Labour Movements

The property-holding class, and especially the manufacturing portion of it which comes into direct contact with the workingmen, declaims with the greatest violence against these Unions, and is constantly trying to prove their uselessness to the workingmen upon grounds which are economically perfectly correct, but for that very reason partially mistaken, and for the workingman’s understanding totally without effect. The very zeal of the bourgeoisie shows that it is not disinterested in the matter; and apart from the indirect loss involved in a turnout, the state of the case is such that whatever goes into the pockets of the manufacturers comes of necessity out of those of the worker. So that even if the workingmen did not know that the Unions hold the emulation of their masters in the reduction of wages, at least in a measure, in check, they would still stand by the Unions, simply to the injury of their enemies, the manufacturers. In war the injury of one party is the benefit of the other, and since the workingmen are on a war-footing towards their employers, they do merely what the great potentates do when they get into a quarrel. Beyond all other bourgeois is our friend Dr. Ure, the most furious enemy of the Unions. He foams with indignation at the “secret tribunals” of the cotton-spinners, the most powerful section of the workers, tribunals which boast their ability to paralyse every disobedient manufacturer, “and so bring ruin on the man who had given them profitable employment for many a year.” He speaks of a time “when the inventive head and the sustaining heart of trade were held in bondage by the unruly lower members.” A pity that the English workingmen will not let themselves be pacified so easily with thy fable as the Roman Plebs, thou modern Menenius Agrippa! Finally, he relates the following: At one time the coarse mule-spinners had