◆¹ These great developments of Trade Unionism which are commonly called Labour movements do not really, in any accurate sense, represent Labour at all. ◆² All that they represent in themselves is a power to abstain from labouring. In other words, the increased command of the labourers over the machinery of combination, and even their increased command of the tactics of industrial warfare, represents no increased command over the smallest of industrial processes, nor puts them in a better position, without the aid of Ability, to maintain—still less to increase by the smallest fraction—the production of that wealth in which they are anxious to share farther. A strike therefore, however great or however admirably organised, no more represents any part of the power of Labour than the mutiny organised amongst the crew of Columbus, with a view to making him give up his enterprise, represented the power which achieved the discovery of America. And this is not true of the average labourers only; it is yet more strikingly true of the superior men who lead them. From the ranks of the labourers, men are constantly rising whose abilities for organising resistance are remarkable, and indeed admirable; but it is probably not too much to say that no leader who has devoted himself to organising the labourers for resistance has ever been a man capable, to any appreciable degree, of giving them help by rendering their labour more productive. Those who have been most successful in urging their fellows to _ask_ for more, have been quite incompetent to help them to _make_ more. Thus these so-called Labour leaders, no matter how considerable may be many of their intellectual and moral qualities, are indeed leaders of labourers; but they are no more leaders of Labour than a sergeant who drilled a volunteer corps of art students could be called the leader of a rising school of painting; and a strike is no more the expression of the power of Labour than Byron’s swimming across the Hellespont was an expression of the power of poetry, or than Burns’s poetry was an expression of the power of ploughing. A strike is merely an expression of the fact that the labourers, for good or ill, can acquire, under certain circumstances, the power to cease from labouring, and can use this as a weapon not of production, but of warfare. ◆³ The utmost that the power embodied in Trade Unionism could accomplish would be to bring about a strike that was universal; and although no doubt it might do this theoretically, it could never do so much as this practically, for the simple reason that, as I have already pointed out, Labour could not be entirely suspended for even a single day. Further, the more general the suspension was, the shorter would be the time for which it could be maintained; and to mention yet another point to which I have referred already, it could be maintained only, for no matter how short a time, by the assistance of the very thing against which strikes are