which it takes you upwards of _fifty_ weeks to
earn now. Some other pretty surprising things are going to happen,
too. Brother Dowley, who is it that determines, every spring,
what the particular wage of each kind of mechanic, laborer, and
servant shall be for that year?"

"Sometimes the courts, sometimes the town council; but most of all,
the magistrate. Ye may say, in general terms, it is the magistrate
that fixes the wages."

"Doesn't ask any of those poor devils to _help_ him fix their wages
for them, does he?"

"Hm! That _were_ an idea! The master that's to pay him the money
is the one that's rightly concerned in that matter, ye will notice."

"Yes--but I thought the other man might have some little trifle
at stake in it, too; and even his wife and children, poor creatures.
The masters are these: nobles, rich men, the prosperous generally.
These few, who do no work, determine what pay the vast hive shall
have who _do_ work. You see? They're a 'combine'--a trade union,
to coin a new phrase--who band themselves together to force their
lowly brother to take what they choose to give. Thirteen hundred
years hence--so says the unwritten law--the 'combine' will be the
other way, and then how these fine people's posterity will fume
and fret and grit their teeth over the insolent tyranny of trade
unions! Yes, indeed! the magistrate will tranquilly arrange the
wages from now clear away down into the nineteenth century; and
then all of a sudden the wage-earner will consider that a couple
of thousand years or so is enough of this one-sided sort of thing;
and he will rise up and take a hand in fixing his wages himself.
Ah, he will have a long and bitter account of wrong and humiliation
to settle."

"Do ye believe--"

"That he actually will help to fix his own wages? Yes, indeed.
And he will be strong and able, then."

"Brave times, brave times, of a truth!" sneered the prosperous smith.

"Oh,--and there's another detail. In that day, a master may hire
a man for only just one day, or one week, or one month at a time,
if he wants to."

"What?"

"It's true. Moreover, a magistrate won't be able to force a man
to work for a master a whole year on a stretch whether the man
wants to or not."

"Will there be _no_ law or sense in that day?"

"Both of them, Dowley. In that day a man will be his own property,
not the property of magistrate and master. And he can leave town
whenever he wants to, if the wages