TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 731 



of several millions of men for their existence on a weekly -wage apportioned by 

 others, and dependent on vicissitudes which they not only cannot control, but do 

 not foresee, is a very striking fact. A miserable insecurity attaches to their posi- 

 tion. But a weekly or daily wage and uncertainty are ill companions. Riglitly 

 or wrongly, the responsibility is attributed to those who pay the wage, and the 

 inculcation of thrift, with all its good effects, only increases the confusion and 

 sharpens the censure. The influences thus described have, no doubt, rarely been 

 operative all to the same effect, and frequently have not been all present at the 

 same time ; but shorn though it he, in one case of one, in another case of anuther, 

 the change which has passed over the lower and more numerous classes of labour 

 is substantially the same. Owing to it labour is subject to the condition of 

 employment by others, and is less responsible in feeling and partly in fact for its 

 own direction, and for the continuance of the means of earning its own mainten- 

 ance. To the restrictions of society with some reason, and to those who represent 

 to him the restrictive influences without reason, the working man vaguely, if not 

 definitelj', attributes want of work, slackness of work, and change of work. Limi- 

 tations of some kind have always existed, and it would be wrong to ignore the fact 

 that the condition of the classes in question was far worse when these were the 

 incidents of custom and external nature than at present ; but then in those cases 

 the limitations on the action of individuals were both inevitable and impersonal. 

 In many ways they seem to have interfered less with the innate conviction on the 

 part of those who were self-employed that failure and success rested on themselves. 

 But now the whole bulk of the nation is employed by others. Another aspect too. 

 People often resign themselves to the inevitable, but they do not recognise the 

 inevitable in the actions and opinions of others. 



Moreover, there are other influences besides those purely economic which have 

 added prominence to this important separation into the two classes of Emploj'ers 

 and Employed, a very small class of Employers and a very large class of Em- 

 ployed. 



The extension of political power and political privileges, which has affected the 

 operative class most of all, has had consequences in more than one direction :. 

 men who become voters exercise a greater influence on public opinion and on the 

 opinions of their would-be leaders, than is the case when logic and argument 

 form their only weapons or means of persuasion ; and though at times this 

 may take unpleasant forms, in the main it is a perfectly sound political result. 

 People are not made voters in order to act as jurors in an abstract question. They 

 are representative of particular feelings, and are responsible to themselves as 

 to the whole State for bringing into view the interests which are theirs, and the 

 amelioration of which forms part of the problem of government. But even more 

 important in this connection than the influence thus summoned into being for the 

 redress of much that is ill, is the nature of the relation between political equality 

 and social equality. No one nowadays, or, to speak accurately, hardly anyone,^ 

 believes in the vague and fantastic doctrines which embraced physical and mental 

 equality, as if the time had come for mankind to be cast in one mould, and for 

 identity of condition and accomplishments. But still the extension of political 

 equality may be held to promise something. If not, what can he more vain than 

 the cry for the extended franchise ? A vote by itself is no precious possession if 

 we consider it mainly as the right to give abstract decisions on matters of more or 

 less general interest, and as carrying with it no social assurances. Surely a thing 

 such as this would not have formed the motive of the great enthusiasms, and made 

 death itself a thing of nought to those who sought it in tumultuous times. But it is 

 just because it seemed to them to be something more than this that it won its 

 mastery over their life, and because it is taken to be more than this that the more 

 recent extensions of the franchise are so significant. They are construed as ration- 

 ally involving a greater equalisation, so far as human opportunities are concerned, 

 and as conveying an assurance that there shall not be, so far as society can help 

 it, any one class condemned to bear from generation to generation the burden and 

 toil devolving on the lowest ranks of labour. But whether the feeling be rightly 

 defined, whether it be in itself right or wrong, a belief in such a connection i& 



