THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY. 51 



From which it might be supposed that all skilled and unskilled 

 artisans and farm-laborers, with their wives and children, live upon air 

 need no food, no clothing, no furniture, no houses, and are therefore 

 unaffected by enhanced prices of commodities. However fully prepared 

 for the distorting effects of class-bias, one would hardly have expected 

 effects so great. One would have thought it manifest, even to an ex- 

 treme partisan of trades-unions, that a strike which makes coal as dear 

 again, affects, in a relatively small degree, the thousands of rich con- 

 sumers above described, and is very keenly felt by the millions of poor 

 consumers to whom, in winter, the outlay for coal is a serious item of 

 expenditure. One would have thought that a truth, so obvious in this 

 case, would be recognized throughout the truth that, with nearly all 

 products of industry, the evil caused by a rise of price falls more 

 heavily on the vast numbers who work for wages than on the small 

 numbers who have moderate incomes or large incomes. 



Were not their judgments warped by the class-bias, working-men 

 might be more pervious to the truth that better forms of industrial or- 

 ganization would grow up and extinguish this which they regard as 

 oppressive, were such better forms practicable. And they might see 

 that the impracticability of better forms results from the imperfections 

 of existing human nature, moral and intellectual. If the workers in 

 any business could so combine and govern themselves that the share 

 of profit coming to them as workers was greater than now, while the 

 interest on the capital employed was less than now ; and if they could 

 at the same time sell the articles produced at lower rates than like 

 articles produced in businesses managed as at present, then, manifest- 

 ly, businesses managed as at present would go to the wall. That they 

 do not so to the wall that such better industrial organizations do 

 not replace them, implies that the natures of working-men themselves 

 are not good enough ; or, at least, that there are not many of them 

 good enough. Happily, to some extent, organizations of a superior 

 type are becoming possible : here and there they have achieved en- 

 couraging successes. But, speaking generally, the masses are neither 

 sufficiently provident, nor sufficiently conscientious, nor sufficiently in- 

 telligent. Consider the evidence. 



That they are not provident enough they show both by wasting 

 their higher wages when they get them, and by neglecting such oppor- 

 tunities as occur of entering into modified forms of cooperative indus- 

 try. When the Gloucester Wagon Company was formed, it was de- 

 cided to reserve a thousand of its shares, of ten pounds each, for the 

 workmen employed ; and to suit them it was arranged that the calls 

 of a pound each should be at intervals of three months. As many of 

 the men earned 2 10s. per week, in a locality where living is not cost- 

 ly, it was considered that the taking up of shares in this manner 

 would be quite practicable. All the circumstances were at the outset 

 such as to promise that prosperity which the company has achieved. 



