by patience and prudence, but there still remains the more thoroughgoing effort by which the evil is anticipated and turned aside.
There should be that general harmony of effort, that proportion of its several parts to each other, that recognition of the common welfare, which fortify us against disaster, and force it in the background when it comes. There is a wise method in production, and a just relation of its agents to each other, which should greatly reduce the liability of a want of labor, and should ultimately remove it altogether. A true democracy should be exempt from this general failure in the results of activity. Much of our political economy has rested on inferences drawn from a faulty state of society, as if it and the conclusions contained in it expressed the real laws of our being. Society, in its most civilized forms, has always developed a proletariat, it has suffered drainage, and we have come to think this a sort of necessity, a natural result of social growth. With this starting point and expectation we are ready for periods of unemployment, and look at the misery which arises from them as a corrective. Superfluous lives cannot be gotten rid of on cheaper terms. We might as well suppose that disease is an inevitable attachment of physical life and must be left to go with it. Society never has too many workers, and when they are not wanted it is because they have been in some way misdirected. Strong men, industrious and intelligent men, are the wealth of society. There is never a time in which there is little or nothing to do in the world; if we think so it is because we cannot see, or see falsely. Our intelligence determines what is to be done and our diligence performs it. The world is never deficient in occasions for labor, no matter how defective we may be in performing it. Nor is well-devised labor wanting in its returns; intelligence and diligence, in full exercise, always contradict the notion. The world could not be the home of man on any other terms.
Human life begins to be superfluous the moment labor miscarries, and the miscarriage sinks down to those who have the least intelligence and industry. The constitutional disease of society, that which it has propagated with most show of knowledge, is ignorance and indolence. When we reach this stratum we are always in difficulty; the more in difficulty because we come to it in a sluggish rather than in a corrective temper.
Incident to indolence and ignorance are those vices of temper by which we wish to reach results without labor, or to reach them by the labor of others rather than by our own labor. As long as these vices are prevalent among men, whether in the upper or the lower strata of society, or, as is sure to be the case, in both, periods of arrest will come. Men will be baffled in their narrow aims, and will have no broader, more generous ones to put in their place. For a time they will lie idle till the customary impulses revive and once more set them in action. Industrial inactivity is like a financial panic. It is the result of the transient suspension of habitual feelings, and does not relax till men return to their usual frame of mind. These distrustful and apprehensive periods are liable to return as long as men are not pursuing sound purposes in a sober way. Any deficiency in fairness, integrity and mutual confidence divides society against itself, and renders a portion of its efforts futile. This is the more true as the division and subdivision of labor increases, and the final adjustment of returns is made by complicated exchanges. When a portion of the community finds its share of good things much reduced, when in the distribution of the rewards of labor, custom or cunning or force has robbed them of a reasonable portion, the motives of labor are greatly lessened, the means of exchange are lessened and the sense of unity and integrity of society is lost. There is in civilized society a large body of just and honest production which goes far to sustain the mind in renewed effort, and
keep firm the ties which bind men together. Yet the element of distrust, as in a financial crisis, extends through the community and weakens the points of life.
The first condition of social, economic strength is that all the members of society shall find suitable occupation and by means of it become the givers and receivers of aid. This plain, simple fact has been much obscured by accepting competition, often in an unethical and unsocial form, as the general law of economic activity. This law it is not; and it needs at all times to be held in check by ethical impulses and by the welfare of the community. It is this welfare which is the supreme law. Labor owes much of its degradation to a rigid and unreasonable application of competition. As we go down in the scale of occupations, and in efficiency in those occupations, the greater is the injustice and injury that attend on competition till we reach a point at which large numbers are pressed by it to the very verge of life. Then comes in that mischievous generalization which tends to make human degradation a permanent product of nature. The increase of human life is said to be geometrical, the increase of the means of life arithmetical, and so the two tendencies grind eternally against each other. Our best sympathy is expressed in letting this collision come to the quickest, shortest results. Some of this crushing process obtains between ill-trained and sluggish, well-trained and active men. Let it have way.
Yet the agricultural products of the world have not only never given out, they have never been brought near a maximum. Food, raiment and shelter are most varied in kind and abundant in quantity where men are most numerous. The Algonquin Indian wandered in the forest in the winter, unfed and unsheltered. The foundation of his trouble was his indolence and ignorance. The inhabitants of India may perish by famine in large numbers. The distress arises not from the fact that the people have
outstripped the productive power of the world, but because they have outstripped their wisdom in handling those powers.
Let men covet wealth, and at the same time use narrowly and competitively the means of attaining it, and the two strata of society, upper and lower, will shape between them a human life in which want will stand over against luxury, hatred over against contempt, and the two classes, oppressed by spiritual destitution and physical poverty, will wage with each a variable and hopeless warfare such as wisdom and good will can alone leave behind us.
A first remedy for unemployment is to make employment remunerative; so remunerative that the workman shall be the buyer of many things as well as the seller of one thing. When his single sale of labor stands in equipoise over against his many purchases, we shall have buyers as well as sellers and our production and traffic will never cease. We have in trade-unions a first step in the adjustment of exchange. Workmen strive to escape the competition of the incompetent and shiftless, to redirect distribution in ways more just and equal, and by this means to be able to play their own part in economic life more advantageously for themselves and for all. This effort is new in its breadth of application, but has never been new with the wise and thrifty. Personal skill and professional attainments have always lifted themselves above the storm-swept plain of competition, and gathered about themselves a prosperity and comfort resting on special and superior exertion. So long as we subject ourselves to the fortunes of the indolent and set up our standards of life at the very foot of the slope, we shall have a competition like that of the Chinese to contend with. We shall march so near the verge of the precipice that many will be pushed over it, and the least flurry will be disastrous. A sufficient return for diligence is the first claim and the