PROPOSED SUBSTITUTES FOR RELIGION

There appears to be a connection between the proposed substitutes for religion and the special training of their several authors. Historians tender us the worship of Humanity, professors of physical science tender us Cosmic Emotion. Theism might almost retort the apologue of the specter of the Brocken.

The only organized cultus without a God, at present before us, is that of Comte. This in all its parts—its high priesthood, its hierarchy, its sacraments, its calendar, its hagiology, its literary canon, its ritualism, and we may add, in its fundamentally intolerant and inquisitorial character—is an obvious reproduction of the Church of Rome, with humanity in place of God, great men in place of the saints, the Founder of Comtism in place of the Founder of Christianity, and even a sort of substitute for the Virgin in the shape of womanhood typified by Clotilde de Vaux. There is only just the amount of difference which would be necessary in order to escape servile imitation. We have ourselves witnessed a case of alternation between the two systems which testified to the closeness of their affinity. The Catholic Church has acted on the imagination of Comte at least as powerfully as Sparta acted on that of Plato. Nor is Comtism, any more than Plato's Republic and other Utopias, exempt from the infirmity of claiming finality for a flight of the individual imagination. It would shut up mankind for ever in a stereotyped organization which is the vision of a particular thinker. In this respect it seems to us to be at a disadvantage compared with Christianity, which, as presented, in the Gospels, does not pretend to organize mankind ecclesiastically or politically, but simply supplies a new type of character, and a new motive power, leaving government, ritual and organization of every kind to determine themselves from age to age. Comte's prohibition of inquiry into the composition of the stars, which his priesthood, had it been installed in power, would perhaps have converted into a compulsory article of faith, is only a specimen of his general tendency (the common tendency, as we have said, of all Utopias) to impose on human progress the limits of his own mind. Let his hierarchy become masters of the world, and the effect would probably be like that produced by the ascendency of a hierarchy (enlightened no doubt for its time) in Egypt, a brief start forward followed by consecrated immobility for ever.

Lareveillere Lepaux, a member of the French Directory, invented a new religion of Theo-philanthropy which seems in fact to have been an organized Rousseauism. He wished to impose it on France but finding that in spite of his passionate endeavours he made but little progress he sought the advice of Talleyrand. "I am not surprised" said Talleyrand "at the difficulty you experience. It is no easy matter to introduce a new religion. But I will tell you what I recommend you to do. I recommend you to be crucified and to rise again on the third day." We cannot say whether Lareveillere made any proselytes but if he did their number cannot have been much smaller than the reputed number of the religious disciples of Comte. As a philosophy, Comtism has found its place and exercised its share of influence among the philosophies of the time but as a religious system it appears to make little way. It is the invention of a man not the spontaneous expression of the beliefs and feelings of mankind. Any one with a tolerably lively imagination might produce a rival system with as little practical effect. Roman Catholicism was at all events a growth not an invention.

Cosmic Emotion, though it does not affect to be an organized system, is the somewhat sudden creation of individual minds set at work apparently by the exigencies of a particular situation and on that account suggestive prima facie of misgivings similar to those suggested by the invention of Comte.

Now is the worship of Humanity or Cosmic Emotion really a substitute for religion? That is the only question which we wish in these few pages to ask. We do not pretend here to inquire what is or what is not true in itself.

Religion teaches that we have our being in a Power whose character and purposes are indicated to us by our moral nature, in whom we are united and by the union made sacred to each other, whose voice conscience however generated, is whose eye is always upon us, sees all our acts, and sees them as they are morally, without reference to worldly success or to the opinion of the world, to whom at death we return, and our relations to whom, together with his own nature, are an assurance that according as we promote or fail to promote his design by self improvement and the improvement of our kind, it will be well or ill for us in the sum of things. This is a hypothesis evidently separable from belief in a revelation, and from any special theory respecting the next world, as well as from all dogma and ritual. It may be true or false in itself, capable of demonstration or incapable. We are concerned here solely with its practical efficiency, compared with that of the proposed substitutes. It is only necessary to remark, that there is nothing about the religious hypothesis as here stated, miraculous, supernatural, or mysterious, except so far as those epithets may be applied to anything beyond the range of bodily sense, say the influence of opinion or affection. A universe self-made, and without a God, is at least as great a mystery as a universe with a God; in fact the very attempt to conceive it in the mind produces a moral vertigo which is a bad omen for the practical success of Cosmic Emotion.

For this religion are the service and worship of Humanity likely to be a real equivalent in any respect, as motive power, as restraint, or as comfort? Will the idea of life in God be adequately replaced by that of an interest in the condition and progress of Humanity, as they may affect us and be influenced by our conduct, together with the hope of human gratitude and fear of human reprobation after death, which the Comtists endeavor to organize into a sort of counterpart of the Day of Judgment?

It will probably be at once conceded that the answer must be in the negative as regards the immediate future and the mass of mankind. The simple truths of religion are intelligible to all, and strike all minds with equal force, though they may not have the same influence with all moral natures. A child learns them perfectly at its mother's knee. Honest ignorance in the mine, on the sea, at the forge, striving to do its coarse and perilous duty, performing the lowliest functions of humanity, contributing in the humblest way to human progress, itself scarcely sunned by a ray of what more cultivated natures would deem happiness, takes in as fully as the sublimest philosopher the idea of a God who sees and cares for all, who keeps account of the work well done or the kind act, marks the secret fault, and will hereafter make up to duty for the hardness of its present lot. But a vivid interest—such an interest as will act both as a restraint and as a comfort—in the condition and future of humanity can surely exist only in those who have a knowledge of history sufficient to enable them to embrace the unity of the past, and an imagination sufficiently cultivated to glow with anticipation of the future. For the bulk of mankind the humanity worshippers point of view seems unattainable at least within any calculable time.

As to posthumous reputation good or evil it is and always must be the appendage of a few marked men. The plan of giving it substance by instituting separate burial places for the virtuous and the wicked is perhaps not very seriously proposed. Any such plan involves the fallacy of a sharp division where there is no clear moral line besides postulating not only an unattainable knowledge of men's actions but a knowledge still more manifestly unattainable of their hearts. Yet we cannot help thinking that on the men of intellect to whose teaching the world is listening this hope of posthumous reputation, or to put it more plainly, of living in the gratitude and affection of their kind by means of their scientific discoveries and literary works exercises an influence of which they are hardly conscious, it prevents them from fully feeling the void which the annihilation of the hope of future existence leaves in the hearts of ordinary men.

Besides so far as we are aware no attempt has yet been made to show us distinctly what humanity is and wherein its holiness consists. If the theological hypothesis is true and all men are united in God, humanity is a substantial reality, but otherwise we fail to see that it is any thing more than a metaphysical abstraction converted into an actual entity by philosophers who are not generally kind to metaphysics. Even the unity of the species is far from settled, science still debates whether there is one race of men or whether there are more than a hundred. Man acts on man no doubt, but he also acts on other animals, and other animals on him. Wherein does the special unity or the special bond consist? Above all what constitutes the holiness? Individual men are not holy, a large proportion of them are very much the reverse. Why is the aggregate holy? Let the unit be a complex phenomenon, an organism or whatever name science may give it, what multiple of it will be a rational object of worship?

For our own part we cannot conceive worship being offered by a sane worshipper to any but a conscious being, in other words to a person. The fetish worshipper himself probably invests his fetish with a vague personality such as would render it capable of propitiation. But how can we invest with a collective personality the fleeting generations of mankind? Even the sum of mankind is never complete, much less are the units blended into a personal whole, or as it has been called a colossal man.

There is a gulf here, as it seems to us, which cannot be bridged, and can barely be hidden from view by the retention of religious phraseology. In truth, the anxious use of that phraseology betrays weakness, since it shows that you cannot do without the theological associations which cling inseparably to religious terms.

You look forward to a closer union, a more complete brotherhood of man, an increased sacredness of the human relation. Some things point that way; some things point the other way. Brotherhood has hardly a definite meaning without a father; sacredness can hardly be predicated without anything which consecrates. We can point to an eminent writer who tells you that he detests the idea of brotherly love altogether; that there are many of his kind whom, so far from loving, he hates, and that he would like to write his hatred with a lash upon their backs. Look again at the severe Prussianism which betrays itself in the New Creed of Strauss. Look at the oligarchy of enlightenment and enjoyment which Renan, in his Moral Reform of France, proposes to institute for the benefit of a select circle, with sublime indifference to the lot of the vulgar, who, he says, "must subsist on the glory and happiness of others." This does not look much like a nearer approach to a brotherhood of man than is made by the Gospel. We are speaking, of course, merely of the comparative moral efficiency of religion and the proposed substitutes for it, apart from the influence exercised over individual conduct by the material needs and other non-theological forces of society.

For the immortality of the individual soul, with the influences of that belief, we are asked to substitute the immortality of the race. But here, in addition to the difficulty of proving the union and intercommunion of all the members, we are met by the objection that unless we live in God, the race, in all probability, is not immortal. That our planet and all it contains will come to an end appears to be the decided opinion of science. This "holy" being, our relation to which is to take the place of our relation to an Eternal Father, by the adoration of which we are to be sustained and controlled, if it exist at all, is as ephemeral compared with eternity as a fly. We shall be told that we ought to be content with an immortality extending through tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of years. To the argumentum ad verecundiam there is no reply. But will this banish the thought of ultimate annihilation? Will it prevent a man, when he is called upon to make some great sacrifice for the race, from saying to himself, that, whether he makes the sacrifice or not, one day all will end in nothing?

Evidently these are points which must be made quite clear before you can, with any prospect of success, call upon men either to regard Humanity with the same feelings with which they have regarded God, or to give up their own interest or enjoyment for the future benefit of the race. The assurance derived from the fondness felt by parents for their offspring, and the self-denying efforts made for the good of children, will hardly carry us very far, even supposing it certain that parental love would remain unaffected by the general change. It is evidently a thing apart from the general love of Humanity. Nobody was ever more extravagantly fond of his children, or made greater efforts for them, than Alexander Borgia.

It has been attempted, however, with all the fervour of conviction, and with all the force of a powerful style, to make us see not only that we have this corporal immortality as members of the "colossal man," but that we may look forward to an actual though impersonal existence in the shape of the prolongation through all future time of the consequences of our lives. It might with equal truth be said that we have enjoyed an actual though impersonal existence through all time past in our antecedents. But neither in its consequences nor in its antecedents can anything be said to live except by a figure. The characters and actions of men surely will never be influenced by such a fanciful use of language as this! Our being is consciousness; with consciousness our being ends, though our physical forces may be conserved, and traces of our conduct—traces utterly indistinguishable—may remain. That with which we are not concerned cannot affect us either presently or by anticipation; and with that of which we shall never be conscious, we shall never feel that we are concerned. Perhaps if the authors of this new immortality would tell us what they understand by non-existence, we might be led to value more highly by contrast the existence which they propose for a soul when it has ceased to think or feel, and for an organism when it has been scattered to the winds.

They would persuade us that their impersonal and unconscious immortality is a brighter hope than an eternity of personal and conscious existence, the very thought of which they say is torture. This assumes, what there seems to be no ground for assuming, that eternity is an endless extension of time; and, in the same way, that infinity is a boundless space. It is more natural to conceive of them as emancipation respectively from time and space, and from the conditions which time and space involve; and among the conditions of time may apparently be reckoned the palling of pleasure or of existence by mere temporal protraction. Even as we are, sensual pleasure palls; so does the merely intellectual: but can the same be said of the happiness of virtue and affection? It is urged, too, that by exchanging the theological immortality for one of physical and social consequences, we get rid of the burden of self, which otherwise we should drag for ever. But surely in this there is a confusion of self with selfishness. Selfishness is another name for vice. Self is merely consciousness. Without a self, how can there be self-sacrifice? How can the most unselfish motive exist if there is nothing to be moved? "He that findeth his life, shall lose it; and he that loseth his life, shall find it," is not a doctrine of selfishness, but it implies a self. We have been rebuked in the words of Frederick to his grenadiers—"Do you want to live for ever?" The grenadiers might have answered, "Yes; and therefore we are ready to die."

It is not when we think of the loss of anything to which a taint of selfishness can adhere—it is not even when we think of intellectual effort cut short for ever by death just as the intellect has ripened and equipped itself with the necessary knowledge—that the nothingness of this immortality of conservated forces is most keenly felt: it is when we think of the miserable end of affection. How much comfort would it afford anyone bending over the deathbed of his wife to know that forces set free by her dissolution will continue to mingle impersonally and indistinguishably with forces set free by the general mortality? Affection, at all events, requires personality. One cannot love a group of consequences, even supposing that the filiation could be distinctly presented to the mind. Pressed by the hand of sorrow craving for comfort, this Dead Sea fruit crumbles into ashes, paint it with eloquence as you will.

Humanity, it seems to us, is a fundamentally Christian idea, connected with the Christian view of the relations of men to their common Father and of their spiritual union in the Church. In the same way the idea of the progress of Humanity seems to us to have been derived from the Christian belief in the coming of the Kingdom of God through the extension of the Church, and to that final triumph of good over evil foretold in the imagery of the Apocalypse. At least the founders of the Religion of Humanity will admit that the Christian Church is the matrix of theirs so much their very nomenclature proves and we would fain ask them to review the process of disengagement and see whether the essence has not been left behind.

No doubt there are influences at work in modern civilisation which tend to the strengthening of the sentiment of humanity by making men more distinctly conscious of their position as members of a race. On the other hand the unreflecting devotion of the tribesman which held together primitive societies dies. Man learns to reason and calculate and when he is called upon to immolate himself to the common interest of the race he will consider what the common interest of the race when he is dead and gone will be to him and whether he will ever be repaid for his sacrifice.

Of Cosmic Emotion it will perhaps be fair to say that it is proposed as a substitute for religious emotion rather than as a substitute for religion since nothing has been said about embodying it in a cult. It comes to us commended by glowing quotations from Mr. Swinburne and Walt Whitman and we cannot help admitting that for common hearts it stands in need of the commendation. The transfer of affection from an all loving Father to an adamantine universe is a process for which we may well seek all the aid that the witchery of poetry can supply. Unluckily we are haunted by the consciousness that the poetry itself is blindly ground out by the same illimitable mill of evolution which grinds out Virtue and affection. We are by no means sure that we understand what Cosmic Emotion is even after leading an exposition of its nature by no ungifted hand. Its symbola so to speak are the feelings produced by the two objects of Kant's peculiar reverence—the stars of heaven and the moral faculty of man. But after all these are only like anything else aggregations of molecules in a certain stage of evolution. To the unscientific eye they may be awful because they are mysterious, but let science analyse them and then awfulness disappears. If the interaction of all parts of the material universe is complete we fail to see why one object or one feeling is more cosmic than another. However we will not dwell on that which as we have already confessed we do not feel sure that we rightly apprehend. What we do clearly see is that to have cosmic emotion or cosmic anything you must have a cosmos. You must be assured that the universe is a cosmos and not a chaos. And what assurance of this can materialism or any non theological system give? Law is a theological term, it implies a lawgiver or a governing intelligence of some kind. Science can tell us nothing but facts, single or accumulated as experience, which would not make a law though they had been observed through myriads of years. Law is a theological term, and cosmos is equally so, if it may not rather be said to be a Greek name for the aggregate of laws. For order implies intelligent selection and arrangement. Our idea of order would not be satisfied by a number of objects falling by mere chance into a particular figure, however intricate and regular. All the arguments which have been used against design seem to tell with equal force against order. We have no other universe wherewith we can compare this, so as to assure ourselves that this universe is not a chaos, but a cosmos. Both on the earth and in the heavens we see much that is not order, but disorder; not cosmos, but acosmia. If we divine, nevertheless, that order reigns, and that there is design beneath the seemingly undesigned, and good beneath the appearance of evil, it is by virtue of something not dreamed of in the philosophy of materialism.

Have we really come to this, that the world has no longer any good reason for believing in a God or a life beyond the grave? If so, it is difficult to deny that with regard to the great mass of mankind up to this time Schopenhauer and the Pessimists are right, and existence has been a cruel misadventure. The number of those who have suffered lifelong oppression, disease, or want, who have died deaths of torture or perished miserably by war, is limited though enormous; but probably there have been few lives in which the earthly good has not been outweighed by the evil. The future may bring increased means of happiness, though those who are gone will not be the better for them; but it will bring also increase of sensibility, and the consciousness of hopeless imperfection and miserable futility will probably become a distinct and growing cause of pain. It is doubtful even whether, after such a raising of Mokanna's veil, faith in everything would not expire and human effort cease. Still we must face the situation: there can be no use in self-delusion. In vain we shall seek to cheat our souls and to fill a void which cannot be filled by the manufacture of artificial religions and the affectation of a spiritual language to which, however persistently and fervently it may be used, no realities correspond. If one of these cults could get itself established, in less than a generation it would become hollower than the hollowest of ecclesiasticisms. Probably not a few of the highest natures would withdraw themselves from the dreary round of self mockery by suicide, and if a scientific priesthood attempted to close that door by sociological dogma or posthumous denunciation the result would show the difference between the practical efficacy of a religion with a God and that of a cult of "Humanity" or "Space."

Shadows and figments, as they appear to us to be in themselves these attempts to provide a substitute for religion are of the highest importance, as showing that men of great powers of mind, who have thoroughly broken loose not only from Christianity but from natural religion and in some cases placed themselves in violent antagonism to both, are still unable to divest themselves of the religious sentiment or to appease its craving for satisfaction. There being no God, they find it necessary, as Voltaire predicted it would be, to invent one, not for the purposes of police (they are far above such sordid Jesuitism), but as the solution of the otherwise hopeless enigma of our spiritual nature. Science takes cognizance of all phenomena, and this apparently ineradicable tendency of the human mind is a phenomenon like the rest. The thoroughgoing Materialist, of course, escapes all these philosophical exigencies, but he does it by denying Humanity as well as God and reducing the difference between the organism of the human animal and that of any other animal to a mere question of complexity. Still, even in this quarter, there has appeared of late a disposition to make concessions on the subject of human volition hardly consistent with Materialism. Nothing can be more likely than that the impetus of great discoveries has carried the discoverers too far.

Perhaps with the promptings of the religious sentiment there is combined a sense of the immediate danger with which the failure of the religious sanction threatens social order and morality. As we have said already, the men of whom we specially speak are far above anything like social Jesuitism. We have not a doubt but they would regard with abhorrence any schemes of oligarchic illuminism for guarding the pleasures of the few by politic deception of the multitude. But they have probably begun to lay to heart the fact that the existing morality, though not dependent on any special theology, any special view of the relations between soul and body, or any special theory of future rewards and punishments, is largely dependent on a belief in the indefeasible authority of conscience, and in that without which conscience can have no indefeasible authority—the presence of a just and all-seeing God. It may be true that in primaeval society these beliefs are found only in the most rudimentary form, and, as social sanctions, are very inferior in force to mere gregarious instincts or the pressure of tribal need. But man emerges from the primaeval state, and when he does, he demands a reason for his submission to moral law. That the leaders of the anti- theological movement in the present day are immoral, nobody but the most besotted fanatic would insinuate; no candid antagonist would deny that some of them are in every respect the very best of men. The fearless love of truth is usually accompanied by other high qualities; and nothing could be more unlikely than that natures disposed to virtue, trained under good influences, peculiarly sensitive to opinion and guarded by intellectual tastes, would lapse into vice as soon as the traditional sanction was removed. But what is to prevent the withdrawal of the traditional sanction from producing its natural effect upon the morality of the mass of mankind? The commercial swindler or the political sharper, when the divine authority of conscience is gone, will feel that he has only the opinion of society to reckon with, and he knows how to reckon with the opinion of society. If Macbeth is ready, provided he can succeed in this world, to "jump the life to come," much more ready will villainy be to "jump" the bad consequences of its actions to humanity when its own conscious existence shall have closed. Rate the practical effect of religious beliefs as low and that of social influences as high as you may, there can surely be no doubt that morality has received some support from the authority of an inward monitor regarded as the voice of God. The worst of men would have wished to die the death of the righteous; he would have been glad, if he could, when death approached, to cancel his crimes; and the conviction, or misgiving, which this implied, could not fail to have some influence upon the generality of mankind, though no doubt the influence was weakened rather than strengthened by the extravagant and incredible form in which the doctrine of future retribution was presented by the dominant theology.

The denial of the existence of God and of a Future State, in a word, is the dethronement of conscience; and society will pass, to say the least, through a dangerous interval before social science can fill the vacant throne. Avowed scepticism is likely to be disinterested and therefore to be moral; it is among the unavowed sceptics and conformists to political religions that the consequences of the change may be expected to appear.

But more than this, the doctrines of Natural Selection and the Survival of the Fittest are beginning to generate a morality of their own, with the inevitable corollary that the proof of superior fitness is to survive—to survive either by force or cunning, like the other animals which by dint of force or cunning have come out victorious from the universal war and asserted for themselves a place in nature. The "irrepressible struggle for empire" is formally put forward by public writers of the highest class as the basis and the rule of the conduct of this country towards other nations; and we may be sure that there is not an entire absence of connection between the private code of a school and its international conceptions. The feeling that success covers everything seems to be gaining ground and to be overcoming, not merely the old conventional rules of honour, but moral principle itself. Both in public and private there are symptoms of an approaching failure of the motive power which has hitherto sustained men both in self- sacrificing effort and in courageous protest against wrong, though as yet we are only at the threshold of the great change, and established sentiment long survives, in the masses, that which originally gave it birth. Renan says, probably with truth, that had the Second Empire remained at peace, it might have gone on forever; and in the history of this country the connection between political effort and religion has been so close that its dissolution, to say the least, can hardly fail to produce a critical change in the character of the nation. The time may come, when, as philosophers triumphantly predict, men, under the ascendancy of science, will act for the common good, with the same mechanical certainty as bees; though the common good of the human hive would perhaps not be easy to define. But in the meantime mankind, or some portions of it, may be in danger of an anarchy of self-interest, compressed for the purpose of political order, by a despotism of force.

That science and criticism, acting—thanks to the liberty of opinion won by political effort—with a freedom never known before, have delivered us from a mass of dark and degrading superstitions, we own with heartfelt thankfulness to the deliverers, and in the firm conviction that the removal of false beliefs, and of the authorities or institutions founded on them, cannot prove in the end anything but a blessing to mankind. But at the same time the foundations of general morality have inevitably been shaken, and a crisis has been brought on the gravity of which nobody can fail to see, and nobody but a fanatic of Materialism can see without the most serious misgiving.

There has been nothing in the history of man like the present situation. The decadence of the ancient mythologies is very far from affording a parallel. The connection of those mythologies with morality was comparatively slight. Dull and half-animal minds would hardly be conscious of the change which was partly veiled from them by the continuance of ritual and state creeds; while in the minds of Plato and Marcus Aurelius it made place for the development of a moral religion. The Reformation was a tremendous earthquake: it shook down the fabric of mediaeval religion, and as a consequence of the disturbance in the religious sphere filled the world with revolutions and wars. But it left the authority of the Bible unshaken, and men might feel that the destructive process had its limit, and that adamant was still beneath their feet. But a world which is intellectual and keenly alive to the significance of these questions, reading all that is written about them with almost passionate avidity, finds itself brought to a crisis the character of which any one may realize by distinctly presenting to himself the idea of existence without a God.



THE LABOUR MOVEMENT

(This Lecture was delivered before the Mechanics' Institute of Montreal, and the Literary Society of Sherbrooke, and published in the CANADIAN MONTHLY, December, 1872. The allusions to facts and events must be read with reference to the date.)

We are in the midst of an industrial war which is extending over Europe and the United States, and has not left Canada untouched. It is not wonderful that great alarm should prevail, or that, in panic-stricken minds, it should assume extravagant forms. London deprived of bread by a bakers' strike, or of fuel by a colliers' strike, is a serious prospect; so is the sudden stoppage of any one of the wheels in the vast and complicated machine of modern industry. People may be pardoned for thinking that they have fallen on evil times, and that they have a dark future before them. Yet, those who have studied industrial history know that the present disturbance is mild compared with the annals of even a not very remote past. The study of history shows us where we are, and whither things are tending. Though it does not diminish the difficulties of the present hour, it teaches us to estimate them justly, to deal with them calmly and not to call for cavalry and grapeshot because one morning we are left without hot bread.

One of the literary janissaries of the French Empire thought to prove that the working class had no rights against the Bonapartes, by showing that the first free labourers were only emancipated slaves. One would like to know what he supposed the first Bonapartes were. However though his inference was not worth much, except against those who are pedantic enough, to vouch parchment archives for the rights and interests of humanity, he was in the right as to the fact. Labour first appears in history as a slave, treated like a beast of burden, chained to the door- post of a Roman master, or lodged in the underground manstables (ergastula) on his estate, treated like a beast, or worse than a beast, recklessly worked out and then cast forth to die, scourged, tortured, flung in a moment of passion to feed the lampreys, crucified for the slightest offence or none. "Set up a cross for the slave," cries the Roman matron, in, Juvenal. "Why, what has the slave done?" asks her husband.

One day labour strikes; finds a leader in Spartacus, a slave devoted as a gladiator to the vilest of Roman pleasures; wages a long and terrible servile war. The revolt is put down at last, after shaking the foundations of the state. Six thousand slaves are crucified along the road from Rome to Capua. Labour had its revenge, for slavery brought the doom of Rome.

In the twilight of history, between the fall of Rome and the rise of the new nationalities, we dimly see the struggle going on. There is a great insurrection of the oppressed peasantry, under the name of Bagaudae, in Gaul. When the light dawns, a step has been gained. Slavery has been generally succeeded by serfdom. But serfdom is hard. The peasantry of feudal Normandy conspire against their cruel lords, hold secret meetings, the ominous name commune is heard. But the conspiracy is discovered and suppressed with the fiendish ferocity with which panic inspires a dominant class, whether in Normandy or Jamaica. Amidst the religious fervour of the Crusades again breaks out a wild labour movement, that of the Pastoureaux, striking for equality in the name of the Holy Spirit, which, perhaps, they had as good a right to use as some who deemed their use of it profane. This is in the country, among the shepherds and ploughmen. In the cities labour has congregated numbers, mutual intelligence, union on its side; it is constantly reinforced by fugitives from rural serfdom; it builds city walls, purchases or extorts charters of liberty. The commercial and manufacturing cities of Italy, Germany, Flanders, become the cradles of free industry, and, at the same time, of intellect, art, civilization. But these are points of light amidst the feudal darkness of the rural districts. In France, for example, the peasantry are cattle; in time of peace crushed with forced labour, feudal burdens, and imposts of all kinds; in time of war driven, in unwilling masses, half-armed and helpless, to the shambles. Aristocratic luxury, gambling, profligate wars—Jacques Bonhomme pays for them all. At Crecy and Poictiers, the lords are taken prisoners; have to provide heavy ransoms, which, being debts of honour, like gambling debts, are more binding than debts of honesty. But Jacques Bonhomme's back is broad, it will bear everything. Broad as it is, it will not bear this last straw. The tidings of Flemish freedom have, perhaps, in some way reached his dull ear, taught him that bondage is not, as his priest, no doubt, assures him it is, a changeless ordinance of God, that the yoke, though strong, may be broken. He strikes, arms himself with clubs, knives, ploughshares, rude pikes, breaks out into a Jacquerie, storms the castles of the oppressor, sacks, burns, slays with the fury of a wild beast unchained. The lords are stupefied. At last they rally and bring their armour, their discipline, their experience in war, the moral ascendency of a master-class to bear. The English gentlemen, in spite of the hostilities, only half suspended, between the nations, join the French gentlemen against the common enemy. Twenty thousand peasants are soon cut down, but long afterwards the butchery continues. Guillaume Callet, the leader of the Jacquerie, a very crafty peasant, as he is called by the organs of the lords, is crowned with a circlet of red-hot iron.

In England, during the same period serfdom, we know not exactly how, is breaking up. There is a large body of labourers working for hire. But in the midst of the wars of the great conqueror, Edward III., comes a greater conqueror, the plague called the Black Death, which sweeps away, some think, a third of the population of Europe. The number of labourers is greatly diminished. Wages rise. The feudal parliament passes an Act to compel labourers, under penalties, to work at the old rates. This Act is followed by a train of similar Acts, limiting wages and fixing in the employers' interest the hours of work, which, in the pages of imaginative writers, figure as noble attempts made by legislators of a golden age to regulate the relations between employer and employed on some higher principle than that of contract. The same generous spirit, no doubt, dictated the enactment prohibiting farm labourers from bringing up their children to trades, lest hands should be withdrawn from the land-owner's service. Connected with the Statutes of Labourers, are those bloody vagrant laws, in which whipping, branding, hanging are ordained as the punishment of vagrancy by lawgivers, many of whom were themselves among the idlest and most noxious vagabonds in the country, and the authors of senseless wars which generated a mass of vagrancy, by filling the country with disbanded soldiers. In the reign of Richard II., the poll tax being added to other elements of class discord, labour strikes, takes arms under Wat Tyler, demands fixed rents, tenant right in an extreme form, and the total abolition of serfage. A wild religious communism bred of the preachings of the more visionary among the Wycliffites mingles in the movement with the sense of fiscal and industrial wrong. "When Adam delved and Eve span, where was then the gentleman?" is the motto of the villeins, and it is one of more formidable import than any utterance of peasant orators at Agricultural Labourers' meetings in the present day. Then come fearful scenes of confusion, violence and crime. London is in the power of hordes brutalized by oppression. High offices of state, high ecclesiastics are murdered. Special vengeance falls on the lawyers, as the artificers who forged the cunning chains of feudal iniquity. The rulers, the troops, are paralyzed by the aspect of the sea of furious savagery raging round them. The boy king, by a miraculous exhibition of courageous self- possession, saves the State; but he is compelled to grant general charters of manumission, which, when the danger is over, the feudal parliament forces him by a unanimous vote to repudiate. Wholesale hanging of serfs, of course, follows the landlords' victory.

The rising under Jack Cade, in the reign of Henry VI., was rather political than industrial. The demands of the insurgents, political reform and freedom of suffrage, show that progress had been made in the condition and aspirations of the labouring class. But with the age of the Tudors came the final breakup in England of feudalism, as well as of Catholicism, attended by disturbances in the world of labour, similar to those which have attended the abolition of slavery in the Southern States. This is the special epoch of the sanguinary vagrancy laws, the most sanguinary of which was framed by the hand of Henry VIII. The new nobility of courtiers and upstarts, who had shared with the king the plunder of the monasteries, were hard landlords of course; they robbed the people of their rights of common, and swept away homesteads and cottages, to make room for sheep farms, the wool trade being the great source of wealth in those days. By the spoliation of the monasteries, the great alms-houses of the Middle Ages, the poor had also been left for a time without the relief, which was given them again in a more regular form by the Poor Law of Elizabeth. Hence in the reign of Edward VI., armed strikes again, in different parts of the kingdom. In the West, the movement was mainly religious; but in the Eastern countries, under Kett of Norfolk, it was agrarian. Kett's movement after a brief period of success, during which the behaviour of the insurgents and their leader was very creditable, was put down by the disciplined mercenaries under the command of the new aristocracy, and its suppression was of course followed by a vigorous use of the gallows. No doubt the industrial conservatives of those days were as frightened, as angry, and as eager for strong measures as their successors are now: but the awkwardness of the newly liberated captive, in the use of his limbs and eyes, is due not to his recovered liberty, but to the narrowness and darkness of the dungeon in which he has been immured.

In Germany, at the same epoch, there was not merely a local rising, but a wide-spread and most terrible peasants' war. The German peasantry had been ground down beyond even an hereditary bondsman's power of endurance by their lords generally, and by the Prince Bishop and other spiritual lords in particular. The Reformation having come with a gospel of truth, love, spiritual brotherhood, the peasants thought it might also have brought some hope of social justice. The doctors of divinity had to inform them that this was a mistake. But they took the matter into their own hands and rose far and wide, the fury of social and industrial war blending with the wildest fanaticism, the most delirious ecstacy, the darkest imposture. Once more there are stormings and burnings of feudal castles, massacring of their lords. Lords are roasted alive, hunted like wild beasts in savage revenge for the cruelty of the game laws. Munzer, a sort of peasant Mahomet, is at the head of the movement. Under him it becomes Anabaptist, Antinomian, Communist. At first he and his followers sweep the country with a whirlwind of terror and destruction: but again the lords rally, bring up regular troops. The peasants are brought to bay on their last hill side, behind a rampart formed of their waggons. Their prophet assures them that the cannon-balls will fall harmless into his cloak. The cannon-balls take their usual course: a butchery, then a train of torturings and executions follows, the Prince Bishop, among others, adding considerably to the whiteness of the Church's robe. Luther is accused of having incited the ferocity of the lords against those, who, it is alleged, had only carried his own principles to an extreme. But in the first place Luther never taught Anabaptism or anything that could logically lead to it; and in the second place, before he denounced the peasants, he tried to mediate and rebuke the tyranny of the lords. No man deserves more sympathy than a great reformer, who is obliged to turn against the excesses of his own party. He becomes the object of fierce hatred on one side, of exulting derision on the other; yet he is no traitor, but alone loyal to his conscience and his cause.

The French Revolution was a political movement among the middle class in the cities, but among the peasantry in the country it was an agrarian and labour movement, and the dismantling of chateaux, and chasing away of their lords which then took place were a renewal of the struggle which had given birth to the Jacquerie, the insurrection of Wat Tyler, and the Peasants' War. This time the victory remained with the peasant, and the lord returned no more.

In England, long after the Tudor period, industrial disturbances took place, and wild communistic fancies welled up from the depths of a suffering world of labour, when society was stirred by political and religious revolution. Under the Commonwealth, communists went up on the hill side, and began to break ground for a poor man's Utopia; and the great movement of the Levellers, which had in it an economical as well as a political element, might have overturned society, if it had not been quelled by the strong hand of Cromwell. But in more recent times, within living memory, within the memory of many here there were labour disturbances in England, compared with which the present industrial war is mild. [Footnote: For the following details, see Martineau's "History of the Peace."] In 1816, there were outbreaks among the suffering peasantry which filled the governing classes with fear. In Suffolk nightly fires of incendiaries blazed in every district, thrashing machines were broken or burnt in open day, mills were attacked. At Brandon large bodies of workmen assembled to prescribe a maximum price of grain and meat, and to pull down the houses of butchers and bakers. They bore flags with the motto, "Bread or Blood". Insurgents from the Fen Country, a special scene of distress, assembled at Littleport, attacked the house of a magistrate in the night, broke open shops, emptied the cellars of public-houses, marched on Ely, and filled the district for two days and nights with drunken rioting and plunder. The soldiery was called in; there was an affray in which blood flowed on both sides, then a special commission and hangings to close the scene. Distressed colliers in Staffordshire and Wales assembled by thousands, stopped works, and were with difficulty diverted from marching to London. In 1812, another stain of blood was added to the sanguinary criminal code of those days by the Act making death the penalty for the destruction of machinery. This was caused by the Luddite outrages, which were carried on in the most systematic manner, and on the largest scale in Nottingham and the adjoining counties. Bodies of desperadoes, armed and disguised, went forth under a leader, styled General Ludd, who divided them into bands, and aligned to each band its work of destruction. Terror reigned around; the inhabitants were commanded to keep in their houses and put out their lights on pain of death. In the silence of night houses and factories were broken open, machines demolished, unfinished work scattered on the highways. The extent and secrecy of the conspiracy baffled the efforts of justice and the death penalty failed to put the system down. Even the attempts made to relieve distress became new sources of discontent and a soup kitchen riot at Glasgow led to a two days conflict between the soldiery and the mob. In 1818, a threatening mass of Manchester spinners, on strike came into bloody collision with the military. Then there were rick burnings, farmers patrolling all night long, gibbets erected on Pennenden heath, and bodies swinging on them, bodies of boys, eighteen or nineteen years old. Six labourers of Dorsetshire, the most wretched county in England, were sentenced to seven years' transportation nominally for administering an illegal oath, really for Unionism. Thereupon all the trades made a menacing demonstration, marched to Westminster, thirty thousand strong, with a petition for the release of the labourers. London was in an agony of fear, the Duke of Wellington prepared for a great conflict, pouring in troops and bringing up artillery from Woolwich. In 1840, again there were formidable movements, and society felt itself on the crust of a volcano. Threatening letters were sent to masters, rewards offered for firing mills, workmen were beaten, driven out of the country, burned with vitriol, and, there was reason to fear, murdered. Great masses of operatives collected for purposes of intimidation, shopkeepers were pillaged, collisions again took place between the people and the soldiery. Irish agrarianism meanwhile prevailed, in a far more deadly form than at present. And these industrial disturbances were connected with political disturbances equally formidable, with Chartism, Socialism, Cato Street conspiracies, Peterloo massacres, Bristol riots.

Now the present movement even in England, where there is so much suffering and so much ignorance, has been marked by a comparative absence of violence, and comparative respect for law. Considering what large bodies of men have been out on strike, how much they have endured in the conflict, and what appeals have been made to their passions, it is wonderful how little of actual crime or disturbance there has been. There were the Sheffield murders the disclosure of which filled all the friends of labour with shame and sorrow, all the enemies of labour with malignant exultation. But we should not have heard so much of the Sheffield murders if such things had been common. Sheffield is an exceptional place; some of the work there is deadly, life is short and character is reckless. Even at Sheffield, a very few, out of the whole number of trades, were found to have been in any way implicated. The denunciation of the outrages by the trades through England generally, was loud and sincere; an attempt was made, of course, to fix the guilt on all the Unions, but this was a hypocritical libel. It was stated, in one of our Canadian journals, the other day, that Mr. Roebuck had lost his seat for Sheffield, by protesting against Unionist outrage. Mr. Roebuck lost his seat for Sheffield by turning Tory. The Trades' candidate, by whom Mr. Roebuck was defeated, was Mr. Mundella, a representative of whom any constituency may be proud, a great employer of labour, and one who has done more than any other man of his class in England to substitute arbitration for industrial war, and to restore kindly relations between the employers and the employed. To Mr. Mundella the support of Broadhead and the criminal Unionists was offered, and by him it was decisively rejected.

The public mind has been filled with hideous fantasies, on the subject of Unionism, by sensation novelists like Mr. Charles Reade and Mr. Disraeli, the latter of whom has depicted the initiation of a working man into a Union with horrid rites, in a lofty and spacious room, hung with black cloth and lighted with tapers, amidst skeletons, men with battle axes, rows of masked figures in white robes, and holding torches; the novice swearing an awful oath on the Gospel, to do every act which the heads of the society enjoin, such as the chastisement of "nobs," the assassination of tyrannical masters, and the demolition of all mills deemed incorrigible by the society. People may read such stuff for the sake of amusement and excitement, if they please; but they will fall into a grave error if they take it for a true picture of the Amalgamated Carpenters or the Amalgamated Engineers. Besides, the Sheffield outrages were several years old at the time of their discovery. They belong, morally, to the time when the unions of working men being forbidden by unfair laws framed in the masters' interest were compelled to assume the character of conspiracies; when, to rob a union being no theft, unionists could hardly be expected to have the same respect as the better protected interests for public justice; when, moreover, the mechanics, excluded from political rights, could scarcely regard Government as the impartial guardian of their interests, or the governing classes as their friends. Since the legalization of the unions, the extension of legal security to their funds and the admission of the mechanics to the suffrage there has been comparatively little of unionist crime.

I do not say that there has been none. I do not say that there is none now. Corporate selfishness of which Trade Unions after all are embodiments seldom keeps quite clear of criminality. But the moral dangers of corporate selfishness are the same in all associations and in all classes. The Pennsylvanian iron master who comes before our Commissions of Inquiry to testify against Unionist outrage in Pennsylvania where a very wild and roving class of workmen are managed by agents who probably take little thought for the moral condition of the miner—this iron master I say is himself labouring through his paid organs in the press, through his representatives in Congress, and by every means in his power to keep up hatred of England and bad relations between the two countries at the constant risk of war because it suits the interest of his Protectionist Ring. The upper classes of Europe in the same spirit applauded what they called the salvation of society by the coup d'etat, the massacre on the Boulevards and the lawless deportation of the leaders of the working men in France. In the main however I repeat the present movement has been legal and pacific and so long as there is no violence, so long as no weapons but those of argument are employed, so long as law and reason reign, matters are sure to come right in the end. The result may not be exactly what we wish because we may wish to take too much for ourselves and to give our fellow men too little, but it will be just and we cannot deliberately desire more. If the law is broken by the Unionists, if violence or intimidation is employed by them instead of reason, let the Government protect the rights of the community and let the community strengthen the hands of the Government for that purpose.

Perhaps you will say that I have forgotten the International and the Commune. There is undoubtedly a close connection between the labour movement and democracy, between the struggle for industrial and the struggle for political emancipation, as there is a connection between both and Secularism, the frank form assumed among the working men by that which is concealed and conformist Scepticism among the upper class. In this respect the present industrial crisis resembles those of the past which as we have seen were closely connected with religious and political revolutions. In truth the whole frame of humanity generally moves at once. With the International, however, as an organ of political incendiarism, labour had very little to do. The International was, in its origin, a purely industrial association, born of Prince Albert's International Exhibition, which held a convention at Geneva, where everybody goes pic-nicing, for objects which, though chimerical, were distinctly economical, and free from any taint of petroleum. But a band of political conspirators got hold of the organization and used it, or at least, so much of it as they could carry with them, for a purpose entirely foreign to the original intent. Mark, too, that it was not so much labour or even democracy that charged the mine which blew up Paris, as the reactionary Empire, which, like reaction in countries more nearly connected with us than France, played the demagogue for its own ends, set the labourers against the liberal middle class, and crowded Paris with operatives, bribed by employment on public works. I detest all conspiracy, whether it be that of Ignatius Loyola, or that of Karl Marx- -not by conspiracy, not by dark and malignant intrigue, is society to be reformed, but by open, honest and kindly appeals to the reason and conscience of mankind. Yet, let us be just, even to the Commune. The destruction of the column at the Place Vendome was not a good act; but if it was in any measure the protest of labour against war, it was a better act than ever was done by the occupant of that column. On that column it was that, when Napoleon's long orgy of criminal glory was drawing to a close, the hand of misery and bereavement wrote "Monster, if all the blood you have shed could be collected in this square, you might drink without stooping." Thiers is shooting the Communists; perhaps justly, though humanity will be relieved when the gore ceases to trickle, and vengeance ends its long repast. But Thiers has himself been the literary arch-priest of Napoleon and of war: of all the incendiaries in France, he has been the worst.

The Trade Unions are new things in industrial history. The guilds of the Middle Ages, with which the unions are often identified, were confederations of all engaged in the trade, masters as well as men, against outsiders. The Unions are confederations of the men against the masters. They are the offspring of an age of great capitalists, employing large bodies of hired workmen. The workmen, needy, and obliged to sell their labour without reserve, that they might eat bread, found themselves, in their isolation, very much at the mercy of their masters, and resorted to union as a source of strength. Capital, by collecting in the centres of manufacture masses of operatives who thus became conscious of their number and their force, gave birth to a power which now countervails its own. To talk of a war of labour against capital generally would, of course, be absurd. Capital is nothing but the means of undertaking any industrial or commercial enterprise, of setting up an Allan line of steamships or setting up a costermonger's cart. We might as well talk of a war of labour against water power.

Capital is the fruit of labour past, the condition of labour present, without it no man could do a stroke of work, at least of work requiring tools or food for him who uses them. Let us dismiss from our language and our minds these impersonations, which though mere creatures of fancy playing with abstract nouns end by depraving our sentiments and misdirecting our actions, let us think and speak of capital impersonally and sensibly as an economical force and as we would think and speak of the force of gravitation. Relieve the poor word of the big c, which is a greatness thrust upon it, its tyranny, and the burning hatred of its tyranny will at once cease. Nevertheless, the fact remains that a working man standing alone, and without a breakfast for himself or his family, is not in a position to obtain the best terms from a rich employer, who can hold out as long as he likes or hire other labour on the spot. Whether Unionism has had much effect in producing a general rise of wages is very doubtful. Mr. Brassey's book, "Work and Wages," goes far to prove that it has not, and that while, on the one hand, the unionists have been in a fool's paradise, the masters, on the other, have been crying out before they were hurt. No doubt the general rise of wages is mainly and fundamentally due to natural causes: the accumulation of capital, the extension of commercial enterprise, and the opening up of new countries, which have greatly increased the competition for labour, and consequently, raised the price, while the nominal price of labour as well as of all other commodities has been raised by the influx of gold. What Unionism, as I think, has evidently effected, is the economical emancipation of the working man. It has rendered him independent instead of dependent, and, in some cases almost a serf, as he was before. It has placed him on an equal footing with his employer, and enabled him to make the best terms for himself in every respect. There is no employer who does not feel that this is so, or whom Mr. Brassey's statistics, or any statistics, would convince that it is not.

Fundamentally, value determines the price the community will give for any article, or any kind of work, just so much as it is worth. But there is no economical deity who, in each individual case, exactly adjusts the price to the value; we may make a good or a bad bargain, as many of us know to our cost. One source of bad bargains is ignorance. Before unions, which have diffused the intelligence of the labour market, and by so doing have equalized prices, the workman hardly knew the rate of wages in the next town. If this was true of the mechanic, it was still more true of the farm labourer. Practically speaking, the farm labourers in each parish of England, ignorant of everything beyond the parish, isolated and, therefore, dependent, had to take what the employers chose to give them. And what the employers chose to give them over large districts was ten shillings a week for themselves and their families, out of which they paid, perhaps, eighteen-pence for rent. A squire the other day, at a meeting of labourers, pointed with pride, and no doubt, with honest pride, to a labourer who had brought up a family of twelve children on twelve shillings a week I will venture to say the squire spent as much on any horse in his stables. Meat never touched the peasant's lips, though game, preserved for his landlord's pleasure, was running round his cottage. His children could not be educated, because they were wanted, almost from their infancy, to help in keeping the family from starving, as stonepickers, or perambulating scarecrows. His abode was a hovel, in which comfort, decency, morality could not dwell; and it was mainly owing to this cause that, as I have heard an experienced clergyman say, even the people in the low quarters of cities were less immoral than the rural poor. How the English peasants lived on such wages as they had, was a question which puzzled the best informed. How they died was clear enough; as penal paupers in a union workhouse. Yet Hodge's back, like that of Jacques Bonhomme, in France, bore everything, bore the great war against Republican France; for the squires and rectors, who made that war for class purposes, got their taxes back in increased rents and tithes. How did the peasantry exist, what was their condition in those days when wheat was at a hundred, or even a hundred and thirty shillings? They were reduced to a second serfage. They became in the mass parish paupers, and were divided, like slaves, among the employers of each parish. Men may be made serfs, and even slaves by other means than open force, in a country where, legally, all are free, where the impossibility of slavery is the boast of the law. Of late benevolence has been, abroad in the English parish, almsgiving and visiting have increased, good landlords have taken up cottage improvements. There have been harvest-homes, at which the young squires have danced with cottagers. But now Hodge has taken the matter into his own hands, and it seems not without effect. In a letter which I have seen, a squire says, "Here the people are all contented; we (the employers) have seen the necessity of raising their wages." Conservative journals begin to talk of measures for the compulsory improvement of cottages, for limiting ground game, giving tenant right to farmers, granting the franchise to rural householders. Yes, in consequence, partly, at least of this movement, the dwellings and the general conditions of the English peasantry will be improved, the game laws will be abolished; the farmers pressed upon from below, and in their turn pressing upon those above, will demand and obtain tenant right; and the country, as well as the city householders will be admitted to the franchise, which, under the elective system, is at once the only guarantee for justice to him and for his loyalty to the State. And when the country householder has the suffrage there will soon be an end of those laws of primogeniture and entail, which are deemed so Conservative, but are in fact most revolutionary, since they divorce the nation from its own soil. And then there will be a happier and a more United England in country as well as in town: the poor law, the hateful, degrading, demoralizing poor law will cease to exist; the huge poor- house will no longer darken the rural landscape with its shadow, in hideous contrast with the palace. Suspicion and hatred will no more cower and mutter over the cottage hearth, or round the beer-house fire: the lord of the mansion will no longer be like the man in Tennyson slumbering while a lion is always creeping nearer. Lord Malmesbury is astonished at this disturbance. He always thought the relation between the lord and the pauper peasant was the happiest possible; he cannot conceive what people mean by proposing a change. But then Lord Malmesbury was placed at rather a delusive point of view. If he knew the real state of Hodge's heart he would rejoice in the prospect of a change, not only for Hodge's sake, but, as he is no doubt a good man, for his own. England will be more religious, too, as well as happier and more harmonious, let the clergy be well assured of it. Social injustice especially when backed by the Church, is unfavourable to popular religion.

The general rise of wages may at first bring economical disturbance and pressure on certain classes, but, in the end, it brings general prosperity, diffused civilization, public happiness, security to society, which can never be secure while the few are feasting and the many are starving. In the end, also, it brings an increase of production, and greater plenty. Not that we can assent, without reserve, to the pleasant aphorism, that increase of wages, in itself, makes a better workman, which is probably true only where the workman has been under-fed, as in the case of the farm labourers of England. But the dearness of labour leads to the adoption of improved methods of production, and especially to the invention of machinery, which gives back to the community what it has paid in increased wages a hundred or a thousand fold. In Illinois, towards the close of the war, a large proportion of the male population had been drafted or volunteered, labour had become scarce and wages had risen, but the invention of machinery had been so much stimulated that the harvest that year was greater than it had ever been before. Machinery will now be used to a greater extent on the English farms; more will be produced by fewer hands, labourers will be set free for the production of other kinds, perhaps for the cultivation of our North-West, and the British peasant will rise from the industrial and intellectual level of a mere labourer to that of the guider of a machine. Machinery worked by relays of men is, no doubt, one of the principal solutions of our industrial problems, and of the social problems connected with them. Some seem to fancy that it is the universal solution; but we cannot run reaping machines in the winter or in the dark.

High wages, and the independence of the labourers, compel economy of labour. Economize labour, cries Lord Derby, the cool-headed mentor of the rich; we must give up our second under-butler. When the labourer is dependent, and his wages are low, the most precious of commodities, that commodity the husbanding of which is the chief condition of increased production, and of the growth of national wealth, is squandered with reckless prodigality. Thirty years the labourers of Egypt wrought by gangs of a hundred thousand at a time to build the great Pyramid which was to hold a despot's dust. Even now, when everybody is complaining of the dearness of labour, and the insufferable independence of the working class, a piece of fine lace, we are told, consumes the labour of seven persons, each employed on a distinct portion of the work; and the thread, of exquisite fineness, is spun in dark rooms underground, not without injury, we may suppose, to the eyesight or health of those employed. So that the labour movement does not seem to have yet trenched materially even on the elegancies of life. Would it be very detrimental to real civilization if we were forced, by the dearness of labour, to give up all the trades in which human life or health is sacrificed to mere fancy? In London, the bakers have struck. They are kept up from midnight to noon, sometimes far even into the afternoon, sleepless, or only snatching broken slumbers, that London may indulge its fancy for hot bread, which it would be much better without. The result of the strike probably will be, besides relief to the bakers themselves, which has already been in part conceded, a more wholesome kind of bread, such as will keep fresh and palatable through the day, and cleaner baking; for the wretchedness of the trade has made it vile and filthy, as is the case in other trades besides that of the bakers. Many an article of mere luxury, many a senseless toy, if our eyes could be opened, would be seen to bear the traces of human blood and tears. We are like the Merchant Brothers in Keats:—

"With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt, Enriched from ancestral merchandize, And for them many a weary hand did swelt In torch-lit mines and noisy factories, And many once proud-quivered loins did melt In blood from stinging whip; with hollow eyes Many all day in dazzling river stood To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood."

"For them the Ceylon diver held his breath, And went all naked to the hungry shark; For them his ears gushed blood; for them in death The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark Lay pierced with darts; for them alone did seethe A thousand men in troubles wide and dark: Half ignorant, they turned an easy wheel That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel."

Among other economies of labour, if this movement among the English peasantry succeeds and spreads to other countries, then will come an economy of soldiers' blood. Pauperism has been the grand recruiting serjeant. Hodge listed and went to be shot or scourged within an inch of his life for sixpence a day, because he was starving; but he will not leave five shillings for sixpence. Even in former days, the sailor, being somewhat better off than the peasant, could only be forced into the service by the press gang, a name the recollection of which ought to mitigate our strictures on the encroaching tendencies of the working class. There will be a strike, or a refusal of service equivalent to a strike in this direction also. It will be requisite to raise the soldier's pay; the maintenance of standing armies will become a costly indulgence. I have little faith in international champagne, or even in Geneva litigation as a universal antidote to war: war will cease or be limited to necessary occasions, when the burden of large standing armies becomes too great to be borne.

The strike of the English colliers again, though it causes great inconvenience, may have its good effect. It may be a strong indication that mining in England is getting very deep, and that the nation must exorcise a strict economy in the use of coal, the staple of its wealth and greatness. The lot of the colliers, grubbling all day underground and begrimed with dirt, is one of the hardest; the sacrifice of their lives by accidents is terribly large; and we may well believe that the community needs a lesson in favour of these underground toilers, which could be effectually taught only by some practical manifestation of their discontent.

To the labour movement, mainly, we owe those efforts to establish better relations between the employer and the employed, which are known by the general name of co-operation. The Comtists, in the name of their autocrat, denounce the whole co-operative system as rotten. Their plan, if you get to the bottom of it, is in fact a permanent division of the industrial world into capitalists. And workmen; the capitalists exercising a rule controlled only by the influence of philosophers; the workmen remaining in a perpetual state of tutelage, not to say of babyhood. A little acquaintance with this continent would probably dissipate notions of a permanent division of classes, or a permanent tutelage of any class. It is true that great commercial enterprises require the guidance of superior intelligence with undivided counsels as well as a large capital, and that co-operative mills have failed or succeeded only in cases where very little policy and very little capital were required. As to co-operative stores, they are co-operative only in a very different sense: combinative would be a more accurate term; and the department in which they seem likely to produce an alteration, is that of retail trade, an improvement in the conditions of which, economical and moral, is assuredly much needed. But if we are told that it is impossible to give the workmen an interest in the enterprise, so as, to make him work more willingly avoid waste and generally identify him self with his employer the answer is that the thing has been done both in England and here. An artisan working for him self and selling the produce of his individual skill has an interest and a pride in his work for which it would seem desirable to find if possible some substitute in the case of factory hands whose toil otherwise is mere weariness. The increased scale of commercial enterprise however is in itself advantageous in this respect. In great works where an army of workmen is employed at Saltaire or in the Platt works at Oldham there must be many grades of promotion and many subordinate places of trust and emolument to which the workmen may rise by industry and probity without capital of his own.

The general effect of the labour movement has been as I have said the industrial emancipation of the workmen. It has perhaps had an effect more general still. Aided by the general awakening of social sentiment and of the feeling of social responsibility, it has practically opened our eyes to the fact that a nation and humanity at large is a community the good things of which all are entitled to share while all must share the evil things. It has forcibly dispelled the notion in which the rich indolently acquiesced that enjoyment leisure culture refined affection high civilization are the destined lot of the few while the destined lot of the many is to support the privileged existence of the few by unremitting coarse and jobless toil. Society has been taught that it must at least endeavour to be just. The old ecclesiastical props of privilege are gone. There is no use any longer in quoting or misquoting Scripture to prove that God wills the mass of mankind to be always poor and always dependent on the rich. The very peasant has now broken that spell and will no longer believe the rector if he tells him that this world belongs to the squire and that justice is put off to the next. The process of mental emancipation has been assisted by the bishop who was so rash as to suggest that rural agitators should be ducked in a horse pond. Hodge has determined to find out for himself by a practical experiment what the will of God really is. No doubt this is an imperfect world and is likely to remain so for our time at least; we must all work on in the hope that if we do our duty it will be well for us in the sum of things and that when the far off goal of human effort is at last reached, every faithful servant of humanity will have his part in the result; if it were not so, it would be better to be a brute, with no unfulfilled aspirations, than a man. But I repeat, the religion of privilege has lost its power to awe or to control, and if society wishes to rest on a safe foundation, it must show that it is at least trying to be just.

Wealth, real wealth, has hardly as yet much reason to complain of any encroachment of the labour movement on its rights. When did it command such means and appliances of pleasure, such satisfaction for every appetite and every fancy, as it commands now? When did it rear such enchanted palaces of luxury as it is rearing in England at the present day? Well do I remember one of those palaces, the most conspicuous object for miles round. Its lord was, I daresay, consuming the income of some six hundred of the poor labouring families round him. The thought that you are spending on yourself annually the income of six hundred labouring families seems to me about as much as a man with a heart and a brain can bear. Whatever the rich man desires, the finest house, the biggest diamond, the reigning beauty for his wife, social homage, public honours, political power, is ready at his command. Does he fancy a seat in the British House of Commons, the best club in London, as it has been truly called? All other claims, those of the public service included, at once give way. I remember a question arising about a nomination for a certain constituency (a working man's constituency, by the way), which was cut short by the announcement that the seat was wanted by a local millionaire. When the name of the millionaire was mentioned, surprise was expressed. Has he, it was asked, any political knowledge or capacity, any interest in public affairs, any ambition? The answer was "None." "Then why does he want the seat?" "He does not want it." "Then why does he take it?" "Because his wife does." Cleopatra, as the story goes, displayed her mad prodigality by melting a pearl in a cup, out of which she drank to Antony. But this modern money-queen could throw into her cup of pleasure, to give it a keener zest, a share in the government of the greatest empire in the world.

If the movement, by transferring something from the side of profits to that of wages, checks in any measure the growth of these colossal fortunes, it will benefit society and diminish no man's happiness. I say it without the slightest feeling of asceticism, and in the conviction that wealth well made and well spent is as pure as the rill that runs from the mountain side.

Real chiefs of industry have generally a touch of greatness in them and no nobleman of the peerage clings more to his tinsel than do nature's noblemen to simplicity of life. Mr. Brassey with his millions never could be induced to increase his establishment his pride and pleasure were in the guidance of industry and the accomplishment of great works. But in the hands of the heirs of these men colossal fortunes become social nuisances waste labour breed luxury create unhappiness by propagating factitious wants too often engender vice and are injurious for the most part to real civilization. The most malignant feelings which enter into the present struggle have been generated especially in England by the ostentation of idle wealth in contrast with surrounding poverty. No really high nature covets such a position as that of a luxurious and useless millionaire. Communism as a movement is a mistake but there is a communism which is deeply seated in the heart of every good man and which makes him feel that the hardest of all labour is idleness in a world of toil and that the bitterest of all bread is that which is eaten by the sweat of another man's brow.

The pressure is hardest not on those who are really rich but on those who have hitherto on account of their education and the intellectual character of their callings been numbered with the rich and who are still clinging to the skirts of wealthy society. The best thing which those who are clinging to the skirts of wealthy society can do is to let go. They will find that they have not far to fall and they will rest on the firm ground of genuine respectability and solid comfort. By keeping up then culture they will preserve their social grade far better than by struggling for a precarious footing among those whose habits they cannot emulate and whose hospitalities they cannot return. Then income will be increased by the whole cost of the efforts which they now make it the sacrifice of comforts and often of necessaries to maintain the appearances of wealth. British grandees may be good models for our millionaires but what most of us want are models of the art of enjoying life thoroughly and nobly without ostentation and at a moderate cost. It is by people of the class of which I am speaking that the servant difficulty that doleful but ever recurring theme is most severely felt. Nor would I venture to hold out much hope that the difficulty will become less. It is not merely industrial out social. There is a growing repugnance to anything like servitude which makes the female democracy prefer the independence of the factory to the subordination of the kitchen, however good the wages and however kind the mistress may be. We must look to inventions for saving labour, which might be adopted in houses to a greater extent than they are now. Perhaps when the work has been thus lightened and made less coarse, families may find "help," in the true sense, among their relatives, or others in need of a home, who would be members of the family circle. Homes and suitable employment might thus be afforded to women who are now pining in enforced idleness, and sighing for Protestant nunneries, while the daily war with Bridget would be at an end.

I would not make light of these inconveniences or of the present disturbance of trade. The tendency of a moment may be good, and yet it may give society a very bad quarter of an hour. Nor would I attempt to conceal the errors and excesses of which the unions have been guilty, and into which, as organs of corporate selfishness, they are always in danger of running. Industrial history has a record against the workingman as well as against the master. The guilds of the Middle Ages became tyrannical monopolies and leagues against society, turned callings open to all into mysteries confined to a privileged few, drove trade and manufactures from the cities where they reigned to places free from their domination. This probably was the cause of the decay of cities which forms the burden of complaint in the preambles to Acts of Parliament, in the Tudor period. Great guilds oppressed little guilds: strong commercial cities ruled by artisans oppressed their weaker neighbours of the same class. No one agency has done so much to raise the condition of the workingman as machinery; yet the workingman resisted the introduction of machinery, rose against it, destroyed it, maltreated its inventors. There is a perpetual warning in the name of Hargreaves, the workingman who, by his inventive genius, provided employment for millions of his fellows, and was by them rewarded with outrage and persecution.

Flushed with confidence at the sight of their serried phalanxes and extending lines, the unionists do like most people invested with unwonted power; they aim at more than is possible or just. They fancy that they can put the screw on the community, almost without limit. But they will soon find out their mistake. They will learn it from those very things which are filling the world with alarm—the extension of unionism, and the multiplication of strikes. The builder strikes against the rest of the community, including the baker, then the baker strikes against the builder and the collier strikes against them both. At first the associated trades seem to have it all their own way. But the other trades learn the secret of association. Everybody strikes against everybody else, the price of all articles rises as much as anybody's wages, and thus when the wheel has come full circle, nobody is much the gainer. In fact long before the wheel has come full circle the futility of a universal strike will be manifest to all. The world sees before it a terrible future of unionism ever increasing in power and tyranny, but it is more likely that in a few years unionism as an instrument for forcing up wages will have ceased to exist. In the meantime the working classes will have impressed upon themselves by a practical experiment upon the grandest scale and of the most decisive kind the fact that they are consumers as well as producers, payers of wages as well as receivers of wages, members of a community as well as workingmen.

The unionists will learn also after a few trials that the community cannot easily be cornered, at least that it cannot easily be cornered more than once by unions any more than by gold rings at New York or pork rings at Chicago. It may apparently succumb once being unable to do without its bread or its newspapers or to stop buildings already contracted for and commenced, but it instinctively prepares to defend itself against a repetition of the operation. It limits consumption or invents new modes of production, improves machinery, encourages non union men, calls in foreigners, women, Chinese. In the end the corner results in loss. Cornering on the part of workingmen is not a bit worse than cornering on the part of great financiers; in both cases alike it is as odious as anything can be, which is not actually criminal; but depend upon it a bad time is coming for corners of all kinds.

I speak of the community as the power with which the strikers really have to deal. The master hires or organizes the workmen, but the community purchases their work; and though the master when hard pressed may in his desperation give more for the work than it is worth rather than at once take his capital out of the trade the community will let the trade go to ruin without compunction rather than give more for the article than it can afford. Some of the colliers in England, we are informed, have called upon the masters to reduce the price of coal, offering at the same time to consent to a reduction of their own wages. A great fact has dawned upon their minds. Note too that democratic communities have more power of resistance to unionist extortion than others, because they are more united, have a keener sense of mutual interest, and are free from political fear. The way in which Boston, some years ago, turned to and beat a printers' strike, was a remarkable proof of this fact.

Combination may enable, and, as I believe, has enabled the men in particular cases to make a fairer bargain with the masters, and to get the full market value of their labour, but neither combination nor any other mode of negotiating can raise the value of labour or of any other article to the consumer, and that which cannot raise the value cannot permanently raise the price.

All now admit that strikes peaceably conducted are lawful. Nevertheless, they may sometimes be anti-social and immoral. Does any one doubt it? Suppose by an accident to machinery, or the falling in of a mine, a number of workmen have their limbs broken. One of their mates runs for the surgeon, and the surgeon puts his head out of the window and says— "the surgeons are on strike." Does this case much differ from that of the man who, in his greed, stops the wheel of industry which he is turning, thereby paralysing the whole machine, and spreading not only confusion, but suffering, and perhaps starvation among multitudes of his fellows? Language was held by some unionist witnesses, before the Trades Union Commission, about their exclusive regard for their own interests, and their indifference to the interests of society, which was more frank than philanthropic, and more gratifying to their enemies than to their friends. A man who does not care for the interests of society will find, to his cost, that they are his own, and that he is a member of a body which cannot be dismembered. I spoke of the industrial objects of the International as chimerical. They are worse than chimerical. In its industrial aspect, the International was an attempt to separate the interests of a particular class of workers throughout the world from those of their fellow workers, and to divide humanity against itself. Such attempts can end only in one way.

There are some who say, in connection with this question, that you are at liberty to extort anything you can from your fellow men, provided you do not use a pistol; that you are at liberty to fleece the sailor who implores you to save him from a wreck, or the emigrant who is in danger of missing his ship. I say that this is a moral robbery, and that the man would say so himself if the same thing were done to him.

A strike is a war, so is a lock out, which is a strike on the other side. They are warrantable, like other wars, when justice cannot be obtained, or injustice prevented by peaceful means, and in such cases only. Mediation ought always to be tried first and it will often be effectual, for the wars of carpenters and builders, as well as the wars of emperors, often arise from passion more than from interest, and passion may be calmed by mediation. Hence the magnitude of the unions, formidable as it seems, has really a pacific effect; passion is commonly personal or local, and does not affect the central government of a union extending over a whole nation. The governments of great unions have seldom recommended strikes. A strike or lock-out, I repeat, is an industrial war, and when the war is over there ought to be peace. Constant bad relations between the masters and the men, a constant attitude of mutual hostility and mistrust, constant threats of striking upon one side, and of locking out upon the other, are ruinous to the trade, especially if it depends at all upon foreign orders, as well as destructive of social comfort. If the state of feeling and the bearing of the men toward the masters, remain what they now are in some English trades, kind-hearted employers who would do their best to improve the condition of the workman, and to make him a partaker in their prosperity, will be driven from the trade, and their places will be taken by men with hearts of flint who will fight the workman by force and fraud, and very likely win. We have seen the full power of associated labour, the full power of associated capital has yet to be seen. We shall see it when instead of combinations of the employers in a single trade, which seldom hold together, employers in all trades learn to combine.