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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



of view of the wealth and the welfare of the t 

 whole nation. Strikes convert the workmen into 

 wasteful consumers of wealth : the food and cloth- 

 ing they destroy becomes a dead loss, without 

 compensation ; the closed works deteriorate in 

 condition ; it may take months and an immense 

 outlay to restore them to an efficient state — again 

 an unmitigated destruction of wealth. The calam- 

 ity spreads on to auxiliary trades, to the makers 

 of machinery and materials — again consumption 

 without production, a clear diminution of the 

 public wealth. Thus the impoverishing process 

 does its fatal work : it eats up capital, it lessens 

 the power of making and of employing makers ; 

 the means of buying dwindle down, for to buy is 

 only to exchange wealth for wealth, and with less 

 wealth there must be less buying, less business, 

 stagnation and depression in every direction ; and 

 if the strikes are wanton, against permanently 

 lower prices, as experience has amply demon- 

 strated for many months past, are we not in pres- 

 ence of one cause of the commercial depression ? 

 But there is worse yet to tell. Strikes are 

 instruments of war : and, the battle over, the loss 

 may be soon effaced by the energies of peace. 

 But the novel principles on which trades-unions 

 construct the regulation of labor are a very dif- 

 ferent matter indeed. They generate conduct 

 which inflicts injury of the widest range, and, 

 still more, creates influences whose misleading 

 power is very enduring. The unions lay down 

 rules which attack the quantity and the quality 

 of the article they have to sell. They thus attack 

 the efficiency of labor, the worth of wages, to the 

 injury of every man in the country. To limit, 

 by arbitrary regulations which take no heed of 

 the position of trade and industry, the quantity 

 of labor sold for a given wage, to undermine its 

 quality by demanding the same reward for the 

 man who works badly as for the man who works 

 well, to give no play to the differences of physi- 

 cal and mental ability with which Nature has en- 

 dowed human beings, to suppress the energy of 

 character and of hope by the abolition of piece- 

 work and of the strongest motives for exertion, 

 to demand of a purchaser a fixed and elevated 

 price without the slightest regard for the quality 

 of the article sold, to encourage laziness, unman- 

 liness, the absence of the respect for the man's 

 self as well as for his employer, and to place the 

 relation of seller and purchaser on the basis cf 

 inherent and abiding hostility, is to violate the 

 laws of human nature, as it finds itself in this 

 world, and to trample under foot the fundament- 

 al principle of every form of industry, that work 



should be as productive as possible, and the wealth 

 thereby produced should reach the highest range 

 of abundance and cheapness. It is not to know 

 the vital truth that the laborers and the capital- 

 ists receive their satisfactions out of one common 

 fund, the wealth created, and that what renders 

 it needlessly and artificially smaller is to injure 

 both the parties who contribute to its creation, 

 and along with them the whole people. 



The unions have failed in their vehement re- 

 sistance against the law of supply and demand 

 which governs every market, that of labor as well 

 as any other They had to choose between re- 

 fusing to give the article ; that is, between no 

 wages or a lower price for labor ; but great was 

 the harm they did to the public wealth during 

 the struggle. Prices were kept up for a long 

 time above their true level, fewer goods were pro- 

 duced and fewer sold. Foreign countries, espe- 

 cially after their excessive creation of machinery 

 for producing had ceased, had become extremely 

 bad customers of England. Still worse — they un- 

 dersold the dear goods of England in distant 

 markets. In many instances they actually in- 

 vaded England herself: Belgian and American 

 goods were freely sold in the heart of the very 

 workshop of the whole world. England was do- 

 ing less business and becoming poorer. 



There is one fact more of great significance, 

 which must not be omitted in this review of our 

 late commercial history. Men of the mood of 

 mind of the unionist workmen are emphatically 

 not savers. When wages are large, they do not, 

 like the French peasant, turn a portion of them 

 into saving, and thereby increase capital, and the 

 production of wealth in the country. What they 

 extort from employers they consume unproduc- 

 tively ; they destroy it in indulgences, and only 

 too often in drink. This engenders a very marked 

 distinction between exceptional wages and ex- 

 ceptional profits The marked tendency of em- 

 ployers is to make themselves rich, to build up 

 fortunes ; but, really, fortune means a machine 

 for the constant production of wealth. That is 

 its very essence. To buy an estate — the common 

 ambition of the prosperous English trader — is to 

 acquire a rent-yielding instrument : and rent is 

 the result of the cultivation of the land. A heavy 

 holding in railway-stocks is the ownership of an 

 instrument which enriches not the shareholder 

 only but the whole country, which calls into be- 

 ing a vast power of employing and rewarding la- 

 bor. The mighty towns of England, the count- 

 less factories of her manufacturing regions, are 

 all savings out of profits : how feeble are the pro- 



