STATIC STATE AND THE TECHNOLOGY OF ECONOMIC REFORM 37
they would encourage early marriage and large families among
the employing classes, while practicing the opposite themselves.
However, it sometimes happens that the spokesmen for the
laborers play into the hands of the employing classes by advocat-
ing, mainly on sentimental grounds, the opposite policy.
Again, if it should be found that one cause of low equilibrium
wages In certain occupations is the lack of educational oppor-
tunities, the remedy may be applied at the source by providing
such opportunities. It must be admitted that certain economic
optimists have placed too much dependence upon an assumed
natural mobility of labor. In the absence of first-class educa-
tional opportunities there is no such mobility. Children who
grow up in families who are too poor to pay the cost of educa-
tion are practically doomed to follow those occupations for which
no education is necessary. A system of free and universal educa-
tion, especially if it is directed toward practical ends, greatly
increases the mobility of labor. It gives every young person a
wider choice of occupations. It is not, of course, pretended that
the field of choice is unlimited, but it helps somewhat even if the
number of choices open to the individual is only slightly increased.
This gives him some opportunity to avoid the less attractive and
seek the more attractive occupations. Again, the mobility is not
achieved mainly by enabling the man or woman of middle age
to shift from one occupation to another, though something may be
done even here. Greater mobility is achieved when the oncoming
stream of youth seeking occupations is enabled to spread itself
more widely instead of being compelled through lack of education
to concentrate itself in the unskilled occupations.
Such an improvement of the educational system as will give
every young person as much education as he is capable of
utilizing will raise the equilibrium wage in the occupations that
were previously poorly paid. When large numbers have no
choice but to enter the unskilled occupations, then at a very
low wage as many will offer themselves in these occupa-
tions as employers are willing to employ; but when every young
person has a wider choice of occupations it will take a higher wage
in these occupations that were formerly poorly paid to induce
as many to enter them as employers are willing to employ. If
the educational system is comprehensive,—if it aims not merely
to transform unskilled into skilled manual workers. but to move