If we had to rely for this result upon trade unions alone, it would be highly problematical.  For here a psychological curiosity emerges, which, familiar and intelligible as it is, is none the less a curiosity.  So far from still higher wages for well-paid workpeople being regarded in the world of manual labor as detrimental to the interests of other workpeople, it has become almost a point of honor to believe the contrary.  A wage dispute in a particular trade is conceived as an engagement in a far-flung battle between Capital and Labor, in which success at any part of the line will facilitate the victory of the whole army.  This conception contains a measure of truth, as regards immediate and purely temporary effects; though, even here, it is made to seem unduly plausible by the recurrence of trade cycles, which cause wages at any time to move in the same direction all along the line.  But, if the foregoing analysis has been appreciated, the essential falsity of this notion should be evident.  It is an illusion, which should receive no endorsement, either tacit or express, in any work on economics.  The general wage level of a country cannot be regarded (except temporarily, and within narrow limits) as a function of the efficiency of labor organization; it depends on the far deeper economic facts set out in Sec.3 above.

Let us now try to summarize the conclusions of this section.  There is a tendency towards a uniformity of real wages for workers of the same grade and of the same efficiency.  This tendency is not due to competition alone.  It is helped by many acts of a collective kind, arising from a sense of “what should be”; it is obstructed by other acts of a like kind, where the sense of “what should be” is based on imperfect understanding.  The more people act in accordance with “what should be,” and the better their understanding, the more will this tendency approximate to an accurate economic law.

Sec.8. Women’s Wages.  The wages of women represent a problem of great public interest, upon which the principles laid down in this chapter have a most important bearing, and which in its turn serves to illustrate these principles further.  It has been suggested that male and female labor can be regarded as a strong case of Joint Supply, and the suggestion is not merely facetious.  The essential point, that the proportions of available male and female labor are fairly constant (not that they may not alter with time and circumstances, but that they are essentially independent of the conditions of demand) holds true not only of a country as a whole, but hardly less of a particular district.  If men and women are to be regarded as separate grades, they are grades between which immobility is complete.  Now men and women differ in many ways which affect both the demand for and the supply of their services.  On the one hand, far fewer women wish to enter business employments of any kind, as women have plenty of work