234 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK 
four thirty and driving off immaculately dressed in his Buick, can 
scarcely help wondering whether a mistake was not made in clos- 
ing the canon with the book of the prophet Malachi. 
One more passage from Steward’s pamphlet deserves quota- 
tion: 
I submit, in conclusion, that the “Increase” of wages as a result 
of shorter hours does Nor mean an increase of the price of the article 
produced, as do strikes for higher Wages, when successful. In a 
reduction of Hours the Producer and Consumer will come together 
more frequently and stay longer, and the knowledge they will exchange 
will commence melting and dividing between them the profits of 
Capital. The Capitalist, as we now understand him, is to pass away 
with the Kings and Royalties of the past.? 
With which satisfactory conclusion we may leave Ira Steward 
and return to the American Federation and the student of eco- 
nomic theory. 
The standard of living or bootstrap theory of wages has not 
been popular with modern economists, though it may certainly 
claim a respectable father in the person of one David Ricardo. 
“The natural price of labor . . . varies,” as every student will 
recall, “at different times in the same country, and very mate- 
rially differs in different countries. It essentially depends on the 
habits and customs of the people.” * There is no need to enter 
into the refinements and contradictions of Ricardian theory. 
Grant only what is flatly stated in that passage, and it is only 
one step more to the position of the bootstrappers, namely, that 
labor can get more by demanding and taking more. That is what 
underlay the early eight-hour movement; that is what made the 
eight-hour idea so extraordinarily valuable to the builders of 
the American Federation. The productivity theorist who quar- 
rels with them for accepting this basic idea because, as the theorist 
says, it is not true, is simply missing the point. Whether or not 
the idea may be said to be true in the abstract, a plausible argu- 
ment, at any rate, may be made for the standard of living theory 
as explaining wages in New York cigar factories in the seventies 
and eighties, with an endless stream of European immigrants 
flowing through the city, and the margin of productivity a dim 
and distant thing on the western horizon. And whether or not 
Ibid.) p. 23. 
> Ricardo, Political Economy, Gonner’s ed., p. 7a.