40 POLITICAL ECONOMY 



one condition of which was the injury of a third party. Neither 

 master nor man should be suffered to agree to a rule excluding 

 the knobstick ; we fear he will be excluded by the system of 

 contumely, after all has been done that can be done for him, 

 but we can at least protect him against positive enactments. 



The case of labourers employed to do the work of skilled 

 artisans is closely analogous but not identical. Perhaps some 

 of our readers may not be aware of the great distinction in 

 social status between the artisan and the labourer. In works 

 on political economy the labourer means a man who lives by the 

 labour of his hands, but in workmen's language a labourer 

 means a man of wholly different and much lower standing than 

 the skilled workman. The labourer in each trade does the 

 work requiring comparatively little skill, but much strength and 

 hard work, and in workshops the line between labourers and 

 artisans or mechanics is as clear and as strongly drawn as that 

 between employers and workmen. Not that a labourer is 

 necessarily or generally a mere beast of burden without any 

 skill ; on the contrary, an engineer's labourer or a bricklayer's 

 labourer requires considerable training; and so it is in each 

 branch of trade. Custom has partitioned the work between two 

 classes, one receiving nearly twice the wages of the other, and 

 consisting of men with some education, men who dress in a 

 good black coat on Sundays, and who look on the other or 

 labouring class as one with whose members they cannot asso- 

 ciate out of the workshop, while in the workshop the labourers 

 are treated as servants. Labourers have sometimes foremen of 

 their own ; they have unions also, in emulation of their betters ; 

 but the labourer and mechanic are as different as the mechanic 

 and the gentleman. This being the relation between the two 

 classes, it is a mortal sin in a labourer to presume to encroach 

 on the field which the mechanic arrogates to himself. Of course 

 labourers, by seeing mechanics constantly at work, are fre- 

 quently able to do the simpler parts of the work as well as they. 

 Woe to the labourer who is caught doing the work of his betters ; 

 he will not be beaten, any more than a gentleman's servant 

 wearing his master's clothes will be thrashed, but he will n^t 

 long keep his employment. The subdivision of the work into 

 two categories has come about in the interest of all concerned. 



