220 INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND WAGES
illustrating the striking change in the attitude of industry
toward the wage-earner and the consumer, if indeed, the
two may be differentiated :*
In European industry, labor is a commodity, governed in
price by a law of supply and demand. The industrialist pre-
fers an overstocked labor market and speaks complacently of
a labor reserve, meaning by that a supply in excess of the
demand, so that labor will be docile and wages will stay
down. Simply, he is a buyer of labor, and his first rule of
profit is to cheapen what he buys.
That language was once current in this country. The low-
wage fallacy went with the pattern of industrialism as we
received it from the Old World. It was not so long ago that
American industry solidly opposed any law to restrict immi-
gration, saying it could not do without cheap European labor
to perform the manual task. It was so cheap that industry
could afford to waste it, and did waste it in a callous manner.
But the view has profoundly changed. . . .
In the automobile industry, it had been demonstrated that
by method, power and automatons the productive power of
a man could be increased in a prodigious manner, with a re-
sult divisible in three directions. The wage-earner got more
wages, the public got cheaper motor cars and the profits were
fabulous. The automobile industry offered only the most
striking example. The same principle was working in many
other places. Wages rising, costs falling, profits increasing.
What the war did was to cause a wholesale reformation of
industrial practise, under a new type of mentality, thus bring-
ing to pass all at once a change that had been bound in any
case to take place in a few years under stress of competi-
tion. . . .
There was for a long time no way of regarding wages but
as the price of labor. To think of wages as payment for
work performed, roughly measured by the quantity of output
1 “The American Book of Wonder,” by Garet Garrett; The Saturdey Eve-
ning Post, Philadelphia, January 7, 1928. See also “The American Omen,”
by Garet Garett. E. P. Dutton and Co., New York. 1928.
