ited, and
resorting to any of them can be, if not wholly prevented, at least made
so perilous that the practices will become extinct.

It is possible to give to every competitor a fair field and no favor,
and, in so doing, to infuse again into the industrial system the life
and vigor which competition guarantees. This and only this will insure
that progress in production itself which is the _sine qua non_ of
future comfort. It may then be expected that inventions will continue,
that machines will become more perfect, and that the power of society
to pay wages will grow larger. Labor will then be the heir of the
centuries, and under proper laws can claim and get its inheritance. If
the world crowds itself fuller and fuller of population and progress at
the same time stagnates, nothing can prevent an increase of poverty
unrelieved by any bright outlook. Technical progress, power to make two
blades of grass grow where one grows now, and to do it in the various
departments where men labor, is the sole condition of a sound hope for
the future of the wage-earner. It will be as necessary under Socialism
as under the present system; but under Socialism it will be difficult
to get. In so far as it is possible to judge, it depends on the
preservation of normal competition in the general economic field.

Leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World have recently announced
an intention of forcing the hours of labor downward from ten hours per
day to eight, six, and finally, four, while at the same time the pay
will be forced up in a more or less corresponding ratio. They have also
announced an intention of making capital useless to its owners, by
crippling its productive power, and so making it easier to seize it. It
goes without saying that a four-hour day and high wages can never come
by a war which destroys most of the income to be divided. Make the
figures more moderate and allow time enough for it, and it may be made
to come by the diametrically opposite plan of making industry more and
more fruitful. The ten-hour day succeeded the twelve- or fourteen-hour
one of former times in exactly that way.

The division of the social income is of vital importance as well as the
general size of it. I have claimed for the regulation of monopoly that
it is nearly the greatest of possible reforms. Perhaps the very
greatest is a change in the mode of adjusting wages. They are fixed at
present in a rough-and-ready way, though not without