ment to ensure the development and exercise of those
higher qualities and talents required in the performance of the more
skilled industrial tasks, and to ensure also the performance of the more
arduous, irregular, disagreeable, and less desirable industrial tasks.
It is a recognition of the fact that the spirit of serving without
direct reward is not a sufficiently strong and constant motive to
persuade men to make the special efforts, or to undergo the special
disadvantages required for some kinds of work. It is an incentive to the
development of those abilities and talents which are relatively scarce
in industry; it is also an incentive to the undertaking of those tasks
which the run of men, at any given time and place, regard as unusually
difficult or undesirable. The extra reward for different kinds of work
which are judged to require for their performance qualities equally
difficult to secure, and which subject individuals to the same hardships
should be the same. The test of the special reward must be in any
particular case, the amount necessary to secure the performance of the
work in question.

The conscientious and consistent application of these two doctrines in
settlement of wage controversies which involve the reconsideration of
established differentials should result in the gradual building up of an
ordered scheme of wage relationship, such as is sought. This scheme
would rest upon fairly widely held ideas as to the most suitable basis
for wage differences. It would not make greater call upon the human
sense of fairness than must be made by any plan which hopes to secure
industrial peace by getting all parties to industrial conflict to agree
upon rules or principles for the settlement of the claims of each.
Whether that aim, itself, is a fanciful one, need not be again debated
here.

5.--Lest it appear that the above proposals have been put forward
without giving due weight to their defects, it is now well to consider
certain criticisms to which they may be fairly open. Two objections, in
particular, are likely to be made. One is of practical nature, the other
of a theoretical nature. They may be considered in that order.

The objection of a practical nature is that it will not be possible to
apply the suggested principles either accurately or consistently, and
this for two reasons. Firstly, it may be asserted that the application
of the proposed doctrines would require a scientific comparison of the