rentices
who may be taken into the trade. This device acts directly on the
supply of laborers, and that produces effects on wages. If, however,
the number of apprentices is limited, some are kept out who want to get
in. Those who are in have, therefore, made a monopoly, and constituted
themselves a privileged class on a basis exactly analogous to that of
the old privileged aristocracies. But whatever is gained by this
arrangement for those who are in is won at a greater loss to those who
are kept out. Hence it is not upon the masters nor upon the public that
trades-unions exert the pressure by which they raise wages; it is upon
other persons of the labor class who want to get into the trades, but,
not being able to do so, are pushed down into the unskilled labor
class. These persons, however, are passed by entirely without notice in
all the discussions about trades-unions. They are the Forgotten Men.
But, since they want to get into the trade and win their living in it,
it is fair to suppose that they are fit for it, would succeed at it,
would do well for themselves and society in it; that is to say, that,
of all persons interested or concerned, they most deserve our sympathy
and attention.

The cases already mentioned involve no legislation. Society, however,
maintains police, sheriffs, and various institutions, the object of
which is to protect people against themselves--that is, against their
own vices. Almost all legislative effort to prevent vice is really
protective of vice, because all such legislation saves the vicious man
from the penalty of his vice. Nature's remedies against vice are
terrible. She removes the victims without pity. A drunkard in the
gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and
tendency of things. Nature has set up on him the process of decline and
dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their
usefulness. Gambling and other less mentionable vices carry their own
penalties with them.

Now, we never can annihilate a penalty. We can only divert it from the
head of the man who has incurred it to the heads of others who have not
incurred it. A vast amount of "social reform" consists in just this
operation. The consequence is that those who have gone astray, being
relieved from Nature's fierce discipline, go on to worse, and that
there is a constantly heavier burden for the others to bear. Who are
the others? When we see a drunkard in the gutter we pity him.