[Footnote 177-8: In Switzerland, the trades-unions have shown themselves very powerful against the employers of tradesmen, but rather powerless against manufacturing employers, and thus materially increased the already existing inferiority of the former. (_Böhmert_, II, 401.) They may, however, by further successful development, constitute the basis of a new smaller middle class, similar to the tradesmen's guilds at the end of the middle ages; and indeed by a new exclusiveness, in a downward direction. This would be a bulwark against the destructive inroads of socialism similar to that which the freed peasantry in France were and still are. While this is also _Brentano's_ view, _R. Meyer_, Emancipationskampf des vierten Standes, 1874, I, 254 ff., calls the trades-unions a practical preparation for socialism to which the English "morally went over" in 1869 (I, 751); which indeed loses much of the appearance of truth from the fact that _Marx_ (_Brentano_, Arbeitergilden, II, 332) and the disciples of _Lassalle_ (_Meyer_, I, 312) hold the trades-unions in contempt. _John Stuart Mill_ approves of all trades-unions that seek to effect the better remuneration of labor, and opposes all which would bring the wages paid for good work and bad work to the same level. (Principles, II, ch. 14, 6; V, ch. 10, 5.) Compare _Tooke_, History of Prices, VI, 176. Reports of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the Organization and Rules of Trades-Unions, 1857.] SECTION CLXXVIII. WAGES-POLICY.--MINIMUM OF WAGES. The demand[178-1] so frequently heard recently, that the state should guaranty an "equitable" minimum of wages, could be granted where the natural rate of wages has fallen below that minimum, only on condition that some of the working class in the distribution of the wages capital (no longer sufficient in all the less profitable branches of business) should go away entirely empty handed. Hence, as a rule, in addition to that wages-guaranty, the guaranty of the right to labor is also required. But as useful labor always finds purchasers (the word "useful" being here employed in the sense of the entire economy of a people, and understood in the light of the proper gradation of wants and the means of satisfying them), such a right to labor means no more and no less than that the state should force labor which no one can use, upon others.[178-2] Something similar is true of Louis Blanc's proposition that the rate of wages of the workmen should be determined and regulated by their own votes and among themselves.[178-3]