question, how many instances exist of masters refusing to raise wages, when the prosperous state of trade makes masters competitors for working hands, rather than working hands for employment? This point is well handled as follows in a Criticism, by Mr. James Stirling, in the recently-published volume of 'Recess Studies,' on Mr. Mill's newly-espoused doctrine on Trades' Unions:

The striking effect upon the labourer's mind of a brisk or slack demand for labour-although a mystery to the closet student-is a familiar fact to every business man practically conversant with the hiring of labour. No intelligent foreman, who has stood at the gate of a public work engaging hands, has failed to note the different bearing of the workman in good times and in bad. When trade is dull the labourer deferentially comes up to his employer, whispering, with bated breath, his humble petition for employment. But let hands get scarce, and labour be in demand, and unconsciously he alters his tone and raises his demands. When railway bills are rife, and a demand springs up for strong arms to wield pick and shovel, then no man so independent as your isolated navvy. Feeling his importance, he offers himself to no one, but stands quietly in the market-place, sucking his pipe, and waiting to be coaxed; and it is only when the bewildered contractor yields his utmost demands, that he deigns to take off his coat, and handle his pick-axe. The secret of his power is not combination, but competition; not the union of helpless labourers, but the rivalry of powerful capitalists. All this the baffled contractor knows to his cost; and to tell him [as Mr. Mill tells him] that "nothing but a close combination" can give his imperious navvy "even a chance of successfully contending with his employers," must sound in his ears like a dismal mockery.'

Whatever exceptions may be taken to the apologetic style of Mr. Thornton, which is certainly peculiar, he is not chargeable with any disposition to throw a decent veil over those principles or practices, which have procured its present evil repute for Trades' Unionism in this country. While confessing for his clients all the violence of means and all the class-selfishness of ends they have ever been accused of, he nevertheless stands forward in their defence on the ground, common, as he affirms, to all classes, ofthat universal selfishness, which is, and always has been, the governing principle of all human institutions.' Masters and men, according to Mr. Thornton, fatally confront each other in something like Hobbes's misanthropically imagined state of nature, with nothing but force, or the fear of force in the background, to appeal to for arbitrament on any point of dispute, and no principle of justice recognized, as regulative of their relations, on one side or the other.

When Mr. Thornton says there is no particular rate of wages

to

to which the labourer has a right, or by not obtaining which he can be wronged, and that no price can be proposed either to him or by him which can be one whit more fair or just than any other price,' we think he may fairly be called upon to define his terms. If he means by right, legal right, his proposition is a self-evident truism. Clearly the employer cannot be compelled by law to pay more than he contracted a legal obligation to pay in wages. But if Mr. Thornton means by right, moral right, his proposition becomes a shocking paradox. In a moral sense surely the labourer has a right-and what is more is pretty sure to be sensible of it-to be paid wages by his employer at a rate proportionate to the value of the products of his labour to the latter. As the employer knows his capital has a right to profits, so the labourer knows his capital (the skill his training and handicraft have acquired for him) has a right to profits also-i. e., to be paid the just value of its contribution to the joint work of production. If, indeed, he has no skill and not much industry he may be content to be paid low wages for little work; or if his personal capital is a drug in one particular market, he will probably make up his mind to take it to some other-just as his employer, under the like circumstances, would probably make up his mind to transfer his capital from an over-stocked to an under-stocked field of production. But, in a free country, no working man will long content himself to do work for others which contributes to the profit of their capital, without producing a proportionate profit to his. If he cannot get his wages raised proportionately to his work, and cannot get away (an unlikely circumstance in this age of locomotion), he will not fail finally to lower his work. proportionately to his wages.

In the higher trades and professions,' says Mr. Longe, the employers can safely (so far as regards the interests of the labourers, at all events) leave the determination of wages to the labourers themselves. In the lower trades, however, and more especially in the case of agricultural labourers, it would be mere mockery of the necessities of the poor, as well as false economy, so far as regards the general interests of society, and of the employers themselves as a permanent class, to allow competition to determine the wages they should pay, whenever wages have been already reduced to such a rate as would at all involve the question of sufficiency. In such a case a true political economy would require the employer to study well the difference between cheap labour and low wages-a distinction which the false theory we have been considering entirely ignores.'

But a distinction which is ignored by no enlightened employer of labour! Lord Dudley's agent, Mr. Smith, who holds

a leading

a leading position in the iron trade, declared to the Trades' Union Commissioners that he would never consent to reduce puddlers' wages below 7s. 6d., and that he should prefer the present rate of 8s. 6d. to be the minimum. 'I do not wish,' he very justly remarks, 'ever to see a puddler working at a less rate of wages than he is at the present time, even though, unfortunately, the price of iron should have to be reduced; because the moment you bring a class of men like the puddlers, who are very hard-worked, below a certain rate of wages, that moment you rid the community of the best men.'

And

'I believe,' remarks an iron-moulder, that nothing but England's well-paid artisans maintained our position during the great struggle and crisis of revolutions on the Continent. you will recollect further, that at the moment when the Chartist agitation was going on in the country, their cry was, "Only pull down the artisan class of the country to the level of the labourer, and the charter would have to be granted."

In a remarkable speech delivered in the House of Commons on the 7th July, 1869, and subsequently republished in a pamphlet with additional statistical details, by Mr. Thomas Brassey, Junr., who, as our readers may be aware, has a hereditary title to practical experience of the conditions of labour in some of its most stirring skilled departments during the last twenty years, we find the same disinclination expressed by one versed in the profitable employment of labour to regard the mere figure of money wages as decisive of the cheapness or dearness to the employer of the labour for which those wages are paid. Mr. Brassey maintains unhesitatingly that, daily wages are no criterion of the actual cost of executing works or carrying out manufacturing operations. In the construction of the Paris and Rouen Railway, where some 4000 Englishmen were employed, though these English navvies earned 5s. a day, while the Frenchmen employed received only 2s. 6d., it was found, on comparing the cost of two adjacent cuttings in precisely similar circumstances, that the excavation was made at a lower cost per cubic yard by the English navvies than by the French labourers. On the Delhi and Umritsur Railway, it has been found, as I am informed by Mr. Henfrey, my father's resident partner in India, that, mile for mile, the cost of railway work is about the same in India as it is in England, although the wages, if estimated by the amount of daily pay, are marvellously low.'

Mr. Lothian Bell is cited by Mr. Brassey as having given in a recent address read at a meeting of ironmasters in the north of England, the result of his investigations as to the cost of smelting pig-iron in France, which he said distinctly established the fact

that

that more men were required to do an equivalent quantity of work in France than in England.

Taking into account the saving in respect of fuel, the cost of producing pig-iron in France was twenty shillings, in some cases even thirty shillings, more than that exhibited by the cost-sheets of the manufacturers at Cleveland. So too, Mr. Hewitt, an American ironmaster, stated that the price of iron was one pound sterling per ton higher at Creuzot than in England. And M. Michel Chevallier, in his introduction to the Reports of the Jurors of the French Exhibition, says, that rails are from twenty-five to thirty francs dearer per ton in France than in England. To the same effect, Mr. Lothian Bell says that whereas labour in Westphalia costs from twenty to twenty-five per cent. less than with us, the labour-saving arrangements are much neglected; and a ton of iron smelted in the Ruhrort district cannot be produced for less than fifteen shillings a ton above the cost upon the Tees. A similar difference is shown in the price of the rails recently purchased for the Mont Cenis Railway, the price of which at the works in France was from seven pounds twelve shillings to eight pounds per ton, while the price in England was seven pounds per ton. In proof of the conscious inability of the French ironmasters to compete with our manufacturers in an open market, I may mention that the import duty in France on rails is two pounds eight shillings per ton.'

The twin assumptions that there is no principle of justice applicable to any rate of wages which may be agreed to between employers and labourers, and no permanent interest influencing the employers of labour to respect any such principle, or regard any rule towards the employed but that of paying their labour at the lowest rate at which it can be constrained to sell itself, would certainly constitute, if they were but a little better established on facts, a moral apology more than adequate for any coercion the employed can put on the employers. On such assumptions there is room for no other than belligerent rights in the relations between employers and employed. The next task is to show that the belligerency of the Unions has on the whole been successful. And to show this another enormous assumption is called in aid-viz., that every rise of wages in the various branches of industry of late years has been directly or indirectly due to the action of Trades' Unions.

Mr. Thornton indeed admits that every protracted strike of late years has been unsuccessful in its object. He admits further that every protracted strike must be unsuccessful, if only the masters hang together with the same tenacity as the men. Evidently therefore a strike, or the threat of a strike, on the part of the men can effect its object only in cases in which the masters

do

do not think it worth while to oppose lock-outs to strikes. Then the question arises-Can all the cumbrous and costly machinery of national, nay international, labour leagues-really be required to constrain masters to yield points to their men which the latter are resolute to obtain, and which the former are not resolute to refuse? Mr. Thornton himself, in one of those lucid intervals, the recurrence of which in his writings throws the suspicion of artistic artifice on the Rembrandt shadows of other passages in them, acknowledges that Masters are generally fond of peace and quietness. Their hearts are in their business pursuits; they are eager to be doing, and dislike proportionably to be checked in mid-career. They are in consequence so averse to industrial strife, and incur so much inconvenience and risk so much loss by engaging in it, that, great as have been their past concessions for tranquillity's sake, they would not improbably concede a good deal yet, if they could believe that any concessions would suffice, or could see any end to the exactions continually practised on them.'

Mr. Thornton asserts roundly that, it is indeed notorious that in all trades whatsoever in which Unionism prevails, the Unions have of late years been able materially to raise wages.' This involves, as we have observed, the assumption, that wherever wages have risen, they have been raised by Unionism. But, as a matter of fact, wages have not risen, of late years in all trades whatsoever in which Unionism prevails.' It is stated by Mr. Brassey, and the statement is confirmed by an unimpeachable Unionist authority, Mr, George Potter, that between 1851 and 1861 no advance took place in the wages of the engineers, though theirs is the most powerful of the Trades' Societies; but in the case of the boiler-makers wages rose from 26s. to 32s. 6d., in consequence of the extension of iron ship-building, and the great amount of iron bridge-work.'

*

Mr. Brassey cites the evidence of Mr. Moult, the Secretary to the Master Builders' Association of Birmingham, before the Trades' Union Commissioners, that of the 900,000 men employed in the building trades not more than 90,500 were members of the Trades' Unions; and that while the Trades' Unions professed to aim at securing uniformity of wage throughout the country, yet the wages of masons varied in different parts from 44d. to 7 d. per hour, the wages of bricklayers from 44d. to Sd., and those of carpenters from 4 d. to Sd. per hour. These figures conclusively prove the fallacy of the idea that Trades' Unions can secure for their clients an uniform rate of wages,

*Contemporary Review,' June, 1870, Art. 6, above cited.

irrespective