day's work to eight hours, by raising the prices of English goods, would drive them off many markets, and reduce millions of English labourers to destitution. The margin of superior cheapness possessed by English goods is too small to retain the custom of foreign buyers for English wares, if less work is to be given for the same wages in England on a large scale, and if the minimum at which they must be sold, to face the increased cost of production, must be necessarily raised. Buyers in every market abroad would find articles of equal goodness with the English offered on lower terms. There could be but one result to such an issue. English goods would be driven off foreign markets, and the means of England to maintain her population fearfully reduced.

This great feature of English industry—that so large a portion of it is occupied in producing goods to be sold abroad in keen competition with those of other nations -is a fact of which the Unions are bound to take the most serious notice, but which, unfortunately, is too commonly disregarded.

(b.) A second principle, adopted by many Unions, demands the same payment for all labourers. The daily wage is to be the same for all. It is commonly defended on humanitarian grounds; the Union is bound to protect all its members. It cannot permit a miserable pittance to be doled out to those of them who are deficient in skill and strength. The labourers are to be regarded as a homogeneous body of men, to be treated all alike, and not to be subjected to the picking and choosing of masters.

This policy admits of no defence. In the first place

it has been well remarked, it runs counter to a fundamental principle of human life-a principle which even Socialist writers, even when preaching equality, have not ventured to challenge, that differences of merit must be followed by different degrees of wealth as their reward. A social state, which in actual practice, permanently violated this primary instinct of human feeling, is not conceivable. It would be quite as reasonable to demand that every bullock and every sheep shall be paid for at the same price.

In the next place, this policy ignores the position of labourers in the world. They are men without property offering their services for hire; and the hire they earn must necessarily-except under compulsory and absolute Communism-be proportioned to the quality of the service rendered. The labourers live by what they obtain from the owners of capital in exchange for the work they perform. As was shown in a previous chapter, the employer must receive the worth of the money he pays. He buys labour, and the labour must be worth the wage or he must give up the busiHe cannot and will not continue to pay for what he does not get. The work performed by the inferior workman is worse and less than that accomplished by the good one; and it is the work produced which every employer buys in hiring labourers. And is it not obvious that upon such a system the work given by the worst workman would become the standard of all? Why should the stronger and more skilled man make toilsome efforts, if he is to receive the same wage, whether he makes them or not?

ness.

Further, it is clear that equality of payment for al

workmen is to enact a compulsory Poor Law on cmployers and ultimately upon the whole community. The bad workman does not pay for all his living. All that he receives above the worth of his work is manifestly a tax paid by the employer, if it diminishes his profits, or by the purchaser of the goods, if their cost of production, and consequently their price, is raised. Moreover, this rule, if universally enforced, would make the whole body of labourers themselves its chief victims. The price of every article they bought in every shop would be higher. They would have taxed themselves in order to give to others of their class what they had not earned. Is this what the Unionists intend? By no means; their idea is that the tax would be paid out of profits. But this lands them in the old fallacy that sellers of labour who must sell to live can make buyers, who are not compelled to buy, pay what they choose.

Further, the policy of equal wages for good and inferior workmen alike is open to a moral objection of the greatest weight. It degrades labour by lowering the tone of mind of the workman. The impulse which throbs in a man's breast to make use of the faculties with which he is endowed under the hope of the reward which such efforts will bring is one of the most characteristic and of the noblest instincts which the Creator has implanted in the human race. To place weakness and want of intelligence, much more laziness, absence of self-respect and of the spirit to improve his condition at the cost of effort, in one labourer, on a level with zeal to make the best of himself for his own sake and that of his family, with manly ambition to raise himself by

whose scattered position necessarily maintains a personal connection between the farmer and his men. But, undoubtedly, these vast aggregations of similarly placed workmen render the birth of the Union easy; and then the difficulty of arriving at the just wage by bargaining becomes greatly aggravated.

But Trades Unions, as they are now worked, pursue objects of a far wider range. They are not content with debating with employers what is the value of labour, according to the state of the demand and supply in the market. They are not satisfied with obtaining for labourers their just rewards according to the condition of the trade, the numbers of the labourers seeking employment, the prices realised by the goods made, and the means of the masters to pay wages. They have far more ambitious aims. They frame a policy of labour to be imposed on the labourers as much as on the masters, as to the manner in which men shall work.

This policy is founded on a distinct theory of human life in respect of working. They seek to dictate, not only the price of the article to be supplied by the labourers, but also its form and quality, what sort of an article it shall be. They refuse to be limited by ideas which relate to market value, and the fair price to be given for the thing furnished; they insist on prescribing what kind of a commodity shall be supplied. The employer is not to ask for labour, and the labourer to give it, on terms arranged between themselves. Master and man must cease to be pure buyers and sellers, hirers and hired. Only a certain kind of labour shall be brought to market and sold ; a kind ordered by

a few leaders of Unions. It shall not be a simple hiring of a labourer's faculties of mind and body to be applied, in the exercise of his natural liberty, to the work prescribed by the hirer in return for a reward mutually agreed upon; nor shall the order of the Union merely specify the amount of that pay. The labourer's liberty

to dispose of his own person, to

The decree of the

sell his service on his own terms, is taken away from him. He must impose the condition on the master, that if he engages another but inferior labourer to work by his side, the worse workman shall receive the same wage with himself. All labour shall be regarded as the same. No difference of quality shall be recognised. There shall be no good workmen and bad workmen. Unions pronounces them to be all alike, just as if fishmongers and cattle dealers were to pronounce that there are no large salmon or small salmon, large bullocks or small bullocks; all shall be bought by the head and paid for at the same price. Nay care shall be taken that there shall be no labour of the best quality. The spirit of the workman shall be to make what he gives for his wages, his work, as small as possible; his aim shall be to produce as few goods as he can.

Now, it is obvious that such rules and practices are founded on ideas in which the conception of exchanging is totally absent, of giving and receiving in exchange things of equal value. They imply a relation between employers and labourers radically different from that of hirers and givers of services, of buyers and sellers in a market. The spirit they breathe is that of a lawgiver who lays down at his own pleasure what shall be the position of labourers in the world. He frames an