ostensibly directed, namely Capital; and not even Capital could make that time long. Nature, who is the arch-taskmaster, and who knows no mercy, would soon smash like matchwood a Trade Union of all the world, and force the labourers to go back to their work, even if no such body as an employing class existed. All the ideas, then, derived from the recent developments of Trade Unionism, that Labour, through its means, will acquire any greatly increasing power of commanding an increasing share of the total income of the community, rests on a total misconception of the power that Trade Unionism represents, and a total failure to see the conditions and things that limit it. It is limited firstly by Nature, who makes a general strike impossible; secondly by Capital, without which any strike is impossible; and lastly by the fact that the labourers of the present day already draw part of their wages from the wealth produced by Ability; that any further increase they must draw from this source entirely; and that, being thus dependent on the assistance of Ability now, Trade Unionism, as we have seen, has not the slightest tendency to make them any the less dependent on it in the future. When the reader takes into account all that has just been said, he will be hardly disposed to quarrel with the following conclusions of Professor Marshall, who derives them from history quite as much as from theory, and who expresses himself with regard to Trade Unions thus: “Their importance,” he says, “is certainly great, and grows rapidly; but it is apt to be exaggerated: for indeed many of them are little more than eddies such as have always fluttered over the surface of progress. And though they are now on a larger and more imposing scale in this age than before, yet much as ever the main body of the movement depends on the deep, silent, strong stream of the tendencies of Normal Distribution and Exchange.” [Sidenote ◆1 Trade Unionism, in raising wages, can do little more than accelerate or regulate a rise that would take place owing to other causes.] [Sidenote ◆2 But none the less it may be of great benefit to the labourers, and remove many evils which a general rise in wages has not removed, and could not remove by itself.]