Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/252

 60 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.

some dream of doing, would be to enthrall men in a caste system.

Or take even such moderate measures as the limitation of working-hours and of the labor of women and chil- dren. They are superficial in looking no further than to the eagerness of men and women and little children to work unduly, and in proposing forcibly to restrain over- work while utterly ignoring its cause the sting of poverty that forces human beings to it. And the methods by which these restraints must be enforced, multiply officials, interfere with personal liberty, tend to corruption, and are liable to abuse.

As for thoroughgoing socialism, which is the more to be honored as having the courage of its convictions, it would carry these vices to full expression. Jumping to conclusions without effort to discover causes, it fails to see that oppression does not come from the nature of capital, but from the wrong that robs labor of capital by divorcing it from land, and that creates a fictitious capi- tal that is really capitalized monopoly. It fails to see that it would be impossible for capital to oppress labor were labor free to the natural material of production; that the wage system in itself springs from mutual con- venience, being a form of cooperation in which one of the parties prefers a certain to a contingent result ; and that what it calls the "iron law of wages" is not the natural law of wages, but only the law of wages in that unnatural condition in which men are made helpless by being deprived of the materials for life and work. It fails to see that what it mistakes for the evils of competi- tion are really the evils of restricted competition are due to a one-sided competition to which men are forced when deprived of land. While its methods, the organiza- tion of men into industrial armies, the direction and control of all production and exchange by governmental

�� �