< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu
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ASSOCIATION IN ITS RELATION TO LABOR.
"It is now evident to all eyes that labor does not obtain its legitimate reward, but, on the contrary, that those who work the hardest fare the worst. . . . . At this point society must attend to the rights of labor, and settle once for all the great problem of its just reward. This appears to demand a discrimination, a disconnection, a disunion, between cost and value. . . . Making value, or 'what a thing will bring,' the limit of its price, stagnates exchange and prevents our wants from being supplied. Now, if it were not a part of our present system to get a price according to the degree of want or suffering of the community, there would long since have been some arrangement made to adapt the supply to the demand.. . . Cost being made the limit of price, would give to the washer-woman a greater income than the importer of foreign goods; that this would entirely upset the present system of national trade, stop all wars arising out of the scramble for the profits of trade, and demolish all tariffs, duties, and all systems of policy that give rise to them; would abolish all distinctions of rich and poor; would enable every one to consume as much as he produced, and, consequently, prevent any one from living at the cost of another without his or her consent."

The difficulty underlying these two economical theories is the same, as I understand it. Mr. Thornton, and in a certain degree the political economists also, convert supply and demand into two entities. Take his illustration (page 59):

"Suppose at each of two horse-fairs a horse to be sold valued by its owner at £50, and suppose there be in the one case two and in the other three persons, of whom each is ready to pay £50 for the horse, though no one of them can afford to pay more. In both cases supply is the same—viz., one horse at £50—but demand is different, being in the one case two and in the other three horses at £50. Yet the price at which the horse will be sold will be the same in both cases, viz., £50."

Here he assigns a metaphysical limit to supply, and yet admits only a portion of the mental process by which that limit is reached. The fact that the buyers can afford to pay only £50 has little to do with the price paid. The cause which influences their mental action is, that they know there are plenty of other horses they can buy at £50, though there is only one at hand. Economically, the absent horses enter into the supply nearly as effectively as the one present. This supply, present and absent, affects the minds of both buyer and seller, and limits the price; the limit is not a metaphysical one, imposed by the competition of sellers alone, as Mr. Thornton would have us believe, and as he directly says elsewhere. We must bear in mind that Mr. Thornton has been partially approved by Mill and Prof. Cairns, in considering the weight of his theories. In the relations of capital and labor, he assumes that capitalists have the same control of the market-price of labor which he conceives sellers to have in ordinary trade; hence the necessity of trades-unionism to resist this control, which could not be governed by the economical forces of the market; and hence the above formula of supply and demand. Mr. Warren's error is essentially the same. In his view, the price of labor is regulated by a meta-

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