Accor

governed by the laws of supply and demand. dingly, if the number of hat-makers can be kept down it reduces the number of hats that can be made, raises their prices, and enables the hat-makers to demand higher wages than they otherwise could do. Many unions try thus to limit production by refusing to admit more than a fixed number of apprentices, and by declining to work with any man who has not been brought up to the trade. It is probable that, where a trade is a small one, and the union powerful, there may be some success. The trade becomes a monopoly, and gets higher wages by making other people pay dearer for the goods they produce. They raise a tax from the rest of the nation, including all the workmen of other trades. This is a thoroughly selfish and injurious thing, and the laws ought by all reasonable means to discourage such monopolies. Moreover, monopoly is extremely hurtful in the long run to the working classes, because all the trades try to imitate those which are successful. Finding that the hatters have a strong union, the shoemakers, the tailors, and the seamstresses try to make similar unions, and to restrict the numbers employed. If they could succeed in doing so, the result would be absurd; they would all be trying to grow richer by beggaring each other. As I have pointed out in the Logic Primer (section 177, p. 117), this is a logical fallacy, arising from the confusion between a general and a collective term. Because any trade separately considered may grow richer by taxing other trades, it does not follow that all trades taken together, and doing the same thing, can grow richer.

No doubt, working men think that, when their wages are raised, the increase comes out of the pockets of their employers. But this is usually a complete mistake; their employers would not carry on business unless they could raise the prices of their goods, and thus get back from purchasers the increased sum which

they pay in wages. They will even want a little more to recompense them for the risk of dealing with workmen who strike at intervals, and thus interrupt business. It is the consumers of goods who ultimately pay the increased wages, and though wealthy people no doubt pay a part of the cost, it is mainly the working people who contribute to the higher wages of some of their own class.

The general result of trades-union monopolies to the working people themselves is altogether disastrous. If one in a hundred, or one in a thousand is benefited, the remainder are grievously injured. The restrictions upon work which they set up tend to keep men from doing that which they are ready and willing to do. The lucky fatten at the cost of those whom they shut out in want of work, and the strikes and interruptions of trade, occasioned by efforts to keep up monopolies, diminish the produce distributed as wages.

54. Professional Trades-Unions. We often hear the proceedings of trades-unions upheld on the ground that lawyers, doctors, and other professional men have their societies, Inns of Court, or other unions, which are no better than trades-unions. This is what may be called a tu quoque (thou also) argument. "We may form unions because you form unions." It is a poor kind of argument at best; one man acting unwisely is no excuse for another doing so likewise. I am quite willing to allow that many of the rules of barristers and solicitors are no better than those of trades-unions. That a barrister must begin to be a barrister by eating certain dinners; that he must never take a fee under a certain amount; that he must never communicate with a client except through a solicitor; that a senior counsel must always have a junior; and most of the rules of the so-called etiquette are clearly intended to raise the profits of the legal profession. Many things of this kind want reform. But, on the other hand, these unions avoid many of the faults of trades-unions. There is no limit to the number of

persons who may enter them; all men of good character and sufficient knowledge can become barristers and solicitors. Moreover, the entrance to the legal, medical, and several other professions is being more and more regulated by examinations, which are intended purely to secure able men for the service of the public. Nor is any attempt made in these professional trades-unions to prevent men from exerting themselves as much as they can, so as to serve the public to the utmost of their ability. These professional trades-unions are thus free from some of the evils which other unions produce.

55. The Fallacy of Making Work. One of the commonest and worst fallacies into which people fall in political economy is to imagine that wages may be increased by doing work slowly, so that more hands shall be wanted. Workmen think they see plainly that the more men a job requires, the more wages must be paid by their employers, and the more money comes from the capitalists to the labourers. It seems, therefore, that any machine, invention, or new arrangement which gets through the work more quickly than before, tends to decrease their earnings. With this idea, bricklayers' labourers refuse (or did lately refuse) to raise bricks to the upper parts of a building by a rope and winch; they preferred the old, laborious, and dangerous mode of carrying the bricks up ladders in hods, because the work then required more hands. Similarly, brickmakers refused to use any machinery; masons totally declined to set stones shaped and dressed by machinery; some compositors still object to work in offices where type-composing machines are introduced. They are all afraid that if the work is done too easily and rapidly, they will not be wanted to do it; they think that there will be more men than there are berths for, and so wages will fall. In almost every case this is an absurd and most unfortunate mistake.

No doubt, if men insist on sticking to a worse way of doing work after a better one has been invented,

they may get bad wages, and perhaps go to the workhouse in old age. Thus, the hand-weavers in Spitalfields would continue weaving by hand, instead of learning to weave by steam power, and the case is somewhat the same with the hand-nailers of South Staffordshire. But when the younger workmen of a trade are wise and foreseeing enough to adopt a new invention as soon as it is successful, they are never injured, and usually much benefited by it. Seamstresses in England received wretchedly poor wages before the introduction of the American sewing machine, and they thought they would be starved altogether when the same work could be done twenty times as fast by machine as by hand. The effect, however, has been just of the opposite kind. Those who were not young, skilful or wise enough to learn machine-sewing, receive better wages for hand-sewing than they would formerly have done. The machine sewers earn still more, as much in many cases as 20s. a week. The explanation of this is that, when work is cheapened, people want much more of it. When sewing can be done so easily, more sewing is put into garments, and the garments being cheapened, more are bought. At the same time a good deal of the sewing, and finishing, and fitting, cannot be done by machinery, and this furnishes plenty of employment for those who cannot work machines.

If masons were to employ machines for cutting stone, they would be benefited like the seamstresses, instead of being injured. The cost of cutting stone by hand is now so great that people cannot build many stone buildings, nor use stone to decorate brick buildings, unless they are wealthy people. Were the dressing of stone much cheapened by the aid of machinery, a great deal more stone would be used, and the masons, instead of labouring at the dull work of cutting flat surfaces, would find plenty of employment in finishing, and carving, and setting the machineshaped stones.

I have not the least doubt that, in

addition to those engaged in working the machines, there would in the end be more masons wanted after the general introduction of machines than before. With type-setters the same thing will happen, if they take betimes to the new type-composing machines. It is true that a man with the aid of a good machine can set types several times as fast as without. But though the wages paid for setting a certain number of types might thus be reduced, so many more books, pamphlets, newspapers, and documents of various kinds would be printed, that no want of employment could be felt. Much of the work, too, such as the justifying, correcting, making into pages, &c., cannot be done by machinery, or not profitably, so that there would be plenty of work even for those who would not consent to work machines.

The fact is that wages are increased by increasing the produce of labour, not by decreasing the produce. The wages of the whole working population consist of the total produce remaining after the subtraction of rent, interest, and taxes. People get high wages in Lancashire because they use spinning machinery, which can do an immense quantity of work compared with the number of hands employed. If they refused to use machinery, they would have to spin cotton by hand like the poor inhabitants of Cashmere. Were there no machinery of any kind in England we should, nearly all of us, be as poor as the agricultural labourers of Wiltshire lately

were.

People lose sight of the fact that we do not work for the sake of working, but for the sake of what we produce by working. The work itself is the disagreeable price paid for the wages earned, and these wages consist of the greater part of the value of the goods produced. It is absurd to suppose that people can become richer by having less riches. To become richer we must make more riches, and the object of every workman should be not to make work,