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    as are practicable , either of the worldly prosperity or the mental and moral culture of the labouring classes ; to use no means for conciliating , but a thousand for alienating , their good will ; to allow them , as far as depends upon ourselves , to grow up barbarians in the midst of our civilization ; and when

    they , despairing of help from us , have turned to helping themselves , and are taking the only means we have given them of learning how to better their lot , by mutual consultation and practical experiment , then to bear down upon them with the strong hand of power , and close that door also against them . But it cannot be done : there are passions aroused strong enough to effect it if it were practicable , but it is not .

    The hope that experience , when allowed freely to take its course , will be the mother of wisdom to the operative classes as it has been to all mankind , is already justified by an actual result . The mechanics have discovered and recognised that strikes on the old principle , strikes by cessation of working , are always failures . The doctrine of the Trades' Unions now is , that when they resolve upon a strike , their course must not be to cease working , but to work on their own account ; and that the common funds , which formerly went to support them in idleness , must now be administered as a

    capital for their productive employment . Can any thing be at once more unexceptionable and more desirable , than such an experiment as this ? Possessing the necessary funds , the labourers mean to become capitalists , and to make actual trial of the difficulties of a joint management . If they succeed , who will not hail as one of the most important fruits of modern civilization , the demonstrated possibility of arrangements of society under which the whole produce of labour would belong exclusively to the labourers ? But if , as is infinitely more probable , they fail ; is not this the very lesson which their

    superiors are most anxious , and ought to be most anxious that they should learn ? When they perceive that the laws of property , which so revolt their moral sense , by rendering the condition of the idle so often preferable to that of the industrious , are the necessary condition of a large production ; when they find that the attempt to realize ( otherwise than with the slow progress of human improvement ) the cooperative principle as applied to the production of wealth , causes so much waste of labour in the intricate business of management and check , and such a relaxation of the intensity

    of individual exertion , that under the fairest possible distribution there is a smaller share for each , than falls or might fall to the lot even of the most scantily remunerated , under the present arrangements ; then , and not till then will they patiently submit to the necessity of not moving faster than their limbs will carry them ; and instead of aiming at impracticable changes in the general order of society , will combine with all other honest and intelligent men , in introducing all the improvements which the existing social system admits of . For the remainder of the Notes on the Newspapers , see page 309 .

    Untitled Article

    248 Notes " on the Newspapers .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1834, page 248, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2632/page/16/