“You mean the working-man doesn’t get more, even when he produces more?”

“Take the case of the glass factories.  Men used to get eight dollars a day there, but someone invented a machine that did the work of a dozen men, and that machine is run by a boy for fifty cents a day.”

A little pucker of thought came between her eyes.  “Might there not be a law forbidding the employer to reduce wages?”

“A minimum wage law.  But that would raise the cost of the product, and drive the trade to another state.”

She suggested a national law, and when I pointed out that the trade would go to other countries, she fell back on the tariff.  I felt like an embryologist—­watching the individual repeating the history of the race!

“Protection and prosperity!” I said, with a smile.  “Don’t you see the increase in the cost of living?  The working-man gets more money in his pay envelope, but he can’t buy more with it because prices go up.  And even supposing you could pass a minimum wage law, and stop competition in wages, you’d only change it to competition in efficiency—­you’d throw the old and the feeble and the untrained into pauperism.”

“You make the world seem a hard place to live in,” protested Sylvia.

“I’m simply telling you the elementary facts of business.  You can forbid the employer to pay less than a standard wage, but you can’t compel him to employ people who aren’t able to earn that wage.  The business-man doesn’t employ for fun, he does it for the profit there is in it.”

“If that is true,” said Sylvia, quickly, “then the way of employing people is cruel.”

“But what other way could you have?”

She considered.  “They could be employed so that no one would make a profit.  Then surely they could be paid enough to live decently!”

“But whose interest would it be to employ them without profit?”

“The State should do it, if no one else will.”

I had been playing a game with Sylvia, as no doubt you have perceived.  “Surely,” I said, “you wouldn’t approve anything like that!”

“But why not?”

“Because, it would be Socialism.”

She looked at me startled.  “Is that Socialism?”

“Of course it is.  It’s the essence of Socialism.”

“But then—­what’s the harm in it?”

I laughed.  “I thought you said that Socialism was a menace, like divorce!”

I had my moment of triumph, but then I discovered how fond was the person who imagined that he could play with Sylvia.  “I suspect you are something of a Socialist yourself,” she remarked.