of commodities. For example, three hundred families of an agricultural village send to the markets not once but twenty times in the course of a year. The peasant delights in loitering about the market places and taverns; though he have nothing but a bushel of beans, he spends an entire day in the city. And for the three hundred families this constitutes an average loss of 6000 days' labor, not including the cost of transportation, which is twenty times greater than in an association which sells its commodities in large quantities, since under coöperation purchases are made only for Phalanxes numbering about 1500 individuals. If a village is situated near a city, we find that the three hundred families will sometimes send a hundred milk women with a hundred cans of milk, the sale and transportation of which will cause these women to lose a hundred mornings. I have observed that they can be replaced by a small cart drawn by an ass and driven by a woman, a gain of forty-nine fiftieths. There is nothing in which economy is recognized as more urgently needed than in fuel; this economy assumes vast proportions in the coöperative state; a Phalanx has only five kitchens in place of three hundred. The whole can be supplied by three great fires, which, compared to the 300 fires of a village, brings the economy in fuel to nineteenths.

The following statement of the principles of trade unionism is made by George Howell, who was for many years a prominent leader in the labor movement in Great Britain.

of trade

In their essence trade unions are voluntary associations of 392. The workmen for mutual assistance in securing generally the most principles favorable conditions of labor. This is their primary and funda- unionism mental object and includes all efforts to raise wages or resist a reduction in wages; to diminish the hours of labor or resist attempts to increase the working hours; and to regulate all matters relating to methods of employment or discharge and mode of working. They have other aims also, some of them not less important than those embraced in the foregoing definition, and the sphere of their action extends to almost every

eedy gman

detail connected with the labor of workmen and the well-being of their everyday lives. . .

...

It must be conceded that every man has a perfect right for himself to fix the price at which he will give his labor, or to refuse to work if the terms offered him do not suit him. So equally has another man the right to accept or refuse either the work or the terms without molestation from his fellow-workmen or from his employer; and that which one has the right to do singly, two or more have the right to do in agreement so long as they both individually and in combination do not interfere by unlawful means with the free action of a third party to refuse or accept the proffered terms. An employer has an equal right to say to the workman, "I will give only a certain price, or employ you on specified conditions; if you don't like it you can go elsewhere.' A good deal depends in all cases upon the manner in which these things are said and done; the right, however, remains in theory and in fact.

An individual workman has but little chance of obtaining what he deems a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, or other equal- equitable conditions of labor. His necessities often compel

a posi

h his

yer

gaining

him to accept terms which he feels to be inadequate and even unjust, but the question with him is how to enforce higher wages or better terms. It is true that he wants work; it is equally true that the employer wants his labor, but the latter can afford to wait until another man more needy than the first applies for employment, when perhaps he will be able to obtain the services of the last comer on his own (the employer's) terms. In any case he can but wait and see, and if he cannot procure workmen on the terms he has fixed, there is no great harm done; he can only then agree to give the higher price and secure their labor. With the journeyman it is different; he cannot wait, his means are exhausted and hunger compels him to accept any terms that may be offered.

s equal- But if the workmen who are thus seeking employment have ditions mutually agreed not to accept work below a stated price, or only upon specified conditions, and they have with others provided a fund which will enable them to withhold their labor until a better price is offered, they are justified in so doing, and

they have by this arrangement placed themselves upon something like an equality with the employer, because they have the means of waiting and bidding for better terms.

Notwithstanding the dreams of the philosophers and Utopians and the varied activities of coöperative societies and trade unionists, there exists all over western Europe a vast mass of poverty and wretchedness. A distinguished English philanthropist, Mr. Rowntree, published in 1901 a careful survey of the amount and character of the poverty in York, an English city of about 78,000 population, and the following are his conclusions:

Having made an estimate, based upon carefully ascertained 393. The facts, of the earnings of practically every working-class family extent of poverty in in York, the next step was to show the proportion of the total the English population living in poverty. Families regarded as living in city of York (condensed) poverty were grouped under two heads:

(a) Families whose total earnings were insufficient to obtain the minimum necessaries for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency. Poverty falling under this head was described as "primary" poverty.

(b) Families whose total earnings would have been sufficient for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency, were it not that some portion of it was absorbed by other expenditure, either useful or wasteful. Poverty falling under this head was described as "secondary" poverty.

To ascertain the total number living in primary poverty it How the was necessary to ascertain the minimum cost upon which standard of living was families of various sizes could be maintained in a state of measured physical efficiency. This question was discussed under three heads, namely, the necessary expenditure for (1) food, (2) rent, and (3) all else, and it was shown that for a family of father, mother, and three children, the minimum weekly expenditure upon which physical efficiency can be maintained in York is 21S. 8d. This estimate was based upon the assumption that the diet is selected with careful regard to the nutritive value

cotal

er in ty in

of various food stuffs, and that these are all purchased at the lowest current prices. It only allows for a diet less generous as regards variety than that supplied to able-bodied paupers in workhouses. It further assumes that no clothing is purchased which is not absolutely necessary for health, and assumes, too, that it is of the plainest and most economical description. No expenditure of any kind is allowed beyond that which is absolutely necessary for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency.

The number of persons whose earnings are so low that they cannot meet the expenditure necessary for the above standard of living, stringent to severity though it is, and bare of all creature comforts, was shown to be no less than 7230, or almost exactly 10 per cent of the total population of the city. [The investigators from a house-to-house investigation reported] 20,302 persons, or 27.84 per cent of the total population, as living in poverty. Subtracting those whose poverty is "primary," we arrive at the number living in "secondary" poverty, namely, 13,072, or 17.93 per cent of the total population. The figures will be clearer if shown in tabular form:

NUMBER OF PERSONS IN POVERTY IN YORK

PER CENT OF THE
TOTAL POPULATION

J

n

e

r

F

f

F

C

1

1

The closing years of the nineteenth century were marked by the extraordinary growth of socialistic parties whose fundamental contention is that poverty is caused, first and foremost, by the ownership by private individuals of the land, mines, machinery, etc., necessary for production. This "bourgeois" system, as they call it, enables the capitalists to keep the workingmen in poverty by appropriating from their labor an inordinate amount of profit. Two of the founders of modern socialism, Karl

Marx and Friederick Engels, in the Communist Manifesto published in 1848, declared that the socialistic movement was simply part of a great historical process extending through a long period, and that the industrial revolution would inevitably create in each country a vast proletariat which in time was destined to overthrow the capitalist system just as the bourgeoisie had destroyed feudalism. This notion of socialism as a historical prophecy is stated in the following extracts:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of 394. Extracts class struggles. In the earlier epochs we find almost everywhere a complicated organization of society into various orders.

from the Communist

Manifesto

. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; (much in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild masters, journey- condensed) men, apprentices, serfs.

our time

The modern bourgeois society, which has sprung from the New class ruins of feudal society, has not done away with class antago- struggles in nisms. It has only established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeois, possesses, however, Bourgeoisie this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. vs. Proletariat Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other, Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

to overthrow

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened How comup fresh fields for the rising bourgeoisie. The East Indian and merce helped Chinese markets, the colonization of America, gave to com- feudalism merce, navigation, and industry an impulse never before known. The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolized by close guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing demands of the new markets. The manufacturing system (on a small scale) took its place. The guild masters were pushed to one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of the division of labor in each single workshop.