EIGHT-HOUR THEORY IN THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR 235 
the idea is or ever was true, the labor leaders found it extraor- 
dinarily useful in their business. 
Mr. Gompers in his autobiography explains the matter thus: 
“The first economic theory that came under my eyes was not 
calculated to make me think highly of economists. My mind 
intuitively rejected the iron law of wages, the immutable law of 
supply and demand, and similar so-called ‘natural laws.” * And 
again: “My method of evolving my philosophy has been 
intuitive.” * The “intuitive” method of thinking has the great 
advantage of allowing you to believe more or less what you need 
to believe, without being too strongly biased by either facts or 
logic, both of which commodities too often function only as 
excess baggage in the equipment of the practical organizer of men. 
On the side of facts and logic, the British economists who 
followed Ricardo, in trying to discover why wages went up, not 
unnaturally stumbled on capital as the controlling agent, and the 
wage-fund doctrine developed. In the United States, with its 
extraordinary natural resources, attention was no less naturally 
drawn to product as not only the source but the determinant 
of wages. Henry George and General Walker, at sword’s point 
on most matters, were agreed on this doctrine. American wage 
theory never lost this initial bent, and Professor Clark has given 
it practically final form in his specific productivity theory. Now 
Mr. Gompers and his associates just “intuitively” rejected all 
this body of theory, not because it was false, but because 
they could not use it, and because they found in the bootstrap 
theory, on the other hand, an idea that gave them practically 
unlimited scope. Perhaps, after all, it is fortunate that they 
did so. 
What is the form, then, into which the Ricardo-Steward doc- 
trine was cast by Mr. Gompers and his associates? Perhaps 
it has never been more clearly stated than in a comparatively 
late article by Frank K. Foster, one of the war-horses of 
the early Federation movement, published in the American 
Federationist for November, 1900, under the title, “Sidelights 
on the Shorter Workday Demand.” The following passages, 
with the emphasis of their author’s italics, are taken from this 
article: 
' Seventy Years of Life and Labor, Vol. II, p. 1. 
Ibid., p. 24.