FRASER'S

THE

HE organisation of labour in parliamentary boroughs, and the possible extension of this organisation to all kinds of labour, joined to the likelihood that combinations entered into with a view to securing higher wages will assume the form of a powerful partisanship, in as well as out of Parliament, are matters of real or professed alarm to many who oppose any large extension of the franchise. Mr. Lowe is not the only person who has sounded this alarm. The resistance to any substantive reform, and the suggestion made that checks and counterchecks to an overpowering exercise of the franchise by the poorer classes, should be devised, may be expressions of an honest fear. But they may also be mere subterfuges, uttered with a view to maintaining a preponderance of political power in the hands of a section in the community, and with the object of securing sectional ends or private advantages.

The association of labourers in trades unions is partly an imitation of practices long since adopted by employers, partly a retaliatory act. For many centuries the association of employers was permitted by law, or its necessity or convenience was. superseded by positive legislation. Upwards of five hundred years ago, a plague of a novel and eminently destructive character devastated

VOL. LXXV.-NO. CCCCXLV.

Europe. It was known by the name of the Black Death. Many calculations, necessarily vague, have been hazarded as to the extent of its ravages. Fear, which multiplies numbers, led those who witnessed the calamity to say that only one tenth of the population survived it. Later and calmer estimates have reckoned the loss at half the population. But even this calculation is excessive. One thing only is known positively, that in consequence of the dearth of hands, the wages of labour were doubled.

It was not to be expected that in those times, the rulers of the people, interested as they were in low prices of labour, would submit patiently to so serious an inconvenience. It is true that the rise in price was due to an economical law; but passion and self-interest never recognise economical laws, even had that age been competent to comprehend their existence. The Parliament passed laws to regulate the wages of labour, and the struggle between labour and capital commenced. Thirty years after the plague, labour had organised itself, made subscriptions to a common fund for purposes of defence, and had broken out into insurrection.

The peasants' war, under Tyler's guidance, was the fruit of the statute of labourers. The conclusion was for the time a drawn battle, part of the victory

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