TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 733 



industrial activity. At the present we seem tending^ in another direction, and in 

 response to our needs and our circumstances seeking a positive moral guidance in an 

 enlarged conception of social duty and solidarity ; and the position -which employed 

 labour occupies with regard to them is sufficient to insure it attention, and not 

 attention only, but sympathetic attention. Those who have lost their means of 

 faith in the first commandment of the New Testament turn with feverish haste 

 to work out their salvation by a stricter attention to the second, and those whose 

 faith is unimpaired but spiritual vision enlarged perceive that the one is imperfect 

 ■without the other. Social regeneration, socialisation, collectivism, social duty, 

 social action, are phrases which occur in profusion, and, though they disfigure the 

 language, mark the attitude and give distinction to the actions of the present. In 

 England, at any rate, the imagination of the people has been struck and its feelinga 

 stirred with regard to this particular problem, which stands out before other 

 matters sharply marked and conspicuous. 



But though ifis true that many general influences have combined to increase- 

 this prominence, its main and original cause lies in the vast economic change which 

 has swept mankind into two opposite, though not necessarily opposed, classes. To 

 realise the history of that change is a first step towards imderstanding its nature 

 and its consequences. But for it it would be possible to interpret present com- 

 plaints as but the repetition of those of the past, and as finding prototypes in the 

 outcries which have arisen from time to time from those who brooded over the 

 contrasts between the poor and the rich. They would mean nothing more than 

 did many an early pamphlet bearing such a title as ' England's Crying Sin with 

 Regard to the Poor.' Or, again, the opposition might be construed as an 

 antagonism between Labour and Capital, in disregard of the union existing between 

 labour of a certain kind and capital, and of the confusion which such a distinction 

 involves between profits and interest. 



Of equal importance is the light which history throws upon the present con- 

 dition of the masses affected by this grave economic change. Its effects might 

 well have been experienced in two ways. Not only did the power of directing 

 their lot pass from them to others, resulting in somewhat subtle consequences as 

 regards the burden and pride of feeling the full responsibility for action, but in 

 addition it would not have seemed unnatural had they experienced considerable 

 material injury from a competition against an employing class with a practical 

 monopoly of capital ; and it is true that the conditions of that competition, which, 

 be it remembered, determines the division of the product between wages, profits, 

 and interest, were in one respect altered to their disadvantage. But in another 

 way, and due to the self-same causes, new opportunities were offered for the 

 development of organisations which were to turn the balance in their favour. 

 Till the change of which we have been speaking, till the breaking down of 

 local divisions which held separate those in like circumstances and of like 

 interest in different places, till the simplification into one class of employed of so 

 large a number of those whose means were small, common action for common 

 ends, as, indeed, any definite control and direction by a central authority, were 

 impossible. Thus the very forces occasioning change provided the means for its 

 beneficial regulation. The narrowness of view attributed to a too rigidly 

 specialised labour has been met by educational advantages which, in England at 

 any rate, found their occasion in the factory organisation which began to spread 

 through the country at the close of the eighteenth century. Factory development 

 has given rise to a control which fails of its effect when called on to penetrate into 

 the small workshops and the seats of home industries. Dependence on wages finds 

 a corrective in the growth of benefit societies and the insurance clauses of trade 

 associations; separation from management and capital has in some instances been 

 stayed by schemes for co-operation and profit-sharing ; while the greatest defect of 

 all, the weakness of employed labour in competition with the allied and resourceful 

 forces of capital and management, has led to the marvellous organisation of trade 

 unions and kindred associations. In face of these remedial agencies, and despite 

 the mismanagement and abuses which have attended many of them, the ill-fate 

 which seemed at one time to menace the condition of those whose streogth lay in 



