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124 made effective. These range from legislation relating to the conditions for work, as in the matter of railway labor, to limitations upon output, upon the number of men who may work in a trade, and the kind of work that they may do and may not do. All of these things are impediments to the natural operation of the law of supply and demand and therefore are bad. The harassed manufacturer who determines to operate henceforth an open shop, or none at all, generally does so in order to become free to conduct his business without insolent and ignorant dictation, not to pare wages, for he will be constrained to pay the market rate anyhow. This brings us to the most serious objection of all against labor unionism, viz. that it promotes slackness in work. That such has happened is certain. For example, we know that west of the Alleghanies building construction is done now at much lower cost with non-union men than with union men, both getting the same wages per hour. We know that non-union men there lay now as many bricks per hour as in pre-war times which union bricklayers refuse todo. We know therefore that inefficiency in this respect is due wholly to slackness and not to physical impairment. Henry Ford, that great manufacturer, recently declared that unionism expressed itself in the promotion of loafing.

The world is still in the throes of economic readjustment following the greatest cataclysm of history. America is enmeshed in this like all the rest of the world, though not so acutely as Europe. The readjustment is far from being completed. I doubt if it has scarcely more than begun and I expect that it will have many years to run. It may be prolonged by the erection of more economic impediments, stupidly conceived as