vous dearth of laborers, can such
labor be well off, and incompetence and indifference draw
high wages?

3. Our labor is for the most part very thriftless. In the
purchase and in the preparation of food--the chief item of
expense in the workingman's family and that wherein economic
habits count for most--men and women are alike improvident.
The art of making money go the farthest in food is
comparatively unknown. Workingmen will turn up their noses
at the fare on which a Carlyle did some of the finest
literary work of our century. I remember some time ago
speaking to one of our butchers, who told me that workingmen
largely ordered some of his best cuts. Now an ample supply
of nutritious food is certainly essential for good work,
whether of the brain or of the brawn. The advance of labor
is rightly gauged, among other ways, by its increasing
consumption of wheat and meat, but the nutritiousness of
meat is not necessarily dependent upon its being from the
finest cut. I should like to see all men eating "French"
chops and porter-house steaks if they could afford it; but
when I know the average wages of our workingmen and the cost
of living on the simplest possible scale, it is discouraging
to learn such a fact as that which I have mentioned, since
all the elements of necessary sustenance can be had in so
much cheaper forms. * * *

4. Labor must fault itself further, on the ground of its
lack of power of combination and of its defective methods in
combination. It has been by combination that the middle
class has arisen, and by it that capital has so wonderfully
increased. The story of the Middle Ages, familiar to us all,
is the story of the rise of the industrial class by
combination in guilds. Labor's numbers, now a hindrance,
might thus become a help. In a mob men trample upon each
other; in an army they brace each other to the charge of
victory.

Trades-unions represent the one effective form of
combination won by American labor. Trades-unions need no
timid apologists. Their vindication is in the historic tale
of the successful advances which they have won for
workingmen. Called into being to defend labor against
legislation in the interests of capital, in the days when to
ask for an advance in wages led to worki