the
socialist offers us is total blindness. But of this presently.

To return to the argument. Let us consider next what wages the
monopolist in the cases described above will have to pay. We take for
granted that he will only pay as much as he has to. How much will this
be? Clearly enough it will depend altogether on the number of available
working men capable of doing the work in question and the situation in
which they find themselves. It is again a case of relative "economic
strength." The situation may be altogether in favor of the employer or
altogether in favor of the men, or may occupy a middle ground. If the
men are so numerous that there are more of them than are needed for the
work, and if there is no other occupation for them they must accept a
starvation wage. If they are so few in number that they can _all_ be
employed, and if they are so well organized as to act together, they can
in their turn exact any wage up to the point that leaves no profit for
the employer himself at all. Indeed for a short time wages might even
pass this point, the monopolist employer being willing (for various
reasons, all quite obvious) actually to pay more as wages than he gets
as return and to carry on business at a loss for the sake of carrying it
on at all. Clearly, then, wages, as Adam Smith said, "are the result of
a dispute" in which either party must be pushed to the wall. The
employer may have to pay so much that there is nothing or practically
nothing left for himself, or so little that his workmen can just exist
and no more. These are the upward and downward limits of the wages in
the cases described.

It is therefore obvious that if all the industries in the world were
carried on as a series of separate monopolies, there would be exactly
the kind of rivalry or competition of forces represented by the consumer
insisting on paying as little as possible, the producer charging the
most profitable price and paying the lowest wage that he could, and the
wage earner demanding the highest wage that he could get. The
equilibrium would be an unstable one. It would be constantly displaced
and shifted by the movement of all sorts of social forces--by changes of
fashion, by abundance or scarcity of crops, by alterations in the
technique of industry and by the cohesion or the slackening of the
organization of any group of workers. But the balanced forces once
displaced would be seen constantly to come to an equilibrium at a new