§ 7. Probabilities of Industrial Peace.--This concentrative process at work in both capital and labour, consolidating the smaller industrial units into larger ones, and tending to a unification of the masses of capital and of labour engaged respectively in the several industries, is at the present time by far the most important factor of industrial history. How far these two movements in capital and in labour react on one another for peace or for strife is a delicate and difficult question. Consideration of the common interest of capital and labour dependent on their necessary co-operation in industry might lead us to suppose that along with the growing organization of the two forces there would come an increased recognition of this community of interest which would make constantly and rapidly for industrial peace. But we must not be misled by the stress which is rightly laid on the identity of interest between capital and labour. The identity which is based on the general consideration that capital and labour are both required in the conduct of a given business, is no effective guarantee against a genuine clash of interests between the actual forms of capital and the labourers engaged at a given time in that particular business. To a body of employés who are seeking to extract a rise of wages from their employers, or to resist a reduction of wages, it is no argument to point out that if they gain their point the fall of profit in their employers' business will have some effect in lowering the average interest on invested capital, and will thus prevent the accumulation of some capital which would have helped to find employment for some more working men. The immediate direct interests of a particular body of workmen and a particular company of employers may, and frequently will, impel them to a course directly opposed to the wider interests of their fellow- capitalists or fellow-workers. But it is evident that the smaller the industrial unit, the more frequent will these conflicts between the immediate special interest and the wider class interest be. Since this is so, it would follow that the establishment of larger industrial units, such as workmen's unions and employers' unions, based on a cancelling of minor conflicting interests, will diminish the aggregate quantity of friction between capital and labour. If there were a close union between all the river-side and carrying trades of the country, it is far less likely that a particular local body of dock-labourers would, in order to seize some temporary advantage for themselves, be allowed to take a course which might throw out of work, or otherwise injure, the other workers concerned in the industries allied to theirs. One of the important educative effects of labour organizations will be a growing recognition of the intricate _rapport_ which subsists not only between the interests of different classes of workers, but between capital and labour in its more general aspect.