are, as things stand, at times a necessary
evil; though our author goes dead against
them: saying, "the evil that is greater than
a strike must be great indeed, so great that
the probability of it arising in the present
age of competition is very small; and the
frequency with which strikes occur is, in my
opinion, in a great measure attributable to the
fact that the general run of working men do not
fully comprehend the nature and magnitude of
the evils involved in a strike, and lacking the
check that would arise from a thorough
understanding of these evils, they adopt a strike as a
first instead of a last resource."

If strikes be bad and a wicked waste of good
money, so also is all the carousing and
mummery of certain benefit societies, which can do
nothing without drink, banners, processions,
and a general display of rag-bag tomfoolery.
Why worthy citizens and respectable artisans,
well-conducted fathers of families, and young
men with the ordinary amount of sensitiveness
to ridicule, should consent to make perambulating
mummers of themselves, because they
have agreed to give each other such and such
a sum of money weekly, under such and such
circumstances, is one of those profound
mysteries of human polity quite impossible of
solution. But it does seem a bitter waste of
money, generally not too plentiful, to spend
what might be so useful to the suffering, in
simple folly and absurdity. It is to be
supposed that scarves, and banners, and pewter
medals, and queer triangular bits of cloth called
aprons, and tarnished tags, and rusty ribbons,
answer to some deep histrionic instinct in the
human mind; for we find the love of them
everywhere—the absurdity lessening just in
proportion to the original cost of material, and
the extent to which the tags and ribbons are
employed.

One of the most amusing of all the chapters
is that headed "On the Inner Life of
Workshops." To the outside public, and the
uninitiated in general, it naturally appears that men
go into a workshop to work, and that "work,
and work alone, is the beginning and end of
workshop life." "But any working man who
entered a workshop with such an idea in his
head, and with no other qualification than being
able to use his tools, would soon find himself in
very evil case. For him the shop would be
'made hot,' so hot, that, as a rule, he would
have to leave it, and might thank his planets if
he was fortunate enough to escape personal
violence. This, however, is only a hypothetical
case; and such a monster as a working man who
considered work, even during his working hours,
to be his being's end and aim is, happily for
himself, rarely to be met with in the flesh." The
first thing that an apprentice is taught, before
even he is told the names of the tools, is to
"keep nix." Now "keeping nix" is keeping a
bright look-out for overseers, managers, or foremen,
so as to be able to warn in time the men
who are skulking, reading, smoking, or "doing
corporation work"—that is, their own work
instead of the master's. The boy who can keep
"nix" well, is a treasure to the men, and will be
made a favourite among them, and taught his
trade with care and zeal; but the dull, slow, or
malicious boy, who lets his mates be "dropped
on," is cuffed and sworn at far more than he is
taught his trade, and, indeed, is considered very
nearly incapable of being taught his trade at
all. Besides keeping "nix," the apprentice has to
learn how to smuggle drink into the shop
undetected, as well as to perform many of the
ordinary services of the Eton fag; in return
for which he is taught "the cunningest trade
wrinkles of which the men are the masters,"
and so finds his account in his cleverness.

Of course, the usual practical jokes are played
off on a new comer, and he is sent to the most
ill-tempered man of the shop to ask for the
loan of a half-round square, and is told to call him
by some peculiarly offensive nickname; then the
elbow of his hammer-hand is jerked, and that
knocks a piece of skin off his chisel-hand; and
when he complains, they say, "It couldn't have
hurt him, as it wasn't on him a minute;"
and various other circumstances of rough
humour and horse-play come in as part of
the learning belonging to the years of
apprenticeship. But boys wear down their sharp
angles in time, and learn all the workshop
ways, and they do not get worse treated than
the fags at public schools, or the middies
on board a man-of-war. It enters into the
nature and obligation of boyhood to be
knocked about. In the present case, if
any man knock boys about too much, and
steps over the line laid down between the
admissible and the brutal, he is "small-ganged"
for his pains, and so learns better manners and
more moderation. To be small-gauged is to
be set upon by all the boys of the shop in a
close phalanx; and how strong soever the man
may be, and how ever well able to master a few
of his tormentors, all together they are too
many for him, and Gulliver has to yield to
Lilliput. Sometimes, though rarely, a man
revenges himself when out of his time on some
one who had been particularly obnoxious to him
as an apprentice. Such vows of retaliation are
often made and seldom kept; but once the
journeyman engineer saw a young man, so soon
as the clock struck twelve on the day on which
his indentures expired, throw down his tools
and immediately "pitch into" a workman who
had habitually ill used him in the first three
years of his apprenticeship. That was a man
with a purpose and a fixed idea invaluable to
a novelist.

There are certain times and circumstances
in a man's life when he has to "pay his footing"
in the workshop—the footing being a
sum of money to be spent in drink for the
community. Each new comer into a workshop
pays his footing on entering; a boy, on
commencing his apprenticeship, and a young man,
on ceasing to be an apprentice, pay footing; so
does a man on his marriage; formerly a man
had to pay his footing for very slight occasions,