Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/807

Rh the same. When this is the case, there are three parties having distinct interests. The owner of capital must have "use"; the borrower of capital and employer of labor must have "profits"; and the laborer must have "wages." But it will answer all the purposes of this statement in this connection to assume that the owner and user of capital are one, and that the contest is between him and the laborer.

Laborers in the several departments of industry are as much competitors with one another as with other classes of society, and in some respects even more so. In connection with the class-feeling, which is apt to be engendered among the laborers of a particular department of industry, they come to regard the desired increase of their wages as the one thing needful for the prosperity and happiness of mankind. Allow that the additional wages are secured; then, with what result? Labor is a large item in production, and, when it is made more expensive, the cost of production is increased. This may or may not add to the commercial price of the product: if it does, the additional price must be paid by all who purchase for consumption; and, as about three fourths of all consumers in the civilized world are working-men dependent on their wages, they are now worse off than before, being taxed to better the condition of the favored few.

"That is not the intention," retorts Reformer; "we mean that the articles so produced shall be kept at their former price by reducing the profits of the employer." A good idea, which should teach modesty to the "money power"; but it has this drawback, namely, that, if capital in this particular industry is thus compelled to accept considerably less return than capital employed in other industries, it will desert this field of operations for some other which pays better, and the laborers who have their wages thus arbitrarily raised will reap the penalty for their ignorance of economical laws by finding themselves out of employment, or working on short time. Capital and enterprise could, under such circumstances, be retained in the business at all only by an increase in the price of the product through reduced production, increased demand, or other means, so as to pay both the increase of wages and the usual interest of capital and profit to management.

Reformer answers: "Such gain at the laborers' expense is precisely what galls; there is quite too much of it; and it should be restricted by public sentiment taking the form of law." Beware, my dear sir; that is just the way the other side used to do! Within the present century, even England has had laws on her statute-books restricting the freedom of laborers as laborers in the most arbitrary manner, because it was assumed that only employers understood the proper thing to have done, and they made the laws. This was a survival of barbarism in the interest of employers, and it can hardly be revived at this late day in the interest of employés. There may, indeed, be certain forms of restriction imposed on employers for the protection of laborers; as, for example, in relation to the unhealthy condition of shops,