c) Child labor is found chiefly in cotton mills, glass factories, coal mines, agriculture.

d) Probably 1,750,000 children, fifteen years of age and under, who are "gainfully employed" in the United States at the present time.

2. Things are not really cheap because they cost little money: a) Their cost may have been very great because of the necessity of adding the child life that has been expended in their manufacture.

b) Every person who gets "bargains" that are cheap because they are child-made is partly responsible for child labor.

c) If the forces of the dollar win, the child's life is hardened into a money-making machine, grinding for a space, and then giving way to another.

d) For every dollar earned by a child under fourteen years of age, tenfold will be taken from his earning capacity in later years. e) Child labor is undoubtedly cheap labor, but the product is cheaper than the labor involved in its creation.

3. Child labor is a process of mind stunting:

a) The child is removed from the possibility of an education. b) Grind, monotony, and degeneration are substituted for enthusiasm, play, and life.

c) The child's body is forming at fourteen, and its growth should not be marred by imposing upon it the restrictions which come from factory life.

4. Child labor is demoralizing:

a) The child ceases to be a child in knowledge while he or she is still a child in ideas.

b) No adequate home influence or school influence to ward off the dangers.

c) The child is his own pilot, but how easily misguided.

d) Is often surrounded with unbearable monotony, unsanitary conditions, wayward companions, and every other form of undesirable influence.

e) The nervous strain is very great; the child is often "speeded up" with the adults. He seeks relief for his strained nervous system in some kind of activity which leads ultimately to the police court.

5. Child labor helps to destroy family life:

a) The girl in the factory is frequently untrained in the maintenance of a home.

b) Factory work makes of the girl a wife and mother incapable by knowledge or training of doing her duty by her children, her home, or her husband.

c) It makes of the boy an unskilled worker, incapable of earning large means, or of becoming a worthy father.

E. The Danger of Economic Insufficiency

See also 262. Why Wealth Should Be in the Hands of the Many. 263. Evils of the Concentration of Wealth.

220.

272. The Nature and Extent of Poverty.

SUPPLY AND DEMAND IN THE CASE OF LABOR'

Some peculiarities in this action of demand and supply in the case of labor must be studied because they affect, not merely the form, but also the substance of the action; and to some extent they limit and hamper the free action of those forces.

1. The first point to which we have to direct our attention is the fact that human agents of production are not bought and sold as machinery and other material agents are. The worker sells his work, but he himself remains his own property: those who bear the expenses of rearing and educating him receive but very little of the price that is paid for his services in later years.

In the lower ranks of society the evil is great. For the slender means and education of the parents, and the comparative weakness of their power of distinctly realizing the future, prevent them from investing capital in the education and training of their children with the same free and bold enterprise with which capital is applied to improving the machinery of any well-managed factory. Many of the children of the working classes are imperfectly fed and clothed; they are housed in a way that promotes neither physical nor moral health; they receive a school education which, though in modern England it may not be very bad so far as it goes, yet goes only a little way; they have few opportunities of getting a broader view of life or an insight into the nature of the higher work of business, of science, or of art; they

Adapted by permission from Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, I, 638-51. (Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1912.)

meet hard and exhaustive toil early on the way, and for the greater part keep to it all their lives. At last they go to the grave carrying with them undeveloped abilities and faculties, which, if they could have borne full fruit, would have added to the material wealth of the country-to say nothing of higher considerations-many times as much as would have covered the expense of providing adequate opportunities for their development.

But the point on which we have specially to insist now is that this evil is cumulative. The worse fed are the children of one generation, the less will they earn when they grow up, and the less will be their power of providing adequately for the material wants of their children; and so on; and again, the less fully their own faculties are developed, the less will they realize the importance of best faculties of their children, and the less will be their power of doing so.

2. The next of those characteristics of the action of demand and supply peculiar to labor which we have to study lies in the fact that when a person sells his services he has to present himself where they are delivered. It matters nothing to the seller of bricks whether they are to be used in building a palace or a sewer; but it matters a great deal to the seller of labor, who undertakes to perform a task of given difficulty, whether or not the place in which it is to be done is a wholesome and a pleasant one, and whether or not his associates will be such as he cares to have.

Since no one can deliver his labor in a market in which he is not himself present, it follows that the mobility of labor and the mobility of the laborer are convertible terms; and the unwillingness to quit home, and to leave old associations, including perhaps some loved cottage and burial ground, will often turn the scale against a proposal to seek better wages in a new place. And when the different members of a family are engaged in different trades, and a migration which would be advantageous to one member would be injurious to others, the inseparability of the worker from his work considerably hinders the adjustment of the supply of labor to the demand for it.

3. Again, labor is often sold under special disadvantages, arising from the closely connected group of facts that labor power is "perishable," that the sellers of it are commonly poor and have no reserve fund, and that they cannot easily withhold it from the market.

Perishableness is an attribute common to the labor of all grades: the time lost when a worker is thrown out of employment cannot be recovered, though in some cases his energies may be refreshed by rest.

4. The want of reserve funds and of the power of long withholding their labor from the market is common to nearly all grades of those whose work is chiefly with their hands. But it is especially true of unskilled laborers, partly because their wages leave very little margin for saving, partly because when any group of them suspends work there are large numbers who are capable of filling their places. The effects of the laborer's disadvantage in bargaining are cumulative in two ways. It lowers his wages; and, as we have seen, this lowers his efficiency as a worker, and thereby lowers the normal value of his labor. And in addition it diminishes his efficiency as a bargainer, and thus increases the chance that he will sell his labor for less than its normal value.

5. The next peculiarity in the action of demand and supply with regard to labor which we have to consider is closely connected with some of those we have already discussed. It consists in the length of time that is required to prepare and train labor for its work, and in the slowness of the returns which result from this training.

Independently of the fact that, in rearing and educating their children, parents are governed by motives different from those which induce a capitalist undertaker to erect a new machine, the period over which the earning power extends is generally greater in the case of a man than a machine; and therefore the circumstances by which the earnings are determined are less capable of being foreseen, and the adjustment of supply to demand is both slower and more imperfect.

Not much less than a generation elapses between the choice by parents of a skilled trade for one of their children, and his reaping the full results of their choice. And meanwhile the character of the trade may have been almost revolutionized by changes.

221.

CRAFT SKILL AND THE COMPETITIVE STRUGGLE'

In the past, for the most part, the skilful manipulation of the tools and materials of a craft and this craftsmanship of the brain have been bound up together in the person of the worker and have been his possession. And it is this unique possession of craft knowledge and craft skill on the part of a body of wage-workers, that is, their possession of these things and. the employers' ignorance of An editorial taken by permission from the International Molders' Journal, LI (1915), 197-98.

them, that has enabled the workers to organize and force better terms from the employers.

This being true, it is evident that the greatest blow that could be delivered against unionism and the organized workers would be the separation of craft knowledge from craft skill. For if the skilled use of tools could be secured from workmen, apart from the craft knowledge which only years of experience can build up, the production of "skilled workmen" from unskilled hands would be a matter, in almost any craft, of but a few days or weeks; any craft would be thrown open to the competition of an almost unlimited labor supply; the craftsmen in it would be practically at the mercy of the employer.

Of late, this separation of craft knowledge and craft skill has actually taken place in an ever-widening area and with an everincreasing acceleration. Its process is shown in the two main forms which it has been taking. The first of these is the introduction of machinery and the standardization of tools, materials, product, and process, which make production possible on a large scale, and the specialization of the workmen. Each workman under such circumstances needs and can exercise only a little craft knowledge and a little craft skill. But he is still a craftsman, though only a narrow one and subject to much competition from below. The second form, more insidious and more dangerous than the first, but to the significance of which most of us have not yet become aroused, is the gathering up of all this scattered craft knowledge, systematizing it, and concentrating it in the hands of the employer and then doling it out again only in the form of minute instructions, giving to each worker only the knowledge needed for the mechanical performance of a particular relatively minute task. This process, it is evident, separates skill and knowledge even in their narrow relationship. When it is completed, the worker is no longer a craftsman in any sense, but is an animated tool of the management. He has no need of special craft knowledge or craft skill, or any power to acquire them if he had, and any man who walks the street is a competitor for his job.

There is no body of skilled workmen today safe from the one or the other of these forces tending to deprive them of their unique craft knowledge and skill. Only what may be termed frontier trades are dependent now on the all-round craftsman. These trades are likely at any time to be standardized and systematized and to fall under the influence of this double process of specialization. The