confounded with the services that are sold. Accordingly, while the clergyman's vocation is sacred, and belongs to the sphere of religion, his salary belongs to the sphere of exchange, and its determination, in harmony of course with the higher impulses, is a business transaction. This distinction ought to be better understood than it is; and both clergymen and people need to be reminded that the spiritual things belong to one sphere, and the temporal things to another. The amount of a minister's salary, and the time and mode of its payment, are matters of pure business; and the minister himself is to be blamed if he does not attend to them, and insist on them, on business principles.

In the professions generally, and particularly in the ministerial profession, while, if we confine our attention to those persons who both have the requisite gifts of Nature and have been also thoroughly trained, we shall find a high rate of compensation on the two grounds of a strong Demand and a limited Supply, we must bear in mind too the counter-working influences which tend to increase the competition and thus decrease the compensation, namely, the respectability which attends them, the desire of knowledge for its own sake which is gained in connection with them, the instruction wholly or in part gratuitously offered to those in course of preparation for them, and the desire to do good without regard to pecuniary reward which actuates many who enter upon them.

(d) Physicians and lawyers and clergymen serve primarily individuals, or at most relatively small groups of individuals, and of course look for their pay to those whom they have served. It is different with Statesmen, the fourth class of professional laborers that we need to look at in an economic view. Statesmen worthy of the name serve at least a whole nation, and to the nation as such must they turn for their pecuniary rewards. And such men have never turned in vain to those whom they have benefited as a whole. Bismarck is the best modern instance of a Statesman, who has received from a grateful country immense money-measured remunerations for immense political services rendered. The Demand for the services of Statesmen rests in the deep consciousness of men organized politically into a Nation, that they need, especially in trying times, a Man of the highest natural gifts, and of the broadest attainments and of the loftiest political integrity to plan and act for them in emergencies, as they are conscious that they cannot plan and act for themselves organically. This does not mean, that the one ever knows essentials better than the many: he does not. This does not mean, that the true objective of a nation's march is ever discerned more clearly, or rather felt after more eagerly, by one man than by the many men concerned: it is not. Still less does it mean "a man on horseback." But it does mean this: a Nation (as the very name implies) is made up of the thoughts and hopes and throbbings and dim forecastings and half-formed purposes of multitudes constituting a unit (born together for one destiny on earth); and the true Statesman is one of themselves, sharing with them at once the traditions of the past and the perspectives of the future; one, with the instinct and the intellect to gather up and embody the general feeling and the general will; one, who has gained in some way the confidence of the masses who are willing for the time being to entrust to him the guidance of their affairs, and to empower him to plan and act for them as their champion and deliverer; and one, who (because he is one) can better seize the propitious moments for declaration and negotiation and public action, yet who never forgets that he is nothing but an agent for others, and is as ready to lay down responsibility at the public will as to assume it at the public will.

Washington was such a statesman, and Lincoln. Even Bismarck, under monarchical and later imperial environment, disclaims anything substantive and original in his own action: he did what he could not help doing: he followed the instincts of Prussia, and his own; and became the means of fulfilling as they gradually ripened the longings of the other German people for unity and order. Such a statesman was Chatham in England, and Cavour in Italy. Now, such services as these, done for a whole people, always deserve and usually receive, though not expressly bargained for beforehand, yet implied in the public devotion of one party and the general consensus of the other, extraordinary honors and emoluments. This is right, even on purely Economic principles. The services of great statesmen to their country in great epochs and emergencies are at once a gift and a sale, they are both patriotic and economic, there is equally a national Demand for them and a grateful recognition of them, the Supply is always exceedingly rare and the reward often exceedingly great; and it is to be put down to the lasting credit of the science of Economics, that its peculiar motives and results may mingle in and harmonize with the motives and results of the higher moral impulses, such as those of Patriotism and Religion, as in the cases of the Soldier and Statesman and Clergyman. There was no rational ground for the hesitation of Garibaldi to receive from the Parliament of Italy in 1875 an annual pension of 50,000 lire.

(e) There is a single class more of Professional laborers, loosely so-named, which should be noted before we dismiss the subject of Demand for laborers to pass to consider the Supply of them, namely, Literators and Artists and Actors of the highest rank. Statesmen primarily serve the individual nation that selects and rewards them, though their influence may indirectly uplift other nations also; but the great Writers and Painters and Actors, whatever may be their local habitation and name at first, soon come to belong to the world at large and to derive their revenue from many lands, because the highest Art is cosmopolitan in its own nature, and the best characterization of men as such cannot but be the property of Mankind. Shakspeare is no longer English, nor Angelo Italian, nor Mozart German, nor even Bernhardt French. Deep as are the scars and the sea that separate nation from nation, there is something deeper still in the innate recognition by man of man as depicted by the great Masters in immortal lines. There is, accordingly, a sort of Demand in the inmost soul of Humanity as such for these living and lofty touches and delineations of itself, whencesoever they may come. There is not indeed nor can there be, as in most other cases of sale, a bargain made beforehand between these preordained sellers of the rarest services and their silent yet waiting purchasers, yet there is after all an antecedent and an assured understanding between them. They are in touch even across the sea. The master strikes his chord, and the audience, fit, though few and scattered, listens and applauds and makes return.

Is the principle of "International Copyright," so-called, correct? Let us look narrowly before we pronounce. At present this good country of ours makes itself a mocking and a by-word even to its own intelligent and art-loving citizens by putting a tariff-tax of 30% on paintings and statuary by foreign artists, not at all to get revenue thereby, but to "protect" domestic artists in their inferior work by artificially lifting the price of their wares. So far is carried this jealousy of foreign works of art, that when the artists generously loan them for exhibition on our national occasions, they are put under bonds not to sell them on this side without previously paying the tariff-tax, which is graciously intermitted during the Exposition. This is Restriction. This is Protectionism pure and simple. This is legally excluding the Better in order to give a forced currency to the Worse. Now, domestic Copyright restricts the sale of any book to one publisher in his interest and in that of the author. The book now in the reader's hand is thus copyrighted. This legal arrangement between authors and publishers and their public may be perhaps logically defended, it may even be for the public weal on the whole, though in many cases it doubtless raises the price of good books, which would have been published without any such artificial encouragement. The copyright, however, like all patent-rights also, soon expires by limitation of time, and the public thereafter have the unrestricted use of what is really their own.

For what is sometimes called "literary property" is not property in the strict sense of the word. A book is not like a plough or a house. Its contents even when most original have been but colored, as it were, and rearranged and reinforced by the author's individual mind. Its substance always comes out of the common stock. It cannot be the author's own, as the bushel of wheat is the farmer's, who sowed the seed on his own land and threshed it in his own barn and carried it to market in his own wagon. The rights of the individual and the rights of the Community commingle more or less in private property of every kind, at least to the extent that the latter may tax the property if needful for the common wellbeing, as it is bound also legally to secure it to the owner when threatened by others; it is no part of the purpose of the present book to draw the wavering line in general between the rights of individuals and the rights of their Government as towards them; but the distinction between common property and copyrighted property is plain enough to everybody, and the Law puts emphasis on the distinction by making the one quickly terminable and the other continual. So then, when the Government under which the author resides, has given him a limited copyright within its own jurisdiction, it would seem as if the individual right in the premises had been sufficiently recognized alongside of the undoubted right of the Whole to the ultimate use of the labors of their own citizen.

When, however, it comes to International Copyright, which is an attempt to secure to authors of one country artificial privileges under restriction in selling their wares in all other countries, the argument breaks down. Even for the one country, in which the author lives and is taxable, the argument is not very strong, and hardly binds advanced public opinion either as to the grounds of it or even the practical benefits of it on the whole. By the attempted extension of it to all countries, its reasonableness disappears. Taxation cannot extend beyond the jurisdiction of the country taxing; and it certainly seems as if a legal privilege, beyond common law privileges, ought not by extension through the formal action of other countries to exempt from taxation (in case it were needful) the results of the original privilege. The purpose of International Copyright is not the blessed one as announced to the world by James Smithson, "the increase and diffusion of knowledge among mankind," but directly and artificially by means of legal restrictions the "increase" of the prices of books and of other "knowledge" to the masses of "mankind," and the "diffusion" of these extra prices as between authors and publishers. Protectionism does not seem to be one whit more respectable in this form than in the form of tariff-taxes on foreign works of art.

2. We have already seen in our first chapter the proofs of the proposition, that the Value of anything whatsoever bought and sold is determined by the Demand for it and the Supply of it then and there present. Also we have now seen at considerable length the main phases and grounds of the Demand for each of the three classes of Personal services bought and sold among men. The next topic in order is the Supply of personal services in the various markets. Here it will not be necessary to distinguish particularly the three classes of Services, inasmuch as the circumstances governing the Supply in each are substantially similar.

In Economics generally we have to deal chiefly with Persons, and only subordinately with Things; when we come to the Supply of personal services, answering to the Demand for them on the part of other persons, this point becomes conspicuous; and it is here, if anywhere, within the realm of our science, that we need to devote a word to a singular doctrine, that has been famous for nearly a century under the term of Malthusianism. Thomas Robert Malthus, 1766-1836, was an English clergyman and teacher, a wide traveller and keen observer of men, one who divided his time during a long life between cure and chair and the libraries of the Universities, published in 1798 his "Essay on the Principles of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society"; in this and in subsequent editions enlarged and enriched, he brought out with its proofs the core of his startling pronouncement, that the human race is found to increase in numbers in something like geometrical progression, while the means of subsistence for them on any given area of agriculture can only increase in something like arithmetical proportion; the United States was then doubling its population in 25 years, and he calculated that, at this rate, the inhabitants of any country in five centuries would increase to above a million times their present number, which would give England in that time more than twenty million millions of people, or more than could even get standing-room there; for this natural tendency of the law of human fecundity to outstrip the results of the law of returns from land, he saw no remedy except in checks to population, which he divided into the positive and the preventive, the first of which, such as war and famine and disease, increase the annual number of deaths; and the second of which, such as prudence in contracting marriage and temperance after marriage, diminish the number of births; and Malthus and his followers, among whom the famous Thomas Chalmers was prominent, were at great pains to inculcate upon the laboring classes the duty of later marriages and fewer children, as an indispensable condition of their rise in comforts, and of "the future improvement of Society."

These discussions have attracted great attention almost to the present day, and have been supposed to be very pertinent to the subject of wages, and thus to be an important part of Political Economy; but when one looks more closely, the force of that spring of population which the Creator has coiled up in the nature of man, as contrasted with the weakness of that power by which the earth brings forth sustenance for man, is seen to be a topic in Physiology and not in Political Economy at all. Political Economy presupposes the existence of Persons able and willing to make exchanges with each other, before it even begins its inquiries and generalizations. How they come into existence, the rate of their natural increase, and the ratio of this increase to the increase of food, however interesting as physiological questions, have clearly nothing to do with our Science. Each adult human being is as much constituted by Nature to receive personal services as to render them, in Economics each without exception receives when and because he renders, and all alike are naturally able to become capitalists also; economical laws present no obstacles, that we can see, to all men becoming rich, as we use that term; the town or city in which many people are growing rich simultaneously, is the best place in the world for other people to go to get rich in, and not at all towns in which other people are getting poorer; most men are unwilling, some perhaps may be unable, to fulfil the moral conditions of growing rich; while, we may depend upon it, the famines of the world have been caused more by the indolence and want of foresight of individuals, and especially by the monstrous maladministrations of Governments, than by any law of the increase of population.

Experience too has shown, that the strong impulse in mankind towards procreation is not too strong for the purpose intended by the Creator; that He who is the author of the impulses is author also of natural counterworkings of them; that, as men under moral and religious training come more and more under the influence of reason and affection, the preventive checks to population come silently and effectually into operation; and that, taking the world at large, food and comforts have more than kept pace with the stride of population, since its inhabitants as a whole were plainly never so well fed and clothed and housed as now. The abstract antagonism of the law of the increase of population with the law of the increase of food, or what we prefer to call the law of diminishing returns from Land, may be admitted, if one chooses to insist on it; but any practical tendency of these to come into collision, as the world is and is to be, is confidently denied. When Malthus wrote, and long afterwards, England was under the dominance of Protectionism; the wretched Corn-laws forbidding the importations of foreign grain, in order that the domestic growers might sell to their countrymen at artificial prices, and thus grow the richer as bread became the dearer, were only repealed in 1846; and the demonstrated ability of Great Britain under free trade to draw on the fertility of the whole world for the steadily and increasingly cheap maintenance of her people, demonstrates the irrelevancy of Malthusianism to the Science of Economics.

The Supply of personal services at any time or place in answer to the Demand for them, is affected by several important circumstances, which we shall now proceed to consider in their order.

(a) The agreeableness or disagreeableness of rendering a given set of services will affect the Supply of laborers at that point, and help to determine the rate of Wages paid to them; because the more agreeable employment will attract the larger number of laborers, will experience in consequence the press of competition, and the rate of wages then and there will be lessened thereby. The more disagreeable employment will feel less the pressure of numbers, and will secure, other things being equal, a higher rate of remuneration in consequence. Among the elements which, in spite of diversity of tastes, make any employment agreeable or disagreeable to the laborers, are (1) the less or greater exertion of physical strength required, (2) the healthfulness or unhealthfulness of the service, (3) its cleanliness or dirtiness, (4) the degree of liberty or confinement in it, (5) the safety or hazard of the employment, (6) the esteem or disrepute of it in public opinion. To illustrate each of these in order, the stone-mason, the glass-blower, the scavenger, the factory operative, the worker in a powder-mill, the smuggler, will each receive a larger compensation owing to the peculiar element of disagreeableness involved in his own personal service; and he will be able to demand and secure the higher rate through the action of this disagreeableness upon the Supply of such laborers. Of all these elements, public opinion is perhaps the most operative; and if this be favorable to an employment, and some social consideration be attached to it, and only common qualifications be required for it, the wages in it will infallibly be low. This is doubtless the main reason why so many young women prefer to teach, rather than be employed in mills or shops or offices, and why the wages of female teachers have been so remarkably low; although each of the elements of agreeableness specified above may also contribute something towards the same result. If a business be decidedly opposed to public opinion, it must hold out the inducement of a large reward, or nobody will engage in it. This explains the abnormal gains of the slave-trade, the liquor-business, of gambling-houses, and of lotteries.

(b) The easiness or difficulty of learning to render acceptably a given set of personal services, will have a quick and constant influence on the Supply of these services, and of course also on the rate of the return paid for them. The elements of this Difficulty in general are time, expense, lack of natural gifts, want of foresight on the part of those concerned, and lack of push and persistency on the part of the learner himself. To put a boy apprentice to a trade, for example, requires on the part of the parents a foresight, an ability to get on without his immediate help, and sometimes also an amount of money for his board and clothes which all parents do not possess; many boys too, who must acquire their skill to sell personal services when they are young, if at all, find on trial that they do not like the trade, or have not the requisite gifts, or fail in the appropriate patience and propulsion; and the consequence is, that the Supply of laborers along that particular line is lessened, and the right to demand and the ability to secure a higher rate of wages than is accorded to common laborers accompany the small supply, through the reduction of numbers which these obstacles at the entrance occasion and the consequent weakness of competition. This is one principal ground of the difference in the wages of skilled and unskilled laborers; the other being, as we have seen, the stronger and more constant Demand for the former, owing to the impulse imparted by Capital. All these points of difficulty at the outset apply still more strongly in the case of professional laborers, serving more effectually to thin out the ranks of these, and pushing upward still higher the gauge of compensation for the successful competitors.

(c) The constancy or inconstancy of prospective employment in a given business, is a consideration that affects the Supply within it, and then the wages. If the services be of such a character, that they can only be carried on during nine months of the year, the wages of the renderers will be greater by the day or the month than they would be, provided the services were in order during all the twelve months. The laborer is apt to look at the aggregate earnings of the year, and will hardly take up a trade which affords employment but a part of the time, unless some compensation can be found in the higher wages for that time. This is the chief reason why the wages of the mason and house-painter, in this climate at least, are higher than those of the blacksmith and carpenter. The coachman, also, may stand by his horses half the day or night with no call for his services, and must have, therefore, a proportionably higher fare from those whom he does transport. In general, it is found that men prefer a constant rendering with a lower rate of pay, than an inconstant one with a prospect of larger wages for the particular jobs actually done; and because the many prefer that, those who take up with the other are able to secure a higher relative rate of pay in their less eligible vocation. It must be noticed, however, as counterworking this, that some men have desire for intervals of leisure in their business, and for opportunity to make these intervals subservient to some avocation or other means of livelihood.

(d) The probability of success or the opposite in any line of personal services, is a circumstance that has some influence on the rate of wages paid in it, through the action of this probability on the numbers of those who enter upon it. If ultimate success be doubtful, fewer persons will naturally engage in such a business, and those who dare in it and succeed, will probably reap a very high reward. So, also, those who take jobs by the contract, and therein assume more or less of risk, are commonly paid at a higher rate for their services than those who do similar work by the day. It is true, that this is owing partly to the fact that the contractor usually puts in his own capital more or less, and must therefore be paid profits as well as wages, and also that the wages of superintendence are due to him in addition to ordinary wages; still, there is a residuum of difference, which can only be accounted for by the risk he runs of a successful issue of his contract. The general variation in Supply and wages from this fourth cause, would certainly be greater than it is, were it not for the overweening confidence which men in all generations seem to have in their own good luck. This excess of worldly faith is always seen in the rush which is made for newly discovered mining regions. It was seen to perfection in 1889 in the uncontrollable advance of thousands into, and their almost immediate exit out of, the then just opened territory of Oklahoma. The facility with which lottery tickets are sold even yet in many countries proves the prevalence of this over-confidence. It is demonstrable beforehand on the doctrine of Chances, that no person can rationally buy any lottery ticket at its advertised price, because if that person should buy all the tickets advertised he would certainly lose money, since the sum of the prizes is always less than the sum of the prices. Otherwise the projectors of the lottery would always lose money.

(e) The mobility or immobility of laborers as a class acts powerfully upon the Supply of them at any one time and place, and consequently upon the rates of wages then and there. In some countries, notably in the United States, laborers as a class move from place to place with considerable facility under the action of Demand for personal services. According to the Census of 1870, 7,500,000 of the native population dwelt in other States than those in which they were born. Many of these, doubtless, had left their native region to obtain more fertile land, and many also to obtain more remunerative employment as laborers. The native American, more than most other persons, is not only willing to move from place to place in the hope of bettering his condition, but is also willing to change his occupation from time to time in the same hope. There is more freedom of movement locally, and less fixedness of occupation on the part of laborers and others, in this country than in any other industrial country. Even foreign immigrants here,—factory operatives, miners, and other laborers,—seem to catch after a while the spirit of the country in both these respects. There is one considerable advantage in all this, namely, competition becomes more uniform in all places, an unusual demand for laborers at any one point is easily met, and wages neither rise so high nor fall so low at special points as they otherwise would. But there are considerable disadvantages in all this too, chiefly these, the services of laborers floating locally or changing the kind of their labor can never become so excellent as service more steady in place and time; and, especially, thorough apprenticeships, or whatever may be equivalent to these, are held in too little esteem by public opinion, and are too little requisite in order to obtain transient employment. To meet the obvious pressure of these disadvantages, an admirable device is now being hit on, namely, to introduce into our public schools something in the way of "manual training" for the various trades. Public institutions also, some of them on a great scale, as the Cooper Union in New York and a more recent munificent foundation in Philadelphia, have been established on purpose to train boys and girls both in eye and hand to render skilfully those artisan services of the various kinds which will always be in demand among men, and which have certainly deteriorated among us owing in part to the disuse of the old apprenticeship-system.

In Europe, on the other hand, the laborers as a class are far less mobile than here; and in Asia still less so. There is said to be no country in Europe in which the proportion of foreigners to the native population exceeds three per centum. In England, which is a small country, the difference in Wages between the northern and southern counties is very remarkable. Professor Fawcett is authority for the statement, that an ordinary agricultural laborer in Yorkshire during the winter months earns 13 shillings a week, while a Wiltshire or Dorsetshire laborer doing similar work during the same number of hours earns but 9 shillings. The contrast in general between the Wages of English agricultural laborers and those paid in mills and mines and furnaces is still more striking. And so more or less, in respect to the Value of Commodities: competition is yet by no means perfect in distributing these so as to make their price uniform in the same country or even in the same county; but the immobility of laborers for an obvious reason is much greater than the immobility of goods. While laborers should certainly be free to go wherever their services may be in greater Demand, the natural reluctance of most men to leave their native haunts, enables each of the nations to work out its freely chosen ends without wholesale interference from abroad. If China should precipitate itself upon the United States, or India upon England, as the mere economical impulse might indicate, it would be disastrous to the western nations; but men are everywhere under other influences besides the economical one, although this is strong and distinct and pervasive; Political Economy deals with men as they are all things considered, and with Buying and Selling as this actually takes place over the world, or rather as it would take place if factitious economical restraints were removed; and Providence has other great ends in view besides commercial prosperity, vital as that is to all other progress, and often holds one impulse in check by a stronger one.

(f) Custom, with its cognates Prejudice and Fashion, has still a good deal to do with the Supply of laborers in certain departments of effort, and of course with the rates of wages in them. In former times in this country and in the older countries particularly, Custom and decree were dominant in determining, for example, the current fees of lawyers and doctors, competition coming in to decide how many such fees a professional laborer should get, rather than the amount of each particular fee. The shares of the produce going respectively to the agricultural tenant and to the landowner, were specially under the dominion of Custom; as the mode (now decadent) of taking farms "at the halves," once universally prevalent in New England, sufficiently shows. In certain other matters relating to land and trade, Custom has long been gradually hardening into express law, as, for instance, the famous "Ulster Right" in Ireland. Prejudice, which is only another name for Custom, has some voice still in adjusting rates of wages, as may be seen in women's wages crowded down apparently to a point unreasonably low as compared with the wages of men; and also in the rate of John Chinaman's wages in those parts of the United States where he ventures to offer his services in the teeth of public opinion and hostile legislation. It may be spoken with general truth and satisfaction, that competition seems now to be breaking down mere custom and prejudice in all directions, and may perhaps in the good time coming reign supreme over the economic field; while Fashion, which bears indeed on one side of its shield the motto "custom," carries too on the other the bold word "competition," and this second side is likely to be presented to the public mostly in the future, because, they who lead the styles in any department whatsoever will always offer their services to Society at an advantage to themselves, that being one form of competition, and their rate of compensation will be legitimately higher than the average rate of their fellows, of which a good instance was the marked worldly prosperity during the decade of the Eighties of Worth, the man-dressmaker of Paris.

(g) Legal Restrictions are another cause acting on wages, by acting directly on the Supply of laborers. Laws inhibiting or promoting immigration; laws appointing the fees and salaries of officials; tariff-taxes, whether prohibitory or only restrictive; laws creating privileged classes of any kind, which is only another designation for laws restricting the rights of the masses; unequal modes of taxation, whether adopted in ignorance or by design; all have a direct and powerful agency upon the distribution of laborers, upon the supply of them at given points, and upon the rates of their wages. Governments are coming, however, much more freely than formerly, but never through their natural choice and drift as governments, only by the gradual and oft-disappointed compulsion of their citizens, to leave all these matters Economical except the wages of their own servants and those commodities which they choose to tax, to the simple and safe action of Supply and Demand.

(h) Voluntary Associations for that avowed purpose were a mediÆval, and have come to be again a modern, agency in adjusting the Supply of laborers to their respective markets, and in regulating the wages of various classes of them. The Guilds of the Middle Ages, and particularly the old guilds of London, had a remarkable history, upon which we can not here even touch. Their local importance is sufficiently attested by the fact, that the City Hall of London is to this day the "Guildhall." King Edward III. humored the civic feeling of his time by becoming himself a member of the Guild of Armorers. "A seven years' apprenticeship formed the necessary prelude to full membership of any trade-guild. Their regulations were of the minutest character; the quality and value of work was rigidly prescribed, the hours of toil fixed from daybreak to curfew, and strict provision made against competition in labor. At each meeting of these guilds their members gathered round the Craft-box, which contained the rules of their Society, and stood with bared heads as it was opened. The warden and a quorum of guild-brothers formed a court which enforced the ordinances of the guild, inspected all work done by its members, confiscated unlawful tools or unworthy goods; and disobedience to their orders was punished by fines, or in the last resort by expulsion, which involved the loss of right to trade. A common fund was raised by contributions among the members, which not only provided for the trade objects of the guild, but sufficed to found chantries and masses, and set up painted windows in the church of their patron saint. Even at the present day the arms of the craft-guild may often be seen blazoned in cathedrals, side by side with those of prelates and kings."[6]

The Trades-Unions and Brotherhoods of the present day cannot plead the provocations and justifications of their mediÆval predecessors. It cannot be denied, however, that they have some provocations and justifications in the bad example set before them by the various combinations (implied or explicit) of the Wages-payers as a class. If the Wages-payers combine, then the Wages-takers would seem to have no resource but in combination. Both alike are wrong in this. Both alike oppose in this the spirit of Political Economy, which is ever the spirit of Freedom, and is ever against such factitious associations for such purposes, because they tend to destroy the independence of personal action on the part of both payers and takers of wages, and tend also to bring all the workmen of any one general grade down to one level of effort and reward.

(i) Lastly, we must note the influence of Casual Events upon wages, as these events affect the Supply of laborers. For example, in 1348, a terrible plague, called the Black Death, invaded England and swept away more than one-half of its population. "Even when the first burst of panic was over, the sudden rise of wages consequent on the enormous diminution in the supply of free labor, though accompanied by a corresponding rise in the price of food, rudely disturbed the course of industrial employments; harvests rotted on the ground, and fields were left untilled, not merely from scarcity of hands, but from the strife which now for the first time revealed itself between Capital and Labor" (Green). The landowners of the country districts, and the craftsmen of the towns, not understanding the law of Wages as an invariable resultant of the Demand and Supply of laborers, were scandalized by what seemed to them the extravagant demands of the new labor-class. Parliament equally ignorant with the People of the natural economic law, enacted as follows: "Every man or woman of whatsoever condition, free or bond, able in body, and within the age of threescore years, and not having of his own whereof he may live, nor land of his own about the tillage of which he may occupy himself, and not serving any other, shall be bound to serve the employer who shall require him to do so, and shall take only the wages which were accustomed to be taken in the neighborhood where he is bound to serve two years before the plague began." Afterwards, the runaway laborer was ordered by Parliamentary enactment to be branded in the forehead by a hot iron, and the harboring of the country serfs in the towns, in which under their civic rules a serf keeping himself a year and a day was thereafter free, was rigorously forbidden. These acts of Parliament, and many more of the same kind, were powerless to keep down wages to the old standard, but were powerful to keep up ill-blood and social discontent. They prepared the way for agitators like John Ball, for the poet-agitator Piers Ploughman, and for the great Peasant Revolt of 1381. John Ball's famous rhyme condensed the scorn for the nobles, the longing for just rule, and the resentment at oppression, of the peasants of that time and of all times:—

A hundred years after the Black Death the wages of a common English laborer—we have the highest authority for the statement—commanded twice the amount of the necessaries of life which could have been obtained for the wages paid under Edward III.

3. Having now seen fully the varied action of Supply and Demand upon the Value of personal services in their three kinds, we come at length to the most important general point in this chapter, namely, that in the second class of Services, those purchased in connection with the use of Capital, Wages are all the time enlarging relatively to Profits. We have seen clearly already, that Cost of Labor and Cost of Capital are the only onerous elements in the cost of Commodities; because, while Natural Agents are all the time assisting and assisting more and more effectively in such production, they work without weariness or decay and without fee or reward. The reward of laborers is Wages, and the reward of capitalists is Profits; and we are now to demonstrate, that the part of their joint products falling to laborers as wages is all the while increasing as compared with the remaining part falling to capitalists as profits. This truth is of the deepest significance, and of the most cheering character; because men are more important in the universe than things; and because the number of men who sell their services as laborers is vastly greater than the number of men who sell their services as capitalists.

It is another indisputable and exhilarating truth for the masses of mankind, that the Value of each item or article of those products created by the joint action of laborers and capitalists is ever becoming less and less as measured by any relatively fixed standard as Money; so that, while wages as thus measured becomes a larger and larger aggregate as compared with the aggregate of profits, and is shared of course by a much larger number of people, those commodities looked at as a collection of items for which the wages of these many is usually expended for their own comforts, are becoming all the time cheaper and cheaper to everybody, owing to the ever-enlarging and wholly gratuitous action of natural forces.

For the sake of simplicity in the argument on this great point, we will first look at what the facts are through recent illustrations gathered by other parties for a wholly different purpose, and then give in detail the economical grounds for these patent and universal facts. Take for example, from Poor's Railroad Manual for 1889 a table showing in a graphic way the steady reduction in freight charges per ton per mile from 1865 to 1888 of seven representative Eastern trunk railroad lines, namely, the Pennsylvania, Fort Wayne and Chicago, New York Central, Michigan Central, Lake Shore, Boston and Albany, and Lake Erie and Western; and of six leading Western roads, namely, the Illinois Central, St. Paul, Burlington and Quincy, Chicago and Northwestern, Rock Island, and Chicago and Alton. The following are the figures:—

Rate Charges per Ton per Mile (in Cents).

This reduction of rates in the case of the group of Eastern roads has amounted to 79 per centum, and in the Western group to 73 per centum, in the twenty-four years. Not less remarkable than the extent of this decline in freight charges per mile is its uniformity. Both groups show a wonderful steadiness in the progress of rate reductions. Starting at quite different points as to territorial development, they have yet travelled at a nearly equal pace in the same direction. This shows the operation of causes at once steady and universal. Statistics can never of themselves yield us causes; but they guide the way to them; at any rate, they prevent any radical misinterpretation of them. The great and overshadowing cause here of the cheaper freights per ton, as everywhere else of cheaper rates at the junction of efforts by capitalists and laborers, is of course the perpetual and augmenting and ever-gratuitous assistance of natural forces at every point.

While the rates of freight per ton have decreased more than three-quarters in less than one-quarter of a century in the case of these 13 railroads on the whole average, the entire cost of the operation of these roads in this interval of time has not been diminished to any appreciable extent, as also stated by the same Manual. The main item in all the operation-expenses of railroads is the wages paid to the laborers of all grades; and the laborers are quite as well paid now on these 13 roads as they were in 1865, proper allowances being made for the changed and changing standards in the national Money. If, on a broad view, railroad employees of all grades have lost nothing as such in their wages in this interval; and the general public, including these laborers and also the capitalists concerned, have greatly gained, how can we account for the immensely lessened freight-charges while the whole operation-expenses continue substantially as before?

There is only one rational account to be given of this. And it is trustworthy. All known facts jump with it, and nothing substantial can be urged against it. The gains to the masses including the capitalists and the laborers have come out of the capitalists as such. This is apparent as well as real. Cost of Labor and Cost of Capital is the whole cost. If the whole cost of moving one ton of freight from Boston to Chicago is ¾ less than it was ¼ of a century ago, the cost of the labor being the same at the two points of time, then the conclusion is inevitable, that the cost of the capital at the second point is less than it was at the first point. With this conclusion all facts agree. All the laborers connected with a railroad from highest to lowest must be paid at any rate, or else the trains will certainly cease to move, whether the stockholders receive any dividend or not on their capital invested. The original stock—the capital that built the roads—of many if not of most the railroads in the country, has been annihilated, a new indebtedness in another form called bonds having taken the place of it. Even the nominal dividends of dividend-paying roads have declined in the interval from 10 or 8 to 5 or 4 per centum in the general, that is, 50 per centum. It is perfectly evident on every hand, that there is something in the nature and progress of things, that makes for wages as contrasted with profits: wages hold on and relatively enlarge, profits decline or go out altogether.

Fortunately we are not left to generalities here, however plain and certain these may be. One of the 13 railroads specified above, the Illinois Central, made a remarkable exhibit in its own annual Report of 1887, showing the cost of its locomotive service for each year of the thirty years preceding. This cost per mile run had fallen from 26.52 cents in 1857 to 13.93 cents in 1886. This reduction had been effected wholly on the Capital side of the account, by inventions and improvements of all sorts in the machinery of locomotion; while the wages of the engineers and firemen had risen in the period from 4.51 cents to 5.52 cents per mile run. The cost of the labor had risen both relatively and absolutely while the cost of the capital had declined both absolutely and relatively. In 1857 the engineers and firemen had received as wages 17% of the entire cost of the locomotive service, but in 1886 they had received 39% of that total cost. The table is as follows: —

I. C. R. R. CO.

Performance of Locomotives. Relation of Wages to Total Cost per Mile Run.

In 1857 the engineers and firemen received 17²⁰¹/₁₀₀₀ per cent. of total cost.
In 1865 the engineers and firemen received 15⁹¹/₁₀₀₀ per cent. of total cost.
In 1867 the engineers and firemen received 20⁸⁶⁵/₁₀₀₀ per cent. of total cost.
In 1886 the engineers and firemen received 39⁶²⁷/₁₀₀₀ per cent. of total cost.

These illustrations from the railroads are plainly indicative of a general truth of the utmost importance in Political Economy, namely, that all increase of Capital and all inventions and improvements in its practical application, while it redounds to the benefit of capitalists as a class, redounds in a still higher degree to the benefit of laborers as a class. Let us now attend for a moment to the convincing Proof of this truth in two phases of such proof, and also to a cheering conclusion that follows it.

(a) As any country grows older in time and richer through abstinence, and as the whole world thus grows older and richer, the tendency there and everywhere towards a general decline in the rate per centum for the use of capital becomes patent and universal. The rate of interest on money loaned, and the rate of profits on capital used, tend all the while to go down as and because capital accumulates. No one will dispute this as a simple fact of history. And no economist will dispute, that this is just what we might expect beforehand as a corollary from the admitted proposition, that, other things being equal, an increased Supply of anything means a lessened Value for any specific part of it. Three centuries ago in England the legal rate of interest was 10%, while now the current rate is about 4% in that country, and has been considerably lower than that in Holland, although in both countries and everywhere else there are temporary interruptions and reactions in the constant tendency now being considered. During the first years of mining operations in California, from 8% to 15% per month with security of real estate was paid for the use of money, which enormous rates long ago declined to rates not much higher than those paid in the States along the Mississippi River, and in these also the rates are all the while approximating those current in the older Eastern States, whose own rates too are slowly declining. But, while there is a less rate of profit or interest on each 100 invested, there are many more hundreds capitalized; consequently, there is an absolute gain to capitalists as a class, at once in the aggregate amount of the capital and in the aggregate sum of the profits from it, since no capitalist would have a motive to capitalize further under the smaller rates of profit, unless the aggregate of profits under the new conditions were greater than under the old condition of higher rates; and, as much of this accumulating capital in order to become productive must now be offered to laborers in the form of wages, we might almost pronounce beforehand, that it would prove both an absolute and also a relative gain to laborers as a class. And so it is.

(b) Let us take to figures. An hypothesis or supposed case, whenever it may easily become an overt fact, may be reasoned from just as logically and securely as the overt fact itself. Let $100,000,000, while the rate of profit is 6%, and $500,000,000, when the rate has fallen to 4%, be expended in payment of simple wages. So far forth as that one element of cost goes, the value of the products to be divided yearly between capitalists and laborers will become respectively $106,000,000 and $520,000,000. In the first case, $6,000,000 is profits and $100,000,000 is wages; in the second case, $20,000,000 is profits and $500,000,000 is wages. Here is an absolute gain to the capitalists, since profits have gone up from $6,000,000 to $20,000,000, and so are more than three times as great as before. But wages have gone up both absolutely and relatively to the rise of profits. They have risen from $100,000,000 to $500,000,000, and are five times as great as before. Profits have risen as in the ratio 1:3+, but wages in the ratio of 1:5. This arithmetical example is put for the sake of illustration merely, but the principle of it holds good in every case, in which the rate per centum goes down in consequence of the increase of capital in business; and, therefore, the advantages of ever-enlarging Capital are even greater to laborers as a class than to the capitalists themselves. Most assuredly, if the capitalists take less out of each hundred of the swelling hundreds now than before, the laborers must take more out of each hundred than before. Profits and Wages are reciprocally the leavings of each other, because the aggregate products created by the joint agency of Capitalist and Laborer are wholly to be divided between the two. There can be no other claimant even.

(c) This demonstration is extremely important in Political Economy, and consequently in Social Life; for it proves beyond the possibility of a cavil, the Value of personal services tends constantly to rise, not only as compared with the Value of the material commodities which by the aid of capital they help to create (a truth we have seen before), but also as compared with the Value of the use of its co-partner capital itself; and therefore, that there is inwrought into the very substance of things in this world a tendency towards an equality of economical condition among men. God has ordered it, and men cannot radically alter it. Self-interest is indeed the mainspring of movement in the economic world; but the beauty of it and the wonder of it is, that no man can labor intelligently and productively under the influence of self-interest without at the same time benefiting the masses of men. His fair exchanges benefit the parties of the other part as much as they benefit himself. His very savings productively employed are poor men's livings. Only under the blessed freedom of universal Buying and Selling, subject only to the taxation of a good Government for public purposes purely, can these broad benefits designed by a wise Providence be fully realized in action; and the power of individual greed and corporate privilege and governmental perversion to thwart the beneficent though complicated workings of these laws of Capital and Labor towards the common weal and universal progress of mankind is shortlived and soon punished.

4. How comes it about, then, if these laws of mutual inter-dependence between capitalists and laborers are so well-placed and Providentially balanced, that there always have been and are still so many misunderstandings and ill-feelings and actual collisions between employers and skilled laborers, whose interests are at bottom one and whose relations ought to be so cordial? This is the last topic in our Chapter on Personal Services. Here we must look around narrowly and tread carefully. But there is a path. We can find it if we will. It leads through many short-comings in men's characters and through much ignorance of plain economical truths and past unreasoning jealousies and aggregated action on the part of both classes, and over the needful distinctions between impulsive selfishness and a true self-interest back to the same old laws of God laid down at once in the constitution of things and in the constitution of men.

Labor-troubles are almost as old as Civilization. The Greek poet Euripides in his play of the "Supplicants" both indicates facts as they were then, and points out a future hope in which we may share, that these middle classes by a better harmony preordained and mutually beneficial may yet "save the State":—

At Rome and in the Roman Empire, instead of the usual voluntary union of capitalists and laborers for the mutual advantage of each other, the laborer was owned by the capitalist, and the true relations between the two were thoroughly disguised and wretchedly distorted. Business in all its branches came to be carried on by means of slaves; the lands were tilled by slaves; slaves became the artisans of the country; the money-lenders and bankers of the centre scattered branch-banks in the towns under the direction of their slaves and freedmen; the Company that leased on speculation the Customs-Taxes from the State had their slaves and freedmen levy these taxes at each custom-house; the contractor for buildings bought architect-slaves; and the merchant imported his goods in ships of his own manned by his slaves or freedmen, and then sold the same at wholesale or retail by the same means. In this way a gigantic system of unnatural traffic was built up and extended. In this way the very name "laborer" became tainted by the vile system of slavery of which he was a part, and the distinction itself between capitalist and laborer was obliterated. "Roman mercantile transactions fully kept pace with the contemporary development of political power, and were no less grand of their kind." "The Roman denarius followed up closely the Roman legions." "It is very possible that, compared with the suffering of the Roman slaves, the sum of all negro suffering is but a drop" (Mommsen).

We want now to examine critically the causes of these constantly recurring labor-troubles, the true economical Remedies for them, and in connection with these the futility of the remedies popularly recommended for low Wages and the disputes between employers and employed of the second class.

(1) There is an extremely common misapprehension on the part of both labor-givers and labor-takers as to the real nature of the transaction between them. Both parties forget, or rather neither party is ever fully instructed, that it is a case of pure Buying and Selling. There is never any obligation of the moral sort between buyers and sellers. The relation itself is purely economical. Moral considerations indeed cover this relation from above, just as they cover all other relations between man and man in human Society; and any two individuals standing over against one another as buyer and seller, also stand over against each other in higher and broader relations as man and man; but it works confusion and mischief as between both, whenever relations differing in their nature and operation and reward are not separated from each other in the mind of each relator, and whenever each does not act in the particular relation according to the nature and rules of that relation alone. When A hires B to work in his factory, this new relation is economical not moral; there were moral relations between the two before this relation was knit, and will be again after this has been broken, and indeed are while this continues; but the economical relation is one thing, and the others a very different thing; they are so different, that they cannot be blended in mind or motive to any advantage to either individual or to either set of relations; and any degree of confusion as between the relations has always wrought mischief as between the individuals, because instead of seeing either set of relations in its own clear light, they now see both in a commingled twilight.

What is the economical relation? This. A desires the personal service of B in his factory purely for his pecuniary benefit, and assumes his own ability to make all the calculations requisite for determining how much he can (profitably to himself) offer B for his service; and B, who knows all about his own skill, how it was acquired and how much it has cost, wants to sell his service to A for the sake of the pecuniary return or wages. There is no obligation resting upon either. Man to man, each in his own right. There is no benevolence in the heart of either, so far as this matter goes. Benevolence is now an impertinence. It is a question of honest gain in broad daylight. Benevolence is blessed in its own sphere, but there is no call for it here and now. If it comes in an unbidden guest, it comes in to mar and to distort. It is an incongruity. "I never knew a Jew converted but it spoilt him," was the word of one deeply versed in human nature and in Christian experience. Conversion is good, and its field is broad; but the Jew as such is incongruous with it. Good is benevolence and wide its field, but Buying and Selling does not need it. Its own motives are independent of it, and sufficient without it.

A clouded understanding of this vital distinction has always played its part in Labor-troubles. Buyers and Sellers of personal services are always on a plane of perfect equality as such exchangers, and no one can be more independent than either of them except the hermit in his cell. Which must look out for the interest of the other beyond the terms implied in the trade itself? Which is the superior party? Which should take off his hat, the other remaining covered? The truth is, and all experience and all analysis brings us up abreast of it, that the two parties to a trade of any kind stand on a footing of absolute equality towards each other then and there in the economical relation about to be knit, and any conception in the mind of either that he has the other "at his mercy" in either the good or bad sense of that phrase, disturbs and destroys the proper conditions and balances of the exchange in hand; and, what is more to the point, it implies that each party has not all he can do to fulfil in the letter and in the spirit what is always implied in the terms of a trade deliberately entered upon by two parties. When B agrees to work for A at skilled labor in his factory for a year at $15 per week, he makes a good deal of a contract; and virtually pledges to A not only the motions of his hands for that period of time, but also the vigorous attention of his mind to that service and to the general interests of his employer so far as these come under his own eye and supervision. Nor is this all: he virtually pledges himself to B to coÖperate with the least possible friction in all plans for betterment in his division of the work, and to cordially coalesce with all other employees for the general ends of the business without too much of self-assertion and without too little of courtesy to others. To fulfil this contract in all its spirit rounds up the circle of B's economical obligations to A. He will practically have all he can do, so far as A is concerned, and in consistency with all his various duties to others, to make good to him at all points his simple business pledges. Benevolence, the interests of a common citizenship, and the reciprocal ties of religion, lie wholly outside.

A will practically have all he can do, so far as B is concerned, to fulfil in the letter and in the spirit his economical obligations to him, without troubling himself to see whether B is going to vote the same party ticket that he himself votes, and without confounding either B's poverty or prosperity with his own obligation to be polite to him at all times and to pay him promptly his weekly stipend. So long as B renders in letter and in spirit what he has agreed to render, and A returns in the same way what he has promised to return, the less either thinks and talks and acts about the other in all the other relations of life, the better hope of good success to both in this relation. Church relations and social relations and political relations are all of consequence in themselves; but when any of these begin to get mixed up with labor-relations, there is soon a muss and a mess. Incongruous things, things no way vitally connected with that, often come in to disturb and destroy a simple matter of mutual renderings.

(a) The first practical remedy for difficulties arising under this first head, is a clearer separation in the mind of both parties to a trade of what really belongs to Buying and Selling from what belongs to all other departments of activity. More common sense is needed at this point, more simple analysis, more daylight, more personal independence, more introspection as to motives, more power in making distinctions, and a more practical separation of what is clear and fixed from what is complex and obscure in human relations. Metaphysics may yet lie in cloud-land, Ethics may not yet have drawn its outer and interior lines so strong and deep as it will, Sociology also is a vast field of complexities, but truth to tell Economics has no mysteries to speak of. I buy and sell for my own advantage, which proves in the nature of things to be for the equal advantage of my compeer. It is my business and my compeer's business and every other man's business who buys and sells, to pick that action out in its motive and result from the great mass of dubious actions, and to set it up in its own light, to rejoice in it as the clearest thing in social action, to claim it as God's own plan so far forth for our comfort and progress, and then to see to it that no preposterous hand mixes it up with perplexities or theologies or other abominations—muddying with a tentative pole the stream of our clear brook! In this country at least, in its ignorance of common things and common science, the pulpit often fulminates against the gains of exchange as "materialism," and mixes up buying and selling with "worldliness," and only half permits its deluded hearers the privileges of the market, and illustrates again in modern times such teaching as is denounced to St. Timothy,—"some swerving turned aside to vain babbling, desiring to be teachers of the Law, understanding neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm." "Let every shoemaker stick to his last." Those who have looked into it with any care have found, that Exchange in all its natural outgoings is not answerable to these pulpit charges, nor is contrary to the letter or spirit of the biblical precepts, but on the other hand is in full harmony with the claims of Conscience and with all the inbreathings and aspirations of Christianity.

(b) The second practical remedy for the labor-difficulties arising from the want of thorough understanding by both parties of the real nature of hired renderings of the second class, is fair common honesty. More of an easily accessible intelligence, more of penetration and separation as to social relations in general, meets the first point; but quite as needful as this simple intellectual process, is the still simpler moral habit of doing just what one has agreed to do, without evasions and without diminutions. Labor difficulties take their origin more often, perhaps, in some clouded moral action of one of the parties, than in a clouded mental apprehension. Men are too conscious as men of their own temptations, to be lax in their pledged renderings and of their own shortcomings at this point, not to be suspicious of each other as buyers and sellers, for fear the party of the other part is about to withdraw something either in quantity or quality of what he has promised to render; there is almost always something or other to give color to such a suspicion, and it grows by what it feeds on; frank explanations are not had at the outset, and a good understanding is not come to, as it doubtless might be in nine cases out of ten; and the little cloud, at first no bigger than a man's hand, by and by becomes black and threatening, and bursts at last in a strike or lock-out of large proportions. An open honesty that is such and seems such, that is not beyond the aim and reach of common men, that is taught in scores of forms in "Poor Richard's Almanack," and that each man ever likes to meet with and so ought ever to put forth, is in fact a preventive of conflicts between laborers and employers, and would if properly manifested have prevented multitudes of such actual conflicts. Here is the main, almost the sole, point of contact between strict Ethics and the Economics. What buyers and sellers, that is to say, the whole practical world, needs, is not disquisitions on Morals from Press or Pulpit, but an inner ear to hear the true click of Conscience, and the quick and open answer in honest action.

(2) A second general cause of the Labor-troubles of the past and present has been a strong tendency to neglect the special preparation for their peculiar functions by both capitalists and laborers. A successful employer of laborers year in and year out to their advantage and his own is always one who has been trained to that function by special preparations. He is a living man with all the limitations of living men: he has to deal with many living men with all their imperfections: he has to deal also, and constantly, with what is in its own nature dead, namely, Capital, always either a commodity or a claim: to animate and invigorate these dead forms of value, to put them into vital connection with living men who shall enhance their value, and thus to become a leader to living men as towards swelling interests, demands unusual native gifts and a special long-continued training. When one looks from without upon such an establishment as this in full action, it seems automatic, it seems as if almost anybody with a clear head could continue to direct it; and when this "captain of industry" departs this life, perhaps his son or some previous subordinate, without the proper gifts and at least without the peculiar training, assumes the post of direction. For a little everything seems to go on as before. As sure as fate, however, a friction will soon develop here, and a misunderstanding there, there will be whisperings among the men, some breath of suspicion will be likely to cloud the borrowing-power, opening difficulties of any kind such as loss of credit or a weakening of the usual markets are apt to throw a new operator more or less off his base, and gathering labor-troubles of any sort commonly find such a man unprepared for lack of suitable training and experience to ward them off or to make timely concessions to the men or to minimize the evil results when these become inevitable.

Also labor-troubles are quite as likely to arise from the want of character and training and considerateness of the employees towards the capitalists. The relations are reciprocal and they are also in their very nature delicate. One poor workman however good his disposition, one unfaithful overseer no matter how great his possible skill, may mar the current product in such a way as to lose it the market and cost the establishment the present profit. The strength of a chain is the strength of its weakest link. It is a matter of immense difficulty at any time, and emphatically so at the present time to organize a working force in factory from top to bottom so as to have it go forward as a unit as towards the marketing of the product, without bad workmanship at some point and unskilful supervision at another; because the laborers as a rule have not given themselves time to learn thoroughly their special parts, because they are not content to remain steady at one thing and at one place, and because they do not practically recognize even if they perceive it that their own permanent interests are exactly coincident with the permanent interests of their employers. Just now in this country the public Law robs the manufacturers (at their own behest) of their best markets at home and abroad, makes it difficult or impossible for them through wanton taxation of their raw materials to create a good quality of goods for any market, and so multiplies frictions and failures and losses along the whole line of production. The lack of what may be called Apprenticeship on the part of skilled laborers, the consequent difficulty of rising from one gradation of effort to a higher and better-paid one, the restlessness of native laborers under such disabilities, the rapid admixture of foreigners, the lack of coherence throughout in point of intelligence and apparent identity of interests, together with the instability and haphazardness of the resources and personal training of the employers as a class, gives birth to Labor-troubles which are at the same time Capital-troubles, to read the daily record of which makes one sick at heart.

(a) The only possible and practicable remedy for this state of things, so far as the employers are concerned, is in a more conservative attitude of capitalists as a class about passing over their resources to the hands of men who have not proven their ability to handle them wisely by a full course of training in the management of practical affairs. By a wretched policy in this country at present Capital is prohibited from building and from buying ships, with which to navigate the oceans; from selling domestic manufactures in foreign markets; and also from a profitable agriculture, which may sell its products abroad and take its pay back. Consequently Capital, eager in its own nature to be invested to a profit somehow somewhere, has rushed without due circumspection into the hands of domestic operators, who have not been half fitted for their task, who have knitted relations with laborers without being able to secure their permanent respect or to control their services, and who have lost to their owners in multitudes of cases the entire capital intrusted to them. If capitalists had had during the last quarter of a century one-half of their natural and proper chance to invest their money to a profit, there would not have been such a reckless investment through incompetent hands in building mills and foundries in this interval of time, and such wholesale losses in connection with them. When capital comes to be at liberty to turn right or left according to its own will in view of a prospective profit, factory companies and projectors cannot draw resources from the public for their operations, without demonstrating to the owners the trained and tried capacity of the practical operators, who will buy the materials and hire the laborers and market the products.

(b) The practical remedy for the inexperience and instability and unskilfulness of laborers as tending towards labor-troubles of all kinds and degrees, is only to be found in a want of market for such services. In a natural and wholesome state of things, such as would exist in the United States were it not for national laws tampering with Trade and with Money, the questions asked an applicant for skilled work by any labor-taker would be, "What have you learned to do? How long and for what pay do you want to do it? What do you want to reach next, when the present job is done?" When employment turns on good answers to such questions as these, and when the questions themselves are put in good faith, there will be an end of Strikes and Lockouts. Untrained and restless hands will get nothing to do in mills and factories. Apprenticeship in its various forms will come back into vogue, and will probably be made a part of the course in public schools. The division and gradation of laborers will be carried out further than it ever yet has been. Laborers will then be organized in the best sense of that word, and to the best advantage of capitalists. The permanent Supply of skilled laborers will be constantly adjusting itself to a permanent and increasing Demand for them. And it requires no millennium for such a state of things to come in. It requires nothing but an ordinary and enlightened and beneficent selfishness on the part of capitalists to adjust itself to the ordinary selfishness of laborers sure to become enlightened and beneficent to the best and ever-growing interests of both parties. This is not the spoken word of Morality, still less is it the divine word of Religion, it is only the common programme of a common-sense Political Economy.

(3) The third and last general cause of misunderstandings and embittered disputes as between laborers and capitalists is partly economical and partly moral, and consequently the remedy for it is partly moral and partly economical. The Past projects itself down into the Present partly with blessings and partly with curses. In the old times under Slavery and Feudalism the laborer always came forward to his task with a taint upon him. Sometimes the taint attached to his birth, and at all times it attached to his calling. Slavery in all its forms always makes manual labor degrading. The courtly Cicero apologizes in a letter to his friend for his open sorrow over the death of his favorite slave; and in several passages of his treatise on Morals he follows his Greek teachers, Plato and Aristotle, and declaims in a pitiful way against the noble rights of laborers. "All artisans are engaged in a degrading profession." Again, "there can be nothing ingenuous in a workshop." When trade and commerce are carried on on a small scale, "they are to be regarded as disgraceful"; when on a large scale, "they must not be greatly condemned—non admodum vituperanda!" (I, 42.)

Serfdom once existed in England, and threw its shade over free laborers there long after itself had disappeared. A class of indented servants pervaded all the New England Colonies, and a clause of the New England Confederation of 1643 provided for their forced rendition from Colony to Colony, and passed over almost verbally into the Constitution of the United States of 1787 as applicable to the slaves of the South. In this way in all parts of this country manual laborers came to be more or less off color, and this has continued in a continually lessened degree till this time. When those who work with their hands are looked down upon by those who do not, two sets of feelings are apt to be engendered equally unfortunate to the two classes that entertain them. The non-manual workers, the employers, are more or less puffed up with pride and a sense of superiority (there are beautiful exceptions) as towards their laborers, and the latter in their turn are apt to develop alongside an unmanly servility and an apparent deference, a sort of secret breasting up of hostility and defiance, which is sure to manifest itself when labor troubles come on even when it has not helped to brood these troubles into life. The parties then are not well placed as towards each other to negotiate and to compromise and to coalesce in a future harmony. The party of the first part is too proud to yield to their inferiors, and the party of the second part is too bitter to be sweetened. Who is sufficient for these things? And what is the remedy for them?

(a) So far as employers are concerned, their natural though unreasonable and provoking arrogance may well be reduced by the economical reflection, that the laborers are exactly as necessary to production as the capitalists are, that the two stand on a precise level so far as the product goes, that each is one blade of the shears and the other the other and that it takes both blades to cut anything, that while the laborers are sellers in the open market the capitalists are likewise sellers and that the same ultimate purchaser furnishes the market for both sets of sellers, that as sellers they are only equal in position, that buying and selling is a levelling as well as an uplifting process the world over, and that as such co-equal partners in one indivisible operation all haughtiness on one side and all undue humility on the other is nothing but obstacle as towards the common end; and also by the moral and social reflection, that their laborers are just such men as themselves in motive and action, that the two are very likely to exchange places with each other before very long, that riches are extremely liable to take to themselves wings and fly away, that Christianity is no respecter of persons, that humanity deems nothing human alien from itself, that morality puts the golden rule upon the fore-front of its precepts, and that whatever may unite any body of men in a legitimate purpose of achievement along any line of human action multiplies the power of each individual and exalts his standing and responsibility as such individual and thus reduplicates the reward of his individual action.

(b) So far as the employees are concerned, in any temporary sense of dependence or even of injustice, there is open to them the economical reflection (and it will do them good to bring it home) that their best route to the respect and favor and feeling of equality of their employers is through the excellence of the service they render them and the courtesy (not servility) with which they render it, that as every capitalist becomes such by means of abstinence they may themselves by saving become capitalists, that there is nothing in the nature of their work or its relations to capital to cause them to hang down their heads, that handsome is that handsome does, that the opportune offer of the present capital to work on gives them a chance to exhibit their skill and to earn a living, that the capitalists are just as dependent on them as they upon those, and that as single sellers of a valuable personal service they daily confront on a footing of equality the sellers of a valuable product so created; and there is open to them also the moral and social reflection fortified by constant observation and experience, that no matter where a man begins it is the end that crowns his work, that life to all is a series of stepping-stones, that manly qualities are appreciated everywhere, that character tells in the lowest position however high and low are reckoned, that the poor gain and hold friends quite as well as the rich, that there was a certain poor wise man that saved the city by his wisdom and gained a lasting record in consequence, that the poor and the rich are constantly changing places in this world, and that there is no respect of persons with God.

We may see now what we are to think of some popular remedies constantly recommended for low Wages. A brief discussion of what is false will give us a stronger hold of what is true. The chapter will close with relevant reference to three current remedies.

1. It is being dinned into the ears of the present generation, that Government has large functions in the ongoings of business, that it ought sometimes to interfere to better the rate of Wages, at least to designate a minimum below which they shall not go, and that Government should hold itself ready to undertake directly to carry on certain branches of business under certain circumstances. This scheme goes under the high-sounding name of Nationalism. Richard T. Ely, Professor of Political Economy in Johns Hopkins University, is one of the most prominent representatives at present of this school of thought. In his Introduction to Political Economy just published (1889), he lays down this principle: "When for any class of business it becomes necessary to abandon the principle of freedom in the establishment of enterprises, this business should be entirely turned over to Government, either local, state, or federal, according to the nature of the undertaking." He begins his book by attempting to hammer in the "lesson" that as Civilization improves, coÖperation takes the place of individualism. The golden age of individualism, he says, is among the wild tribes of Australia. They never coÖperate with each other in their economic efforts, or in anything else. No one expects anything from his neighbor, and every one does unto others as he thinks they would do to him. The life there is one prolonged scene of selfishness and fear. But as civilization comes in, he says, individualism goes out, and coÖperation takes its place. The fine old Bentham principle of laissez faire, which most English thinkers for a century past have regarded as established forever in the nature of man and in God's plans of providence and government, is gently tossed by Dr. Ely into the wilds of Australian barbarism.

There are some propositions that are certainly true, and one of them is, that no man can write like that, who ever analyzed into their elements either Economics or Politics, who ever gained a clear conception of the sphere of either science in its relation to the other, or who ever saw distinctly the relations of either to the nature of Man. The sole motive in Buying and Selling is the gain of the individual, each for and by himself. That always was the motive, is now, and always will be. No complications of modern business, no complexities of credit, no combinations of capitalists or laborers, ever altered or ever can alter one particle the motives of men in buying and selling. In a natural and progressive state of things, Individualism, instead of going out, comes more and more into play, through the Division of Labor and the falling of all sorts of services more and more into specialties. To talk glibly, as Professor Ely does, about Government taking up easily and carrying on in a better way and to better ends branches of pure business as they are dropped or forced from the hands of Individuals, is ignorance at once and alike of the real nature of Government and of Business. Let us look at a few of the native incongruities and logical fallacies of this nationalistic position.

(1) What is human Government? Is there anything substantive and continuous in its personnel and purposes, as there is in the government of God? Is government anything more, can it be anything more, than a transient Committee of the citizens charged and changed to do in certain few particulars the changing will of a Majority? Government is indeed a necessity, as men are, to restrain the lawless, and to shape the ends of the law-abiding; but it has to be administered, if at all, by precisely the same kind of men as the rest are, chosen for brief periods, their duties sharply prescribed by constitution or custom, and impeachments or other punishments provided for them when they transgress. One President of the United States and one Judge of its Supreme Court have already been solemnly impeached by the sovereign people themselves.

Government, then, is an Agent, and nothing more. Even nationalists will not contend for the divine right of kings. And the duties of every decent government on earth are political in their character. The agents are chosen and dismissed with a direct reference to that kind of action. Politics has a sphere wholly distinct from Economics. The true and only end of politics is the greatest good of the greatest number, so far as that end can be mediated by governmental agents of the people. Individualism as such does indeed sink out of sight under a true Politics, and the inalienable rights of one are maintained for the sake of and in consistency with the greater rights of all. But Economics is all individuals from beginning to end. "It takes two to make a bargain." Only two. Each of the two has his own motive, estimates for himself, gives and takes for himself, and enjoys alone his own gain. All this is involved in the very idea of Property, which is derived from proprius, and which means one's own. How illogical, then, and incongruous, to suppose, that a set of limited human agents briefly trained to purely political action, and liable to be turned out of office by every change in party administration, can be competent at the same time and in addition to perform economical functions for the people!

Notice, too, that governmental agents in all good countries are already overburdened with their mere political duties. Work is behindhand in every portfolio, on every court calendar, and in every legislative body, in Christendom. How absurd it is, therefore, to talk about throwing upon shoulders, already overburdened, additional loads of a different kind, for which shoulders and heads are wholly unfitted!

Why not, then, inquires our nationalist innovator, organize new bureaus to undertake in their behalf the buying and selling of the people? Ah! Who pays the taxes needful for the support of the present political bureaus? And who would have to pay the taxes needful for the support of the new economical bureaus? Besides not having any substantive existence of its own Government has not one cent of money, except what the people voluntarily pay in taxes out of their own personal gains, in order to maintain their own agents to do certain political things for them, which they cannot do as well for themselves directly; and when it comes to the cold question for the people themselves to answer, whether they will organize a new set of hired men to do their trading for them, and pay them for doing this out of aggregate gains certainly to be vastly diminished by the process, our nationalistic leaders will perhaps find out that the people have common sense, whether the said leaders have it or not.

But the damning difficulty with this governmental business association is, after all, in the inevitable lack of motive on the part of the hired men doing the buying and selling. It is an honor to human nature, that hired men never have and never can have the zeal and enterprise of principals and owners to forecast and to perform and to lay up; because it shows that man is a rational animal, made in the image of his Maker, always acting under the pressure of personal motives, and always estimating what is his own more highly than what belongs to another. Business motives act in their fulness only on the individual, whose is the effort and whose is the return. Any policy whatever on the part of Government, which lessens the number and the eagerness of individual operators in favor of great artificial combinations resting in the shadow of the Law, lessens of necessity the gains of exchanges, and the progress of the nation, because it lessens of necessity the press of motive on the many to work and save.

Government, accordingly, is quite too far off in every respect from the business, that is to say, from the buying and selling of the people, to undertake any branch of it when "it becomes necessary to abandon the principle of freedom in the establishment of enterprises." It will then be high time to "abandon" the "enterprises" themselves. If the "principle of freedom" cannot compass the "establishment of enterprises," is it likely that the "principle" of secondary and irresponsible agents can do it? To show the people how to make their bargains, how to buy and sell and save and spend, is a function government is not fitted for, was not established to perform, and never undertook without making a botch of it.

In the Preamble of the Constitution of the United States there is a careful and complete and elegant enumeration of the purposes, which the body of the instrument was designed to attain. These purposes are six. No one of them contains even a hint of any purpose to enter upon the "establishment of enterprises," still less of any necessity "to abandon the principle of freedom." The last of these six purposes is phrased: "and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." The liberty to buy and sell freely was precisely that "liberty" of the Colonies which was most threatened and infringed by the British Government, to vindicate that special "liberty" was the chief cause of the American Revolution, and "to secure the blessings" of that and other forms of similar "liberty" was the final purpose of the Constitution of the United States.

It is true indeed that the Constitution empowers Congress, a creature of the People, "to establish Post Offices and Post Roads"; but the purpose of this was political, and not pecuniary; it was to bind all the States together in one Union of intelligence and intercourse; it was to keep the outlying and distant parts in touch with the central and seaboard; it is not in any sense a "business" enterprise; the department of the mails is not now and never has been, for any length of time, self-supporting; and it illustrates through and through in its "Star route frauds" and other contracts, in its appointment and removal of postmasters, and in the sickening dependence of primal Service of the people on partisan and corrupting impulses, many of them inherent evils of the much-vaunted Nationalism.

But besides all these vital and political objections to the assumption on the part of government of any direct industrial functions whatever, there remains two other fundamental objections, of which the first is, that our national government has received no powers to any such end, and is emphatically prohibited in the Constitution itself from exercising them:—"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively or to the people."

(2) The second remaining objection is, that such proposed action of government could have no tendency at all either to enlarge the Wages-portion, or to increase the industrial efficiency of the laborers, or to diminish the number of competitors at any one point of the wages-scale. As a matter of fact, such governmental action would have precisely the opposite effect at each of these three vital points of wages: employers would have less motive to swell the wages-portion, laborers less motive to improve their capacity, and more motive to congregate locally. Suppose, that at some given point in the scale of wages, free and intelligent competition has been had on both sides, and that the average rate of wages as thus determined proves one dollar per day for each laborer. Suppose further, that everybody outside the employers thinks this is quite too little, and that government accordingly issues a decree that wages at that point must be thereafter one dollar and a half per day. That decree can have no tendency at all to enlarge the wages-portion of those particular employers, because that has already been determined for the next industrial cycle by the general productiveness of the cycle last past, and by the last division under free competition between wages and profits; if, therefore, the decree were carried out, as it never practically could be, the result would be that only two-thirds of the laborers previously employed could be employed then at all, and the remaining third would certainly be worse off than before; and besides the Division of Labor being necessarily lessened, production would be less profitable to the employers, and the next wages-portion would certainly be less than the one before, and thus the outcome of the remedy would be worse than the disease. Now let alone the artificial interference of government, and all natural accessions to Capital at that point, all investment of profits in an enlarged business, all saving from expenditure for the sake of further production, tend strongly of their own accord to enlarge the wages-portion, and thus, the number and intelligence of the laborers continuing as before, are sure to raise the rate of wages. Or, if there be no accessions to Capital, or other influence swelling the wages-portion, and the number of laborers be diminished at that point, as by migration to new fields of effort or enlistment in armies, the competition of wages-givers for laborers will be quickened, and the rate of wages will rise. Reversed conditions will of course give reversed results.

2. A second popular remedy for low Wages, not only proposed, but also for a long time brought into practical action, is Labor-Unions in their various forms and with their manifold methods of operation upon employers. It is important to note here and to remember, that the Guilds of the mediÆval times, from which the modern Trades-Unions have borrowed something of form and much of nomenclature, were in substance extremely different from their modern imitators. Those were combinations of Masters with their journeymen and apprentices and dependents in order to control the entire manufacture and sale of a certain class of products, from the name of which the Guild usually took its own name, as "Cloth-workers' guild," "Shoemakers' guild," and so on. Whittier, himself a shoemaker in his boyhood, apostrophizes the latter guild in words which more or less describe them all: —

These masters thus organized with their laborers were the capitalists of their time, and in this vital matter differed from the Unions of to-day, which are made up of laborers as such organized to confront, and if need be, to antagonize, capitalists. A royal charter was indispensable to the legal existence of those craftsmen. It took money for them to start their guilds, and in progress of time most of them became very rich. "A common fund was raised by contributions among the members, which not only provided for the trade objects of the guild; but sufficed to found chantries and masses, and set up painted windows in the church of their patron saint. Even at the present day the arms of the craft-guild may often be seen blazoned in cathedrals side by side with those of prelates and kings." This radical difference between the two must always be borne in mind in all arguments and inferences drawn over from the mediÆval "unions" to those of the present day.

Two points may be freely conceded to these labor-organizations before we pass to the economic objections to them. In the first place, the employers set the example for the employees in a tacit if not open combination as against the employees in their own interest and emolument. The so-called "protective" tariff, for instance, is nothing in the world but a strongly-linked combination of certain rich capitalists to extort from the masses (their own laborers included) artificially lifted prices for the necessaries of life; and the certain result of shutting out imports by tariff-taxes is the shutting in of would-be exports, to the certain lowering of general wages in a country, because there is a lessened demand for laborers in consequence. For a second good instance of combinations as against employees on the part of employers, take the well-known understanding among manufacturers of the same sort of goods in the same general locality, that laborers discharged from one establishment shall not be hired in any of the rest; and that if the general voice call for a "shut down," or for three-fourths time or less, all in that line of goods shall comply. How can laborers be blamed for organizations in their own behalf when they find themselves confronted as individuals with an organization of employers?

Then, too, it must be acknowledged, that, had it not been for united action of some sort on the part of the laborers, the unreasonable hours of fifty years ago in mills and factories would probably not have been shortened to this day. Capitalists as a class are conservative of methods, as well as of ends. The cotton and woollen manufacturers of Berkshire County, for example, who may doubtless be taken as a fair sample of the manufacturers of New England, stiffly refused the demands of their work-people that the hours might be reduced from an average of 14 throughout the year to an average of 11. When the late Civil War was going on, and the manufacturing became extremely profitable, and the mills were more or less depleted by enlistment, and the remaining hands felt more independent from the consequent rise of wages, the combined demand in one mill for fewer hours was reinforced by simultaneous demands for the same in other mills in the neighborhood (the time and manner having been agreed upon beforehand), and visits in force by the work-people from mill to mill completed the desired reform. The mill-owners were sullen and indignant, and submitted of necessity. The work-men were right. The reform was imperative. Credit must be given to them for the good they have done acting as a body on this and other occasions.

On the other hand, all this is not business. All this is contrary to the very old, and the very good adage, that it takes two to make a bargain. If we express this adage in the language of our science, it will take some such form as this: When two men have mutual services to exchange, let them come to a fair agreement as to the terms on which they will exchange. Certainly, let each make the best terms he can, but let the bargain always be free. If one party, who happens to have the power to do it, uses anything like compulsion upon the other, it ceases so far forth to be a bargain at all, and becomes a sort of robbery, of which in some cases courts will take cognizance. Now, workmen bring a certain valuable service to the market, just such a service as the capitalist wants, and he has to offer just such a service as they want, namely, wages: let the two parties come to a free and fair agreement on the terms of their exchange; let each workman by all means make the very best terms he can, insisting to the last penny on all he can get elsewhere, for the value of his service is determined, as other values are determined, by what it will bring: let the employer do just the same on his side, and so let a fair bargain for the time present be struck. This is a very good kind of striking, and the more intelligence and skill and self-respect a workman has, the better prepared he is to strike the bargain and secure his just due by and for himself alone; and this gives a good chance for every man who has any peculiar gift, who may have surpassed his fellows in diligence and skill, to secure a proportionate reward now and to go on higher in future; all this gives opportunity for diversity of relative advantage, which, as we have seen, lies at the basis of all exchange, which itself starts in individualism and naturally proceeds in a still higher individualism to the end. This is the only way for a laborer of talent and diligence to secure fully what belongs to him as a man and a workman. If he cannot get from a given employer what he thinks he ought to get, what he thinks the service is worth in another market, let him exercise his perfect right to quit and go elsewhere. All this is fair and aboveboard and individual and progressive.

Everybody knows that there is a kind of striking now in vogue wholly different from this, in that it brings a sort of compulsion into play. A fair bargain should be broken, if at all, just as it was made, with the two parties face to face, and everybody else aloof; and a new bargain should be made, just as the old one was, with the two parties face to face, and everybody else aloof. But a combination among workmen to leave an employer in the lurch, and especially a combination which forces into its ranks by cajoling or menaces those who are unwilling to join it, as is so commonly the case in Strikes, is not only contrary to the inmost nature of a bargain, but is also of itself a sort of confession of the injustice of the claim. If the claim be just so far as all the individuals are concerned, there is no occasion to extort it. If the value of the service rendered by each be equal to the sum demanded, and especially if this can be obtained elsewhere, which is the only gauge of the value of any service anywhere, there is no need of conference and combination and conspiracy. Of course, this radical argument against Strikes implies that employers of that grade have not entered into a combination not to hire dissatisfied laborers from other establishments; if they have, then the agreement can be turned with equal force against the employers themselves, for they are resorting to means outside the nature of a bargain, means of the same nature as a Strike. Let, then, each workman tell his employer the present facts just as they are, and if this appeal prove ineffective to secure his commercial right, let him go quickly where he can get the most for his service. That this is not done, that means of the nature of a threat are brought to bear upon the employer, that the justice of the claim is not relied on in a case where more than anywhere else justice can enforce itself, that free and full explanations are not had, that no notice is given, that great damage is expected by their action to accrue to the employer,—all this seems to forget that the transaction between employers and employed is a case of pure exchange, a simple bargain of one service against another service.

The above is the universal and fundamental objection to Strikes. The remedy for economical evils, real or supposed, must ever be found in economical considerations. The strong but foolish tendency of the times is to mix up things that are quite distinct; to try to apply to the evils of Trade the rules of Morals, which is a useless task; to appeal to Politics in matters of pure Bargain; and to resort to Force to cure the evils that flow from the wholly voluntary action of individuals. This is like the doctor who would cure bodily ailments by mental and spiritual recipes. It has all the absurdities of the late famous "Mind-cure." The mind is indeed higher than the body, but bodily maladies must be treated as such, or the patient will die; the imperatives of Ethics are certainly superior to the profitables of Economics, but the latter are well able to take care of themselves on their own ground; Religion is loftier than Morals, but it becomes a very poor substitute for morals in the daily routine of life. Similia similibus curantur. Economical evils can only be removed by a better Economics better applied. Strikes are an outside and irrelevant remedy for low Wages.

A bad principle works badly in practice of course; the principle that underlies strikes is so opposed to the fundamental nature of exchange, that we might know beforehand that it would work badly; and as a matter of fact, it does work badly enough both upon employers and employed, because strikes are certain to embitter the relations between the two classes, which ought always to be cordial and free, and especially, because strikes must work on the minds of the capitalist to lessen the Wages-Portion for the next industrial cycle. Fortunately, we possess authentic statistics gathered about Strikes by the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, and published in detail in the Report of December, 1888. The information given is exact in relation to five principal States, and approximate in relation to the other parts of the United States. We will copy first the table exhibiting the Losses in six years on account of Strikes of both Employers and Employees, and the outside assistance received by the latter:—

Employees' Loss and Assistance and Employers' Loss in the Five Principal States on Account of Strikes and Lock-outs for 1881-1886.

The large percentage of establishments represented in this table, in which the strikes were ordered by labor-organizations, is particularly noticeable. In New York 94.26% of the establishments had strikes which were ordered, in Illinois 83.96%, in Massachusetts 81.91%, and in the United States 82.24%. The "walking-delegate" so-called became the principal personage in all these strikes; he brought the orders to the men from the "central-union" of their special organization, and became in most cases the sole means of communication between the two. "You are the strike," exclaimed the Lord Mayor of London the other day to Mr. Burns, the walking delegate of the dock-laborers now on strike in that city. That the daily bread and home comforts of tens of thousands of men depend on the secret and irresponsible decision of a little knot of agitators, sending out their verbal and often ambiguous written orders by a walking-delegate or two, is one of the monstrosities of Strikes often witnessed in the United States. The laborers sometimes do not know even the causes of the strike. There has been great want and suffering for three months past among the striking coal-miners in the State of Illinois; and a brief editorial in the "Springfield Republican" of Aug. 24, 1889, describes the state of things so justly, that we quote it:—

"Ex-Congressman William L. Scott, who owns coal mines at Spring Valley, Ill., has offered to pay 75 cents a ton for mining to the strikers who in their destitution have been subsisting for some time on public charity. This is 2½ cents a ton more than the miners have asked for, but it is coupled with the condition that each man must seek work individually and not through some outside union committee. Although the men have been reduced to a state of abject want it is said the conditions imposed will prevent a settlement. In that case we may conclude that a few well-fed walking delegates are acting for the men and not they for themselves. It is a strange time to quibble over such a matter. The worst and most oppressive enemy of labor is the parasite who lives upon its distresses."

A strike is a state of war, and like war, there are two parties to it, and it cannot be expected that the party of the other part should not strike back. The "lock-out" is the counter-stroke of the capitalist to the "strike" of the laborer. Lock-outs, however, are comparatively infrequent. Capitalists, as a rule, are conservative and forbearing. Massachusetts took the statistics of lock-outs as carefully as those of strikes, and the following is the table:—

Like war too, strikes and lock-outs are wasteful and demoralizing to both parties. Why should there be a resort to force to settle an industrial dispute any more than to settle any other private dispute? Will such a resort be long tolerated by public opinion in civilized countries? The Legislature of Massachusetts in 1886 provided for a State Board of Arbitration for the settlement of differences between employers and employees. The statute was crude in some respects, and the basis of it not very firmly fixed in the nature of things, but the Bureau of Labor reports that it has been justified by the results in its practical application during the short time of its operation. The broad truth is, that the value of Commodities and the value of Credits is now left to the safe action of Demand and Supply under free competition in every country in Christendom: why should not the value of Services be left to the same safe and inexorable action? Governments gave up long ago all idea of regulating directly or indirectly the prices of merchandise and the prices of commercial claims of all kinds: will they not shortly give up also all idea of regulating directly or indirectly the rates of Wages? They will. The three kinds of things bought and sold are on an exact level in the nature of things, so far as Government is concerned. Wages are abundantly able to take care of themselves in the ordinary way, as goods do, and stocks and bonds; and an enlightened Public Opinion is fast coming to see, that a man's personal service rendered needs no more the oversight of the State in its sale than his horse, or note of hand at interest. Strikes, and lock-outs, and all extraordinary courts or boards to settle quarrels between a labor-giver and a labor-taker as such, since it is a case of ordinary buying and selling, are foredoomed to pass out in the good time coming.

Towards this good end works strongly the common futility of strikes and lock-outs. Carroll D. Wright, chief of the Bureau of Labor in Massachusetts, now the head of the National Bureau of Labor, in his State Report for 1880, gave a succinct account of all strikes in that State from their beginning in 1830. They were 159 in all, of which 109 were unsuccessful, 18 apparently successful, 16 compromised, 6 partly successful, and 10 "result unknown." In Great Britain during the year 1878, there occurred 277 strikes, of which 256 were failures, 17 were compromised, and only 4 were successful. The following table taken from the Massachusetts Report of 1888, gives on a broad scale the results of Strikes in the United States for six years:—

General Summary of Strikes in Five Principal States for 1881-1886.
Percentages.

* In 15 establishments the results were not ascertained.

3. The third popular remedy for low Wages, which has at least the merit of being in the line of economical considerations, as the other two are not, is "Co-operation." The interest in this proposed remedy is much less both in Europe and in the United States than formerly, owing to the failures that have mostly attended the attempts to put the scheme into practice, although there have been some remarkable successes also, particularly in England. The idea of Co-operation is this, namely, that certain laborers within given classes combine of their own accord, (1) either to purchase their necessaries in common and at wholesale, hence at cheaper rates because avoiding all profits of the middlemen; or (2), more especially to engage in the joint production of the commodities they are familiar with, the laborers furnishing the capital also from their little hoards or borrowing it on the strength of their individual or associated credit, managing the business themselves, all being co-partners, and of course all sharing pro rata the entire profits of the concern.

All this is well; and in countries where laborers have been under traditional disabilities, it may be in some cases very promotive of their self-respect, activity, frugality, and general welfare; but any one can see that no new economic principle is involved in the plan. As in all other production, so here, there must be (1) capital from some source, (2) steady and skilful labor, and (3) superintendence or management of the business. It is at the third point that schemes of co-operation have mostly broken down. The faculty of good management is rare; the organizing and executive ability needful to carry through any scheme of co-operation will not come upon call; if any of the co-operators chance to possess it, the scheme may succeed, although he who is conscious of having it will prefer to use it for his own gain in his own way, to say nothing of the practical impossibility of any man's working with the same spirit when the gain or loss is to be largely another's as when it is to be wholly his own; moreover, it has been well said, "it is impossible to hire commercial genius or the instincts of a skilful trader"; so that, while there is no trouble about the workmen uniting the character of capitalist and laborer in their own persons, and no doubt that they will work harder and more skilfully while sharing profits as well as receiving wages, it is still true, that the difficulty of securing a real "captain of industry," and thus a perfect organization and management of the whole business, puts the scheme of co-operation out of the question as a means of raising wages, or promoting the general welfare of laborers.

In this country, where there is nothing to hinder any laborer from becoming a capitalist, where the savings-banks are open to the smallest gains, where nothing is more common than for two or more workmen to organize a firm to carry on some branch of business, where most of the present capitalists proper were formerly laborers proper, and where the shares of most of the joint-stock companies are open to everybody who has the means to buy them, there is only one consideration that seems to justify any special jealousy of laborers as such towards capitalists as such; and that is the fact, that Legislation, every now and then, sometimes on a small scale and then on a gigantic one, now by means of corporate charters and then by other means more indirect and effective, does confer certain extraordinary privileges upon capitalists. So long as capitalists and laborers rest upon their natural rights and positions, neither can get any undue advantage of the other; and just so far as each recognizes their identity of economic interest and the consequent reciprocity of obligation and effort, the prosperity of each will help build up the other; but, on the other hand, so far forth as any advantages are given to capitalists by special laws, either of State or Nation, these become necessarily unjust to laborers, and ultimately also injurious to capitalists; and in this case, the laborers, seeing just what it is that hurts them, ought to combine together and to strike, not capital (their best friend), but a piece of perverted legislation (their worst enemy).