formulated themselves in what is known as the iron law
of wages; this meaning that wages are said to tend increasingly to a
minimum which will give but a bare living. For skilled labor the law may
be regarded as elastic rather than iron. For unskilled, it is as
certainly the tendency, which, if constantly repeated and so
intensified, would end as law. Many standard economists regard it as
already fixed; and writers like Lasalle, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Marx
heap every denunciation upon it.

Were the fact actually established, no words could be too strong or too
bitter to define this new form of slavery. The standard of life and
comfort affects the wages of labor, and there is constant effort to make
the wage correspond to this standard. It is an unending and often bitter
struggle, nowhere better summed up than by Thorold Rogers in his "Six
Centuries of Work and Wages,"--a work upon which economists, however
different their conclusions, rely alike for facts and figures.

We must then admit in degree the tendency of wages to a minimum,
especially those of unskilled labor, and accept it as one more motive
for persistent effort to alter existing conditions and prevent any such
culmination.

Take now, in connection with the six heads mentioned as governing the
present efficiency of labor, the five enumerated by Adam Smith in his
summary of causes for differences in wages: 1. "The agreeableness or
disagreeableness of the employments themselves. 2. The easiness and
cheapness, or the difficulty and expense of learning them. 3. The
constancy or inconstancy of employment in them. 4. The small or great
trust which must be reposed in those who exercise them. 5. The
probability or improbability of success in them."

These are conditions which affect the man's right to large or small
wage; but all of them presuppose that men are perfectly free to look
over the whole industrial field and choose their own employment,--they
presuppose the perfect mobility of labor. Let us see what this means.

The theoretical mobility of labor rests upon the assumption that
laborers of every order will in all ways and at all times pursue their
economic interests; but the actual fact is that so far from seeking
labor under the most perfect conditions for obtaining it, nearly half of
all humankind are "bound in fetters of race and speech and religion and
caste, of tradition and habit and ignorance of the world, of poverty and
ineptitude and inertia, w