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 SubCommittee 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. 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. 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

He

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..

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-mastership, 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. sop was

If they are not, then

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

against him; and each concession by at 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 millowner 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 ried 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.

car

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 modern 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. But 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 be 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

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 dispasNo. 16.-VOL. III.

sionate 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 circumstances 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, indeed, 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

The

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. 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 ex ́perience 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.

66

1

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 de"mand for it permanently much exceeds "its supply, nothing can prevent their rise," 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.