of man for understanding and controlling his
environment. When we have a system which is clearly bad, _and_ when we
see our way to make it better, we generally make the change however
tardily. Our sense of "What should be" thus reacts upon "What is."
Meanwhile, until we can make the system better, our appreciation of
"What is" affects our sense of "What should be." And the more so, as
we are sensible. For "What should be" is pre-eminently an affair of
relativity. A man may hold very strongly that equal pay to every
individual is desirable, as he puts it, as an ideal. But this will not
prevent him, in a world in which managers are paid far more than
manual workers, from maintaining hotly (at any rate, if he is
sensible) that to pay the manager of a particular concern a manual
worker's wage would be monstrously unfair. He would also argue that it
would be highly inexpedient. Equity and expediency are, in fact,
intricately intertwined in our sense of "What should be"; and our
sense of "What should be" in the particular is governed by our
knowledge of "What is" in the general.

These may seem unnecessary commonplaces. But they have a vital bearing
on the _modus operandi_ of economic laws. These laws do not work _in
vacuo_. They work through the medium of the acts of men. The acts of
men are greatly influenced by their institutions, and by their ideas
of right and wrong. Both institutions and ideas may serve to smooth
rather than obstruct the path of economic laws; because the laws may
represent either "what should be" in the general, or "what is" in the
general, and therefore "what should be" in the particular. This may
hold true even of a trade union or a sense of "fair wages." The
business of economic theory is not to justify a regime of
_laissez-faire_, still less to show the folly of bringing morals into
business. Its value is rather that it may help us, by improving our
understanding, to shape our institutions, and to adopt our moral
sentiments so as to promote the public welfare. With these general
notions in our minds, let us turn to see how stands the case with
Labor.

Sec.3. _The General Wage Level_. The term Labor may be used in a broad or
in a narrow sense. It may be confined to weekly wage-earners: it may
be extended to include all those who work, as the phrase goes, "with
either hand or brain." It is with all classes of Labor, in the
broadest sense of the term, that we must here concern ourselves. It
will