"It's competition as really settles the question. If you wants to test the matter now an' agin, why, a strike's not a bad test. But it's a werry expensive one; an' it means a lot of trouble. Nor I don't see for my part as it's a great consolation to yourselves, to think that maybe you've half-ruined a master or two, as well as half-starvin' of your own little ones. I'd sooner wait a while longer sometimes, lads!"
Stuckey sat down, amid applause; but Holdfast was standing still.
"Stevens was asking just now," he said, "about the worth of labour; and about how it's commonly found in the long run to be paid at its worth. Well, there's a curious fact I came across lately, and I don't know as it mayn't be new to some of you. It is that labour, taken generally, is found to be of pretty much the same value throughout the world."
"Oh! Oh!" cried two or three voices.
"I mean what I say. Mind, I'm not giving you a hard and fast rule. I only tell you that it's been found generally, in places where capital and labour have free play, and where there ain't any extraordinary pressure from the scarcity of one or the other, that the cost of labour is wonderfully equal."
"I don't see that at all," Stevens observed.
"Maybe not; but it's worth your going into and reading about. It's been found by employers, with contracts in all parts of the world, that though the wages of the men in each place were different, the actual cost of the labour was much the same."
"But I say," broke in a voice, "if the cost was different, how could it be the same?"
"I said the wages were different, but the cost of the labour was equal. That's easy enough to understand. I'll give you two instances. There was a London bricklayer working beside a country one. The country bricklayer was paid three-and-sixpence a day for his work; the London chap five-and-sixpence. D'you suppose he was paid more because he was a Londoner? Of course not! He was paid more because his work was worth more. It was found that in one day he laid near upon twice as many bricks as the countryman. Would you say that his labour was the more expensive of the two?"
"No, no," Stevens answered.