Amy Prentice - "Mouser Cats' Story"

Anna Katherine Green - "The Mill Mystery"

Edgar Rice Burroughs - "Pellucidar"

John Lothrop Motley - "History of the United Netherlands, 1587"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Lectures and Essays

G >> Goldwin Smith >> Lectures and Essays




Fundamentally, value determines the price the community will give for
any article, or any kind of work, just so much as it is worth. But there
is no economical deity who, in each individual case, exactly adjusts the
price to the value; we may make a good or a bad bargain, as many of us
know to our cost. One source of bad bargains is ignorance. Before
unions, which have diffused the intelligence of the labour market, and
by so doing have equalized prices, the workman hardly knew the rate of
wages in the next town. If this was true of the mechanic, it was still
more true of the farm labourer. Practically speaking, the farm labourers
in each parish of England, ignorant of everything beyond the parish,
isolated and, therefore, dependent, had to take what the employers chose
to give them. And what the employers chose to give them over large
districts was ten shillings a week for themselves and their families,
out of which they paid, perhaps, eighteen-pence for rent. A squire the
other day, at a meeting of labourers, pointed with pride, and no doubt,
with honest pride, to a labourer who had brought up a family of twelve
children on twelve shillings a week I will venture to say the squire
spent as much on any horse in his stables. Meat never touched the
peasant's lips, though game, preserved for his landlord's pleasure, was
running round his cottage. His children could not be educated, because
they were wanted, almost from their infancy, to help in keeping the
family from starving, as stonepickers, or perambulating scarecrows. His
abode was a hovel, in which comfort, decency, morality could not dwell;
and it was mainly owing to this cause that, as I have heard an
experienced clergyman say, even the people in the low quarters of cities
were less immoral than the rural poor. How the English peasants lived on
such wages as they had, was a question which puzzled the best informed.
How they died was clear enough; as penal paupers in a union workhouse.
Yet Hodge's back, like that of Jacques Bonhomme, in France, bore
everything, bore the great war against Republican France; for the
squires and rectors, who made that war for class purposes, got their
taxes back in increased rents and tithes. How did the peasantry exist,
what was their condition in those days when wheat was at a hundred, or
even a hundred and thirty shillings? They were reduced to a second
serfage. They became in the mass parish paupers, and were divided, like
slaves, among the employers of each parish. Men may be made serfs, and
even slaves by other means than open force, in a country where, legally,
all are free, where the impossibility of slavery is the boast of the
law. Of late benevolence has been, abroad in the English parish,
almsgiving and visiting have increased, good landlords have taken up
cottage improvements. There have been harvest-homes, at which the young
squires have danced with cottagers. But now Hodge has taken the matter
into his own hands, and it seems not without effect. In a letter which I
have seen, a squire says, "Here the people are all contented; we (the
employers) have seen the necessity of raising their wages." Conservative
journals begin to talk of measures for the compulsory improvement of
cottages, for limiting ground game, giving tenant right to farmers,
granting the franchise to rural householders. Yes, in consequence,
partly, at least of this movement, the dwellings and the general
conditions of the English peasantry will be improved, the game laws will
be abolished; the farmers pressed upon from below, and in their turn
pressing upon those above, will demand and obtain tenant right; and the
country, as well as the city householders will be admitted to the
franchise, which, under the elective system, is at once the only
guarantee for justice to him and for his loyalty to the State. And when
the country householder has the suffrage there will soon be an end of
those laws of primogeniture and entail, which are deemed so
Conservative, but are in fact most revolutionary, since they divorce the
nation from its own soil. And then there will be a happier and a more
United England in country as well as in town: the poor law, the hateful,
degrading, demoralizing poor law will cease to exist; the huge poor-
house will no longer darken the rural landscape with its shadow, in
hideous contrast with the palace. Suspicion and hatred will no more
cower and mutter over the cottage hearth, or round the beer-house fire:
the lord of the mansion will no longer be like the man in Tennyson
slumbering while a lion is always creeping nearer. Lord Malmesbury is
astonished at this disturbance. He always thought the relation between
the lord and the pauper peasant was the happiest possible; he cannot
conceive what people mean by proposing a change. But then Lord
Malmesbury was placed at rather a delusive point of view. If he knew the
real state of Hodge's heart he would rejoice in the prospect of a
change, not only for Hodge's sake, but, as he is no doubt a good man,
for his own. England will be more religious, too, as well as happier and
more harmonious, let the clergy be well assured of it. Social injustice
especially when backed by the Church, is unfavourable to popular
religion.

The general rise of wages may at first bring economical disturbance and
pressure on certain classes, but, in the end, it brings general
prosperity, diffused civilization, public happiness, security to
society, which can never be secure while the few are feasting and the
many are starving. In the end, also, it brings an increase of
production, and greater plenty. Not that we can assent, without reserve,
to the pleasant aphorism, that increase of wages, in itself, makes a
better workman, which is probably true only where the workman has been
under-fed, as in the case of the farm labourers of England. But the
dearness of labour leads to the adoption of improved methods of
production, and especially to the invention of machinery, which gives
back to the community what it has paid in increased wages a hundred or a
thousand fold. In Illinois, towards the close of the war, a large
proportion of the male population had been drafted or volunteered,
labour had become scarce and wages had risen, but the invention of
machinery had been so much stimulated that the harvest that year was
greater than it had ever been before. Machinery will now be used to a
greater extent on the English farms; more will be produced by fewer
hands, labourers will be set free for the production of other kinds,
perhaps for the cultivation of our North-West, and the British peasant
will rise from the industrial and intellectual level of a mere labourer
to that of the guider of a machine. Machinery worked by relays of men
is, no doubt, one of the principal solutions of our industrial problems,
and of the social problems connected with them. Some seem to fancy that
it is the universal solution; but we cannot run reaping machines in the
winter or in the dark.

High wages, and the independence of the labourers, compel economy of
labour. Economize labour, cries Lord Derby, the cool-headed mentor of
the rich; we must give up our second under-butler. When the labourer is
dependent, and his wages are low, the most precious of commodities, that
commodity the husbanding of which is the chief condition of increased
production, and of the growth of national wealth, is squandered with
reckless prodigality. Thirty years the labourers of Egypt wrought by
gangs of a hundred thousand at a time to build the great Pyramid which
was to hold a despot's dust. Even now, when everybody is complaining of
the dearness of labour, and the insufferable independence of the working
class, a piece of fine lace, we are told, consumes the labour of seven
persons, each employed on a distinct portion of the work; and the
thread, of exquisite fineness, is spun in dark rooms underground, not
without injury, we may suppose, to the eyesight or health of those
employed. So that the labour movement does not seem to have yet trenched
materially even on the elegancies of life. Would it be very detrimental
to real civilization if we were forced, by the dearness of labour, to
give up all the trades in which human life or health is sacrificed to
mere fancy? In London, the bakers have struck. They are kept up from
midnight to noon, sometimes far even into the afternoon, sleepless, or
only snatching broken slumbers, that London may indulge its fancy for
hot bread, which it would be much better without. The result of the
strike probably will be, besides relief to the bakers themselves, which
has already been in part conceded, a more wholesome kind of bread, such
as will keep fresh and palatable through the day, and cleaner baking;
for the wretchedness of the trade has made it vile and filthy, as is the
case in other trades besides that of the bakers. Many an article of mere
luxury, many a senseless toy, if our eyes could be opened, would be seen
to bear the traces of human blood and tears. We are like the Merchant
Brothers in Keats:--

"With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt,
Enriched from ancestral merchandize,
And for them many a weary hand did swelt
In torch-lit mines and noisy factories,
And many once proud-quivered loins did melt
In blood from stinging whip; with hollow eyes
Many all day in dazzling river stood
To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood."

"For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,
And went all naked to the hungry shark;
For them his ears gushed blood; for them in death
The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark
Lay pierced with darts; for them alone did seethe
A thousand men in troubles wide and dark:
Half ignorant, they turned an easy wheel
That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel."

Among other economies of labour, if this movement among the English
peasantry succeeds and spreads to other countries, then will come an
economy of soldiers' blood. Pauperism has been the grand recruiting
serjeant. Hodge listed and went to be shot or scourged within an inch of
his life for sixpence a day, because he was starving; but he will not
leave five shillings for sixpence. Even in former days, the sailor,
being somewhat better off than the peasant, could only be forced into
the service by the press gang, a name the recollection of which ought to
mitigate our strictures on the encroaching tendencies of the working
class. There will be a strike, or a refusal of service equivalent to a
strike in this direction also. It will be requisite to raise the
soldier's pay; the maintenance of standing armies will become a costly
indulgence. I have little faith in international champagne, or even in
Geneva litigation as a universal antidote to war: war will cease or be
limited to necessary occasions, when the burden of large standing armies
becomes too great to be borne.

The strike of the English colliers again, though it causes great
inconvenience, may have its good effect. It may be a strong indication
that mining in England is getting very deep, and that the nation must
exorcise a strict economy in the use of coal, the staple of its wealth
and greatness. The lot of the colliers, grubbling all day underground
and begrimed with dirt, is one of the hardest; the sacrifice of their
lives by accidents is terribly large; and we may well believe that the
community needs a lesson in favour of these underground toilers, which
could be effectually taught only by some practical manifestation of
their discontent.

To the labour movement, mainly, we owe those efforts to establish better
relations between the employer and the employed, which are known by the
general name of co-operation. The Comtists, in the name of their
autocrat, denounce the whole co-operative system as rotten. Their plan,
if you get to the bottom of it, is in fact a permanent division of the
industrial world into capitalists. And workmen; the capitalists
exercising a rule controlled only by the influence of philosophers; the
workmen remaining in a perpetual state of tutelage, not to say of
babyhood. A little acquaintance with this continent would probably
dissipate notions of a permanent division of classes, or a permanent
tutelage of any class. It is true that great commercial enterprises
require the guidance of superior intelligence with undivided counsels as
well as a large capital, and that co-operative mills have failed or
succeeded only in cases where very little policy and very little capital
were required. As to co-operative stores, they are co-operative only in
a very different sense: combinative would be a more accurate term; and
the department in which they seem likely to produce an alteration, is
that of retail trade, an improvement in the conditions of which,
economical and moral, is assuredly much needed. But if we are told that
it is impossible to give the workmen an interest in the enterprise, so
as, to make him work more willingly avoid waste and generally identify
him self with his employer the answer is that the thing has been done
both in England and here. An artisan working for him self and selling
the produce of his individual skill has an interest and a pride in his
work for which it would seem desirable to find if possible some
substitute in the case of factory hands whose toil otherwise is mere
weariness. The increased scale of commercial enterprise however is in
itself advantageous in this respect. In great works where an army of
workmen is employed at Saltaire or in the Platt works at Oldham there
must be many grades of promotion and many subordinate places of trust
and emolument to which the workmen may rise by industry and probity
without capital of his own.

The general effect of the labour movement has been as I have said the
industrial emancipation of the workmen. It has perhaps had an effect
more general still. Aided by the general awakening of social sentiment
and of the feeling of social responsibility, it has practically opened
our eyes to the fact that a nation and humanity at large is a community
the good things of which all are entitled to share while all must share
the evil things. It has forcibly dispelled the notion in which the rich
indolently acquiesced that enjoyment leisure culture refined affection
high civilization are the destined lot of the few while the destined lot
of the many is to support the privileged existence of the few by
unremitting coarse and jobless toil. Society has been taught that it
must at least endeavour to be just. The old ecclesiastical props of
privilege are gone. There is no use any longer in quoting or misquoting
Scripture to prove that God wills the mass of mankind to be always poor
and always dependent on the rich. The very peasant has now broken that
spell and will no longer believe the rector if he tells him that this
world belongs to the squire and that justice is put off to the next. The
process of mental emancipation has been assisted by the bishop who was
so rash as to suggest that rural agitators should be ducked in a horse
pond. Hodge has determined to find out for himself by a practical
experiment what the will of God really is. No doubt this is an imperfect
world and is likely to remain so for our time at least; we must all work
on in the hope that if we do our duty it will be well for us in the sum
of things and that when the far off goal of human effort is at last
reached, every faithful servant of humanity will have his part in the
result; if it were not so, it would be better to be a brute, with no
unfulfilled aspirations, than a man. But I repeat, the religion of
privilege has lost its power to awe or to control, and if society wishes
to rest on a safe foundation, it must show that it is at least trying to
be just.

Wealth, real wealth, has hardly as yet much reason to complain of any
encroachment of the labour movement on its rights. When did it command
such means and appliances of pleasure, such satisfaction for every
appetite and every fancy, as it commands now? When did it rear such
enchanted palaces of luxury as it is rearing in England at the present
day? Well do I remember one of those palaces, the most conspicuous
object for miles round. Its lord was, I daresay, consuming the income of
some six hundred of the poor labouring families round him. The thought
that you are spending on yourself annually the income of six hundred
labouring families seems to me about as much as a man with a heart and a
brain can bear. Whatever the rich man desires, the finest house, the
biggest diamond, the reigning beauty for his wife, social homage, public
honours, political power, is ready at his command. Does he fancy a seat
in the British House of Commons, the best club in London, as it has been
truly called? All other claims, those of the public service included, at
once give way. I remember a question arising about a nomination for a
certain constituency (a working man's constituency, by the way), which
was cut short by the announcement that the seat was wanted by a local
millionaire. When the name of the millionaire was mentioned, surprise
was expressed. Has he, it was asked, any political knowledge or
capacity, any interest in public affairs, any ambition? The answer was
"None." "Then why does he want the seat?" "He does not want it." "Then
why does he take it?" "Because his wife does." Cleopatra, as the story
goes, displayed her mad prodigality by melting a pearl in a cup, out of
which she drank to Antony. But this modern money-queen could throw into
her cup of pleasure, to give it a keener zest, a share in the government
of the greatest empire in the world.

If the movement, by transferring something from the side of profits to
that of wages, checks in any measure the growth of these colossal
fortunes, it will benefit society and diminish no man's happiness. I say
it without the slightest feeling of asceticism, and in the conviction
that wealth well made and well spent is as pure as the rill that runs
from the mountain side.

Real chiefs of industry have generally a touch of greatness in them and
no nobleman of the peerage clings more to his tinsel than do nature's
noblemen to simplicity of life. Mr. Brassey with his millions never
could be induced to increase his establishment his pride and pleasure
were in the guidance of industry and the accomplishment of great works.
But in the hands of the heirs of these men colossal fortunes become
social nuisances waste labour breed luxury create unhappiness by
propagating factitious wants too often engender vice and are injurious
for the most part to real civilization. The most malignant feelings
which enter into the present struggle have been generated especially in
England by the ostentation of idle wealth in contrast with surrounding
poverty. No really high nature covets such a position as that of a
luxurious and useless millionaire. Communism as a movement is a mistake
but there is a communism which is deeply seated in the heart of every
good man and which makes him feel that the hardest of all labour is
idleness in a world of toil and that the bitterest of all bread is that
which is eaten by the sweat of another man's brow.

The pressure is hardest not on those who are really rich but on those
who have hitherto on account of their education and the intellectual
character of their callings been numbered with the rich and who are
still clinging to the skirts of wealthy society. The best thing which
those who are clinging to the skirts of wealthy society can do is to let
go. They will find that they have not far to fall and they will rest on
the firm ground of genuine respectability and solid comfort. By keeping
up then culture they will preserve their social grade far better than by
struggling for a precarious footing among those whose habits they cannot
emulate and whose hospitalities they cannot return. Then income will be
increased by the whole cost of the efforts which they now make it the
sacrifice of comforts and often of necessaries to maintain the
appearances of wealth. British grandees may be good models for our
millionaires but what most of us want are models of the art of enjoying
life thoroughly and nobly without ostentation and at a moderate cost. It
is by people of the class of which I am speaking that the servant
difficulty that doleful but ever recurring theme is most severely felt.
Nor would I venture to hold out much hope that the difficulty will
become less. It is not merely industrial out social. There is a growing
repugnance to anything like servitude which makes the female democracy
prefer the independence of the factory to the subordination of the
kitchen, however good the wages and however kind the mistress may be. We
must look to inventions for saving labour, which might be adopted in
houses to a greater extent than they are now. Perhaps when the work has
been thus lightened and made less coarse, families may find "help," in
the true sense, among their relatives, or others in need of a home, who
would be members of the family circle. Homes and suitable employment
might thus be afforded to women who are now pining in enforced idleness,
and sighing for Protestant nunneries, while the daily war with Bridget
would be at an end.

I would not make light of these inconveniences or of the present
disturbance of trade. The tendency of a moment may be good, and yet it
may give society a very bad quarter of an hour. Nor would I attempt to
conceal the errors and excesses of which the unions have been guilty,
and into which, as organs of corporate selfishness, they are always in
danger of running. Industrial history has a record against the
workingman as well as against the master. The guilds of the Middle Ages
became tyrannical monopolies and leagues against society, turned
callings open to all into mysteries confined to a privileged few, drove
trade and manufactures from the cities where they reigned to places free
from their domination. This probably was the cause of the decay of
cities which forms the burden of complaint in the preambles to Acts of
Parliament, in the Tudor period. Great guilds oppressed little guilds:
strong commercial cities ruled by artisans oppressed their weaker
neighbours of the same class. No one agency has done so much to raise
the condition of the workingman as machinery; yet the workingman
resisted the introduction of machinery, rose against it, destroyed it,
maltreated its inventors. There is a perpetual warning in the name of
Hargreaves, the workingman who, by his inventive genius, provided
employment for millions of his fellows, and was by them rewarded with
outrage and persecution.

Flushed with confidence at the sight of their serried phalanxes and
extending lines, the unionists do like most people invested with
unwonted power; they aim at more than is possible or just. They fancy
that they can put the screw on the community, almost without limit. But
they will soon find out their mistake. They will learn it from those
very things which are filling the world with alarm--the extension of
unionism, and the multiplication of strikes. The builder strikes against
the rest of the community, including the baker, then the baker strikes
against the builder and the collier strikes against them both. At first
the associated trades seem to have it all their own way. But the other
trades learn the secret of association. Everybody strikes against
everybody else, the price of all articles rises as much as anybody's
wages, and thus when the wheel has come full circle, nobody is much the
gainer. In fact long before the wheel has come full circle the futility
of a universal strike will be manifest to all. The world sees before it
a terrible future of unionism ever increasing in power and tyranny, but
it is more likely that in a few years unionism as an instrument for
forcing up wages will have ceased to exist. In the meantime the working
classes will have impressed upon themselves by a practical experiment
upon the grandest scale and of the most decisive kind the fact that they
are consumers as well as producers, payers of wages as well as receivers
of wages, members of a community as well as workingmen.

The unionists will learn also after a few trials that the community
cannot easily be cornered, at least that it cannot easily be cornered
more than once by unions any more than by gold rings at New York or pork
rings at Chicago. It may apparently succumb once being unable to do
without its bread or its newspapers or to stop buildings already
contracted for and commenced, but it instinctively prepares to defend
itself against a repetition of the operation. It limits consumption or
invents new modes of production, improves machinery, encourages non
union men, calls in foreigners, women, Chinese. In the end the corner
results in loss. Cornering on the part of workingmen is not a bit worse
than cornering on the part of great financiers; in both cases alike it
is as odious as anything can be, which is not actually criminal; but
depend upon it a bad time is coming for corners of all kinds.