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This illustration has been carefully selected for the purpose of meeting the most difficult type of case-the case where the employees produce nothing that other wage-earners buy. We shall get something much more typical if we pass out of this lordly estate, with its spacious gravelled walks, its lilied ponds, and splashing fountains; and letting its coronetted gates clang behind us (while the lodgekeeper's supercilious eye takes contemptuous note murmuring of innumerable flunkeys. It was a very live sort of mistletoe once, however, when respectable people brought it home at every election time to deck their walls with, or waved it triumphantly in parliamentary debates— as a magic charm to keep those wicked trade unions from springing up to blight the land. According to this theory the average wage depends upon the number of workers and upon the amount of capital that the kind capitalist graciously places at their disposal to make things with.

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Now, what workers get certainly does depend largely on what they produce; and how much they produce does depend largely on the amount of capital available for them to use. But we cannot calculate the average worker's wage by such a simple piece of arithmetic as the jotting down of a thousand million pounds of capital as the Dividend and ten million workers as the Divisor, and giving the answer as a hundred pounds apiece; and then, to make the conclusion a little more realistic, slipping in a few unobtrusive words of explanation" £100 a minute (if we are in an optimistic mood), or £100 a lifetime " (if we are thinking of to-morrow's visit to the dentist). It is a very pretty piece of arithmetic, no doubt, and quite useful when one is talking to a submissive muddle-headed man to persuade him to work hard and pay all the taxes thoughtfully laid upon his shoulders (where they don't hurt very much)—instead of asking to have them paid by the wealthy folk who would have to draw the money out of the Wages Fund to meet the tax-gatherer's claims-and where would the industrious worker be then, poor thing? . . . No, we can't waste space in exposing the architecture of antiquated mouse-traps of this description.

of the cut of our country-made clothes) find our way to some grimy coal-mine and clamber down its shaft (while the engineer's back is turned) to see what may happen there.

If through working less energetically or more wastefully, the coal-miners brought it about that very many more hands would have to be employed to maintain a given output of coal, coal must become more costly to produce and its price must rise. The working classes would in consequence suffer doubly and trebly. For, not only would they have to pay more for the coal they burn in their homes, but the mills and factories that use coal in driving their machinery would see their prosperity relatively declining, and less therefore could be offered in wages to factory hands. Factory-made goods would be liable to become dearer. Gas would rise in price. Steamships would cost more to keep going, and we should have to pay rather more than before for the food supplies and raw materials that these floating factories gather in for us from all quarters of the globe (often after the goods have made long journeys in America or elsewhere on coal-driven trains).

All this should help us to an understanding of one of the central facts of modern industrial life, a fact which both employers and the well-to-do classes, on the one hand, and the wage-earners on the other, are very prone to overlook. It has been pointed out that when employers in one industry gain by the introduction of new methods, practically all workers(employers and employees) outside this industry may be expected to gain. But when in any one industry (say, the railway industry) the wageearners succeed in making the employers give them

better pay, gains and losses are likely to be unevenly distributed among wage-earners and employers in other occupations. For if the guards and porters get higher pay, and their employers (the railway shareholders) get smaller profits in consequenceprovided the railways do just as much business as before, without charging more for their services to the general public (mainly, of course, the working classes whose factory materials and whose ordinary goods, in various stages of completion, are carried by train)-it merely means that the railway hands have more to spend than before and the shareholders have less. This is likely to benefit both employers and employees in the boot-making trade, the breweries and the woollen industries, whose products are mainly bought by the wage-earning classes; for while the railway hands will spend a little more freely in these directions, the better-off shareholders will spend on these about as much as they spent before. These better-off people are much more likely to curtail their expenditure on such things as silk dresses and motor-cars, with the result that employers and employees in these industries will be worse off, as well as such people as chauffeurs, valets, and butlers.

There is therefore-and this is the important point -no real division of the players into two opposing teams, with all the employers on one side and all the wage-earners on the other, the one always gaining whenever the other loses. But, rather, there are always a great many detached struggles perpetually going on in each separate industry, the employers trying to get higher profits out of what they and their hands produce in common, and their hands trying to get higher wages. When the wage-earners win

in one of these many struggles, both employers and employees in some other industries (say, in the boot-making trade) may be better off-though hardly so if the wage-earners' success is unwarranted by the conditions of the time, and in consequence some of the more struggling employers have to abandon their efforts to keep men employed and all the employers have to charge more for their goods. But both employers and employees in yet other industries (say, the motor industry) are likely to suffer. Similarly when the employers get the upper hand in one of these separate struggles, boot-makers (employers and employed) are likely to be worse off, and silk dress makers (employers and employed) to be better off. There is, in short, no such thing as Marx's" class war " being waged between employers in general and wage-earners in general-or, as the leaders in these struggles usually describe it—a war between Capital and Labour. It is largely this delusion-the idea that there is a permanent and inevitable conflict of interest between the whole class of employers and the whole class of employees-that lies at the basis of the policy of the "sympathetic strike," under which one group of employees attempts by ceasing work to give support to strikers whenever there occurs an industrial dispute with which the former are not directly concerned.

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Nevertheless the sympathetic strike" in one vital respect does resemble war. For, in the intricately interwoven network of the modern world's activities, even though it may not be a crime, the sympathetic strike has become (as a general rule) something much more serious. It is now-a colossal blunder. Wage-earners have many interests in common, and trade unions can forward them in

many such ways as were indicated in the footnote to p. 86. But a sympathetic strike is rarely, and a universal strike still more rarely, likely to be of more benefit to the wage-earners as a class (apart from political effects in a non-democratic country) than a universal lock-out would be to their associated employers.

But it is time we touched on the question-why do those pampered employers get such preposterous incomes as compared with the pittance of the working men?

The average employee is always raising in conversation with his fellows that eternal question.

"I was born free as Caesar; so were you:
We both have fed as well; and we can both
Endure the winter's cold as well as he.
. . And this man

Is now become a god; and Cassius is

A wretched creature, and must bend his body,
If Caesar carelessly but nod on him.

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus; and we petty men

Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves."

Well, to begin with, are "profits" on the average so much higher than "wages" on the average? To strike an average we must take every profithunter into account; just as, if we are asking for the average incomes of people who are called to the Bar, we must add together not merely the incomes of the Lord Chancellor, the Judges of the highest courts, and the people who "swank round" in the silken gown of the K.C.-we must remember also the hordes of briefless barristers dwelling like bats in the nooks and crannies of Lincoln's Inn Field and other places where creatures of this species

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