hinery and
driving of workers is repressed, it will be impossible to prove that
in the long run there is any good whatsoever in it, and the evil in it
is obvious and deplorable.

_"Making Work" as related to Technical Progress._--The policy reverses
the effects of progress. That which has caused the return to labor to
grow steadily larger is labor saving or product multiplying, and labor
making and product reducing are the antithesis of this. Enlarging the
product of labor has caused the standard of pay to go steadily upward
and the actual rate to follow it; and the prospect of a future and
perpetual rise in the laborers' standard of living depends almost
entirely on a continuance of this product-multiplying process. A
single man maintaining himself in isolation would gain by everything
that made his efforts fruitful, and society, as a whole, is like such
an isolated man. It gains by means of every effective tool that is
devised and by every bit of added efficiency in the hands that wield
it.

_Reversing the Effect of Progress._--It follows that undoing such an
improvement and going back to earlier and less productive methods
would reverse the effect of the improvement, which is higher pay for
all; it is restoring the condition in which the product of labor and
its pay were lower. The "ca'-canny" policy--the arbitrary limiting of
what a man is allowed to do--has this effect. It aims to secure a
reduction of output, not by enforcing the use of inferior tools, but
by enforcing the inferior use of the customary tools. The effect, in
the long run, is, and must be, to take something out of the laborers'
pockets.

_The Effect of the Work-making Policy under a Regime of Strong Trade
Unions._--It is, of course, only a strong trade union that can enforce
such a policy as this. Making one's own work worth but little offers a
large inducement to an employer to hire some one else if he can.
Within limits, the powerful union may prevent him from doing this, and
if for the time being society is patient and tolerant of anarchy,--if
it allows men who are willing to work well in a given field to be
forcibly excluded from it by men who are determined to work ill,--the
policy may be carried to disastrous lengths.

_How Static Law thwarts the Work-making Policy._--Even strong unions,
as we have seen, succeed in maintaining only a limited difference of
pay between their trade and others. The effort to maintain an
excessive premium on