Evolution of the Wages System. 231 



It is from Bohemia, Austria, Italy, Germany, Ireland, etc., 

 towards England and America that the laborers emigrate, 

 and never from England or America to Continental Europe 

 and Asia. 



The wages or stipulated-income system may be properly 

 regarded as an integral part of moaern civilization, which 

 it is absolutely impossible to abolish without returning to 

 barbarism. If the most Utopian socialistic scheme were 

 adopted to-morrow it could not dispense with the payment 

 of wages without abolishing factory methods of production 

 and returning to the self-employing hand-labor conditions 

 of primitive society. If we are to have railroads and fac- 

 tories at all, it would be just as necessary to pay salaries 

 and wages if they were owned by the government as when 

 they are owned by private individuals. Whether we have 

 socialism or private ownership, unless we are to abandon 

 the economic use of iron, steam, electricity, and the achieve- 

 ments of modern science, we must have a wages system. 



This does not imply that the poverty, ignorance and 

 social degradation of the present industrial life is to con- 

 tinue. What it means is that the social progress of the 

 future must be sought along the same general lines that it 

 has traveled in the past ; namely, towards greater special- 

 ization of labor, stipulation of income, and interdependence 

 of social classes. The wages system does not, as is com- 

 monly assumed, imply an iron law ; on the contrary it is as 

 elastic as human wants and desires, and is capable of as 

 much expansion as the social character of man. There is 

 nothing in this system to prevent wages from indefinitely 

 increasing. It is just as possible for the laborer's income 

 to rise from the present rate to $5000 a year under the 

 wages system, as it was for it to increase from $20 a year 

 in the fourteenth century to $900 or $1000 a year to-day.* 

 In fact, if the same relative increase in wages, and the 

 social fi-eedom it implies, takes place during the next hun- 

 dred years that has occurred during the present century, the 

 laboring classes will be better off richer and freer by 

 the year 2000, under the wages system, than even Bellamy's 



* The wages of compositors, carpenters, masons, bricklayers, engineers, and 

 some other classes of mechanics, have already reached SIOOO a year in this coun- 

 try, which, allowing for the difference in the value of gold, is manv hundred 

 per cent, higher than the wages of the artificers as fixed by the Statute of 

 Laborers in lajO. 



