the latter will have the power of increasing their demands until their wages more and more absorb the profits. In other words, a forcible monopoly of employment will make the workmen who exercise it the real owners. Now, many of the employers in the railway companies, for example, are shareholders, who are often far from rich; and, in fact, one of the railway men, who dared to drive a train at the beginning of the recent strike, was ' Thomas John, who, being a shareholder in the Taff Vale Company', says your report (The Times, August 8), 'had deserted the ranks of the strikers'. It would be a national disgrace if men, who have been paid for their work and have laid out no capital, should, by a series of violent strikes, dispossess poor shareholders who have invested their hard-earned savings. Nor is this all; through the combination of unions the workmen of a given district, if allowed to monopolize employments in that district, will become the real owners of every industry in the district, by a series of violent strikes so organized as to prevent new workmen coming into the district. . . .

It is not to be denied that a section of workmen may enrich themselves by this unjust and illegal process. Meanwhile, they are not benefiting all labourers, for they are preventing others from being employed. In these labour troubles it has been astounding how strikers have been able to assault, to intimidate, to prevent poor men from working, who are sorely in need of employment, and how little legal protection and what scant sympathy has been accorded to the so-called 'blacklegs', who are the poor that cry, and have none to help them. What are the causes of this strange departure from English justice and generosity? One cause is that men have got it into their heads that the strikes are a struggle of labour against capital, and therefore of the poor against the rich. Superficially this is true,

and in former strikes it was the whole truth. But nowadays the violent strike is also a struggle of labour against labour, of those who can, at all events, afford to strike against those who want work-of the employed against the unemployed. We are constantly in danger of forgetting that there are higher and lower classes in the ranks of labour itself. There is another cause of the want of sympathy with the blacklegs'. It is thought that they ought to be members of the unions. There is an undefined feeling', which is thus expressed by Sir Edward Reed this morning:

'In the long run there can be little doubt, I think, that work'ing men will become so generally combined in trade organizations that they will feel themselves safe, and not unfair, in 'making the complete organization of all labour a condition ' of supplying their own.'

In order to dispel this vision by reality, I might say that even if there is little doubt of its realization in the long run, there is no doubt at all that to prevent a non-unionist from working at the present moment is unjust and illegal. I might also point out that the desirability of the end does not justify the illegal means of forcing non-unionists into unions, and preventing them from working if they refuse. I might further appeal to the prophets of a general organization of all labour to use their imaginations and ask themselves whether its formation could be tolerated by any Government; for it is certain that, when formed, it would be so strong as to destroy the existing Government, and become itself a government, which would cease to be the protector of all rights, and become a huge trade union. But what would be the economical working? That is the real question.

A general organization of labour would ruin this country. The threat of a general strike would, no doubt, raise wages at first. But a general rise in

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wages would not only over-stimulate population, but would encourage an immense influx of foreign workmen. Nor could there be any remedy but the prohibition of foreign labour, which has so often improved English industries. Another feature of English history, not so easy to control, is the rise of individual Englishmen from grade to grade. If trade unionists prevent non-unionists from rising into their places now, so the better paid would prevent the worse paid from rising into their places in a general organization of all labour. Nor would there be any remedy short of paying all workmen equally, which would be in the first place unjust, and in the second place destructive of skilled labour and of the ambition of one workman to excel another. The further effects would be still worse. The rise of wages would cause a rise of prices, which would partly neutralize the high wages and partly stimulate foreign production and imports, with the result of driving prices down, and with them partly the wages, but mainly the profits of the capitalists.

All these consequences will sit easily on the conscience of the Socialist and the leveller, and especially the impoverishment of the capitalist. I have already pointed out that the effect of violent strikes for a monopoly of employment on the terms of the strikers must end in extruding the capitalists and making the strikers the real owners of the concern affected. This effect would be immensely intensified by a general organization of all labour, because the workmen would demand more and more of each capitalist as the condition of supplying him with any labour at all. Nor is it any answer to say that the workmen would see that the capitalist gets some share, for some of the recent strikes have been against companies which pay no dividend to the shareholders. There is a limit, however, to the impoverishment of all capitalists. It consists in a pro

cess much easier than many suppose. Let anybody purchase a Stock Exchange List and read the amount of British capital which is at this moment invested abroad in foreign securities all over the world. He will soon convince himself that capitalists can gradually and, so to speak, imperceptibly depart with their capital and their intelligence from this country, leaving the general organization of labour to starve in a fool's paradise. August 20.

THE LABOUR QUESTION AND CONCILIATION BOARDS

FROM The Times, SEPTEMBER 2, 1890.

It is satisfactory that Sir Edward Reed, in his letter which you published on the 26th, admits that all employers have a right to employ men in lieu of those on strike. It would have been more satisfactory had he further definitely admitted that those on strike have no right to forcibly prevent men from being employed in lieu of themselves; for this is the very point. Instead of discussing it, he goes off to the irrelevant contention that they have a right to use all their powers of persuasion'. But the point is that they have no right to use force, that the strikers in South Wales did use force, and that it is becoming habitual to strikers to use force, which is illegal and equally unjust to the employers and to the unemployed. This also is what I tried to show in my letter (The Times, August 23).

Instead of making any attempt to deal with this point, he positively says that, if the strikers used anything but persuasion, it never came to his 'certain knowledge'. Why he had only to read the reports in The Times (August 8-15), and especially the earlier of these reports, to find that the railway men on strike roughly handled those who refused to 'come out', prevented them from working the

engines, and so intimidated the officials that they were obliged to stop the traffic and have the gates guarded by police. Such acts can only be called persuasion in the euphemistic sense in which a schoolmaster tries the gentle persuasion' of the rod. Really they are not persuasion, but force, and illegal force. Either Sir Edward Reed does not know the difference, or did not make himself acquainted with 'the early incidents of the Cardiff strike', which he hints I do not understand; and whether from confusion or from ignorance proceeded to countenance these acts of violence by promising 'to hold up the grim visage of democracy'. At any rate, after it had been pointed out to him in my letter that those whose cause he espoused had used force, he ought not in his answer to have evaded the real question. Have strikers a right to forcibly prevent new servants from being employed? What is the answer of dabblers in violent strikes to this question?

The extent and the intent of this question at this moment and in the future embolden me to offer another illustration of its importance. In his letter Sir Edward Reed says that he is a member of the committee to form a Conciliation Board contemplated by the Cardiff Chamber of Commerce. As this board is likely to be a model for others, I hope it will not seem impertinent to offer one suggestion on the general constitution of Conciliation Boards. In his chapter on Courts of Conciliation', which has had some influence, Lord Brassey says: "It may be that a Court of Conciliation can never adjust a real quarrel. But it is certain that it may do much to prevent a quarrel from arising' (Work and Wages, p. 271, ed. 1872). These words are all the more valuable because the book contains no suspicion of the advent of the new trade unionism, with the violent strike and the boycotting of the blackleg. They convey an impartial opinion in 1872, which