Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/396

 874 THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL sullenly the workman resents his exclusion from all share in the direction of the industrial world. This feeling is part of the ' real inwardhess ' of the demand for an Eight Hours Bill. The ordinary journalist or member of Parliament still says: 'I don't consult any one except my doctor as to my hours of labour. That is a matter which each grown man must settle for himsel!.' We never hear such a remark from a workin.g man belonng to any trade more highly organized than chimney. sweeping. The modern artisan has learnt that he can no more fix for himself the time at which he shall begin and end his work than he can fix the sunrise or the tides. When the carrier drove his own cart and the weaver sat at his own loom they began and left off work at the hours that each preferred. Now the railway worker or the power-loom weaver knows that he must work the same hours as his mates. It was this industrial autocracy that the Christian Socialists of 1850 sought to remedy by re-establishing the 'self-governing workshop ' of associated craftsmen; and a similar purpose still pervades the whole field of industrial philanthropy. Sometimes it takes the specious name of' industrial partnership'; some- times the less pretentious form of a joint-stock company with one-pound shares. In the country it inspires the zeal for the creation of peasant proprietorships, or the restoration of 'village industries,' and behind it stalk those bogus middle class 'reforms' known as ' free land ' and ' leasehold enfranchisement.' But it can scarcely be hidden from the eyes of any serious student of economic evolution that all these well-meant endeavours to set back the industrial clock are, as regards any widespread result, foredoomed to failure. The growth of capital has been so vast, and is so rapidly increasing, that any hope of the great mass of the workers ever owning under any conceivable Individualist arrangements the instruments of production with which they work can only be deemed chimerical.  Hence it is that irresponsible personal authority over the actions of others cxpelled from the throne, the castle, and the  The estimated value of the wealth of the United Kingdom to-y is 10,000 mil- lions sterling, or over 1,100 per family. The much be-praised co-operative ment controls about 13 millions sterling. The total possessions of the millions of the wage-earning class are less than 200 millions sterling, or not  per family. The eight millions of the population who do not belong to the wage-earning class own all the rest; the death duty returns show, indeed, that one-half of the entire total is in the hands of about 25,000 families. For references to the authorities for these and other statistics quoted, see Fabian Tract No. 5, Fact for $ocialit (London:The Fabian Society, 276, Strand, W.C.).