rate of wages which they have compelled will not probably for a long time to come restore to them their former savings and comforts. Meantime, however, it is probable that other persons have been drawn into their industry, and thus by their own act the number of persons seeking their bread by this industry has been increased, and in the nature of things the demand for wages is greater, proportioned to the capital available for wages, than before; and either wages will presently fall again, or some part of the laborers will be thrown out of employment.

314. Trades-unions have apparently sought to prevent this natural consequence by arbitrary and tyrannical regulations concerning the employment of apprentices and of non-unionists; and by attempts to shorten the hours of labor, which is of course only an indirect way of increasing the rate of wages. Also they have endeavored to "make work" by forbidding men to do more than a certain amount of work in a given time. All these are deplorably rude and temporary expedients, the contrivance of men ignorant of natural laws, and, what is even more mischievous, flying in the face of the golden rule. To forbid a boy to learn a trade which he desires, to prohibit the employment of non-unionists, are acts of pure selfishness; and the whole spirit of the trades-unions in this matter is one which seeks to monopolize benefits at the expense of other men. But, as I told you before, nothing is truer, or more plainly proved by the whole experience of society, than that no merely selfish policy can achieve a great or lasting success. God did not make the world so.

315. When wages are permanently too low in any wellestablished industry, that means that too many persons are seeking to share in the gross returns of that industry. The remedy lies in either increasing the demand for the goods, which means widening the market for them, which can be done only by an extension of commerce, when more capital could be profitably invested in the industry; or in decreasing the number of persons desiring employment in it. Now a strike certainly does not widen the market for goods; it does

not extend commerce, which is the only way to permanently increase demand; and, by alarming capital, is far more likely to decrease than to increase the proportion used in the given industry; and by stopping work it checks the accumulation of that which is already invested. But it does not decrease the amount of labor offering-for the strikers simply stand idle, and mean to re-enter the same industry as soon as the contest between them and their employers is decided; as soon, that is to say, as one side or the other has suffered all the loss it can bear. I can not see, therefore, how the conditions are changed by the strike-except for the worse; and a strike of this kind can, I imagine, permanently increase the prosperity of the workmen just about as much as a man can lift himself from the ground by a vigorous tug at his coatcollar.

XXIX.

OF TRADES-UNIONS.

316. The theory taught by the trades-union leaders is that in striking the laborers demand only a share of the profits of the capitalists who are their employers. Thus they persuade the working-people that "capital," as they say, is the enemy of "labor," and that "labor" can prosper only by depriving capital " " of some share of its profits: that one man can gain only by another's loss.

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317. You will ask, perhaps, whether it is not true that the owners of capital do seek to increase their profits, even at the expense of their hired laborers; and whether, therefore, there is not a natural antagonism, not between capital and labor, but between the employer and his hired work-people?

318. Undoubtedly both employer and employed seek their own benefit; and where the employer has the working-men in his power he will seek to increase his profits by lessening. their remuneration. This, however, can happen only where the laborers are slaves, and where the master therefore has a

monopoly of their services. Where the workmen are free and moderately intelligent, and competition in business is unobstructed, if capital makes abnormal gains, other capital at once rushes in to partake of these; if wages are above the average, other laborers rush in to share the higher rates; and in either case profits or wages, as the case may be, fall to a general average.

319. Now a trades-union seeks to prevent this natural fall of wages by restricting the taking of apprentices and the employment of non-unionists; that is to say, by, so far as its members can, making a close corporation or monopoly of the trade. But suppose the capitalists should in their turn try to prevent the extension of the industry by combining to prevent fresh capital flowing into it? The one course would be as reasonable, as logical, and as vain as the other.

320. When wages in any industry fall to a point too low to afford the laborers engaged in it a comfortable subsistence, and with prudence and economy a small surplus, that is a proof that labor presses too severely upon the capital which can be profitably employed in that industry. Suppose now ten thousand persons employed in such an industry, and all enrolled in the trades-union. Their present course would be to strike. Their true course would be to use the fund which every trades-union accumulates, to send surplus members to a region where labor is better rewarded: that is to say, to re-establish the disturbed equilibrium.

321. THERE ARE NO SURPLUS MEN IN THE WORLD: when any one appears to be so, he is only in the wrong place. Enable him to go elsewhere, and teach him that he shall if need be do something else, and he is no longer surplus, but highly necessary to civilization. More than one half of our planet still lies waste and useless, and suffers for lack of strong arms and stout hearts to redeem it.

322. And here I come to one of the most mischievous blunders of the trades-unions. They teach, if not directly, yet by the spirit of their doctrines, that men have a vested right in their employments: that a mason has a right to re

main a mason, and that society owes him a living by that trade. I wish particularly to warn you against this error. No man has the least right to subsistence as merely a mason, or a shoemaker, a lawyer, a clergyman, a tailor, a bricklayer, or a miner. If his labor as a mason is surplus, if no more masons are wanted when he comes along with his trowel, it is his duty, not to conspire against society with absurd regulations about apprentices and hours of labor, but to go at something else. A man who regards himself as only a shoemaker, a mason, a tailor, a lawyer, a physician, or a clerk, becomes thereby a contemptible object. He loses his independence, and makes himself the sport of circumstances. In our days, when new inventions continually change the methods of labor, it is especially hazardous for men to bind themselves for life to a single employment; and those only can hope to benefit both themselves and their fellow-laborers who, when they find their occupation overcrowded, have courage and independence enough to seek a new calling, and if possible a new field of labor.

323. Trades-unions and labor societies arise out of a per fectly just feeling, among hired laborers, that they are less comfortable than they wish to be. Education has, in all civilized countries, given to the great class of laborers for wages the taste and desire for a greater amount of comfort than contented them in other days. But the means they take to obtain their desires are, as I have tried to show you, mostly crude and in violation of natural laws.

324. Trades-unions should use their means to seek out new fields of labor; to teach their members energetically that though to-day they may be shoemakers, they can, if need be, achieve success as shepherds, gold-miners, farmers; that dependence is hateful; that independence is possible to all who have health and will; and that migration is the duty of the strongest.

XXX.

THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY.

325. When you come to read more elaborate works of Political Economy than this, you will perceive that some of the ablest writers on this subject speak of the desirableness of placing a check upon the increase of population. Mr. Mill, indeed, and those who follow him, hold that such a check is absolutely necessary; and that population should bear a "gradually diminishing ratio to capital and employment;" and he urges it as a duty upon the laboring class to postpone marriage, and bring fewer children into the world.

326. The Rev. Mr. Malthus, an English clergyman, presented to the world, in the year 1798, a lamentable and alarming picture of what must happen if men continued to increase upon the earth, while land could not increase. He believed that the best and most fertile soils were first occupied; that as population increased, the best soils lost some of their fertility, and the poorest came into use; and thus, naturally and inevitably-supposing him to be right-the more mouths, the less food; and we should by and by be involved in a general and disgusting scramble for dinner, in which, of course, the weakest would starve. Upon this theory Mill and other writers, whom you will by and by read, base their appeal for a decrease of population.

327. But it will strike you, if you reflect upon the matter, that, first, as it is not possible by law to prevent men from marrying and breeding children; and as, according to Mill and others, abstinence from the solace of the family life is to be expected only of the most thoughtful and prudent-in which they are right, of course-the result would be degeneration of a people, who, acting under such a belief, would in fact breed mainly from the lowest part of the race. Thus