Page:Philosophical Review Volume 20.djvu/276

262 realisation of the very well-being of the community. This struggle to get rights admitted may lead, as it has recently in Great Britain, to the necessity of labour representation in parliament, a result which is at once an indication of the size of the labour class in the community, and of their power to see their case fully stated—a result, too, which every wise member of society will welcome. The struggle may and does involve organisation of ways and means, for organisation is a source of strength and compels attention by the sheer weight of its massed opinion. Hence the origin of, and, we may say, the necessity for, Trade-Unions of every kind, which are more and more assuming a political as well as an economic significance, and are being endowed by the state with powers of their own of even a sinister kind, as in the case of the recent Trades Disputes Act. The rights to which labour may lay claim are primarily of two kinds, the right of property and the right of contract, and of the two the latter is the more prominent. Labour is, as we saw, the performance of a function for some end in which the community is concerned. The end lies, in the case of labour, beyond the workman. It is a subordinate end; as we say the labour is done for his master or for some end determined by another, an end which is not the workman's and not found in the work itself, and is compensated in the form of payment or wages. In the very nature of labour, therefore, we have implied a relation between persons, the labourer on the one hand and the master on the other. To maintain that relation securely, both as to the doing of the work and the reward to be obtained, it is required that the two parties concerned have a hold on the actions of each other, and have the power to anticipate what each in the future (so long as the relation lasts) will do. The expression of this mutual reliance may be implicit in the form of mutual trust, or it may be explicit. It can always be made explicit, and when this is done it appears in the form of what is called Contract. The right of contract, therefore, is inherent in the very nature of labour. Moreover, a man cannot make a contract with another unless he has something to contract