LABOUR AND CAPITAL.

Westport Times, Volume VIII, Issue 1176, 15 May 1874, Page 2

LABOUR AND CAPITAL.

[teibtjke.] The relation of labour to capital 13 the great question of the day, and there can be no rest for the commercial world until it is placed upon a satisfactory footing. The feudal system of master aud servant has passed away, and cau no more return than our ancestors who were engaged in carrying it out can do so. But it does not follow that a satisfactory relationship may not be established, either on the co-operative or partnership systems, and when the representatives of the two great powers come to its discussion in a friendly spirit, instead of meeting each other as opposing forces, it will be done. Wo are sorry to find Carlyle taking a very gloomy view of the subject. In a characteristic letter which he has addressed to Sir James Whitworth, commending him for his system of giving bonuses to his workmen —a species of modified partnership —he expresses his abhorrence of the present relations existing between labour and capital, delivering himself thus:—''The look of England is to me at this moment abundantly ominous ; the question of capital and labour growing ever more anarchic—insoluble altogether by the notions hitherto applied to it—pretty sure to issue in petroleum one day, unless some other gospel than that of the ' dismal science,' come to illuminate it. Two things are pretty sure to me—the first is that capital and labour never can or will agree together till they both first of all decide ou doing their work faithfully throughout, and like men of conscience and honour, whose highest aim is to behave like faithful citizens ot this universe aud obey the eternal commandment of Almighty God who made them. The second thiug is, that a sadder object than that of the coal strike or any other conceivable strike is the fact that, loosely speaking, we may say all England has decided that the most profitable way is to do its work ill, slimly, swiftly, and mendaciously. What a contrast betweeu now and say only a hundred years ago! At the latter date, or still more conspicuously for ages beforo that, all England awoko to its work with an invocation to the Eternal Maker to bless them in England. Now shopkeepers, workmen, and all manner of labourers awaken as if with an unspoken but heartfelt prayer to Beelzebub: ' Oh, help us, thou great lord of shoddy, adulteration, aud malfeasance, to do our work with the maximum of slimness, swiftness, profit, and mendacity, for the devil's sake. Amen.' " There is, unfortunately, too much of the cheap and nasty. It has to bo fought against and conquered. It is tho work of this ago to do so. There is a small use of sitting down and bemoaning an evil generation. They have to bo made better and it must bo done. There is a gospel other thau that which Carlyle calls the " dismal scieuce," and it needs but to get hold of it to set the world to rights.