The complete elimination of the capitalist individualistic method of determining wages and prices, in favour of the measurement by "normal time" and "normal work" alone, would be open to grave objections both in theory and practice. Above all there is the practical danger of overburdening the State with the task of regulating and normalising, a task which only the most confirmed optimism would dare to regard lightly. It appears to me exceedingly doubtful at the present whether any State, even the most absolute monarchy with the best administration, would be competent to undertake such a task. I can see no likelihood of satisfaction on this point for some time to come, and must therefore range myself on the side of those who claim a better chance of success for the simpler method of improved organisation for the free settlements of wage-disputes by united representatives of both classes. But these and similar investigations are beyond the range of the main subject under discussion in this book. My task is to prove that the maximum working-day of protective policy, or of protective and wage-policy, has nothing to do with the normal working-day in its strict sense--whether it be the normal working-day of Rodbertus separately adjusted in separate branches of industry, or the all-round normal working-day of non-communistic socialism. The normal working-day in the precise sense of Rodbertus, or even in the sense of the more rational socialists, affords an artificially fixed unit of value for the equitable determination of wages and prices; but it is neither a regulation by protective legislation of the longest permissible duration of the work within the astronomical day, nor a method of influencing the capitalistic settlement of wages by the legal enforcement of a much shorter maximum working-day. A normal working-hour would serve as well as a normal working-day for a common denominator for the uniform reduction of the various kinds of work to one normal measure of time and labour, with a view to the valuation of the products and contributions of labour. It may be said that the normal working-day, in the sense of Rodbertus, by virtue of its being a matter periodically fixed and prescribed, is a normal working-day also in that wider sense in which the term may equally be applied to the maximum working-day of protective policy. But it cannot claim the title of normal working-day from the fact of this _fixity_ or this _artificial regulation_, but only from the essential fact that it serves the purpose of a valuation of labour products and labour contributions on a scale which is really normal, _i.e. socially just and equitable_.