This brought the laugh on the minister, but the lawyer cut it short: “Well, then, I don’t really see why the trades-unions are not as business-like as the syndicates in their dealings with all those outside of themselves. Within themselves they practise an altruism of the highest order, but it is a tribal altruism; it is like that which prompts a Sioux to share his last mouthful with a starving Sioux, and to take the scalp of a starving Apache. How is it with your trades-unions in Altruria?” he asked my friend. “We have no trades-unions in Altruria,” he began. “Happy Altruria!” cried the professor. “We had them formerly,” the Altrurian went on, “as you have them now. They claimed, as I suppose yours do, that they were forced into existence by the necessities of the case; that without union the working-man was unable to meet the capitalist on anything like equal terms, or to withstand his encroachments and oppressions. But to maintain themselves they had to extinguish industrial liberty among the working-men themselves, and they had to practise great cruelties against those who refused to join them or who rebelled against them.” “They simply destroy them here,” said the professor. “Well,” said the lawyer, from his judicial mind, “the great syndicates have no scruples in destroying a capitalist who won’t come into them or who tries to go out. They don’t club him or stone him, but they under-sell him and freeze him out; they don’t break his head, but they bankrupt him. The principle is the same.” “Don’t interrupt Mr. Homos,” the banker entreated. “I am very curious to know just how they got rid of labor unions in Altruria.” “We had syndicates, too, and finally we had the _reductio ad absurdum_--we had a federation of labor unions find a federation of syndicates, that divided the nation into two camps. The situation was not only impossible, but it was insupportably ridiculous.” I ventured to say: “It hasn’t become quite so much of a joke with us yet.” “Isn’t it in a fair way to become so?” asked the doctor; and he turned to the lawyer: “What should you say was the logic of events among us for the last ten or twenty years?” “There’s nothing so capricious as the logic of events. It’s like a woman’s reasoning--you can’t tell what it’s aimed at, or where it’s going to fetch up; all that you can do is to keep out of the way if possible. We may come to some such condition of things as they have in Altruria, where the faith of the whole nation is pledged to secure every citizen in the pursuit of happiness; or we may revert to some former condition, and the master may again own the man; or we may hitch and joggle along indefinitely, as we are doing now.” “But come, now,” said the banker, while he laid a caressing touch on the Altrurian’s shoulder, “you don’t mean to say honestly that everybody works with his hands in Altruria?”