There was therefore very little disposition among the Whigs to undertake economic reforms. "We can no more prevent time," said Macaulay, "from changing the distribution of property and intelligence, we can no more prevent property and intelligence from aspiring to political power, than we can change the courses of the seasons and of the tides."[211] But in the immediate present they would decline to change the distribution of property as firmly as to change that of political power. The two things in fact went together. Society was based on property; universal suffrage meant the confiscation of property. Therefore the franchise must be limited to the owners of property. "My firm conviction," said the same typical Whig, "is that, in our country, universal suffrage is incompatible, not with this or that form of government, but with all forms of government, and with everything for the sake of which forms of government exist; that it is incompatible with property, and that it is incompatible with civilization."[212] This refusal to undertake anything in the nature of graduated taxation or social reform was accompanied by a dislike of the organizations by which the working people endeavoured to help themselves. After the repeal of the Combination Acts in 1824 the number of Trade Unions had greatly increased. The methods of these associations were often of a violent and dangerous character. Any unusual poverty will produce disorder, even among men of good understanding. The effect on men of poor education is much worse. The new-found power of combining was thus often abused, intimidation and assault were common, and even murder was not unknown. To the Whigs, as to the philosophic Radicals, the whole system of Trade Unionism was nothing but tyranny and oppression. They failed to see the necessity for combination. They assumed that nothing could increase wages but an increase of production, and consequently that so long as the total earnings of a trade remained fixed a Trade Union could produce no result except a bad {172} temper. They ignored the possibility that the master's profits and the landlord's rent might both be reduced without injury to the industry as a whole. In all this the Utilitarians agreed with them. But theorists like Hume and Roebuck were compelled logically to admit that if a man was to be free to pursue his own interest, he was to be free to combine with others. A Trade Union was thus not offensive to a Radical except when it abused its rights and acted oppressively. The Whigs had a much stronger objection. A Union to them was obnoxious in itself, probably because it had a social and political, as well as an industrial complexion. The Radical employer at least understood his men. The Whig landowner probably did not. Brougham described the Union leaders as "idle, good for nothing agitators," and declared that "the worst enemies of the trades themselves, the most