_First_--a vehement protest against
the doctrine of _Laissez faire_; which, he says, "on the part of the
governing classes will, we repeat again and again, have to cease; pacific
mutual divisions of the spoil and a would-let-well-alone will no longer
suffice":--a doctrine to which he is disposed to trace the Trades Union
wars, of which he failed to see the issue. He is so strongly in favour of
_Free-trade_ between nations that, by an amusing paradox, he is prepared
to make it _compulsory_. "All men," he writes in _Past and Present_,
"trade with all men when mutually convenient, and are even bound to do
it. Our friends of China, who refused to trade, had we not to argue with,
them, in cannon-shot at last?" But in Free-trade between class and class,
man and man, within the bounds of the same kingdom, he has no trust: he
will not leave "supply and demand" to adjust their relations. The
result of doing so is, he holds, the scramble between Capital for larger
interest and Labour for higher wage, in which the rich if unchecked will
grind the poor to starvation, or drive them to revolt.
_Second_.--As a corollary to the abolition of _Laissez faire_, he
advocates the _Organisation of Labour_, "the problem of the whole future
to all who will pretend to govern men." The phrase from its vagueness
has naturally provoked much discussion. Carlyle's bigoted dislike of
Political Economists withheld him from studying their works; and he seems
ignorant of the advances that have been made by the "dismal science,"
or of what it has proved and disproved.
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