Page:The farm labourer in 1872.djvu/19

 trade. The objects of modern unionism, on the contrary, seem to be to array employer and employed against each other, thereby causing enormous waste and loss to them chiefly, and to the world at large indirectly, instead of all sharing the profits of increased demand; and furthermore, to encourage bad work for what is erroneously called the good of trade. You cannot compare an old house, or an old piece of furniture, or even an old brick, with its modern substitute, without perceiving what we have lost in good workmanship, which means Truth and Honesty, and something more than mechanical skill.

Our whole art of construction is a hideous sham and lie, ill-concealed by a bastard and meaningless ornamentation. If the history of a generation as of a nation is written in its works, the story of Mammon-worship and its antithesis Trades-unionism, Dead Truth and Living Lies, is written in the work of the last fifty or one hundred years. If wrong-headed Harry Brougham and his dupes could have lived long enough, they might have perceived that civilization and progress, and even the material advancement of the people was not altogether comprised in more pay and shorter hours, strikes, paralyzation of capital and dead levelment of man; but that there are such things as industrial