wouldn't be any labor unions, and there wouldn't be any strikes."

"That is all very well," said the lawyer, from that judicial mind which I
always liked in him, "as far as the strikes are concerned, but I don't
understand that the abolition of the unions would affect the impersonal
process of 'laying off.' The law of demand and supply I respect as much as
any one--it's something like the constitution; but, all the same, I should
object extremely to have my income stopped by it every now and then. I'm
probably not so wasteful as a working-man generally is; still, I haven't
laid by enough to make it a matter of indifference to me whether my income
went on or not. Perhaps the professor has." The professor did not say, and
we all took leave to laugh. The lawyer concluded: "I don't see how those
fellows stand it."

"They don't, all of them," said the doctor. "Or their wives and children
don't. Some of them die."

"I wonder," the lawyer pursued, "what has become of the good old American
fact that there is always work for those who are willing to work? I notice
that wherever five thousand men strike in the forenoon, there are five
thousand men to take their places in the afternoon--and not men who are
turning their hands to something new, but men who are used to doing the
very thing the strikers have done."

"That is one of the things that teach the futility of strikes," the
professor made haste to interpose, as if he had not quite liked to appear
averse to the interests of the workman; no one likes to do that. "If there
were anything at all to be hoped from them, it would be another matter."

"Yes, but that isn't the point, quite," said the lawyer.