that at the least he should be altogether
prompt to second, heart and soul, every
attempt of the master to establish a relation
of good-will and confidence with him. Men
rarely quarrel except through what is wisely
called—misunderstanding.

There is some reason that we will not
undertake to give, which causes Lancashire,
although by no means the only British factory
district, to be the district most afflicted by
misunderstandings. Nowhere else are the
masters so much obstructed by the dictatorial
spirit of the men; nowhere else is the law so
much interfered with, by the dictatorial spirit
of the masters. In Scotland, Yorkshire, and
the west of England, masters and men work
generally well together, and the law is more
or less obeyed; machinery, for instance, not
being, as a rule, obstinately left unfenced.

Many pages of this journal have been
devoted already to the discouragement of
strikes. We have urged invariably that
the one perfect remedy against them is the
opening up of more and better opportunities
of understanding one another, between man
and master. In case we may be supposed
to be ignorant of the feelings about which
we reason, let it be known that every thought
—almost every word—upon this subject
given in the paragraphs that follow will be
the thought or word, not of a speculative
person at a distance, but of a Lancashire
mill-owner. At the time of the disastrous Preston
strike, a Preston manufacturer, whose men
stood by him honestly and well, published
at Manchester, a little pamphlet;* which,
if its counsel had been taken, would
assuredly have made the present strike of
Manchester impossible. Mr. Justice
Talfourd's last words, placed lately by the men
above their manifesto, was then chosen
as a motto by the masters. Coming, this
gentleman wrote, into Lancashire from a
district where good feeling subsisted
between the employer and the employed, it
was with the utmost surprise that he found
labour and capital to be in a state of antagonism
throughout the country. From the time
when he first began to employ labour in
Lancashire, more than a quarter of a century ago,
he has made it his strict business to study
the system at work around him, and discover
the real causes of the evils that undoubtedly
exist; and he has no hesitation in saying,
that the main cause is a want of cordial
feeling—the absence, in fact, of a good
understanding between the parties to the
labour-contract. This feeling must be established,
he adds, or the case never will be mended.
Such understanding does not come by any
explanations from third parties; it is
produced only by direct and habitual
intercourse between the parties too often at
issue. The Preston manufacturer says that
no doubt the masters in Lancashire help their
men to be intelligent by spending money
liberally upon schools connected directly or
indirectly with their mills. Duty is done
amply; and, for duty's sake, too, to children;
but, he adds, what is really wanted is the
education of the adult intellect. The minds
of children, having been prepared by the
rudiments of knowledge to receive ideas
(whether good or evil), they are then cast
adrift to gather and continue their education
by absorbing all the notions, all the prejudices,
and all the fallacies with which chance
may surround them. A dispute arises; there
is no sympathy shown to the operatives by
the employers; but much real or pretended
sympathy is shown by the delegates, who tell
them fine-spun theories about the results of
trades' unions; talk to them in an inflated
manner about their rights and wrongs; tell
them that a strike is the only way of battling
for the right. Such men never interfere without
widening the breach on which they get a
footing.
* Strikes Prevented. By a Preston Manufacturer.
Galt and Co. 1854.

So far, the Preston manufacturer says what
we have felt and said on numerous occasions.
Now let us see how he not only speaks, but
acts, and how the doing looks which
illustrates the saying.

In the first place, minor acts of friendship
to the men may be mentioned:—He has
encouraged them to form a Provident Club
in connection with his mill, and given them
all help in it that would not compromise
their independence; at the same time he has
encouraged them also to support the benefit
clubs out of doors. He has liked them to be
led to accumulate savings, never believing
that a store of money in the operative's
power would facilitate a strike, but rather
knowing that the provident man who has
saved property will be especially unwilling to
see it dissipated. He has provided his men
with a reading-room and a lending library,
and secured a fund for its support, while he
has removed a cause of soreness that exists in
even well-regulated mills, by devoting to their
library the fines levied upon operatives for
faults of discipline. Such fines are necessary,
and the faults for which they are imposed
cost, of course, loss to the millowner for
which they are no real compensation;
nevertheless, if the master puts such shillings into
his own pocket, or, as is sometimes the case,
gives them as pocket-money to a son,
experience declares that they are grudged, and
sometimes counted as extortions. Let the
fine go to the common account of the men,
and the payer of it, instead of being pitied as
the victim of a tyrant, will be laughed at—
thanked for his donation to the library, and
so forth. Practically, also, the result of this
system, as the Preston manufacturer has
found, is to reduce the number of the fines.
Men would so much rather be victims than
butts, that acts of neglect are more
determinedly avoided, though we may suggest the