This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
78
THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND
CH.

is falling, and that they are receiving their dues in a depreciating currency. Of currency the artisan knows little or nothing, but assuredly he feels his loss, sees trade active and himself poor, and inevitably agitates for a readjustment. And this is happening in the Far East as well as in the Far West; in the tropics, as I have had experience, as well as in the United States, and, of course, in England.

This readjustment, like all such, is bound to be a long, tedious, and harassing process, chequered by many outbursts and many disasters. This is one cause that has accentuated the antagonisms of labour and capital to such an acute and alarming point.

In mitigation of these evils our most practical men are busy creating a structure of mutual understanding, of conciliation, of arbitration, and of constitutional practice wherein we shall one day excel the world. But to-day and in the early future we must all allow that we have to encounter so many backward fluctuations, and dire disappointments, and breaches of agreement, and utter failures that we must fall back upon some other hope and remedy.

We have all listened so long to eulogies of co-operation and profit-sharing as not to believe much in them, though, as a matter of fact, the sliding scale of wages in use in some important trades is itself profit-sharing in a certain sense. But the only final cure for the war of labour and