(c) This demonstration is extremely important in Political Economy, and consequently in Social Life; for it proves beyond the possibility of a cavil, the Value of personal services tends constantly to rise, not only as compared with the Value of the material commodities which by the aid of capital they help to create (a truth we have seen before), but also as compared with the Value of the use of its co-partner capital itself; and therefore, that there is inwrought into the very substance of things in this world a tendency towards an equality of economical condition among men. God has ordered it, and men cannot radically alter it. Self-interest is indeed the mainspring of movement in the economic world; but the beauty of it and the wonder of it is, that no man can labor intelligently and productively under the influence of self-interest without at the same time benefiting the masses of men. His fair exchanges benefit the parties of the other part as much as they benefit himself. His very savings productively employed are poor men's livings. Only under the blessed freedom of universal Buying and Selling, subject only to the taxation of a good Government for public purposes purely, can these broad benefits designed by a wise Providence be fully realized in action; and the power of individual greed and corporate privilege and governmental perversion to thwart the beneficent though complicated workings of these laws of Capital and Labor towards the common weal and universal progress of mankind is shortlived and soon punished. 4. How comes it about, then, if these laws of mutual inter-dependence between capitalists and laborers are so well-placed and Providentially balanced, that there always have been and are still so many misunderstandings and ill-feelings and actual collisions between employers and skilled laborers, whose interests are at bottom one and whose relations ought to be so cordial? This is the last topic in our Chapter on Personal Services. Here we must look around narrowly and tread carefully. But there is a path. We can find it if we will. It leads through many short-comings in men's characters and through much ignorance of plain economical truths and past unreasoning jealousies and aggregated action on the part of both classes, and over the needful distinctions between impulsive selfishness and a true self-interest back to the same old laws of God laid down at once in the constitution of things and in the constitution of men. Labor-troubles are almost as old as Civilization. The Greek poet Euripides in his play of the "Supplicants" both indicates facts as they were then, and points out a future hope in which we may share, that these middle classes by a better harmony preordained and mutually beneficial may yet "save the State":--