Page:Challenge of Facts and Other Essays.djvu/141

122 large quotas of the existing stock of subsistence in return for a day's time spent in supplying the thing which is in demand and without which the other conditions of abundance and prosperity cannot be made available.

With this observation we strike out and lay aside nearly all the so-called labor question, and nearly all the mystery of the alleged conflict of labor and capital. The conjuncture is in favor of the laborer, technically so-called; accordingly he can, to a great degree, have his own way with the other parties in the market.

We have not, however, developed our proposition merely for the sake of this negative and controversial result. On the contrary, its importance lies in the deduction yet to be made of the sense and significance of a state of the labor market, continuing for centuries, in which the conjuncture is in favor of the unskilled laborers. Such has been the case, if we take the terms of the proposition in their broadest and most liberal sense, since the great discoveries of the sixteenth century which opened the outlying continents to the masses of the population of Europe.

Whenever a period in which men are in demand supervenes upon a period in which they have been present in excess, the struggle for existence is softened. The disregard of human life and human suffering gives place to the contrary sentiments. It might seem to be logical that when all were suffering, all would sympathize with each other and that when many were well off, they would become inwrapped in selfish indifference to the few who, by exception, were suffering; but this is one of the cases, of which there are so many in social science, in which observation corrects the easy inference. It warns us again that what seems a simple and easy deduction is not even presumptively true. It is when