The only way to attack the heresy is from the concrete illustration drawn from the United States of America. There restriction of output is not merely unknown, it is definitely repudiated by the Trade Unions. Unfortunately, many labour intellectuals who have no knowledge of American conditions pervert the facts and hold up to execration the industrial organization in the United States of America. “Scientific management,” they have told the British workman, “is merely cunningly devised slavery in which the shackles of serfdom are so precisely adjusted that the workman is a mere cog, helplessly and inhumanly enmeshed in a grinding anti-social mechanism.” The average workman, however, pays little attention to rhetoric and rodomontade, from whomsoever it may emanate, and I have succeeded in satisfying bodies of workmen as to the value of production by taking an American establishment and giving the output, hours and remuneration per man per annum, or any other convenient period of time, along with the output, hours and remuneration per man for the same period in a comparable establishment in England. The output will be expressed in pounds sterling of wholesale market prices. This really does sink in. Then the moral can be driven home. The vital truth can be shown that in a well-run establishment, as output increases, the cost of the fixed charges per unit of production decreases. Consequently every percentage increase in output—assuming no “softening” of the selling price—results in a larger percentage increase in the amount available for division between workmen and employer. If that division is effected on equitable lines, there is an obvious advantage to the worker. That is why the workman in the United States of America can take home much higher real earnings than his brother in this country. It is not difficult to satisfy the hard-headed practical English worker that these higher American earnings are neither manna dropped from heaven nor doles from more compassionate employers. If there is scepticism as to the value to Trade Unions of production, there is complete apathy as to the necessity of production for the nation’s sake. What is wanted is to secure conviction of the need by simple homely illustrations. The extent to which in any community increased production conduces to plenty, and plenty to employment, good wages, a higher standard of living, and low prices is beyond the present ken of Labour. In other words, the proposition that the prosperity of a country depends upon the production in the country obtains no credence whatsoever; it is generally treated by working men as a sheer irrelevance.