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