CHAPTER III.

PERSONAL SERVICES.

There are three kinds of things only ever bought and sold in this good

world of ours. In the preceding chapter we have conned carefully the

first kind, material commodities, in their three subdivisions of

land-parcels and products of such parcels and products of free land

and sea. In the present chapter we come to study the second kind of

valuable things, personal services, which we shall also find

subdivisible into three classes. We have treated of Commodities first,

because their value in its grounds and changes is more easily

understood than that of the other two kinds, while in point of _time_

Services might well enough have been considered first, since it is

these that manipulate into value the originally rude forms of Nature.

The main difference between the two is this: in Commodities the

attention is naturally drawn to tangible _things_ offered for sale,

such as lands and wheat and fish; while in Services the attention is

strongly drawn to _persons_ offering them for sale, such as the common

laborer and the skilled artisan and the professional artist. This

distinction, though obvious and useful as between commodities and

services, is not after all radical; because Economics is a science of

Persons from beginning to end; inasmuch as the services precede and

are merged in the commodities, and inasmuch as the Desires (personal)

of some men for the renderings of other men antedate and underlie all

exchanges whatsoever.

Personal Services are technically named _Labor_ in the science of

Political Economy. This nomenclature is old and familiar, and will

probably always persist on that account, but it is not of itself of

the happiest, and it gives birth to some ambiguities and many

fallacies. Let us look at these for a moment, before we pass to the

definition and discussion of what is commonly called Labor, but what

is better described by the term, Personal Services.

Contrast will help us a little here. Commodities can always be

measured by some _Standard_ outside of themselves: for example,

land-parcels are measured into acres and fractions thereof by a

surveyor's compass and chain; metals and cereals are weighed into

centners and parts thereof by scales of some sort; and sugar is not

only weighed at the custom-house, but tested as to other qualities by

the polariscope. Now land, wheat, sugar, and all other commodities,

have an existence separate from the standards that measure them, and

whether they are bought or not they continue for a time essentially

the same. They exist _per se_. They were indeed brought into existence

on purpose to be sold, and if they cannot be sold, similar things

additional will not then and there be brought into the market, but

these things themselves are there separate from the seller and

separate from the buyer. Not so with personal services. They do not

exist _per se_. They are not separate from the seller, and they cannot

come into existence without a buyer. _Skill_ is something the artisan

cannot part with, nor can he sell the service to which the skill gives

rise till the buyer be present with the return-service in his hands.

The Laborer of any class cannot put his "service" on exhibition, and

then wait for a buyer, as the commercial drummer sells goods by

sample. The doctor, for example, must have his _patient_ before he can

show his skill. The buying and selling of personal services,

accordingly, is more intimate and ultimate than the buying and selling

of commodities: it brings people more closely together: it depends

much more on traits of _character_ and on acquired _skill_.

Right here we may see clearly the main objection to the term, "Labor,"

as commonly used, and the bad fallacy to which it gives birth. "Labor"

is indeed in form and origin an _abstract_ term as much as "service"

is, with this difference, that the word "service" radically implies

the person serving and another person served at the same instant; but

the term "Labor" has long been taking on itself in the mouths of men a

_concrete_ meaning, as if it might be something separate from the

laborers, as in the common phrase "Labor and Capital," which has

already done a world of mischief and is likely to do a good deal more,

because it seems to imply, that the two are alike in independent

self-existence, and that they stand over against each other on equal

terms for a fair bargain or for a free fight. This is not the case, as

we shall see more fully later; since capital is something separable

from the capitalist, always a commodity or a claim, always

transferable, always valuable or else it will not be "Capital." Some

of the German economists, and particularly John Conrad of Halle, have

avoided this difficulty by a clean nomenclature. They say

"_Labor-givers_" and "_Labor-takers_," instead of Laborers and

Capitalists, and especially instead of "Labor and Capital," thus

emphasizing the personal element in both terms, and also leaving

themselves free to define and use the term "Capital" as distinct from

any particular capitalist, while the term "Labor" cannot be defined

and used as distinct from any given laborer. This precise point,

though probably new, is of very considerable consequence in the true

doctrine of Wages.

We are compelled by the exigencies of the English language and the

still stronger fetters of economical custom to continue to use the

terms "Labor" and "Laborers" in their technical sense, and in

connection with the scientific terms "Capital" and "Capitalist"; but

we shall always use each of these words in the same meaning, and free

them as far as possible from the fungous accretions that have fastened

upon them in the course of time.

_Personal effort of any kind put forth for another in view of a

return-service and for the sake of it is labor._

_Laborers are persons rendering their peculiar services to other

persons for a commercial reward._

_The valuable received by a laborer for his service rendered is

Wages._

These definitions exclude from our circle of view all Efforts of

anybody put forth for other than commercial reasons; and they include

all Efforts of everybody, from the President to the scrub, put forth

under the inducement of a return-service or Wages. No good end seems

to be reached by trying to distinguish, as Francis Walker does in his

"Wages-Question," between the "Wages-class" and the "Salary-class,"

because there appears to be no scientific or other economical

difference between Wages and Salary. Each is a return-service for

another service rendered, and that is all there is to it. The whole

class of Laborers, accordingly, in any civilized and progressive

country, is immensely large and becoming constantly larger. Excluding,

of course, from this class all persons in so far as they render

so-called moral services to others, which are in their very nature

_free_, such as those that spring from duty and courtesy and

benevolence, and these happily are also an immense and fast-augmenting

class, though our Science has nothing to do with them directly, the

number of those persons in every community and in every rank of every

community, who sell personal services of some sort in distinction

from commodities and credits, is pretty nearly as large as the _per

capita_ population of adults and competents within that circuit. It

must be borne in mind, that the same persons whose primary business it

may be to sell commodities or credits, often sell services also in

some subordinate or incidental way; and also, that the same persons,

who are dispensing on the one hand their gifts and moral renderings

freely, are frequently of the busiest in selling on the other hand

their personal services for pay. In other words, the sellers of

Services cannot be discriminated _as to their persons_ from other

sellers, or even from downright _givers_; but the _action_ itself, and

the law of it, is quite distinct in the three cases of selling, and

utterly diverse in the one case of giving.

Now, can we sub-classify within this vast class of service-sellers, so

as to help us understand better the class as a whole, and so

especially as to help us understand better the Law of Wages within the

entire class? We have just criticised Walker in a friendly spirit for

attempting to draw lines of demarcation within this wide field: can we

draw any useful ones ourselves less open to criticism than his, and

such as rest back upon fair differences in nature and form? Walker

makes his distinctions turn on certain peculiarities in the

return-services: can we make ours turn better and clearer on certain

peculiarities in the services themselves? We can at least try. Hard

and fast lines cannot be drawn here, we admit. The exterior lines

around Commodities and around Services and around Credits are each

sharp and firm; and so is the deep-fixed circle that includes all

three of these alike as Valuables; but _within_ the smaller circles

the lines of needful division are somewhat more shadowy, though we

leave with confidence to competent Economists the triple lines but

just now drawn within the sphere of material Commodities.

A rude classification among "Laborers," then, yet one useful and

indeed indispensable, may be made into (1) Common Laborers, (2)

Skilled Laborers, and (3) Professional Laborers.

Common Laborers are those, whose services may be acceptably rendered

by an ordinarily competent person after a little patient practice and

instruction, without anything corresponding to an _apprenticeship_ as

a preliminary to their selling their service. Farm hands, teamsters,

porters, waiters, miners, 'longshoremen, railroad laborers, and many

more belong to this first class. Owing to the ease with which this

class can be recruited at any time from growing boys and emigrating

foreigners and from those who may have essayed the class above and

fallen back, the Supply here is kept constantly large relatively to

the Demand for such services, and consequently Wages are always the

lowest and steadiest in this lowest class of Laborers.

Skilled Laborers are those, who have had to pass through something

equivalent to an apprenticeship in order to be able to offer their

services for sale. These, as a class, present some considerable points

of difference from common laborers. Their numbers are fewer, for the

reason, that relatively few parents can afford to give their children

the time and money needful for them to learn a trade, or to become

skilful in any art requiring prolonged education; as a result of this

lessened press of competition among themselves, and because being

intelligent and consequently mobile they are able to insist better on

their claims and distribute themselves to points where their services

are in more demand; and because they are likely to be subject to a

stronger Demand than common laborers, on account of the close

connection of their services with special accumulations of Capital;

the Wages of skilled laborers will infallibly rule higher than those

of common laborers. Artisans in general constitute this second class

of laborers.

Professional Laborers are those, who have received a technical

education,--something more than an apprenticeship,--expressly to fit

them to render difficult and delicate services to their fellow-men for

pay, and who possess besides the requisite character and talents and

genius to enable them to succeed. Clergymen, physicians, lawyers,

literary men, artists, actors, and many more, render professional

services loosely so-called. The obstacles at the entrance of this path

occasioned by the lack (1) of appropriate natural gifts, or (2) of the

requisite industry and character, or (3) of the means of suitable

education and training, practically exclude so many persons, that the

competition in the higher walks of professional life is not such as to

prevent a very large remuneration for services rendered. The demand

for these is often peculiarly intense, as well as the supply

peculiarly limited. When great interests of property, of reputation,

of life, are at stake, it is felt that the best men to secure these

must be had at almost any price. Fees and rewards for services of

great delicacy, of great difficulty, of great danger, are paid by

individuals and corporations and nations without grudging.

Comparatively few men reach the highest points of excellence in their

respective professions, and they have in consequence a natural

monopoly in these fields of effort, and receive for their labor a very

high rate of Wages. For example, Daniel Webster often took a fee of

$1000 for a single plea in court; Paganini, a like sum for an hour's

playing on a violin; and Jenny Lind, at least as much for an evening's

singing in a concert, because there was in each case a strong demand

for a peculiar service and only one person in the world who could

render that service in the circumstances to the same perfection. But

the objections which lie with such force against artificial

monopolies, cannot be urged at all against a natural monopoly; for, if

the road to excellence be open to all, and no artificial obstructions

thrown in the way of any, there is no blame but rather praise for him

who distances all competitors, and asks and receives for services of

peculiar excellence a large remuneration. Exchange rejoices in all

diversities of advantage that are the birth of freedom, but reprobates

with all her force advantage that is gained by artificial

restrictions, because artificial restrictions always infringe on

somebody's right to render services for a return; and the right to

render services for a return is the fundamental conception in the

Right of Property.

Is it open for us, to gain a somewhat deeper and clearer sense of

_what that is exactly_ that is rendered in these three classes of

personal Services, before we pass to the considerations which

determine in all cases their Value? It is plain, that what common

Laborers sell for the most part, if not exclusively, is _muscular

exertion_ of some kind, guided by the mind as trained in habit, and

aided by appropriate implements, all designed to meet the desire and

so call forth the return-service of the purchaser; it is equally

plain, that skilled Laborers with scarcely any more exceptions than

before sell the same sort of physical exertions, or motions, this time

guided by mental action of a higher grade and wider scope, and aided

also by more elaborate tools working towards the desires and

consequent returns of a set of buyers more scrupulous and exacting

than the first set; and it is plain enough, that some of the highest

professional services, for instance the surgeon's, though not by any

means the mass of such services, are essentially of the same kind as

the two former, namely, muscular motions, guided by the most intimate

and exact knowledge of things, and aided too by instruments the most

scientific and expensive. In many of the professional services the

physical element sinks to a minimum, while the intellectual and moral

factors come to the front and take up the chief attention; it will be

found, however, that the physical factor is always present in some

degree, as, for example, in the counsel's plea before the court, and

in the physician's visit on his patient; and in almost all cases, if

not in all, some implement or other plays its part in the process of

professional service before it ends, as Cicero used a pitch-pipe or

tuning-fork to gauge his voice in his great pleas for Roman clients.

Precisely what is rendered, then, in all cases of Personal Services in

each of their three loose kinds, is _muscular motion conjoined with

mental effort and both these assisted by habit and by some form of

what we call Capital_. The Services are therefore _Personal_ in the

highest sense. The Mind and Body of the Laborer conspire to render

them. The most sagacious animal can never be trained to render one of

them. They are wholly _human_. Nevertheless the muscular part in the

rendering--motion and resistance to motion--is just what tools and

machinery can be made to take the place of in large measure but never

in whole measure, because tools may not be taught _to think_. It may

seem sometimes as if machinery were about to take the place of human

hands in some classes of Production; but it will be found in the

ultimate issue, as it has been found in every stage of the process,

that human hands and human minds in action are absolutely essential at

every point of the Exchanges among men. Men are so made and Society is

so organized, that they need increasingly for their comfort and

progress the personal services of their fellow-men, and can render

their own in exchange for these; and consequently, there never can

fail (under freedom) a MARKET for Personal Services of the three

kinds.

Having now seen as closely as possible what that is which is rendered

in personal services, let us pass to the principles which determine

their remuneration. That is, we will now inquire carefully into the

Value of personal services. We have learned already, that Demand and

Supply in their action and reaction upon each other determine in all

cases the value of Commodities for the time being; and we shall find

it to be equally the dictate of all reason, and the outcome of all

experience, that Demand and Supply decide too in all cases on the

value of all Services and all Credits then and there. Shall we look

first at the considerations that issue in the Demand for personal

services, and then at those other considerations that limit the Supply

of them?

1. Demand is never the mere desire for anything, but desire coupled

with the ability to pay for it at rates satisfactory to the present

holder. The Demand for Services, therefore, is made by the prospective

purchasers of them; and the purchasers, of course, are those who

desire them and are willing to pay for them at current rates. It will

be easiest and surest for us to study the Demand for Services in each

of the three classes of them in succession.

(1) The Demand for Common Laborers has several points of difference

from that for Skilled, and from that for Professional, Laborers. It is

scarcely ever intense. It is mostly disconnected from large

accumulations of Capital. The desire is usually for immediate

gratification, without any other end in view. It is frequently for

such a service, as, if a renderer may not be conveniently and cheaply

found, one is inclined to do for himself. For instances: if the barber

be not accessible and reasonable and tolerably skilful, a man will

certainly shave himself, provided he have not yet attained the

independence and the luxury of wearing a full beard; and the ordinary

housewife, if the cleanly and tractable domestic does not come into

sight, will do her own work with casual assistance. It is this

important fact, that common services among men and women in common

life may in many cases be dispensed with altogether, and in many other

cases substitutes be found for them, in connection with the other

important fact, that common laborers learn their art quickly and

easily, and consequently are present everywhere in large numbers, that

makes the Wages of such laborers uniformly low. The Demand is moderate

and the Supply is large.

(2) The Demand for Skilled Laborers is steadier and stronger than for

Common, because in general the desire for these is not for immediate

gratification, but for an ultimate satisfaction to arise from the

commercial coöperation of these laborers with their employers, who are

capitalists, in connection with accumulations of capital, the end in

view being the production of commodities for sale at a profit. Here

comes in a new motive on the part of capitalists to buy the personal

services of laborers. The motive is simple and intelligible and

commendable, but its nature and operation is popularly and grossly

misapprehended.

Capital is the result of Abstinence from the present use of a Valuable

in gratification, for the sake of a future increase of it through

Production. But Abstinence is always irksome in itself. It must have

its prospective reward in an increase, a profit, or it will never

transform itself from a mere valuable into a capitalized product. Now,

the owner of the valuable, having transformed it into capital from

this motive, is under a commercial necessity to hire laborers, in

order by their help to make his capital yield a profit. Capital lying

idle decreases in _value_ even, to say nothing of its yielding no

increase to itself; and the motive of the capital-owner, accordingly,

is strong and constant to buy the services of laborers, to marry

these services with his own capitalized products, and thus to produce

commodities for sale, whose value shall be greater than the present

value of the capital and the services combined. Here we reach in the

minds and motives of a large class of men an ultimate Demand for

laborers, and specially for skilled laborers, which is as true and

constant to its legitimate end of Profit as the needle is true and

constant to the pole.

At this point it is very evident, that, if the fair expectation of the

capitalists be realized in a steady profit, and the larger the circle

of capitalists and the more of capitalized products to each the better

for all concerned, the Demand for laborers will become steady, and

will be likely to steadily increase, because there will then be a

constant motive on the part of all capitalists as such to put back a

part or all of their yearly profits into capitalized products, and

thus the Demand for laborers will become more intense, and the rates

of Wages so far forth must be enhanced. The steady Demand for the

services of the laborers hinges upon the steady Profits of the

capitalists, and there is no antagonism between the interests of these

two classes of buyers and sellers, but rather a complete identity of

interest between them.

We are looking now solely at what constitutes the Demand for laborers

of the second class. As always, so here, there is Desire first and

then a ready Return-service. The Desire of employers of this class is

for a Profit on their capital, and the return-service for the laborers

is present as a part of these capitalized products. This part of the

capital we call Wages-Portion. It is already in hand or provided to be

in hand when the wages fall due. Of course it is expected, that the

current wages will ultimately come out of the current joint-production

of the laborers upon the capitalized products set apart for that

purpose by the capitalist. But if the profits fail to the capitalists

at the end of that industrial-cycle, whether it be two months or

twenty-four, then Desire will fail or be weakened to hire laborers for

the next cycle, and the return-services or Wages-Portion with which to

pay them for another cycle will be lessened of necessity. Both

elements in Demand are curtailed by the falling-off of Profits. There

is at the same instant less desire to buy services and less ability to

pay for them. It is of the very nature of capitalized products to wear

out in the process of production; if there be not net profits at the

end of the cycle for the capitalists, it shall go hard but there will

be less wages for the laborers during the next cycle. This is not a

matter of sentiment or of philanthropy, but of eternal law, which God

has ordained and the devices of men cannot frustrate. Capitalists and

laborers are joint partners in the same concern. Under industrial and

commercial freedom their interests are identical. Both are buyers and

sellers to each other at the same instant; and, as always when both

parties are alike benefited and satisfied with a trade, both will

cheerfully and profitably continue the connection. The Demand of each

class for the product of the other will continue unabated. Profits and

wages reciprocally beget each other.

But still it is not altogether true, what has sometimes been stated by

economists, that capitalists are under the same sort of pressure to

buy their services as the laborers are to sell them. Capital is a

Valuable already created by the mutual desires and efforts of two

persons, and is now the exclusive property of one of them, and has

also been set apart by him through an act of will to be thereafter an

aid to some future production under the motive of a new value to

accrue thereby. The capital has now become secondary to and separated

from the person who owns it. He very seldom understands the real

nature and operation of it. He commonly imparts to it in his

imagination a more substantive and persistent existence than it

actually possesses. He is frequently more or less stuck up as towards

his neighbors and employees in consequence of his possession of it.

The very fact that he has capitalized it for future operations shows

that he is independent of it as a means of present livelihood. The

personal services of the laborers, on the other hand, stand in very

different relations to _them_. Their personal services may indeed be

_valuable_, but they cannot be _capitalized_. As laborers they have

nothing else to sell. Unless they sell their services now, these have

no existence even, still less can they have any value. It is only by a

mischievous figure of speech, that the skill of laborers is sometimes

spoken of as their "Capital." Therefore, the laborers are under a

certain remote yet inherent disadvantage as sellers of their personal

services, when compared with the capitalists as buyers of them. This

disadvantage, however, though apparent in the nature of things, and

under certain circumstances disastrous to the laborers, may disappear

practically under another and natural state of things; and it is every

way to be desired by both classes alike that it should disappear in

practice.

Whenever there is a broad and constant and profitable market for all

the commodities the capitalists and the laborers can jointly

produce,--that is to say, whenever profits are steady and remunerative

and wages are high and growing in their purchasing-power,--the Demand

for skilled laborers must always be such as puts the laborers on a

footing of equality as over against the capitalists, because under

such circumstances the purchasers of services are many and eager, two

bosses will be likely to be bidding for one skilled laborer, and then

wages are always growing in dollars and each dollar growing in

effective purchasing-power.

It is of the last importance in this connection to notice, that

everything in Profits and Wages turns in the last resort upon the

breadth and freedom of MARKETS. It is out of the return-service

received from the _sale_ of the commodities produced jointly by the

capitalists and laborers, that both wages and profits must ultimately

be paid. There is no other possible source of them. When the Market

fails, everything fails that leads up to a market. Particularly fails

the Demand for laborers for the next industrial cycle, and of course

drops also the prospective wages for that cycle. The public folly and

universal loss of shutting off foreign markets for our own commodities

by lofty tariff-barriers, as has been conspicuously done by the United

States for thirty years past, follows of course from this radical

truth; and the Wages of laborers, instead of being lifted by

tariff-taxes, as has been so often falsely and wickedly asserted, are

inevitably _depressed_ by them, because they effectually forbid to

capitalists and laborers their best and freely chosen _markets_ for

the sale of their joint products.

Another vastly important matter, constantly affecting the Demand for

laborers of the second class, is the Competency or otherwise of the

practical managers of the Capital invested in industrial enterprises.

Capital cannot manage itself. It is of itself wholly inert. It is

always either a Commodity or a Credit. Conscious of their inability to

handle wisely their own bits of Capital, or else taught it through a

bitter experience, by far the larger number of individual owners of it

loan it to others to manage; they invest it in some industrial

corporation, in a bank or a mill or a railroad. Some one person, or at

least a small body of persons, must practically manage now all

specific accumulations of capital. It is they in their capacity of

manipulating-capitalists, who constitute in large measure the Demand

for laborers. But such managers, who are at once skilful and

long-headed and honest, do not grow upon a chance bush. They are rare.

Most of them in this country at least have been those, who started in

a small way in the control of their own earned or small-inherited

properties, and rose through practice and knowledge and conscience to

the ability to handle profitably to all concerned large masses of

Capital. In the hands of such men, given a tolerable chance by public

law and private circumstances, both Profits and Wages are sure to come

in satisfactorily. They are Captains of Industry. They are an honor to

human nature. They are a blessing to the whole community. They have no

need and no will to ask to be bolstered up in their business by unjust

taxes enforced upon a whole people.

Such men sometimes have sons or _protégés_, who possess similar

capacities and similar integrity, and these by experience become able

to carry on the business to similar successful issues. This is happy,

but it is unusual. More commonly, in the second, and pretty certainly

in the third, generation, the line of royal succession fails. There

comes in a lieutenant rather than a captain of Industry. Likely enough

he mistakes the nature of capital, and thinks that it will go along of

itself without that eternal vigilance that is the one price of its

maintenance and increase; likely enough he lacks the touch and rule of

men, and his laborers become demoralized and refractory; more likely

still he thinks he sees other operators around him getting quicker

rich by speculating in enterprises outside the legitimate business,

and takes some of his own and of what is not his own and throws it out

of its proper channels; and, as the result of one or all of these,

things soon go wrong, profits and wages fall off, poor work is done

and finds slow sale, and Demand for laborers (which is their

life-blood) slackens or goes out in that establishment. No wonder the

Paper-makers in their annual gathering at Saratoga of 1889, resolved

as the main outcome of their meeting, that they would bring up their

sons (or somebody's sons) to succeed them in their business by a

thorough practical training in the paper-mill itself, beginning early

and continuing long. Industrial higher education in this or some other

form is the secondary hope of manufacturing business in the United

States, the primary hope being in a decent commercial liberty to buy

their supplies and to sell their products in the best markets wherever

these are to be found.

There is one other important item that bears directly upon the Demand

for laborers of the second class, and consequently upon their Wages,

namely, the constant introduction of more and better Machinery. At

first blush it would seem, and it has often been stated so, that the

use of machinery takes just so much work from human hands, reduces by

so much the Demand for laborers, and tends to lessen by so much their

wages. All this is the opposite of the truth; but before we explain

_why_ it is the opposite of the truth, let us attend carefully to the

truth itself, as stated in 1889 by the highest living authority on

these special points, Sir Edwin Chadwick, the octogenarian pioneer in

sanitary and economic reforms. Fifty-six years ago Chadwick joined

with his colleagues of the English Factory Inspection Board in

recommending reduced hours of labor and other improvements which have

now become general in England. In a paper recently read before the

Political Economy Club, he calls attention to the greatly increased

production which follows improved machinery and shortened hours.

He says: "_Spinning machines which formerly turned 8000 in a minute,

now turn 11,000; and in Lancashire not more than half the hands are

now employed to produce the same amount with new machinery as were

employed on the machinery of 1833. As an example of the extent of

the reduction of hands by these improvements, it may be mentioned that

one large family of cotton spinners in Manchester, which 40 years

ago employed 11,000 hands, could not now muster one half that

number._ YET THE MILL POPULATION HAS INCREASED, AS WELL AS THE GENERAL

POPULATION, THE HANDS DISCHARGED BEING ABSORBED IN OTHER EMPLOYMENTS.

_At the beginning of the century the cost of spinning a pound of yarn

was a shilling. The pound of that same yarn is now spun for a

half-penny by hands earning double wages for their increased energetic

attention and skill. It is now found, however, that the strain of the

increased responsible attention cannot be so long sustained as the

slow, semi-automatic pace by the old working of the old mills with the

long hours. Hence there is a tendency to a further voluntary reduction

of the working hours in the best mills, first to nine hours. In one

mill, in which 2000 men are employed a voluntary reduction has been

effected to about eight hours with a more equable production; and I

have heard of other examples. As showing the cost of working with

inferior hands and loose regulations, a recent report from the

Manchester Chamber of Commerce states that 20s. worth of bundled

yarn may be produced at a cost of from 2d. to 3d. per pound less

in Manchester than in Bombay, notwithstanding the hours of working

are 80 hours per week, while in Manchester they are only 50. At

the present time Lancashire, with its short hours, will meet Germany

or any other country, in neutral markets, in the world. In Germany the

spinners and weavers still work 13 hours a day as they once did in

England; France has only come down to 12 hours; whereas the English

rate has long been 10 hours, and may soon be 9 or even 8. And

this reduction improves the health of the wage-workers, while the

reduced cost of production allows them higher wages; yet Germany with

its long hours and high tariff maintains a system_ OF LOW PAY, DEAR

PRODUCTION, HIGH COST OF DISTRIBUTION, AND LIMITED SALES."

The accuracy of these important statements of fact is confirmed on

every hand. Committees of British spinners and weavers have repeatedly

visited the United States, and then reported to their fellows at home,

that wages, all things considered, were equal for spinners and weavers

in Great Britain and the United States, and in some cases and respects

higher in the former. Many times before his late lamented death,

John Bright publicly testified that wages in England during his

parliamentary life had risen in general 50%, and in some of the

manufacturing lines 100%. A few months before these statements of

Chadwick were made, Sir Richard Temple reported to his section of the

British Association, "_That the average earnings per head in the United

Kingdom, taking the whole population without division into classes, is

£35, 4s., and exceeds the average of the United States, which is £27,

4s., and of Canada, which is £26, 18s., and of the Continent, which is

£18, 1s.; while it falls below that of Australia, which is £43, 4s. per

head._"

According to this, the average earnings in Great Britain per head of

the population are 30% higher than in the United States, and 81%

higher than on the Continent of Europe. Truly, Britain is a prosperous

and profitable country so far as average earnings of the whole people

by the year is concerned. Sir Richard goes on in the same statistical

paper to show, that the average annual profit on British Capital is

14%, and that Capital yields about the same rate for the United

States.

Now, can we easily give the grounds on which the introduction of more

and better machinery, instead of displacing laborers, tends to lift

and actually does lift the wages of those concerned, who continue to

work with their hands and heads? We will try it.

(a) It takes the hands and heads of laborers to invent and construct

and keep in repair the machinery itself, that is often supposed to

displace laborers, and so far forth opens a vent for the more

profitable employment of some of the laborers, who before performed

the cruder and more repetitive and automatic parts of the processes,

which parts alone machinery can be made to perform.

(b) Machinery always lessens the cost of a given amount of production,

otherwise there would be no motive for its introduction. But, other

things being equal, the lessened cost of a commodity broadens the

market for its sale. The cheaper a useful commodity is offered, the

more the buyers of it the world over. The more and the better the

machinery brought in, the more and the cheaper the commodities

produced and the broader and better the markets to be supplied; and,

therefore, the more and the more skilful the hands needed to tend the

machinery and to market the products.

(c) The more commodities thus created by men and machines, and the

wider the markets found for them over the earth, the more laborers are

required to extract and prepare and transport the raw materials for

the now augmenting commodities, and also to ship and distribute the

finished products. As Chadwick says, notwithstanding the strictly

_factory_ hands have diminished one half in one place, "yet the _mill_

population has increased, as well as the general population, the hands

discharged being absorbed in other employments."

(d) These improvements in machinery, and the consequent refinements in

the skill of the laborers, cheapen also of course the commodities

consumed by the laborers themselves, and therefore a given rate of

wages, to say nothing of a rate sure to enlarge under these

circumstances, now secures for the laborers a higher grade of

comforts.

More and better and more durable machinery, consequently, so far

forth, tends at once to enhance the rate of laborers' wages and

increase the purchasing power of the unit in which wages are paid.

To return now to the main line of discussion under the present head,

we have shown by proof positive that there is nothing either in new

machinery introduced, or in higher wages paid in connection with such

machinery, or in shortened hours made possible by these two, to lessen

the Demand of Capitalists for the personal services of Laborers;

because, there is nothing in all these, commercial and industrial

freedom being presupposed, to lessen the Profits of the Capitalists,

which profits are the sole motive actuating them as such. That high

wages and short hours are rather an advantage to Profits in connection

with skilled laborers and fine machinery, than a disadvantage when

compared with long hours and low pay and poor implements, is clearly

shown by Chadwick in the passage quoted comparing England with English

Bombay, where the working hours are 60% more and the wages greatly

less and the cost of the machinery very little; "twenty shillings'

worth of bundled yarn may be produced at a cost of from 2_d._ to 3_d._

less in Manchester than in Bombay"; call it 2-1/2_d._ less; that is,

it costs the Bombay spinner more than 1% per pound of yarn more to

spin it than it costs the Manchester spinner! For truth and decency's

sake, then, let us have done with the gabble in this country about the

advantages of "pauper labor" over skilled, of low wages over high, of

cheap machinery over dear!

The penetrating reader will perceive, that the root of this whole

matter lies in the breadth and quickness of the _Markets_, in which

the commodities produced by the laborers and capitalists may be sold

against other commodities, and against Services and Credits; if the

markets of the world are free to all to buy in and to sell in, which

seemingly two things are precisely one and the same thing, then the

Demand of Capitalists for the services of laborers to create and

market salable commodities wherever these may be wanted, can

apparently never slacken on the whole; because, the desires of men

which the efforts of other men may satisfy commercially, are

indefinite in number and unlimited in degree; and, therefore, the

Wages of the skilled laborers, the commercial freedom of the nations

being presupposed, are likely to be on the whole on a steady rise

throughout the world; and the amount and excellence of the machinery

on a similar rise, since Capitalists can always under these

circumstances see their Profits looming up ahead of them,--the profits

of an endlessly diversified and marketable Production.

The chief reason at any rate, and almost the only reason in common

sight, why little England has surpassed in commercial prosperity of

every sort every other nation on the globe during the past forty

years, as evidenced by these statistics of Sir Richard Temple and

other abounding proofs on sea and land, is in the fact, that her

statesmen of the last generation came to perceive clearly, and then

helped the people to see, that a market for products is products in

market; that her traditional tariff-barriers to keep foreign goods out

kept in equally domestic goods that wanted to get out for a profit,

and so down went the tariff-barriers little by little, accursed alike

by God and Englishmen, never to be set up again around the shores of

the land of Cobden and Bright and Elliott; and to-day we read, that

the average annual Earnings per head of the entire population of the

United Kingdom, men and women and children, English and Irish and

Scotch, are $176, while the annual average Profits of Capital within

the three kingdoms is 14%.

(3) In the last place here, we must now look at the Demand for the

personal services of Professional laborers. These are persons, who

have done something more with reference to their life-work than serve

an apprenticeship to a trade, or acquire some mechanical skill in

connection with some kind of machinery. An Education rather than an

Apprenticeship is implied in Professional laborers. Knowledge of the

bodies and of the minds of men; acquaintance with some one section at

least of the general laws that pervade the universe; some confidence

(the more the better) in God, who created and governs the world; are

all requisite to a reasonable success on the part of Professional

laborers. The Demand for their services, and of course also the Return

made to them for such services, will largely depend on such superior

knowledge and confidence acquired by such persons, and involved in

their services. Clergymen, physicians, lawyers, statesmen, literators,

actors, teachers, and scientific experts, may serve as our chief

examples of Professional laborers.

(a) "All that a man hath will he give for his life." When men fall

sick, or those fall sick who are dear to them, they send for the

doctor. Scarcely any trait of human nature is more universal than

this. And the trait puts honor on human nature, because it implies a

relatively high estimate of the worth of life in the mind of the

patient, and also a relatively high confidence in a certain class of

one's fellow-men. As Society progresses, and as Christianity deepens

the sense of the worth of the individual life, and knits a stronger

tie of confidence between man and man, a change is slowly coming over

the relations between physicians and their patients; people do not

wait to fall sick before they send for the doctor, so much as they

formerly did; some individuals and families are establishing

connections with a medical adviser, who studies their constitutions

and habits of life beforehand, guides them in general sanitation, and

thus both he and they are better ready for curatives in times of

illness. Gladstone has long had such an attendant, with the best of

results as he thinks, and strongly commended such action to John

Bright, but too late to save the latter from what was thought to be

premature death in consequence of imprudent and ill-advised handling

of his health. In a few cases in England and the United States an

annual salary is paid a physician for general care of the family's

health, whether sickness befall or not, instead of the more usual fees

on consultation and attendance. Dr. Munn of New York receives such an

annual salary from Mr. Jay Gould. But in whatever way medical services

are paid for, the Demand for them is constant and intense. The motive

to buy them is immediate and personal, not mediate and remote, as in

the case of capitalists and laborers of the second class.

It is to be noticed further in respect to physicians, and indeed in

respect to all professional laborers much more than in respect to

other laborers, that much knowledge has been gained by them for its

own sake, out of pure love for it, rather than for the sake of merely

selling their services as laborers; while this does not diminish in

the least the commercial character of their services, it tends to

beget on the part of the buyers of them a stronger confidence in the

men who render them, so that the Demand for such services and

consequently the pay for them is enhanced by the trust reposed in the

laborers on the ground of something acquired by them for other than

selling purposes, and which indeed _cannot be sold_; and superior

_character_ also, as well as superior knowledge, which is wholly

_moral_ in its basis and not mercantile at all, affects the Demand for

the services of the possessor of it to increase it, on the ground of a

naturally stronger trust in him as a professional laborer, and at the

same time tends to increase his Wages by limiting the circle of those

who can offer in competition such services on the background of such

superior knowledge and character.

(b) Lawyers do not meet such a universal Demand in the nature of

things as do physicians. Said Jonathan Smith of Lanesborough in the

Massachusetts Convention of 1788: "We have no lawyer in our town, and

we do well enough without." Still, one hundred years after that time

there were about 70,000 lawyers in the United States, and Lanesborough

itself had had in the meantime at least three distinguished ones. The

interests of property and of reputation, and the constitutional rights

of individuals as over against the claims of Government, so far as

these may be conserved through the agency of lawyers, are by no means

so constant and imperative as are the interests of life and health.

Yet lawyers are in legitimate request in all civilized countries. A

Latin legal maxim announces the obvious truth: _It is the interest of

the Commonwealth that there should be an end of disputes and

litigations._ Beyond question courts and counsel are wholesome on the

whole for the individual and for the commonwealth. But the extremely

complicated and unsatisfactory condition of American Law at present,

owing to the fact that we have a none too simple United States Law

with its three grades of courts and judges, and considerably divergent

bodies of Law in each of 42 States, and owing also to the fact that

our law in general is drawn almost at random from two pretty distinct

Sources, the Common Law of England and the Civil Law of Rome,

multiplies the number of lawyers relatively to the population out of

all proportion to such ratio in other countries, and tends to make the

lawyers as a class too conservative of old and drawn-out processes to

the extent of opposing obvious betterments and simplifications. Said

David Dudley Field, President of the American Bar Association, in

August, 1889, at Chicago: "_So far as I am aware, there is no other

country calling itself civilized where it takes so long to punish a

criminal, and so many years to get a final decision between man and

man. Truly we may say, that Justice passes through the land on leaden

sandals. One of our most trustworthy journalists asserts that more

murderers are hung by mobs every year than are executed in course of

law. And yet we have, it is computed, nearly 70,000 lawyers in the

country. The proportion of the legal element is, in France, 1:4762; in

Germany, 1:6423; in the United States, 1:909. Now turn from the

performers to the performance. It appears that the average length of a

lawsuit varies very much in the different States; the greatest being

about 6 years, and the least 1-1/2. Very few States finish a litigation

in this shorter period. Taking all these figures together, is it any

wonder that a cynic should say that we American lawyers talk more and

speed less than any other equal number of men known to history?_"

Mr. Field then repeated his well-known argument for Codification,

ascribing the law's delays to the chaotic condition of the law, and

maintaining that it is the first duty of a government to bring the

laws to the knowledge of the People. "_You must, of course, be true to

your clients and the courts, but you must also give speedy justice to

your fellow-citizens, more speedy than you have yet given, and you

must give them a chance to know their laws._"

Owing to the immense difficulties in the way of any one person

mastering the various branches of the law in this country, it is

falling more and more into specialties, and lawyers are devoting

themselves to some one of its many branches, the main division line

being between "Law" and "Equity" technically so-called; and whenever

one becomes eminent along any line, his compensation is apt to be very

large owing at once to a large Demand and to a small Supply at that

point, while the average compensation of the lawyers as a whole class

is meagre enough, because there are too many of them, and the people

have become very suspicious of the law's meshes and delays.

(c) The grounds for the unabating Demand in Christian countries for

religious teachers and preachers, let us rather say, for spiritual

guides, lie deep down in the nature of man. If there be one

proposition about men more incontestable than another, it may be this,

that men are made in the image of God, and that there is among men in

general an irrepressible striving to maintain and deepen this image.

The touch between man and man and between man and God is such at this

point, that men can help each other in this striving, and that they

_feel_ that they can help each other. This is the chief reason why

some men are constantly consecrating themselves to the Christian

ministry, and other men as constantly soliciting these to become their

pastors and teachers. Those more enlightened in divine things and more

spiritually minded offer themselves, as it were, not commercially but

morally, to the unenlightened and less advanced as guides and helpers.

It is, as it was with Wolfe and his men at the Heights of Abraham:

those who got first to the top tarried a little to help those up who

came after. And the most striking thing about it is, that the masses

of men at bottom are as desirous to be uplifted as the choicer spirits

among them are desirous to help the work forward. Ministers are still,

and always will be (human nature is unchangeable), eagerly called;

chapels and churches and cathedrals are still going up all over the

earth; worship and petition and aspiration are ever ascending on the

great world's altar stairs towards heaven, guided and inflamed by the

chosen and choosing men of God,--"_when priests on grand cathedral

altars praise_!"[5]

It is a monstrous perversion of language to maintain, that a clergyman

in rendering such services as these is selling his religion. It is

true, that he is selling under Demand services to the appropriate

rendering of which his own personal piety contributes one large

element, and thorough confidence in him on the part of his people as a

good and earnest man contributes another large element; but the piety

and the spiritual power and the worthy example are not nourished for

the sake of selling the services, but for their own sake in personal

worth and worthiness, and these things must not be confounded with the

services that are sold. Accordingly, while the clergyman's vocation is

sacred, and belongs to the sphere of religion, his salary belongs to

the sphere of exchange, and its determination, in harmony of course

with the higher impulses, is a business transaction. This distinction

ought to be better understood than it is; and both clergymen and

people need to be reminded that the spiritual things belong to one

sphere, and the temporal things to another. The amount of a minister's

salary, and the time and mode of its payment, are matters of pure

business; and the minister himself is to be blamed if he does not

attend to them, and insist on them, on business principles.

In the professions generally, and particularly in the ministerial

profession, while, if we confine our attention to those persons who

both have the requisite gifts of Nature and have been also thoroughly

trained, we shall find a high rate of compensation on the two grounds

of a strong Demand and a limited Supply, we must bear in mind too the

counter-working influences which tend to increase the competition and

thus decrease the compensation, namely, the respectability which

attends them, the desire of knowledge for its own sake which is gained

in connection with them, the instruction wholly or in part

gratuitously offered to those in course of preparation for them, and

the desire to do good without regard to pecuniary reward which

actuates many who enter upon them.

(d) Physicians and lawyers and clergymen serve primarily individuals,

or at most relatively small groups of individuals, and of course look

for their pay to those whom they have served. It is different with

Statesmen, the fourth class of professional laborers that we need to

look at in an economic view. Statesmen worthy of the name serve at

least a whole nation, and to the nation as such must they turn for

their pecuniary rewards. And such men have never turned in vain to

those whom they have benefited as a whole. Bismarck is the best modern

instance of a Statesman, who has received from a grateful country

immense money-measured remunerations for immense political services

rendered. The Demand for the services of Statesmen rests in the deep

consciousness of men organized politically into a Nation, that they

need, especially in trying times, a Man of the highest natural gifts,

and of the broadest attainments and of the loftiest political

integrity to plan and act for them in emergencies, as they are

conscious that they cannot plan and act for themselves organically.

This does not mean, that the one ever knows essentials better than the

many: he does not. This does not mean, that the true objective of a

nation's march is ever discerned more clearly, or rather _felt after_

more eagerly, by one man than by the many men concerned: it is not.

Still less does it mean "_a man on horseback_." But it does mean this:

a Nation (as the very name implies) is made up of the thoughts and

hopes and throbbings and dim forecastings and half-formed purposes of

multitudes constituting a unit (born together for one destiny on

earth); and the true Statesman is one of themselves, sharing with them

at once the traditions of the past and the perspectives of the future;

one, with the instinct and the intellect to gather up and embody the

general feeling and the general will; one, who has gained in some way

the confidence of the masses who are willing for the time being to

entrust to him the guidance of their affairs, and to empower him to

plan and act for them as their champion and deliverer; and one, who

(because he _is_ one) can better seize the propitious moments for

declaration and negotiation and public action, yet who never forgets

that he is nothing but an _agent_ for others, and is as ready to lay

down responsibility at the public will as to assume it at the public

will.

Washington was such a statesman, and Lincoln. Even Bismarck, under

monarchical and later imperial environment, disclaims anything

substantive and original in his own action: he did what he could not

help doing: he followed the instincts of Prussia, and his own; and

became the means of fulfilling as they gradually ripened the longings

of the other German people for unity and order. Such a statesman was

Chatham in England, and Cavour in Italy. Now, such services as these,

done for a whole people, always deserve and usually receive, though

not expressly bargained for beforehand, yet implied in the public

devotion of one party and the general _consensus_ of the other,

extraordinary honors and emoluments. This is right, even on purely

Economic principles. The services of great statesmen to their country

in great epochs and emergencies are at once a gift and a sale, they

are both patriotic and economic, there is equally a national Demand

for them and a grateful recognition of them, the Supply is always

exceedingly rare and the reward often exceedingly great; and it is to

be put down to the lasting credit of the science of Economics, that

its peculiar motives and results may mingle in and harmonize with the

motives and results of the higher moral impulses, such as those of

Patriotism and Religion, as in the cases of the Soldier and Statesman

and Clergyman. There was no rational ground for the hesitation of

Garibaldi to receive from the Parliament of Italy in 1875 an annual

pension of 50,000 lire.

(e) There is a single class more of Professional laborers, loosely

so-named, which should be noted before we dismiss the subject of

Demand for laborers to pass to consider the Supply of them, namely,

Literators and Artists and Actors of the highest rank. Statesmen

primarily serve the individual nation that selects and rewards them,

though their influence may indirectly uplift other nations also; but

the great Writers and Painters and Actors, whatever may be their local

habitation and name at first, soon come to belong to the world at

large and to derive their revenue from many lands, because the highest

Art is cosmopolitan in its own nature, and the best characterization

of men as such cannot but be the property of Mankind. Shakspeare is no

longer English, nor Angelo Italian, nor Mozart German, nor even

Bernhardt French. Deep as are the scars and the sea that separate

nation from nation, there is something deeper still in the innate

recognition by man of man as depicted by the great Masters in immortal

lines. There is, accordingly, a sort of Demand in the inmost soul of

Humanity as such for these living and lofty touches and delineations

of itself, whencesoever they may come. There is not indeed nor can

there be, as in most other cases of sale, a bargain made beforehand

between these preordained sellers of the rarest services and their

silent yet waiting purchasers, yet there is after all an antecedent

and an assured understanding between them. They are in touch even

across the sea. The master strikes his chord, and the audience, fit,

though few and scattered, listens and applauds _and makes return_.

Is the principle of "International Copyright," so-called, correct? Let

us look narrowly before we pronounce. At present this good country of

ours makes itself a mocking and a by-word even to its own intelligent

and art-loving citizens by putting a tariff-tax of 30% on paintings

and statuary by foreign artists, not at all to get revenue thereby,

but to "protect" domestic artists in their inferior work by

artificially lifting the price of their wares. So far is carried this

jealousy of foreign works of art, that when the artists generously

loan them for exhibition on our national occasions, they are put under

bonds _not to sell them on this side_ without previously paying the

tariff-tax, which is graciously intermitted during the Exposition.

This is Restriction. This is Protectionism pure and simple. This is

legally excluding the Better in order to give a forced currency to the

Worse. Now, domestic Copyright restricts the sale of any book to one

publisher in his interest and in that of the author. The book now in

the reader's hand is thus copyrighted. This legal arrangement between

authors and publishers and their public may be perhaps logically

defended, it may even be for the public weal on the whole, though in

many cases it doubtless raises the price of good books, which would

have been published without any such artificial encouragement. The

copyright, however, like all patent-rights also, soon expires by

limitation of time, and the public thereafter have the unrestricted

use of what is really their own.

For what is sometimes called "literary property" is not property in

the strict sense of the word. A book is not like a plough or a house.

Its contents even when most original have been but colored, as it

were, and rearranged and reinforced by the author's individual mind.

Its substance always comes out of the common stock. It cannot be the

author's own, as the bushel of wheat is the farmer's, who sowed the

seed on his own land and threshed it in his own barn and carried it to

market in his own wagon. The rights of the individual and the rights

of the Community commingle more or less in private property of every

kind, at least to the extent that the latter may tax the property if

needful for the common wellbeing, as it is bound also legally to

secure it to the owner when threatened by others; it is no part of the

purpose of the present book to draw the wavering line in general

between the rights of individuals and the rights of their Government

as towards them; but the distinction between common property and

copyrighted property is plain enough to everybody, and the Law puts

emphasis on the distinction by making the one quickly terminable and

the other continual. So then, when the Government under which the

author resides, has given him a limited copyright within its own

jurisdiction, it would seem as if the individual right in the premises

had been sufficiently recognized alongside of the undoubted right of

the Whole to the ultimate use of the labors of their own citizen.

When, however, it comes to International Copyright, which is an

attempt to secure to authors of one country artificial privileges

under restriction in selling their wares in all other countries, the

argument breaks down. Even for the one country, in which the author

lives and is taxable, the argument is not very strong, and hardly

binds advanced public opinion either as to the grounds of it or even

the practical benefits of it on the whole. By the attempted extension

of it to all countries, its reasonableness disappears. Taxation cannot

extend beyond the jurisdiction of the country taxing; and it certainly

seems as if a legal privilege, beyond common law privileges, ought not

by extension through the formal action of other countries to exempt

from taxation (in case it were needful) the results of the original

privilege. The purpose of International Copyright is not the blessed

one as announced to the world by James Smithson, "_the increase and

diffusion of knowledge among mankind_," but directly and artificially

by means of legal restrictions the "increase" of the prices of books

and of other "knowledge" to the masses of "mankind," and the

"diffusion" of these extra prices as between authors and publishers.

Protectionism does not seem to be one whit more respectable in this

form than in the form of tariff-taxes on foreign works of art.

2. We have already seen in our first chapter the proofs of the

proposition, that the Value of anything whatsoever bought and sold is

determined by the Demand for it and the Supply of it then and there

present. Also we have now seen at considerable length the main phases

and grounds of the Demand for each of the three classes of Personal

services bought and sold among men. The next topic in order is the

Supply of personal services in the various markets. Here it will not

be necessary to distinguish particularly the three classes of

Services, inasmuch as the circumstances governing the Supply in each

are substantially similar.

In Economics generally we have to deal chiefly with Persons, and only

subordinately with Things; when we come to the Supply of personal

services, answering to the Demand for them on the part of other

persons, this point becomes conspicuous; and it is here, if anywhere,

within the realm of our science, that we need to devote a word to a

singular doctrine, that has been famous for nearly a century under the

term of _Malthusianism_. Thomas Robert Malthus, 1766-1836, was an

English clergyman and teacher, a wide traveller and keen observer of

men, one who divided his time during a long life between cure and

chair and the libraries of the Universities, published in 1798 his

"_Essay on the Principles of Population as it affects the Future

Improvement of Society_"; in this and in subsequent editions enlarged

and enriched, he brought out with its proofs the core of his startling

pronouncement, that the human race is found to increase in numbers in

something like geometrical progression, while the means of subsistence

for them on any given area of agriculture can only increase in

something like arithmetical proportion; the United States was then

doubling its population in 25 years, and he calculated that, at this

rate, the inhabitants of any country in five centuries would increase

to above a million times their present number, which would give

England in that time more than twenty million millions of people, or

more than could even get standing-room there; for this natural

tendency of the law of human fecundity to outstrip the results of the

law of returns from land, he saw no remedy except in checks to

population, which he divided into _the positive_ and _the preventive_,

the first of which, such as war and famine and disease, increase the

annual number of deaths; and the second of which, such as prudence in

contracting marriage and temperance after marriage, diminish the

number of births; and Malthus and his followers, among whom the famous

Thomas Chalmers was prominent, were at great pains to inculcate upon

the laboring classes the duty of later marriages and fewer children,

as an indispensable condition of their rise in comforts, and of "the

future improvement of Society."

These discussions have attracted great attention almost to the present

day, and have been supposed to be very pertinent to the subject of

wages, and thus to be an important part of Political Economy; but when

one looks more closely, the force of that spring of population which

the Creator has coiled up in the nature of man, as contrasted with the

weakness of that power by which the earth brings forth sustenance for

man, is seen to be a topic in Physiology and not in Political Economy

at all. Political Economy presupposes the existence of Persons able

and willing to make exchanges with each other, before it even begins

its inquiries and generalizations. How they come into existence, the

rate of their natural increase, and the ratio of this increase to the

increase of food, however interesting as physiological questions, have

clearly nothing to do with our Science. Each adult human being is as

much constituted by Nature to receive personal services as to render

them, in Economics each without exception receives when and because he

renders, and all alike are naturally able to become capitalists also;

economical laws present no obstacles, that we can see, to all men

becoming _rich_, as we use that term; the town or city in which many

people are growing rich simultaneously, is the best place in the world

for other people to go to get rich in, and not at all towns in which

other people are getting poorer; most men are unwilling, some perhaps

may be unable, to fulfil the moral conditions of growing rich; while,

we may depend upon it, the famines of the world have been caused more

by the indolence and want of foresight of individuals, and especially

by the monstrous maladministrations of Governments, than by any law of

the increase of population.

Experience too has shown, that the strong impulse in mankind towards

procreation is not too strong for the purpose intended by the Creator;

that HE who is the author of the impulses is author also of natural

counterworkings of them; that, as men under moral and religious

training come more and more under the influence of reason and

affection, the preventive checks to population come silently and

effectually into operation; and that, taking the world at large, food

and comforts have more than kept pace with the stride of population,

since its inhabitants as a whole were plainly never so well fed and

clothed and housed as now. The abstract antagonism of the law of the

increase of population with the law of the increase of food, or what

we prefer to call the law of diminishing returns from Land, may be

admitted, if one chooses to insist on it; but any practical _tendency_

of these to come into collision, as the world is and is to be, is

confidently denied. When Malthus wrote, and long afterwards, England

was under the dominance of Protectionism; the wretched Corn-laws

forbidding the importations of foreign grain, in order that the

domestic growers might sell to their countrymen at artificial prices,

and thus grow the richer as bread became the dearer, were only

repealed in 1846; and the demonstrated ability of Great Britain under

free trade to draw on the fertility of the whole world for the

steadily and increasingly cheap maintenance of her people,

demonstrates the irrelevancy of Malthusianism to the Science of

Economics.

The Supply of personal services at any time or place in answer to the

Demand for them, is affected by several important circumstances, which

we shall now proceed to consider in their order.

(a) The _agreeableness_ or disagreeableness of rendering a given set

of services will affect the Supply of laborers at that point, and help

to determine the rate of Wages paid to them; because the more

agreeable employment will attract the larger number of laborers, will

experience in consequence the press of competition, and the rate of

wages then and there will be lessened thereby. The more disagreeable

employment will feel less the pressure of numbers, and will secure,

other things being equal, a higher rate of remuneration in

consequence. Among the elements which, in spite of diversity of

tastes, make any employment agreeable or disagreeable to the laborers,

are (1) the less or greater exertion of physical strength required,

(2) the healthfulness or unhealthfulness of the service, (3) its

cleanliness or dirtiness, (4) the degree of liberty or confinement in

it, (5) the safety or hazard of the employment, (6) the esteem or

disrepute of it in public opinion. To illustrate each of these in

order, the stone-mason, the glass-blower, the scavenger, the factory

operative, the worker in a powder-mill, the smuggler, will each

receive a larger compensation owing to the peculiar element of

disagreeableness involved in his own personal service; and he will be

able to demand and secure the higher rate through the action of this

disagreeableness upon the Supply of such laborers. Of all these

elements, public opinion is perhaps the most operative; and if this be

favorable to an employment, and some social consideration be attached

to it, and only common qualifications be required for it, the wages in

it will infallibly be low. This is doubtless the main reason why so

many young women prefer to teach, rather than be employed in mills or

shops or offices, and why the wages of female teachers have been so

remarkably low; although each of the elements of agreeableness

specified above may also contribute something towards the same result.

If a business be decidedly opposed to public opinion, it must hold out

the inducement of a large reward, or nobody will engage in it. This

explains the abnormal gains of the slave-trade, the liquor-business,

of gambling-houses, and of lotteries.

(b) The _easiness_ or difficulty of learning to render acceptably a

given set of personal services, will have a quick and constant

influence on the Supply of these services, and of course also on the

rate of the return paid for them. The elements of this Difficulty in

general are time, expense, lack of natural gifts, want of foresight on

the part of those concerned, and lack of push and persistency on the

part of the learner himself. To put a boy apprentice to a trade, for

example, requires on the part of the parents a foresight, an ability

to get on without his immediate help, and sometimes also an amount of

money for his board and clothes which all parents do not possess; many

boys too, who must acquire their skill to sell personal services when

they are young, if at all, find on trial that they do not like the

trade, or have not the requisite gifts, or fail in the appropriate

patience and propulsion; and the consequence is, that the Supply of

laborers along that particular line is lessened, and the right to

demand and the ability to secure a higher rate of wages than is

accorded to common laborers accompany the small supply, through the

reduction of numbers which these obstacles at the entrance occasion

and the consequent weakness of competition. This is one principal

ground of the difference in the wages of skilled and unskilled

laborers; the other being, as we have seen, the stronger and more

constant Demand for the former, owing to the impulse imparted by

Capital. All these points of difficulty at the outset apply still more

strongly in the case of professional laborers, serving more

effectually to thin out the ranks of these, and pushing upward still

higher the gauge of compensation for the successful competitors.

(c) The _constancy_ or inconstancy of prospective employment in a

given business, is a consideration that affects the Supply within it,

and then the wages. If the services be of such a character, that they

can only be carried on during nine months of the year, the wages of

the renderers will be greater by the day or the month than they would

be, provided the services were in order during all the twelve months.

The laborer is apt to look at the aggregate earnings of the year, and

will hardly take up a trade which affords employment but a part of the

time, unless some compensation can be found in the higher wages for

that time. This is the chief reason why the wages of the mason and

house-painter, in this climate at least, are higher than those of the

blacksmith and carpenter. The coachman, also, may stand by his horses

half the day or night with no call for his services, and must have,

therefore, a proportionably higher fare from those whom he does

transport. In general, it is found that men prefer a constant

rendering with a lower rate of pay, than an inconstant one with a

prospect of larger wages for the particular jobs actually done; and

because the many prefer that, those who take up with the other are

able to secure a higher relative rate of pay in their less eligible

vocation. It must be noticed, however, as counterworking this, that

some men have desire for intervals of leisure in their business, and

for opportunity to make these intervals subservient to some avocation

or other means of livelihood.

(d) The _probability of success_ or the opposite in any line of

personal services, is a circumstance that has some influence on the

rate of wages paid in it, through the action of this probability on

the numbers of those who enter upon it. If ultimate success be

doubtful, fewer persons will naturally engage in such a business, and

those who dare in it and succeed, will probably reap a very high

reward. So, also, those who take jobs by the contract, and therein

assume more or less of risk, are commonly paid at a higher rate for

their services than those who do similar work by the day. It is true,

that this is owing partly to the fact that the contractor usually puts

in his own capital more or less, and must therefore be paid profits as

well as wages, and also that the wages of superintendence are due to

him in addition to ordinary wages; still, there is a residuum of

difference, which can only be accounted for by the risk he runs of a

successful issue of his contract. The general variation in Supply and

wages from this fourth cause, would certainly be greater than it is,

were it not for the overweening confidence which men in all

generations seem to have in their own good luck. This excess of

worldly faith is always seen in the rush which is made for newly

discovered mining regions. It was seen to perfection in 1889 in the

uncontrollable advance of thousands _into_, and their almost immediate

exit _out of_, the then just opened territory of Oklahoma. The

facility with which lottery tickets are sold even yet in many

countries proves the prevalence of this over-confidence. It is

demonstrable beforehand on the doctrine of Chances, that no person can

rationally buy _any_ lottery ticket at its advertised price, because

if that person should buy all the tickets advertised he would

certainly lose money, since the sum of the prizes is always less than

the sum of the prices. Otherwise the projectors of the lottery would

always lose money.

(e) The _mobility_ or immobility of laborers as a class acts powerfully

upon the Supply of them at any one time and place, and consequently

upon the rates of wages then and there. In some countries, notably in

the United States, laborers as a class move from place to place with

considerable facility under the action of Demand for personal services.

According to the Census of 1870, 7,500,000 of the native population

dwelt in other States than those in which they were born. Many of

these, doubtless, had left their native region to obtain more fertile

land, and many also to obtain more remunerative employment as laborers.

The native American, more than most other persons, is not only willing

to move from place to place in the hope of bettering his condition, but

is also willing to change his occupation from time to time in the same

hope. There is more freedom of movement locally, and less fixedness of

occupation on the part of laborers and others, in this country than in

any other industrial country. Even foreign immigrants here,--factory

operatives, miners, and other laborers,--seem to catch after a while

the spirit of the country in both these respects. There is one

considerable advantage in all this, namely, competition becomes more

uniform in all places, an unusual demand for laborers at any one point

is easily met, and wages neither rise so high nor fall so low at

special points as they otherwise would. But there are considerable

disadvantages in all this too, chiefly these, the services of laborers

floating locally or changing the kind of their labor can never become

so excellent as service more _steady_ in place and time; and,

especially, thorough apprenticeships, or whatever may be equivalent to

these, are held in too little esteem by public opinion, and are too

little requisite in order to obtain transient employment. To meet the

obvious pressure of these disadvantages, an admirable device is now

being hit on, namely, to introduce into our public schools something in

the way of "manual training" for the various trades. Public

institutions also, some of them on a great scale, as the Cooper Union

in New York and a more recent munificent foundation in Philadelphia,

have been established on purpose to train boys and girls both in eye

and hand to render skilfully those artisan services of the various

kinds which will always be in demand among men, and which have

certainly deteriorated among us owing in part to the disuse of the old

apprenticeship-system.

In Europe, on the other hand, the laborers as a class are far less

mobile than here; and in Asia still less so. There is said to be no

country in Europe in which the proportion of foreigners to the native

population exceeds _three per centum_. In England, which is a small

country, the difference in Wages between the northern and southern

counties is very remarkable. Professor Fawcett is authority for the

statement, that an ordinary agricultural laborer in Yorkshire during

the winter months earns 13 shillings a week, while a Wiltshire or

Dorsetshire laborer doing similar work during the same number of hours

earns but 9 shillings. The contrast in general between the Wages of

English agricultural laborers and those paid in mills and mines and

furnaces is still more striking. And so more or less, in respect to

the Value of Commodities: competition is yet by no means perfect in

distributing these so as to make their price uniform in the same

country or even in the same county; but the immobility of laborers for

an obvious reason is much greater than the immobility of goods. While

laborers should certainly be free to go wherever their services may be

in greater Demand, the natural reluctance of most men to leave their

native haunts, enables each of the nations to work out its freely

chosen ends without wholesale interference from abroad. If China

should precipitate itself upon the United States, or India upon

England, as the mere _economical_ impulse might indicate, it would be

disastrous to the western nations; but men are everywhere under other

influences besides the economical one, although this is strong and

distinct and pervasive; Political Economy deals with men as they _are_

all things considered, and with Buying and Selling as this actually

takes place over the world, or rather as it would take place if

factitious economical restraints were removed; and Providence has

other great ends in view besides commercial prosperity, vital as that

is to all other progress, and often holds one impulse in check by a

stronger one.

(f) _Custom_, with its cognates Prejudice and Fashion, has still a

good deal to do with the Supply of laborers in certain departments of

effort, and of course with the rates of wages in them. In former times

in this country and in the older countries particularly, Custom and

decree were dominant in determining, for example, the current fees of

lawyers and doctors, competition coming in to decide how many such

fees a professional laborer should get, rather than the amount of each

particular fee. The shares of the produce going respectively to the

agricultural tenant and to the landowner, were specially under the

dominion of Custom; as the mode (now decadent) of taking farms "_at

the halves_," once universally prevalent in New England, sufficiently

shows. In certain other matters relating to land and trade, Custom has

long been gradually hardening into express law, as, for instance, the

famous "Ulster Right" in Ireland. Prejudice, which is only another

name for Custom, has some voice still in adjusting rates of wages, as

may be seen in women's wages crowded down apparently to a point

unreasonably low as compared with the wages of men; and also in the

rate of John Chinaman's wages in those parts of the United States

where he ventures to offer his services in the teeth of public opinion

and hostile legislation. It may be spoken with general truth and

satisfaction, that competition seems now to be breaking down mere

custom and prejudice in all directions, and may perhaps in the good

time coming reign supreme over the economic field; while Fashion,

which bears indeed on one side of its shield the motto "custom,"

carries too on the other the bold word "competition," and this second

side is likely to be presented to the public mostly in the future,

because, they who lead the styles in any department whatsoever will

always offer their services to Society at an advantage to themselves,

that being one form of competition, and their rate of compensation

will be legitimately higher than the average rate of their fellows, of

which a good instance was the marked worldly prosperity during the

decade of the Eighties of Worth, the man-dressmaker of Paris.

(g) _Legal Restrictions_ are another cause acting on wages, by acting

directly on the Supply of laborers. Laws inhibiting or promoting

immigration; laws appointing the fees and salaries of officials;

tariff-taxes, whether prohibitory or only restrictive; laws creating

privileged classes of any kind, which is only another designation for

laws restricting the rights of the masses; unequal modes of taxation,

whether adopted in ignorance or by design; all have a direct and

powerful agency upon the distribution of laborers, upon the supply of

them at given points, and upon the rates of their wages. Governments

are coming, however, much more freely than formerly, but never through

their natural choice and drift as governments, only by the gradual and

oft-disappointed compulsion of their citizens, to leave all these

matters Economical except the wages of their own servants and those

commodities which they choose to tax, to the simple and safe action of

Supply and Demand.

(h) _Voluntary Associations_ for that avowed purpose were a mediæval,

and have come to be again a modern, agency in adjusting the Supply of

laborers to their respective markets, and in regulating the wages of

various classes of them. The Guilds of the Middle Ages, and

particularly the old guilds of London, had a remarkable history, upon

which we can not here even touch. Their local importance is

sufficiently attested by the fact, that the City Hall of London is to

this day the "Guildhall." King Edward III. humored the civic feeling

of his time by becoming himself a member of the Guild of Armorers. "A

seven years' apprenticeship formed the necessary prelude to full

membership of any trade-guild. Their regulations were of the minutest

character; the quality and value of work was rigidly prescribed, the

hours of toil fixed from daybreak to curfew, and strict provision made

against competition in labor. At each meeting of these guilds their

members gathered round the Craft-box, which contained the rules of

their Society, and stood with bared heads as it was opened. The warden

and a quorum of guild-brothers formed a court which enforced the

ordinances of the guild, inspected all work done by its members,

confiscated unlawful tools or unworthy goods; and disobedience to

their orders was punished by fines, or in the last resort by

expulsion, which involved the loss of right to trade. A common fund

was raised by contributions among the members, which not only provided

for the trade objects of the guild, but sufficed to found chantries

and masses, and set up painted windows in the church of their patron

saint. Even at the present day the arms of the craft-guild may often

be seen blazoned in cathedrals, side by side with those of prelates

and kings."[6]

The Trades-Unions and Brotherhoods of the present day cannot plead the

provocations and justifications of their mediæval predecessors. It

cannot be denied, however, that they have some provocations and

justifications in the bad example set before them by the various

combinations (implied or explicit) of the Wages-payers as a class. If

the Wages-payers combine, then the Wages-takers would seem to have no

resource but in combination. Both alike are wrong in this. Both alike

oppose in this the spirit of Political Economy, which is ever the

spirit of Freedom, and is ever against such factitious associations

for such purposes, because they tend to destroy the independence of

personal action on the part of both payers and takers of wages, and

tend also to bring all the workmen of any one general grade down to

one level of effort and reward.