The

notions in those days than now. state of Europe generally was far more dead and hopeless. There were no wars, certainly, and no expectations of wars. But there was a dull, beaten-down, pentup feeling abroad, as if the lid were screwed down on the nations, and the thing which had been, however cruel and heavy and mean, was that which was to remain to the end. England was better off than her neighbours, but yet in bad case. In the south and west particularly, several causes had combined to spread a very bitter feeling abroad amongst the agricultural poor. First amongst these stood the new poor law, the provisions of which were rigorously carried out in most districts. The poor had as yet felt the harshness only of the new system. Then the land was in many places in the hands of men

on

their last legs, the old sporting farmers, who had begun business as young men while the great war was going on, had made money hand over hand for a few years out of the war prices, and had tried to go on living with greyhounds and yeomanry uniforms -horse to ride and weapon to wearthrough the hard years which had followed. These were bad masters in every way, unthrifty, profligate, needy, and narrow-minded. The younger men who were supplanting them were introducing machinery, threshing machines and winnowing machines, to take the little bread which a poor man was still able to earn out of the mouths of his wife and children-so at least the poor thought and muttered to one another; and the mutterings broke out every now and then in the long nights of the winter months in blazing ricks and broken machines. Game preserving was on the increase. Australia and America had not yet become familiar words in every English village, and the labour market was everywhere overstocked; and last, but not least, the corn laws were still in force, and the bitter and exasperating strife in which they went out was at its height. And while Swing and his myrmidons were abroad in the counties, and

manry and poor law guardians, the great towns were in almost worst case. Here too emigration had not yet set in to thin the labour market; wages were falling, and prices rising; the corn law struggle was better understood and far keener than in the country; and Chartism was gaining force every day, and rising into a huge threatening giant, waiting to put forth his strength, and eager for the occasion which seemed at hand.

You generation of young Englishmen, who were too young then to be troubled with such matters, and have grown into manhood since, you little knowmay you never know!-what it is to be living the citizens of a divided and distracted nation. For the time that danger is past. In a happy hour, and so far as man can judge, in time, and only just in time, came the repeal of the corn laws, and the great cause of strife and the sense of injustice passed away out of men's minds. The nation was roused by the Irish famine, and the fearful distress in other parts of the country, to begin looking steadily and seriously at some of the sores which were festering in its body, and undermining health and life. And so the tide had turned, and England had already passed the critical point, when 1848 came upon Christendom, and the whole of Europe leapt up into a wild blaze of revolution.

Is any one still inclined to make light of the danger that threatened England in that year, to sneer at the 10th of April, and the monster petition, and the monster meetings on Kennington and other commons? Well, if there be such persons amongst my readers, I can only say that they can have known nothing of what was going on around them and below them, at that time, and I earnestly hope that their vision has become clearer since then, and that they are not looking with the same eyes that see nothing, at the signs of to-day. For that there are questions still to be solved by us in England, in this current half-century, quite as likely to tear the nation in pieces as the corn laws, no

doubt. They may seem little clouds like a man's hand on the horizon just now, but they will darken the whole heaven before long unless we can find wisdom enough amongst us to take the little clouds in hand in time, and make them descend in soft rain.

But such matters need not be spoken of here. All I want to do is to put my younger readers in a position to understand how it was that our hero fell away

into beliefs and notions, at which Mrs. Grundy and all decent people could only lift up eyes and hands in pious and respectable horror, and became, soon after the incarceration of his friend for night poaching, little better than a physical force Chartist at the age of twentyone. In which unhappy condition we shall now have to take a look or two at him in future numbers.

To be continued.

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 tradesunionist 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

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 Glas

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

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

66

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-headand-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

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, Mr. John Ball, the Rev. F. D. Maurice, Mr. E. Akroyd, Mr. W. E. Forster, Mr. H. Fawcett, Mr. 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

Babel clangour of strange tongues, suggesting the need of some deeper union than that of words.

We

Looking, therefore, from a higher point of view, the first question that offers itself is this-Is it requisite, is it advan tageous that the operative classes should thus seek to realize for themselves a distinct corporate or quasi-corporate class existence? From 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. 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, where 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 mastertailors, 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

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

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

66

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-headand-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

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, Mr. John Ball, the Rev. F. D. Maurice, Mr. E. Akroyd, Mr. W. E. Forster, Mr. H. Fawcett, Mr. 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