Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/260

248 perceiving the absurdity into which they fall by the concession. Logically, we say that if one can earn a dollar in one hour, he can earn the same the next hour, and the next, and so on to the limit of his endurance. But, if we begin at the other end of the line of argument, and say that one can do as much and get as much pay in ten hours as in twelve, and then say that he can get as much pay in eight as in twelve, and then again as much in six, there is no logical stop anywhere till the bottom is reached. The stubborn fact of time is kicked out of the back door. It is the same as saying that a man works six hours, earns three dollars, and then works six more at the same work for nothing; while the same persons who say it have to admit that, if the man worked six hours in one day and six hours the next day, he would get as much pay for the second six as for the first six. Time is too tough a customer to be disposed of in that manner, and we must deal with him as a fact that has come to stay.

I think the most stupid are now able to see that one's ability to provide for his wants depends primarily upon his labor, and that time is a principal element in the case. He must have it and he must use it, and his prosperity, other things being equal, will be much or little as time is wisely used or neglected. The law of prosperity has not been repealed by any of the edicts of the leagues and unions. Not a fact or principle has been abolished or suspended. An hour lost is the loss of the product of labor that might have been performed in that hour, and it falls on the man who owned the hour, and not on another man or set of men. He does not escape his loss by the absurd theory that he lost it after four o'clock of Monday, instead of before ten Tuesday morning. It is an absolute loss, whatever the day when it was made. If the man worked for himself, as the saying is, he would see it was a total loss and nothing else; but, working for another, he fancies the other man is the loser, or else, by some hocus-pocus, it is shifted upon society. If men worked by the piece they would see how it is. Let two men start together in life as shoemakers, with a view to do their best in getting on in the world, as Henry Wilson did sixty years ago. They are equal in skill and endurance, and can work twelve hours at a fair stroke without impairing health. Working by the piece, they find they can earn sixteen and two thirds cents per hour, or at the rate of two dollars a day. There is no difference between them in purpose, and only the small difference in the method of getting on, that James thinks he will sooner get in comfortable circumstances by working twelve hours a day, and John imagines that nine hours will answer the purpose just as well. At the end of the year of three hundred days they find that James has earned six hundred dollars, and John has earned but four hundred and fifty dollars.