134 POLITICAL ECONOMY 



Of course it may be said that men engaging at different rates 

 in different months are competing, but if they are, this would 

 be competition with the sting taken out. The plan does give 

 different rates of wages for the same degree of merit, which is 

 the one essential thing required to determine a market value. 



It is not in the least necessary that all engagements should 

 be for equal times. If an employer takes a contract which he 

 thinks will require twenty men for six months, let him engage 

 them for that time. Even weekly engagements are compatible 

 with the method, but the bulk of engagements must be for much 

 longer. Engagements for different periods might be at different 

 rates ; sometimes short engagements and sometimes long ones 

 would be most highly paid : there would be a true market with 

 all its sensitiveness and all its convenience. Of course by 

 coalitions attempts would from time to time be made to force the 

 market one way or the other, but the futility of these attempts 

 would soon be experimentally proved. Men are not monsters, 

 and when they have recourse to such rude methods as strikes or 

 lock-outs, it is because no other action is open to them. 



It has now been shown that engagements for long periods, 

 starting at all periods of the year, would provide a real market 

 determining wages by the same process as the price of other com- 

 modities is fixed ; but the objection will inevitably occur that 

 even this benefit may be purchased at too dear a rate. Masters 

 would have no control over their workmen if they were unable to 

 dismiss them at a week's notice. Workmen might be subjected 

 to annoyance, inconvenience, even oppression if they were bound 

 to work in a particular shop for a whole year. This brings me 

 to the second feature of the new proposal. 



Each engagement ought not to be a contract with a man to 

 keep him individually for a whole year or other period, but 

 should provide on the one hand that the master shall employ one 

 competent hand for the given time at the given rate, and on the 

 other hand that the workman shall not leave without providing 

 a competent substitute who will work until the end of the given 

 time at the given rate. This system might be called ' the time- 

 labour system ' of engagement as contrasted with the ' personal 

 system.' An employer would on the new system buy a unit of 

 labour for a definite time, instead of, as at present, buying the 



