public domain, a wage-worker might soon live in his own cottage. As the
settler often did in the West, to acquire a home he might first build
two or four rooms as the rear, and, living in it, with later savings put
up the front. A house and a vegetable garden, with the increased
consequent thrift rarely in such situation lacking, would add a large
fraction to his year's earnings. Pasture for a cow in suburban city land
would add yet more. Then would this wage-earner, now his own landlord
and in part a direct producer from the soil, withdraw his children from
the labor market, where they compete for work perhaps with himself, and
send them on to school.

What would now happen should the wage-workers of the city demand higher
wages? It is hardly to be supposed that any industrial centre could
reach the stage of radical reform contemplated at this point much in
advance of others. When the labor organizations throughout the country
take hold of direct legislation, and taste of its successes, they will
nowhere halt. They will no more hesitate than does a conquering army.
Learning what has been done in Switzerland, they will go the lengths of
the Swiss radicals and, with more elbow room, further. Hence, when in
one industrial centre the governing workers should seek better terms,
similar demands from fellow laborers, as able to enforce them, would be
heard elsewhere.

The employer of our typical city, even now often unable to find outside
the unions the unemployed labor he must have, would then, should he
attempt it, to a certainty fail. The thrifty wage-working householder,
today a tenant fearful of loss of work, could then strike and stay out.
The situation would resemble that in the West twenty years ago, when
open land made the laborer his own master and wages double what they are
now. Wages, then, would perforce be moved upward, and hours be