Social and Political Views 



and similar experiences showed us that when the organisation 

 of the trade unions was more complete, and the accumulated 

 funds of several years were devoted to this purpose, the bulk 

 of the inhabitants of London, and of other great cities, could 

 be made to suffer a degree of famine comparable with that 

 of Paris when besieged by the German army in 1870. 



Wallace's watchword throughout these social agitations 

 was '' Equality of Opportunity for All," and the ideal 

 method by which he hoped to achieve this end was a system 

 of industrial colonisation in our own country whereby all 

 would have a fair, if not an absolutely equal, share in the 

 benefits arising from the production of their own labour, 

 whether physical or mental.* 



With regard to the education of the people, especially 

 as a stepping-stone to moral and intellectual reform, Wal- 

 lace believed in the training of individual natural talent, 

 rather than the present system of general education thrust 

 upon every boy or girl regardless of their varying mental 

 capacities. He also urged that the building-up of the mind 

 should be alternated with physical training in one or more 

 useful trades, so that there might be, not only at the out- 

 set, but also in later life, a choice of occupation in order 

 to avoid the excess of unemployment in any one direction. 



In his opinion, one of the injurious results of our com- 

 petitive system, having its roots, however, in the valuable 

 '• guilds " of a past epoch, was the almost universal re- 

 striction of our workers to only one kind of labour. The 

 result was a dreadful monotony in almost all spheres of 

 work, the extreme unhealthiness of many, and a much 

 larger amount of unemployment than if each man or 

 woman were regularly trained in two or more occupations. 

 In addition to two of what are commonly called trades, 



^ A full account of this scheme is given in his " Studies, Scientific and 

 Social," chap. xxvi. 



147 



