moments.  Under what possible system, save in a grievous dearth of laborers, can such labor be well off, and incompetence and indifference draw high wages?

3.  Our labor is for the most part very thriftless.  In the purchase and in the preparation of food—­the chief item of expense in the workingman’s family and that wherein economic habits count for most—­men and women are alike improvident.  The art of making money go the farthest in food is comparatively unknown.  Workingmen will turn up their noses at the fare on which a Carlyle did some of the finest literary work of our century.  I remember some time ago speaking to one of our butchers, who told me that workingmen largely ordered some of his best cuts.  Now an ample supply of nutritious food is certainly essential for good work, whether of the brain or of the brawn.  The advance of labor is rightly gauged, among other ways, by its increasing consumption of wheat and meat, but the nutritiousness of meat is not necessarily dependent upon its being from the finest cut.  I should like to see all men eating “French” chops and porter-house steaks if they could afford it; but when I know the average wages of our workingmen and the cost of living on the simplest possible scale, it is discouraging to learn such a fact as that which I have mentioned, since all the elements of necessary sustenance can be had in so much cheaper forms. * * *

4.  Labor must fault itself further, on the ground of its lack of power of combination and of its defective methods in combination.  It has been by combination that the middle class has arisen, and by it that capital has so wonderfully increased.  The story of the Middle Ages, familiar to us all, is the story of the rise of the industrial class by combination in guilds.  Labor’s numbers, now a hindrance, might thus become a help.  In a mob men trample upon each other; in an army they brace each other to the charge of victory.

Trades-unions represent the one effective form of combination won by American labor.  Trades-unions need no timid apologists.  Their vindication is in the historic tale of the successful advances which they have won for workingmen.  Called into being to defend labor against legislation in the interests of capital, in the days when to ask for an advance in wages led to workingmen’s being thrown into prison, they have in England led on to the brilliant series of reforms which mark our century, as told so well in the articles by Mr. Howell (The Nineteenth Century for October, 1882) and by Mr. Harrison (The Contemporary Review for October, 1883).  Doubtless they have committed plenty of follies, and are still capable of stupid tyrannies that only succeed in handicapping labor, in alienating capital, and in checking productivity—­that is, in lessening the sum total of divisible wealth.  Such actions are inevitable in the early stages of combination on the part of uneducated men,