than the tumultuous action of a mass, each pursuing his individual interest with more or less of ignorance, fear, and passion.

The question of strikes has generally been disposed of by economists with a summary reference to the doctrine of the wage-fund. Strikes could not increase the wage-fund, therefore they could not enhance wages. If they should appear to raise the rate in any trade, this must be due either to a corresponding loss in the regularity of employment or to an equivalent loss, in regularity or in rate, by some other trade or trades occupying a position of economical disadvantage. Hence, strikes could not benefit the wages class. But we have rid ourselves of the incubus of the wage-fund; and the question of strikes is, therefore, with us an open question as yet. We have seen' that the amount of wages received by the laborer may be insufficient to furnish the food necessary to his maximum efficiency, and that an increase of wages might, by increasing his laboring power, increase the product not only proportionally, but even more than proportionally, under-feeding, whether of men or cattle, being admittedly false economy. If a strike should enable a body of laborers to secure such an advance against the reluctance of their employers, it might easily turn out that the masters would not only not be injured, but would be benefited in the result. The same would be true of an advance of wages which allowed the workmen to obtain more light and warmth and better air in more commodious dwellings. The same might prove to be the case with an advance of wages which merely stimulated the social ambition of the workmen, the wages of labor being, in the language of Adam Smith, "the encouragement of industry, which, like every other human quality, improves in proportion to the encouragement it receives." The same would probably be the result, though after some delay, of an advance of wages

'Pp. 53-58

which enabled workmen to send their children to school, thus bringing them into the mill or shop, a few years later, far more intelligent and physically more capable than if they had been put at work at seven or eight years of age. It might easily prove, according to the principles which have been laid down respecting the efficiency of labor, that such expenditures would be found to be the best investment which the employer ever made of the same amount of money, giving him industrial recruits of a much higher order.

I might multiply illustrations showing how an advance of wages which masters were unwilling to concede, and which workmen through their isolated and mutually jealous and suspicious action would be unable to command, if effected through united action might prove to be for the interest of both masters and men.

By others, again, the question of strikes is dismissed with the assertion that they generally fail of their objects. "Never, in any case," says Mr. R. W. Hopper, "has an extensive strike resulted in an advance of wages." To a request to act in a mediation between masters and men, Lord Cranworth replied, "In the game, so to say, of combination the workmen eventually fail." M. Théodore Fix, in his work Les Classes Ouvrières,' writes: "After

Doubtless a much larger proportion of the earlier than of the later strikes in England were attended by immediate success. The reason may be presumed to be that, after the repeal of the Combinations Acts in 1824, the workmen struck simply for bread enough to eat. They had been held down by law and ground by an unequal competition till they were reduced below the economical point of subsistence. As to this the testimony of all reports is unanimous. Strikes made for such a palpable cause are more likely to succeed than those which are made, as many of the later ones have been, for doubtful reasons, on ill-chosen occasions, or for the enforcement of trades-unions rules

making vast sacrifices, the workmen almost invariably succumb."

Granting that this is so in the sense in which the terms are used—that is, that in the great majority of cases workmen making a demand and seeking to enforce it by a strike, are beaten, and, after the exhaustion of their resources, have to go to work again on their master's terms1-is this quite conclusive of the whole question? The argument used against strikes is, it will be observed, much the same as that which was formerly employed by reactionary essayists, and even admitted with reluctance by many liberal writers, in proof of the failure of the French Revolution. The StatesGeneral had been succeeded by the Assembly; the Assembly by the Convention; the Convention by the Directory; the Directory had been turned out by the First Consul; the First Consul had been made Consul for life; the Consul had become Emperor; the Emperor had been driven from France; and after an interval of insolent foreign domination, a legitimate prince, unrestrained by a single constitutional check, untrammelled by a single pledge, led back priest and noble, unforgiving and unforgetting, to resume their interrupted license. There had been revolution after revolution; constitution after constitution; there had been proscriptions, confiscations, and massacres; there had been untold loss of blood and treasure; and in the end a king had returned who did not accept a constitution, but conferred a charter.

It is not an inspiring thought that arguments like these were for a whole human generation held sufficient to prove that the French Revolution was a mistake and a failure;

which must appear to any disinterested person as void of sense and against common justice.

'Prof. Fawcett, in his Political Economy, has collected a number of instances of strikes immediately successful. The best succinct account of the strike-movement in England which we have met is contained in Ward's Workmen and Wages. The same work also contains much information respecting strikes and trades-unions on the Continent of Europe.

for we know now that the Bourbons were restored only in seeming; that the restoration of the old régime was forever impossible. The king and the princes had indeed returned, the same race besotted with the vain conceit of divine right; they led back, indeed, the same train of priests and nobles, untaught and incapable of learning; but they came back, not to the same, but to another France. Is it not conceivable that those who look on the submission of a body of laborers after a strike as a proof that their entire effort has been fruitless, may commit the same mistake as those who looked on the return of Louis XVIII. as the restoration of the Bourbons? But perhaps another insurrection, political in form but industrial in origin, may even better illustrate this point. I refer to the rising of the peasantry of England in the reign of Richard II." The rebellion," says Prof. Rogers," "was put down, but the demands of the villains were silently and effectually accorded; as they were masters for a week of the position, the dread of another servile war promoted the liberty of the serf."

Strikes are the insurrections of labor. Like insurrections in the political body, they are a purely destructive agency. There is no creative or healing virtue in them. Yet, as an insurrection may destroy political institutions which have outlived their usefulness, and have become first senseless and then pernicious, thus clearing the way for an after-work of harmonious construction, so a strike may have the effect to break up a crust of custom which has formed over the remuneration of a class of laborers, or to break through a combination of employers to withstand an advance of wages, where the isolated efforts of the individuals of the wages class, acting with imperfect knowledge and under a fear of personal proscription, would be wholly inadequate to accomplish those objects.

'Hist. Agr. and Prices, i. 8.

But a strike can only justify itself by its results.1 Unless it is to make way for a better order, it is waste, and waste of the worse sort, since not only is a great loss of production incurred,' but bad habits are likely to be formed in a period of enforced idleness, and bad blood certain to be generated by the contest.

Insurrections mark the first stages of the movement towards political freedom. Happy are the people who have got past insurrections, and can make their further progress "with even step and slow." Strikes are only of unquestionable utility in the first stages of the elevation of masses of labor long abused and deeply abased. Happy is the wages class when it has acquired that individual and mutual intelligence and that activity of industrial movement which put them beyond the necessity of such a brutal resort! Yet I can not conceive how one can look at the condition of the manufacturing operatives as they were left at the repeal of the iniquitous Combinations acts in 1824, and question that the early strikes in England were essential to the breaking up of the power of custom and of fear over the minds of the working classes, habituated to submission under the terror of laws now universally recognized as oppressive, unaccustomed to concerted action, illiterate, jealous, suspicious, taxridden, and poverty-stricken. What but some great struggle could have taught them the self-confidence and readiness for self-assertion which should overcome that fearful inertia? What else would have impressed the employing

Not necessarily, as we have shown on a preceding page, by its immediate results.

The loss to production by strikes is often grossly overestimated. Not a few strikes take place because of a threatened reduction of wages in consequence of previous over-production, and the strike results in clearing the market more thoroughly than would be done otherwise. Then, again, the enforced inactivity of a strike for higher wages is often succeeded by an increased activity, which does something to make good the loss of time.