232 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK
the hopeless task of organizing American industrial labor in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century could scarcely have been
successfully accomplished by any man who did not vastly over-
emphasize the importance and effectiveness of organization. If
that faith did not enable Mr. Gompers to cut his way through
the masses of legal red tape wound round labor organizations
during the present century, it did at least enable him during the
preceding years to weld the American labor movement together
into a powerful working body.
In that task of organization the eight-hour issue was a tool
of great value,—to no small extent, it is submitted, because its
underlying theory made it an effective gospel under the circum-
stances then existing. That theory came down from the eight-
hour advocates of the years 1865-72. Mr. Gompers once put
the whole thing thus: ‘‘In the language of that foremost of eco-
nomic and social thinkers, Ira Steward, ‘The way out of the wage
system is through higher wages, resultant only from shorter
hours.” ’’* The reader should note well the little word only, for
it represented Steward’s actual thought, and it represented the
dominant wage theory of the American Federation during its first
ten proselyting years. In his autobiography Mr. Gompers testi-
fied to his debt to Ira Steward, George E. McNeill and George
Gunton, as leaders of the earlier movement.” They furnished the
idea, and Mr. Gompers hammered out the organization to make
the idea effective.
Let us look first at the idea as enunciated by Steward. In
his pamphlet on ‘‘The Eight-Hour Movement. A Reduction of
Hours is an Increase of Wages,’’ published by the Boston Labor
Reform Association in 1865, he states his ultimate aim thus:
‘The simple increase of wages is the first step on that long road
which ends at last in a more equable distribution of the fruits of
toil. For Wages will continue to increase until the Capitalist
and Laborer are one. But we must confine ourselves first to the
simple fact that a reduction of Hours is an increase of Wages.’
This last revolutionary proposition, which became the corner-
stone of American Federation thinking, he proceeded to demon-
strate in the following series of propositions :
1 Proceedings of the A. F. of L., 1890, p. 13.
> Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor, Vol. I, pp, 59, 209, 290.
* Steward. Ira. The Eight-Hour Movement, p. 6.
