eserver of
justice, the court finds two issues which need to be settled rightly.
The dispute between _entrepreneurs_ and workmen must be rightly
adjusted, and the issue between the workmen and other labor must be
so. The power of the state cannot properly be used (1) to force from
employers more than they can afford to give, or (2) to exclude from
any field of employment free laborers who are able and willing to do
the required work. Arbitrators make their awards with an eye to
conditions within the business and to the state of the labor market.
Instinctively an arbitrator, in trying to satisfy his sense of
justice, thinks first of the amount that the business yields. The men
must not take the whole income from the business, leaving to the
_entrepreneur_ nothing wherewith to meet the claim for interest.
Without doing this, however, they may ask for much more than other
laborers will accept, and the question arises whether this should be
conceded to them. In merely putting the relation of workmen to
employers on a proper footing, the tribunal may leave the relation of
the strikers to other workmen as unsatisfactory as it has been. It
appears that the tribunal of arbitration cannot by one act settle the
two issues that are presented to it. If it gives to the men what seems
like a fair share of the product of the business which employs them,
it gives more than most workers get and more than the law of final
productivity of labor would afford. Yet without a ruthless cutting
down of the pay of favored laborers it cannot apply the standard of
final social productivity of labor. If it applies this standard and
cuts down the men's actual pay, they will refuse to abide by the
decision; and if it tries to obtain a power of compulsion and make the
men accept its decisions, they will try--probably successfully--to
defeat the attempt. A system of compulsory arbitration that should go
to the length of forcibly equalizing the wages paid to men of like
ability in different occupations, would not be tolerated in a
democratic community.

_The Difficulty of Applying the Test of Final Productivity._--The law
of final productivity works most efficiently when it works
automatically, as it does when competing employers make the best
bargains they can with locally organized laborers. The results, then,
approach the theoretical standard, though they do not entirely
coincide with it. The law, however, cannot be rigorously applied by a
tribunal