analogy between the effort of the
non-union men to get the places and an effort to get away a man's
farm. It is a matter of course that the employer may rightfully
discharge men who prove worthless and fail to render the service which
is contracted for. The question is whether he has the right to dismiss
them when they will render the service only on what seem to him
exorbitant terms. On this point the verdict of his own reason is
extremely clear. To offer to render the service only on exorbitant
terms has the same effect as to offer an inferior service on the
original terms, and the right of tenure which the workingmen claim, if
it exists at all, is contingent on the rendering of effective service
on reasonable terms. On the supposition that they have owned their
places at all they seem to their employer to have forfeited them when
they have insisted on too high wages. On this point, however, the
men's reason may give an opposite verdict, though it is based on the
same principle. To them the terms they insist on may appear
reasonable, and they then think that, because they are so, their
ownership of their positions is valid and that other claimants are
usurpers. Both parties in the dispute base their contentions on the
supposed reasonableness of the terms they demand.

_The Necessity for Knowing what Terms are Reasonable._--A momentous
question both for society and for the working people is whether there
is any way of ascertaining what terms are reasonable and securing
conformity to them. What we shall find is that it is possible to keep
in view the natural standard of wages, as in an early chapter we have
defined it, and that it is possible, in the midst of the struggle of
massed capital with massed labor, to secure a certain degree of
conformity to this standard. It is possible so to shape the system
that a wide difference between actual pay and standard pay will not
exist, and that wages will everywhere tend toward their natural
levels, as they did under that earlier regime before either the
capital or the labor of a subgroup acted collectively.

_The Attitude of the Community toward Striking Laborers._--So long as
a local community sympathizes with the worker's dread of competition
and tolerates his claim of ownership of his position, it does not
utterly condemn and repress every use of force in asserting his
claim. The local public is partly composed of friends or neighbors of
the striking worker and is reluctan