purchases may save the profits of board, and thrift and saving may diminish the absolute cost of food and clothes and spending money-accumulation will go on faster. And the wife's wages must be added, and what the children themselves may earn: so on the other hand sickness or curtailed work or bad habits may diminish the income. We do not treat here of the anomalies of wages, the drink money, the doles that make situations of service sometimes the subject of purchase or a bonus, and that, like savage dogs, make a friend's house and hospitality things to be avoided, not for their cost but the annoyance of properly adjusting them -the commissions which servants receive from shopmen for directing their employers' custom, and the calculation of board wages. Nor do we discuss commissions, some of which usage has specifically settled,-1 per cent. on real estate sales, to per cent. on stock sales, 24 for selling and collecting, and 5 per cent. for guarantee, etc., etc.; nor the honorarium or fee of due bills, or of custom, or of official organizationsthey are personal matters; or local customs, or subjects of special agreement.

The number of different occupations in the United States and in Europe is between thirteen and fourteen hundred, and of these between five and six hundred may be followed by females.

These occupations can be divided into classes according to various principles, such as the materials with which they are occupied, the responsibility attached to them respectively, the amount of preparation and the time and cost necessary to enable a workman to exercise them, which must always form one of the items in the calculation of wages, and the style of living and dressing demanded by society of persons following any particular occupation. The latter, too, and particularly the last, as they affect the cost of living, are particularly fitted to show us how wages should vary with certain elements.

The most hurried observation shows that we have enunciated the true elements of the amount of claims for wages. It may often appear otherwise. There is a difference in the worth of labor depending on the ability or activity or per

sonal qualities of the employed; the man of acknowledged skill that has cost him years of toil and thousands of dollars to acquire, has been surpassed in his year's income; but these cases are exceptional ones of talent or circumstances, or collateral value, and like diamonds, rarely wanted and bought, though notable when we do see them.

It is to be wished that in the item of statistics the price of board for any class could always be distinctly ascertained in the United States decennial and the States' quinquennial census and returns and tables-and be officially revised and arranged every five years; for by the examination of history we find it decided, constant and regular in the changes it undergoes, unless interrupted by such civil and political revolutions as we have just been in.

The justice and adaptability of the above principles are apparent by observing all around us how flexibly they sway from side to side, and expand or contract so as to include all the phases of actual life. See how they offer opportunity both of poverty and of accumulation. In a wide, new and active country like ours, and in every country in course of development, there is always work enough, but carelessness, laziness, drunkenness, may wilfully curtail the number of hours of employment, and the earnings, or waste the pay that is received, and so may sickness curtail or expend it. Thrift will always live comfortably and make due accumulation under these principles of wages, from working over hours as strength allows, or from eschewing a family, or diminishing individual expenses, for they do not reduce wages to the minimum of a bare bestial subsistence and demand from labor its utmost time, strength and producing power, but only an average.

It is strange that at this day it is necessary to state that the products of labor are distinct from the wages of labor, yet it is the disregard of this plain distinction that arrays the employed against the employer, the workman against the capitalist, the poor against the rich. The accumulation of the products which labor collects or makes from nature is the grand motive power of wealth-getting. There always is a surplus of products of labor be

yond subsistence, and always plenty of workers who, for one reason or another, have that surplus for sale.

When the laborer has sold his labor, and received his fair price, as we have above set it forth,-that is, got his wages,he has no room for feeling against or in favor of his employer, any more than a shopkeeper has for or against the man who buys and pays the price for his goods.

The savings of a man's labor which buy the products of another, whether a few dollars worth, or, when aided by aceumulation, a hundred thousand dollars worth from a gang of thousands employed, gives the purchaser a property and right in those products, which is not to be challenged. Whether bought with actual barter or cash, or anticipated by credit, they constitute capital; and this accumulation by one, of the purchased surplus labor and wages of others, constitutes riches. Very few could get rich by simply laying aside a part of their own wages.

We broach no new theory or experiments in the labor question; we simply make it plain, and clear it from the ignorance and the prejudices that make it the instrument of envy in cheating and annoying the rich, or those supposed to be so, or of rascality in grinding the poor, or of that fatal curse of republics, the selfish, impudent, deceiving demagogism that for its own ends excites hard thoughts and worse actions between different classes of the citizens of a common society and of a common nationality. The statesman's or socialist's question is not so much upon what the claim of labor for wages is founded, as how to get at the fair amount of those claims in any given case. If this matter were well understood, the "strikes" would look and be avoided as the crimes they are, of the same sort as thieving, as highway robbery, as murder. They destroy and diminish the property of others in both parties, they reduce them to poverty, they take life by taking the means by which they live, as well as by violence. They are to be treated as capital crimes if they cannot be controlled under any other char

acter.

Is it expected that the laborer and workman will take these formulas out of his pocket, with his pencil, to apply

them and calculate whenever a hiring takes place? Hardly that, for he will always have them when once settled like other pervading convictions;-the commonest customs and modes of acting of individual or social economy are the results in practice of rational conviction, sometimes recognized, oftener but a routine.

Employment is the laborer's necessity; with the employer the questions are often various: shall I do it with more or less expense? shall I be satisfied with less profit? shall I do it now or at another time? or shall I do it at all?

Our object is not to ensure wages, nor to find or suggest employment. Through reading and thinking people the truth will sooner or later be transmitted through the whole social mass, and no portions of the people will make it a matter of general or of antagonistic unions and leagues.

We find, in our calculations, that some classes of labor do not receive wages enough. We find that in consequence of this inadequency, poverty, and even crime exist with all their attendant insecurity, wickedness, misery, and other social evils, and all the burdensome private, corporation, and public expenses and taxation, for repressing and meliorating and supporting it. Just and fair wages of labor will not, of course, ward off the helpless non-productive consumption of laziness, nor of congenital or induced imbecility of body or mind, nor accidents, nor sickness, but they will ameliorate, limit, and diminish them; and they will separate unavoidable calamities from the operation of public and private kindness and philanthropy, from the coercive measures and guards of civil government against wrong-doing and crime. For the importance of this, we have discussed the labor question from this point of view. There are 317,000 persons known to be assisted annually in the city of New York -the population itself of a mighty city.

We give briefly two further tests in the formulas of calculation of the proper wages of two other classes of workmen—the clerk and the bricklayer. And first the clerk. His average board in New York city is $8 a week, or $416 a year; his average of sickness is only about 8 weeks in his life; his average of life, from the age of 20, when

he commences work, is about 21 years, equal to 41 years for the whole life, and 4 years less than the general average life of all occupations, which by Table is 46 years; and he can work say to the age of 45. He then requires an endowment life policy to the amount of two years' support of his family, say 4 times his annual board, or $2,160, payable at his age of 45, or at his death before: the annual premium on that sum, commencing at the age of 20, is $78.71. His clothes a year, of his board, $139. His money for amusement and improvement, board, $139. The interest, at 7 per cent., on the cost of his childhood, 14 years, and youth, 6 years, up to 20 years of age, or 12 times the board of his class ($3,342), is $234 a year. The husband's proportion (4 of support of 2 children to 20 years of age) is of double his own bringing up, or 93 times the annual board of an adult of his class ($3,342), and the annual interest on this is $267.33. His State, county, and town taxes are, say $40 a year; making his total annual demands $1,313. As he can work the whole time-300 days, or 2,400 hours in a year-his wages should be $4.37 a day, 54 cents an hour.

He has no cost for preparation for his business to claim wages for, because the public schools afford that in the United States; nor for tools, or shop, or office, or convenience, as he provides none. This result bears a striking fairness upon its face.

Take still more briefly the bricklayer. Board, $5.50 a week, $286 a year. Life from 20, 223 years, or 42% in the whole, and 4 less than general average. Of this he can work 25 years, but only 200 days in a year. He can work to 45 years of age, and therefore requires an endowment insurance of two years' support of his family; 4 his annual board, or $1,544; annual premium, commencing at 20, is $56.33. Clothing, $95; spending money, $95. Interest, at 7 per cent., on his "bringing-up" till 20 ($3,646), is $255. The husband's proportion, 4 of support of 2 children to 20 years of age, $2,621. Interest on that is $183 a year. State, county, and town tax, $40. And here begin, in a small way, the claims of educated labor; he brings in a new item of