ed more and more to
upset the commercial system I have told you of; without providing
anything really effective in its place. The result was growing
confusion, great suffering amongst the working classes, and, as a
consequence, great discontent. For a long time matters went on like
this. The power of the upper classes had lessened, as their command over
wealth lessened, and they could not carry things wholly by the high hand
as they had been used to in earlier days. So far the State Socialists
were justified by the result. On the other hand, the working classes
were ill-organised, and growing poorer in reality, in spite of the gains
(also real in the long run) which they had forced from the masters. Thus
matters hung in the balance; the masters could not reduce their slaves to
complete subjection, though they put down some feeble and partial riots
easily enough. The workers forced their masters to grant them
ameliorations, real or imaginary, of their condition, but could not force
freedom from them. At last came a great crash. To explain this you must
understand that very great progress had been made amongst the workers,
though as before said but little in the direction of improved
livelihood."

I played the innocent and said: "In what direction could they improve, if
not in livelihood?"

Said he: "In the power to bring about a state of things in which
livelihood would be full, and easy to gain. They had at last learned how
to combine after a long period of mistakes and disasters. The workmen
had now a regular organization in the struggle against their masters, a
struggle which for more than half a century had been accepted as an
inevitable part of the conditions of the modern system of labour and
production. This combination had now taken the form of a federation of
all or almost all the recognised wage-paid employments, and it was by its
means that those betterments of the conditions of the workmen had been
forced from the masters: and though they were not seldom mixed up with
the rioting that happened, especially in the earlier days of their
organization, it by no means formed an essential part of their tactics;
indeed at the time I am now speaking of they had got to be so strong that
most commonly the mere threat of a 'strike' was enough to gain any minor
point: because they had given up the foolish tactics of the ancient
trades unions of calling out of work a part only of the workers of such
and such