Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/260

 '244 CRITICAL NOTICES: tion unduly taxes certain parts of the nervous system and entails positive as well as negative injury. While his mental nature is being deformed his physical nature is being degraded, owing to oscillations of temperature in a vitiated atmosphere, and also owing to the unnatural attitudes in which the work has to be per- formed. "If we compare his life with the life of the cottage artisan he has replaced, who a century ago having a varied muscular action in working his loom, with breaks caused by the incidents of the work, was able to alternate his indoor activities with outdoor activities in garden or field, we cannot but admit that this industrial development has proved extremely detrimental to the operative. In their social relations too there has been an entailed retrogression rather than a progression. The wage-earn- ing factory hand does, indeed, exemplify entirely free labour, in so far that making contracts at will, and able to break them after short notice, he is free to engage with whomsoever he pleases and when he pleases. But this liberty amounts in practice to little more than the ability to exchange one slavery for another ; since fit only for his particular occupation he has rarely an opportunity of doing anything more than decide in what mill he will pass the greater part of his dreary days. The coercion of circumstances often bears more hardly on him than the coercion of a master does on one in bondage." Trade unions Mr. Spencer considers to be necessary in the existing conditions of civilisation. He believes that they prevent employers from doing many unfair things, that they act as a check on the aggressiveness of the employer, that they compel him to raise wages more quickly than he would otherwise do, and that they raise the status of the workman. In addition to these advantages trade unions give a useful social discipline to their members, and have the effect of preparing them for such higher forms of social organisation as will probably hereafter arise. But the master-and-workman type of industrial organisation is not an ideal type, and might, under certain conditions, be superseded by a system of co-operative production in which merit and reward would be more nearly adjusted. But the practicability of the co- operative system depends on character. Higher types of society are made possible only by higher types of nature. The best in- dustrial institutions are possible only with the best men. Co-operation is one method of regulating labour. Socialism is another method, and Mr. Spencer is of opinion that the funda- mental point at issue between socialists and anti-socialists con- cerns the mode of regulating labour. Under a socialistic system the regulators of labour would be a vast and highly organised bureaucracy. This bureaucracy would be constituted on militant principles, and would work on militant lines. It would ultimately become a new aristocracy. It would be much more formidable and despotic than the old aristocracy, inasmuch as it would possess much greater powers. At the present time Mr. Spencer