(b) The practical remedy for the inexperience and instability and unskilfulness of laborers as tending towards labor-troubles of all kinds and degrees, is only to be found in a want of market for such services. In a natural and wholesome state of things, such as would exist in the United States were it not for national laws tampering with Trade and with Money, the questions asked an applicant for skilled work by any labor-taker would be, "_What have you learned to do? How long and for what pay do you want to do it? What do you want to reach next, when the present job is done?_" When employment turns on good answers to such questions as these, and when the questions themselves are put in good faith, there will be an end of Strikes and Lockouts. Untrained and restless hands will get nothing to do in mills and factories. Apprenticeship in its various forms will come back into vogue, and will probably be made a part of the course in public schools. The division and gradation of laborers will be carried out further than it ever yet has been. Laborers will then be _organized_ in the best sense of that word, and to the best advantage of capitalists. The permanent Supply of skilled laborers will be constantly adjusting itself to a permanent and increasing Demand for them. And it requires no millennium for such a state of things to come in. It requires nothing but an ordinary and enlightened and beneficent selfishness on the part of capitalists to adjust itself to the ordinary selfishness of laborers sure to become enlightened and beneficent to the best and ever-growing interests of both parties. This is not the spoken word of Morality, still less is it the divine word of Religion, it is only the common programme of a common-sense Political Economy. (3) The third and last general cause of misunderstandings and embittered disputes as between laborers and capitalists is partly economical and partly moral, and consequently the remedy for it is partly moral and partly economical. The Past projects itself down into the Present partly with blessings and partly with curses. In the old times under Slavery and Feudalism the laborer always came forward to his task with a taint upon him. Sometimes the taint attached to his birth, and at all times it attached to his calling. Slavery in all its forms always makes manual labor degrading. The courtly Cicero _apologizes_ in a letter to his friend for his open sorrow over the death of his favorite slave; and in several passages of his treatise on Morals he follows his Greek teachers, Plato and Aristotle, and declaims in a pitiful way against the noble rights of laborers. "_All artisans are engaged in a degrading profession._" Again, "_there can be nothing ingenuous in a workshop_." When trade and commerce are carried on on a small scale, "_they are to be regarded as disgraceful_"; when on a large scale, "_they must not be greatly condemned--non admodum vituperanda_!" (I, 42.)