Page:Traveler from Altruria, Howells, 1894.djvu/60

54 the strikes are concerned, but I don't understand that the abolition of the unions would affect the impersonal process of laying-off. The law of demand and supply I respect as much as any one—it's something like the constitution; but all the same I should object extremely to have my income stopped by it every now and then. I'm probably not so wasteful as a workingman generally is; still I haven't laid by enough to make it a matter of indifference to me whether my income went on or not. Perhaps the professor has." The professor did not say, and we all took leave to laugh. The lawyer concluded, "I don't see how those fellows stand it."

"They don't, all of them," said the doctor. "Or their wives and children don't. Some of them die."

"I wonder," the lawyer pursued, "what has become of the good old American fact that there is always work for those who are willing to work? I notice that wherever five thousand men strike in the forenoon, there are five thousand men to take their places in the afternoon—and not men who are turning their hands to something new, but men who are used to doing the very thing the strikers have done."

"That is one of the things that teach the futility