The working class will be best fortified in such a struggle for higher wages when their organization is a permanent one, and when they have taken care, during good times, to collect a certain amount of capital to protect their members, during their cessation from work, against acute want. This is the object of the trades-unions as they have grown up in England, especially since the total decline of the guild system and of governmental provisions relating to apprentices, fixed rates of wages[176-8] etc. But it cannot be denied that these unions, although democratic in form, often exercise a very despotic sway over their members;[176-9] that they have, so far as the employers of labor are concerned, and the non-union laborers, gone back to a number of measures, outgrowths of the guild and embargo systems, which it was fondly hoped had been forever banished by the freedom of industry.[176-10] What many of the friends of this system hope it may accomplish in the future, viz.: regulate the whole relation between capital and labor, and thus, on the whole, control the entire public economy of a people,[176-11] is, fortunately, all the more certainly a chimera, as any national or universal approximation to this end would be the most efficacious way to compel employers of labor to the formation of corresponding and probably far superior opposing unions. Notwithstanding this, however, I do not doubt that the recent development of trades-unions in England is both a cause and an effect of the rise in wages in the branches of industry in question, as well as of the moral elevation of the condition of the working class which has simultaneously taken place.[176-12] The mere possibility of a strike is of itself calculated, in the determination of the rate of wages, to procure for the equitable purchaser of labor the desirable preponderance over the inequitable.[176-13]