730 • EEPOET— 1897. 



and the abolition of common rights, partly to the greater opportunities afforded for 

 the use of capital hy these and other causes, farming came to be carried on in 

 greater separation from proprietorship, and both the average size of farms and of 

 properties would seem to have increased. Agricultural labour became more and 

 more the occupation of a class of agricultural labourers, disassociated from capital 

 and severed more decisively than before from the ownership of the soil, or the 

 prospect of independent cultivation. But this was the very change which 

 took place at much the same time in manufacture. Here, too, the powerful 

 progress of change was sweeping into the distant past the small master craftsman 

 with his one or two apprentices and his three or four journeymen. Here, too, in 

 ever increasing number throng those who are employed with small hope or prospect 

 of ever employing either themselves or others. The development of the means of 

 communication and locomotion, at first by road-making and canalisation, and 

 afterwards by the laying and extension of the vast railway system, set free demand 

 from those bonds of restriction which had confined it to seek its satisfaction in the 

 products of the district, and by delocalising demand localised industry. Here and 

 there, indeed, local industries continued to survive, here and there special circum- 

 stances stood in the way of the establishment of factories, but elsewhere and in 

 general there emerged into view the colossal growth of the nineteenth century, 

 the system of Great Industry. And one feature, and that the most important 

 feature so far as we are concerned, in industry as in agriculture, was the demar- 

 cation of those engaged into the classes of Employer and Employed. 



This tendency to horizontal cleavage, to borrow an expressive term, which may 

 be studied in the contrast between the existing systems and those of the past, as 

 well as in the history of the actual movement, was greatly accentuated by the 

 blurring of those lines of vertical division which had left districts and local groups 

 partially self-subsistent and separate ; and, in England and certain other countries, 

 by the disproportionate increase of the urban population, more closely knit and 

 more sensitive to sentiments of union and the possibilities of common action. 

 Non-competing grades have been substituted for non-competing groups. Though 

 these former are more than two, being many in number and capable of extension 

 so far as some degree of non-competition is concerned, there are, however, cir- 

 cumstances inherent in our system which make the separation between the class 

 of manual labour and the others more complete, and restrict within the most 

 rigid limits the competition which can take place. It has been said, indeed, that 

 the leading feature of modern times is the substitution of the cash nexus for the 

 personal nexus, but it may be doubted if it is really the most important. Pecuniary 

 payments connect the employers and those who under the more skilled labour of 

 superintendence control direction and invention, and yet these latter classes rank 

 themselves and are ranked in general estimation with the employers rather than 

 with the employed. They are not included popularly, at any rate, under the term 

 labour when labour difficulties are spoken of. We must look somewhat deeper for 

 an explanation. There are some three or four characteristics which may serve to 

 distinguish labour in its popular sense from the other industrial grades. 



In the first place, the work is different. Manual labour has to do what is set 

 before it, the others have to devise what is to be done. Theu' work is one con- 

 cerned largely with management and with organisation as a whole, and this quality 

 not only enables them to realise the entire circumstances of the industry, but in 

 many cases relieves them from the narrow and unsatisfying consequences of 

 specialisation or restriction to the performance of particular portions of the com- 

 mon task. In the second place, the needs of the manual labom' class are particular. 

 Specialisation, and particularly manual specialisation, with its blunting effects on 

 the mind, requires a powerful corrective. In the third place, the highly-skilled 

 labour which directs and invents is less decisively removed from the chance of at- 

 taining to the employing class, and even if few prove successful in this to the full 

 extent, the functions they exert are closely akin. It is, no doubt, true that no posi- 

 tive barrier is placed in the way of indefinite rise on the part of those engaged in 

 labour of any kind, however unskilled ; but in point of practice the obstacles to be 

 overcome amount well-nigh to prohibition. In the fourth place, the dependence 



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