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the investigation of these problems economical considerations should be rightly combined with ideas of industrial organization and evolution. As harmony is restored between capital and labour, as employers and employed gradually cease to be opposed, and meet together and co-operate in mutual trust, equally animated with the conception of peaceably working out the great ends before them, the evolution of the industrial organization will go on. Its movement will reveal the laws by which it moves, and progress, from being purely empirical, will tend to become, more and more as time goes on, conscious, intentional, and systematic.

It would not be difficult to propound a number of questions which want a scientific answer; but the questions relate to wages. What limit can be put to the fluctuations in wages? How are such limits to be imposed? What sacrifices are necessary on the part of employers and employed? Is it not possible to fix the fluctuation to part of the wages, so that one part would be fixed, the other fluctuating? Then, if so, what laws regulate the proportion of the fixed to the unfixed, in the different branches of

human industry? As new experiments are instituted, it will become possible to find out the laws evolved by new conditions and new industrial facts. Such laws, being concrete and not abstract, are precisely those laws that are capable of being directly applied to practice. As I have said before, it is to the advanced and large-minded employers that we must look for the working out of such practical problems. The guiding truths are not to be sought deductively, but discovered inductively by the study and examination of the actual industrial phenomena. We shall do well to reflect on what John Stuart Mill has said on this, that "society can subject the distribution of wealth to whatever rules it thinks best; but what practical results will flow from the operation of those rules must be discovered, like any other physical or mental truths, by observation and reasoning."

This book has been written with the sole object and hope of helping this great cause on. Each effort upon the onward march has its effect. It is by our united and associated efforts that our progress is assured, and I have sought only to

bring to others "the lamps of invention, and not the firebrands of contradiction." To me it seems difficult to point to any set of men in history, certainly to none in modern history, on whom a greater and more important duty rested, than at the present moment devolves upon the English capitalists. They have to solve the industrial problem of the world, to discover the truths on which it must depend, and, putting aside the preconceived notions and prejudices of the past, to urge forward the final industrial and social re-organization towards which we are now moving. There cannot be a nobler or more sacred work for men to do.

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