TRADES' UNIONS. 151 



unwilling to take advantage of their seasons of weakness, 

 and prepared to rejoice, though secretly mayhap, in their 

 defeats and reverses. And further, their discomfiture 

 will be always quite certain enough when seasons of 

 depression come, from the circumstance that, fixing their 

 terms in prosperous times, they will fix them with re- 

 ference rather to their present power of enforcing them 

 than to that medium line of fair and equal adjustment 

 on which a conscientious man could plant his foot and 

 make a firm stand. Men such as you, able and ready to 

 work in behalf of these combinations, will of course get 

 the work to do, but you will have little or no power given 

 you in their direction : the direction will be apparently in 

 the hands of a few fluent gabbers ; and yet even they will 

 not be the actual directors, they will be but the expo- 

 nents and voices of the general mediocre sentiment and 

 inferior sense of the mass as a whole, and acceptable 

 only so long as they give utterance to that ; and so, ulti- 

 mately, exceedingly little will be won in this way for 

 working men. It is well that they should be allowed 

 to combine, seeing that combination is permitted to 

 those who employ them ; but until the majority of our 

 working men of the south become very different from 

 what they now are, greatly wiser and greatly better, 

 there will be more lost than gained by their combina- 

 tions. According to the circumstances of the time and 

 season, the current will be at one period running in 

 their favour against the masters, and at another in favour 

 of the masters against them : there will be a continual 

 ebb and flow, like that of the sea, but no general ad- 

 vance ; and the sooner that the like of you and I get out 

 of the rough conflict and jostle of the tideway, and set 

 ourselves to labour apart on our own internal resources, 

 it will be all the better for us/ 



