Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/378

 apply it to some of the projects of the labor-reformers, using all candor and honesty. As I understand it, the trades-unions are conducted, so far as the members find it possible to conduct them, upon a theory exactly opposite to the universally recognized law of success. They make a regulation that no master-workman shall have more than a given number of apprentices. They say that no man shall work before a certain hour in the morning and after a certain hour in the evening. They provide that no man shall work for another who has treated a particular workman in a way not approved by the union. They require that, when one can not get a given price for labor, he shall cease work and remain idle. In some cases they contend that a good and specially effective hand shall have no better wages than an inferior and less effective one; and practically they strive to place a limit to the power of the community to provide for its support and comfort. The right to do all this I do not intend to discuss, but only its wisdom. Is it in the line of the conditions of success as we know them?

What makes a prosperous farmer? The answer is, industry, knowledge, adaptation of means to ends in such a way that the greatest crops shall be raised from the fewest acres. What makes a prosperous town or village? Evidently the development and judicious application of its forces to production in all departments. If we see a township with a hundred farms, and each farmer managing so that he secures only eight tons of hay from twelve acres, we shall find scraggy and lean cattle, small, inconvenient buildings, poor fences, and all the signs of unthrift, dilapidation, poverty, and decay. There is no doubt about it. Compare such a town with an adjoining one where by intelligence and active industry the farmers get twenty-five tons of hay from twelve acres. In the latter town will be found double the number of cattle, and more than double the number of the conveniences and comforts of life. The difference between two such towns is in what is termed accomplishment. That is to say, one town has shown what the result is from limiting its productions to less than one ton of grass per acre, and the other has shown how the face of things appears where all hands have tried to get two tons of grass per acre.

Now the same general result would follow were the main pursuit of the population mechanical instead of agricultural. Start the shoe business in two towns side by side, making the hours of labor six in one and twelve in the other, and in twenty-five years the latter town will be able to buy the former out four or five times. This, because the capital saved in the several years will have been earning all the time, while the other town will have used up all its earnings from year to year, and will stand at