would be members of the family circle. Homes and suitable employment might thus be afforded to women who are now pining in enforced idleness, and sighing for Protestant nunneries, while the daily war with Bridget would be at an end. I would not make light of these inconveniences or of the present disturbance of trade. The tendency of a moment may be good, and yet it may give society a very bad quarter of an hour. Nor would I attempt to conceal the errors and excesses of which the unions have been guilty, and into which, as organs of corporate selfishness, they are always in danger of running. Industrial history has a record against the workingman as well as against the master. The guilds of the Middle Ages became tyrannical monopolies and leagues against society, turned callings open to all into mysteries confined to a privileged few, drove trade and manufactures from the cities where they reigned to places free from their domination. This probably was the cause of the decay of cities which forms the burden of complaint in the preambles to Acts of Parliament, in the Tudor period. Great guilds oppressed little guilds: strong commercial cities ruled by artisans oppressed their weaker neighbours of the same class. No one agency has done so much to raise the condition of the workingman as machinery; yet the workingman resisted the introduction of machinery, rose against it, destroyed it, maltreated its inventors. There is a perpetual warning in the name of Hargreaves, the workingman who, by his inventive genius, provided employment for millions of his fellows, and was by them rewarded with outrage and persecution.