Thus, in the case of the Manchester strike, the workmen--though not of the unskilled class--may state that they are unable to feel the working of the principle of competition; that if they do not get what pay they like at one factory, they are not practically at liberty to get the value of their labour in another. Even the population of one mill, thrown out of work, is too large and too special, as to the nature of the various kinds of skill possessed among its people, to be able to find anything like prompt absorption into other factories; but as masters almost always act in groups for the determination of wages, it is the population, not of one mill, but that of five or six, that becomes discontented; and the best proof of the fact that it is practically unable to better itself even though higher wages may be given elsewhere is, that it does not better itself. There is a curious and decided variation in the rates of wages paid in various factories and manufacturing towns; variations artificially increased by strikes, but the existence of which shows, at any rate, to the satisfaction of the operatives, that rates may be arbitrary, and that the natural law does not work easily in their case which brings the price of any article to its just, uniform level. The Manchester masters point out to their men other masters who pay less than they pay; the operatives point on the other hand, to masters paying more. But it is not in their power to carry their own labour to those masters, as it ought to be, for a free working of the principle of competition. Mechanical and accidental difficulties stand completely in the way, and they are aggravated on both sides by habits of imperfect combination. It is just to state these difficulties, and to show that the instinct of the operative may not be altogether reprehensible when it suggests to him that against the worst uneasiness which he feels in the system to which he belongs, a blister or a bloodletting, in the shape of a strike, is the best remedy. He may be very wrong, as a man is apt to be wrong when doctoring himself. There is an excuse for his quackery in the fact that he has, at present, no physician to call in. The difficulties of the case, as it is felt by employers and employed in our manufacturing districts, is aggravated, as we have said, by imperfect combinations; for, between the trades’ unions and the masters’ associations there is, in truth, a perfect unity of interest. They who reduce the master’s capital, reduce his power of employing labour; they who wrong the labourer by whom they live, reduce his will and power to do work. At present, men and masters are in many cases combatants, because they never have been properly allies; they have not been content to feel that they are fellow-workers, that the man at the helm and the man at the oars are both in the same boat, and that the better they agree together, the more likely they will be to weather out a storm.