interest will, on
favorable occasions, revolt against laws or rules which restrain it.

Again, in the United States all past attempts to settle wage disputes by
reference to principles have been isolated and sporadic. They have,
therefore, been virtually foredoomed to failure. For as will be made
clearer as we progress, any successful attempt to base wage settlements
upon principles will demand the consistent and courageous application of
these principles for a not inconsiderable period, and to all important
industries alike. Otherwise compromise and a search for any way out of
the immediate crisis is the only possible principle of settlement. Any
well-conceived policy of wage settlement must have regard for a far
wider set of forces and facts than are presented by any single
controversy. The objects of any policy could only be attained through a
long series of decisions ranging throughout the field of industry, and
related to each other. This, it is trusted, will become plain as the
difficulties of formulating policy are discussed.

3.--Prof. Marshall in his great book has an arresting passage on the
importance of the tendency to organization which characterizes the whole
field of industry. He writes: "This is not a fitting place for a study
of the causes and effects of trade combinations and of alliances and
counter alliances among the employers and employed, as well as among
traders and manufacturers. They present a succession of picturesque
incidents and romantic transformations which arrest public attention and
seem to indicate a coming change of our social arrangements now in one
direction and now in another; and their importance is certainly great
and grows rapidly. But it is apt to be exaggerated; for indeed many of
them are little more than eddies such as have always flitted over the
surface of progress. And though they are on a larger and more imposing
scale in this modern age than before; yet now, as ever, the main body of
the movement depends on the deep, silent, strong stream of the
tendencies of normal distribution and exchange which 'are not seen' but
which control the course of those episodes which 'are seen.' For even in
conciliation and arbitration the central difficulty is to discover what
is the normal level from which the decisions of the court must not
depart far under penalty of destroying their own authority."[2]

Writing in England in 1920, it seems to me as if the events of change in
Engla