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so forth and so on. Questions as to what their wages were were met with evasive answers. We knew we could employ everybody too in the United States if we put the wages low enough so that the cost of production would be sero, but we knew that we would dry up our market. We hadn't yet reached the purchaser's market theory of economics. It didn't seem a practical thing to do in either the United States or England. There wasn't anything we could do, but we questioned them about that. We were told that the wage was fixed by the government after consultation with the labor unions.

I asked a question from the floor, which was put to them through an interpreter, as to the character of these labor unions, the degree to which they had independent life. I was told that they word part of the national organization. Of course, how else would they be run? We had not yet gotten to the stage of free or captive trade unions. These words were not in use in that time, but I remember thinking, “That Russian set-up is nothing. What kind of a trade union is that? It's clear that it's a device, though maybe a good device, by which the government fixes the wages. There never were trade unions in Russia before the Revolution and it would be surprising if there were now really solid ones. This may be the best that can be done. It might be just a device