The various schools of political economists differ widely as to the facts which have formulated themselves in what is known as the iron law of wages; this meaning that wages are said to tend increasingly to a minimum which will give but a bare living.  For skilled labor the law may be regarded as elastic rather than iron.  For unskilled, it is as certainly the tendency, which, if constantly repeated and so intensified, would end as law.  Many standard economists regard it as already fixed; and writers like Lasalle, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Marx heap every denunciation upon it.

Were the fact actually established, no words could be too strong or too bitter to define this new form of slavery.  The standard of life and comfort affects the wages of labor, and there is constant effort to make the wage correspond to this standard.  It is an unending and often bitter struggle, nowhere better summed up than by Thorold Rogers in his “Six Centuries of Work and Wages,”—­a work upon which economists, however different their conclusions, rely alike for facts and figures.

We must then admit in degree the tendency of wages to a minimum, especially those of unskilled labor, and accept it as one more motive for persistent effort to alter existing conditions and prevent any such culmination.

Take now, in connection with the six heads mentioned as governing the present efficiency of labor, the five enumerated by Adam Smith in his summary of causes for differences in wages:  1.  “The agreeableness or disagreeableness of the employments themselves. 2.  The easiness and cheapness, or the difficulty and expense of learning them. 3.  The constancy or inconstancy of employment in them. 4.  The small or great trust which must be reposed in those who exercise them. 5.  The probability or improbability of success in them.”

These are conditions which affect the man’s right to large or small wage; but all of them presuppose that men are perfectly free to look over the whole industrial field and choose their own employment,—­they presuppose the perfect mobility of labor.  Let us see what this means.

The theoretical mobility of labor rests upon the assumption that laborers of every order will in all ways and at all times pursue their economic interests; but the actual fact is that so far from seeking labor under the most perfect conditions for obtaining it, nearly half of all humankind are “bound in fetters of race and speech and religion and caste, of tradition and habit and ignorance of the world, of poverty and ineptitude and inertia, which practically exclude them from the competitions of the world’s industry.”

“Man is, of all sorts of luggage, the most difficult to be transported,” was written by Adam Smith long ago; and this stands in the way of really free and unhampered competition.  Mr. Frederick Harrison, one of the clearest thinkers of the day, has well defined the difference between the seller and the producer of a commodity.  He says:—­