interest be. Since this
is so, it would follow that the establishment of larger industrial
units, such as workmen's unions and employers' unions, based on a
cancelling of minor conflicting interests, will diminish the aggregate
quantity of friction between capital and labour. If there were a close
union between all the river-side and carrying trades of the country, it
is far less likely that a particular local body of dock-labourers would,
in order to seize some temporary advantage for themselves, be allowed to
take a course which might throw out of work, or otherwise injure, the
other workers concerned in the industries allied to theirs. One of the
important educative effects of labour organizations will be a growing
recognition of the intricate _rapport_ which subsists not only between
the interests of different classes of workers, but between capital and
labour in its more general aspect. This lesson again is driven home by
the dramatic scale of the terrible though less frequent conflicts which
still occur between capital and labour. Industrial war seems to follow
the same law of change as military war. As the incessant bickering of
private guerilla warfare has given way in modern times to occasional,
large, organized, brief, and terribly destructive campaigns, so it is in
trade. In both cases the aggregate of friction and waste is probably
much less under the modern _regime_, but the dread of these dramatic
lessons is growing ever greater, and the tendency to postponement and
conciliation grows apace. But just as the fact of a growing identity in
the interest of different nations, the growing recognition of that fact,
and the growing horror of war, potent factors as they seem to reasonable
men, make very slow progress towards the substitution of international
arbitration for appeals to the sword, so in industry we cannot presume
that the existence of reasonable grounds for conciliation will speedily
rid us of the terror and waste of industrial conflicts. It is even
possible that just as the speedy formation of a strong national unity,
like that of Prussia under Frederick the Great, out of weak, disordered,
smaller units, may engender for a time a bellicose spirit which works
itself out in strife, so the rapid rise and union of weak and oppressed
bodies of poorer labourers make for a shortsighted policy of blind
aggression. Such considerations as this must, at any rate, temper the
hopes of speedy industrial pacificatio