In occupations of another type, the issue takes a somewhat different form.  In the teaching profession, “equal pay” would not exclude the women; it would be far more likely to exclude the men.  For, though the advocates of the principle would declare that their intention is that the salaries of women should be leveled up to those of men, it is more probable that the ultimate outcome would be a leveling down.  Educational authorities have the ratepayer and the taxpayer to consider; and, apart from this, they have their own interpretation of “what should be.”  To pay a woman less than a man for the same work may seem glaringly unfair; but it is not very clear why a woman, who is an elementary school teacher, should be paid much more than, say, a hospital nurse, merely because in the former case a number of men happen also to be employed.  In fact, there is a clashing of equities in this connection; and there is little doubt which of them the educational authorities would prefer.  A leveling down of the men’s salaries would make it all but impossible to attract men of the desired type into the profession, and would thus lead to the virtual extinction of the male elementary school teacher.  This might seem in a narrow sense to be economically desirable.  Why should not men take their services to the tasks for which they can command a higher reward, and which women cannot do as well?  But whether this would be desirable in the true interests of education is a far more doubtful matter.  And this is the real problem of “equal pay for equal work” for male and female school teachers.  The reader will notice that I have refrained from alluding to the controversy as to whether men should receive more on the grounds that they have wives and families to maintain.  That, although a most absorbing issue, is not the real issue in practice at the present time.  The real issue is a clashing between a sense of “what should be” on obvious general grounds and a sense of “what should be” in the particular, derived from the very patent and general “what is” that men receive as a rule far higher pay than women.

CHAPTER X

THE REAL COSTS OF PRODUCTION

Sec.1. Comparative Costs.  Beneath the great diversity of the considerations which are applicable to the different agents of production, certain general conclusions emerge from the analysis of the last four chapters.  In no case did we find that the aggregate supply of the agent was determined by clear and certain economic laws, possessing any fundamental significance.  The supply of natural resources is a fixed thing, quite independent of the efforts or the desires of man.  However the supply of capital and the supply of labor may react under present conditions towards economic stimuli, these reactions possess no quality of inevitability and bear no clear relation to “what should be.”  The supply of risk-bearing responds perhaps more decidedly to the prospects of increased