The facts now referred to are those of contemporary trade unionism. These are supposed by many of the trade unionists and their sympathisers to show the growth of democratic power in the domain of production generally. What they do in reality is to exhibit its essential limitations. They {236} show this in a way which is hidden from the careless thinker by a curiously inaccurate and misleading use of language. Trade unionism is constantly described as the organisation of Labour. In reality it is nothing of the kind. It is an organisation of labourers; and that, as we shall see, is a totally different thing; for where labourers are spoken of under the collective name of Labour, they are so spoken of with special and exclusive reference to the phenomena which they manifest when actually exerting themselves in production. Were the same men organised for some ethical or religious purpose, they would be spoken of not as Labour, but as the National or Popular Conscience. The organisation of Labour is the setting men to perform a large variety of correlated productive tasks, and prescribing to each man what his own task shall be. But the organisation of labourers that has been brought about by trade unionism is of a precisely opposite kind, and has a precisely opposite end. Its end is not production, but the cessation of production; not the prescribing, the devising, and the allotting of tasks, but the taking men away from them. In a word, it is the organisation not of production, but of obstruction; nor does the fact that the trade unions have succeeded in organising the latter give so much as a hint that they would be able to organise the former. Even if they could do so, it would be the leaders, not the men, that performed the feat—a new race of employers separating themselves from the body of the employed; and this fact is oddly enough acknowledged {237} by the very men who are apparently most blind to it. For one of the arguments most frequently used to show the practicability of industrial democracy is based on the unusual ability manifested by the officials of the trade unions in managing strikes and great demonstrations of strikers. Must not these men, it is asked, have very exceptional capacities who can gather together their thousands at the shortest possible notice, and march them into Hyde Park through the crowded thoroughfares of London? And it is perfectly true that many of the trade union leaders are, in their own way, men with remarkable and exceptional characteristics. But, in the first place, the more that their admirers magnify them, the more do they detract from the democratic character of trade unionism; and in the second place, if a man is necessarily exceptional because he can so far organise some thousands of men as to march them occasionally into an enclosure where they walk about sucking oranges, how much more exceptional must be the abilities that can organise similar