From which it might be supposed that all skilled and unskilled artisans and farm-laborers, with their wives and children, live upon air—need no food, no clothing, no furniture, no houses, and are therefore unaffected by enhanced prices of commodities. However fully prepared for the distorting effects of class-bias, one would hardly have expected effects so great. One would have thought it manifest, even to an extreme partisan of trades-unions, that a strike which makes coal as dear again, affects, in a relatively small degree, the thousands of rich consumers above described, and is very keenly felt by the millions of poor consumers to whom, in winter, the outlay for coal is a serious item of expenditure. One would have thought that a truth, so obvious in this case, would be recognized throughout—the truth that, with nearly all products of industry, the evil caused by a rise of price falls more heavily on the vast numbers who work for wages than on the small numbers who have moderate incomes or large incomes.
Were not their judgments warped by the class-bias, working-men might be more pervious to the truth that better forms of industrial organization would grow up and extinguish this which they regard as oppressive, were such better forms practicable. And they might see that the impracticability of better forms results from the imperfections of existing human nature, moral and intellectual. If the workers in any business could so combine and govern themselves that the share of profit coming to them as workers was greater than now, while the interest on the capital employed was less than now; and if they could at the same time sell the articles produced at lower rates than like articles produced in businesses managed as at present, then, manifestly, businesses managed as at present would go to the wall. That they do not go to the wall—that such better industrial organizations do not replace them, implies that the natures of working-men themselves are not good enough; or, at least, that there are not many of them good enough. Happily, to some extent, organizations of a superior type are becoming possible: here and there they have achieved encouraging successes. But, speaking generally, the masses are neither sufficiently provident, nor sufficiently conscientious, nor sufficiently intelligent. Consider the evidence.
That they are not provident enough they show both by wasting their higher wages when they get them, and by neglecting such opportunities as occur of entering into modified forms of coöperative industry. When the Gloucester Wagon Company was formed, it was decided to reserve a thousand of its shares, of ten pounds each, for the workmen employed; and to suit them it was arranged that the calls of a pound each should be at intervals of three months. As many of the men earned £2 10s. per week, in a locality where living is not costly, it was considered that the taking up of shares in this manner would be quite practicable. All the circumstances were at the outset such as to promise that prosperity which the company has achieved.
