and liabilities of every one of the four thou- | of it is an evil; and every extension of it, sand lodges should be properly valued on even if for a time injuriously affecting some actuarial data; and although the results of class of labourers, is always an ultimate good. the investigation have been satisfactory as a To be protected against competition is to be whole, there are still a considerable number saved the necessity of being as active and as inprotected in idleness, in mental dulness; to be of lodges which exhibit deficits.* telligent as other people; and if it is also to be protected against being underbid for employment by a less highly paid class of labourers, this is only where old customs or local and partial monopoly has placed some particular class of artizans in a privileged position as compared with the rest; and the time has ment is no longer promoted by prolonging come when the interest of universal improvethe privileges of a few. The quiet, provident working men, who have been paying subscriptions for years to the trade union clubs, in reliance on their benefit engagements, are to be sincerely pitied. Wholly apart from trade expenditure, nearly every one of these clubs is insolvent that is to say, the funds in hand and the income to come in in future years will wholly fail to meet the engagements falling due in those years-even if not a penny more be spent on trade objects. In addition to this, any member is liable to exclusion at the caprice of the committee, and the Act of 1871 cuts him off from all redress before the law. Contrast this painful position and that of a member of the Manchester Unity, where there is the demonstration of rigid mathematics that the society is financially sound, and the protection of the law to enforce the contracts it enters into. We have now shown in detail the manner in which trade unions as a whole, and as now existing in this country, interfere with the operation of the wholesome and natural laws which, if left to themselves, tend to a steady increase of wages, by rendering it the interest of the workman to command a better price for his labour by raising its quality that is, its skill and efficiency. The trade unions take the exactly opposite course—that is, they seek the higher wages, not by improving, but, as Mr. Denny says, by degrading' labour; not by deserving nore, but by doing less, to the rapid and inevitable detriment of their own technical skill as artizans, and to their moral qualities as men and as citizens of a free country. Their denunciation of the competition,' which every other class, and every other man and woman in the country and the world, has to meet and contend against, is an insolent call to be protected while everybody else is, for their benefit, unprotected; and the answer to the call cannot be better given than in the language of Mr. J. S. Mill. Instead (he says) of looking upon Competition as the baneful and anti-social principle which it is held to be by the generality of socialists, I conceive that even in the present state of society and industry every restriction * The excellent pamphlet (No. 17, p. 116) by the son of the late Mr. Neison gives a clear and concise account of the Manchester Unity during its process of reform. If the slop-sellers and others of their class have lowered the wages of tailors and some other artizans by making them an affair of competition instead of custom, so much the better in the end. What is now required is classes of labouring people obtain partial not to bolster up old customs, whereby limited gains, which interest them in keeping up the present organization of society, but to introduce new general practices beneficial to all; and there is reason to rejoice at whatever makes the privileged classes of skilled artizans feel that they have the same interests and depend for their remuneration on the same general causes, and must resort for the improvement of their condition to the same remedies as the less fortunately circumstanced and comparatively helpless multitude (Frinciples of Political Economy,' book iv. chap. 7). We do not attempt, nor is it needful, to add a word to the force of this admirable passage. If the influence of trade unions had not been practically confined to a comparatively small part of the working classes, the results would have been highly disastrous, and the prospects of the country in the future would be gloomy in the extreme. There is good reason to believe that the numbers in all the trade unions in this country are considerably under a million persons-probably not more than eight hundred thousand-or equal to about eight or ten per cent. of the men engaged in artizan, handicraft, and other kinds of manual labour; and the reasons for these limited dimensions of the unions are not difficult to understand. There is first the native aversion of Englishmen to dictation and coercion of any kind, but especially by people whom they know and see to be inferior rather than superior to themselves: secondly, there is the obvi ous objection of the enterprizing, prudent, ambitious, and reliant men to sacrificing their talents and confort to the supposed interests of the common, ordinary, and idle majority of their fellows: thirdly, there is the very large number of quiet, sober, conscientious workmen, who have be come attached to a particular master or employment, who have sons and nephews by the side of them growing up in the same occupation, and who avoid instinctively the secret conclaves and the tyrannical decrees of trade union agitation: and, fourthly, there is the large and powerful class of men classed by the unions as mere labourers,' and therefore excluded from the protected and preserved trade union paradise. These non-privileged men have everything to gain and nothing to lose by the failure of the unions, for it is a primary object of union rules and policy to keep down the mere labourer rigidly where he is, so as to retain the larger benefits to themselves. We have spoken freely of the faults of the trade unions. But justice requires that there should be a degree of condemnation, fully as emphatic, as regards certain classes and certain practices of Employers. In his speech, in September last, at the Trade Union Congress at Leicester, Mr. Thomas Brassey, M.P., said, as regards the present depression of trade: In the discussions on the state of trade, and the prolonged depression throughout the commercial world, the exorbitant price of labour is continually referred to. We hear but little, however, of the larger share of blame which rests upon the Capitalists, the employers of labour, and the investors and lenders of money, who overstock the market with goods to be sold at ruinous prices, and who by encouraging speculative building have raised the wages of artizans to their present level. to sneer at their creditors, and start another A The railway strike of July, 1877, in the United States, was criminal in its violence and tinued reign of fraud, mendacity, and insolence tyranny, but it was provoked by the long-conon the part of the Fisks, Goulds, and the race of autocratic railway presidents and officers who became rich by plundering railway bondand shareholders. To a large extent Mr. Brassey is justified. We are happy to read the following prayer in this remark. There has been of late in a petition from bankers and merchants (Noyears disgraceful recklessness on the part of vember, 1877), very largely signed:- Your a considerable number of the Employer honourable House their strong conviction that, petitioners desire further to represent to your class; and a recklessness chiefly attributa- owing to the rapid growth and the increasing ble to the defects of the law in affording a complexities of modern business, the establishswift and cheap remedy to persons deceived ment and maintenance of a Court of Bankand defrauded by the concocters and manruptcy under the presidency of a judge distinguished as a mercantile lawyer, and free to agers of limited companies; the introducers give his whole time and attention to the adminand promoters of loans to foreign borrow-istration of his Court, has become the only means ers; the syndicates' for favouring the public with concessions for public works, inventions, &c.; and above and greater than all, by the scandalous inefficiency of the Bankruptcy Laws to expose and punish swiftly the ever-swelling crowd of insolvent debtors, who run a brief and wondrous course of splendour, audacity, and folly; fail for hundreds of thousands; pay dividends of a few farthings (shillings and even pence have become vulgar); and emerge in a few weeks (or days even) with unabashed faces, faultless toilet, and lisping impudence, by which insolvent debtors can be justly dealt with, by procedure in open court, and the estates appertaining to them expeditiously and economically distributed. Exhaustive experience has amply proved that it is futile to rely on creditors who have incurred losses by bankrupts to institute the necessary measures for the proper investigation of their affairs, and if need be of exposure of their conduct, which on every ground of public morality and commercial policy is imperatively required. And your petitioners declare most emphatically that they have but little faith in the practical efficacy of any Bankruptcy Law unless it shall be administered under the supervision of a vigilant and energetic chief judge.' We entirely agree with Mr. Lowe (Fortnightly Review, March, 1877) that the time has come when the Act of 1869 for the Abolition of Imprisonment for Debt must be amended in the interest of the poorer classes. As the law now stands, debtors owing more than £50 escape imprisonment, and, indeed, punishment of any kind; while the poor and needy persons whose liabilities are below that sum are at the mercy of their creditors. There is no justice in the distinction. If, as was rightly argued, and as experience has shown, the abolition of the power to imprison operates in limiting credit in large cases, the same beneficial result will be seen in small cases, and the law will be made the same for all. In the statement we have now given of the principles and facts on both sides of the controversy between Capital and Labour, we venture to think that no reasonable critic will accuse us of partiality or serious omission. We are not among those who consider the contention-the merits of which we have been examining-as a great peril to this country. In the nature of things there inust always be contention, sometimes fierce and protracted, between capital and labour; for, as we have tried to make plain, there is a point at which, from being co-operators, they become rivals, each advancing claims which the other contests. But this country has advanced further than any other in convincing both sides that they can best settle their disputes by peaceful means, by discussion, by accepting explanations, and, of late years, by a willingness to ask the advice and abide by the decision of impartial bystanders. Above all, the legislature has effectually removed from the law the smallest trace of partiality, either for men or *We take the following statement from the memoir of Rev. John Macfarlane, LL.D., of Clapham, by Mr. Graham of Liverpool (Edward Oliphant, 1876), just published. I was shocked at one of my interviews with him (a man of education and intelligence, in large business in the city) to hear him say, "I see some at the Lord's Table with whom I would not sit down at my own table. We have hun dreds of thousands invested in our business; we have branches all over England; and we generally find that the bankrupts by whom we lose money are all religious professors. So much so, that when we hear that any of our customers are given to much praying and professing, we drop the connection." This is very sad, of course. Little do some professors know the evil they do by walking before the world inconsistently with their profession and station as Church members' (p. 217). masters. If any undue favouritism does remain, it is towards the men; and the most unjust and mischievous examples of it are the exemptions in the Act of 1871 of trade unions from that jurisdiction of the courts which is paramount over every other person and thing in the Queen's dominions. The conflict must be left in its results to the play and influence of that free spirit of liberty which can alone bring into the paths of truth and soberness the most refractory contentions that arise among men; nor is there any reason to fear that in this difficulty, as in hundreds of similar difficulties which have preceded it-tariff reform, poor law amendment, the management of colonies, free trade in shipping, free trade in corn, protection to manufactures, factory Acts, sanitary legislation - the process of cure will not be quite (equal to the extirpa tion of the disease. It is on every ground desirable that the Trade Unions should now be let alone. They have no longer the shadow of a grievance against the law or against sober public opinion. The habit and fashion of patronizing them by public men, philanthropists, Church congresses, clerical notabilities, and others, should cease, as answering no useful purpose, and greatly retarding the acceptance of sound views by the workmen themselves. Not just yet, but at no distant period, the trade unions will be forced by events to see that the only effectual way to increase wages is to cheapen production, by the application to it of advancing efficiency and skill; and that the more production is cheapened-that is to say, the greater the outturn of commodities in proportion to the labour expended on them-the better will that labour be paid. At present the unions are wandering in the outer darkness, where the fallacy is cherished, that if by degrading labour commodities can be made dear, wages will be sustained and enhanced. If we could imagine it to be possible for any country to apply such a principle throughout the whole extent of its transactions for even a single year, we may safely affirm that before the end of the first six months such a cry of distress and ruin would be raised from every class and order of the inhabitants as was never heard before in this world. Events will also teach more and more plainly that the surest and the only way to the just and rapid Distribution of the results of labour and capital, is to render Production, in the most emphatic sense, free, intelligent, and effective. When this is done, all is done. The parties to the process, whether capitalists or labourers, each of them obtain at once their fair share of the joint result; and for the conclusive reason, that they contribute to that result on terms freely discussed, intelligibly understood, and effectively applied. When the working classes have acquired the habit of conducting their affairs on this basis, they will gradually and safely advance to whatever future developments of industry may be afforded by co-operation in any of its possible forms. ART. VI.-Comprehension. COMPREHENSION is one of the great cries of the present age. In one form or another it rises from the midst of every country of Christendom. There is not a single section of the Church universal that can be said to abstain altogether from joining in the general chorus. Nay, more; faint tones having the same meaning may be heard proceeding from beyond the boundaries of Christendom proper. The one word, however, covers many and diverse senses. Under the apparent harmony the listening ear can detact harsh discords. It is only in the distance that the voices blend into a sort of unity. The Romish Church yearns-yearns no doubt intensely, and in part, at all events, purely to comprehend the whole world within its fold; but comprehension on its lips means the abject submission of all who now dissent from it. The Greek, or Orthodox Church, would also welcome comprehension, but though it might treat with the Romish Church as an equal-as a sister, though erring-it would claim from Protestantism in all its sections a peccavi little less emphatic than Rome itself. The Episcopal Protestant Church in England is of divided mind in the matter of comprehension, as in other things. One section would rejoice if reunion with Rome could be effected, and desires only that the pill of submission should be sweetened; another section coquets with the Greek Church, which condescendingly listens to the endorsement of its own pretences, whilst scarcely concealing the disgust it feels at Anglican claims to be a portion of the true Church. All sections, however, agree in the terms on which they would be comprehended with their non-Episcopal fellow Protestants, namely, the absorption of the latter. Many no doubt are anxious that those whom they style 'Dissenters' should be reconciled to what they call the Church;' but as to a comprehension which would mean mutual reconciliation on the basis of mutual concession, after mutual conferences on equal terms-they will none of it.* Exceptions no doubt there are-noble exceptions; but they are exceptions. Outside the great Episcopal organizations, which on the ground of their episcopacy claim to be either the true Church or at all events integral parts of it, there is a broader spirit at work, and a less one-sided notion of comprehension prevails. Presbyterians in America have composed their long-standing differences; Presbyterians in England have united; and Presbyterians in Scotland are hoping to follow the good example. Wesleyan and Primitive Methodists in Ireland are sinking their distinctions; and there are many signs that ere long the two great branches of orthodox. Congregationalism-the Baptists and Pædobaptists-will forget their ancient feuds, and though retaining each its distinguishing feature, commune and co-operate as brethren. But outside those most sectarian of the Christian sects-the Episcopal Churchesthat spirit of mutual recognition and of occasional intercommunion which is a very true, if not a formulated and organic comprehension, is obviously stirring more and more powerfully in all the denominations. In America it has long been common for private members, ministers, and theological tutors, to pass and repass between Presbyterianism and Congregationalisin without so much as a whisper of its being an act of desertion or apostacy. Adherents of both denominations have joined to found Churches and sustain organizations for common Christian work; and it has occurred that such association has extended even to Baptists and Methodists in places where none of them were strong enough to work alone. The interchanges of these denominations in England have never assumed this semi-corporate character, except in the case of Union (Baptist and Independent) Churches; and yet it is no infrequent thing. for Baptist and Methodist ministers to pass over to Congregationalism without furtherquestion, and for the members of these sev-eral Churches to be temporarily incorporated with another Church than their own where circumstances render it natural.. *Not even Canon Curteis, who, whilst eloquently expatiating on what conferences or synods did to prevent or remove splits in the early Church, ever suggests a similar synod or conference now, between Episcopalian and non-Episcopalian Churches. One-sided conferences have only one-sided results! It Un And it certainly now excites no sort of sur-them make this fact a ground of boasting, prise when interchanges of pulpits take and adduce it as a proof that they are the place, whether on ordinary or extraordinary true abode of the Spirit of Truth which occasions. In a very true sense Presbyte- Christ promised to send into the world. rians, Baptists, Methodists, and Congrega- is an old tale; the fact looks very well till tionalists, are undergoing comprehension, it is examined, but it does not bear examinand though it is of an unformulated kind, ation. We need not look far for the reait is none the less real. son of the exemptions in question: it is a fruit of the position assigned by them to the principle of authority. Neither of these Churches concerns itself greatly about the intellectual relation of its members to its teachings so long as they keep their questionings to themselves, and are docile in practice. To the mass of the clergy, and still more to the mass of the laity, the credenda are and must be mysteries, which it is dangerons to attempt to explore. Whenever and wherever a freer spirit has begun to stir, it has been stamped out, not merely with energy, but even with brutality. willing to commit suicide, every effort to create and nourish intellectual independence is discouraged, and therefore these Churches are rarely at all, and never publicly, troubled with intellectual conflicts. But do they therefore comprehend no divergent elements? As a matter of fact, they embrace within their pale abject superstition on the one hand and blank atheism on the other. Men and women may be seen going together, with the same outward signs of devotion, through all the rites of the Church, of whom the one class regard the process as a magical means of setting themselves right with heaven for time and eternity, and fanatically cling to their conviction, while the other look upon it as a dismal farce, over which they gnash their teeth in private, but which they keep up because it would be inconvenient for them to drop it. Yes, the Romish and Greek Churches are comprehensive, but it is a comprehension of hypocrisy. In Germany, too, the Lutheran and the Reformed Churches are gradually assuming a less repellent attitude toward each other than they held a generation ago. Prior to this time the reaction against the compulsory union brought about in Prussia during the reign of Frederick William III. had driven those asunder in spirit who had once been almost losing the consciousness that they were separated, and the cry had been gradually waxing more shrill and massive, Ilie Lutheraner, hie Reformirter!'-an ecclesiastical revival of the old political warcry Here Guelph, here Ghibelline!' But the necessities of the time are so grave, and the combined energies of indifference, scepticism, and superstition are so mighty, that the consciousness of their constituting, notwithstanding all differences of doctrine, sentiment, rite, and practice, one Evangelical Church, is happily again awakening, and will, it is to be hoped, lead to hearty cooperation in Christian work, if not to organic union. Baptists, indeed, are still regarded by many in the State Church as an ecclesiastical nuisance; Methodists, as foreign intruders, who work under false pretences; Independents, as the born antagonists of everything like authority in faith, government, and practice; and even Presbyterians, not being Germans, are more highly esteemed whilst they remain in Scotland than when they invade the Fatherland. State Churchisin there, as elsewhere, generates ecclesiastical exclusiveness, though it may tolerate, if not foster, the greatest incongruities of faith and doctrine, and a soul-destroying indifference in practice. Another kind of comprehension, however, less ostentatious, but more vital in its character, is partly making its way and partly asking for recognition-comprehension as to matters of faith. Two sections of Christendom alone may be said to be undisturbed by the movement to which I now refer, namely, the Romish Church and the Greek Church. So far as can be observed, neither among the clergy nor among the laity of either of these Churches is there a party desiring that it should officially recognize forms of religious belief and teaching that deviate essentially from its time-honoured standards. If there be signs thereof in either, it is in the Greek Church. Both of Protestantism, in nearly all its branches, is being stirred to its very depths by this movement. In most of the State Churches comprehension as to matters of faith, though not in the extremes just described, exists already de facto: it now claims to exist de jure. Of the de facto breadth of the English State Church it is unnecessary to speak. It is patent enough, and it requires no inconsiderable exercise of charity to avoid thinking that there is not a good deal of insincerity on the part of the laity as well as on the part of the clergy, when men whose thoughts diverge so widely use the same words to express not only their common devotions, but even their common beliefs. Germany has long been credited with be |