Agnes is no longer to be a milliner, but has got an appointment as a seamstress. There will be no great demand for fine head-gear, or gew-gaws of any kind now. From all I hear the new scheme of supply aims solely at the production of all articles _en masse_. Hence it follows, as a matter of course, that there will be but a very limited demand for skilled labour, taste, and what more or less approaches to art in trade. But it is all the same to Agnes, and she says she doesn’t care what they do with her so long as she can’t share her lot with Franz. They forget, as I told them, that even Providence itself could not serve all alike to their full content. “Then they should have left each one to look after himself,” interrupted Franz; “we could never have been so badly off under the old system.”
In order to pacify them somewhat, I read to them out of the _Onward_ a statement in tabular form dealing with the selections of trades people had made, and with the labour assignments to them. A greater number of persons had registered themselves as gamekeepers than there are hares within forty miles’ circumference of Berlin. From the number of entries made the Government would have no difficulty in posting a hall-porter at every single door in Berlin: every tree could have its forester, every horse its groom. There are a great many more nurse-girls than kitchen-maids registered; more coachmen than ostlers. The number of young women who have put their names down as waitresses and public singers is very considerable, but this superabundance is balanced by the paucity of those who desire to become sick-nurses. There is no lack of salesmen and saleswomen. The same remark applies to inspectors, managers, foremen, and similar positions; there is even no scarcity of acrobats. The entries for the more arduous labours of the pavior, the stoker, the smelter are more sparse. Those who have manifested a desire to become cleansers of sewers are, numerically, not a strong body.
Under these circumstances, what has the Government to do in order to bring their scheme for organising production and consumption into some sort of harmony with the entries made by the people? Should Government attempt a settlement by fixing a lower rate of wages for those branches which showed any over-crowding, and a higher rate for those labours which were not so coveted? This would be a subversion of the fundamental principles of Socialism. Every kind of labour which is useful to the community (Bebel always taught) must appear of equal value in the eyes of the community. The receipt of unequal wages would soon tend to favour inequalities in the style of living; or it would enable the better paid ones to effect savings. By this latter means, and indirectly, in the course of time a capitalist class would grow up, and thus the whole socialistic system of production be thrown into disorder. Government had under its consideration the suggestion to effect a settlement of the difficulty by fixing working-days by varying lengths. The objection to this was that some violence must then inevitably be done to the natural and necessary dependence of various occupations upon each other. That matter of supply and demand, which played such a prominent part under the old reign of capital, is not to be suffered under any circumstances to come up again.