he labor market, where they compete for work perhaps with himself, and
send them on to school.

What would now happen should the wage-workers of the city demand higher
wages? It is hardly to be supposed that any industrial centre could
reach the stage of radical reform contemplated at this point much in
advance of others. When the labor organizations throughout the country
take hold of direct legislation, and taste of its successes, they will
nowhere halt. They will no more hesitate than does a conquering army.
Learning what has been done in Switzerland, they will go the lengths of
the Swiss radicals and, with more elbow room, further. Hence, when in
one industrial centre the governing workers should seek better terms,
similar demands from fellow laborers, as able to enforce them, would be
heard elsewhere.

The employer of our typical city, even now often unable to find outside
the unions the unemployed labor he must have, would then, should he
attempt it, to a certainty fail. The thrifty wage-working householder,
today a tenant fearful of loss of work, could then strike and stay out.
The situation would resemble that in the West twenty years ago, when
open land made the laborer his own master and wages double what they are
now. Wages, then, would perforce be moved upward, and hours be
shortened, and a long step be made toward that state of things in which
two employers offer work to one employe. And, legal and social forces no
longer irresistibly opposed to the wage-workers, thenceforth wages would
advance. At every stage they would tend to the maximum possible under
the improved conditions. In the end, under fully equal conditions,
everywhere, for all classes, the producer would gather to himself the
full product of his labor.

The average business man, too, of the city of our illustration, himself
a producer--that is, a help to the consumer--would under the better
conditions reap new opportunities. Far less than now would he fear
failure through bad debts and hard times; through the wage-workers'
larger earnings, he would obtain a larger volume of trade; he would
otherwise naturally share in the generally increased production; and he
would participate in the common benefits from the better local
government.

But the disappearance of the local monopolist would be predestined. The
owner of local franchises would already have gone. The local land
monopolist would have seen his land values diminished. In every such