But accepting a lower wage than that demanded by the union was not the only way in which an employee could drag down his fellows. In many trades it was not much use fixing the wage the worker was to receive unless the quantity of work he gave for it was also fixed. You must be tired by this time of the silly joking of the Capitalist newspapers about bricklayers who are not allowed by their unions to lay more than three bricks a day. A bricklayer has clearly as much right to charge a day’s wages for laying three bricks as his employer has to sell the house when it is built for the biggest price he can get for it. Those who condemn either of them are condemning the Capitalist system, like good Bolshevists. The three-brick joke is only a comic exaggeration of what actually occurs. The employers, to find out how much work can be got out of a man, pick out an exceptionally quick and indefatigable man called a slogger, and try to impose what he can do in a day on all the rest. The unions naturally retort by forbidding any of their members to lay a brick more than he must do if he is to be worth employing at all. This practice of deliberately doing the least they dare instead of the most they can is the ca’canny of which the employers complain so much, though they all do the same thing themselves under the more respectable name of “restricting output” and selling in the dearest market. It is the principle on which the Capitalist system is avowedly founded. Thus Capitalism drives the employers to do their worst to the employed, and the employed to do the least for them. And it boasts all the time of the incentive it provides to both to do their best! You may ask why this does not end in a deadlock. The answer is it is producing deadlocks twice a day or thereabouts. The King’s speeches in opening Parliament now contain regularly an appeal to the workers and employers to be good boys and not paralyze the industry of the nation by the clash of their quite irreconcilable interests. The reason the Capitalist system has worked so far without jamming for more than a few months at a time, and then only in places, is that it has not yet succeeded in making a conquest of human nature so complete that everybody acts on strictly business principles. The mass of the nation has been humbly and ignorantly taking what the employers offer and working as well as it can, either believing that it is doing its duty in that station of life to which it has pleased God to call it, or not thinking about the matter at all, but suffering its lot as something that cannot be helped, like the weather. Even late in the nineteenth century, when there were fourteen million wage workers, only a million and a half of them were in trade unions, which meant that only a million and a half of them were selling their labor on systematic Capitalist business principles. Today nearly four and a half millions of them are converts to Capitalism, and duly enrolled in militant unions.