Trade Societies and the Social Science Association.¹

By J. M. Ludlow.

Part First.

I suppose there is no subject on which it is so easy to find equally sincere and able men holding diametrically opposite opinions,—none on which it is so easy for the same men sincerely to pass from one extreme of opinion to the other,—as that of trade societies. No doubt opinion runs on such a subject in great measure according to class, and varies according to position. The workman is in favour of trade societies, the employer is adverse to them; the strong trades-unionist who merges into the rank of an employer—witness Lovejoy the bookbinder in Mr. Dunning's interesting account of the Bookbinder's Trade Society (Report, p. 83.)—often becomes in turn the strongest of anti-unionists; and probably, if the passage from the position of employer to that of journeyman were not as rare as the inverse transformation is frequent, the anti-unionist employer of to-day would, if reduced to weekly wages, deem many an argument on behalf of trade societies weighty which he now holds worthless. But class interests are far from accounting for the diversity of opinion which exists. There are employers who deem trade societies beneficial; there are working men who combat them with all their might.

The fact is, I take it, that trade societies will be found, at some one place or time or the other, to have justified almost every most opposite opinion which has been held respecting them. They have been schools of assassination; they have been schools of morality. They have promoted drunkenness; they have vigorously checked it. They have encouraged laziness and bad work; they have strenuously battled for solidity and honest workmanship. They have been composed of the dregs of the trade; they have gathered together the pick of it. They have been led by selfish and designing spouters; they have had for leaders the most virtuous men of the class. They have thwarted the most benevolent employers; they have been their best of friends, their main support against the unprincipled. They have promoted and organized strikes; they have kept the trade free from them during the life-time of a generation.

And who, that knows what the working classes of this country are to the present day—how various in intelligence, education, morality, manliness, from trade to trade, from district to district, from town to town,—ay, from one end of a large town to the other—will wonder

¹ Trade Societies and Strikes. Report of the Committee on Trade Societies, appointed by the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, presented to the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Association, at Glasgow, September, 1860. (J. W. Parker & Son.)

page 314 at these diversities? Looked at in the simplest point of view, trade societies are nothing but the effort of the wages-receiving class to realize, trade by trade, a corporate existence. "What wonder that they should be what the wages-receivers are themselves? that they should vary in character with the working men who compose them?

To form an opinion, therefore, as to the tendencies of trade societies in general, it is absolutely necessary to discard those accidentals which belong, not to the instrument, but to the material out of which it has to be wrought; just as it is absolutely necessary, judging of the value of any particular trade society, to bear those accidentals in mind. Now the mischief is, that the very reverse process is generally followed. Trade societies in general are condemned, because some "Edinburgh Reviewer" has brought together half a dozen raw-head-and-bloody-bones stories against a few particular sets of trades-unionists; an unjust and injudicious strike by a trade society is supported by workmen of other trades, because they know their own society to be moderate and beneficial. For myself, I confess, so thick are the clouds of prejudice, arising from their own narrow experience, which I find generally to dim the sight of so-called practical men especially, that I mostly remain quite satisfied when a man comes simply to the negative conclusion, that "there is a great deal to be said on both sides," especially if coupled with a firm determination never again to take on trust any rhetoric of Times' or other "able editors" on the subject of any strike or society, but carefully to examine the facts for himself.

It is not, indeed, for want of inquiry that such ignorance continues to prevail. Parliamentary committees on trade combinations have sat and reported in 1824, in 1825, in 1838; not to speak of the evidence bearing on the subject which has incidentally been received by other committees, such as that of last year on Mr. Mackinnon's bill for councils of arbitration. Parliamentary inquiries again have been followed by a voluntary one on the part of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, whose council appointed in 1858 a Committee to consider the subject. This Committee, whose report appeared last autumn, and of which I had the honour to be a member, comprised amongst its members Sir James Shuttleworth, Lord Radstock, Lord Robert Montagu and Messrs. Buxton and Freeland, M.P.s, Sir. John Ball, the Rev. E. D. Maurice, Mr. E Akroyd, Sir. W. E Forster, Mr. H. Fawcett, Sir. T. Hughes, Dr. Farr, and other well-known names, ranging, it may be said, through all the compass of political and social, and, in great measure, of religious opinion. The papers annexed to the report comprise ten accounts of strikes or lock-outs, two accounts of trade combinations in particular towns, one account of a particular trade society, abstracts of Parliamentary papers relating to trade combinations, and other documents. And, believing as I do that there is some definite conclusion to be come to on the subject of trade societies, I venture to hope that the volume in question may help a few to such a conclusion. Scarcely, however, by the report which heads the volume—never, indeed, in its ultimate shape, even submitted to the Committee, although practically it no doubt expresses "on the whole the views of a majority" of that Committee, but which, like any other report purporting to represent the opinions of a mixed body, can never in fact be much more than a string of successive minimums of disagreement;—rather by the mass of materials which the Committee has brought together, in somewhat handier shape, and in something more of order, than a Blue-book would probably have afforded. No doubt that mass of materials exhibits all the discordance of which I have spoken,—proving thereby, indeed, its value as a mirror of the facts;—no doubt prejudice and bad faith will be able to use it as an arsenal for the support of the most opposite views. But, for the thoughtful and candid, the very juxta-position of so many jarring elements will induce the effort to reduce them to unity,—like a page 315 Babel clangour of strange tongues, suggesting the need of some deeper union than that of words.

Looking, therefore, from a higher point of view, the first question that offers itself is this:—Is it requisite, is it advantageous that the operative classes should thus seek to realize for themselves a distinct corporate or quasi-corporate class existence? Prom the point of view of the old guild system, the answer must decidedly be a negative one. The principle of that system is, that the distinction between master and journeyman should be simply one of degree. We have so long outgrown that system, that we use the one remnant of it which still lives in our language—the word "masterpiece"—without, for the most part, a thought of its real meaning, and of the vastly different sphere of commercial ideas and practices from those of the present day to which it bears witness; so that, indeed, for most of us, it is only by way of Germany, whore that system, though effete, still lingers, that we realize the meaning of the term. But at a time when the difference between master and workman was not that the one had capital and the other only labour, but that the one had a skill and experience which the other had not yet attained to, and of which the last tangible demonstration was required to be some work of peculiar excellence in the common calling, there were properly speaking no classes of masters and workmen; and a society embodying the class interests of either would have been simply out of place. The class was the trade—tailors, coopers, weavers, or the like; in the guild which embodied it, the master-tailors, master-coopers, master-weavers, had the natural pre-eminence of skill and seniority; if they were privileged to employ others, it was simply by virtue of that pre-eminence, and of the acknowledged right which it gave them to direct and instruct the less able and less experienced.

But such a state of things can never last long in its efficiency. It has for sure dissolvent the accumulation of capital, which the progress of society at once calls into being and renders necessary, and of which the inevitable result is to change the conditions of mastership, and to transfer the privilege of employing others in a given labour from the skilled man to the moneyed one. From the moment that, to establish a given business, more capital is required than a journeyman can easily accumulate within a few years, guild-mastership—the mastership of the masterpiece—becomes little more than a name. The attempt to keep up the strictness of its conditions becomes only an additional weight on the poorer members of the trade; skill alone is valueless, and is soon compelled to hire itself out to capital. The revolution is now complete; the capitalist is the true master, whether he calls himself such or not; the labourer, skilled or unskilled, be he called master or journeyman, is but the servant of the former. Now begins the opposition of interest between employers and employed; now the latter begin to group themselves together; now rises the trade society.

From Mr. F. D. Longe's sketch of the "History of Legislation in England relating to Combinations of Workmen," reprinted in the volume I have referred to, it will be seen that the beginning of this great social revolution may be traced back somewhat over five centuries, and that as early as the reign of Edward III. our building operatives were at work combining to raise wages. Mr. Longe quotes the 34th Edward III. c. 9, to show us the legislature forbidding "all alliances and covines of masons and "carpenters, and congregations, chapters, "ordinances, and oaths betwixt them." The statute is remarkable as showing the co-existence of the two masterships, that of skill and of capital; thus, the "chief masters of carpenters and masons" are to receive fourpence a day, and the others threepence or twopence according as they be worth; but every mason and carpenter, "of whatever condition he be," is to be compelled by "his master whom he serves" to do every work that pertains to him,—where, as it seems to me, the guild-masters are designated by the former expression, and the capitalist- page 316 masters by the latter. It may comfort some readers to find that the struggle between capitalist and labourer, which embodies itself in trade societies and employers' associations, and has its battlefields in strikes, has thus lasted in English society without destroying it for half a millennium; it may sadden others to think that half a millennium has been worn away in that struggle, without finding as yet a solution to it.

But there is another important conclusion to be drawn from the statute which I have just referred to, as confirming what reflection would naturally suggest as the historical development of the subject Evidently, from the moment that the element of capitalist-mastership came in, it was one which not only claimed supremacy over that of skill-mastership, but which tended to reduce the whole idea and system of the guild to a lower level, and to confine, it to the operative class, so that the guild would necessarily merge in the trade society. And this is precisely what the statute exhibits to us. The statute is directed against the requiring of weekly wages, and of too high an amount; it enacts that they shall be paid by the day, and fixes the rate of them; and for this purpose it endeavours to break up the machinery of the wages-receiving class for insisting on other conditions. Now the attempt, on the part of the wages-receivers, to fix the conditions of labour and the amount of its remuneration, is precisely the work of a modern trade society. But when we notice that the wages of master-masons and carpenters are sought to be fixed,—when we pay attention to the "congregations, chapters, ordinances, and oaths" which are forbidden, it is impossible, I think, to mistake the fact, that we have before us precisely such an instance as I have sketched out, of guilds sinking to a, lower level; forced, after embodying the collecive interests of the whole trade, to [unclear: enbody] henceforth only those of the [unclear: operative] portion of it, yet naturally carrying with them, and seeking to retain and exercise, those habits of regulation and authority which were formerly their [unclear: natunl] privilege.

Much light is, I think, thrown upon the subject, when we thus see that the trade society of our days is but the lopsided representative of the old guild, its dwarfed but lawful heir. The historical pertinacity of its struggle against statutory prohibition,—its assumptions of authority,—are thus in great measure explained. It has fought the law on the ground of a prior title; it has dictated to the masters in the name of the shadow of a past corporation. No doubt, when it had once assumed its present character, organizations for the same purpose would spring up, entirely destitute of any historical filiation. But whoever reflects on many common terms of the workman's language,—the word "trade," as signifying the collective operative portion of the trade, the word "tradesman," as synonymous with the workman in a trade,—will see in them additional evidences of the connexion between the old guild and the modern trade society. In some cases, indeed, there is historical proof of the identity between the two; as will be seen in Mr. F. H. Hill's very valuable "Account of Trade Combinations at Sheffield," in which the filiation of the modern trade societies of that town from the "Fellowship of Cutlers in Hallam-shire" in the reign of Queen Elizabeth is clearly shown.

Of course the claim of the wages-receivers, when, through the introduction of capitalist-mastership, they represented only a portion of the trade, to act in the name and with the authority of the old guild, when it embodied the whole, was one perfectly untenable. If working-men's combinations were to stand, they must stand upon some other ground than that of representing a paramount collective authority. But the scission of interests between the capitalist-employer and his workmen at once afforded such a ground. Putting the subject of wages for the present entirely out of the question, it is evident that the whole burthen of the charitable purposes flowing out of the guild system must henceforth fall mainly, if not exclusively, on the wages-receivers. The capitalist-employer, even if nominally still a member page 317 of the guild or fellowship, owed nothing to it but the strictest legal dues. The higher wages he paid, the less he would deem himself bound to provide for the maintenance of the aged or infirm journeyman, for his decent interment, for his widow and children. Yet working-men saw every day their fellows helpless with ago and infirmities, their families reduced to beggary. All right-feeling men would seek to preserve the guild organization for such purposes; where it had perished, all right-feeling men would seek to form some new one with the like view. And I cannot help thinking that many of the stringent trade-society regulations as to apprenticeship, which are inveighed against as deep-laid plots against economic principles, are originally the simple expression of parental providence on the part of the working-man. At a time when book-education, so to speak, did not exist—when facilities of locomotion were small—when every trade, even if not regulated from within, was regulated more or less by Act of Parliament from without,—what education could the father give to the son, except in his own trade? Of what avail would that education be, unless a field were provided for its exercise? This, I think, comes out very clearly in the "Acts and Ordinances" of the Hallam-shire cutlers, as quoted by Mr. Hill (see p. 523 of the volume), where it will be seen that every restriction against the exercise of the trade falls before those who have been "taught by their fathers."

Be this as it may, it will easily be seen how, apart from those trade societies which are directly descended from the old guilds or fellowships, another class must have arisen from the need of providing amongst working-men for those purposes which were formerly embraced in those of the guild, which are now mostly reached by the machinery of the Friendly Societies' Acts. Accordingly, the Committee's volume affords several instances of trade societies which began by being benefit societies. In discussing the question of the advantage of a connexion between benefit societies and trade societies, the Committee appear to me to have overlooked this fact, which is nevertheless not without importance. Friendly societies having been only endowed with legal existence in the latter half of the last century, it is obvious that during 400 out of the 500 years during which the trade societies' struggle has lasted, it was only by means of a trade society organization that the workers in a given trade—other than such as might here and there have retained some old legal corporate privileges—could compass the purposes of a benefit society. The connexion between the two is, therefore, historically not an external accident; it flows, on the contrary, primarily from the mere effort to band the workers together for purposes of common benefit. The accident, on the contrary, has been the enactment of the Friendly Societies' Acts, which, by affording peculiar facilities for securing certain benefits by combination, has disconnected those purposes from the others, and raised the question of disconnecting also the machineries for attaining them.

Of the extent to which trade societies, so called, which are also benefit societies, dispense relief for what are strictly benefit society purposes, few who have not examined into the fact can have any idea. I take up the volume of the yearly reports of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and I find that it spent in 1853 for sick, superannuation, funeral, and accident benefit, 6,054,l., making 11s. 3d. per member; in 1854, 6,145l., making 10s. 7d. per member; in 1855, 7,230l., making 11s. 6½d; in 1856, 8,017l., making 11s. 11½d.; in 1857, 9,821l., making 13s. 5½d.; in all, for the five years, upwards of 37,000l., which one must hold to have been directly saved to the public in the shape of poor-law relief or charity, by the providence of these much-abused agitators.

But there is one mischance to which the worker is subject, more dreaded, more frequent, more constantly recurrent than sickness, disabling accident, or any other evil attendant upon his calling,— page 318 want of work. Continuous employment is the lot but of a very small minority in any trade. There is scarcely any but has its slacks or dead seasons, amounting generally to at least a month, sometimes extending to three or four in the year. How is the worker to provide against this? By individual saving? The requirement implies at least, be it observed, that the wages of eleven months' work, of ten, of nine, of eight, shall be sufficient for the year's maintenance; but, without following out this remark into its ultimate consequences, let it be noticed at once how hardly such a requirement bears upon the young man, before he has begun to save, and with all the impulses of youth upon him, all its temptations about him. Evidently, the mere need of providing for the event of want of work, for the labour of proceeding in search of it, begets the idea of forming a common purse, of securing against individual imprudence by collective organization. Hence another ground for the trade society, which indeed was insisted on by the minority of the Sub-Committee by which the conclusions of the Report were drawn up. I am myself unable to see why the chances of want of work (for any cause exclusive of strikes) should not be quite as capable of being reduced to an average, and should not supply a purpose quite as worthy to be included amongst those of legalized Friendly Societies, as those of sickness, old age &C.; and I consider it a serious blot in our Friendly Societies' Acts, that they do not so include it. At any rate the purpose is one which must be provided for by every working man, and, by all but the most exemplary cannot be sufficiently compassed except by means of a collective organization. To require them therefore to separate the relief of the unemployed from the relief of other social needs in the trade is really to call upon them to maintain two separate organizations, where one would otherwise suffice.

Now this function of trade societies, in maintaining the unemployed, and equalizing the pressure on the labour market by supplying them with the means of travel, is one of enormous importance to themselves, and it is only by dwelling upon it that we can understand the totally opposite points of view from which trade societies are looked at by the working classes, and by the general public. The general public practically never sees them but through the heated and distorting medium of a strike atmosphere; or, to use a different image, the strike is the sole point of contact between the one sphere and the other. For the working man on the contrary, it can never be too often repeated that the strike is but an accident in the history of his trade society.¹ He looks to it above all as a hand stretched out to him in all his needs. In such a year the firm that employed him failed, and he received donation during so many weeks. In such another year trade was very slack in the neighbourhood where he was employed, and he received tramp allowance to go to a distant county. In such another he fell sick; in such another he was temporarily disabled by accident, and still from the same source flowed the aid which he received. He knows that, if he reaches a certain age, he will receive his superannuation allowance; he knows that, if he be called away by death, his widow will not have to ruin herself in giving him decent burial, and will herself receive something towards her support. True, there was that disastrous strike in the year 18—when the society's full purse got drained, and none but the most urgent cases of sickness were helped, and sore were his own privations. But what of that once in a life-time? Contributions flowed in all the more abundantly the very next year after the strike. His society does not exist for that; it exists to enable working men to make the best of their earnings, and live and die comfortable. What do you mean by talking about trade societies as mere hotbeds of agitation? He only knows that he would have had to

¹ I cannot help regretting the multiplication in the Committee's volume of accounts of strikes, as compared with those of trade combinations in themselves, as being likely to foster the error which I am combating.

page 319 go to the poor house many a time, but for his society. Most truly is it said by Mr. Hill, "The efficiency of trades societies in saving their unemployed workmen, not always thrown out of employment by a strike or dispute with their masters, from destitution and the degradation of parish relief, is a point which is much insisted on by the members of those societies. They are, to a great extent, designed, whether wisely or not, for the relief and commodity of the poorer sort of their respective fellowships." Accordingly, we find that in general the largest individual item in the expenditure of the funds of a trade society is that of relief to the unemployed, quite irrespective of strikes. Thus—to refer still to the Amalgamated Society,—the amount of "donation benefit" dispensed by that body is generally double that of "sick benefit."

We have thus three classes of trade societies already—trade societies lineally descended from the old guilds,—trade societies formed for general purposes of mutual relief,—trade societies formed originally, or mainly existing, for that purpose of mutual relief which the Friendly Societies' Acts do not recognize, viz. the maintenance of the unemployed. All these three forms, it will be observed, have in them nothing aggressive, nothing militant. There remains to examine the fourth form, that which rests upon or is developed out of the actual antagonism between capital and labour.

I say the antagonism between capital and labour. There are writers and speakers, who talk glibly of political economy, and yet complacently assert that there is no such antagonism. Such men either never have read political economy—I speak simply of the present plutonomic school—or are incapable of understanding it, or seek to befool their hearers. If there is one thing which, while plain to the child, is patent to any student of Ricardo or Mill, it is that the interest of the buyer of labour is to buy cheap, that of the seller to sell dear; or, to speak in Mr. Mill's more imposing language, that "the rate of profit and the cost of labour vary inversely as one another." The fact of capitalist-master-ship, therefore, in constituting an employer-class interested, for the sake of their own profits, in buying labour cheap, developed necessarily in the wages-receiving class a counter-interest in selling their labour dear, and tended to organize the latter on the ground of that common interest. Hence the latest, most characteristic form of trade society—that which aims at regulating the conditions of the sale of labour, from the sole point of view of the interest of the labourer. The four chief fields of operation for such a society are obviously: 1st. The hours of labour; 2nd. The admission of workers to the market; 3d. The rate of wages; 4th. The methods of work.

Now, so long as the capitalist-class as such subsists,—so long as it claims to act in the bargain of labour upon the dictates of its class interest,—it is insulting to common sense to say, not only that the workers have no right to combine against it on the ground of their class interest, but that they are not likely to be benefited by such combination. If they are not, then Æsop was an idiot, and the fable of the bundle of sticks is a madman's raving and not the teaching of the commonest experience, and Mr. Mill's or Mr. Wakefield's paragraphs on the subject of "co-operation, or the combination of labour," must be consigned to the flames. For what is, to begin with, any capitalist-employer towards the workers, but as many employers rolled up in one as there are workers whom he seeks to employ; employers bound together into a harmony, and power, and fixity of purpose such as no sworn brotherhood of assassins could attain to? Suppose he has employment for three hundred men; suppose no more than that number apply to him, but singly and without previous concert: He has practically the pick of all their several necessities and weaknesses, through which to obtain in every case those minimum wages which best suit his interests—his immediate interests at least—as a profit-maker. The wariest and boldest of them have no such chance page 320 against him; and each concession by a needier or weaker fellow-workman diminishes their power of resistance. Isolate that struggle, and I say that, so long as there is no combination amongst the workmen, and no appeal to physical force, the necessary result will be that the capitalist employer, by sheer force of unity of interest and will, will end by reducing the 300 men, through the mere processes of the bargain and sale of labour, to as abject a state of slavery—as he may think consistent with his profits.

I am not, of course, drawing from nature. I am supposing a cast-iron employer—a pattern plutonomist—entirely occupied with the problem of reducing his cost of production so as to enhance his profit, and ready to descend to any meanness for the purpose. I am supposing a set of operatives—the model men of newspaper-writers and master builders' associations—entirely devoted to the assertion of the "right" of the employed "individually to make any trade-engagements on which they may choose to agree." I know well enough that in our factory districts especially the process is far other; that the preponderance of capital asserts itself there in quite an opposite shape, the mill-owner rather taking a pride in not descending into particulars in fixing a rate of wages which the operatives may take or not as they please. I know indeed also that extreme as the case is, it could be very nearly paralleled in several instances taken from those employments where machinery has not been introduced, especially those which are carried on by home labour. It has happened repeatedly, it may happen to this day—in the various trades connected with clothing particularly, but also in others, the cheap East-end gilding-trade, for instance—that workers have been brought together on a placarded offer of employment, with the direct purpose of extracting from the miseries of the neediest, and then imposing, if practicable, upon the others, the lowest obtainable rate of wages.

At any rate, the abstract possibility of the process is sufficient to show that, when the bargain and sale of labour is treated, upon the principles of modem political economy, as a struggle between adverse interests, the interest of the worker cannot be adequately supported against the interest of the employer, except by a combination of as many men as the employer is ready to employ. Many sincere and well-meaning employers stop at this point. They are willing to admit, in the fullest manner, the right of their own workmen to associate together, and to deal with them as a quasi-corporate body; they deny the right of their workers to associate themselves with any strangers from without the mill or factory. Such persons forget, in the first instance, that mighty overweight which I have pointed out on the master's side, of his singleness of will and continuity of purpose. Hut the master has generally various other advantages. To say nothing of superior intellect and education,—in all the less paid trades, where wages scarcely, if at all, above the minimum requisite for the support of life, by no means imply a rate of profit below the average, he has often a power of reduction of personal expenditure, till it reach that minimum, sufficient to countervail the collective retrenchments of very many of his operatives. If his firm he a well-established one, he has, moreover, generally "something to the good,"—a nest-egg in the funds, in railway shares or debentures, gas shares, mortgages, land, &C.,—constituting an additional reserve-power, which may easily be more than equivalent to the collective savings of all his workpeople. Lastly, if, before even he has saved anything out of profits, he is known to be prosperous, or deemed capable of prospering, he possesses, in the shape of credit, reckoned not only upon his business capital, which is supposed an equivalent force to the labour it could employ, but upon his fixed capital, and upon any other resources which he may be presumed to have, a further power, against which his workmen have nothing to set off but the collective amounts of the slender credit of page 321 each, with landlord (supposing landlord and employer to be two), baker, grocer, &C. Taking all these into account, I think it will be seen that, as a general rule, the combination power of the workmen of a given establishment represents—in "the haggling of the labour-market"—a power greatly inferior to that of the employer; that those workmen are fully justified, for the defence of their own class interest, in extending their combinations to much greater numbers of their fellows.

No doubt the scale weighs often the other way. There may be peculiarities in the manufacture, which render the labour required a practical monopoly. The employer, instead of having money saved, may be trading upon borrowed capital, in mortgaged mills, with mortgaged machinery; or he may be simply young and inexperienced in the face of an old and well-disciplined trade society. But, beyond himself, the employer—unless quite exceptionally unpopular—is sure to find support in that "tacit but constant and uniform combination" of masters, spoken of by Adam Smith, which, indeed, full often now-a-days takes the form of an organized society. The inexperience or imprudence of one employer is therefore made up for by the experience and shrewdness of others, and it may safely be said that seldom can the workmen of a single employer engage in a contest with him one day, without having to face the chance of seeing the whole employer-class (in their department) of the town or district arrayed against them on the morrow. I forbear to push the hypothesis any further; but any one who studies the history of the late London building strike, for instance, will see that the indirect assistance from without the trade afforded to the master builders, in the shape of forbearance to enforce contracts, can scarcely have been less, if at all, than the direct assistance supplied in money subscriptions from without to the building operatives.

As a mere question, therefore, of the ponderation of forces in the bargain of labour, I do not see how any dispassionate man can fix a limit beyond which trade combinations of workmen are not justified in defence of their class interest. I do not pretend for a moment to say that, by means of such combinations, the class interest of the worker may not preponderate. However it may suit some employers to gloss over the fact that trade societies often have the better of them, the number of successful strikes which take place is surprising, when the question is looked into; the number of concessions to the fear of a strike may be surmised, but cannot be reckoned. Sometimes the inferiority of the employers is patent and avowed; as may be seen in the history of the Padiham strike, from the circular of the "Committee of the Lancashire Master Spinners and Manufacturers Defence Society" (see pp. 447-8), which declares that "the" Padiham masters could not have made head" against the men's union without the support of the masters of other towns; or, again, in the history of Shipwrights' Trade Combinations in Liverpool, which shows us the Liverpool shipwrights practically masters, not only of their own employers, but of the town itself for a series of years. But these instances—most of which indeed are explainable by peculiarity of circum-stances—do not in the least impair the worker's plea for combination, as his main safeguard against the overweight of capital in the bargain of labour.

Newspaper political economists, in-deed, never tire of teaching the working man that wages depend on demand and supply, and, therefore, that trade societies cannot affect them. Why, it is precisely because they depend upon demand and supply—the demand of living men's capital, the supply of living men's labour—that trade societies can affect them. A leading defect in the science of political economy, as taught by the plutonomic school, is its frequent—not indeed constant—forgetfulness of the human will, as an economic force. It generally strives to drag man and his actions from the sphere of spontaneousness down into that of fatality; to treat him as a blind creature led by page 322 fixed instincts, and not as one endowed with free-will, capable of all degradation, capable of all self-devotion. Now in the bargain and sale of labour, the will of man plays on either side a part which it suits the plutonomist to overlook, but which is most real; and it is precisely that play of human wills which limits the realm within which all trade organizations of masters and men have their appointed work. The cases are, indeed, comparatively rare in which will does not form an element of price. The well-to-do classes in any country always could pay much higher for the necessaries of life than in ordinary times they do; but they do not choose to do so; their will limits the price they pay to the standard fixed by others, though, perhaps, oftener than they think, a little enhanced for them. Conversely, our best plutonomists themselves, such as Mr. Mill, recognize the enhancing effect of the will upon price in the case of domestic servants; since, as he truly says, "most persons who can afford it, pay to their domestic servants higher wages than would purchase in the market the labour of persons fully as competent to the work required." To this influence of the will must be traced in great measure the differences in price between one part of a town and another, between one shop and another, and even between town and town. In the daily experience of life, we know perfectly that we can get a given article at a lower price in one place than we can in another, the difference in locality being sometimes not more than the width of a street, the breadth of a bazaar. We know perfectly that the reason of such difference is simply, that the one man chooses to sell lower than another; it is only when one comes to speak of wages that "the inexorable laws of supply and demand" are treated as some almighty power whose fiats alone rule the world of labour. Now, the working man in combining does not mean in the least to deny that there are such laws; he simply claims to master and use them, just as we master and use the laws of heat and electricity. On the demand for labour he cannot much operate, but he can operate upon its supply.

It is extremely well put by Mr. Dunning, in his pamphlet on "Trades Unions and Strikes," that although, when the supply of labour "permanently much exceeds its demand, nothing can prevent the reduction of wages; and conversely when the demand for it permanently much exceeds its supply, nothing can prevent their rise,"¹ so that "at these two extreme points all contention is hopeless;" it is "the intermediate states that admit the operation of trade societies." For the so-called "artificial," but more properly spontaneous scarcity of labour which they tend to produce is, in fact, as real whilst it lasts, as the fatal one arising from the non-existence of workers. A man who will not work, whilst he will not, is as complete a zero in the labour supply as if he were dead, or had never come into the world. It is simply their trust in the fragility of the human will which inspires employers ever to resist a strike, otherwise than by the mere importation of labour from without. If they in turn had to deal with cast-iron men, men whom they knew ready for actual suicidal starvation in preference to concession, they would feel at once that the scarcity of labour was as much an absolute one, as if the earth had swallowed the working men who resist them. The real grievance of such employers against trade societies is, that by disciplining the will of the working man, they tend to harden the spontaneous scarcity of labour which they produce or regulate into a rigidity more and more approaching to the absoluteness of a fatal scarcity.

Do you blame the working man for this? Erase then first from your volumes of plutonomic oracles, all those pages and

¹ There is something quite childish in the way in which would-be instructors of the working classes incessantly point them to the rise of wages, among classes in which no trade societies exist, in proof that such societies are superfluous. Of course Mr. Dunning, and all other society men not wholly idiotic, as fully recognize the fact as they distinctly deny the conclusion.

page 323 pages which inculcate upon the labouring classes the necessity of the "prudential" check upon population. What! you bid the working man, by disciplining his will, by the severest self-restraint, for the sake of rendering his labour scarce, and, therefore, of gaining a higher price for it; you bid him, I say, bind down those family instincts which are, in one view, the very safety-valves of society; and you would fain discourage him from endeavouring, by every means which the like discipline and self-restraint can afford, to wring by combination the highest price for his labour without stifling those instincts! You insist upon the action of the will as the last and supreme resort in diminishing the supply of labour; yet, when it comes to a question of immediate demand, you afford him scarcely a glimpse of that action! Nay, you go further than this,—you make it almost a crime for him to bring into the world other men made in God's image, lest they should compete for the price of labour with himself and his fellows,—but when do you ever let fall a word of blame upon those who bring into the world to compete with him—fatally, inexorably to elbow him out—men of iron, and steel, and brass—cheap feeders upon water, and grease, and oil? They are no brethren of his, and yet you expect him to treat them tenderly when they are dashing the bread from his children's mouths; you punish him if he dare molest them; you lift up eyes and hands in scientific horror because he does not appreciate "the blessings of machinery." Of all hypocrisies which this century has seen go forth under high heaven, I know none more insolent than that of modern plutonomy, inculcating "the prudential "check" upon the working man, and advocating the unlimited, unregulated, introduction of machinery. Evidently, the will of the capitalist has at least as much to do with the begetting of the one class of competitors, as the will of the labourer with that of the other. If there is a morality of the one action, there is also of the other; if the one current of production is to go on unrestrained at the hands of the one class, why not the other too? But, above all, if the capitalist is to be allowed, for the sake of increasing his own profit, and contracting his demand for human labour, to flood the market with iron men in the shape of material machinery, why is not the labourer, for the sake of increasing his own earnings, and contracting the supply of human labour, to narrow the labour-market by any moral machinery which combination can afford to him?—I need hardly observe that I am not speaking here of the ultimate effects of machinery, which I believe to be beneficial, but simply of its immediate effects, which, with Ricardo and Mill, I believe to be often seriously detrimental to the working classes.

It is often objected, that whilst the endeavour to narrow the labour-market by combination may be successful in a given trade, yet it does not benefit the working-classes at large; that the limiting the number of competitors in one trade only tends to cause an overflow in others; that the high wages of the few only cause the low wages of the many; and writers and speakers on the subject, who deal in moralities, thereupon proceed to lecture trade societies on their selfishness. The trade society may well retort: Address your lecturing to your own class, first of all. Bid the merchant, the manufacturer, be content with the most moderate profits, lest by taking too much, he should depress the money demand for his neighbours' goods and wares; bid him abstain from enlarging his own establishment, lest by driving weaker men out of his own trade he should only be increasing the number of competitors in another. In your let-alone political economy,—in your gospel of buy-cheap-and-sell-dear,—there is no room for such moralities as you attempt to foist upon us, whilst you never recollect to quote them to our employers.

But apart from such tu quoque argumentation, I venture to say that, even if it were true that trade combinations, to use Mr. Mill's words, are to be "looked" upon as simply intrenching round a page 324 "particular spot against the inroads of over-population," they would yet he beneficia For it is not the same thing to the ountry that the same sum of 15l. should be received in wages by ten well-to-do workmen at thirty shillings, or by thirty starvelings, at ten shillings. The higher wants of the former give a stronger impulse to the circulation of capital, secure its healthier and more beneficia employment, than the abject necessities of the latter, which throw them upon inferior and often unwholesome food, inferior and insufficient clothing, and such shelter as can be but a nursery of disease and infirmity. So strongly am I convinced of this fact that, much as I loathe slavery, I consider that there is a worse social state even than that robbery of the many by the few which slavery represents,—a state of absolute universal wretchedness, in which self-sacrifice itself becomes impossible. But indeed it is obvious on a little reflection that the position, that trade combinations merely shift locally the rate of wages without being able to raise it generally, is a mere petition of principle. For it assumes that the circulating capital employed in the purchase of home labour is all that can be so employed; that the rate of profit has reached its minimum. Our enornous investments of capital in foreign funds, railways, &C. are as sufficient a practical answer to such an assumption, as the speculations of economists "on the tendency of profits to a minimum'—evidently not supposed to have hem reached,—are a sufficient theoretica one. So long as there is accumulated capital to spend upon anything beyond labour, so long as there is profit realized in any trade beyond the minimum out of which to renew such accumulations,—the trade society of that trade have the right to repel any accusation of selfishness towards their class at large, for seeking to raise their wages, their condition generally, at the expense of the profit-maker. No doubt the interest of one particular trade may often be opposed to that of another; thus, the interest of the working engineers, as machine-makers, is primâ facie antagonistic to that of most at least of their fellow craftsmen, and it is logically absurd for the Amalgamated Society to make grants, as it has done, for the support of a strike against machinery. But the working men have a full right to say that the question is one that regards themselves, and to claim to meet it simply by a further application of their own machinery of combination. The "National Association of United Trades"—a body now very much dwindled from the importance it once possessed, but which still numbers some 6,000 affiliated members in various trades—represented an important step in this direction; other local ones are indicated by the Trades Committees of Glasgow and Liverpool, formed of delegates from the various trade-societies of their respective towns, from both of which the Committee of the Social Science Association received hearty and intelligent assistance.

The sticks, in short, claim the right to be bundled together as they please, without limit as to number, as to the shape of the bundles, or as to the tightness of the ligature. The working man claims to fix for himself by combination, from trade to trade or in any number of trades, the conditions which he shall demand, and, if he can do so, obtain for the sale of his labour. He does so at the bidding of that political economy, which teaches him to look upon wealth as the ground and subject matter of a nation's or house-law; to look upon the relation of employer and employed as the mere result of a struggle between hostile interests; to recognize, in his employer's "rate of profit," the rival force which is always endeavouring to outweigh that of the "cost" of his own "production;" to recognize the dependence of "price" on the relation of demand and supply; to study the effects of a scarcity of labour in raising its price; and in the effects of a combination of labour to note the means of increasing its productiveness. In other words, that political economy teaches him that his class-life is a bat- page 325 tle : he accepts that battle, and seeks to discipline his forces, so that there shall be no cross-firing between man and man, or between corps and corps, so that every shot shall tell against that which your science teaches him is the common enemy—not capital,—but profit To tell him that he will fight with more success by breaking up his ranks, forgetting his discipline, and dismissing his commissariat, is pure mockery.

(To be continued.)