conduct--_the opinion of friends_--is lost on the very class who stand
most in need of its control. Obscurity screens immorality from detection;
numbers shelter crime from punishment. The temptations to vice multiply,
while the barriers against it are cut away. The really good poor are
invariably stationary; moving about is as fatal to their habits as it is
to those of children. The _free circulation of labour_, of which we hear
so much from master employers and the Chrematists, is often an advantage
with a view to the creation of wealth, or the sudden completion of great
undertakings: considered with reference to national morals, happiness, and
ultimate safety, it is one of the greatest curses which can befall a
people.

It is a sense of the evils arising from this feeling of isolation amidst
multitudes, and the experienced inability of the poor, all struggling
against each other for subsistence, to resist the progressive decline of
their wages till they reach the lowest point consistent with the support
of existence, which has made the working classes in France and England of
late years so generally embrace, and make such incredible efforts to
support, trades'-unions. They have endeavoured, in so doing, to regain
that organization of crafts in separate classes and bodies, which was
overturned amidst the shouts of triumph consequent on the French
Revolution. But this attempt, so far from palliating the existing evils,
has had the greatest possible tendency to aggravate them; for it has too
often vested irresponsible power in hands wholly unfit to wield it.
Perhaps the greatest, the most wide-spread, the most acute suffering
endured by the labouring poor in Great Britain during the last thirty
years, has arisen from strikes. Nothing has tended so strongly to shake
society to its centre; to array the working classes against their
employers; to spread habits of recklessness, violence, and improvidence
among them, and alienate their natural supporters from them by the
frightful crimes to which they have given rise. Foresight, industry,
regularity of conduct, frugality, saving habits--those prime guardians of
humble virtue--are out of the question when men are subjected to the
tyranny of these dreadful, popularly elected despots. The last and only
possession left to the poor--their own labour--is liable to be reft from
them by the imperious commands of an unknown and irresponsible committee;
which, elevated to importance b