reasonable wages--and require the same hours--reasonable hours--
then higher wages and shorter hours will hurt no employer.
Moreover, such action is better for the employer than unemployment
and low wages, because it makes more buyers for his product. That
is the simple idea which is the very heart of the Industrial
Recovery Act.

On the basis of this simple principle of everybody doing things
together, we are starting out on this nationwide attack on
unemployment. It will succeed if our people understand it--in the
big industries, in the little shops, in the great cities and in the
small villages. There is nothing complicated about it and there is
nothing particularly new in the principle. It goes back to the
basic idea of society and of the nation itself that people acting
in a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone
could even hope to bring about.

Here is an example. In the Cotton Textile Code and in other
agreements already signed, child labor has been abolished. That
makes me personally happier than any other one thing with which I
have been connected since I came to Washington. In the textile
industry--an industry which came to me spontaneously and with a
splendid cooperation as soon as the recovery act was signed--child
labor was an old evil. But no employer acting alone was able to
wipe it out. If one employer tried it, or if one state tried it,
the costs of operation rose so high that it was impossible to
compete with the employers or states which had failed to act. The
moment the Recovery Act was passed, this monstrous thing which
neither opinion nor law could reach through years of effort went
out in a flash. As a British editorial put it, we did more under a