Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/379

Rh the end of twenty-five years at the same point whence it started. In other words, limitation and curtailment of resources inevitably tend to poverty, and development and use of resources surely tend to prosperity and comfort. The limitations of the unions, all of them, are on the line of non-accomplishment, and are avowedly designed to hinder or check production. They are adopted on the theory that with less production wages will rise, and in the rise of wages the laborer will receive as much compensation for one day's labor as he otherwise would for two days' labor.

Under certain contingencies, and for a time as to some individuals, that may happen. In a temporary glut of the market, curtailment of production is found to be a remedy, or a partial one, for unduly low prices, but even then the laborer has to lose all of the time needed to free the market from the excess of goods. Labor as a whole gains nothing, but loses. The farmers who raise only half a crop to the acre do not find in the long run that they get as much money as their neighbors who raise a full crop, notwithstanding there are short periods when hay which ordinarily fetches twelve dollars per ton will bring twenty-five dollars. Nobody has ever seen a half-crop farmer permanently prosperous out of the resources of his farm, and nobody has seen general prosperity when half the laboring population was idle, or when the whole laboring population was idle half the time. It is impossible in the nature of things, because the rewards of labor all come from the productions of labor, and when less is produced there must necessarily be less to divide. The price of a ton of hay in the market may go up from ten dollars to twenty, but the laws of production and labor are not cheated, nevertheless; for the way has not yet been discovered by which the one ton will sustain the life of the ox and the horse as long as the two tons will; and in spite of the double price the reduction in quantity is a dead loss to somebody, and in the end comes out of the consumers of meat, who are all taxed in higher prices they have to pay.

The direct effect of less labor is fewer articles for use, comfort, and luxury. This is the avowed purpose of the unions in trying to compel all laborers to agree to a limit for the hours of labor. They propose to sustain prices by creating comparative scarcity of goods, and claim that thereby they can secure as many comforts as before with shorter hours of work. But how? If they work enough faster, so as to make as many goods in six hours as they before made in ten, they would save in hours, it is true, and get as many goods. But this is not the aim. No scarcity would be attained in that way, and consequently prices would not be raised; and the conditions of poverty and prosperity would remain precisely as they were. It would be simply a question whether it is better on the whole to work leisurely or in a hurry, and unions