138 president's address — section f. 



own conditions, they did not attempt to deny the right of 

 any outside their ranks to accept the employment which they 

 refused. By theii* organisation, by the moderation of their 

 proceedings, by the power which the accumulation of funds 

 gave them to withstand a lock-out or to bear a strike, they 

 have been enabled to secure many privileges and con- 

 cessions — such as increases in wages and reductions in hours 

 of labour — for their members, and they have secured a 

 control in the industrial life of the race which, properly 

 exercised, is calculated to still further extend the sphere of 

 their usefulness. In an evil hour, however, the control of the 

 unions, especially in these colonies, has passed largely into 

 the hands of men many of whom are professional agitators ; 

 the honest worker has exchanged the tyranny of an employer 

 for the more oppressive tyranny of a mob orator. Not 

 content with the right which they have now to dispose of 

 their own labour on their own terms, the members of unions 

 now want to refuse a similar n^ht to all others. The 

 tyranny of the old and often inhuman employers was the 

 cold, cunning, secret tyranny of the few over the many. 

 The tyranny of later day unions is the hot, violent, over- 

 bearing tyranny of the many over the few. The late 

 maritime strike was an evidence of the readiness with which 

 the shghest pretext is seized upon to provoke discontent ; 

 while the recent shearers' strike in Queensland proved that 

 open rebellion against the law of the land and the com- 

 mission of dastardly crimes are considered legitimate weapons 

 in the warfare against capital. Any impartial survey of the 

 history of strikes and lock-outs must result in the con- 

 viction that they have both failed to settle the conflict, and 

 have both resulted in a waste of national energies and 

 resources. Not only is this so, but the action of later day 

 trade unions has tended to make the labourer less skilful 

 and labour less effective and more costly. How can it be 

 otherwise, when the trade unions require that the bad work- 

 man shall receive the same wage as the good one, — that the 

 skilled artizan shall be allowed to do no more work in a day 

 than the muddler ? I say that the tendency of this attitude 

 of the trade unions is to crush out all stimulus to exertion, 

 to take away all encouragement to effort, to pull the expert 

 down to the level of the blunderer, and not to raise the 

 blunderer to the level of the expert. We have, indeed, seen 

 fulfilled the prophetic utterance of Mr. J. S. Mill :— " We 

 look in vain among the working classes in general for the 



