ners; that he must never take a fee under a certain
amount; that he must never communicate with a client except through a
solicitor; that a senior counsel must always have a junior; and most of
the rules of the so-called #etiquette# are clearly intended to raise the
profits of the legal profession. Many things of this kind want reform.
But, on the other hand, these unions avoid many of the faults of
trades-unions. There is no limit to the number of persons who may enter
them; all men of good character and sufficient knowledge can become
barristers and solicitors. Moreover, the entrance to the legal, medical,
and several other professions is being more and more regulated by
examinations, which are intended purely to secure able men for the
service of the public. Nor is any attempt made in these professional
trades-unions to prevent men from exerting themselves as much as they
can, so as to serve the public to the utmost of their ability. These
professional trades-unions are thus free from _some_ of the evils which
other unions produce.

#55. The Fallacy of Making Work.# One of the commonest and worst
fallacies into which people fall in political economy is to imagine that
wages may be increased by doing work slowly, so that more hands shall be
wanted. Workmen think they see plainly that the more men a job requires,
the more wages must be paid by their employers, and the more money comes
from the capitalists to the labourers. It seems, therefore, that any
machine, invention, or new arrangement which gets through the work more
quickly than before, tends to decrease their earnings. With this idea,
bricklayers' labourers refuse (or did lately refuse) to raise bricks to
the upper parts of a building by a rope and winch; they preferred the
old, laborious, and dangerous mode of carrying the bricks up ladders in
hods, because the work then required more hands. Similarly, brickmakers
refused to use any machinery; masons totally declined to set stones
shaped and dressed by machinery; some compositors still object to work
in offices where type-composing machines are introduced. They are all
afraid that if the work is done too easily and rapidly, they will not be
wanted to do it; they think that there will be more men than there are
berths for, and so wages will fall. In almost every case this is an
absurd and most unfortunate mistake.

No doubt, if men insist on sticking to a worse way of doing work after a
better one has been inv