Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/808

790 too long hours, the employment of children, etc. But these are general rules, which do not touch the right of enterprise to select its field, and, under freedom of competition, to make the most of it. Restriction within limits may be even demanded by economics as well as by humanity; but here the limits are of importance to the last degree, since disregard of them may destroy individualism and land us in state communism.

If force could be used to compel capital under some rule to surrender all or most of its gains to laborers, it would remove to a great extent the motive for saving and the incentive to enterprise, and prevent the opening of new fields for the employment of new hands, ever asking for something to do. Hoarding would take the place of investment. Wealth would still be desired for use, but not for business; and the currents along the old channels would become sluggish, and, with failure to invest for profit, would come the falling off of means for use. This is substantially what takes place during periods of great commercial depression, when loss of confidence and fear of extending credits temporarily deprive capital of its active functions, and throw labor out of employment. It is furthermore substantially the condition of things under Eastern despots, where property is not protected from spoliation, and there is, consequently, little saved for the assistance of labor, which has, in consequence, to be done at a disadvantage, and all the people are hopelessly poor.

Employers are not absolute arbiters of fate, and can not make a remunerating profit with the cost of production and the state of the market against them. Should the outlay for wages in any department of industry be so great that its products could only be sold as a loss, managers must contract operations or stop altogether, when the laborer becomes the direct and principal sufferer; and thus it is shown how easy it would be for him, if he had his own way, to destroy the industry on which he depends for support. Most laborers in the present state of their education are not a whit wiser than this implies, though some of them happily are. It is stated that committees of working-men, appointed to confer with their employers, have been known even to refuse the highest wages it would have been possible to exact, lest their product should be so weighted with cost of production as to place it at a disadvantage in the markets, and thus cripple their industry, and in the end do them more harm than good. There are few such working-men, however, and it is to be feared that they are little on the increase in number and influence. Mr. Gregg affirms (1879) that "never during the experience of a generation and a half can I remember to have seen the artisans throughout the length and breadth of the land acting so entirely in defiance of common sense and right feeling, and with so total a disregard of plain and repeated warning" ("Nineteenth Century").

"Oh," interrupts Reformer, "you are running on at a great rate,