al union of labour. Though slight spasmodic international co-
operation of workers may even now be possible, especially among members
of English-speaking races, the divergent immediate interests, the
different stages of industrial development reached in the various
industrial countries, seem likely for a long time at any rate to
preclude the possibility of close co-operation between the united
workers of different nations.

Sec. 6. Parallelism of the Movements in Capital and Labour.--Now this
movement in labour, irregular, partial, and incomplete as it is, is
strictly parallel with the movement of capital. In both, the smaller
units become merged and concentrated into larger units, driven by self-
interest to combine for more effective competition in larger masses. The
fact that in the case of capital the concentration is more complete,
does not really impair the accuracy of the analogy. Small capitals, when
they have co-operated or formed a union, are absolutely merged, and
cease to exist or act as individual units at all. A "share" in a
business has no separate existence so long as it is kept in that
business. But the small units of labour cannot so absolutely merge their
individuality. The capital-unit being impersonal can be absolutely
merged for common action with like units. The labour-unit being personal
only surrenders part of his freedom of action and competition to the
Union, which henceforth represents the social side of his industrial
self. How far the necessity of close social action between labour-units
in the future may compel the labourer to merge more of his industrial
individuality in the Union, is an open question which the future history
of labour-movements will decide.

The slow, intermittent, and fragmentary manner in which labour-unions
have been hitherto conducted even in the stronger trades, is a fact
which has perhaps done more to hide the true parallelism in the
evolution of capital and labour. The path traced above has not yet been
traversed by the bulk of English working men, while, as has been shown,
working women have hardly begun to contemplate the first step. But the
uneven rate of development, in the case of capital and labour, should
not blind us to the law which is operating in both movements. The
representative relation between capital and labour is no longer that
between a single employer and a number of individual working men, each
of the latter making his own terms with the forme