When the great body of the people of a country are so generally educated as to know that it is the interest of the humblest and the poorest that property shall be secure, there will be little occasion for fencing round property with guards, against the secret violence of the midnight robber, or the open daring of the noonday mob. "It is an enlightened moral public sentiment that must spread its wings over our dwellings, and plant a watchman at our doors."[35] A very little insecurity destroys the working of capital. The cloth trade of Verviers, a town in France, was utterly ruined, because the morals of the people in the town were so bad, and the police so ineffectual, that the thefts in the various stages of the manufacture amounted to eight per cent. upon the whole quantity produced. The trade of the place, therefore, was destroyed; and the capital went to encourage labour in places where the rights of property were better respected. But, generally speaking, the security of property is not so much weakened by plunder, as by those incessant contentions which harass the march of capital and labour; and keep up an irritation between the classes of the capitalists and the labourers, who ought to be united in the most intimate compact for a common good. These irritations most frequently exhibit themselves in the shape of combinations for the advance of wages. We have no hesitation in declaring our opinion that it is the positive duty of the working-man to obtain as high wages as he can extract out of the joint products of capital and labour; and that he has an equal right to unite with other workmen in making as good a bargain as he can, consistently with the rights of others, for his contribution of industry to the business of production. But it is also necessary for us to declare our conviction that, in too many cases, the working men attempt an object which no single exertion, and no union however formidable or complete, can ever accomplish. They attempt to force wages beyond the point at which they could be maintained, with reference to the demand for the article produced;--and if they succeed they extinguish the demand, and therefore extinguish the power of working at any wages. They drive the demand, and therefore the supply, into new channels;--and they thrust out capital from amongst them, to work in other places where it can work with freedom and security. Above all, such combinations, and the resistance which they call up, have a tendency to loosen the bonds of mutual regard which ought to subsist between capitalists and labourers. Their real interests are one and the same.