existing relations between classes and sexes -as logically admissible, and not to be set aside as practically chimerical without actual experiment. His enthusiasm is the speculative passion of starting ever fresh game in the wide field of abstract social possibilities -philosophically indifferent to all objections drawn from the actual conditions of men, women, or things in the concrete. Mr. Mill would be very capable, like Condorcet, of deriving from the doctrine of human perfectibility the inference that there was no demonstrable reason why the duration of human life might not be prolonged indefinitely by discoveries (hereafter to be made) in hygiene. And to all objections drawn from universal human experience of the growth and decay of vital power within a limited period, it would be quite in the character of his mind and temper to reply calmly that the life of man, like the genius of woman, had not hitherto been developed under such conditions as to draw out its capabilities to the full extent. Like Condorcet, too, while dealing perturbation all round him, Mr. Mill is imperturbable, and might be described as he was, as 'un mouton enragé-un volcan couvert de neige.' of slavery, and political economists who swear by Mr. Mill are taking up the same strain in milder language. Whereas the only man who works not for wages, as M. Edmond About justly observes, is the slave.* Labour for wages for pay received as the equivalent of work done-as the same lively and acute writer says with perfect truth-is the general rule of service, public or private, in the whole social hierarchy; and the one class incited by some who should know better to revolt against that rule as a special injustice and indignity to itself is precisely the class whose simple manual service comes most distinctly under it. If wage-receiving labour, according to the new doctrine, is the slave, wage-paying capital (according to the same doctrine) is the tyrant of the modern organization of industry. Here, again, that doctrine is precisely the reverse of truth. Everywhere, and at all times, capital is labour's most submissive 'help' or servant. Everywhere, and at all times, the advances of capital are at the service of the effective worker: and to give proof of possession of the qualities of the effective worker is to command the power of the purse. The tyranny of capital is only There is a curious playing at cross-purposes true in the sense that, by laws as old as the between the recent economical champions of world, those must obey who have not qualithe claims of labour to rank as something else ties to command; those must be soldiers than labour, and receive as its reward some- who are not fit to be officers in the army of thing that shall not be called wages, and the industry. Mr. Mill has said that the lapractical assertors for their class, so far as com-bourers need only capital, not capitalists. bined in Trades' Unions, of the simpler claim of a maximum of wage for a minimum of work. The former (we borrow the words of Mr. Mill) 'cannot think that the working classes will be permanently contented with the condition of labouring for wages as their ultimate state. They may be willing to pass through the class of servants in their way to that of employers, but not to remain in it all their lives.' On the other hand, the whole action of the latter-the Trades' Unionists tacitly assumes for all who enter their combinations (and rightly assumes in the great majority of cases) the position of life-long wage-receivers. If Unionism is an authentic expression of the views and wishes of the more stirring section of the working classes, it is an expression contradictory of the views and wishes which the school of political economists, headed by Mr. Mill, think those classes must entertain. Never did a pair of poor correlative terms become the subject of such unreasoning or wrong-reasoning animosity as those of Labour for Wages. In the novel vocabulary of national and international labour-leagues, work for wages by manual labourers in the employ of capitalists is denounced as a badge Like most smart sayings of the social-revolutionary sort, this is quite beside the mark. What labourers need, speaking generally, is neither capital nor capitalists, so much as the qualities which inspire confidence in capitalists, or even confidence in each other. Capital is always, at least as eagerly as labour, in quest of employment; and, so far from tyrannizing over labour, is always willing to serve it at the lowest living wages, if only coupled with security. It is that security which the ordinary manual labourer is unable to afford. He must look somewhere above him, not so much for capital as for guarantee and guidance. Somebody must be found, whom the capitalist, not himself employing his capital, can feel himself morally safe in trusting with funds to employ profitably in his stead. That somebody is not the handworker but the head-worker-the captain of industry' in the now well-worn Carlylian phrase. He it is who can alone afford a moral guarantee to the capitalist that the funds entrusted to him shall be employed with a discretion ensuring their replacement *A, B, C du Travailleur,' p. 234. Paris, 1868. 'Fortnightly Review,' June, 1869, p. 689. with a profit. who can be trusted with capital is the man whom capital helps to wealth. Working men may organize trades-unions against him, abuse him as their tyrant, echo Mr. Mill's dictum that they want capital only, not capitalists; but work under him they must, if they would have their hand-labour facilitated in its processes, and forwarded to its markets, by the aid of capital, machinery, and commercial knowledge and connection. And everywhere the man | title of labourers of the most elevated and the most indispensable order, so the fact of having made savings, or acquired skill, at more or less cost of training, entitles provident and skilled labourers to the designation of capitalists. It is one of the most weighty and serious accusations brought against Trades' Unionism, that it is an actual, if not avowed part of its system, to prevent such men from earning or saving as much as they otherwise might do, in comparison with the less skilled or provident, and, therefore, from rising to that position in the social scale due to their individual energies, were those energies left unshackled. As to Mr. Mill's notion that the working classes generally are not likely to be permanently contented with the condition of labouring for wages as their ultimate state, it may be replied, firstly, that men and classes are seldom contented with any state in which they happen to find themselves; but, secondly, that what men or classes may be 'willing,' and what they may be able for, are apt to be two different things. Few people perhaps, at the outset of life, would be found exactly willing to accept what, nevertheless, proves to be their ultimate place in it. No anticipated organization of the labour of the future can be more ungrounded on any induction from the past than that which imagines the main body of the employed as merely passing through the class of servants in their way to that of employers. These latter must always be the élite of their class, in industrial and intellectual faculties. While there is a mass of manual labour to be done, those must continue to do it, whose economical circumstances or intellectual culture raise them least above their work. Certainly in his Memorandum on the Law Relating to 'It seems inaccurate,' says Sir William Erle, Trades' Unions,' 'to contra-distinguish labourers or working men from capitalists or employers, as if they were separate classes; for both classes labour; and the labour of the brain for the employing class may be immeasurably more severe than the labour of the muscles of motion for the working class. The accumulated stores of the mental labour of past ages exceed in lated. These stores must be used by the emvalue all money capital, or past labour accumuployer in the degree required by his business; but muscular action may be supplied with very slight recourse to accumulated knowledge in many departments of labour.' Trades' Unionism as a monstrous and porWe are not amongst those who regard tentous birth from its very origin. Nothing union in some shape amongst men employed can be more natural in its first growth than in one common occupation, and sensible of the lowest stratum in the social order should one common interest. And nothing could not be a caste; and when Mr. Mill talks of be more certain, in the modern progress of 'two hereditary classes, employers and employed,' he assumes the existence of that industry, to give concentrated force to that principle of union amongst the working powhich does not exist in any free country-pulation than the operative multitudes assome impassable barrier of caste forbidding sembled in vast establishments at our great the ascent of superior minds to superior posi-seats of industry. A mill or foundry, coltions. But there always must remain a lowest social stratum naturally forming the manual labouring class, the reward of whose labour may as well be called wages as by any other name the thing to be named requiring to be distinguished in degree, if not in nature, from the profits of capital, or the payment of managerial direction and superintendence. We have said, in degree if not in nature, since, in truth, of no class in a free country can it be said with accuracy that it is a class exclusively devoted to labour, and destitute of capital. As the exertion of the comparatively rare faculties required for the superintendence of industrial establishments, and the conduct of commercial transactions, entitles capitalist employers (or employers whose credit commands the use of capital) to the lecting work-people by the thousand within one enclosure, may be said to constitute a Trades' Union in itself,* and all the artificial * On this point we are able to cite the testimony, unexceptionable to that purpose, of Mr. George Potter, who probably did not perceive the inference which the following words must at once suggest to the reader : "Take the case of one master on one side, and a thousand men on the other: his position as proprietor, capitalist, and employer, gives him a power which, if not quite equal to the united power of his thousand men, is immensely too great for any one among the thousand to cope ber combine in one demand for what they conceive with single-handed; whereas, let the whole numto be no more than their due, and then the parties would be equally matched Contemporary Review,' June, 1870, p. 409. It is not very easy to understand what more extension and elaborate officialism of the later Union organization, seeking to embrace whole trades, nay, to constitute national and even international federations, can add little or nothing to the power possessed already by the operative masses on the spot where employed, by the mere fact of their conscious indispensableness to keep profitably at work the capital engaged in large concerns, and sunk in buildings, machinery, and material. That there will always be union in their common interest amongst masses of workpeople we hold to be as certain as that no ambitiously extended organization of that union can give it a force which does not already belong to it in the nature of things. And it would really seem as if the great body of workpeople were of the same opinion. As yet,' says Mr. Thornton, 'there are very few trades in the United Kingdom in which more than 10 per cent. of the men employed are Unionists: there is but one, that of the plasterers, in which as many as half are. In counting up their future conquests they are decidedly reckoning without their hosts. Their progress hitherto has been due less to their own strength than to their opponents' weakness of purpose.' quites in a singular manner the flattering acceptance by his Gamaliel of his former agrarian lucubrations, by taking into his hands the task of showing up the baselessness of a theory on which Mr. Mill (with other economists) had founded his doctrine of wages, and his disbelief of the power of Trades' Unions to effect their artificial elevation. Now, Mr. Thornton has taken it into his head to turn champion of Trades' Unions-though on grounds upon which they certainly would not accept his championship. In assuming it, however, with ulterior objects which we shall presently seehe had first of all to disarm Mr. Mill of his wage-fund theory. Very opportunely he found that theory already demolished, and had only to appropriate a demonstration already done to his hand. We think we hear the unsophisticated reader excluim, 'What on earth is a wage fund theory?' Let the unsophisticated rea der rejoice with us: a Wage-fund theory is a thing-or unthing (to borrow a German idiom)-which is henceforth shunted fairly out of the way of future discussion of all questions affecting labour and labour's wages Mr. Longe, the barrister, in a pamphlet published four or five years back, which, at the time of its appearance, received less notice than it deserved-none at all at the hands of the political economists, one of whose fundamental doctrines it refuted— has the merit of having first methodically exposed the so-called Wage-fund theory. Mr. Thornton, in the first edition of his above-cited work 'On Labour,' adopted without acknowledgement Mr. Longe's pre Mr. Thornton in, his last publication On Labour,'&c., which has attracted more attention from its dashing style of moral paradox and social prophecy than his 'Plea for Peasant Proprietors' did, some score and odd years back, till Mr. Mill endorsed its most hazarded and amazing statements (of which more anon), somewhere likens himself to Saul sitting at the feet of Mill, his Gamaliel. In this last publication the modern Saul re-viously published refutation of that theory, can be wanted in the shape of effective representation of the feelings and interests of employed and employers than such an agency as has for years been supplied by the Boards of Concilia tion established in Nottingham, the Staffordshire Potteries and Wolverhampton, of the satisfactory working of which full evidence was given to the Trades' Union Commissioners by Mr. Mundella, M. P., Mr. Hollins, and Mr. Rupert Kettle. These Boards,' say the Commissioners in their Final Report,require no complicated machinery, no novel division of profits, no new mode of conducting business; they need no Act of Parliament, no legal powers or penalties. All that is needed is that certain representative employers and workmen should meet at regular stated times, and amicably discuss around a table the common in terests of their common trade or business. There is not a trade or business in the United Kingdom in which this system might not at once be adopt ed; and we see no reason why, in every case, results should not follow from the establishment of Boards of Conciliation, as satisfactory as those at Nottingham and in the Potteries, to which we have before referred. Under such a system we should look hopefully for a peaceful, prosperous future for the industry of this country.' * on using that refutation as the basis of his own *Fortnightly Review,' May and June, 1869. If we decline to stand by, simply assisting as spectators of that Japanese etiquette, it is because we consider Mr. Longe's refutation of the Wage fund theory' as having exploded, together with that theory, much more of the economical doc trines previously inculcated as orthodox than the most authoritative teacher of those doctrines, Mr. Mill, even now has seen fit to acknowledge. But, in mercy to the general reader, we place the following details of that exploded theory at the foot of our pages, instead of inserting them in the text. of business.'* The modern economist has never thought he could get far enough from the old-fashioned practical man. It must be owned the latter personage was too apt to confound inference with fact, and to claim for illegitimately drawn conclusions from observation and experience the credit due to these latter only. One important advantage, however, the despised practical man has always had over the man of closet-science and In the preceding foot-note the reader will find in brief compass the substantial refutation of the so-called Wage-fund theory-a theory which formed the foundation, down to the date of Mr. Mill's imperfect palinode, of the orthodox economic creed on the whole subject of wages of labour. Had any rash champion of plain good sense ventured at an earlier period to question the solidity of that foundation, he would doubtless have been consigned to the limbus infantum of imma-paper logic.' The former has always had ture inquirers, cut off ere they had well crossed the threshold of economic existence, or even perhaps stigmatized by Mr. Fawcett with the epithet of practical man' or 'man The theory, now exploded, once looked fairly in the face, is absurd in a degree to which nothing could have so long blinded its promulgators but the habit of reliance on abstract reasoning unverified by recurrence to facts. We extract, as follows, Mr. Mill's own enunciation of that theory made in the act of renouncing it : some basis of fact, the latter has often had none. We do not hesitate to say that for every error or fallacy which scientific' economists have superciliously laid to the account of practical men,' we should be able to charge to those same economists another error or fallacy, destitute of any even seeming foundation in fact or experience, and which practical knowledge of the subjectmatter of their subtle reasonings would have enabled them to avoid. The editor of the new Oxford edition of the Wealth of Nations,' Mr. Thorold Rogers, justly observes in his preface that, 'to be scientific, political economy must be constantly inductive. Half, and more than half, of the fallacies into which persons who have handled the subject have fallen, are the direct outcome of purely abstract speculation.' In no exercise of human intellect, indeed, is it more indispensable that the athlete, from time to time, Antæus-like, should touch earth. There is supposed to be, at any given instant, a sum of wealth, which is unconditionally devoted to the payment of wages of labour. The sum is not regarded as unalterable, for it is augmented by saving, and increases with the progress of wealth, but it is reasoned upon as at any given moment a predetermined amount. More than that amount it is assumed that the wagesreceiving class cannot possibly divide among them; that amount, and no less, they cannot but obtain. So that, the sum to be divided being fixed, the wages of each depend solely on the divisor, the number of participants.' A logical deduction—a deduction exThat is—we quote the words of Mr. Longe-pressly drawn by Mr. Mill, in which also he 'we are to regard capital as wealth which has been destined by its owners to the definite ob- from this henceforth exploded wage-fund was implicitly followed by Mr. Fawcettject of carrying on production by the employment of labourers in their own country, just as figment of a certain predetermined portion money subscribed to some charity is destined for of national wealth—exclusively to be distinthe objects of such charity. It may have to lie idle for weeks, months, or years, while mercantile or foreign undertakings offer their 10 per cent. profits for its use. Its owners are never to change their minds. It can never be directed from its original object. It cannot be spent unproductively. It cannot be lost, either to its owner, or to the country, or to the labourers, for the purchase of whose labour it has been destined, while its owners were as yet ignorant in what trade, in what production, it should be actually employed.' This aggregate capital,' predestined exclusively and irreversibly to the function of wagefund, will, it was assumed, with equally predestined certainty, be distributed to the last farthing, by the process of competition, among the different classes of labourers making up the collective entity of the 'general labourer. This is the crowning absurdity of a theory absurd at all points. Mr. Longe asks 'How could the shoemakers compete with the tailors, or the blacksmiths with the glass-blowers? Or how should the capital which a master shoemaker saved, by reducing the wages of his journeymen, get into the hands of the mastertailor? Or why should the money, which a re duction in the price of clothes enables the private consumer to spend in other things, go to pay or refund the wages of any other class of labourers belonging to his own country? It would clearly be just as likely to be spent in the purchase of foreign wine or in a trip to Switzerland. 'The notion of all the labourers of a country constituting a body of general labourers capable of competing with each other, and whose “ general" or "average" wage depends upon the ratio between their number and the "aggregate" wage-fund, is just as absurd as the notion of all the different goods existing in a country at any given time, e. g., the ships, and the steam-engines, and the cloth, &c., constituting a stock of general commodities, the "general" or "average" price of which is determined by the ratio between the supposed quantity of the whole aggregate stock and the total purchase-fund of the community.' *The business man,' says Mr. Fawcett,' assuming a confidence which ignorance alone can give, contemptuously sneers at political economy, and assumes that he is in possession of a superior wisdom which enables him to grapple with all the practical affairs of life, unhampered by theories and unfettered by principles. The Economic Position of the British Labourer,' p. 1. merchant's capital to the manufacturer and labourer, it is clear that neither he nor his capital come within Mr. Mill's theory of the causes which determine the wages of productive labour.' guished by the title of capital-and consti- | products. Whatever may be the use of the tuting a fund inalienably predestined by capitalists to the employment of labour (apparently for labour's own sake) is that this wage-fund constitutes the sole effective demand for labour, and that-as Mr. Mill has expressly affirmed-'demand for commodities is not a demand for labour.' As Mr. Longe was the first demolisher of the doctrinal foundation for this prodigious paradox, so he was the first to contrast with the real course of facts in this workday world the paradoxical superstructure reared, as we have seen, on that foundation. We extract as follows the main points of his answer to Mr. Mill's proposition that demand for commodities is not a demand for labour, referring our readers to this pamphlet for detailed illustrations drawn from the actual system on which the different industrial trades of this country are commonly conducted: It would be interesting to know whether, having unconditionally surrendered the Wage-fund theory,' Mr. Mill elects to surrender or adhere to the above-cited deduction from that theory. The one, in our judgment, has been as thoroughly exposed as the other, and, indeed, the superstructure must logically fall with the foundation. In the meanwhile a rising disciple and zealous champion of Mr. Mill has endeavoured to effect a diversion in his master's favour by charging Mr. Longe, whom he curtly designates as 'an assailant of Mr. Mill's theory of wages,' with having fallen into the fallacy that all the funds expended upon commodities of whatever kind are expended on labour.' If Mr. Longe had fallen into that fallacy, he would simply have furnished a pendant to the fallacy he exposed 'The demand for commodities which could be got without labour would certainly be no demand for labour; but the demand for commo-viz., dities which can only be got by labour is as much a demand for labour as a demand for beef is a demand for bullocks. Assuming the goods for which there is a demand to have been already produced, the demand for such specific goods would certainly not be a demand for labour; but if such specific goods would not satisfy the demand, the demand for such kind of goods would be a demand for the labour required to increase the supply. It is not labour" that the employer buys but the labourers' "work" (opus as distinguished from labor); and it is the self-same thing that the consumer wants, and the purchaser of commodities buys, whether it is embodied in the materials which the capitalist supplies or not, and whether he buys it directly of the labourer himself, as in the case of the independent workman or working tradesman, or whether he buys it of a master-manufacturer, merchant, or retail dealer, at a price which includes, together with the labourers' wages, the profits which those intervening dealers require as remunerative for their trouble, and interest on their capital, which has been advanced either in the purchase of materials, or in the payment of wages, or, in the case of the merchant and retail dealer, in the purchase of the finished goods for resale. In the case of the large manufacturing trades, the wages of the workmen employed in producing goods might be, and, probably are, often paid, at least partly, out of the funds suppliedby the merchants who purchase the goods which they have made. The funds supplied by the merchant and the manufacturer are certainly capital, according to the common meaning and use of that term; but they clearly form no part of that " capital" in which, according to Mr. Mill's theory, the "wage-fund" of the labourers consists, for they are not employed in the maintenance of labour, but in the purchase of its Mr. Mill's fallacy that demand for commodities was no demand for labour. The And he further one fallacy would have been neither less nor tion one extreme is apt to provoke its op- *Land Systems of Ireland, England, &c.' By T. E. Cliffe Leslie. Appendix. |