Do not
try to bar these men of their right as free Englishmen to combine, if they
choose, for what they consider their own benefit. Look upon these struggles
between employers and employed as fair battles, in which, by virtue of the
irreversible laws of political economy, the party who is in the right is
almost certain to win; and interfere in no wise, save to see fair play, and
lawful means used on both sides alike. If you do more; if you interfere
in any wise with the Trades' Unions themselves, you will fail, and fail
doubly. You will not prevent the existence of combinations: you will only
make them secret, dark, revolutionary: you will demoralize the working man
thereby as surely as the merchant is demoralized by being converted into a
smuggler; you will heap up indignation, spite, and wrath against the day
of wrath; and finally, to complete your own failure, you will drive the
working man to demand an extension of the suffrage, in tones which will
very certainly get a hearing. He cares, or seems to care, little about
the suffrage now, just because he thinks that he can best serve his own
interests by working these Trades' Unions.
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