vices; each is "exploited" just as much by those who pay as the handicraftsman is. We men have a way of inflating ourselves with big words on this earth, as if we thus gained dignity or were any the less bound down to toil and suffering. If wages were abolished, or if the socialistic state were established, not a feature of the case would be altered. Men would be worn out in maintaining their existence, and the only question would be just what it is now: Can each one get more maintenance for a given expenditure of himself by living in isolation, or by joining other men in mutual services?
The wages system, then, is part of the industrial organization. An American farmer is his own landlord, tenant, and laborer; if he finds it hard to get a living, he has no employer against whom he can strike; he may curse the ground, or shake his fist in the face of heaven, but that will not help him. He must either work harder or cut down his enjoyments to the measure of his production. If, however, the three interests are separated in a higher organization of society — if the farmer makes a contract by which he yields the use of his land to another, and himself becomes a landlord, and if the new tenant employs a laborer, then the personal rights and interests of three men come into play, and impinge upon each other at every change which before would have affected different interests of the same person. The first farmer could not as employee strike against himself as employer, but the three new parties have antagonistic interests which must be adjusted and readjusted from time to time by some force or other. If, then, we regard the economic forces of supply and demand as the only, the proper, and the inevitable regulators of the complex and highly refined interests that arise between the members of a highly organized society,
