nd adaptable. Just how high
the scientific and practical education may rise in the central levels of
this body is a matter for subsequent speculation, just how much
initiative will be found in the lowest ranks depends upon many very
complex considerations. But that here we have at least the possibility,
the primary creative conditions of a new, numerous, intelligent,
educated, and capable social element is, I think, a proposition with
which the reader will agree.

What are the chief obstacles in the way of the emergence, from out the
present chaos, of this social element equipped, organized, educated,
conscious of itself and of distinctive aims, in the next hundred years?
In the first place there is the spirit of trade unionism, the
conservative contagion of the old craftsmanship. Trade Unions arose
under the tradition of the old order, when in every business, employer
and employed stood in marked antagonism, stood as a special instance of
the universal relationship of gentle or intelligent, who supplied no
labour, and simple, who supplied nothing else. The interest of the
employer was to get as much labour as possible out of his hirelings; the
complementary object in life of the hireling, whose sole function was
drudgery, who had no other prospect until death, was to give as little
to his employer as possible. In order to keep the necessary labourer
submissive, it was a matter of public policy to keep him uneducated and
as near the condition of a beast of burden as possible, and in order to
keep his life tolerable against that natural increase which all the
moral institutions of his state promoted, the labourer--stimulated if
his efforts slackened by the touch of absolute misery--was forced to
devise elaborate rules for restricting the hours of toil, making its
performance needlessly complex, and shirking with extreme ingenuity and
conscientiousness. In the older trades, of which the building trade is
foremost, these two traditions, reinforced by unimaginative building
regulations, have practically arrested any advance whatever.[26] There
can be no doubt that this influence has spread into what are practically
new branches of work. Even where new conveniences have called for new
types of workmen and have opened the way for the elevation of a group of
labourers to the higher level of versatile educated men,[27] the old
traditions have to a very large extent prevailed. The average sanitary
plumber of to-day in England in