* 
oars 
SS. -. 
TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 913 
the more gentlemanly forms of commercial fraud on a large scale; for which the 
punishment awarded by the law courts is often trivial incomparison with the aggregate 
gains which the breakers of the law, whose offences can seldom be proved, make 
by their wrongdoing ; and it is still more trivial in comparison with the aggregate 
injury which such wrongdoing inflicts on the public. Many of the worst evils in 
modern forms of competition could be diminished by merely bringing that part of 
the law which relates to economic problems of modern growth into harmony with 
that which relates to the old-fashioned and well-matured economic questions relat- 
ing to common picking and stealing. And somewhat similar remarks apply to the 
punishments for infringements of the Factory Acts. 
But at best the action of the law must be slow, cumbrous, and inelastic, and 
therefore ineffective. And there are many matters in which public opinion can 
exercise its influence more quickly and effectively by a direct route, than by the 
indirect route of first altering the law. For of all the great changes which our 
own age has seen in the relative proportions of different economic forces, there is 
none so important as the increase in the area from which public opinion collects 
itself, and in the force with which it bears directly upon economic issues. 
For instance, combinations of labour on the one side, and of employers on 
the other, are now able to arrange plans of campaign for whole trades, for whole 
counties, for the whole country, and sometimes even beyond. And partly on 
account of the magnitude of the interests concerned, partly because trade disputes 
are being reduced to system, affairs which would be only of local interest are dis- 
cussed over the whole kingdom. 
The many turbulent little quarrels which centred more often about questions 
of individual temper than of broad policy are now displaced by a few great 
strikes ; as to which public opinion is on the alert; so that a display of temper is a 
tactical blunder. Each side strives to put itself right with the public, and requires 
of its leaders above all things that they should persuade the average man that 
their demands are reasonable, and that the quarrel is caused by the refusal of the 
other side to accept a reasonable compromise. 
This change is increasing the wisdom and the strength of each side; but the 
employers have always had fairly good means of communication with one another ; 
it is the employed that have gained most from cheap means of communication by 
press, by railway, and by telegraph, and from improvements in their education 
and in their incomes, which enable them to make more use of these new and 
cheaper facilities. And while the employers have always known how to present 
their case to the public well, and have always had a sympathetic public, the 
working classes are only now beginning to read newspapers enough to supply an 
effective national working-class opinion; and they are only now learning how to 
present their case well, and to hope much from, or care much for, the opinion of 
those who are neither employers nor of the working classes. 
I myself believe that in all this the good largely predominates over the evil. 
But that is not the question with which I am specially concerned at present. My 
point is that, in the scientific problem of estimating the forces by which wages 
are adjusted, a larger place has to be allowed now than formerly to the power of 
combination, and to the power of public opinion in judging, and criticising, and 
aiding that combination ; and that all these changes tend to strengthen the side of 
the employés, and to help them to get a substantial though not a great increase of 
real wages; which they may, if they will, so use as to increase their efficiency, 
and therefore to increase still further the wages which they are capable of earn- 
ing, whether acting in combination or not. 
§ 19. Thus public opinion has a very responsible task. I have spoken of it as 
the opinion of the average man; and he is very busy, and has many things 
to think about. He makes great mistakes; but he learns by all of them. 
He has often astonished the learned by the amount of ignorance and false reasoning 
which he can crowd into the discussion of a difficult question; and still more 
by the way in which he is found at last to have been very much in the right 
on the main issue. He is getting increased power of forming a good and helpful 
opinion, and he is being educated in mind and in spirit by forming it, and by giving 
