consequence, great discontent. For a long time matters went on like this.
The power of the upper classes had lessened, as their command over wealth
lessened, and they could not carry things wholly by the high hand as they had
been used to in earlier days. So far the State Socialists were justified by the
result. On the other hand, the working classes were ill-organised, and growing
poorer in reality, in spite of the gains (also real in the long run) which they
had forced from the masters. Thus matters hung in the balance; the masters could
not reduce their slaves to complete subjection, though they put down some feeble
and partial riots easily enough. The workers forced their masters to grant them
ameliorations, real or imaginary, of their condition, but could not force
freedom from them. At last came a great crash. To explain this you must
understand that very great progress had been made amongst the workers, though as
before said but little in the direction of improved livelihood.«
    I played the innocent and said: »In what direction could they improve, if
not in livelihood?«
    Said he: »In the power to bring about a state of things in which livelihood
would be full, and easy to gain. They had at last learned how to combine after a
long period of mistakes and disasters. The workmen had now a regular
organisation in the struggle against their masters, a struggle which for more
than half a century had been accepted as an inevitable part of the conditions of
the modern system of labour and production. This combination had now taken the
form of a federation of all or almost all the recognised wage-paid employments,
and it was by its means that those betterments of the condition of the workmen
had been forced from the masters: and though they were not seldom mixed up with
the rioting that happened, especially in the earlier days of their organisation,
it by no means formed an essential part of their tactics; indeed at the time I
am now speaking of they had got to be so strong that most commonly the mere
threat of a strike was enough to gain any minor point: because they had given up
the foolish tactics of the ancient trades unions of calling out of work a part
only of the workers of such and such an industry, and supporting them while out
of work on the labour of those that remained in. By this time they had a biggish
fund of money for the support of strikes, and could stop a certain industry
altogether for a time if they so determined.«
    Said I: »Was there