Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/64

58. An Ohio judge in dissolving a combination of ice dealers ordered the reestablishment of the price charged during the preceding year.

The decision of this judge bears a close resemblance to the action of the English government as to wages immediately after the black death. The present movement toward the regulation of prices, rates and wages is distinctly a reversion to conditions preceding the nineteenth century; and the importance and extent of the movement will necessitate a thorough search for a reliable and scientific standard for the determination of fair wages and fair prices. The medievalists had a very definite conception of fair price; men of to-day are not so favored. During the middle ages these problems were solved by means of the inelastic measuring rod of status, or of class demarkation. Each class in the community had its own rather definite and customary standard of living; and the summit of personal ambition was success within a limited social and economic sphere rather than that of progress from one class to the next higher. Ambition was curbed and chastened by the great fact of birth within a given social compartment. The attempt was made so to regulate prices as to maintain class immobility. With the advent of the era of competition the rigidity of class demarkation was destroyed; and a democratic form of government resting on broad suffrage requirements makes a return improbable. The modern student or statesman instead of resting his theory of fair price upon a basis of special privilege, must place it upon the firm foundation of equality of privileges, upon the abolition of artificial and inherited inequalities. This return to medievalism does not mean a return to artificial and unyielding class demarkations. Society is moving toward a point farther up on the spiral of history. The return to medievalism does mean the elimination of forced and monopoly gains; and is a natural and inevitable product of the progress toward democracy.

If the cornerstone upon which medieval writers based their doctrines regarding fair price has been removed by the increasing power of the non-privileged class; what is left upon which to build a new and democratic doctrine of fair price? In the modern formulation of the doctrine, a fair price for an article or a service is one which will give to the workers who have any useful part in getting the article into the hands of the final consumer, whether that part be in obtaining the raw material, transforming or exchanging these materials, a "fair wage." A fair price will also give to capital a "reasonable rate" of interest, and to the entrepreneur or manager—the man whose genius guides and directs the business—such a return as will keep him in the business and will call forth his best efforts. A fair price does not contain elements which go to make up monopoly profits, or to reward the efforts of unnecessary workers in the complex system of modern industry. This is the basic principle upon which the new economic edifice must be anchored. Competition has led to combination, and combination to