JOSIPN MCDONOUGH 
 
 RARE BOOKS 
 
 ^ ALBANY - NY.) 
 
TALKS ABOUT LABOR, 
 
 AND 
 
 CONCERNING THE EVOLUTION OF JUSTICE BETWEEN 
 THE LABORERS AND THE CAPITALISTS. T 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 
 
 549 AND 551 BROADWAY. 
 
 1876 . 
 
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1876, 
 By D. A PPLETON & CO., 
 
 In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 
 
 i tf 4 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 Nothing ambitious lias been attempted in this 
 little book. The writer has not undertaken to 
 construct a social theory, nor to solve the grave 
 problems which are involved in the relations ex¬ 
 isting between labor and capital, by any copy¬ 
 righted or patented formula whatsoever. He has 
 simply tried to investigate—for his own satisfac¬ 
 tion in the first instance—the conditions under 
 which the work of the world is done, and to do so 
 with impartiality of feeling,- as between the classes 
 that contribute to it; to ascertain how far such 
 conditions are conventional or arbitrary and how 
 far they are naturally fixed; to discover, conse¬ 
 quently, what readjustments appear practicable, 
 and to learn, at the same time, what principles of 
 justice are underlying the whole matter. He has 
 aimed at nothing more, in a word, than to find 
 the direction in which one may hopefully look 
 for some more harmonious and more satisfac¬ 
 tory conjunction of capital with labor than pre¬ 
 vails in our present social state, by finding in what 
 direction the rules of ethics and the laws of politi- 
 
4 
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 cal economy tend together. That there must be 
 such a coincidence between what is just and what 
 is practicable — between material conditions and 
 moral principles, in the evolution of society—he 
 is persuaded firmly. If he has gained even a dim 
 discernment of it, he has done all that he expected 
 to do. Time alone can bring about the full dis¬ 
 covery. 
 
 In submitting the meagre results of an earnest 
 study of the subject, he has endeavored to present 
 them as briefly and compactly as possible, only 
 hoping to suggest to some other minds a mode of 
 thought wdiich they may be willing to pursue. 
 He has also endeavored to present the argument 
 of his view with fairness, and has adopted for that 
 purpose—though with imperfect skill—the con¬ 
 versational form, in which both modifying and 
 opposing considerations can be brought into a dis¬ 
 cussion most easily. This method of treating the 
 subject has sometimes induced—in the opening 
 chapters especially—an extremeness of statement 
 on one side, which the counter-statement is trusted 
 to correct. Taken alone, there are some state¬ 
 ments of that kind, perhaps, wdiich the writer 
 would not wish to have accepted as sound teach¬ 
 ing. If his view of the subject is considered at 
 all, he would ask to have it considered as a w hole. 
 
 J. K L. 
 
 Buffalo, May, 1876. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 FIRST EVENING. 
 
 ABOUT THE POWER OF CAPITAL. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 A Vision of Judgment.—The Evolution of Justice in Human 
 History.—The Nature and Functions of Capital.—Its In¬ 
 herently Oppressive Powers.—The Theoretic Situation of 
 Hired Labor.— Human Necessities against Human De¬ 
 sires.—The Relations of Political Economy to the Social 
 Problem ......... 7 
 
 SECOND EVENING. 
 
 ABOUT THE RIGHTS OF CAPITAL. 
 
 Might and Right in Society.—What morally belongs to Supe¬ 
 rior Endowments and Advantages.—The Point of Social 
 Equilibrium.—Some Study of the Modes in which Wealth 
 is acquired.— The Judge’s Doctrine of Morals and his 
 Doctrine of Justice.34 
 
6 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 THIRD EVENING. 
 
 ABOUT TDE COMPETITION OF FACULTIES AMONG MEN. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 The Comparative Quality of “ Business ” Faculties and the 
 Excessive Premium put upon them.—The Judge’s Co¬ 
 operative Theory.—Trades-Unions and Labor-Strikes.— 
 
 The Preaching and Teaching that need to go together . 69 
 
 FOURTn EVENING. 
 
 ABOUT THE JUST CLAIMS OF LABOR. 
 
 The Increase of Production within a Century past. — The 
 Judge’s Estimates.—Machine Labor and its Results.— 
 
 The Working-man’s Measure of Gain.—Wasteful Con¬ 
 sumption.—What it is and what Kind of Waste can be 
 socially restrained. — The Sources of Increase to the 
 Capital Fund and of Increased Dividends to Labor . 98 
 
 FIFTH EVENING. 
 
 ABOUT TIIE WAYS AND MEANS OF JUSTICE. 
 
 The “ Wages-Fund” and the Wages System.—The Common 
 “Compensation Fund” which may be substituted in 
 Political Economy. — Effects of Partnership between A 
 Labor and Capital.—Its Practical Beginnings and its 
 Ultimate Consequences.—Loanable Capital and Public 
 Debts.—The Judge’s New Party.—Malthus and the Far 
 Future.181 
 
TALKS ABOUT LABOE. 
 
 FIEST EVENING. 
 
 ABOUT THE POWER OF CAPITAL. 
 
 A Vision of Judgment.—The Evolution of Justice in Human His¬ 
 tory.—Nature and Functions of Capital. — Its Inherently 
 Oppressive Powers.—The Theoretic Situation of Hired La¬ 
 bor.—Human Necessities against Human Desires.—The Re¬ 
 lations of Political Economy to the Social Problem. 
 
 The judge (who is not a judge, by the way, but 
 only called so in familiar speech by some of us who 
 should like to see him on the bench) had lately 
 become my neighbor, living a few doors distant 
 on the same street. I knew that his home was 
 desolate and had lost its charm for him, because 
 the shadow of death which is darker than any 
 other had fallen on it not many months before. 
 So I proposed to him that he should drop in upon 
 me, for an evening smoke and an hour or two of 
 quiet talk, just as frequently as he might afford, 
 without keeping any account between us of visits 
 given or returned. He accepted the invitation 
 
8 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR . 
 
 frankly, and came often during the winter to my 
 little study—as we style, with some complacency, 
 the modest chamber of our cottage in which I 
 smoke and read during idle hours at home. 
 
 It happened rather fortunately, I think, that 
 on the night when the judge came first I sat 
 with a newspaper in my hand, and had been read¬ 
 ing in it the account of a certain wide-spread 
 “ strike” among the workmen of some important 
 trade in the Eastern States. This led us into talk 
 upon a subject which I found had interested him 
 much, and on which he had been pondering, in 
 his characteristic way, with searching earnest¬ 
 ness. 
 
 I had wheeled an easy-cliair for him to the 
 front of the fire, which burned cheerfully in the 
 grate ; we had settled ourselves comfortably, with 
 full pipes, and surrounded ourselves satisfactorily 
 with that atmosphere of fragrant smoke in which 
 ideas float more lightly than they do in common 
 air. My wife, who likes the pleasant little room, 
 for all its smokiness—and none the less, perhaps, 
 because of that—sat opposite, half busy with some 
 bit of foolish sewing, as women like to be in their 
 leisure times, while my elder daughter Kate, in 
 the sitting-room just beyond, was entertaining a 
 young gentleman named John, whose frequent 
 visits, I began to see, had an object in them which 
 I could not altogether disapprove. 
 
FIRST EVENING. 
 
 9 
 
 We had skirmished for a while in the region 
 of small-talk, as people do until they have uncov¬ 
 ered, on one side or the other, some ground on 
 which they may engage in rational conversation, 
 and at last, in a casual way, I made allusion to the 
 matter of which I had been reading, and remarked 
 that, even in this country of fewer hands than 
 acres, the labor question, as it is called, or the 
 question between capital and labor, is becoming a 
 very serious one. 
 
 “ I think,” replied the judge, “ that it has be¬ 
 come already the question above all other ques¬ 
 tions in social importance, and that we have not 
 another problem in the world to-day that is press¬ 
 ing upon us so sternly for an equitable solution 
 as that one which is involved in the perpetual 
 contention between capitalists and laborers.” 
 
 I was surprised at the emphasis and earnest¬ 
 ness with which he spoke on the subject, and, 
 while I admitted the importance of this labor 
 question, I doubted whether it could be held to 
 take rank above all other questions, when we con¬ 
 sider the many issues that remain in controversy 
 among men, affecting their social state, both in 
 morals and in government. 
 
 “ Why,” said he, u this labor question of to¬ 
 day succeeds the slavery question of yesterday, 
 inevitably, by the nature of things. Having de¬ 
 termined that one man may not own the labor of 
 
10 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 another man, how can we help going on to inquire 
 about and ascertain the just terms on which the 
 labor of one may be used by another ? It is 
 plainly, to my mind, the sequent step—the next 
 proceeding in the inquisition of human rights, 
 which we are forced to enter upon, whether will¬ 
 ingly or not. Our civilization, as we call it, is, 
 more than anything else, an evolution of the sen¬ 
 timent of justice among men, and almost every 
 other fruit of civilization, in its moral aspect, is 
 incident to that or developed out of it. This re¬ 
 sults so from the kneading and moulding of men 
 into organic social masses—a process which tends 
 steadily to press out the savage egotism or selfism 
 which saturates the isolated human being. Now, 
 that sentiment of justice, or sensibility to injus¬ 
 tice, in society, which has only to-day gathered 
 enlightenment enough to abhor a legal system 
 of servitude which it tolerated yesterday, cannot 
 have reached yet the end of its education in that 
 direction, but rather the beginning of new teach¬ 
 ings that are larger and more exact. Just as surely 
 as it has recognized the hideous oppression of law ’ 
 which made one man the master by ownership of 
 another, just so surely it is going to take cogni¬ 
 zance now of the oppression of those circumstances 
 in the social state which give to one an overmas¬ 
 tering power over his fellow. 
 
 “ This movement of education among men to 
 
FIRST EVENING. 
 
 11 
 
 a truer apprehension of justice and right, in place 
 of conventional notions which confuse the moral 
 sense, is not an eccentric one; it follows logical 
 paths to its several ends, and can he traced like 
 the construction of so many syllogisms in human 
 history. In fact, the slow judicial action of society, 
 sifting out rights from wrongs by clumsy methods 
 and tardy forms of procedure, and so establishing 
 equity between its members, is almost all there is 
 of history that is worth a serious studying. My 
 reading of the chronicles of our race is very much 
 to me as though I stood upon the threshold and 
 looked into some great judgment-hall, wherein 
 the painful formulation of an unwritten common 
 law of justice between man and man has been go¬ 
 ing on, since human history began, in passionate 
 litigation, in tedious argument, in hesitating but 
 irrevocable decisions. This solemn court of high 
 chancery sits always ; knows no • adjournment; 
 never suspends nor dismisses a cause. Its judges 
 and jury we cannot see, for they are of that 
 ghostly and changeful substance which has its 
 palpable but unseen forms, and which we call 
 4 public opinion.’ But the suitors, the clients, the 
 witnesses, the advocates, the attorneys, the bailiffs 
 —they throng the court. Whole nations fill its 
 wide galleries and its far-stretching corridors and 
 aisles, waiting for the verdicts which come so 
 slowly in. It is a merciless and an awful court; 
 
12 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR . 
 
 its justice long delayed and very stern. Death 
 and terror are its frequent ministers ; many times 
 its instruments have been pestilence and famine 
 and war, insurrection, revolution and massacre, 
 the dungeon, the scaffold and the stake. It has 
 issued its writs in blood, and executed them with 
 fire and sword. It wears out the lives of its lit¬ 
 igants with the weariness of its forms and the 
 heartlessness of its procedure. Generations die, 
 and son succeeds to son in the inheritance of every 
 wrong that is pleaded at its bar. But the verdict 
 of justice issues always at last; indisputably jus¬ 
 tice; inexorably the final and the absolute adju¬ 
 dication of right. At long intervals, of many 
 centuries sometimes, there is a pause and a stir in 
 the august chamber, and the voices of the criers 
 proclaim an old cause ended, the trial of a new 
 cause begun; the old cause settled forever and 
 ever, and sent out of court with the seal of an 
 everlasting judgment set upon it; the new cause 
 summoned to a hearing that will not rest until 
 the same irrevocable seal has been stamped upon 
 the decision of it. So, in times past, we have 
 heard the suit of the people against the king, the 
 suit of the commons against the lords, the suit of 
 conscience against the Church, cried into court 
 and cried out of court; and so, too, of late, not 
 least though last, we have heard the procla¬ 
 mation of justice declared in the long, long 
 
FIRST EVENING. 
 
 13 
 
 suit of the slave and the serf against their mas¬ 
 ters. 
 
 “ Is"ow, I tell you, when the slave went out of 
 court, a triumphant suitor, the laborer for hire 
 came in and took his place; for when the great 
 chancery court of civilization pronounced against 
 the possession by one man of the labor of another 
 through mastery, or force, or operation of law, it 
 bound itself to go further in the matter and to in¬ 
 vestigate the equity of the terms under which one 
 man, in any other way, may possess the fruits of 
 another’s labor; the equity, that is, of the division 
 to be made between him who toils and him who 
 possesses the tools and the materials with which 
 and on which that toil is expended. The trial of 
 this question is on. Its hearing has begun. It 
 cannot be arrested by any injunction, nor by any 
 change of venue, nor by any stopping of the ears 
 nor shutting of the eyes. It will go on, and on, 
 to the end, whether that be this century or the 
 next one.” 
 
 The judge is ordinarily a quiet man in his 
 talk. I never had heard him speak in so fervid a 
 temper and so oratorical a style before. I could 
 see that his feelings had been deeply wrought upon 
 by the subject, and I became curious to know what 
 view of it had produced this effect on so dispas¬ 
 sionate a mind. 
 
 My wife had dropped her sewing in her lap, 
 
14 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 and her face wore something of a startled look. 
 “ You have frightened me, almost,” said she, 
 “with your vision of judgment; I never thought 
 of history in that way before. There is an awful 
 solemnity in the idea, and it does not seem to he 
 a fanciful one at all, hut so real that I can almost 
 feel myself in the very presence of the inexorable 
 court.” 
 
 “ I have the same impression,” was my re¬ 
 mark, “ and the picture which the judge has drawn 
 is, without any doubt, as true as it is striking. But 
 I do not exactly see that the suit of the laborer 
 for a just partition of the products of labor is so 
 immediately sequent to that of the slave for his 
 freedom. It seems to me that the two questions 
 involved are so different, both in origin and in 
 principle, tlrat the solution of one does not open 
 the way very much to a solution of the other. 
 The institution of slavery is a purely arbitrary one, 
 existing by virtue, only, of a determination on the 
 part of one body of men to oppress another body 
 of men, because they have the power to do so; 
 and nothing, therefore, but the willingness of so¬ 
 ciety is needed at any time to break it up. But 
 the labor system, or the arrangement of the condi¬ 
 tions under which labor for hire is performed, 
 seems to be rooted in the constitution of human 
 society, and the oppression or inequity that is inci¬ 
 dent to it appears to me to proceed out of circuin- 
 
FIRST EVENING . 
 
 15 
 
 stances over wliicli society lias little control, so far 
 as we are yet able to perceive. I confess that I 
 cannot understand liow the sentiment of justice, 
 which civilization is certainly developing, will have 
 power to interfere with the operation of those in¬ 
 flexible laws, proceeding from a source of justice 
 whose legislation we cannot comprehend, which 
 have been imposed upon mankind and which gov¬ 
 ern, with a force stronger than human law can 
 ever have, the whole organization of work in the 
 world.” 
 
 “ Yes, I see,” said the judge ; “your perplexi¬ 
 ty is just that -which one is placed in who exam¬ 
 ines this question under the lights only which our 
 modern science of political economy throws upon 
 it. A man who would be hopeful for humanity 
 w T ill not find much encouragement there. I used 
 to be troubled very greatly until I began to see, 
 as I see clearly now, that the labor question be¬ 
 longs but partly, not wholly, to political economy, 
 and that more is assumed for that science than any 
 true economist would claim, when we remit the 
 question wholly to it for determination, as we are 
 apt to think that we must do. I am profoundly 
 a believer in political economy; that is to say, I 
 am thoroughly, in the main, a disciple of those 
 doctrines, political and social, which are grounded 
 upon our systematic modern analysis of the crea¬ 
 tion and distribution of wealth. But political 
 
16 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 economy is, or ought to be, strictly what may b(7 
 called a systematic science—a formulation, merely, 
 of facts as they exist. It does not embrace, by 
 very far, even in the branches to which it relates, 
 the whole of social philosophy, because that ex¬ 
 tends to the searching out of causes and forces be¬ 
 hind and superior to existing conditions and pres¬ 
 ent facts. In the flush of enthusiasm produced 
 by the revelations that it has made to society with¬ 
 in the last century, there is a tendency now to ele¬ 
 vate political economy, which lias no right to be 
 anything else than a systematic, scientific formu¬ 
 lation of certain existing social facts, into a social 
 philosophy, and that, I am sure, is a great mistake. 
 
 “ However, this is not exactly to the point of 
 the question we are discussing. Let me go hack 
 to my proposition, that the labor question belongs 
 but partly to political economy, and cannot be re¬ 
 mitted for its solution altogether to the laws which 
 that science has determined. It belongs in that 
 domain a little more, perhaps, but not much more, 
 after all, than did the slavery question, which, on 
 one side of it, was a stupendous economical ques¬ 
 tion, and dealt with as such. But we should have 
 waited very long for the forces which the political 
 economist is studying to bring about a solution of 
 it; longer, at least, than the civilized communi¬ 
 ties of mankind have been found willing to wait. 
 And so, in like manner, I believe, the simple jus- 
 
FIRST EVENING. 
 
 17 
 
 tice of human society, as its education grows, is 
 going to give every laborer bis due sliare of what 
 labor produces—more fairly at least than the ma¬ 
 jority have it now. 
 
 “ You do not see, you say, that this labor ques¬ 
 tion is immediately sequent to the question of 
 slavery, and you view it as not belonging in the 
 same category of human wrongs or inequities. 
 But I am sure, if you consider a moment, you will 
 concede that labor for hire, under the conditions 
 which now exist, partakes, or may partake, very 
 considerably, of the-nature of slavery.” 
 
 “ Oh, no!” I exclaimed, “that is surely an 
 exaggerated statement. There is, of course, an 
 oppressive inequality, very often, in the relation¬ 
 ship between the employer and the employed, but 
 it has hardly a similitude to that terribly degrad¬ 
 ing subjugation of one man to another which 
 slavery involves.” 
 
 “Wait a moment,” rejoined the judge. “Let 
 me ask you to give a definition of slavery.” 
 
 “ I should say, in brief, that it is the forcible 
 reduction of one man to a condition in w 7 hicli he 
 is regarded and dealt with as the property of an¬ 
 other.” 
 
 “Yo; that is the form, only, which slavery 
 wears when it accepts the name of slavery; it is 
 „ not the essential fact in it. The real essence of 
 slavery, as it seems to me, is the coercing of a man 
 
18 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 to yield tlie labor of his hands, or the service of 
 his faculties, to the benefit of another man, with¬ 
 out freedom or power to exact an equivalent re¬ 
 turn ; because, with some few exceptions, that is 
 all which renders the enslaving of one man by 
 another an object of desire. The motive of slave¬ 
 holding, as a rule, we must look for in the gain, 
 or the supposed gain, that is to be got by it. The 
 essential fact of slavery, therefore, is this: that 
 it places one man in possession of the labor of 
 another under conditions which are compulsory on 
 the latter, or which leave him no freedom or pow¬ 
 er to exact an equal return, and the statement of 
 that fact seems to be the truest definition of 
 slavery that can be given. What say you ? ” 
 
 “ I cannot dispute your definition.” 
 
 “ Well, then, we may fairly say that any con¬ 
 dition in which a man is constrained to give the 
 benefit of his labor to another, and exercises less 
 than equal freedom in the arrangement of the 
 terms of compensation upon which he does so, 
 partakes more or less of the nature of slavery. 
 Whatever difference there is must be of degree 
 rather than of kind. Is not that tme ? ” 
 
 “ We will concede that it is—at least until I 
 have seen what conclusions it leads to.” 
 
 “ That is enough. Now let us see how far, in 
 our present state of society, the conditions under 
 which capital and labor operate together affect the 
 
FIE ST EVENING. 
 
 19 
 
 freedom of tlie latter. To do so, we must start 
 with ideas‘well defined. We must acquire a clear 
 notion of what capital is and what its functions 
 are, even though we have to go back to a few 
 elementary statements, in order to set it with dis¬ 
 tinctness before our minds. 
 
 “ In the primitive state of mankind, as we con¬ 
 ceive it, the human creature performs such little 
 labor as he does without implements to help his 
 hands, except the simplest weapons that can be 
 used for killing, in the chase, and he directs his 
 labor to immediate ends, which need no provision 
 for time to be consumed in accomplishing them. 
 He must hunt each day for that day’s food, as the 
 brutes do. The objects of his exertion are all ob¬ 
 jects of the moment; the means with which he 
 exerts himself are just those with which Hature 
 has furnished him, ready for the moment. When 
 tools and implements begin to be made, either to 
 expedite labor, or to make the doing of things 
 possible which are not possible to the naked hands; 
 or when labor begins to be applied to the produc¬ 
 ing of results which cannot be attained until to¬ 
 morrow, or next week, or next month, or next 
 year, that instant civilization begins, and that in¬ 
 stant labor is placed under new conditions. Now, 
 these new conditions, under which civilized labor 
 is placed, are what we must particularly note and 
 remember, for they are conditions on which it be- 
 
20 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 comes as dependent as the new-horn babe is de¬ 
 pendent on the sustenance which others give it. 
 
 “ When an implement is made, whether axe, 
 or cart, or basket, or canoe, or rope, or whatever it 
 may be, up to the latest most complicated machine, 
 the man who makes it must have his immediate 
 wants, of food, etc., in some way supplied to him 
 while he is making it, either from a store of his 
 own, or from a store provided by somebody else, 
 who consents to supply his daily needs for the 
 sake of a benefit from the implement when it is 
 made. In the same way, when labor is applied to 
 the producing of any remote«or lasting, instead of 
 an immediately beneficial result, as when a piece 
 of soil is cleared and broken up for seed, and 
 corn and roots are planted ; or when herds and 
 flocks are got together in pastures, for fattening 
 and for breeding their increase; or when a road is 
 made ; or when a pack-peddler or a caravan or a 
 ship is sent to carry things to some other place, to 
 exchange for other things;—when any kind of 
 work, in fact, is done, wherein the object of exer¬ 
 tion is removed by some interval of time from the 
 act of exertion, somebody must have saved or accu¬ 
 mulated, out of the fruits of past labor, that which 
 will supply the current wants of those whose labor 
 directs itself to the remote result. So, too, when 
 a division of labor has been brought about, and 
 several men take each a distinct and special task 
 
FIRST EVENING. 
 
 21 
 
 for the benefit of all, becoming one a farmer, an¬ 
 other a shoemaker, another a weaver of cloth, an¬ 
 other a dresser of skins, and so on, there must be 
 somewhere, in somebody’s hands, a store from 
 which they can draw while the exchanges between 
 them are brought about, and while each one is 
 partitioning to every other his contribution to the 
 total wants of all. Without such a store for the 
 interval of exchange, onr division of labor, which 
 is the material measure of civilization more than 
 anything else, would be impossible. 
 
 “ 1STow, all that, whatever it may be, which is 
 so accumulated for these purposes, and so used, 
 is capital. The nature and function of capital, 
 therefore, we can best define by saying that it is 
 everything, derived and accumulated from past 
 labor, which enables present labor to be employed 
 in any such way that the beneficial results from it 
 have to be waited for. 
 
 “ All this may seem trite, but we need to set it 
 out freshly and distinctly before us in the discus¬ 
 sion we have engaged in, because it defines the 
 relationship between capital and labor. It brings 
 us face to face with one tremendous fact: that 
 every hind of labor which does not immediately 
 produce for the man who performs it the imme¬ 
 diate satisfaction of an immediate want is abso¬ 
 lutely dependent upon capital. JNTow, put along¬ 
 side of that a second grim fact, which no one will 
 
22 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 dispute, viz.: that this complex social state which 
 we call civilization has left no labor to be done by 
 any man that is not of that dependent hind , or 
 next to none. Think of it! It cannot be realized 
 in an instant. AVe have to pause and reflect be¬ 
 fore we can fairly conceive the remoteness with 
 which almost every object for which we, any of 
 us, exert ourselves, is separated nowadays from 
 the exertion that we make, or the labor that we 
 perform, to attain it, no matter what may be the 
 particular division of human labor to which we 
 have assigned ourselves. AVe do something for 
 somebody in the next street, who does something 
 else for somebody else in the next town, who does 
 something else for somebody else in another State, 
 who does something else for somebody else in 
 New York, or in Boston, or in Chicago, or in New 
 Orleans, or in London, or in Paris, or in Calcutta, 
 who does something else for somebody else on an 
 Illinois farm, who grows the wheat that we make 
 our bread of, or on a South Carolina plantation, who 
 grows the cotton that is in our shirts, or on a Texas 
 pasture-range, who fattens the beef that we con¬ 
 sume, or in an English factory, who weaves cloth 
 for our coats, or in a Chinese tea-garden, who 
 grows the herb which solaces our evening repast. 
 AVhat man in the civilized world can trace the 
 intricate, devious, infinitely complicated way in 
 which the particular result of his particular labor 
 
FIRST EVENING. 
 
 23 
 
 is raveled into a thousand threads, by our modern 
 division of labor and the wonderful system of 
 modern commercial exchange, to be woven in and 
 out with millions of other threads, raveled and 
 spun in the same way from the work of innumer¬ 
 able other hands, and so stretched hither and 
 thither, all over the globe, to reach the ten thou¬ 
 sand separate objects of want and desire for which 
 he labors ? ISTo man can track, any longer, the 
 work which he sends out from himself to a hun¬ 
 dredth part of the results which it brings back to 
 him. He cannot any longer, if he would, take 
 things at first hands from Nature, by the immedi¬ 
 ate process of direct labor. Civilization has put 
 everything at a certain remove, and capital, on 
 every side of him, holds an intermediate agency. 
 
 “ Here, then, entangled helplessly in the meshes 
 of the vast network of this modern organization 
 of labor and exchange, stands the man who has 
 hands and brain, intelligence, strength, and will 
 to work, according to the demand of Nature, for 
 what he needs, but who stands empty-handed—- 
 with no accumulation of things hitherto produced 
 —with no capital. What can he do ? There are 
 no wild creatures any more within his reach that 
 he can hunt for food, or whose skins he can ap¬ 
 propriate for clothing. There is not an animal 
 that he can kill which is not the property of some¬ 
 body—stamped with the right of possession by ac- 
 
24 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LAB OB. 
 
 quirement or accumulation. There is not a held 
 in which he can dig a root, or pluck an ear of corn, 
 or gather a handful of fruit, that is not hedged 
 with the same right. There is nothing within his 
 reach to which he can apply his labor, to make it 
 productive for others and so exchangeable—not a 
 scrap of raw material, whether metal, or wood, or 
 stone, or even clay—that is not ticketed and la¬ 
 beled < Hands off! ’ The mark of appropriation, 
 the sign and seal of capital, are on everything 
 around him. Except with the consent of the sov¬ 
 ereigns of this universal domain, if he so much as 
 attempts to apply his hands to any productive 
 work, he is a trespasser and a thief. What can he 
 do \ Why, nothing, hut helplessly cry out to those 
 who hold this environment of capital around him: 
 i Pray let me work! let me have something to w r ork 
 with and "work upon ! land to cultivate, or wood 
 to cut, or iron to forge, or clay to mould and burn ! 
 Give me a chance to produce something that is ex¬ 
 changeable for bread, with those who have bread. 
 Make your own terms with me—the best terms 
 that you can make with me and with my fellows 
 who, like me, have only capacity to work and de¬ 
 sire to work, and who are utterly without the 
 means 1 Take every advantage that you will of 
 the desperate pressure of our necessities ! Make us 
 bid against one another, until we bid ourselves 
 down to so small a share of the products of our la- 
 
FIRST EVENING. 
 
 25 
 
 bor, expended upon your materials, with your im¬ 
 plements, that it will barely keep our bodies and 
 our souls together; but let us work, and not 
 starve! ’ 
 
 “ In God’s name, my dear sir, is not the potent 
 possibility of oppression that exists here something 
 terrible ? And when we have two classes of men, 
 with the possession of capital on one side and the 
 necessity to labor on the other, does not the rela¬ 
 tionship between them partake very considerably 
 of the nature of slavery ? 
 
 “ Mind you, I am not quarreling with this state 
 of things, nor denouncing it. I am only stating 
 the facts about it. I recognize it as being an in¬ 
 evitable incident of civilization up to the point 
 that we have reached ; for, without having placed 
 ourselves under the conditions that produce it, we 
 could never have risen above barbarism. But I do 
 say that when civilization develops so frightful a 
 power in the hands of one part of mankind over 
 another part, it is the business of civilization to 
 find some way in which to counteract, or modify, 
 or nullify it, and it cannot have any other business 
 in hand that is half so imperative.” 
 
 The judge had risen restlessly from his seat, 
 during the latter part of his speech, and was pac¬ 
 ing the room, in a singular state of excited feeling. 
 My daughter Kate and her young friend had stolen 
 into the study, attracted from their own topics by 
 2 
 
2G 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 the warmth and eloquence of ours. We had all 
 listened intently to the vehement declamation of 
 the judge, and, when he paused, there was a mo¬ 
 ment of thoughtful silence. I was moved a good 
 deal by what he had said, but not altogether con¬ 
 vinced of the soundness of his view. 
 
 “ Your statement,” said I, after a little reflec¬ 
 tion, “ your statement of the situation as between 
 labor and capital seems to me to be a theoretical 
 and an extreme one. You represent the depend¬ 
 ence of labor upon capital, but you do not take 
 into account the reciprocal dependence of capital 
 upon labor, which is just as rigorous a fact, and 
 which, if it be not quite equal to the other, goes 
 certainly very far toward neutralizing it. The 
 man of capital must have the help of the man of 
 labor to make his capital productive for him, just 
 as much as the laborer must have the help of the 
 capitalist to put him in the way of performing 
 productive work. The dependence is mutual, 
 and there is a pressure of necessity on each side to 
 compel them to terms with one another, in the 
 matter of dividing whatever maybe the joint prod¬ 
 uct from what they severally contribute. You 
 leave this important fact out of the case, and pre¬ 
 sent it one-sidedly, which is not fair nor true argu¬ 
 ment.” 
 
 “ Oh, no,” cried the judge, “ I do not forget the 
 dependence of capital upon labor—for its gains ; 
 
FIRST EVENING. 
 
 27 
 
 tlie necessity under which, they both act together 
 in production; the self-interest which brings one 
 into cooperation with the other, when the two 
 exist apart, in separate hands. I do not forget, 
 and I have no wish to put out of sight nor to be¬ 
 little the facts that you refer to. I should have 
 come to them in a moment. 
 
 “ The common interest which associates capi¬ 
 tal and labor together in production is a certain 
 fact, but we must take care to analyze it and see 
 its parts. I used to be deceived by it, and trusted 
 to it for a comfortable settlement of this whole 
 matter of justice to labor, until I happened one 
 day to think what a mighty difference there is be¬ 
 tween capital and labor in the abstract and the 
 capitalist and the laborer in the concrete. If you 
 place capital and labor together in the same hand 
 —let the same man, that is, be both laborer and 
 capitalist at once—there is then no possible issue 
 between them ; their identification in interest and 
 their mutuality of dependence are complete ; and 
 this is their natural state of union—the one which 
 we theoretically contemplate whenever we prove 
 to ourselves that there is natural justice in the re¬ 
 lationship between them. But put them apart— 
 dissociate them so far as their personal representa¬ 
 tion is concerned, making the laborers one class 
 and the capitalists another class; what then? You 
 have put persons in the place of things, now, and 
 
28 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 the situation is wholly changed. You are no 
 longer merely dealing with- the inter-operative 
 functions of capital and labor in the abstract, but 
 you are dealing with them under the dominion of 
 concrete human motives and passions, human ne¬ 
 cessities and desires, and all the nice balance which 
 existed between them before is totally destroyed by 
 interference. The man of wealth, be it a greater or 
 less accumulation, is ordinarily covetous of more, 
 and so feels that it is for his interest to employ 
 what he possesses as capital, to produce an in¬ 
 crease. lie is commonly actuated in this by no 
 immediate necessity, but by a desire, or by pru¬ 
 dential fore-calculations for the future. But the 
 man without wealth, who possesses nothing save 
 the ability to work—how enormously different are 
 the forces that act upon him I There are no alter¬ 
 natives in his case ; no region of choice within 
 which he is free, except that narrow one which has 
 death on one side of it. lie must employ his 
 labor productively in order to live. 11 is interest 
 in the matter is the interest which a man has in 
 the preservation of his life, and of other lives that 
 are dear to him and dependent on him. When, 
 therefore, you bring these two together, to make 
 terms of copartnership with one another in the 
 business of production, you have love of gain to 
 urge the one and love of life to force the other. 
 Behind the one you have prudence, avarice and 
 
FIRST EVENING. 
 
 29 
 
 many selfish desires; behind the other you have 
 hunger, misery, starvation, death. On one side 
 you have a powerful human motive ; on the other 
 side a desperate human necessity. Will you say 
 that the two contracting parties stand upon an 
 equal footing in their negotiation ? Will you ex¬ 
 pect to keep equity in the middle of such unequal 
 forces as these 1 Will you trust, your laws of politi¬ 
 cal economy to secure justice to labor in such a 
 situation as this % No, sir. It will not do. Those 
 are the theorists, in this matter, who talk of capital 
 and labor as though they were merely dead names 
 of things; as though they were nothing more than 
 the £ x ’ and the ‘y’ of a simple equation; as 
 though there were not a living, breathing, palpi¬ 
 tating humanity represented in them, whose needs 
 and misfortunes and passions complicate the prob¬ 
 lem. I am not the theorist, for I face the facts as 
 the world shows them to me, and they tell me 
 that it is an idle dream to look for fair dividends 
 to be made between capital and labor by simple 
 operation of the mutual interests which bring them 
 together.” 
 
 “ But, my dear judge,” said I, u there certainly 
 is an extremeness in your statements. You will 
 not claim that the situation you have described is 
 actually and commonly the situation in which the 
 laborer makes his bargain with the capitalist. 
 How often does starvation really occur, even 
 
30 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 among the poorest and most unfortunate of man¬ 
 kind, and how often does it appear so imminent 
 to any laborer that his fear of it will actually 
 dictate the wages to which he submits ? You must 
 concede, I think, that‘the situation of ‘desperate 
 necessity 3 is an exceptional and not the common 
 one, and that when it does occur, to any large ex¬ 
 tent, it is produced by causes of general misfor¬ 
 tune or calamity which have disturbed the whole 
 productive organization of society.” 
 
 “ Yes, but why is this so ? It is because here, 
 as in many other instances, the heart of man is 
 more generous than the social systems he has 
 framed. I think well of human nature, on the 
 whole, and I believe that kindness toward a fellow¬ 
 being is more in accordance with our nature than 
 cruelty ; though it has to be developed, like every 
 other moral disposition in man, by intelligent per¬ 
 ceptions. That is the ground on which I rest my 
 hope for humanity in the very matter that we are 
 speaking of. We eke out, now, a tyrannical and 
 heartless theoretic economy with practical charities 
 and generosities that make it tolerable. The 
 change to be brought about is this: that we must 
 reduce the generosity to a system, not of gener¬ 
 osity, but of justice and right. According to the 
 theory of our wages system, the fortunate part of 
 mankind which has possessed itself, in one way 
 and another, of almost all the instruments and 111 a- 
 
FIRST EVENING. 
 
 31 
 
 terials and adjuncts of productive labor, has a right 
 to compel the other part to perform work for just 
 that least and lowest share of the products of labor 
 which the competition of their bodily necessities 
 will force them to accept; but the practice of the 
 system is not often as heartless as the theory of it. 
 It seldom happens that the men of capital drive 
 the hardest and sharpest bargain that they might 
 with the men of labor. It seldom happens that 
 their cruel power is exercised to the terrible ex¬ 
 treme which it might be carried to. It seldom 
 happens that the vast army of empty-handed men 
 and women, whose bread to-morrow depends upon 
 their chance to work to-day, are desperately driven 
 to bid each other down to quite such fragments 
 and crumbs of subsistence as they might be, if 
 there were no humanity nor generosity to leaven 
 the brutal selfishness of the theory of the system 
 to which they are subjected. Capital is all the 
 time giving something more of a share of the pro¬ 
 duction which it controls to labor than it might 
 give, in somewhat higher wages than it might 
 pay; and, at the same time, a broad, grand organi¬ 
 zation of what we call philanthropy and benevo¬ 
 lence is overlaid upon the system of our social 
 economy, to mitigate its harshness and heartless¬ 
 ness. Contrary to their usual wont, men practise 
 in this matter of their responsibilities toward one 
 another better than their maxims prescribe, and I 
 
32 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 feel assured, by a thousand signs, that the heart of 
 humanity is very nearly right and ripe for some¬ 
 thing juster and fairer than the old institutions of 
 labor. It is only waiting now for certain strong 
 habits of view which it has acquired to be cor¬ 
 rected by truer instincts and a larger enlighten¬ 
 ment.” 
 
 “As I understand you, then,” said I, “your 
 view is that capital holds over labor an oppressive 
 advantage, which is not used, as a rule, to the full 
 extent, but which it asserts, nevertheless, with too 
 much sanction from the economical philosophy of 
 our day, an unlimited right to use; and your de¬ 
 mand is, that the claim of right to exercise so op¬ 
 pressive a power shall be condemned and vetoed 
 by the just judgment of society.” 
 
 “ That is it. You have it exactly. And now 
 —but here have I talked the whole evening away,” 
 cried the judge, looking at his watch, “ and made 
 you all dumb, very nearly, with my uncivil lectur¬ 
 ing. I am ashamed of myself; but you threw me 
 on a subject which runs away with me. I hope, 
 ladies, you will not think that I am always such a 
 rattle-tongued egotist as I have been to-night.” 
 
 And so he went on with many laughing apolo¬ 
 gies until my wife had to put a stop to them, and 
 compelled him to understand that the talk of the 
 evening had interested her so greatly that she 
 should be impatient for a continuation of it. Nor 
 
FIRST EVENING. 
 
 33 
 
 would we any of us let him go until he had prom¬ 
 ised to come again, on the morrow, and resume 
 the topic where it had been left. On that promise 
 we bade him good-night, and, with hearts that had 
 grown much warmer toward him within the past 
 hour or two, we saw him walk slowly to his lonely 
 home. 
 
SECOND EVENING. 
 
 ABOUT THE EIGHTS OF CAPITAL. 
 
 Might and Right in Society.—What morally belongs to Superior 
 Endowments and Advantages.—The Point of Social Equilib¬ 
 rium.—Some Study of the Modes in which Wealth is acquired. 
 —The Judge’s Doctrine of Morals and his Doctrine of 
 Justice. 
 
 Faithful to tlie promise he had made, the 
 judge came early the next night, and found us all 
 waiting for him in the little room. My young 
 friend John, whom I discovered to be a very sen¬ 
 sible fellow indeed, had begged the privilege of 
 being present again. lie was much taken with 
 the judge’s talk, although the conservatism which 
 is commonly incident to his time of life held him 
 back, with more resistance than I could make, 
 from the acceptance of the judge’s views. The 
 conservatism of young men, at a certain stage of 
 experience, by-the-way, is a very curious thing; 
 not strange at all, but curious. It is wholly con¬ 
 trary to the impulses of youth ; but the contrari¬ 
 ness, you see, is just as natural as the impulses 
 
SECOND EVENING. 
 
 35 
 
 are, and perhaps a little more so. . The boy is 
 pretty surely a radical; all his philosophy of life 
 is full of romance, and enthusiasm, and credulity. 
 But the young man, having knocked his head and 
 stumbled with his feet a few times against the 
 hard realities of the world, becomes so distrustful 
 and afraid, very soon, of his enthusiasms, that he 
 tries hard to extinguish them, and pushes himself 
 with all liis might to the opposite extreme of 
 thinking and feeling. Old notions of things, with 
 their wrinkles and their grayness, and with such 
 mouldiness even as they may have acquired, look 
 much wiser and more venerable than the sleek 
 upstart parvenues of doctrine which oppose them, 
 and he has not courage to refuse them a respectful 
 deference, whether they satisfy his judgment or 
 not. He fancies that they must be the true no¬ 
 tions, and he is fearful and ashamed of any revolt 
 in himself against their claims, because he suspects 
 that it is proceeding out of some lingering boyish¬ 
 ness in him which he ought manfully to get rid 
 of. So he becomes resolutely conservative, in his 
 ambition to become manly, and mature, and dis¬ 
 creet. If selfish pursuits, of fortune or ambition, 
 gain possession of him then, as they are apt to do, 
 and he ceases to think much or care much for 
 things outside of his own objects in life, he is 
 more likely to retain his conservative attitude 
 thenceforward than to change it, simply as the 
 
36 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 effect of a certain rheumatic rusting and stiffening 
 of his nature, rather than because of any constitu¬ 
 tional bent of mind that he has. Now, my young 
 friend John was just at that stage of his life when 
 the fear of not being conservatively wise and pru¬ 
 dent overcame pretty much all that was instinctive 
 and natural in his view of things. Being an ex¬ 
 cellent fellow, of industry, intelligence and a 
 steady character, he had risen to quite an impor¬ 
 tant clerkship in one of the iron-working establish¬ 
 ments of the city, with reasonable expectations of 
 a partnership in time; and in that situation, with 
 these prospects, of course he felt himself in a 
 measure responsible to society for the defending 
 and maintaining of its well-established arrange¬ 
 ments and institutions, I was not suq)rised, there¬ 
 fore, to find him, although greatly pleased with 
 the judge, yet stoutly critical of his views, and 
 much disposed to be afraid of some hidden infec¬ 
 tion of communism, or other dangerous and de¬ 
 moralizing doctrine in them. I saw how it was 
 with the young gentleman, and knew that the talk 
 would do him good. 
 
 “ Now,” said the judge, after some greetings 
 and weather observations and the like, when we 
 had settled ourselves before the fire, “ if we are 
 going to take up our old subject again, you must 
 not let me prose upon it as I did Jast night. AVe 
 must have more of a conversation and less of a 
 
SECOND EVENING. 
 
 37 
 
 lecture this evening, if you will help-to keep me 
 from forgetting myself.” 
 
 “ But, you know,” I suggested, “ that we pre¬ 
 fer to be listeners and questioners chiefly in this 
 matter, because we have none of us reflected upon 
 it as you have done, nor arrived at the convictions 
 about it which you have. We are asking you to 
 give us the results of your study and your think¬ 
 ing on the subject, and to show us the course of 
 reasoning by wdiich you have been led to your 
 opinions.” 
 
 “ Yes,” said my wife, “you must be generous, 
 and not exact measure for measure.” 
 
 “Well, well; we’ll not be ceremonious nor 
 disputatious about it,” the judge cried; “ but I 
 shall endeavor not to play quite so oratorical a 
 part as I certainly did last night. And now, where 
 is our question ? At what stage of argument did 
 we drop it % ” 
 
 I was ready to answer, but my wife proved too 
 quick for me. 
 
 “ Let me show you,” said she, “ how far a 
 woman can be interested in these masculine top¬ 
 ics, and how under standingly she may remember a 
 discussion of them. You had shown that capital 
 holds over labor a terribly oppressive advantage, 
 which is dangerous and unjust to the latter, and 
 which, although not fully exercised, is fully as¬ 
 serted as of right, and with a sanction from the 
 
38 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR . 
 
 economical philosophy of our time which ought 
 not to be given to it.” 
 
 “You have stated it with precision, madam, 
 and admirably,” said the judge. “ I am sure that 
 no one can wish to amend the statement. Are we 
 agreed, then, to this point, or is there more to be 
 questioned before we go further ? ” 
 
 “ I should like to ask a question,” said Master 
 John, blushing a little at his own boldness. “Is 
 not the advantage which the capitalist holds, as 
 against the laborer without capital, an advantage 
 that belongs to him, by nature and by right, or by 
 the intention of the Creator? Is it not, I mean, 
 an advantage that inevitably accrues to him by 
 reason of some superior capability that he is en¬ 
 dowed with, and on account of which the pos¬ 
 session of capital is gathered into his hands. It 
 seems to me that, inasmuch as men are not created 
 alike, it must be intended that each should have 
 the benefit of whatever advantage is gained for 
 him by his own peculiar faculties or his own pecul¬ 
 iar character.” 
 
 “ This is an important question that you have 
 raised,” answered the judge, “ and I am glad that 
 you have brought it up. We must look into it. 
 I should not like to dispute the right of a man to 
 appropriate any benefit that legitimately accrues 
 to him from the faculties or the forces which God 
 has endowed him with. When I speak of equity 
 
SECOND EVENING. 
 
 39 
 
 between men I do not mean equality*. There is 
 no such thing as equality among men — except 
 their equal right to an equal opportunity in the 
 world, for doing according to their capabilities 
 and according to whatever moral force is in them. 
 I do contend for that equality, but for nothing 
 more, and this is what I mean by equity. You 
 would not say, I am sure, that every advantage 
 which one man possesses over another, by reason 
 of a superior natural endowment, can be equitably 
 used to its full extent ? For example, one is phys¬ 
 ically larger and stronger than another, so that, 
 if he chooses to do so, and if society does in no 
 way interfere, he may obtain mastery over his 
 fellow by muscular superiority, and command him 
 as a subject or a slave. Would you say, in that 
 case, that the fortunately strong man has a right 
 to all the advantage over his fellow which may 
 accrue to him by reason of his muscular capa¬ 
 bilities %” 
 
 “ Certainly not,” answered John ; “ we are not 
 savages.” 
 
 “ And if one man, not being stronger than his 
 fellow, but being more courageous and more ener¬ 
 getic and aggressive, is still able to domineer over 
 him and to place him in a position of dependence 
 and servility, would you say that the advantage 
 which he thus obtains belongs to him by nature 
 and by right, and by the intention of the Creator, 
 
40 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 who made him a more aggressive creature than 
 his neighbor ? ” 
 
 “No, sir,” said John, after a little hesitation, 
 “ I should not.” 
 
 “ Once again, then: if one man, without being 
 stronger or more courageous than his fellow, is 
 more intelligent and inventive, and succeeds, 
 therefore, in contriving weapons which his neigh¬ 
 bor cannot resist, and in protecting himself with 
 armor which his neighbor cannot penetrate, so 
 that he is able to override his neighbor, as the 
 mediaeval knight did the peasant, and to do as he 
 will with him—would you say that the advantage 
 which accrues in this way from a superior capa¬ 
 bility belongs to its possessor by right, and that 
 society or social opinion has no business to inter¬ 
 fere with it ? ” 
 
 “ I do not think that I should say so,” replied 
 John, with much frankness; “ but these examples 
 that you suggest all look to the exercise of a 
 tyrannical brute force, which civilized society, of 
 course, cannot tolerate.” 
 
 “ Yes, but why ? I have adduced three in¬ 
 stances in which a man may be given the utmost 
 results of an advantage over his fellow-men ob¬ 
 tained by the possession of a superior capability. 
 In our first example the advantage is a physical 
 one—that of muscular strength ; in the second it 
 is a moral one—that of courage and energy; in 
 
SECOND EVENING. 
 
 41 
 
 the third it is an intellectual one—thaf> of knowl¬ 
 edge and invention. The three sides of human 
 nature are represented in these three examples, 
 and yon admit, therefore, that there may accrue 
 advantages to a man from every kind of capability 
 that the human being can possess which he has no 
 right to enjoy, or which society cannot afford to 
 concede to him. hTow, what is the distinction to 
 be drawn between advantages which rightfully be¬ 
 long to the man who possesses a superior capability 
 and those which do not rightfully belong to him ? ” 
 My young friend John could not answer. 
 
 “ Perhaps we can find out,” continued the 
 judge, “ by a little more questioning. ' If the 
 stronger man has no right to subjugate his fellow- 
 man, by the superior strength that he possesses, 
 he has a right, has he not, to the larger product of 
 the more efficient labor which his superior strength 
 enables him to perform ? ” 
 
 “ Undoubtedly.” 
 
 “And the more energetic and enterprising man 
 has a right to the enjoyment of what he achieves 
 by his superior activity and resolution, in fair 
 competition with his neighbors \ ” 
 
 “ Certainly.” 
 
 v “And the intelligent man who makes his 
 knowledge or his inventive faculty helpful to him 
 in his work, has a right to the benefit, has he 
 not ? ” 
 
42 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 “ Assuredly.” 
 
 “It seems, therefore, tliat according to our 
 sense of right, there are some advantages which 
 the man who is more capable, in any wise, than 
 his fellow, may justly take from his fortunate en¬ 
 dowment, and some which he may not take with 
 justice. Consequently the mere fact that such an 
 advantage is placed within his power by the Crea¬ 
 tor who endowed him, does not prove, I should 
 say, that it belongs to him to appropriate at will.” 
 
 “ That is true, I must admit,” said John. 
 
 “Just what does belong to him by right, and 
 what does not,” continued the judge, “ may not be 
 so easy to determine exactly. We may safely say, 
 however, that a man has a right to the benefit of 
 every advantage, accruing to him from any kind 
 of superior capability, which is not a disadvantage 
 to his fellow-man, or which is not exercised at the 
 expense of his fellow.” 
 
 We all assented. 
 
 “ I think, too, that the converse of this propo¬ 
 sition is equally true, and that no man has a just 
 right to any use of any advantage in this world 
 which takes aught from the advantages or oppor¬ 
 tunities of any other man. But this may raise 
 nice questions in some cases, and I will not start 
 them by asserting it. The wings of genius would 
 sometimes be clipped if that were made the rule. 
 It is enough for our present inquiry that we settle 
 
SECOND EVENING. 
 
 43 
 
 so much as we have settled; that might of any 
 kind does not make right, whether the potentiality 
 in question he that of strength, or courage, or cun¬ 
 ning, of industry, or economy, or enterprise. The 
 great fact to he recognized—the fact essential to 
 human civilization—is this: that every gift to a 
 man, in his body, or in his mind, or in his soul, is 
 an obligation as well as a gift; that he holds it for 
 his fellows as well as for himself, and that each 
 one is so far his brother’s keeper that he is bound 
 to take care, at least, that his brother be not 
 harmed nor hindered by him.” 
 
 “ That is good doctrine,” exclaimed my wife. 
 
 “It is the philosophy of Christianity on its hu¬ 
 man side,” said I. 
 
 “You are right,” confessed John, “and I see 
 that the point which I raised against your argu¬ 
 ment of last night was not well considered.” 
 
 “It is not necessary, then,” said the judge, 
 “ to go further into this part of our subject. But 
 I think it may do us some good, nevertheless, to 
 consider how it is, under what circumstances and 
 through what causes, of superior capability or 
 otherwise, that the capital accumulated by human 
 industry comes to be gathered, for the most part, 
 into the hands of a comparatively few men, while 
 the rest hold none at all or very little. When we 
 speak of capitalists, we usually refer to the rich 
 men of the community, whose wealth is, more or 
 
44 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 less, employed productively, either by themselves 
 or by others to whom they lend it. M r e must re¬ 
 member, however, that the term capitalists includes 
 a great multitude besides, who are not to be con¬ 
 sidered rich men, but who possess some surplus, 
 more or less, from a few T dollars to a few thousands 
 of dollars in efficient value, which they employ in 
 connection with their own labor, as tradesmen, as 
 manufacturers, as farmers, as mechanics, etc. AVe 
 must put them all, of every degree together, to 
 constitute what can properly be called the capital¬ 
 ist class, as distinguished from the non-capitalist 
 laboring class. Let us do so, imaginatively, and 
 survey the congregation which has the Rothschilds 
 and the Astors at one extreme, while at the other 
 extreme are the humble blacksmiths and shoe¬ 
 makers, whose little capital is just that which will 
 furnish them with shops and tools, and which will 
 buy the material that goes into a job of work in 
 advance of its being paid for, besides furnishing 
 food while the work is being done. Taking them 
 all together, I wish to consider a moment the 
 various ways in which they have severally become 
 possessed of their capital. 
 
 “ First of all, there is the capital that has been 
 accumulated in the hands that hold it by industry 
 and economy; by hard work, producing as much 
 as possible, and by saving or unwastefui habits, 
 consuming as little as may be. Most of the smaller 
 
SECOND EVENING. 
 
 45 
 
 capitals are of this description, and they are held 
 by the highest kind of right, because they repre¬ 
 sent a surplus of actual production, retained by and 
 belonging to the men whose exertion produced it. 
 The largest rights that can be claimed for capital 
 must be conceded to those who hold it by this 
 tenure. 
 
 “ Next, there is the capital that accrues to those 
 whom we call men of superior business capability, 
 by the operation, on a large scale, of the faculty 
 which they possess of organizing and directing 
 productive industry; of giving the highest effi¬ 
 ciency to it in any department, and of practically 
 perfecting the systematic economy of labor and 
 its exchanges. Also that which accrues to those 
 who improve the arts of industry by discovery 
 and invention, and to those who extend its fields 
 and render its economical relationships more in¬ 
 timate, by enterprising and sagacious undertak¬ 
 ings. The capital which accrues in these ways to 
 men of faculty and energy, under the just limita- 
 . tions that we have settled upon, is as honestly 
 gotten and as rightfully held as the other. 
 
 “ After this, there comes the capital that is ac¬ 
 quired in the hands of those who possess it by 
 what we call successful speculation ; by shrewdly 
 or sagaciously taking advantage of opportunities 
 in trade which are produced by circumstances out¬ 
 side of themselves, and relative to which they 
 
46 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOK. 
 
 have no agency, except that of looking out for 
 them and detecting them. The capital thus got¬ 
 ten together seems to me to he of very dubious 
 tenure and the rights morally attaching to it very 
 doubtful. In the hands that hold it, it does not, 
 either directly or indirectly, represent production, 
 but acquisition. It is acquired, generally speak¬ 
 ing, at the expense of others. "While the faculties 
 that belong to the thrifty mechanic, the energetic 
 manufacturer, the ingenious inventor and the 
 sagacious projector, are all useful and beneficial to 
 society, the faculty of the speculator is not so at 
 all, but only beneficial to himself. It enables him 
 to gain possession of that which he lias in no way 
 helped to produce. It is a kind of predatory 
 talent, and deserves, I think, very little admira¬ 
 tion or respect. In many cases the exercise of it 
 is not morally to be distinguished from adroit 
 theft; in some cases it is meaner and more despi¬ 
 cable than theft. The mode of robbery which the 
 footpad and the burglar pursue is an honorable 
 and an honest one compared with the villainous 
 stratagems that are contrived by the gambling 
 speculators of the stock-market and the grain- 
 market. Though society tolerates the robbery 
 that is committed by a speculative ‘ corner 5 and 
 condemns robbery committed on the highway 
 with a pistol, the first is the meaner theft of the 
 two, and the more detestable. Its indirectness 
 
SECOND EVENING . 
 
 47 
 
 has confused the moral notions of mankind; but 
 some day, I trust, we shall have clearer ideas about 
 it prevailing in society. 
 
 “By another kind of acquisition, capital is 
 deposited, so to speak, in the hands of those who 
 become possessors of it, without any agency at all 
 on their own part, either honest or dishonest, 
 either prudential, or sagacious, or crafty. They are 
 only passive recipients of what fortune, or good 
 luck, as we call it, has thrown upon them. Of such 
 capitalists there are two classes: The first is made 
 up of those who inherit an accumulation of wealth. 
 Their own exertions have had nothing to do 
 with the acquisition of it. It has passed into their 
 possession either by gift, or under ordinances of 
 society which are wholly founded upon considera¬ 
 tions of expediency. There is no such thing as a 
 natural right of inheritance, touching any kind of 
 desirable possession, whether it be a house, or a 
 public office, or an honorable title. There is no in¬ 
 herent reason of justice which determines that a 
 son shall become possessed of the wealth which his 
 father has acquired, when the father dies. Still 
 less is there any naturally just reason which deter¬ 
 mines that the wealth accumulated by a man dur¬ 
 ing his life shall pass, when he dies, to the living 
 person of nearest kinship to him in blood, what¬ 
 ever the remove may be. The law which dictates 
 this transmission of property by inheritance is one 
 
48 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 purely of human institution. Thus far in the 
 development of society, men have agreed, and with 
 undoubted prudence, that such an arrangement is 
 practically the best, for the preservation of social 
 order and for the conservation of social stability ; 
 but at some future time the agreement in- society 
 about the disposition to be made by law’, when a 
 man dies, of such wealth as his exertions have 
 accumulated, may be very different, perhaps. It 
 certainly can be so with perfect justice, because 
 the arrangement, as I conceive, is one to be gov¬ 
 erned entirely by the interest and ^veil-being of 
 society, as determined, at any time, by its condi¬ 
 tion or by the general judgment of its members. 
 If the support and education of children until they 
 arrive at a mature age, and the decent support of 
 a surviving widow, are provided for out of the 
 estate of a deceased husband and father—who is 
 the responsible protector of these dependents 
 while they are dependent necessarily, and not 
 longer—natural justice w r ould seem to be fully 
 satisfied. At all events, even if the possessor of 
 inherited wealth be fully entitled to the luxury 
 of living and to the exemption from necessitated 
 labor which it affords him, there cannot conceiv¬ 
 ably accrue to him from it such rights as must 
 attach to the accidental possession if we concede, 
 sir, that the advantages which the man with capi¬ 
 tal holds over the man without capital are rights. 
 
SECOND EVENING. 
 
 49 
 
 The question here is an important one,' because a 
 very large part of the capital accumulated in the 
 world is held by this tenure of inheritance. 
 
 “ Much the same may be said concerning the 
 second class of those who become possessors of 
 capital with no more, or hardly more, than a pas¬ 
 sive agency on their own part in the acquisition 
 of it. This class, which is a large one, is made up 
 of men who, possessing by actual acquisition some 
 property of small value originally, have a great 
 accretion of exchangeable value added to it, through 
 the incidental effect of labor performed by others 
 around them, or through an increase of neighbor¬ 
 ing population, or through some such cause for¬ 
 eign to their own exertions. The property in 
 which such an accretion of exchangeable value oc¬ 
 curs is usually property in land, or real estate, as 
 we call it. A man becomes possessed, for exam¬ 
 ple, of a piece of land, to which no other value 
 attaches, in the first instance, than the productive 
 value of its soil. Blit a city grows up around it, 
 and industry and commerce are so concentrated 
 about the spot in which this piece of land happens 
 to lie that mere space, in square inches and square 
 feet, acquires just there a great artificial value, 
 relatively to the value of other things. By selling 
 his land, or by taking rent for its use, the man 
 becomes rich—becomes largely possessed of capi¬ 
 tal, if he chooses to employ it as such—without 
 3 
 
50 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOK. 
 
 any exertion of his own, and oftentimes without 
 any fore-calculation even of the causes which op¬ 
 erated to give value to his land. Now, I am not 
 going to raise a question as to his right to the 
 wealth which accrues to him in this way, although 
 it is very much of a question whether private 
 property in land should exist at all. I certainly 
 cannot, for myself, satisfactorily refute those cogent 
 arguments which sustain the doctrine that the soil 
 and surface of the earth are the common property 
 of its inhabitants ; that individuals can rightfully 
 appropriate nothing more than the use of such 
 portions of soil and superficial space as they do 
 use, and can only do that with the consent and 
 under the control of the community and state in 
 which they live. In this view, the only right of 
 property which a man can have in land is that 
 relating to the value which he creates in it, or 
 upon it, by his own productive exertions; for all 
 such fixed improvements as he makes, by clearing, 
 by draining, by fertilizing, by inclosing, by erect¬ 
 ing buildings, etc., are as certainly his own as the 
 movable things which his labor has produced; 
 but any other ‘ real estate ’ than that belongs very 
 doubtfully to any individual. However, we need 
 not, as I said, raise the question now. The only 
 point which I wish to make is this: that when 
 wealth is gathered, as so much of the wealth of 
 the world is gathered, into the hands that hold it at 
 
SECOND EVENING. 
 
 51 
 
 any given time, by mere accretion of relative value 
 in some piece of land which a man has acciden¬ 
 tally acquired, and when that accretion is inci¬ 
 dentally brought about by the operation of human 
 energies which the man himself has very likely 
 contributed nothing to, it cannot be, in such cases, 
 that the possessor of this wealth becomes endowed 
 by it with any such rights as our young friend 
 proposes to concede to the capitalist, and which 
 are practically conceded to him in the politico- 
 economical philosophy of the present day. It can¬ 
 not be so, because we cannot possibly reconcile 
 such an idea with our sense of justice. 
 
 “ There is only one more way in which capital 
 is acquired that I must notice. It is the method 
 of outright, recognized dishonesty; by cheating 
 and overreaching, by adulteration and deception, 
 by bribery and corruption ; by practising upon 
 the ignorance, the credulity, or the carelessness of 
 men, and by all the many knavish tricks which 
 evade or defy our criminal laws, and which the 
 technicalities of law often make an actual cover 
 for. It is quite unnecessary to ask what just 
 rights belong to the possessors of capital acquired 
 in these ways, as attaching to the advantages which 
 they derive from it; because, of course, they have 
 none. It is obvious that their possession of what 
 they hold is due merely to the toleration by so¬ 
 ciety of a recognized injustice which it is impotent 
 
52 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 as jet to prevent. But it would be sickening, I 
 am afraid, to inquire bow much of the existing 
 capital of tlie world is held in the bands of men 
 who have acquired it by sinister means of this sort. 
 
 “ We have, then, if I have classified correctly, 
 five generically differing processes by which all 
 existing capital has accumulated, or become ag¬ 
 gregated, in the hands of its present possessors. 
 Broadly generalizing, I think that all the wealth 
 or capital existing (and for the moment we may 
 as well draw no distinction between wealth and 
 capital) is embraced in these five categories : 
 
 “ 1. Capital which is the residue that unwaste¬ 
 ful consumption leaves to industrious labor, in the 
 hands of those who have performed the labor. 
 This includes the surplus earnings of all usefully- 
 applied labor ; not only that which is directly pro¬ 
 ductive, but that which the actual producers need 
 or desire to have performed for them. It includes, 
 therefore, the labor of physicians, surgeons, law¬ 
 yers, clergymen, artists, literary men, and the like. 
 
 “ 2. Capital which accrues to those who have 
 the faculty to organize and direct with efficiency 
 the productive labor of others; or the faculty to 
 make large, economical combinations in the ex¬ 
 changing of the products of labor between different 
 parts of the world; or the ingenious faculty which 
 improves the implements and processes of pro¬ 
 ductive industry; or the enterprising, sagacious 
 
SECOND EVENING. 
 
 53 
 
 faculty tliat conceives and carries out great public 
 works, which, result in wider and more intimate 
 relations between the diverse industries of the 
 
 world. 
 
 “ 3. Capital that is gotten into possession by 
 what we call speculation, which is either mere 
 gambling or a shrewd catching of opportunities in 
 trade, produced very often by public calamities, 
 or by disturbances of industry and commerce that 
 are adverse to the public weal. 
 
 “ 4. Capital that is received by inheritance, or 
 otherwise passively acquired by its possessors, 
 without any agency, or a very small agency, of 
 their own, in the acquisition of it. 
 
 “ 5. Capital that is acquired by actual, unques¬ 
 tionable fraud. 
 
 “Tfe may generalize further, perhaps, and re¬ 
 duce our hve categories to two, dividing all wealth, 
 and therefore all capital, into two parts, separated 
 by one most essential distinction : 
 
 “ 1. Capital held by those who have contrib¬ 
 uted more or less to the creation of it. 
 
 “ 2. Capital held by those who have contrib¬ 
 uted little or nothing to the creation of it. 
 
 “ Kow is it consistent, let me ask, with your 
 notion of justice, as between men, that capital, 
 which is the product of human industry, should 
 be held in possession by men who have performed 
 none of the labor that produced it, nor any such 
 
54 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 labor as assists, or educates, or inspires, or grati¬ 
 fies the wants of those who produced it, unless it 
 is possessed by gift ? ” 
 
 This question was addressed to Master John, 
 who promptly answered : “ No, sir, it is not. Jf 
 strict justice were to prevail, I am sure there could 
 be no such thing possible as the possessing of 
 wealth or capital without having created it, un¬ 
 less it had been conferred by gift, or by some 
 equitable exchange with those who did create it. 
 But is such final justice possible? ” 
 
 “ Ah, that is a later question,” said the judge; 
 “ we are discussing principles now. At least in our 
 accepted beliefs we should aim, I think, to sustain 
 that which is absolutely right and true, without re¬ 
 gard to what may or may not seem to be practicable 
 for the moment. You do not dispute the propo¬ 
 sition that capital ought in strict justice to belong, 
 as a prevailing rule at least, to those who have 
 contributed to the producing of it, or who have 
 contributed in some way to the satisfying of the 
 wants of its producers ? ” 
 
 “ Xo; I should say that the proposition can¬ 
 not be reasonably disputed.” 
 
 “ And it appears to be the fact, does it not, 
 that a very large part of the wealth or capital so 
 far accumulated in the world has passed, by one 
 means and another, into the possession of men 
 who can show no such title to the possession, or 
 
SECOND EVENING . 
 
 55 
 
 who can show the right for a small portion only 
 of what they hold ? ” 
 
 “ Yes.” • 
 
 “ Do you think it is an exaggeration to say 
 that one-third of all the wealth now existing has 
 been gathered into the hands of its present hold¬ 
 ers by inheritance, by passive accretion of value 
 (relatively or excliangeably), by speculation, by 
 gambling, and by various kinds of fraud ? ” 
 
 “ No ; I am afraid that more than that pro¬ 
 portion of the whole, rather than less, would be 
 found, on a strict inquiry, to fall within your cate¬ 
 gories of questionably-acquired capital.” 
 
 “ Then,” said the judge, “ the inequity of the 
 distribution of wealth is surely a very serious 
 matter ; and if there is any upward movement of 
 development in humanity, as I, for one, firmly 
 believe, then there must be a discoverable ten¬ 
 dency in society toward the correction of this in¬ 
 equity, by the operation of social forces and in¬ 
 fluences which have a just direction. If we only 
 investigate as political economy guides us, we 
 shall make no such discovery, because the politi¬ 
 cal economist takes account of no motive in hu¬ 
 man action except self-interest or selfishness. Sci¬ 
 entifically he has no right to take account of any 
 other motive, because his business is simply to in¬ 
 vestigate correlatively the conditions under which 
 the exertions of men are applied to produce the 
 
56 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 satisfaction of their wants and desires, and lie has 
 gone to the proper limit of his science when he 
 has formulated into laws*the operation of this one 
 impulse, from self, which acts in all human in¬ 
 dustry. I have no quarrel to make with political 
 economy, as I said last night. I only contend 
 that there is a larger social philosophy—an ethi¬ 
 cal economy, so to speak—which embraces politi¬ 
 cal economy and extends far outside of it, and 
 into the wider domain of which we have got to 
 carry such questions as this. When I look there, 
 it seems to me that I can see a gradual evolution 
 of what I would call moral intelligence in the 
 civilized world, which tends, though very slowly, 
 to modify the great impelling force of selfishness 
 in all directions, and even, therefore, in the acqui¬ 
 sition of wealth. It is certainly a very slow evo¬ 
 lution, and the fact that it is so does not discour¬ 
 age my faith. 
 
 “ I do not believe, you know, in ignorant 
 morality. Happily for the world, there is, often¬ 
 times, among men, without the least rationality 
 of conscience, a certain negative rectitude of con¬ 
 duct which bears some resemblance to virtue, but 
 which is not of the true quality of virtue at all. 
 It is altogether a negative thing. It is right con- 
 duct because it is not wrong conduct, that is all. 
 It may come of feebleness, it may come of simple¬ 
 ness, it may come of mere dull, plastic obedience 
 
SECOND EVENING. 
 
 57 
 
 to some guiding religious authority ; but it does 
 not come of any vital moral force, and is of no 
 account whatever in an estimate of the moral con¬ 
 dition of mankind. To do right from an under¬ 
 standing of right is, in my view, the only genuine 
 virtue. 
 
 “ Truth and right are always coincident with 
 pure reason, and every notion of right and wrong 
 that we have, as I conceive, is derived from the 
 reasoning intelligence, which God gave us for our 
 enlightenment in this way as in all other ways. But 
 the concepts out of which these moral notions are 
 logically formed come from outside the region of 
 sensual discovery, so that the reason is not helped 
 by the senses to recognize their logical relation¬ 
 ships, as it is helped in the whole domain of sci¬ 
 entific knowledge. It necessarily works, there¬ 
 fore, toward the apprehension of moral truth with 
 far greater slowness and difficulty than toward the 
 apprehension of that which is sensibly phenom¬ 
 enal ; it needs, too, a far longer exercise and cult¬ 
 ure to prepare it for as ready and clear a compre¬ 
 hension of such truth. Who can w r onder, then, 
 if what we call the intellectual development of 
 mankind is far in advance of its moral develop¬ 
 ment ? It could not be otherwise. The neces¬ 
 sary difference is so great that we can see nothing 
 proportionate in it; and yet there is, unquestion¬ 
 ably, a certain ratio, always, between, for example, 
 
58 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR 
 
 the scientific knowledge and the moral develop¬ 
 ment of the human race. The easier objective 
 work of the human reason is its training for the 
 harder subjective work which it is equally ap¬ 
 pointed to do, and the evolution of moral intelli¬ 
 gence by the latter keeps pace with the evolution 
 of scientific, artistic, and political intelligence by 
 the former, though lingeringly and far behind. 
 No doubt the separation is an increasing one, and 
 that fact is deceptive to us; but it is like the race¬ 
 running of the tortoise and the hare—the distance 
 between them augments while both advance, and 
 even though there may be some constant and pro¬ 
 portionate acceleration of the progress of both. 
 
 “ There is this order, as I believe, in the devel¬ 
 opment of humanity : 1. Toward objective or sen¬ 
 suous intelligence ; 2. Toward subjective or moral 
 intelligence; 3. Toward the disciplining of the 
 animal man to act in accord with his intelligence. 
 The first of these will always be far in advance of 
 the second; the second always in advance of the 
 third ; and yet the first and the second contribute 
 steadily to the last, in which their whole divine 
 purpose would seem to be consummated. 
 
 “ Our faith in the moral progress of man is apt 
 to be foolishly discouraged because his conduct 
 continues to be so far in opposition to what he 
 does apprehend of right and wrong. Yet there is 
 that same perversity of conduct, opposed to knowl- 
 
SECOND EVENING. 
 
 59 
 
 edge, even where the strongest persuasions of 
 mere animal selfishness cooperate with the under¬ 
 standing to restrain it. In the care of our bodies, 
 for example, we act just as far in contradiction of 
 what we know of the facts of physiology, of hy¬ 
 giene, and of sanitary science, as we act in contra¬ 
 vention of what we understand to he right and 
 wrong in our moral relationships. The perversity 
 of conduct signifies no more in one case than in 
 the other. In every case it only signifies the im¬ 
 perfect training of the animal and the volitional 
 parts of man to obey the reasoning force in him, 
 which is the sovereign force, nevertheless, and 
 which is surely destined, in the Divine plan, to 
 dominate completely at last. That such training 
 goes steadily on, however slowly, and that men 
 do act, in all ways, a little more according to what 
 they know, however far their doing may still fall 
 behind their knowing, I am not able, for one, to 
 doubt.” 
 
 “ But,” I interposed at this point, “ how does 
 your theory tally with the facts of human history 1 
 Do we not find the fundamental Ideas of right and 
 wrong as well developed and as well defined in 
 the earlier historic stages of civilization as we do 
 now \ ” 
 
 “ Oh, yes,” replied the judge, “ the primitive, 
 fundamental ideas of right and wrong are among 
 the simplest, and therefore among the earliest 
 
60 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 ideas that man acquires. Some of them are so 
 simple and so primitive that they are almost like 
 the axioms of mathematical science, which we call 
 self-evident propositions, because they contain in 
 the very statement of them all the reasoning that 
 enters into their construction. The difficulty to 
 the human intelligence is not in laying hold of 
 these first principles of right, hut in combining 
 and in applying them, as rules of conduct, under 
 varying circumstances and conditions, and in va¬ 
 rying situations, to varying human relationships. 
 AVhile it easily learns to shift its application of 
 fundamental laws in science, or art, or politics, it 
 is readily confused and perpetually loses its bear¬ 
 ings, so to speak, in carrying a moral truth from 
 one group of relationships to another. The same 
 thing is true of all the subjective movements of 
 the human intellect—in all ratiocinative operations 
 where it passes outside of tangible things, and 
 away from the cooperation of the serviceable senses 
 of the human body. I am speaking, of course, of 
 the average human mind, as represented by the 
 mass of men and women, and I do not take ac¬ 
 count of the exceptional few who are given to be 
 tutors of the many. Take an example from our 
 present topic: the simple idea of the right of 
 property is one of the fundamental ideas of right, 
 and constructed very simply, out of little more 
 than the ego and non-ego, or self-consciousness for 
 
SECOND EVENING. 
 
 G1 
 
 its first element and tlie cognition of another self 
 for its second. I have no doubt tliat tlie moral 
 law, ‘ Thou shalt not steal,’ was apprehended by 
 the more advanced tribes of men long before its 
 deliverance on Mount Sinai. But those who could 
 see it to be a law of right conduct between them¬ 
 selves and their familiar neighbors, whom they 
 were habituated to look upon as fellow-men, fellow- 
 citizens, fellow-members, that is, of their own 
 tribe and nation, could not carry it to its univer¬ 
 sal application without becoming confused and 
 lost. Consequently, in the very community where 
 theft, or the seizure of another’s goods, had be¬ 
 come a recognized wrong, as between its own 
 members, we continually find piracy and predatory 
 warfare upon alien or separated communities to be 
 fully approved and never thought of as conduct 
 possessing the same wrongful nature. Tlie simple 
 explanation of this repeated anomaly in human 
 history—an anomaly which is still repeated, to no 
 small extent, even within our civilized regions—is, 
 that the moral intelligence of the average man re¬ 
 quires long culture before it is able to give univer¬ 
 sal application even to the oldest maxims of right, 
 and is not confused and betrayed by habitual no¬ 
 tions of nationality, or race, or sect, or class, or by 
 the simplest variations of circumstance. If you 
 were to contrive to-day some ingenious new way 
 of gaining possession of the property of another 
 
G2 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 without the owner's consent, society at large would 
 be a long time, I venture to say, in getting it cat¬ 
 alogued in the list of recognized dishonesties. To 
 the majority of men, a variation from the simplest 
 form of stealing does actually disguise or obscure 
 the fact that it is stealing. The same slow awk¬ 
 wardness appears in the handling of every other 
 moral truth by the average human intellect, no 
 matter how fully acquired the truth may be in its 
 primitive nakedness. When you take this human 
 intelligence of ours away from the region of sen¬ 
 sible objects, where it can measure and mark its 
 bearings, by visual reference to every-day objects 
 and every-day phenomena, as the surveyor does 
 when he is running a right line, it is easily led 
 astray ; and I do not wonder when I find it so. It 
 is quite according to Nature, I think, that the hu¬ 
 man reason should need much culture before it can 
 deal with subjective ideas as easily as it deals with 
 objective ideas, and therefore I expect the objec¬ 
 tive advancement of the intelligence of mankind 
 to be far in advance of its subjective or moral de¬ 
 velopment, while I am very sure, nevertheless, that 
 the one is everlastingly a contribution to the other. 
 
 “ But very likely you do not see what bearing 
 all this moral philosophy has on our present ques¬ 
 tion ? ” 
 
 I admitted that I did not see the bearing ex- 
 actlv. 
 
 V 
 
SECOND EVENING. 
 
 63 
 
 “ Well,” said tlie judge, “ I have- gone into it 
 a little because this doctrine of morals is at the 
 bottom of my whole social philosophy. It is the 
 justification I have to offer for my faith in an ul¬ 
 timate determination of equity between the capi¬ 
 talist and the laborer, which political economy 
 does not promise; and also because it is necessa¬ 
 rily preliminary to two or three questions that I 
 wish to ask before we drop our subject to-night. 
 I wish to ask you if you think that downright, 
 direct robbery is as rife in this generation as it was 
 last century, within what we call the civilized com¬ 
 munities ? In other words, if professional rob¬ 
 bers, such as highwaymen, brigands, pirates, burg¬ 
 lars, etc., who plunder their fellow-men without 
 any disguise, are as numerous as they were ? ” 
 
 After a little consideration we all said, “ No.” 
 
 “ Some progress has been made, then,” said 
 the judge, “ in diminishing theft of the undis¬ 
 guised sort, at least. Now, what has been the 
 agent? Do you think that law lias done it, by 
 increased vigor and efficiency ? You must re¬ 
 member that the law was terribly merciless a hun¬ 
 dred years ago in its dealing with these crimes 
 against property ; terribly merciless and savagely 
 vigilant. It hanged men and women for trivial 
 thefts, and kept its executioners busy. Since our 
 century began, the tendency of the law has been 
 all the time toward a milder spirit, with not much 
 
64 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 increase, that I can see, in the energy of its po¬ 
 lice. It is true that gas-lighting and newspapers 
 and the telegraph have multiplied the eyes, ears, 
 and amis of the law to a wonderful extent; but 
 still, when all reasonable credit is given to these 
 modern agencies in the police system of society, 
 do you think that the great diminution which has 
 taken place in common theft and violent robbery 
 can he attributed altogether to an augmentation 
 of force in government and law 2 ” 
 
 “No,” said I, “unless the law gains in effi¬ 
 ciency by the lessening of its rigor.” 
 
 “ But that cannot he, my dear sir, unless there 
 is some other restraining force in cooperation with 
 the law, which the law gives room to, by a v r ise 
 retirement of its own energies. Now, that is 
 just the point I was coming to. There is such a 
 morally restraining force, which slowly evolves 
 itself in society, and which, as it is generated, be¬ 
 comes more powerful than law T . It is public sen¬ 
 timent, as we call it, or the prevailing enlighten¬ 
 ment of a given community at a given time, with 
 reference to the applications of a given principle 
 of right. This moral intelligence, first gathering 
 into forcefulness among the few, percolates down¬ 
 ward w r ith sure slowness into the duller mass, 
 and works a gradual change in the general dispo¬ 
 sition of society toward particular forms of wrong¬ 
 doing. AVithin the past century it has operated to 
 
SECOND EVENING. 
 
 65 
 
 render all kinds of simple stealing and violent 
 robbery more disgraceful than they used to be; 
 that is to say, it has placed the human mind, in 
 civilized countries, more generally in an attitude 
 of contempt toward them ; and the contempt of 
 mankind is more terrible to the average human 
 being than scaffolds or prisons are. A certain ad¬ 
 miration of heroism used to be conceded, not 
 more than a generation ago, to the boldness of the 
 footpad and the daring of the burglar—to the 
 Jack Sheppards, the Dick Turpins, and the Mor- 
 rills of that time—which all the audacity of the 
 ‘ James Brothers’ and the c Younger Brothers’ 
 and their sort in our day cannot inspire. The ro¬ 
 mance of these crimes is utterly gone. The com¬ 
 mon moral intelligence of mankind has been de¬ 
 veloped far enough to recognize the despicable 
 villainy of a thief and robber, no matter what 
 qualities of courage or coolness, dexterity, inven¬ 
 tion, or enterprise, may surround and color it. 
 Toward all modes of outright theft and robbery 
 the public sentiment of society has become con¬ 
 demnatory and contemptuous, as it never was 
 before ; and that, more than all other reasons, ac¬ 
 counts to me for the diminished prevalence and 
 audacity of these crimes. 
 
 “ In the same way, ordinary gambling, which 
 was the fashion of society a hundred years ago, 
 and not merely tolerated but approved, has now 
 
66 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 become disreputable, and is driven, for the most 
 part, into shame-faced hiding. So, too, lias duel¬ 
 ing been suppressed, in all the better civilized 
 countries, not by law, but by public sentiment, or 
 by what I call a moral intelligence, which lias be¬ 
 come so far advanced that no sham code of honor, 
 or pride of physical courage, and no specious dif¬ 
 ferences of manner and circumstance in the deed, 
 can blind it any longer to the murder that is done 
 when one human being kills another with deliber¬ 
 ation and intent. 
 
 “ These facts, and many more of the same 
 kind which I might adduce, are very significant to 
 me. They teach us, I think, in what way*to look 
 for the moral improvement of society and what to 
 expect as an evolution of justice and right. They 
 teach me to believe that there is being developed, 
 in the common crowd of human beings, a better 
 state of moral intelligence, which slowly tends to 
 the detection of theft in all its disguises, one by 
 one, and which shall brand in time the man who 
 steals his neighbor’s goods by cheating in trade, or 
 by overreaching, or chicanery, or fraud, or by dis¬ 
 honest cunning of any kind, as much as the man 
 who steals by picking a pocket or picking a lock ; 
 and which shall pronounce, too, against gambling 
 with stocks or with commodities of the market as 
 strongly as against gambling with dice and cards. 
 But, if the gradual clearing of this moral intelli- 
 
SECOND EVENING. 
 
 07 
 
 gence tends that way, toward the recognizing 
 and enforcing of rules of honesty in the conduct 
 of men, it tends still more obviously, I think, 
 toward the recognition and enforcement of rules 
 of justice between them. For it is plain to me 
 that the generalizing of such laws of justice as do 
 not concern property alone has made greater prog¬ 
 ress of late than the generalizing of the law of 
 honesty, or of property-rights, although it is the 
 greater generalization of the two, and really com¬ 
 prehends the other, because honesty is but one 
 particular of justice, and nothing more. With 
 reference, therefore, to all the modes in which 
 wealth' becomes partitioned among men, I firm¬ 
 ly believe that we are tending, in a slow, sure 
 way, toward equity, though not, as we must care¬ 
 fully remember, toward equality.” 
 
 “ You are right, judge,” cried I; “ you are 
 right. I am convinced that your hopeful doctrine 
 of justice is founded well, in reason and upon fact, 
 although the forces to which you intrust your faith 
 act so feebly and so slowly that one needs a pro¬ 
 found philosophy to keep fast his faithfulness to 
 them. I am only impatient now to learn how, 
 and with what clearness, you see a way for the 
 working of these just forces through the prodigious 
 difficulties that environ them.” 
 
 “We have not come to the difficulties yet,” 
 said the judge. “We must determine first what 
 
68 
 
 TALES ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 ought to be tlie adjustment made between capital 
 and labor, or wliat would be if the terms of their 
 copartnership in production were settled on pure 
 principles of justice and right. Then will be the 
 time to consider such obstacles as our doctrine of 
 justice may have to encounter in the way of its 
 realization. A\ r e cannot reach that point to-night, 
 for it is late already, and we had better adjourn 
 the discussion to another evening.” 
 
 “ Let it be soon,” exclaimed my wife, “ for I 
 want to know the difficulties. I feel eager for the 
 prevailing of this doctrine of justice, and am 
 anxious to know how long the world may have 
 to wait for it.” 
 
 “ It shall be an early evening, then,” the judge 
 replied, as he rose, and we fixed our time before 
 he took his leave. 
 
 
 
 
 
THIRD EVENING-. 
 
 ABOUT THE COMPETITION OF FACULTIES AMONG- MEN. 
 
 The Comparative Quality of “ Business ” Faculties, and the Ex¬ 
 cessive Premium put upon them.—The Judge’s Cooperative 
 Theory. — Trades-Unions and Labor-Strikes. — The Preach¬ 
 ing and Teaching that need to go together. 
 
 “ Now, judge,” said I, when we had reassem¬ 
 bled, on the third evening, and after we had ex¬ 
 changed a bit or two of gossip, by way of relish, 
 “ I shall assume to be the presiding officer of this 
 august assemblage, and call to order. We will 
 take up the unfinished business of our last sitting, 
 and the question, I believe, is on the motion of 
 the gentleman from the iron district, that we de¬ 
 clare those advantages which the man of capital 
 holds over the man without capital to be rights 
 which belong to him, and which he may fully ex¬ 
 ercise as it pleaseth him to do. Are you ready 
 for the question 1 ” 
 
 “ But,” interposed John, “if I may be permit¬ 
 ted to correct the speaker, I think it will be re¬ 
 membered that I withdrew that motion, as you 
 
70 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 see fit to call it, after listening to tlie argument of 
 the distinguished gentleman on my right.” 
 
 “ Xever mind,” said the judge, “ I shall he 
 glad to have the question considered as being still 
 before the house, because there are some things 
 more to be noticed before we dismiss it. I do 
 like, however, in a discussion such as this, to be 
 sure that we are keeping step with each other, and 
 that we understand one another at every point in 
 our discourse. I propose, therefore, that we just 
 glance back for a moment, over the ground we 
 have traversed, and see whether we entirely agree 
 in our conclusions.” 
 
 We showed our assent, and the judge went on: 
 
 “ In order to be exact, I have written a little 
 series of propositions, which are the summing up, 
 in my view, of the conclusions established in our 
 talk thus far. They are these : 
 
 “ 1. Xo productive work of any kind can now 
 be done, in most parts of the world, without the 
 help of capital. 
 
 “ 2. The men who have acquired no capital 
 are compelled to solicit that help by the most in¬ 
 exorable of all human necessities—the necessity 
 for bread, clothing, and shelter; while the men 
 who have acquired capital are impelled on their 
 part to yield it by nothing more strenuous, so 
 far as circumstances go, than a selfish motive— 
 the desire for gain. 
 
THIRD EVENING. 
 
 n 
 
 u 3. The relationship between -these two 
 classes, therefore, if nothing intervenes, is one of 
 independence on the side of capital and of de¬ 
 pendence on the side of labor, so that the former 
 possesses, to an appalling degree, the power to 
 deal oppressively with the latter. 
 
 “ 4. In the view to which political economy is 
 restricted, no intervention can be recognized; and, 
 consequently, although this oppressive power that 
 attaches to the possession of capital is seldom ex¬ 
 ercised to its possible extreme, yet our prevailing 
 social doctrines, being narrowed to the limitations 
 of political economy, give a theoretical sanction 
 to the extremest exercise of that power. 
 
 “ 5. But there is nevertheless an intervention 
 that must be acknowledged, proceeding out of the 
 moral intelligence of society, which develops rules 
 of just conduct in the place of rules of conduct 
 that are purely selfish. 
 
 “ 6. This moral intelligence has now attained 
 culture enough to produce a common notion of 
 justice, in the face of which might can no longer 
 be claimed to make right, no matter in what attri¬ 
 butes the endowment of might may be conferred. 
 
 “7. Hence, even though the possessors of 
 wealth had acquired it as a consequence of 
 capabilities in which they are superior to their 
 fellows who acquire no wealth, still the vast ad¬ 
 vantage which that acquisition throws into their 
 
72 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 hands cannot be recognized as belonging to them 
 with absoluteness and by right, to be exercised at 
 will, and under the dictation of their self-interest 
 alone. 
 
 “ 8. But a large part of the wealth and cap¬ 
 ital of the world is gathered into the hands of 
 its possessors either by no active exertion of any 
 kind on their own part, or by methods of acquisi¬ 
 tion which are sometimes pure robbery and some¬ 
 times removed only a step or two from it; and, 
 for all this large part, even that claim of right to 
 the advantage which capital holds over dependent 
 labor cannot reasonably be set up. 
 
 “ 9. On the whole, therefore, we may safely 
 conclude it to be not in accordance with true prin¬ 
 ciples of justice and right, that the terms of co¬ 
 partnership in production, between the capitalist 
 and the laborer, should be left wholly for settle¬ 
 ment to a compromise between the self-interest of 
 the former and the inexorable necessities of the 
 latter. 
 
 “Do you accept this,” said the judge, when he 
 had finished reading, “ as a fair summing up of 
 our talk, and are we agreed thus far in our conclu¬ 
 sions ? ” 
 
 “ I accept and assent,” said I, and so said all 
 the company. 
 
 “ Well, then,” continued the judge, “ we will 
 proceed. We have determined, somewhat to our 
 
THIRD EVENING. 
 
 73 
 
 satisfaction, that the capitalist may not 'rightfully 
 
 exact from the laborer all that he has power to 
 
 * 
 
 exact, when the joint product of capital and labor 
 is divided between them; and noiv, of course, we 
 shall have to determine, as nearly as we can, how 
 much he may demand, with justice, for himself. 
 
 “ But, first, I wish to consider with you a little 
 further, and just for a moment, the question of 
 rights between that wealth which is actually ac¬ 
 quired by superior capability, and that poverty 
 which is the consequence of a want of capability. 
 It is very hard for the human mind, self-environed 
 as it is, to give up the primitive idea that a man is 
 entitled to all the benefits of every advantage that 
 he can get from better faculties than his neighbors 
 have. We cannot, therefore, reach too much dis¬ 
 tinctness on this point. 
 
 “ How, the faculties which contribute to suc¬ 
 cess in the acquisition of wealth, by justifiable 
 methods, are widely diversified faculties ; but, gen¬ 
 erally speaking, how would you rank them among 
 the faculties of the human bein^ ? Looking around 
 among the men of your acquaintance who are 
 called i successful men,’ and who have acquired 
 fortune or pecuniary independence by strictly un¬ 
 exceptionable means, as we estimate in these mat¬ 
 ters, what should you say of the faculties to which 
 their acquisition of wealth has been due % Are 
 they of a highly superior kind, as compared with 
 4 
 
74 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LAB OK 
 
 other human faculties which do not enter into 
 money-making ? ” 
 
 44 Ko,” replied I, 44 I have often thought of that. 
 The men who bring to bear in 4 business/ of pro¬ 
 duction or exchange, any really superior intellect¬ 
 ual force, seem to be few — I mean compara¬ 
 tively few. There is hardly any other object of 
 human exertion that does not call out higher 
 capabilities. I think it is rather seldom—though 
 it sometimes happens — that a man who has 
 capabilities of the higher order can concentrate 
 them on this object of money-getting. Their 
 focus is not easily adjusted to it. But it is 
 the concentration of a man’s forces that tells, in 
 everything; and that man, therefore, whose ener¬ 
 gies are of such a disposition that they will bend 
 themselves, freely and fully to this object, is the 
 successful man in acquiring wealth, even though 
 the faculties thus compacted may be inferior to 
 the faculties of his unsuccessful neighbor. As a 
 rule, I should say—with many exceptions, how¬ 
 ever—the money-making faculties and qualities 
 are quite of a narrow kind, with very frequent 
 littleness and ignobility; but the energy in them 
 and the activity behind them are usually intense. 
 The character of man compounded in this way is 
 an exceedingly useful one, but not in the highest 
 degree an admirable one.” 
 
 44 Very true,” returned the judge, 44 and hence 
 
THIRD EVENING. 
 
 \ 
 
 75 
 
 we see tliat the capable powers among.men which 
 win, in the one great struggle that pits them all 
 against each other—the struggle, that is, to eman¬ 
 cipate themselves from daily servitude to their 
 bodily wants—are not necessarily, nor as a rule, 
 the higher faculties of man, nor those that would 
 seem most deserving. On the other hand, a want 
 of capability in the acquisition of wealth is plainly 
 no proof of an inferior man, nor of a man whose 
 contributions to society are of little worth. The 
 inventors, the scientific discoverers, the originators 
 of new methods and new ideas, the path-finders of 
 commerce, the philosophers, the poets, the men of 
 learning, of literature and of art—all the pioneers 
 and guides of human progress, in a word, are well- 
 nigh invariably men who cannot or do not get a 
 fair share of the wealth of the world in return for 
 their services to it. It is almost a law, in fact, that 
 no man can possess and exercise any faculty of 
 general value to mankind without being rendered 
 nearly impotent so far as the gathering of wealth 
 to himself is concerned. I will venture further, 
 and say that it is a law, with not many exceptions ; 
 it holds good, yon will find, from top to bottom 
 in the whole range of diversified human capabili¬ 
 ties. A man cannot be a good artisan or mechanic, 
 in any kind of hand-labor which makes the least 
 demand upon intelligent faculties, without concen¬ 
 trating so much of all his powers upon the imme- 
 
76 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 •diate object of his labor, that he is compelled to 
 trust its ultimate results, so far as his own benefit 
 is concerned, to other agencies. If he is to be a 
 good workman, he can withhold from his work 
 neither time enough, nor thought enough, nor will 
 enough, to make combinations of trade, or to con¬ 
 duct speculations, or to organize the conjoining 
 of his own labor with the labor of others. All this 
 he must trust those whose business it is, to do for 
 him. For his own part, he can only do good work, 
 of the kind he has chosen to do, and deliver it in 
 commission, as I may say, to such industrial and 
 commercial system as prevails, taking whatever 
 return that system may render to him. If this 
 man tries to 4 make money ’ in any other way than 
 by industriously doing good work, of such kind as 
 he is best fitted to do, it must be at the expense of 
 his proper work, and a certain loss to the world of 
 true, efficient, productive workmanship ensues. 
 
 “ Do you not see, therefore, that an industrial 
 system which puts a great premium on the exercise 
 of those special but not eminent faculties that are 
 employed in what we describe by the general term 
 4 business,’ is an economically vicious system, as 
 well as an unjust one ? In our use of the word 
 4 business,’ we mean by it—1. The organizing, or 
 the effectively putting together, of the labor of 
 different persons, as in manufactories or in trans¬ 
 portation ; 2. Trade, or the conducting of ex- 
 
THIRD EVENING . 
 
 77 
 
 changes between different producers, and between* 
 producers and non-producing consumers ; 3. Fi¬ 
 nancial business, monetary dealings, the manipu¬ 
 lating of that movable, current capital which is 
 the life-blood of industry and commerce. Now, 
 the faculties that are employed in these ways do so 
 monopolize, under present conditions, the acquisi¬ 
 tion and the accumulation of wealth, that it is well- 
 nigh impossible for men to extort more than a de¬ 
 cent living by the employment of other faculties, 
 in all the other greater fields of human industry, 
 intelligence, and energy. Do you not see what a 
 profoundly distracting and depressing influence 
 this exerts upon those purely productive faculties 
 which these 4 business ’ faculties, as we will call 
 them, ought to be in cordial and helpful cooper¬ 
 ation with ? Do you not see that the men who 
 could best be mechanics, inventors, designers, and 
 so on, are under a perpetual temptation to try to 
 be merchants, tradesmen, managers of business, 
 speculators, and the like; while men who do be¬ 
 come artisans and mechanics, in a fit calling, are 
 perpetually drawn away from a fervent concentra¬ 
 tion of themselves upon their work by dreams of 
 easier fortune, and the contriving of plans for mak¬ 
 ing more gain in other ways? ” 
 
 “ I do, indeed,” said I; “ we can, none of us, 
 help seeing the effect, for it is becoming more 
 conspicuous every day; and it is cried out against 
 
78 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LAB OB. 
 
 every day without being rightly understood. The 
 young men of successive generations seem to be¬ 
 come more reluctant to commit themselves to 
 mechanical callings in life, or to directly productive 
 labor of any kind, and prefer to scramble, in 
 crowds which grow greater every year, for clerk¬ 
 ships, for footholds and places of the poorest sort 
 in the ‘ business ’-world. It is the universal com¬ 
 plaint, too, that mechanic workmanship of every 
 kind is deteriorating in its quality. It certainly 
 is difficult, nowadays, to get good and thorough 
 work done in any department of manual industry.” 
 
 “ To be sure,” said the judge, “and I am con¬ 
 vinced that the desertion and deterioration of 
 mechanical industries will continue to be an in¬ 
 creasing evil until we have begun, in some way, 
 to cut down the excessive premium which our 
 present adjustment of relationships between capital 
 and labor puts upon those faculties and energies 
 that enter into what we distinguish from other 
 labor by calling it ‘business.’ The crowds will 
 swarm, of course, where the prizes are distributed. 
 So long as the substantial rewards of exertion are 
 seen to be displayed, almost entirely, in the mar¬ 
 ket-booths and in the counting-houses, in the 
 office and at the desk, instead of in the shop and 
 at the work-bench, you may be sure that the office 
 and the counting-house, the store and the bank, 
 will be mobbed with young applicants; and you 
 
THIRD EVENING. 
 
 79 
 
 may be sure, too, that there will be a lowering of 
 ambition and a lessening of spirit in the work 
 which is done at the bench, at the anvil, and in 
 the factory. It cannot be otherwise. All the in¬ 
 ti nences that act upon labor, under present con¬ 
 ditions, seem to me to be profoundly depressing on 
 the mechanics and the operatives. 
 
 “ There is evidently bad economy, as well as 
 injustice, in the industrial system which has this 
 outcome. Society cannot afford to continue giving 
 such excessive encouragement to one set of human 
 faculties as against all the others which united¬ 
 ly contribute to its material progress. Sooner or 
 later it must contrive in some way to make those 
 several faculties which produce, on one side, the 
 skillful, ingenious mechanic, the adept artisan, the 
 capable clerk, the efficient laborer of any plodding 
 sort, and which produce, on the other side, the 
 organizer, the merchant, the financier, the c man 
 of business 5 —it must contrive in some way, I say, 
 to make these several faculties serve one another 
 on fairer terms; to mah,e them serve one another 
 on terms more nearly proportioned to the value of 
 what they severally contribute to the product of 
 the whole.” 
 
 “ Yes,” said I; “ but how ? ” 
 
 “ Ay, there’s the rub,” replied the judge. 
 “ On principle it is easy to tell how, in general 
 terms. In practice it is not so easy. I trust the 
 
80 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LAB OB. 
 
 growing sense of justice among men to slowly 
 work tlie problem out. There is only one course 
 which the movement toward justice in this matter 
 can take, and that is in the direction of estab¬ 
 lishing a relation of partnership between the or¬ 
 ganizers of labor on one hand and the laborers on 
 the other, to supplant the rude relationship in 
 which they now stand toward each other as ‘ em¬ 
 ployers ’ and ‘employes.’ Employers and em¬ 
 ployes ! These very terms are significant of the 
 arbitrariness of the system which they represent. 
 In the fair sense of that word, the mechanic in a 
 shop, or the so-called operative in a factory, may 
 just as truly be said to ‘ employ’ the capitalist-pro¬ 
 prietor of the factory or the shop to organize the 
 effective combination of his special work with the 
 work of his fellows, and to make the exchange of 
 products for him, as the proprietor may be said to 
 employ him to do the special work which he does. 
 The difference between them in the matter of em¬ 
 ploying each other’s services is just that which 
 grows out of a state of dependence on one side 
 and of independence on the other side, whereby 
 all the reciprocity of interest under which these 
 two men, with their differing faculties, ought to 
 be brought to act together, and to serve and assist 
 one another in the great undertakings of human 
 labor, is extinguished. One becomes actually the 
 ‘ employer,’ and one the ‘ employed,’ instead of 
 
THIRD EVENING. 
 
 81 
 
 each being the employer of the capabilities of the 
 other on fairly-adjusted terms. One receives his 
 daily rate of wages, fixed for the most part by the 
 average state of need in his class; the other makes 
 what he can out of the bargain, and drives it hard 
 to make the utmost. It is very plain to me that 
 no equity in the partitioning of the products of 
 human industry can be had under the wages system 
 that we now maintain ; under the system, that is, 
 which gives a fixed compensation to one side, while 
 profits, indefinite, unshared and unaccounted for, 
 go wholly to the other.” 
 
 “ What, then,” I asked, “ can take the place 
 of the ‘ wages system ? ’ Do you look to the ( co¬ 
 operative system 5 for your remedy ? ” 
 
 “Ho, I do not,” returned the judge ; “ if you 
 mean that plan of association among working-men 
 in which they undertake to conduct for themselves 
 the business incident to their own work. I do 
 not expect much from that c cooperative system,’ 
 notwithstanding the remarkable successes it has 
 shown at Rochdale and in other instances, both in 
 England and on the Continent. It is an attempt 
 on the part of men who represent the mechanical, 
 constructive, producing faculties, to dispense with 
 the cooperation of men who represent the organ¬ 
 izing, combining, commercial faculties, and I hold 
 that these two sets of faculties are indispensable 
 to one another. The mechanic working-man al- 
 
82 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 most always, Tinder present conditions, is a work¬ 
 ing-man, in the received sense of the word, simply 
 because he has no aptitude nor training for the 
 shrewd arithmetic of commerce, and competes at 
 a disadvantage, for that reason, in the scrambling 
 division of worldly goods. Now it is clearly im¬ 
 possible for a number of men in this luckless 
 strait to gain much by going into league with one 
 another, to make a common cause of the common 
 disadvantage under which they are struggling. 
 You surely cannot evolve such a thing as a cor¬ 
 porate capability for traffic or industrial manage¬ 
 ment by any conceivable multiplication together 
 of individual incapabilities. You may put six¬ 
 pences and shillings enough together to form the 
 capital that will create and sustain an iron foun- 
 dery or a cotton-mill ; hut in a body of men whose 
 efficient faculty of accumulation is limited to the 
 mere saving of sixpences and shillings, where are 
 you going to find, or how are you going to de¬ 
 velop, the faculty that can handle such a capital 
 and work profitable results out of it ? This ‘ co¬ 
 operative ’ theory of industrial reform is totally 
 fallacious, in my judgment, because it makeS no 
 account of the competition of faculties out of 
 which tlie # whole problem arises. As I look at 
 the matter, the only cooperation that can possibly 
 achieve any equitable social change is coopera¬ 
 tion between the faculties of the artisan and the 
 
THIRD EVENING. 
 
 83 
 
 faculties of tlie man of business, established upon 
 any terms that shall make a common cause be¬ 
 tween them, in place of the competition and an¬ 
 tagonism to which they are necessarily committed 
 under our present industrial system. That is 
 what I mean when I speak of the organization of 
 capital and labor upon a footing of copartnership. 
 
 “ Mind you, I do not claim an equal copart¬ 
 nership ; for equity and equality, as I have said 
 before, are two very different things. I am not a 
 communist, nor an agrarian, nor a social revolu¬ 
 tionist of any sort. I do not want to abolish 
 property, nor riches, nor poverty even, so far as 
 poverty is a just consequence of the inefficient 
 or unfaithful performance of a man’s part in the 
 work of the world. Equality of goods I have no 
 wish to see brought about; I would not have it 
 in society if I could. All that I contend for, as 
 being necessary to justice between the working¬ 
 man and the business-man—between the laborer 
 and the capitalist—is that fundamental equality of 
 footing, in their relations to one another, which 
 the terms of any sort of copartnership between 
 them will establish, no matter how insignificant 
 at first may be the benefit to the former. Any¬ 
 thing, to begin with, that will engraft a different 
 principle upon this wages system of ours, under 
 which men are mere marketable machines for 
 such and such work, selling themselves by the day 
 
84 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 or the year, instead of being sold for a lifetime as 
 the slaves were.' 5 
 
 “ I suppose, then,” said I, “ that you hope for 
 the success and spread of the experiment which 
 has already been somewhat tried, in a few pro¬ 
 prietary industrial establishments, of making divi¬ 
 dends from the annual profits of the concern to 
 the working-men employed ? ” 
 
 “ Yes, that is my hope. These experiments 
 furnish proof,” continued the judge, “ that some 
 consciousness of the inequity, and some percep¬ 
 tion of the vicious economy of the prevailing 
 wages system, have begun to be awakened, and I 
 am confident that both the moral feeling and the 
 enlightened judgment which are to condemn that 
 system will gain a steady growth. I am not at all 
 surprised that these experiments in the organizing 
 of a partnership between the working-men and 
 the managing capitalist, who supplies and directs 
 their work, have sometimes failed. AVe are sure 
 to hear more of the failures than of the successes, 
 and, although some of them may belong in the 
 ordinary category of business failures, consequent 
 upon adverse times or unsound management, they 
 are naturally enough all charged against the ex¬ 
 periment to which they are incident. In many 
 cases, without doubt, the failure is rightly so 
 charged. There is much to be practically learned 
 before a successful adjustment of dividends from 
 
 
THIRD EVENING. 
 
 85 
 
 tlieir joint production can be made between labor 
 and capital, and between the laborer and the man¬ 
 ager. 
 
 “ The working-men have much to learn. I am 
 not blind at all to the obstacles which their preva¬ 
 lent ignorance of the conditions of production 
 and trade, and their characteristic inaptitude for 
 knowledge or appreciation of what we call busi¬ 
 ness affairs, throw in the way of a reformation of 
 the industrial system. There are comparatively 
 few among them who apprehend in the slightest 
 degree the just merits of their own cause. Their 
 demands and their whole attitude, taking them as 
 a class, are generally unreasoning and provocative 
 of the very antagonism by which they are wronged. 
 I quite believe that the selfishness of capital can 
 more easily be overcome than this blind unreason 
 on the labor-side. It will resist with less obsti¬ 
 nacy, perhaps, the generous, harmonizing forces 
 that are at work in human culture. But I know 
 that those forces are invincible, and that they will 
 have their way in the end. It is but a question 
 of time. The ferment of the age compels all 
 men to learn. The capitalist, on his part, will 
 learn the wisdom of magnanimity in using his 
 power—the expediency of justice ; and the work¬ 
 ing-man, on his part, will learn to understand the 
 conditions by which production is governed, and 
 to estimate his dues from it by some logical reck- 
 
8G 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 oning. But lie may have to learn through bitter 
 teachings of experience, as I fear that he must, 
 because his class is being blindly led now into a 
 conflict with the very laws of industrial economy, 
 under which its own rights must be adjudicated 
 and established.” 
 
 “ I begin to see, sir,” remarked John, “ that 
 your views are not so radically extreme as they 
 seemed to be at first. The ( labor question,' as 
 you look at it, holds itself quite above the issues 
 that are nowadays being raised in the industrial 
 world between labor and capital, and you do not 
 sympathize, I take it, with the ‘ trades-union 5 
 combinations, which interfere so mischievously 
 with almost every important branch of productive 
 enterprise.” 
 
 “ Yes, I do sympathize with them,” said the 
 judge, “ in a sorrowful way. I sympathize deeply 
 with the discontented feeling, on the part of the 
 working-class, out of which they spring, and it is 
 very sad to me to see these people, who have be¬ 
 come conscious that there is something wrong in 
 their relations to the industry to which they con¬ 
 tribute, misconceiving so entirely the nature of the 
 wrong and aggravating it by mistaken means of 
 remedy. They organize a revolt against — they 
 know not what. Not against the wages system, 
 for they affirm that, and confirm it, and rivet upon 
 themselves by every measure which they adopt. 
 
THIRD EVENING. 
 
 They exert their combined influence to suppress 
 the individualization of skill and faculty, which 
 would tend, in a powerful way, to break down the 
 systematic fixity of this wages-paying custom. 
 They level down to one mean average all the dif¬ 
 ferent degrees of the efficient value of labor which 
 they severally represent in their several trades; 
 and such an average is sure to be depressed toward 
 the minimum extreme, by the least skillful, the 
 least conscientious, the least intelligent labor in 
 every trade. It is pitiful to see the mistake which 
 so many of the working-men make in their trades- 
 unions, when they combine to enforce and main¬ 
 tain any uniform rate of wages, and so suppress, 
 as far as possible, among themselves, all competi¬ 
 tive ambition—all competition of faculty and spirit 
 in their own ranks. By this course they leave 
 little inducement for any working-man to excel 
 in his work, either through the acquirement of 
 knowledge and skill, or through industrial con¬ 
 scientiousness. So far as they can, they put the 
 most skilled and most efficient workman upon the 
 same footing with the laziest, the most careless 
 and the least capable. It is a woful mistake in 
 its effect upon the character of the working-class, 
 and therefore in its effect uj>on the standing and 
 strength and social condition of the class.” 
 
 “ But is that the worst mistake of the trades- 
 unions ? ” asked I. 
 
88 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LAB OK 
 
 “Yes,” replied the judge, “because it is their 
 fundamental mistake. Almost everything else 
 which they wrongly do originates in this and 
 forms part of it. There is more than a mistake in 
 some of their measures; there is the nature of 
 crime. There is a criminal violation of their own 
 industrial rights: as when they undertake, for ex¬ 
 ample, by their ndes and by the influential power 
 of their combination, to restrict the liberty which 
 belongs to each man to control the disposition of 
 his own labor; when they assume to dictate to 
 their members the terms upon which each one 
 shall work, and to say when and where and how 
 he shall accept employment, and when and where 
 and how he shall not: also, when they assume 
 to legislate for any branch of industry concerning 
 its hours of labor, the number of apprentices or 
 pupils that shall be annually received into its 
 several establishments, and other matters of that 
 sort, touching which there can be no conceivable 
 right of interference with individual liberty lodged 
 anywhere, neither in any particular body of men 
 nor in the whole body of society. I would not 
 have much intervention of law in dealing with 
 matters pertaining to the organization and regu¬ 
 lation of the industrial system of a country, but I 
 would have all such interferences with individual 
 freedom as these, whether by combinations on the 
 side of labor or on the side of capital, rigorously 
 
THIRD EVENING. 
 
 89 
 
 suppressed, by stringent prohibitions of law, strin¬ 
 gently enforced.” 
 
 “ And what of labor 6 strikes,’ ” said I; u how 
 do you regard them ? ” 
 
 “ I can only condemn them,” replied the judge, 
 “ so far as they are coercively organized. It is 
 assuredly every man’s right to refuse to labor for 
 another, or in cooperation with another, if the 
 terms proposed are not satisfactory to him; pro¬ 
 vided he can afford to refuse, and does not make 
 himself dependent upon the charity of his fellows 
 for support by refusing. It is equally the right 
 of a number 'of men to voluntarily combine in re¬ 
 fusing to work on given terms, if they are unitedly 
 able to support themselves for a certain time with¬ 
 out work; and it is their right under many cir¬ 
 cumstances to make the pressure of their absten¬ 
 tion from work bear as hard as, by voluntary 
 union, it can be made to bear upon the interests 
 of employing capital, for the purpose of extorting 
 better terms. But there are not many labor- 
 strikes, I think, in which coercion of some sort is 
 not employed to bring about the union of those 
 who take part in it. A few restless, dominating 
 spirits get leadership in the matter, by sheer dog¬ 
 matic and dictatorial force, and a most tvrannical 
 constraint is often exercised upon the minority, if 
 not upon the majority, of the members of the in¬ 
 dustrial organization concerned. The workman 
 
90 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 who prefers to continue in employment on the ex¬ 
 isting terms, rather than become idle, or who feels 
 that he cannot afford to surrender employment, and 
 that the suffering to he imposed upon his family by 
 such surrender involves a deeper wrong than the 
 one against which he is asked to array himself in 
 revolt, finds usually among his associates in his 
 own class no toleration whatever of his personal 
 rights, interests, or convictions of duty. Ilis claim 
 to individual freedom of action is resented and re¬ 
 sisted with all the tremendous forces of hostility 
 and oppression which any class organization can 
 bring to bear upon its members. If he does not 
 suffer personal violence from his fellows, as he 
 very often does, he suffers a persecuting ostracism 
 which is even harder to bear up against. It is 
 by such coercion, I think, that most ‘ strikes 9 are 
 brought about, and they are generally more ty¬ 
 rannical and more cruel, I am afraid, than the 
 wrongs in wages-paying which they undertake to 
 redress. The men who set them on foot seem to 
 be commonly of the mischief-making sort—dis¬ 
 turbers, agitators, demagogues. They are men of 
 an energetic and combative disposition, without 
 much judgment, and without much scruple, some¬ 
 times. They love strife and turbulence ; they find 
 their congenial element in such a state of things, 
 and they gain some importance when they bring it 
 about. Such ynen are no doubt actuated more by 
 
THIRD EVENING. 
 
 91 
 
 vanity and by their appetite for controversy than 
 they are by any intelligent sense of rights and 
 wrongs, or by any conscientious solicitude for the 
 interests of the working-class. They do not rep¬ 
 resent the judgment or the feeling of that class, 
 and yet the imperious, combative energy which 
 they possess wins for them a kind of leadership in 
 it that is undoubtedly mischievous. The same 
 kind of fact exhibits itself in every department of 
 society—conspicuously in its political formations, 
 where the positive, dogmatic, aggressive, and not 
 very scrupulous politicians are apt to override bet¬ 
 ter counsels in public affairs and have their way. 
 It is not strange, therefore, that labor-strikes are 
 commonly miscalculated and mistimed; that they 
 are so often aggressive rather than defensive ; that 
 there is so often more of malice than of self-asser¬ 
 tion in their spirit; that they are so often aimed 
 at mischief to the capitalist rather than benefit to 
 the laborer ; that they so often represent a fatuous 
 revolt against the fundamental laws of production 
 and exchange, and that their effect so often is lo¬ 
 cally destructive or injurious to the industries in 
 which they occur. Theoretically, the labor-strike 
 is a legitimate measure of self-defense and self- 
 assertion on the part of the laboring-class against 
 the managing-capitalist class, under their present 
 relations to one another; but, practically, I am 
 afraid, it is a measure seldom wisely or honestly 
 resorted to.” 
 
92 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 9 
 
 u I tliink that is true,” remarked John, “ and 
 the working-men seem to exhibit just as much of 
 a disposition to use their opportunities against 
 capital in a grinding, oppressive, and aggressive 
 way, as the capitalists do, on their side, to make a 
 hard use of the advantages which they hold over 
 labor. They do it with less judgment, too, and 
 with a kind of vindictiveness which does not ap¬ 
 pear on the other side. They so often organize 
 their strikes in some department of production 
 just when the investors of capital in that depart¬ 
 ment are struggling hard against adverse condi¬ 
 tions in it, and make demands which all the cir¬ 
 cumstances of the market then surrounding the 
 particular industry in question render it wholly 
 impossible to accede to. At other times they fatu¬ 
 ously serve the selfish interests of their employers, 
 by interrupting some industry which the capital¬ 
 ists engaged in it are very glad to have suspended, 
 so that there seems to he good reason, in frequent 
 cases, for suspecting that the employers have se¬ 
 cretly instigated the strike, and thus have brought 
 about a check upon production without responsi¬ 
 bility or cost to themselves. It is hardly to be 
 wondered at that this blindness and folly and mis¬ 
 chievous disposition in the laboring-classes loses 
 sympathy for them among intelligent lookers on, 
 and produces an antagonistic feeling in the ranks 
 of the employing capitalists.” 
 
THIRD EVENING. 
 
 93 
 
 “No,” said tlie judge, “it is all natural 
 enough, and that is the troublesome feature of 
 the problem in its present stage. The meaner 
 parts of human nature are involved on both sides 
 of it. There is just as much selfishness and just 
 as much narrow one-sidedness of consideration on 
 the part of the laborers as there is on the part- of 
 the capitalists, with more ignorance, but wdtli less 
 power. I give attention chiefly to those wrongs 
 in the relationship between the two which the 
 capitalists and managers of our industrial organi¬ 
 zation are responsible for, because they represent 
 the stronger side. They hold the pow r er, so much 
 more than the others do, to act wrongfully, and 
 their duty is commensurate w T ith their power. 
 Between two parties, in any system of wrongs, 
 the movement of redress and remedy must come 
 from the stronger one. The most potent moral 
 influence in the world is that of magnanimity pro¬ 
 ceeding out of power, and we must invoke that 
 in this matter before any solution of the problem 
 can be possible. Let the managers and holders of 
 capital begin to acknowledge that the measure of 
 their power is not the measure of their just rights, 
 by beginning to associate the working-men in in¬ 
 terest wdtli them, under some system of partner¬ 
 ship, wdtli some system of dividends introduced to 
 supplement the wages system—and the moment 
 they do this, I know that the working-men will be- 
 
91 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 gin to be inquisitive for themselves about tlie cir¬ 
 cumstances and conditions on which their several 
 industries depend. They will begin to observe and 
 apprehend the phenomena of the market, out of 
 which the laws of industrial economy are deduced. 
 They will begin to understand better the terms on 
 which their particular labor is associated with all 
 other labor in the industrial organization of the 
 civilized world. They will do so on account of 
 having become partners instead of servitors in the 
 several industries, by virtue of which change they 
 will have necessarily acquired an independent 
 personal interest in such matters of knowledge. 
 They must then be inspired by every personal 
 motive to act in cooperation with the managers of 
 capital, in their several branches of productive in¬ 
 dustry, and the desire to cooperate will be effec¬ 
 tive in promoting their intelligence. 
 
 “ This industrial reform is one in which there 
 must be preaching as well as teaching, and the 
 preaching comes first in importance ; wherefore I 
 prefer now to act the preacher. Political economy 
 alone is not enough, as I have said before. Social 
 ethics has quite as much to do with the question, 
 if not more. We must preach the doctrine of 
 justice, as well as teach the laws of production 
 and trade. 
 
 “ It will not do much good to go to the trades- 
 union with instructions in political economy, so 
 
THIRD EVENING. 
 
 95 
 
 long as its members are made distrustful of all 
 your formulas by a vague and rankling conscious¬ 
 ness of something arbitrary in the system of the 
 division of industrial products, which political 
 economy gives countenance to. We must first 
 root out of public sentiment the old barbaric no¬ 
 tion that—• 
 
 ‘ lie may take who has the power, 
 
 And he may keep who can.’ 
 
 We must root it out just as completely with ref¬ 
 erence to the power which attaches to w T ealth, to 
 possessory rights, to superior mercantile facul¬ 
 ties, and to superior opportunities in acquisition, 
 as we have already rooted it out, among civilized 
 men, with reference to the brute power which be¬ 
 longed of old to bodily strength and baronial cas¬ 
 tles, to the lance, the sword, and the coat of mail. 
 We must educate public opinion to recognize just 
 rights in the matter which law cannot enforce, but 
 which its own silent legislation may affirm and 
 make good. 
 
 “ Then political economy may hope to win the 
 ear of the working-man and reach his understand¬ 
 ing. Then the trades-union may be made to be¬ 
 come a powerful organism in the industrial world, 
 and be brought out of conflict into cooperation 
 with capital, in the productive enterprises of soci¬ 
 ety. The guilds of the mediaeval craftsmen were 
 
96 
 
 . TALES ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 institutions of splendid usefulness in many re¬ 
 spects. The modern trades-unions may be the 
 same, and more, in much the same direction. I 
 look forward to the time when they will be en¬ 
 couraged to take upon themselves the responsible 
 guardianship of all the interests of the mechanic 
 industries—each its own ; fixing and maintaining 
 a high standard of excellence in workmanship for 
 every trade ; graduating the mechanics in their 
 several arts and conferring diplomas and degrees, 
 as the colleges do, with such strictness and fairness 
 and authority that the classifications of the union 
 or guild shall be recognized in the labor-market; 
 opening their doors to all new-comers widely, 
 without any bars except such as these standards of 
 proficiency will set up ; aiming to individualize— 
 not generalize—the compensation of labor in each 
 department of work, by individualizing the labor 
 itself; looking always to the efficiency, the skill, 
 the productive value, of each man’s work for the 
 basis of the apportionment of dividends to him 
 from the production to which he contributes. 
 
 “You may say that I am visionary; but re¬ 
 member that I am only trying to define the state 
 of things which must be brought about, as it seems 
 to me, if the just harmony of rights and interests 
 between labor and capital is ever to be attained. 
 I do not expect it very soon. I am not sure that 
 we are within ten centuries of it yet. I am not 
 
THIRD EVENING. 
 
 97 
 
 sure, in fact, that it will ever be reached. But I 
 do have a strong faith, nevertheless, in the final 
 completeness of the evolution of justice among 
 men, before human history ends, and I am willing 
 to be called visionary in that, if you please to con¬ 
 sider me so.” 
 
 The judge rose as he finished speaking, and, 
 in his prompt way, took leave of us for the even¬ 
 ing, so that we had no opportunity to reply to his 
 last remarks. 
 
 5 
 
FOUKTH EVENING. 
 
 ABOUT TIIE JUST CLAIMS OF LABOR. 
 
 The Increase of Production within a Century past.—The Judge’s 
 Estimates.—Machine-Labor and its Results.—The Working¬ 
 man’s Measure of Gain.—Wasteful Consumption.—What it 
 is and what Kind of Waste can be socially restrained.—The 
 Sources of Increase to the Capital Fund, and of Increased 
 Dividends to Labor. 
 
 When tlie judge came lie was a little late, and 
 excused himself by saying that he had taken time 
 to look up a few passages in the political econo¬ 
 mists, touching points which he thought we should 
 now have to consider, and especially with refer¬ 
 ence to the so-called “ wages-fund,” by which the 
 compensation of labor is said to he limited. 
 
 I laughed at this, and rubbed my hands with 
 some show of glee. “ Now you are coming to 
 hard work, judge,” said I. “ I have been think¬ 
 ing of the rough road that we should put you 
 upon when we began to ask questions, as to the 
 source from which you expect to derive a substan¬ 
 tial and permanent increase of dividends to the 
 laboring-men of all classes. If there is any sure 
 
/ 
 
 FOURTH EVENING. 99 
 
 fact in political economy, I should say it is that 
 which is stated in the description of what is called 
 the £ wages-fund : 5 the tact, namely, that at any 
 given time there is a certain tolerably definite ap¬ 
 propriation made out of the accumulations from 
 past labor to maintain present production; that 
 there cannot be divided among the producing la¬ 
 borers of that time, either in wages or otherwise, 
 anything exceeding this appropriation, and that 
 their several shares from it must be, on the aver¬ 
 age, according to the proportion between their 
 total numbers and the total sum. How can it be 
 otherwise ? I do not see that you can put any 
 moral restraint, anymore than you can put a legal 
 restraint, upon unproductive consumption. If 
 you are able to make it a matter of recognized 
 duty that no man shall profligately and wastefully 
 consume the products of labor in idle luxury, you 
 cannot define the duty. You cannot mark points 
 where it begins and where it ends. You cannot 
 even define for any one producing member of so¬ 
 ciety a limit of productive consumption, beyond 
 which his consumption shall be set down as un¬ 
 productive. The food, the clothing, and the shel¬ 
 ter of the producer belong, of course, within the 
 range of his productive consumption; but what 
 kind of food ?—what kind of clothing ?—what 
 kind of shelter ? What latitude of selection and 
 variation shall he have within recognized bounds 
 
100 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 of productive consumption ? And then his educa¬ 
 tion and his culture are just as much objects of pro¬ 
 ductive consumption as the feeding and protecting 
 of his body are, because they contribute to his pro¬ 
 ductive efficiency and capacity. IIow much shall be 
 allowed for these ? How much schooling ? IIow 
 many books? IIow much travel? How much 
 leisure for observation and comparison ? How 
 much recreation to preserve the elasticity of his 
 energies ? How much exercise of hospitality ? 
 How many household conveniences, and refine¬ 
 ments, and adornments ? How many artistic indul¬ 
 gences ? IIow much gratification of rational 
 tastes ? Where shall we say that productive con¬ 
 sumption ends, in his case, and unproductive con¬ 
 sumption begins ? We cannot say. It must be 
 impossible, therefore, to define any rule of duty 
 for governing the consumption of the products of 
 labor. The broad rule which condemns profligacy 
 and wastefulness cannot be reduced to a definite 
 standard. Those who command possession of the 
 products of labor are left substantially free to con¬ 
 sume them as they please. The share which they 
 will reserve from their personal consumption, year 
 by year, and dedicate to renewed production, must 
 depend upon the inducements to accumulation by 
 which they are acted on ; and those inducements 
 are very nearly constant in their influence upon 
 men in a given state of civilization. I do not see 
 
FOURTH EVENING, 
 
 101 
 
 liow we can materially strengthen them, or mate¬ 
 rially augment their effect; and I do not see, 
 therefore, how we can bring about any consider¬ 
 able increment of the c wages-fund,’ or the capital 
 out of which labor is to be paid, proportionately 
 to the number of those who have to draw their 
 compensation from it. If you can tell me, my 
 dear judge, pray do so at once, for I am impatient 
 to learn.” 
 
 “ I must admit,” replied the judge, “ that this 
 is no easy part of our subject which we are ap¬ 
 proaching now. We are coming into fogs that 
 are sometimes pretty thick. I have groped in 
 them, and stumbled and traveled round and round 
 in bewilderment without making headway, a great 
 many times. But I think that if we use our eyes 
 steadily we can gather some light out of the murky 
 confusion to guide us, nevertheless. 
 
 “ The first thing to be certain about, no doubt, 
 is whether labor has or has -not become productive 
 enough to furnish the means for any considerable 
 increase of dividends to labor, without resorting 
 to communism, or the equal partitioning of goods, 
 which I do not believe in at all; without inter¬ 
 fering, in fact, with the inequalities of wealth that 
 are just, nor diminishing in the slightest degree 
 the inducements which stimulate even the great¬ 
 est accumulation of wealth by honest means. 
 What do you think about that ? ” 
 

 
 102 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 “Well,” said I, “it is certain that the produc¬ 
 tiveness of labor has been enormously augmented 
 since the present century began, by the mechanical 
 devices which we call labor-saving, although it 
 would be more proper to describe them as labor¬ 
 helping. But the capacity for consumption in the 
 human race seems to outrun its capacity for pro¬ 
 duction, no matter how the latter may be quick¬ 
 ened. New wants are developed by the ability to 
 supply them, even faster than the supplying capa¬ 
 bility evolves itself, so that those who can com¬ 
 mand the enjoyment of their desires may absorb 
 the products of labor as freely as they ever did. 
 We evidently cannot surfeit human desires, and 
 we seem, therefore, to be making no progress to¬ 
 ward the production of a surplus beyond the greed 
 of the greedy, out of which it will be any easier 
 to make a generous dividend to the dependent 
 laborers of the world than it was a thousand years 
 ago. The conditions of the struggle for existence, 
 relatively considered, seem to remain about the 
 same, after all the gain in productiveness that has 
 accrued to civilized labor.” 
 
 “ That maybe true,” returned the judge, “but 
 we will consider the point hereafter. What I wish 
 to look at now is simply the fact of the enormously- 
 increased and increasing productiveness of labor, 
 which is surely a fact of tremendous import in 
 human history. I do not think that we, any of 
 
FOURTH EVENING. 
 
 103 
 
 us, realize tlie magnitude of the increase and the 
 cumulative ratio at which it has been going on 
 since the Aryan intellect began to be scientifically 
 exercised, and its inventive faculties were brought 
 fairly into play. If we could exactly know how 
 many workmen would have been necessary two 
 hundred years ago, with the processes and ap¬ 
 pliances of that age, to furnish in a given time the 
 products that are now turned out in the same time 
 by the labor of England, France, Germany, and 
 the United States, w T e should doubtless be as¬ 
 tounded by the figures. It would be hard, how¬ 
 ever, to gather the data for even an approximate 
 calculation of the sort; because every present prod¬ 
 uct represents such complicated intermixings of 
 labor. In the case of a product of machine-work, 
 for example, there enters into it all the successive, 
 multifarious operations of industry by which the 
 metals and wood composing the material of the 
 machine in question were produced and brought 
 together; then the inventing and experimenting 
 by which this machine was perfected; then, be¬ 
 hind these, another complication of the same fac¬ 
 tors of labor in the other machines which have con¬ 
 tributed help in the making of this particular one; 
 and so on, indefinitely, almost. If we were able 
 to thus determine the quantity of human labor 
 which the machine itself represents, from first to 
 last, going back, very likely, to years before it was 
 
104 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 ever dreamed of, we should then have to distribute 
 this by equal division over the whole product of 
 its work, from the time it was first set in motion 
 until it wears itself out, with allowance made for 
 repairs and improvements meantime. That done, 
 we should next have to trace out the innumerable 
 tributary industries which have entered into the 
 production and bringing together of the materials 
 upon which the machine operates, or which it is 
 employed to fashion into a given shape; and these, 
 in most cases, will include, first and last, the work 
 of farmers, miners, machinists, inventors, scientific 
 discoverers, merchants, bankers, clerks, shipbuild¬ 
 ers, sailors, railroad engineers, and mechanics and 
 working men in a hundred avocations at least. 
 
 “The calculation is manifestly an impossible 
 one, and any attempt to determine how much the 
 productive efficiency of human labor has been 
 multiplied within a given time can only be guess¬ 
 work at the best. We can keep our estimates 
 safely within reason, however, and have enough, 
 perhaps, to found all necessary conclusions upon. 
 
 “An effort was made not long ago by I)r. 
 Engel, the director of the Prussian Statistical 
 Bureau, to procure statistics of the steam-power in 
 use in the world, lie was only partially success!*ul, 
 but from the data gathered he estimated—if the 
 report that 1 have seen is correct—that there can¬ 
 not be less than from three to three and a half 
 
FOURTH EVENING. 
 
 105 
 
 millions of liorse-power at work in the stationary 
 engines of the world, and ten millions of horse¬ 
 power in the land locomotive engines. The marine 
 engines add considerable to this, but I shall not 
 take them into account at present. Now, this 
 steam power which is at work on the continental 
 portions of the globe—most of it in Europe and 
 America—drawing loads, lifting burdens, forging 
 metals, grinding corn, whirling spindles and driv¬ 
 ing the shuttles in a million of looms, is so much 
 force, brought to the help of human labor, which 
 is maintained without any consumption of animal 
 or vegetable food. The feeding of it is from 
 mineral stores laid up in the bowels of the earth ; 
 its activity draws nothing from the resources of 
 the soil of the globe, except to the extent of the 
 food of the miners who dig the coal which is 
 burned in the engine-furnace, and the force main¬ 
 tained in their muscles is to the force generated by 
 the product of their labor as one to a thousand, at 
 most. This is an important fact to consider in 
 connection with what we are discussing, because 
 the limits to vegetation on the soil-surface of the 
 earth are the chief limits imposed upon human 
 labor. This steam labor-force, which is fed with 
 coals instead of with grains or grasses, is equal to 
 the working force of about 25,000,000 horses, be¬ 
 cause the theoretical c horse-power ’ of the steam 
 engine is nearly equivalent to the average actual 
 
106 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 working power of two horses, according to the 
 calculations now most accepted. Hence, to do the 
 same work, of transportation, of lifting, of grind¬ 
 ing, of crushing, and of moving machinery which 
 acts in the place of human fingers and hands, 
 25,000,000 horses would have to he employed— 
 supposing that horses were capable of the same 
 work, with the same steadiness and celerity and in 
 the same efficient way, which they are not. The 
 horse consumes, I should say, as much food, at 
 least, as three men. It is true that man’s food 
 ordinarily costs more labor than that of the horse, 
 because he wants a greater variety in it, and em¬ 
 ploys labor to bring him tea from China, coffee 
 from Java, sugar from the "West Indies, etc.; but, 
 relatively to the producing capabilities of the soil 
 of the earth, a horse must consume not less than 
 three times as much as a man, and competes with 
 man in that ratio for the subsistence which the 
 earth yields. To put steam-power therefore in the 
 place of 25,000,000 horses is equivalent to a saving 
 of food for about 75,000,000 human beings more 
 than could otherwise be fed from the same area of 
 soil, under the same state of cultivation. This is 
 not, my dear sir, a mere matter of idle speculation ; 
 for statisticians have found that, in all civilized 
 countries of the world, the rate of increase in the 
 number of horses has diminished greatly since the 
 introduction of steam-power began to be rapid and 
 
FOURTH EVENING. 
 
 107 
 
 universal, which was less than half a .century ago. 
 The effect was first noticed in Europe, I believe, 
 but it has become strongly marked in this country, 
 as well. From 1850 to 1860 the increase of horses 
 in the United States was at the rate of 44 per 
 cent., but from 1860 to 1870 it fell to 14 per cent. 
 Something must be allowed, no doubt, for the 
 effects of the war in the last decade, but not 
 enough to account for half this great decrease. It 
 represents the progress of the substitution of in¬ 
 animate for animate dumb servants in the employ 
 of man. I do not care to predict that this will go 
 so far as to displace all domestic animals from 
 working service, but I can see that invention is 
 pushing the horse and the ox out of employment 
 very fast, and that every year the sweep of this 
 effect appears to extend. We are now just at the 
 point, it would seem, of having the steam-engine 
 fully adapted to canal navigation, to street-car 
 locomotion, to ploughing and general farm work 
 and even to draft service on common roads. In 
 my view, this movement of substitution is one of 
 vast importance and significance, not only because 
 it augments the efficiency of labor, but because it 
 tends toward the taking of brute animals out of 
 competition with man as consumers of the products 
 of the soil, and thus enormously increases the stock 
 which remains for division among the human pro¬ 
 ducers. Do you agree with me so far as this \ ” 
 
108 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 “ I do,” said I. u Tlie fact which you have 
 brought to notice has all the significance that you 
 claim for it, I think, and it becomes very interest¬ 
 ing to me, as well as very important, in that view, 
 which I have never seen presented before.” 
 
 “ Very well, then,” continued the judge, “ we 
 will go on: the stationary steam-engines ’in the- 
 world, which have come into existence almost 
 wholly within the last half century, and more than 
 half of them, probably, within the last twenty 
 years, are doing a great variety of work; but 
 chiefly they are employed in propelling machinery 
 which performs mechanical operations that for¬ 
 merly had to be performed by the Angers, hands 
 and arms of working-men and working-women. 
 Along with these steam-engines, there is also being 
 employed, in the same kind of work, an enormous 
 water-power, the machinery for utilizing which 
 has been improved within our own generation al¬ 
 most as greatly as the machinery for utilizing the 
 expansive powder of steam has been ; and this rep¬ 
 resents, even more than steam does, a non-consum¬ 
 ing force, doing prodigious work for man without 
 drawing much from the productive resources of 
 the soil. The water-power in use is fully equal, 
 perhaps, to the steam-power, and both of these 
 mighty servants are driving machines which man 
 has only to wait upon and watch and direct, and 
 which execute, under his supervision and with his 
 
FOURTH EVENING. 
 
 109 
 
 help, each within its own specialized-function, all 
 the way from five to a thousand times the quan¬ 
 tity of a given work which he could do with his 
 unaided hands. 
 
 “ In such simple mechanical operations as the 
 cutting of nails, the making of needles and pins, 
 and the stamping of metals into shapes—where 
 power and precision in one quick monotonous 
 movement are the only requisites—the multiplica¬ 
 tion of product by machine labor over hand labor 
 is very great. In constructive processes where a 
 combination of movements is necessary, the multi¬ 
 plication of product is less, and proportionately so, 
 I suspect, to the mechanical complications involved. 
 But the division of machine labor is being organ¬ 
 ized to perfection, in the same w T ay as the division 
 of human labor, and the constant tendency, in 
 almost every branch of manufacture, is toward the 
 resolving of one complicated machine into two 
 or three or four simple ones, each of which per¬ 
 forms a single operation by a single movement, 
 thus gaining the maximum effect of power, pre¬ 
 cision and uniform speed. 
 
 “ But even in the more complex constructive 
 operations, the gain of product from a given 
 quantity of human labor, employed as auxiliary 
 to machine labor, is immense. Take the making 
 of fabrics for clothing, for example. The power- 
 looms now used at Manchester, England, for the 
 
110 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 manufacture of common cotton goods, are each 
 said to produce daily, on the average, twenty-six 
 pieces of cotton cloth, twenty-nine yards long and 
 twenty-five inches wide. One person can attend 
 to three of these looms, so that the joint daily 
 product of the man and the machine is seventy- 
 eight pieces; whereas, on the old hand-loom of 
 1$00, one man, working one loom, produced only 
 four pieces. Here, from the same expenditure of 
 human labor, we have a multiplication of prod¬ 
 uct almost twenty fold—less the labor which is 
 represented in the improved machine, in the en¬ 
 gine which drives it and in the fuel which the 
 engine consumes, dividing that labor down to the 
 small fraction which is chargeable against one 
 day’s work of the machine, out of the thousands 
 of days’ work it is capable of doing before it is 
 worn out. We shall make a large allowance for 
 the capitalized labor in this machinery if we set 
 down the final multiplication of product, conse¬ 
 quent upon the improvement of mechanical aids 
 to the human laborer, at fifteenfold. 
 
 “ In the spinning and weaving of woollen 
 cloths and all finer fabrics, the production of a 
 given number of workmen has been multiplied, 
 no doubt, in a ratio somewhat less; but still it 
 must be quite within reason to estimate the aver¬ 
 age multiplication at tenfold. 
 
 “ When we pass to consider the making of 
 
I 
 
 FOURTH EVENING. Ill 
 
 these fabrics into clothing, we come npon the most 
 striking: mechanical achievement of our own ^en- 
 eration—-the sewing-machine. I shall ask the 
 ladies here to say how many needle-women one of 
 them is equal to, in efficient work ? ” 
 
 “ Not less than ten, I am sure,” said my wife. 
 
 “ I have no doubt that is a moderate state¬ 
 ment,” continued the judge. “ So far, then, as 
 concerns one of the primary wants of man—his 
 clothing—the constructive work, taking all the 
 successive processes after the raw material has 
 been produced, is undoubtedly being now per¬ 
 formed by not more than one-tenth of the work¬ 
 men and workwomen, for a given quantity and 
 kind of product, that were required even fifty or 
 sixty years ago. 
 
 “ In the matter of shelter—house-building and 
 its allied industries—the fact cannot be very dif¬ 
 ferent, although I should make a somewhat lower 
 estimate. Our modern wood-working machinery 
 has wonderfully revolutionized the carpenter’s 
 trade. The planing machine, for example, prob¬ 
 ably performs more work of its kind in a day 
 than twenty industrious journeymen could do with 
 the same precision and perfectness, using hand 
 tools, and, after making a large allowance for the 
 labor capitalized in the machine, in. the driving 
 engine, etc., we can safely estimate the multiplica 
 tion of product in this part of building-labor at 
 
112 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 fifteenfold. Other kindred machines, like those 
 for grooving and tongning, mortising and tenon¬ 
 ing, etc., accomplish almost as much, relatively 
 to hand labor. The mechanical aids in brick¬ 
 making have become scarcely less efficient. But 
 masonry, on the other hand, has not yet acquired 
 its share of help from the mechanic forces, and so 
 much hand-work, of fitting together and finishing, 
 remains in all the branches of building industry, 
 that the gross average increment of product, com¬ 
 paring equal quantities of labor, must be con¬ 
 siderably less, for a hundred years past, than in 
 the department of labor that we considered before. 
 Taking all the building arts together, including 
 those which deal with wood, stone and metal, and 
 including also the furnishings and the fittings of 
 buildings, I should think it reasonable to estimate 
 that human labor has now, at least, five times the 
 productive efficiency that it had a century ago. 
 
 “ Now let us look at that department of labor 
 which stands first of all—the department of agri¬ 
 cultural labor—the labor which not only produces 
 the most of man’s food, but which produces, also, 
 the materials on which the greater part of all other 
 labor expends itself. Here the increment of prod¬ 
 uct, through improved processes and improved 
 mechanical aids, is necessarily less. The soil is 
 an independent and stubborn factor of production. 
 It imposes its own limits upon the labor to 
 
FOURTH EVENING. 
 
 113 
 
 which it responds. It yields more product to 
 more labor, knowingly applied, but it cannot be 
 made to yield proportionately. The ratio of its 
 product to the producing labor grows steadily less 
 as the latter is increased. The one obstinate 
 limit, therefore, which nature has imposed upon 
 the productiveness of human labor is found right 
 here. But even here the achievements of mechan¬ 
 ics and science have been prodigious—in three 
 ways: first, by multiplying the effectiveness of a 
 given quantity of labor applied to a given area of 
 soil; secondly, by placing at the command of the 
 tiller of the soil the reenforcement of extra help 
 which he needs, temporarily, at the seasons of 
 planting and harvesting, especially the latter; 
 thirdly, by making wider areas of soil tributary to 
 the wants of given communities, by increasing the 
 facilities of transportation. 
 
 “As for the first, even the hand tools of agri¬ 
 cultural labor have been improved so much that 
 the very laziest laborer can outstrip with them the 
 hardest-working laborer of a hundred years ago. 
 With the cast-steel plow of to-day, shaped with 
 scientific calculation, to realize the maximum ef¬ 
 fect from the minimum application of force, the 
 farmer turns far more sod, with the same wear of 
 his horses and of himself, than he could have done 
 with the iron plow of even forty years ago, to saj^ 
 nothing of its clumsier predecessors. Then there 
 
114 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 are the steam plows, the liarrows, the planters, the 
 cultivators, the mowing machines, the reaping 
 machines, the horse rakes, the threshers, the smut- 
 scouring machines, the potato diggers, the ditch 
 diggers, and a score of other contrivances, all of 
 which have come or are coming fast into common 
 use. I have no doubt that, within the regions to 
 which the improved farming of the present day 
 extends, these machines, taken together, have re¬ 
 duced the ordinary working force of men, on 
 given areas of soil, to one-fourth or one-third of 
 the laboring force employed for the same produc¬ 
 tion at the beginning of our century. 
 
 “ But the second element of productive prog¬ 
 ress in agriculture which I mentioned a moment 
 ago adds something to the increment. A given 
 quantity of labor, under the ordinary conditions of 
 agriculture, can prepare soil and plant seeds for a 
 greater crop than the same labor can harvest, 
 during the short season within which the crop has 
 to be gathered and saved, and agriculture was 
 always troubled by this brief periodical need of 
 extra harvesting labor, until the mechanical in¬ 
 ventor made a provision for it which involves, 
 simply, the investing of a certain small capital, em¬ 
 bodied in certain machines, like the reaper and the 
 mower. It has been estimated that McCormick’s 
 reaping machine doubled the production of grain 
 in the regions of the West where it was introduced, 
 
FOURTH EVENING. 
 
 115 
 
 simply by enabling the available labor of those 
 regions to harvest the crop which it was capable 
 of producing. Without the reaping machine, the 
 farmers would have to lose half of their crop, if 
 they effectively expended all the labor that they 
 could expend in planting and cultivation, or else 
 they would have to withhold one half of the culti¬ 
 vating labor which they might apply to their farms, 
 in order to produce no greater crop than they were 
 able to gather in. In either case, according to the 
 calculation, the machine saved a waste of pro¬ 
 ductive labor to the extent of one hundred per 
 cent.; and that reverted effect is quite additional 
 to its own direct effect upon the efficiency of labor 
 while being operated. 
 
 “ Thirdly and finally, the effectiveness of pro¬ 
 ductive labor in agriculture has been augmented 
 very greatly by the extraordinary extension and 
 improvement, during late years, of the avenues 
 and vehicles of transportation. The resulting de¬ 
 crease of time and cost in the carriage of products 
 to distant markets has brought, and is constantly 
 bringing about, more economical divisions of agri¬ 
 cultural labor, whereby it becomes applied with 
 more and more nearly its maximum effect. When 
 any considerable portion of the lands of some re¬ 
 gion whose climate and soil are best adapted to 
 wheat-culture has to be devoted to cattle grazing, 
 or to the breeding of sheep, in order to supply 
 
 I 
 
116 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR 
 
 local wants, there is a certain waste of the labor 
 thus diverted, because it is being applied with less 
 productive efficiency than it might be. But our 
 railroads, our steam vessels, our canals, and our 
 improved rivers have diminished that waste to an 
 enormous extent during the last half century, and 
 their work is j ust fairly begun. The wheat-raising, 
 the corn-planting and pork-fattening, the cattle 
 grazing, the sheep breeding, the dairy farming, 
 the fruit culture, and so on, are being districted 
 with the nicest discrimination—with the closest 
 adaptation of the product to climate, soil and every 
 other influential condition—and the area of dis¬ 
 tributed division is becoming every year more and 
 more continental. You will readily see that this 
 cannot occur without a very great augmentation of 
 the total product, proportionately to the labor ex¬ 
 pended, even allowing for the auxiliary labor by 
 which such wider exchanges are carried on. The 
 same agency, moreover, is putting a stop to the 
 waste of a localized surplus of product, which used 
 to be common and extensive—as when, for exam¬ 
 ple, the farmers of the West burned for fuel the 
 corn which they could carry to no market. 
 
 “Looking over the whole field, at all the im¬ 
 proved conditions of agricultural production, I 
 cannot doubt that the efficiency of labor in it has 
 been increased at least fourfold, since no longer 
 ago than last century, in the better civilized coun- 
 
FOURTH EVENING. 
 
 117 
 
 tries of the world. That is to say,'that, for the 
 same total agricultural product, not less than four 
 times as many laboring hands as are employed 
 in these countries to-day would have had to be 
 employed one hundred years ago. Every succes¬ 
 sive census shows a relative thinning out of popu¬ 
 lation in the rural districts, wherever these im¬ 
 provements are in progress, and some social phi¬ 
 losophers are inspired with great alarm by the 
 increasing tendency of movement in the younger 
 generations of the farm-bred class to £ crowd/ as 
 they say, into cities and towns. They fail to see 
 that it is an inevitable movement, pushed on by 
 the irresistible forces that are at work in society; 
 because it has become impossible to employ on the 
 soil the same proportion of laborers in one genera¬ 
 tion that was employed the generation before, and 
 each succeeding generation finds the proportion 
 considerably reduced. 
 
 “ Do you think that my estimate is too large ? ” 
 
 I said that it seemed more likely to be under 
 than above the fact. 
 
 “■"Well, then,” proceeded the judge, u let us 
 sum our conclusions up. In the matter of the 
 constructive production of man’s clothing, we es¬ 
 timated that the increase of product from given 
 quantities of human labor, as compared with the 
 production of a hundred years ago, has become 
 equal to a multiplication by ten. We estimated a 
 
118 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 multiplication by five in tlie case of labor which 
 produces shelter for him, averaging together all 
 the various kinds of workmanship that are inci¬ 
 dent to the building, fitting and furnishing of his 
 habitations and his houses of business and pleas¬ 
 ure. And, finally, we have estimated a multiplica¬ 
 tion by four in the case of the labor that expends 
 itself in the production of his food, and of such 
 materials derived from the soil as constructive 
 labor is employed upon. Now, I am sure that we 
 are not overstepping the limit of probability if we 
 take the mean multiple of these three to represent 
 the general average increment, within a century, 
 of the productiveness of all labor that is applied to 
 material objects, in those countries, of Europe and 
 America, which are most advanced in the arts and 
 the knowledge of our modern civilization. It 
 seems to me certain that the labor which is pro¬ 
 ductively employed in these countries to-day, put¬ 
 ting it all together, is producing at least six times 
 as much as the same number of laborers could have 
 produced a hundred years ago; or,* to state the fact 
 differently, that only one man need work now 
 where six worked a hundred years ago to produce 
 the same supply for the satisfaction of human 
 wants to the same extent. If the six do still 
 work, as they certainly do, the multiplication of 
 product, proportionately to the increase of popula¬ 
 tion, is enormous; and if this multiplication is going 
 
FOURTH EVENING. 
 
 119 
 
 on at the same rate, as it appears likely to do, there 
 would seem to be even a possibility of surfeiting, 
 by-and-by, all rational wants and desires of the 
 animal man, unless some new rules for the divi¬ 
 sion of the increased product are introduced.” 
 
 I shook my head. 
 
 “ Well, no matter,” said the judge. “Let that 
 be an open question. I do not care about it. I 
 only care to claim that there is furnished to the 
 race at large, by this vast increase of an always 
 increasing production, enough to improve very 
 considerably the conditions of life for every man 
 who industriously contributes toward it, without 
 interfering at all w T ith the just inequalities of 
 wealth, or impairing at all the effective uses of 
 wealth, or diminishing at all the effective induce¬ 
 ments to its accumulation. I am sure that you 
 will agree with me in this ? ” 
 
 I nodded assent and he went on. 
 
 “ But how much have the conditions of life 
 been improved for the ordinary laborer, or for the 
 average mechanic who works for wages, and who 
 works hard, with no little intelligence and with no 
 small measure of the knowledge of the age in his 
 education ? IIow much does he partake of the stu¬ 
 pendous increase of the fruits of labor ? I know 
 that he is a partaker;—the poorest beggar, almost, 
 partakes somewhat of the bettered conditions of 
 life; but do you think that, for the wages-paid 
 
120 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 mechanic of to-day, there is an augmented share of 
 comfort and culture and gratification at all equal 
 to the productive gain, of his generation. A few 
 simple luxuries have been added to his food; but 
 it is no better, on the whole, nor supplied to him 
 more abundantly, than it was three hundred years 
 ago in England, according to Froude, when beef 
 sold for two farthings a pound, a fat lamb for a 
 shilling, a chicken for a penny, and wages were 
 from fourpence to sixpence a day. Ilis house 
 has gained windows of glass; a chimney to dis¬ 
 charge its smoke; a stove or two to equalize its 
 comfortable warmth; some cheap carpeting in 
 place of straw upon the floors; softer beds, per¬ 
 haps, and varnished chairs, instead of benches of 
 rough-hewn deal. lie eats from dishes of a neater 
 pattern than the wooden trenchers of olden times, 
 and he has forks and knives to eat with in a decent 
 way. lie has a cheerfuller light in his dwelling 
 than the rush-light or the tallow dip could give. 
 Ilis clothing is better fashioned and cleaner that it 
 used to be. In body he is made very comfortable, 
 no doubt, although he enjoys but sparingly the 
 conveniences of life which our later times have 
 been fertile in producing. Books are brought 
 within his reach, by public libraries and other¬ 
 wise—if he has time to read them. lie may 
 travel, too, at greatly lessened cost, to see some¬ 
 thing of the world, and he may gratify all his cu- 
 
FOURTH EVENING. 
 
 121 
 
 rious and inquiring and aesthetic desires at less cost 
 than he formerly could—if he has time. But he 
 is compelled to labor just about as hard and just 
 about as continuously to secure the bodily main¬ 
 tenance and comfort of himself and his family as 
 the laborer did two or three hundred years ago. 
 So the greater part of his share of the improved 
 conditions of life, after all, is just in that improve¬ 
 ment of bodily comfort, which does not seem to 
 be very great. Is it enough to fairly account to 
 him for the productive progress of the human race 
 in the last three centuries ? I cannot think so. I 
 cannot make myself feel satisfied with it. 
 
 “ The whole sum total of things which really 
 contribute in any immediate way to the mere 
 maintenance and bodily comfort of the race is pro¬ 
 duced, we must remember, by a fraction only of 
 the labor of the present day. There has not been 
 a single generation, in the civilized countries, for 
 two hundred years past, at least, which directed 
 over half its labor to that end, and we certainly 
 have disengaged more than half of the labor of our 
 time from those objects of production which gratify 
 bodily wants, whether simple or luxurious. Even 
 the highest degree of animal comfort, therefore, 
 seems but a paltry pittance to give to any indus¬ 
 trious producer, out of the abundance of the age. 
 Yet less than that is falling to the lot, to-day, of 
 an actual majority of the toiling men and women 
 6 
 
122 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 wliose work lias filled the world so full of riches 
 that they run to waste. Is this, do you think, a 
 necessary state of things ? Is it a state of things 
 to be satisfied with ? 
 
 “ I have spoken of riches that run to waste out 
 of the abundance to which the world has attained. 
 You touched upon that point a little while ago, but 
 I did not think we were ready then to consider it. 
 We could not rightly estimate the wastefulness of 
 consumption until we had formed some idea of 
 the increase of production, as we have since done. 
 Let us now go back to it. You thought, you said, 
 that profligate and wasteful consumption, on the 
 part of those who are able to command possession 
 of the products of labor, cannot be restrained. I 
 do not quite agree with you. Can you tell me 
 what wasteful consumption is ? ” 
 
 I scratched my head and confessed that I did 
 not see how it could be defined with any precision 
 at all. “And that,” 1 added, “ constitutes just 
 the difficulty in the matter which I was setting be¬ 
 fore you.” 
 
 “ It is a difficulty,” returned the judge, “and 
 I certainly would not undertake to draw a com¬ 
 plete line between wasteful and unwasteful con¬ 
 sumption. It cannot possibly be done. But I 
 have at least one very well defined notion on the 
 subject. Let us rid ourselves, first, of the con¬ 
 fusion which the idea of “ profligacy ” introduces. 
 
 
FOURTH EVENING. 
 
 123 
 
 Profligate consumption is not necessarily waste¬ 
 ful consumption, in tlie economical sense. Profli¬ 
 gacy is a word of shifting signification. It means 
 differently to different persons and under differ¬ 
 ent circumstances. That which seems profligate 
 to one is not profligate to another, and it was this 
 fact, I think, which you had mostly in mind, when 
 you questioned the possibility of bringing the con¬ 
 sumption of the products of labor under any con¬ 
 trolling laws. But there is one broad law that 
 can be laid down and which is sufficient, in the 
 economical view, to cover the whole ground. It 
 is this : that nothing can be said to be wasted 
 which contributes to the gratifying or the satisfy¬ 
 ing of any taste or any want in man, whether nat¬ 
 ural or cultivated. From the moral standpoint 
 this looks like a startlingly broad rule, but I am 
 convinced that it represents the only view which 
 political economy can take. We can make no dis¬ 
 tinction between true tastes and false tastes, or 
 between vicious desires and virtuous ones, because 
 we cannot agree about them. We can take ac¬ 
 count of no wastefulness in any consumption of 
 labor which has distinctly an object in any human 
 taste or human want. There is wastefulness, to 
 be sure, because everything expended upon an un¬ 
 worthy object, or expended disproportionately to 
 the importance of the object, is wasted; but we 
 simply cannot take account of it. 
 
124 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 “ Where, then, is the waste that we can take 
 account of ? I will tell you. It is in the consump¬ 
 tion of wealth which has no object outside of it¬ 
 self. It is in that consumption of labor and of the 
 products of labor which is for the sake of con¬ 
 sumption only; which is for the sake, in other 
 words, of displaying the ability to consume and 
 which consumes objectlessly for that purpose. It 
 is that which we call the ostentation of wealth, or 
 of the power of consumption which wealth gives. 
 This is the great robber of society. It steals more 
 out of what belongs to the race at large, for the 
 comforting and beautifying and enlarging of hu¬ 
 man life, than all the robber appetites and passions 
 and vices put together. It is appalling to think of 
 the extent to which it recklessly and with brutal 
 insensateness destroys the common benefit that 
 ought to accrue to mankind from the great inven¬ 
 tions by which the fruitfulness of labor is mul¬ 
 tiplied. Look at one instance out of hundreds, 
 which our lady-friends here can appreciate. The 
 sewing-machine made it possible to cheapen enor¬ 
 mously the construction of clothing and to set free 
 from that work a vast quantity of labor for other 
 fields of production, tributary to the conven¬ 
 iences of living, or to the sense of beauty, or to 
 the desire for knowledge. Has it realized such a 
 result, in any degree commensurate at all with 
 what it added to the efficiency of labor in the 
 
FOURTH EVENING. 
 
 125 
 
 employment of sewing ? No. And' why ? Be¬ 
 cause a despicable, senseless, and most vulgar van¬ 
 ity in that minor fraction of mankind which has 
 the power, more or less, to command labor at will, 
 refuses to let clothing be cheapened, and persists 
 in the contemptible display of an ability to possess 
 and to wear clothes which cost much labor. So 
 the 4 world of fashion,’ as we call it, exerts a per¬ 
 verted ingenuity in contriving forms of construc¬ 
 tion and frivolous changes in dress which shall 
 constantly use up, and more than use up, if possi¬ 
 ble, all the gain to labor that is derived from me¬ 
 chanical invention. With what object ? To im¬ 
 prove our dress in durability or comfortableness ? 
 No. To add any quality of beauty, or graceful¬ 
 ness, or picturesqueness ? No. To satisfy any de¬ 
 mand from any kind of taste, whether pure and 
 artistic or false 1 No. If these objects are thought 
 of at all, they are the last and the least things con¬ 
 sidered in the edicts of fashion, to which a sur¬ 
 viving barbarism in society is servile. It is a case 
 of consumption, for the most part, with no object; 
 of consumption for the sake of consuming, alone ; 
 of consumption to ostentate the power to consume. 
 Am I not right V 9 
 
 “ You are,” said my wife, “ ‘ ’tis true, and pity 
 ’tis ’tis true.’ ” 
 
 “ The same is true,” continued the judge, “ of 
 consumption in many other ways, to a monstrous 
 
126 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 extent. I think sometimes that almost half of 
 what is expended among wealthy people upon 
 their houses and the appurtenances of their living 
 is expended only to measure against one another 
 the expending power which they severally possess. 
 There is not a desire, nor a taste, nor a sentiment, 
 nor an emotion, nor even an animal sensation of 
 the lowest kind, which prompts it or is gratified 
 by it. It is simply an objectless consumption. 
 
 “ Now, all this is barbaric and vulgar. It is of 
 the essence of vulgarity. It is opposed to all the 
 influences under which human character is being 
 developed in the process of what we call civiliza¬ 
 tion. It is offensive, as much to the practical com¬ 
 mon-sense, and to the bare, bald, calculating utili¬ 
 tarianism of habit, which grow with the growth of 
 intelligence and faculty, as it is offensive to the 
 finer instincts and perceptions that grow in the 
 same process. Will you tell me that there is no 
 hope of the evolution of a state of sentiment in 
 society which will put checks upon this objectless, 
 ostentatious consumption, by holding it in derision 
 and contempt, thus destroying the one small, mean 
 motive behind it-and making it abortive ? I believe 
 differently. I know that there is a quicker sen¬ 
 sitiveness in mankind to imputations of vulgarity 
 than to imputations of immorality. I know that 
 it is easier to attach social disgrace to the doings 
 of things which impugn the polite culture of men 
 
FOTJRTR EVENING. 
 
 127 - 
 
 than to the doing of things which -impugn their 
 virtue or their honesty. I know, therefore, that 
 the poverty of taste, the poverty of resource, the 
 poverty of capacity for enjoyment, which exhibit 
 themselves in an aimless, ostentatious consump¬ 
 tion of wealth, will become contemptible and ridic¬ 
 ulous in our society long before the vices of ap¬ 
 petite and taste which consume wealth unworthily 
 and sinfully are disgraced and condemned. I have 
 hope of seeing, even before my days are ended, 
 the coming of the time when a great house, built 
 for no uses of hospitality—a great house of closed 
 chambers—a great house full of splendors out of 
 which the possessor enjoys nothing except the 
 poor consciousness of possession—will be looked 
 upon as the monument of a barbarian who has 
 survived beyond his age. Yet I have no hope of 
 seeing in my time the extermination of immoral 
 profligacy. Such is the difference of controllabil¬ 
 ity, in my view, between the two kinds of wasteful 
 consumption. 
 
 “ And it ought to be so. Any robust, positive 
 vice, out of which grow evil appetites and perni¬ 
 cious desires, is more tolerable than the nothingness 
 of ostentation, as a consumer of the wealth of the 
 world. I would have this preached as the gospel 
 of social economy, until society is taught to exact 
 from its members some account of their consump¬ 
 tion of the products of its labor; whether morally 
 
128 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 satisfactory or not—whether aesthetically satisfac¬ 
 tory or not—whether sensually satisfactory or not; 
 exacting, simply, that there shall be objects of de¬ 
 sire of some kind to account for their consump¬ 
 tion. The world needs nothing nearer to com¬ 
 munism than that. It has enough to afford to 
 every man the gratification of all wants, all desires, 
 and all tastes, that he can make himself capable of 
 deriving enjoyment from, either by cultivation or 
 by vitiation—no matter what their nature or their 
 extravagance may he—if he will oidy make these 
 the measure of his consumption and not consume 
 aimlessly and wantonly beyond them.” 
 
 The judge paused, and I said to him : “ What 
 then? You have satisfied me that there may be 
 some restraint put upon the wanton waste of 
 wealth in ostentatious consumption, by vulgarizing 
 it in public opinion; but what then? You will 
 only have changed the direction of expenditure, 
 and stimulated the cultivation of wants and de¬ 
 sires to absorb that which was consumed without 
 desire before.” 
 
 “ Xot so,” he replied. “In the nature and in 
 the cultivation of every man there are limits to the 
 consumption of wealth which can yield enjoyment 
 to him, if you suppress ostentation, or that which 
 the keen perceptions of his fellows will detect as 
 pretension and ostentation. And this is especially 
 true of those men who make the acquisition of 
 
FOURTH EVENING. 
 
 129 
 
 wealth an end in life. They leave themselves lit¬ 
 tle time for the cultivation of large tastes, large 
 desires or large capacities for personal enjoyment 
 of any kind. Not only that, but the natural tastes 
 and desires in them lose their edge. There is one 
 passion only in them that can make boundless de¬ 
 mands upon wealth for its gratification, and that is 
 the love of power. But wealth yields power to the 
 possessor of it within limits that are very narrow 
 if it is not productively used, as by the Rothschilds 
 and the Vanderbilts, instead of being wastefully 
 consumed. As you discourage among men, there¬ 
 fore, the vain showing of wealth, by making that 
 vulgar and despicable, you drive them into finding 
 potent uses for it, and thus you throw a vast part 
 of what had been wastefully consumed, by bar¬ 
 baric ostentation, into the fund of productive capi¬ 
 tal. Is not that so ? ” 
 
 I was forced to assent. 
 
 “ We have gone far enough, then, for to-night,” 
 said the judge. “ We set out to discover how, and 
 from what sources, the fund of capital is suscep¬ 
 tible of an increase that will enlarge the dividends 
 to productive labor, without disturbing the social 
 organization in which wealth is unequally dis¬ 
 tributed, and without impairing the inducements 
 to the accumulation of wealth. I think that I 
 have partly, though not wholly yet, answered your 
 questions on this point. We have seen what room 
 
130 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 for such an increase is made by mechanical multi¬ 
 plications of the productiveness of labor, and by 
 the relative diminution of animals which compete 
 with man for subsistence from the earth, and you 
 have agreed with me that it is possible-to cultivate 
 a state of feeling in society which will restrain 
 that kind of unproductive consumption that wastes 
 wealth in the empty ostentation of it. Let us 
 leave the matter here till to-morrow evening, and 
 then we will take up the ‘ wages-fund J in the 
 light of these facts.” 
 
 So we parted for the night. 
 
FIFTH EYEHIHG. 
 
 ABOUT THE WAYS AND MEANS OF JUSTICE. 
 
 The “Wages-Fund” and the Wages System. — The Common 
 “Compensation Fund” which may be substituted in Political 
 Economy.—Effects of Partnership between Labor and Capi¬ 
 tal.— Its Practicable Beginnings and its Ultimate Conse¬ 
 quences.—Loanable Capital and Public Debts.—The Judge’s 
 New Party.—Malthus and the Far Future. 
 
 “How,” said tlie judge, when we were seated 
 together again, “ let ns try, if we can, to reach the 
 end of our discussion to-night, for I am afraid that 
 it is growing tiresome. We have got the way 
 pretty well cleared before us, and ought to go over 
 the remaining ground more rapidly. 
 
 “ I do not pretend, you understand, to have the 
 solution of this great labor-question formulated in 
 any social theory. I do not pretend to lay down 
 a scheme of doctrine for any school or any party 
 of social reform. I am only trying to discover the 
 facts which underlie the problem and the princi¬ 
 ples which bear upon it, and to contribute, if I 
 can, some help toward opening it to proper study. 
 
132 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 I know that it is not a subject for legislation, either 
 in parliaments or in parties, nor a thing to be ar¬ 
 bitrarily dealt with in any way. There are no 
 solvents for it unless we can find them in public 
 opinion, and my hope is in the appeal to that. I 
 want to see given to the question the moral aspects 
 which belong to it, along with the economical 
 ones, holding the two together so that their modi¬ 
 fication of one another may be seen. It has been 
 looked at too long from the opposite standpoints 
 of the philanthropist and the political economist. 
 I would like, if I can, to study it with the eyes of 
 both ; to clearly take in the hard environment of 
 view to which political economy is restricted, and 
 yet to do so without standing quite down at the 
 level of dead facts, but lifted just so far into the 
 region of sentiment that I may possibly see some¬ 
 thing behind and beyond, and find if there are 
 moral forces lying latent there which may be ca¬ 
 pable of ameliorating that environment of hard 
 conditions. 
 
 “ I am convinced that there are such forces, 
 and that they may be brought into gradual activity 
 by a steady propagation of just notions in society 
 concerning labor and capital, and concerning the 
 acquisition and consumption and use of wealth. 
 Xot in the spirit of ranting demagoguism, nor 
 of fanatical, unreasoning philanthropy, so called, 
 but in the spirit of rational justice and of that prac- 
 
133 
 
 FIFTH EVENING. 
 
 tical, every-day common-sense in mankind which is 
 becoming all-powerful. 
 
 “ The doctrine of the £ wages-f und ’ in political 
 economy rests solidly upon stubborn facts. But 
 let us look at the nature of the facts. ‘ Wages,’ 
 says Mr. John Stuart Mill, ‘ not only depend upon 
 the relative amount of capital and population, but 
 cannot, under the rule of competition, be affected 
 by anything else. AY ages (meaning, of course, the 
 general rate) cannot rise but by an increase of the 
 aggregate funds employed in hiring laborers, or a 
 diminution in the number of competitors for hire; 
 nor fall except either by a diminution of the funds 
 devoted to paying labor, or by an increase of the 
 number of laborers to be paid.’ Now, this is true 
 —unquestionably true. But w T hat then ? AYe are 
 not compelled to assume, as the political econo¬ 
 mists incline to do, that there is no possibility of 
 forcing a relative increase of the aggregate funds 
 employed in production. AYe might have to as¬ 
 sume that, if we could find no sources from which 
 to derive such an increase of the fund of capital, 
 without interfering with the ordinary springs and 
 motives of human action. If it could not be had 
 without curtailing the gratification of wants and 
 desires and tastes, on the part of those who com¬ 
 mand at will the consumption of labor and its 
 products, we could not reasonably argue upon any 
 other assumption. But we have found differently. 
 
134 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 We have found that the augmented productiveness 
 of labor, since mechanical invention became ac¬ 
 tive, actually outruns the desires of that minority 
 in society which has so far monopolized most of 
 the benefit from it, and that there is a sickening 
 wastefulness of consumption without object going 
 on, which is plainly susceptible of being restrained 
 by the influences that are developed in the prog¬ 
 ress of human culture. In contemplating these 
 influences as available forces in social economy 
 we contemplate no opposition to human nature, 
 but are strictly in consonance with it. We have 
 a right then, I say, to assume that some relative 
 increment of the aggregate fund of wealth appro¬ 
 priated to productive labor is possible, and we 
 have no right to assume the contrary. 
 
 “ Now comes the question,‘ How can constraint 
 be brought upon those who hold possession of 
 wealth, to compel them to add more of it year by 
 year to the capital-fund, instead of consuming it \ ’ 
 Well, it cannot be done under the existing 4 wages 
 system.’ The political economists are right in 
 that. So long as the pay of the working-man con¬ 
 tinues to be a fixed quantity, it will continue to 
 be very near the lowest quantity at which equi¬ 
 librium is established between his necessities and 
 the gainful desires of the man of wealth who em¬ 
 ploys him. So long as the capitalists think it right 
 to hold and use their dictatorial power in produc- 
 
FIFTH EVENING. 
 
 135 
 
 tion, and the working-man is nothing more than 
 one troublesome factor out of several in their pro¬ 
 ductive calculations, it is certain that the figures 
 which represent him in the calculation are not 
 likely to change much in his favor. The x which 
 stands for quantity of capital to be appropriated 
 to production will bear a pretty constant ratio to 
 the y which stands for quantity of dependent 
 labor, divided by the s which represents the degree 
 to which it is dependent. But change the rela¬ 
 tionship of the laborer to the capitalist, from that 
 of hire to that of partnership—no matter by how 
 slight an alteration—and see how the formula of 
 the calculation is changed! lie escapes at once 
 from under the rule-of-three by which you settled 
 wages for him. He is no longer a factor in the 
 simple division of your ‘ wages-fund; 5 you have 
 to reckon him now among the primary factors in 
 the general division of the general product of 
 labor. He has acquired what he did not have be¬ 
 fore—a certain proprietary interest in the aggre¬ 
 gate fund of produced wealth, and has to be ac¬ 
 counted to for his interest before the question, as 
 to how much of what has been produced this year 
 shall be dedicated to production next year, becomes 
 an open question at all. He has acquired his suf¬ 
 frage, so to speak, in the matter of the allotment 
 to be made between productive and unproductive 
 consumption. 
 
136 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 a TTe can see tliis plainly enough in an indi¬ 
 vidual case, and can see with what effect it op¬ 
 erates to modify the conditions of the distribution 
 of the products of labor and to change the terms 
 of the daily or yearly appropriation made out of 
 them to the capital fund. Here is our young 
 friend John, for example, receiving wages, I be¬ 
 lieve—or a salary, if that sounds better—from his 
 employers, lie is paid for his work a fixed com¬ 
 pensation, which is chiefly determined by the ex¬ 
 isting demand for, and supply of, such services as 
 he is qualified to perform. lie draws it from 
 what Mr. Mill calls ‘ the fund employed in hiring 
 labor,’ and there are limitations put upon it by the 
 limits of that fund. But suppose that next year 
 his employers, who think highly of him and feel 
 friendly toward him, and who desire to attach him 
 permanently in interest to themselves, admit him 
 to a junior partnership in the concern, turning 
 over to him a certain minor share of their property 
 and business, which he is to pay for, perhaps, out 
 of the earnings. lie will have ceased then, will 
 he not, to draw his remuneration for work out of 
 the 1 wages-fund ? ’ lie will have ceased to par¬ 
 ticipate in that drawing of fixed shares from the 
 aggregate product of labor which we call wages- 
 paying, and will have become a participant in the 
 division of that indefinite remainder out of which 
 the appropriations to capital have chiefly to be 
 
FIFTH EVENING. 
 
 137 
 
 made. He will have become, therefore, an abso¬ 
 lute instead of a relative factor in the division of 
 the product. He will have been lifted out of de¬ 
 pendence upon the ‘ wages-fund,’ into a relation¬ 
 ship toward the whole fund of produced wealth 
 which is potentially independent; and that will 
 have been a great gain for Master John, even 
 though his dividends from the earnings of the 
 business should be no greater than his wages are 
 now. 
 
 “ He will have owed it, too, to a generous con¬ 
 cession on the part of his employers; that is, if he 
 has no capital to put into their business equivalent 
 to the partnership in it which they concede to him. 
 Ho doubt they will have been actuated by consid¬ 
 erable motives of self-interest in the matter. Ho 
 doubt they will have expected to gain some relief 
 from care and exertion for themselves, and to gain 
 some energy in the prosecution and management 
 of their business, by infusing young blood into 
 the proprietorship. But still there will have been 
 a strong element of magnanimity in the conces¬ 
 sion. They are under no necessity to make it, and 
 if they are men of mean selfishness they will not 
 make it. They will try, on the contrary, to retain 
 John’s services under hire as long as they can, and 
 then, when he will work for wages no longer, to 
 find some one else of like capacity and fidelity, but 
 more dependent than he, to take his place. They 
 
138 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 prefer, however, as we suppose, to unite John per¬ 
 manently in interest with themselves, and it is 
 with motives partly selfish and partly generous 
 that they open the door for him through which 
 he steps to the more independent footing of a pro¬ 
 prietary producer, and passes at once outside of 
 the domain of your inexorable law of the ‘ wages- 
 fund,’ because he becomes then one of the admin¬ 
 istrators of the law. 
 
 “Now, suppose that these same employers 
 should he further induced by like considerations 
 to make the same kind of concession, in some 
 small way, to every other man in their employ, 
 turning over to him, on the same terms, some lit¬ 
 tle share of interest in their establishment—no 
 matter how little—or supplementing his wages by 
 some slight fraction of dividend from the profits 
 of the business—no matter how slight; would 
 they not, then, have done for him, proportion¬ 
 ately, the same thing which they had done for 
 Master John, and made the like change in his re¬ 
 lations to production and capital ? Would they 
 not, to that extent, have abrogated in their estab¬ 
 lishment the law of the ‘ wages-fund,’ and intro¬ 
 duced another law, to which the appropriations 
 made from production to capital would have to 
 conform to themselves ? 
 
 “ And, then, suppose that all the employers in 
 the country should be induced to do the same 
 
FIFTH EVENING. 
 
 139 
 
 tiling! Wliat would have happened ? Why, your 
 4 wages-fund ’ would have disappeared out of the 
 calculations of political economy, because it would 
 have ceased to be a definable fund. - We could as 
 well talk of a ‘ profit-fund,’ and there is certainly 
 no such thing as that, in any definable sense; be¬ 
 cause the profits of capital are simply that remain¬ 
 der of the product of labor which is left in its 
 possession, after giving to the producing laborers 
 just what the competition of their necessities will 
 compel them to accept. In the case supposed, we 
 should have merged the whole together in one 
 common ‘ compensation-fund.’ With what result? 
 Simply this: our present wages system establishes 
 a given set of conditions, to which production has 
 to be conformed, and there is reserved from con¬ 
 sumption for renewed production just such a fund 
 of capital as those conditions exact. If we intro¬ 
 duced the new set of conditions which the system 
 of dividends contemplates, they would be just as 
 arbitrary and compulsory; production would have 
 to be adapted to them, and the reserve for capital 
 would again be precisely what they exact. It 
 could not be otherwise.” 
 
 “ But that involves, does it not,” said I, “ a re¬ 
 duction of the profits of capital corresponding to 
 the addition made to the remuneration of labor ? ” 
 
 “Ho, not a corresponding reduction,” returned 
 the judge. u Ho doubt it involves some encroach- 
 
140 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 merit upon the general rate of profit which capital 
 now enjoys and is habituated to expect, but not to 
 the extent that might be feared. The greater part 
 of the gain to the working-man will ultimately be 
 an absolute and clear gain, costing the capitalist 
 nothing. The provision for it will be found in an 
 increase of product, relatively to the capital em¬ 
 ployed, resulting from the stimulation of labor by 
 more animating and energetic motives. AVe can 
 certainly calculate upon that, and largely, because 
 we know what self-interest is worth as a stimulant 
 of human exertion. The most conscientious man 
 is incapable, as a rule, of constantly doing quite 
 his best in work when the personal benefit to him¬ 
 self from it is not affected by small differences of 
 industry and carefulness and watchful attention, 
 lie may try to exert himself for another with the 
 same faithfulness and energy and zeal that he 
 would for himself, but he cannot always do it. 
 lie is betrayed into relaxations of spirit which he 
 is not conscious of. Although he does not feel it 
 or know it, there is the want in him of one elastic 
 spring of action that would keep the moral mo¬ 
 tives of his work at a steadier tension. It is the 
 knowledge of this fact in human nature that chiefly 
 induces employers of labor to do that which we 
 supposed in the case of our young friend John. 
 By admitting a faithful employe into partnership, 
 or by holding out that prospect to him, they cal- 
 
FIFTH EVENING. 
 
 141 
 
 dilate upon enlisting a new motor in liim that will 
 reenforce the motives of conscience and add energy^ 
 to his whole performance of service. And the cal¬ 
 culation rarely fails. 
 
 “Now, I am sure that the same effect will fol¬ 
 low the widest application of the experiment. 
 But it will not he an instantaneous effect. It will 
 follow very slowly, perhaps, and the experiment 
 that I refer to cannot be otherwise than a tentative 
 and gradual one, to be successful. I should not 
 dream of having it entered upon by any sudden 
 and universal movement, if that were possible, be¬ 
 cause I know that it would fail. I have said al¬ 
 ready that the dependent laboring-class, as a body, 
 needs to be educated for it, by slow and careful 
 beginnings in the introduction of the new system. 
 It is inevitable that much of the introductory ex¬ 
 perimenting will be abortive; but that offers no 
 discouragement, if we convince ourselves that the 
 direction taken is right. My wish is only to see a 
 movement in the interest of the laboring-people 
 set in that right direction, no matter how slow it 
 may be. That such a work of reform must begin 
 with a work of education on the part of those who 
 are to benefit by it, we can readily see. One of 
 the main elements of the force to be generated in 
 labor, by setting independent personal interests 
 and personal prospects before it, is that of am¬ 
 bition or aspiration. But there are a great many 
 
142 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 laborers, of the duller sort, who are obviously not 
 capable of feeling ambitious. There are no suffi¬ 
 cient aspirations to be awakened in them. There 
 is an inheritance in them, perhaps, of natures blunt¬ 
 ed through many generations by hard conditions 
 of life. There are many others who may be ca¬ 
 pable of ambitious sentiments, but who are not 
 capable of the provident fore-calculation, or the 
 postponement of desires to anticipations and the 
 sacrifice of present ease for future enjoyment, 
 which effective ambition involves. These large 
 classes are almost hopelessly doomed to the con¬ 
 ditions of the present labor system. It will be 
 long generations, no doubt, before they can be ef¬ 
 fectively acted upon by any stimulant of opportu¬ 
 nity that may be given them. But it is needless, 
 meantime, that all the rest of the great brother¬ 
 hood of labor should be doomed by the incapacity 
 of these. It is not necessary that the leaden weight 
 of one stolid part should be laid on the whole class 
 to hold it down. Why not set that kind of a sys¬ 
 tem on foot which shall sift out the enterprising 
 from the inert and distinguish those who are capa¬ 
 ble of laying hold of better opportunities in life 
 from those who are not? Then trust that emula¬ 
 tion and example and encouragement and hope 
 will work like a slow leaven through the whole 
 heavy mass. 
 
 “ If I made any proposition on the subject, I 
 
FIFTH EVE FIX a. 
 
 113 
 
 should propose that, for the beginning of the ex¬ 
 periment of dividends to labor, it be based alto¬ 
 gether upon the expectation of an increased prod¬ 
 uct, relatively to capital employed, and be carried 
 only so far as that expectation may be realized. In 
 other words, that the employers of labor be per¬ 
 suaded to begin to say to their employed laborers 
 this: 4 We are deriving, now, a certain rate of 
 profit—say the average of past years—from the 
 business in which our capital, our exertions in man¬ 
 agement, and your labor, are engaged together. 
 This is the compensation which seems to be fix¬ 
 ed for us by the conditions of the present system 
 of simple wages-paying. We are accustomed to it, 
 and we are not willing either to exert ourselves or 
 to expose our capital to commercial risks for less. 
 But if you will make the rate of profit greater, by 
 working with more energy and more efficiency; by 
 using our tools, our materials, and our capital in 
 general more economically, and by giving more 
 careful attention to all the interests in which you 
 are concerned with us, we will divide the whole 
 increase of profit so produced among you, pro¬ 
 portionately, as near as may be, to what you have 
 severally contributed to it. We will take to our¬ 
 selves, in other words, no more than the remuner¬ 
 ation that we have been accustomed to, and all be¬ 
 yond that shall be yours. We will pay you wages 
 in the mean time, as heretofore, according to 
 
144 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 the market. If we find some among yon who are 
 making exertions to give effect to this proposition 
 and others who are not, we shall not permit the 
 latter to steal the benefit of the exertions of the 
 former. We shall get rid of them as soon as pos¬ 
 sible. We shall try to find men to take their 
 places who will cooperate wdth their fellows and 
 with us in this experiment, or else we shall try, in 
 conjunction with the better workmen, to adjust a 
 scale of wages, or a system of piece-work, in which 
 the relative value of the labor of each workman 
 shall be fairly measured, to determine his §liare of 
 the proposed dividend.’ 
 
 “ Is ow, I have no doubt that this might be tried 
 with good effect to the working-men, and not only 
 with no risk, but with much benefit, to the employ¬ 
 ing capitalists. I have no doubt that those who 
 adopted it would find themselves placed at an ad¬ 
 vantage in competition with those who did not. 
 They would win to themselves the best workmen ; 
 their business would be more easily conducted and 
 extended, and its management would impose upon 
 them less care and less exertion. Nor have I any 
 doubt that the beginning of such a movement on 
 the side of the employers would be responded to 
 very quickly on the side of the better and more 
 ambitious working-men, by a movement toward 
 raising the standard of character and workman¬ 
 ship in their several trades, and toward combining 
 
FIFTH EVENING. 
 
 145 
 
 individualism with cooperation. They would b6 
 prompted to throw their influence against that 
 fatal policy in the trades-unions which establishes 
 a mean level of mediocrity and shiftlessness, which 
 represses ambition, crushes personal freedom, and 
 wears out all the energies there are in the struggle 
 that labor makes for better conditions, by harness¬ 
 ing them to dead loads of incapability and laziness. . 
 They would exert themselves to make the trade- 
 union what it might be—the organized govern¬ 
 ment of a craft; powerful to maintain justice and 
 liberty among its members; to secure for each the 
 largest exercise of his capabilities; to stimulate in 
 each the highest ambition; to dignify to every one 
 the estimate of his avocation; to fix just stand¬ 
 ards of qualification and obligation, and to enforce 
 just rules of apprenticeship, despising every other 
 attempt than that to narrow the doors of admission 
 to any trade. I believe, as I live, that such results 
 as these would follow, and I do not believe that 
 the blind mischief which the labor-unions of the 
 present time are doing, both to labor and capital, 
 can be arrested in any other way than by the invi¬ 
 tation and encouragement of something different 
 from an unmixed wages system. What do you 
 think ? ” 
 
 “ It looks reasonable,” said I. “ It is reason¬ 
 able. I cannot see the least room for doubting 
 that you are right. But, if nothing beyond pres- 
 7 
 
14G 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 ent wages is to be distributable among the labor¬ 
 ers except just the increase of product to which 
 their labor may be stimulated, the gain to them, 
 although considerable, cannot be all that final 
 equity, in your view, demands. According to 
 what you have said, you evidently contemplate 
 something more in the end.” 
 
 “ Oh, yes,” was his reply; “ we must not dis¬ 
 guise the fact that ultimately something more is 
 involved, if we once introduce the principle of divi¬ 
 dends to labor, and give recognition to it on even 
 the smallest scale. There is no question in my 
 mind that it will finally involve a considerable re¬ 
 duction of the profits of capital. The pressure of 
 the principle, systematically organized, will steadi¬ 
 ly force them down. But it is very plain to me 
 that there is ample room for such a reduction of 
 profits, from their present average rate, as will af¬ 
 ford all the addition that is needful and just to the 
 compensations of labor, without impairing at all 
 the strength of the motives on which the accumu¬ 
 lation and employment of capital depend. Let us 
 look at them: 
 
 “ The payment which the employing capitalist 
 demands from the production to which his capital 
 is applied is made up of three parts. There is— 
 1. The payment to him for having refrained, dur¬ 
 ing successive years, from the entire consumption 
 of his acquisitions of wealth, and for having saved 
 
FIFTH EVENING. 
 
 147 
 
 and accumulated tliem and employed them pro¬ 
 ductively—which Mr. Senior has happily called 
 £ tlie remuneration of abstinence.’ There is—2. 
 The payment to him for risks of loss, which are 
 taken in nearly all employments of capital, owing 
 to the casualties and uncertainties of production 
 and trade. There is—3. The payment to him, 
 when he is the manager of his own capital, for his 
 personal executive services in connection with it. 
 
 The first of these payments—that for the re¬ 
 muneration of abstinence—seems to diminish as 
 the state of civilization advances, as the accumu¬ 
 lation of capital increases, and as the effective de¬ 
 sire of accumulation is developed. That it is 
 capable of being reduced very low, without dis¬ 
 couraging the abstinence which augments capital, 
 we have good evidence in the world already. We 
 have an exact measure of it in the current rate of 
 interest on money that is loaned out upon such 
 security that no risk attends the loaning. Gov¬ 
 ernment loans, in countries where a state of politi¬ 
 cal stability is well assured, are of that character. 
 The element of risk is so nearly eliminated from 
 such investments of capital that there is no need 
 of reckoning it at all. It is about the same with 
 safe loans on mortgage, and with some personal 
 investments, also, in property which cannot be im¬ 
 paired under any probable contingency. How, the 
 rate of interest on permanent or prolonged loans 
 
148 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 of the kind described lias fallen in England and 
 Holland to two and three per cent., and those are 
 countries in which the motives that produce an 
 accumulation of capital seem to he more energetic 
 than in almost any others. This low rate of in¬ 
 terest represents the minimum reward which will 
 constitute, in those countries, a sufficient induce¬ 
 ment to abstinence from the present consumption 
 of wealth, and a sufficient encouragement, there¬ 
 fore, to that cumulative employment of labor 
 which produces capital. 
 
 “ As for the second ground of payment to capi¬ 
 tal, which is for the risk of its destruction, when 
 employed as in manufactures or in trade, the haz¬ 
 ards to which it is exposed are of two kinds. It 
 may be absolutely destroyed and go out of exist¬ 
 ence, both as wealth and capital, by casualties of 
 lire, flood, shipwreck, etc.; or, only the right of 
 property which the investor had in it may be de¬ 
 stroyed, through the vicissitudes of commerce, so 
 that it passes into other hands, either to be unpro- 
 ductively consumed or to be still used as capital 
 with a change of ownership merely. The value of 
 the first-named class of risks has been found sus¬ 
 ceptible, for the most part, of very exact calcu¬ 
 lation, under the averaging law of chances, and it 
 is set down in the rates of insurance. The capi¬ 
 talist almost always transfers that class of risks to 
 those who have made a special business of taking 
 
FIFTH EVENING. 
 
 149 
 
 them, and his payments for insurance are charged 
 into the expenses of his own proper business, so 
 that remuneration for these risks is no part, gen¬ 
 erally speaking, of the profit which he demands to 
 compensate him for his employment of capital. 
 The value of the risk, moreover, is slight—sur¬ 
 prisingly slight, now that our underwriting arith¬ 
 metic has reduced it to a precise computation. 
 Of the second class of risks, the greater part are 
 incident to the character and conduct of the in¬ 
 vestor of capital, and attach so entirely to himself 
 that he has no fair reason for making a charge 
 against the community on account of them. Not 
 all of them, to be sure, for there are elements of 
 uncertainty in production and trade which elude all 
 forecalculation, and some liberal allowance is to be 
 made for these; but it is unquestionably true that 
 the investor of capital in productive or commercial 
 enterprises risks far more upon his own knowledge, 
 his own judgment, his own alertness of perception, 
 his own economical vigilance, his own calculating 
 faculties and his own prudence, than in any other 
 way. I venture to say that seven-tenths, at least, 
 of all the losses and failures that occur in the manu¬ 
 facturing and mercantile world are due to one or 
 the other of the following causes, or to all of them 
 combined: 1. The want of a sufficiently wide 
 knowledge of the conditions of the business pur¬ 
 sued, or inattention to the changes of the facts 
 
150 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 which bear upon it: 2. Miscalculation from the 
 facts known, either through careless or incompe¬ 
 tent reckoning. 3. Thriftless and wasteful man¬ 
 agement, due to the want of watchful executive 
 force. 4. Ill-judged confidence in others—extend¬ 
 ing credit incautiously and unwisely. 5. Reckless 
 speculation, or taking chances of the market which 
 are illegitimate, because outside of the realm of ra¬ 
 tional calculation. 6. Last and greatest of all— 
 personal extravagance, or personal consumption in 
 excess of any reasonable reckoning of business prof¬ 
 its. Now, these are all sources of risk which lie 
 within the control of the investor of capital, and 
 which cannot be properly charged for in the de¬ 
 mand for profits upon capital invested and man¬ 
 aged by the owner. The risks which lie outside 
 are comparatively small. 
 
 “ Finally, we have the payment to be made 
 for the personal executive services of the capital¬ 
 ist and business manager. I am willing to put a 
 liberal estimate upon these, but not to rate them 
 extravagantly beyond the compensations paid for 
 all other kinds of service. To the man of busi¬ 
 ness, ordinarily, his business is his pleasure, its oc¬ 
 cupations his delight. He pursues it, ordinarily, 
 even after the merely gainful desires have ceased 
 to act with any strong stimulation upon him. lie 
 has no other sufficient field of activity open to 
 him; he has no other sufficient resources of en- 
 
FIFTH EVENING. 
 
 151 
 
 joyment. Without the occupations of his busi¬ 
 ness he would be wretched. I am sure, therefore, 
 
 that no extraordinary remuneration is needed to 
 
 «/ 
 
 induce men of business faculties to employ their 
 faculties, and I see no reason why their compensa¬ 
 tion for personal services should exceed, at most, 
 the higher salaries paid in public and professional 
 life. 
 
 u Looking, therefore, at all the parts of the 
 payment made to the capitalist, in the form of 
 profits, I conclude that there is room for a consid¬ 
 erable reduction in their rate without weakening 
 the inducements to abstinence, by which capital is 
 accumulated, or weakening the inducement of 
 risks in the employment of capital, or weakening 
 the inducements to exertion in the management 
 of capital. If the general introduction of a sys¬ 
 tem of dividends to labor should result in the par¬ 
 titioning of something less than twenty or fifteen 
 or even ten per cent, of the total product of labor 
 to the business-managing capitalist for his profit, 
 I am confident that the efficiency of the forces 
 which political economy takes account of would 
 not be at all impaired. The consequence of such 
 a system would simply be, that the minimum 
 measure of the inducements under which capital 
 can be accumulated and employed would be found; 
 and that would be the realization of justice be¬ 
 tween capital and labor.” 
 
152 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 “ But, for the bringing about of this state of 
 things.” said I, “ you look to nothing except the 
 growths of public sentiment and opinion which 
 you have alluded to, from time to time, in our 
 discussion ? ” 
 
 “ To nothing else,” he answered, “ except in 
 one direction. There is one direction, only, in 
 which I would invoke the aid of legislation. To 
 that single end I would make the question a po¬ 
 litical one, and, if I had in me any of the qualities 
 of an agitator, I would go among the working-men 
 and set up in their midst the standard of a new 
 party, to be organized upon that solitary issue, and 
 I would try to rally them about it until they had 
 fought the issue out in every country under the 
 sun. I would rally them, if I could, as a class, in 
 uncompromising hostility to all public debt-mak¬ 
 ing, of every kind, whether national or municipal. 
 I w r ould have them demand, and combine to en¬ 
 force their demand, that the power to contract 
 debt be absolutely taken away from every branch 
 •and division of government—from Congress and 
 Parliament down—unless taxation to pay the debt, 
 within three or five years at most, shall precede 
 or go with the debt-making act. To accomplish 
 that abolition of debt-making power in govern¬ 
 ment would be the greatest triumph ever won in 
 the interest of labor. I will tell you why. 
 
 “ We have seen at what a multiplying rate pro- 
 
FIFTH EVENING. 
 
 153 
 
 duction lias increased during the'past hundred 
 years, and is increasing. We have seen, too, how 
 easy it is, under the present system of things, for 
 enormous accumulations of the wealth thus in¬ 
 creasingly produced to be gathered into individual 
 hands. Now, an always-growing share of these 
 accumulations is held by owners who cannot or 
 who do not wish to employ it productively them¬ 
 selves, although they are eager to preserve it as a 
 profitable fund, unimpaired by their own consump¬ 
 tion. This constitutes the loanable capital of the 
 world, and its quantity, as I have said, is being pro¬ 
 digiously augmented. There is a fast-increasing 
 number of men who hold more wealth, outside of 
 their consumption, than they can possibly use pro¬ 
 ductively under their own management; there is 
 another fast-increasing number of men who desire 
 to escape from the cares, exertions, and risks of 
 the management of property productively em¬ 
 ployed ; and, again, there is more and more in¬ 
 herited wealth existing, in estates, where it is so 
 situated that, for one reason or another, it cannot 
 be productively employed by the owners in person. 
 All these people resort to the loaning of their 
 wealth, at interest, as the means of making it pro¬ 
 ductive of income to themselves without personal 
 exertion, and of course they seek, in doing so, to 
 avoid risks and to get the utmost security they can, 
 either for the final replacement to them of the 
 
154 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 wealth which they have given out of their own 
 keeping, or for the certainty and permanency of 
 the interest-payments that are to be made to them 
 for the use of it. There is no fault to he found 
 with this disposition on the part of the loaning 
 class, for it is natural and right; hut it must not 
 be permitted to create artificially, for it own satis¬ 
 faction, modes of investment or consumption of 
 wealth which are opposed to the interests of pro¬ 
 ductive labor, and which lay lasting burdens upon 
 it. That, however, is just the effect that it has 
 been producing for the last hundred years and 
 more. The demand for opportunities to make safe 
 loans of unemployed wealth, or of money, as we 
 say, has forced the fearful growth, in later times, 
 of national and municipal debts. An incorporated 
 community, stably organized, is the most trust¬ 
 worthy of all debtors. Its pecuniary obligations 
 are a joint mortgage upon the property of all its 
 members. Ho individual borrower can offer se¬ 
 curities quite equal to that. Hence public loans, 
 in every country of a creditable character, have 
 been sought for with ravenous avidity. A fatal 
 facility in debt-making, on the part of all the cor¬ 
 porate divisions of government, from that of the 
 State at large down to that of the smallest village 
 community, has been the consequence, and the 
 loaning class has exerted a strong pressure of in¬ 
 visible and hardly conscious influence in favor of 
 
FIFTH EVENING. 
 
 155 
 
 the making of debts. Thus public debts, both 
 national and municipal, have swollen, within the 
 last century, until their aggregate magnitude is 
 appalling to the political economist. They repre¬ 
 sent not only an outrageous mortgage upon future 
 production, but a more outrageous waste, in the 
 consumption of wealth which the owners would 
 not themselves consume, and which might have 
 been added to the productive capital of the world. 
 Three-quarters, at least, of all the borrowed wealth 
 which governments have consumed and which the 
 people are under bonds to account for, has simply 
 undergone destruction in their hands, by methods 
 of sheer wastefulness that are more wanton than 
 any other. It has been devoured by armies, or 
 has vanished in the smoke of battle, or it has been 
 squandered by a thousand modes in extravagant 
 and reckless administration. For some little part 
 of the vast total of public debt there are public 
 improvements of permanent usefulness to show— 
 such as edifices and roads and canals; but I doubt 
 if all these put together in the world will stand 
 for one-fourth of the whole. The stupendous re¬ 
 mainder represents, for the greater part, a wicked 
 obliteration of wealth in one generation at the cost 
 of posterity. 
 
 “ How, I do not maintain that armies can yet 
 be dispensed with altogether in the world, nor that 
 war can be always averted ; but I do say that the 
 
156 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 fatal facility in borrowing which governments have 
 acquired, by reason of the productive progress of 
 the world, and through the fatal habit of indiffer¬ 
 ence to debt which is fostered by the pressure of 
 the increasing demand for public loans as an invest¬ 
 ment of idle wealth, are at the bottom of the causes 
 w r hich produce in modern times oppressive mili¬ 
 tary establishments and ambitious wars. At the 
 same time, they are the underlying causes of cor¬ 
 ruption, extravagance, and recklessness in public 
 expenditure, wherever found, in State or municipal 
 government. It is so easy to make up a deficiency 
 in revenue bv an issue of bonds, for which eager 
 lenders are always waiting, and public opinion is 
 easily reconciled to small accretions of a debt 
 that has outgrown the apprehension of its fig¬ 
 ures. The process is an utterly ruinous one, and 
 it must be arrested, in the interest of labor, from 
 whose use all this wealth, which might be work¬ 
 ing capital, is abstracted, on the one hand, to be 
 added, on the other, to the burden of a lasting 
 mortgage on the products of labor. It must be 
 arrested, peremptorily and absolutely. The work¬ 
 ing-class and the class of active capitalists must 
 combine their strength of numbers, in political 
 action, to put a stop to it, by constitutionally de¬ 
 priving all governments of the power to contract 
 debt, except in the temporary way that I have in¬ 
 dicated. Some carefully-limited borrowing power 
 
FIFTH EVENING. 
 
 157 
 
 of that kind is undoubtedly necessary, to provide 
 for emergencies which cannot be forecalculated, 
 and it would suffice for all contingencies that are 
 conceivable. It would have sufficed amply in our 
 own case, when we were driven to war for the 
 preservation of the Union—and no people were 
 ever placed in a situation of greater stress. It 
 seemed to us at the time that we could not bear 
 the cost of so great a struggle in immediate taxa¬ 
 tion ; but we can easily see now that it would have 
 been better for us if we had done so. It would 
 have been better if we had been left with no other 
 alternative. The Union was not worth saving to 
 us if we could have shrunk from the payment of 
 the cost then and there. As it was, by borrowing, 
 we imposed more than a double cost upon our¬ 
 selves and our children and our children’s children. 
 For every actual dollar’s worth of wealth and labor 
 that we consumed in the prosecution of the war, 
 we laid a mortgage for more than two dollars on 
 the future production of the country, by reason of 
 the inflation of prices which resulted from the 
 forced loan of the legal-tender issue.” 
 
 “ Let me understand,” said I, “ exactly how 
 you would propose to limit the borrowing power 
 of government.” 
 
 “ I should not limit the sum which a govern¬ 
 ment may borrow in situations of temporary emer¬ 
 gency, or for extraordinary purposes of importance, 
 
158 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 because tliere is no ground of calculation to go 
 upon in fixing sucli a limit; but I should strictly 
 and severely narrow down the conditions under 
 which all public borrowing is to be done. I should 
 make it a matter of constitutional law, applying to 
 all the subdivisions of government, that every act 
 which authorizes a loan shall contain in itself the 
 provisions of extra taxation for paying the prin¬ 
 cipal of the loan within three or five years at the 
 most, and that such provisions of taxation shall be 
 subject to no repeal, nor to any modification which 
 impairs the revenue from them, after the loan shall 
 have been consummated. The effect would be to 
 make all public expenditure, whether ordinary or 
 extraordinary, immediately dependent upon the 
 temper and disposition of the tax-paying people, 
 as it ought to be. If the object of proposed ex¬ 
 penditure be not urgent and important enough to 
 command their assent to • immediate additional 
 taxes, it is proper that such expenditure should be 
 barred. Administrators and legislators would be 
 exposed to a more rigorous criticism, and held to a 
 stricter account of reasons for every appropriation 
 which exceeds the ordinary revenues of govern¬ 
 ment. Extravagance would be checked, and reck¬ 
 lessness in political schemes of personal ambition 
 as well, while the needful energies of government 
 would suffer no detriment, I am sure. 
 
 “ You can see what consequences of advantage 
 
FIFTH EVENING. 
 
 159 
 
 to labor would accrue. The loanable wealth, 
 which now finds investment in public loans, to 
 the extent of many thousands of millions of dol¬ 
 lars, would be driven to take the risks, more or 
 less, of productive employment, and be added per¬ 
 force to the working capital of the world. The 
 men who either cannot or will not undertake for 
 themselves the productive employment of such 
 funds as they desire income from, would be im¬ 
 pelled to trust more of them than they now do to 
 the use and management of those who will. In¬ 
 dustrial enterprise would be powerfully reenforced, 
 and a vast improvement made in the conditions of 
 labor at once.” 
 
 “ Well, judge,” said I, “ I will join your party. 
 I can heartily subscribe to the one resolution of 
 its platform. Let us begin with a party of two, 
 and there is no telling what will come of it. 
 
 a As for the rest of the doctrines you have ex¬ 
 pounded to us, they are like the seeds of this apple 
 that I have bitten, in which some far-off possible 
 fruitage may be dimly discerned by those who 
 have the vision of faith which you possess. They 
 are very grand doctrines of justice; very inspir¬ 
 ing doctrines of hopefulness; very noble in the 
 conception of duty between man and man which 
 they body forth, and very lofty in the ideal of hu¬ 
 man society which they set up. But there is only 
 the potential seed of truth in them, as you admit 
 
160 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 yourself. Like tlie seed of this apple, they must 
 be planted, and must wait in obscure darkness for 
 the dull earth to feel them and to be felt by them ; 
 and they must be dissolved by its storms and 
 heated by its fermentations, before any germ of 
 vital force can make its appearance in them. 
 A\ r ill you plant them? AVill you put what you 
 have said here into written words, which may be 
 dropped along the highways and get their chance, 
 at least, of germination in the thoughts and acts 
 of other men ? ” 
 
 lie shook his head. “ I cannot,” he said. “ I 
 found long ago that writing is not my province of 
 work in the world. I have not the courage nor 
 the ambition for such a task.” 
 
 “ Then I shall take the duty upon myself. I 
 have been keeping a record of our talks, which is 
 not very far from exact. If you do not prohibit 
 me, I shall give it to print, because I think there 
 are hints of teaching in it which ought to have 
 some wider audience than this.” 
 
 He only shrugged his shoulders and smiled, as 
 he rose to depart, and the smile, which had no pro¬ 
 test in it, is my warrant for the publication of our 
 talks. 
 
 “ Just one last question,” I added, as he stood 
 at the door. 
 
 “ If there be a possible state of easy conditions 
 in life for all working-men and working-women, 
 
FIFTH EVENING. 
 
 161 
 
 how long can it last before the world becomes pop¬ 
 ulated in excess of the sustaining capabilities of 
 its soil ? ” 
 
 “ Ah ! that,” said the judge, “ is a question that 
 we must leave with God. Malthus has not troubled 
 me at all, although I do not forget him. The 
 laws of increase in population which he deduced 
 are bevond dispute, but it is horrible to construe 
 them as oracles of doom against any wretched class 
 of human creatures. I find, for my own part, no 
 argument of hopelessness in them. It is certain 
 that the checks upon population which are found 
 in prudent restraints of marriage, act, in the sev¬ 
 eral classes of society, with a strength somewhat 
 proportioned to the culture and experience of the 
 class. It is in the state of poverty, not of wealth, 
 that the fecundity of the race increases. It is 
 among the poor that marriage is earliest and most 
 improvident; it is among the poor that marriage 
 is the most fruitful. On the other hand, perhaps, 
 it is in the ranks of the pinched and degraded poor 
 that death works busiest to cut the increase down ; 
 but shall we dare to found cold calculations on that ? 
 I dare not, for one. 
 
 “ As for the final end to which your question 
 looks—it is beyond our ken. We must trust it 
 where we trust all that belongs to the final destiny 
 of the human race. It lies far ofi as yet—much 
 farther than it seemed to do when Malthus wrote. 
 
102 
 
 TALKS ABOUT LABOR. 
 
 We are finding out ways to produce more and 
 more. We are producing with less dependence on 
 the brutes which compete with man for subsist¬ 
 ence from the earth. We may learn by and by 
 to consume with less waste. The old local bounda¬ 
 ries of subsistence are fast breaking down. Men 
 are held no longer, as they were, to the spot of 
 earth on which they were born. America has 
 been opened for the discharge of population from 
 Europe, and Africa will, open wide doors in the 
 near future. It will be long before the world is 
 full of people and its soil can feed no more. Ere 
 that time conies, man may possibly have learned 
 to make food from the inorganic elements for him¬ 
 self. Who knows \ It will be as God has willed. 
 Let us leave the matter with him.” 
 
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