§ 20

Paying a bad or indolent workman the same wages as an efficient and industrious one is to put a tax on skill; it discourages the good workman and encourages the idle one in his idleness. To forbid a bricklayer to lay more than a minimum number of bricks per hour is to encourage the lazy and discourage the honest workman; therefore to curtail the production of work in quantity and quality is directly injurious to the needs of the country and indirectly to the progress of trade; moreover, it is unfair to the good workman as it places him on a level with the inferior or bad one, which is not only morally wrong but economically silly. Trades union laws have grown to be tyrannical. They contradict what was good in their initiative. As at present enacted they prove their authors to be ignorant men, ignorant of the first principles of political economy and of the results which must inevitably follow upon their acceptance. If an honest workman has the will to lay as many bricks per hour (so he does it well) it is tyranny to forbid him. It is neither to his interest nor of the trade he represents to coerce him. For the reason he does better and more work than his idle or incompetent fellow he has a right to a higher wage; to deny him that right is to lower the standard of workmanship generally and particularly. To oblige men to down tools at the command of leaders against their will is tyranny! So we find after all that grandiloquent talk about Liberty is gas. Trades union leaders are tyrants; even more, they are slave drivers! Labour would do well to strike against them instead of striking against doing their duty and being honourable members of society. Indeed, they would do well to duck them in the nearest pond as enemies, not friends, to their cause. The fact is that as soon as the workmen find out they have been misled retribution is likely to follow and quickly. When the honest workman sees clearly that a false position has been pressed upon him he will resent it and drastically. The last railway strike is a black spot in the history of generous and liberal England. The majority of the railway men did not wish it. It was forced on them by the audacity and ambition of their leaders. That statement is proved by the avidity of their return to work. Perchance they thought it was just possible that while they were starving others, and the helpless, they themselves would suffer with them. An empty belly is a very valuable medicine.

Englishmen of whatever class, rich or poor, would never consent to starve out their comrades, their children, their old fathers and mothers. Our workmen are, au fond, too good fellows to do that, even to descend to threaten it. The threat to starve the country was not made by them but by their leaders, who, if they do not know better how to conduct men only a little less ignorant than they, will have to be taught to do so, and quickly.