236 ARISTOCRACY AND E VOL UTION 



Book in show this in a way which is hidden from the careless 

 thinker by a curiously inaccurate and misleading use 

 of language. Trade unionism is constantly described 

 as the organisation of Labour. In reality it is nothing 

 of the kind. It is an organisation of labourers ; and 

 that, as we shall see, is a totally different thing ; 

 for where labourers are spoken of under the collective 

 name of Labour, they are so spoken of with special 

 and exclusive reference to the phenomena which 

 they manifest when actually exerting themselves in 

 production. Were the same men organised for some 

 ethical or religious purpose, they would be spoken 

 of not as Labour, but as the National or Popular 

 Conscience. The organisation of Labour is the 

 setting men to perform a large variety of correlated 

 productive tasks, and prescribing to each man what 

 his own task shall be. But the organisation of 

 labourers that has been brought about by trade 

 unionism is of a precisely opposite kind, and has 

 a precisely opposite end. Its end is not production, 

 but the cessation of production ; not the prescribing, 

 the devising, and the allotting of tasks, but the taking 

 men away from them. In a word, it is the organisation 

 not of production, but of obstruction; nor does the fact 

 that the trade unions have succeeded in organising 

 the latter give so much as a hint that they would 

 be able to organise the former. Even if they could 

 do so, it would be the leaders, not the men, that 

 performed the feat a new race of employers 

 separating themselves from the body of the em- 

 ployed ; and this fact is oddly enough acknowledged 



