ASSOCIATION IN ITS RELATION TO LABOR. 589 



" It is now evident to all eyes that labor does not obtain Hs legitimate re- 

 ward, but, on the contrary, that those who work the hardest fare the worst. 

 . ... At this point society must attend to the rights of labor, and settle once 

 for all the great problem of its just reward. This appears to demand a discrimi- 

 nation, a disconnection, a disunion, between cost and value. . . . Making value, 

 or ' what a thing will bring,' the limit of its price, stagnates exchange and pre- 

 vents our wants from being supplied. Now, if it were not a pai't of our present 

 system to get a price according to the degree of want or suffering of the commu- 

 nity, there would long since have been some arrangement made to adapt the sup- 

 ply to the demand. . . . Cost being made the limit of price, would give to the 

 washer-woman a greater income than the importer of foreign goods ; that this 

 would entirely upset the present system of national trade, stop all wars arising 

 out of the scramble for the profits of trade, and demolish all tariffs, duties, and 

 all systems of policy that give rise to them ; would abolish all distinctions of rich 

 and poor ; would enable every one to consume as much as he produced, and, 

 consequently, prevent any one from living at the cost of another without his or 

 her consent." 



The difficulty underlying these two economical theories is the 

 same, as I understand it. Mr. Thornton, and in a certain degree the 

 political economists also, convert supply and demand into two entities. 

 Take his illustration (page 59) : 



" Suppose at each of two horse-fairs a horse to be sold valued by its owner 

 at 50, and suppose there be in the one case two and in the other three persons, 

 of whom each is ready to pay 50 for the horse, though no one of them can 

 afford to pay more. In both cases supply is the same viz., one horse at 50 

 but demand is different, being in the one case two and in the other three horses 

 at 50. Yet the price at which the horse will be sold will be the same in both 

 cases, viz., 50." 



Here he assigns a metaphysical limit to supply, and yet admits )nly 

 a portion of the mental process by which that limit is reached. The 

 fact that the buyers can afford to pay only 50 has little to do with the 

 price paid. The cause which influences their mental action is, that 

 they know there are plenty of other horses they can buy at 50, though 

 there is only one at hand. Economically, the absent horses enter into 

 the supply nearly as effectively as the one present. This supply, pres- 

 ent and absent, affects the minds of both buyer and seller, and limits 

 the price ; the limit is not a metapliysical one, imposed by the compe- 

 tition of sellers alone, as Mr. Thornton would have us believe, and as 

 he directly says elsewhere. We must bear in mind that Mi\ Thornton 

 has been partially approved by Mill and Prof. Cairns, in considering 

 the weight of his theories. In the relations of capital and labor, he 

 assumes that capitalists have the same control of the market-price of 

 labor which he conceives sellers to have in ordinary trade ; hence the 

 necessity of trades-unionism to resist this control, which could not be 

 governed by the economical forces of the market ; and hence the 

 above formula of supply and demand. Mr. Warren's error is essen- 

 tially the same. In his view,^the price of labor is regulated by a raeta- 



