ploy him for a
month and then to throw him aside, we might possibly get a maximum
product by making him work fourteen hours. If we wanted him for a year
only, possibly a day of twelve hours would insure the utmost he could
do. In a decade he could do more in a ten-hour day, and in a working
lifetime he could probably do more in eight. Forty or fifty years of
continuous work would tell less on his powers and on the amount and
quality of his product.

_The Connection between the Restriction of Products and the
Trade-label Movement._--Very important is the bearing of these facts
concerning the restriction of laborers' products and the trade-label
movement. If that movement should become more general and effective,
it would bring home to all who should take part in it the effects of
the labor-paralyzing policy. The faithful trade unionist would find
himself paying a full share of the bill which that policy entails on
the public. Ordinary customers can avoid the product whose cost is
enhanced by the trade-union rules; but the unionist must take it and
must make himself and his class the chief subjects of the tax which
enhanced prices impose. It may well be that the pernicious quality of
the general work-making policy will become so evident in any case that
it will be abandoned; and this would be made sure by a rule that
should actually make union labor the chief purchaser of union goods.
Ca'-canny would then mean self-taxation on a scale that no arguments
could make popular.

CHAPTER XXVIII

PROTECTION AND MONOPOLY

The more serious perversions of the economic system which we have
encountered have all been traceable to some working of the principle
of monopoly, and it is important to know whether any established
policy of governments lends force to this evil influence. Import
duties were established in America for the purpose of protecting
industries as such, and a vital question now is whether they have now
begun to protect monopolies within the industries.

_A Supposed Conflict between Theory and Practice._--There was a time
when theorists and practical men seemed to be in hopeless disagreement
concerning the entire subject of protection. In the view of the
practical man an economist was a person who, in his study, had reached
certain conclusions which were equally unanswerable in themselves and
irreconcilable with the facts. The expression most commonly heard in
this connection was that "theory and practice