case which arose out of the engineers' strike at Erith, at the Maidstone Summer Assizes, on July 14th, 1876, said :

The law now was perfectly fair and equal as to masters and men. The Act was altered last Session in the interests of the men, and ought to be respected by them. The masters in the present case had desired to introduce piece-work, and had a perfect right to do so. The men had an equal right to refuse it; but they had no right to combine in order to exercise tyranny upon others. You have a right to arrange your own terms of working, but you have no right to combine to impose restrictions upon others. You may advocate your own views, argument, and reasoning, but you must not endeavour, by unlawful means, to compel others to abstain from working.

§ 60. The above cited decisions contain the kernel of the whole case as regards picketing, the sentence last quoted accurately defines what may and what may not be done in the course of these labour disputes. The man who attempts to go beyond this is an enemy to his own class; he injures the cause with which he is connected; he violates every right of citizenship, legal, political, social, and moral, and, if the practice of picketing is to be continued, the trade-unions of the country who sanction it, and use it as a weapon in their social warfare, must so control it that it shall not be exercised to the detriment of others, or in such a way as to violate the personal right of those who may for the time being be opposed to the action of those on strike, or who may be disposed to accept the terms offered by the employers.

CHAPTER VIII.

RESTRAINT OF TRADE.-RESTRICTIVE RULES OF
TRADE-UNIONS.

§ 1. APART altogether from the general abuse heaped on trade-unions by public speakers and writers, many of whom know little about them, and care even less, except indeed in the sense of a desire to suppress them altogether by a process of stamping out, they have been subjected to special condemnation in many quarters in consequence of the restrictions, which it is alleged many of the unions endeavour to enforce, for the purpose of regulating the methods of employment, the quantity and quality of work, the employment of non-union men and unskilled labour, the limitation of apprentices, the regulation of the labour of women and children, the prohibition of the use of machinery, and many other matters which are important as elements in trade, and especially so in the manufacture of those saleable commodities which require the labour of many hands.

§ 2. In no single book has so many of these allegations been brought together as in Mr. Thornton's work 'On Labour.' It is a pity that Mr. Thornton did not consult some of the 'trade-union leaders,' at least to the same extent as he evidently did some of the employers, before he committed his otherwise excellent book to the press, for, possibly, he would have learnt something on the other side, which might have modified

some of his strictures. Mr. Thornton tried to be just: he evidently took some pains to be accurate, but he forgot the fable of the chameleon, or he would have remembered that others have eyes as well as he. In Chapter V., Book iii., of the above work, he says 'that the great unionist error consists in interfering paternally with individual liberty in matters which chiefly concern individual interests, and in insisting in things being done which, unless done cheerfully, had better not be done at all. The error is one of a sort to which leading unionists and working-class leaders generally are peculiarly prone. A favourite notion of theirs is that whatever seems to them right to be done, people ought to be made to do, and a most pestilent notion it is to be entertained by the foremost men of a class who have just been formally invested with the power of making people do whatever they please. Would that these could be persuaded to take "Mill on Liberty " as their daily manual and bosom companion.'

§ 3. With something of a patronising air, Mr. Thornton expresses a wish that the trade-union leaders would study Mr. Mill's essay on Liberty; it is well that Mr. Thornton should be informed that many of those leaders have carefully studied Mr. Mill on 'Liberty,' and on many other subjects, and further that working-class leaders are not the only men who need instruction from Mr. Mill, or who would be benefited by making that particular work, and others by the same author, their daily manuals and bosom companions. Mr. Thornton himself admits this; our advice, if of any practical value, would be still more urgently given if it would only induce mankind to read and profit by the lessons of that great philosopher. But the leaders of working men sometimes find it as hard to get a little common sense into the 'thick-heads' of many of the trade

unionists as Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright found it to be to infuse a little common sense into the obtuse heads of the sturdy British farmers, or as some men in our day find it to drive a small dose of the same commodity into the heads of the aldermen of the City of London. It is no easy matter to reform abuses of any kind whether in Church or State, or in the body politic, especially when what are called 'vested interests' are at stake. We find that the resistance to improved methods of procedure is as great in the learned professions, and even in the matter of new inventions in science and art, as it is in the ranks of the artisan and labouring classes. Every kind of reform is obstructed at first. The accusation, therefore, of unreasonable obstruction must not all be laid at the doors of working-men; and least of all must it be visited on their leaders, even if they do not rush with open arms to receive every proposition which is made to them ostensibly for their benefit, and ultimately with the object of benefiting all classes.

$4. It is, moreover, not correct, as stated by Mr. Thornton, that the unions interfere paternally with individual liberty in matters which chiefly concern individual interests. The unions are made up of 'individual interests,' and it is only by common consent that these are made subservient to the common good. If the individual resents the restraints which a society must exercise over its members, he can at once cease to be a member and take his own course; there can be no insisting on things being done unless he, as an individual, has agreed to them, and then he is only bound so long as he voluntarily continues as a member.

§ 5. Again, with all due deference to Mr. Thornton, it is equally incorrect to say of 'leading unionists and working-class leaders generally,' that 'a favourite notion of theirs is that whatever seems to them to be right to

be done, people ought to be made to do,'' a most pestilent notion it is,' by whomsoever entertained, but it certainly is not a peculiar weakness of trade-union leaders, as Mr. Thornton would have us believe, and as he would have learnt if he had come into close contact with them, and ascertained their views. That some of them have such absurd notions there can be little doubt, but so have priests and parsons, teetotallers, vegetarians, antitobacconists, anti-vaccinators, and politicians, of all sorts and creeds, but most of all do the political economists entertain them, to which class Mr. Thornton himself belongs. Prejudices and absurdities are certainly not monopolies. No one class can claim an hereditary right to them; they are common to all classes and sections of the community, and it is as impossible to eradicate them all at once as it would be to demolish Mont Blanc with a pickaxe of Moonshine. Of course there is no reason why earnest efforts should not be made to get rid of prejudices and obstructions-the only question is, how? First of all, it is necessary that the man who attempts to battle with them should be quite sure that all the facts are clearly known to him, and also the attendant modifying circumstances, if any. Next, that he should be able to state the case accurately and without prejudice. If this be not done, the absurdity of his conclusions will only recoil on himself. Full explanations ought then to be given with regard to the effects which a particular course of action would have on all the parties concerned. Under the very best conditions the process of improvement must be slow, for custom, prejudice, interest, and similar motives, exercise a powerful influence on the minds of the wisest and best of mankind, and they are held as tenaciously by the educated as they are by the ignorant. This fact should be borne in mind by all those who attack trade-unions in the aggregate, because of some