200	ENGLISH    SAGA
a
finance it out of their wages. The pioneers of the Dockers' Union
met "like conspirators hatching a second Guy Fawkes plot in a
members of even the executive council 'of so famous a union as
the Amalgamated Society of Engineers—at least two of whom in
after years became cabinet ministers—used to receive one shilling
and sixpence a night for their direction of the leading Union of
the time and think themselves lucky to get it. Trades Union
leadership in those days was less a career than a vocation. It was
sometimes a martyrdom.
For this reason, and because of the wrongs from which their
dass had suffered and was still suffering, these pioneers of a still
inconceivable future were often politically embittered. The good-
humoured rank and file in pub and music hall, on the beach at
Blackpool or the racecourse at Aintree, troubled their heads little
about past history or future proletarian aspirations. But their
leaders, and the earnest young men studying under immense
difficulties in public libraries and Mechanics' Institutes^1 who
were to be their leaders in the next generation, were painfully
aware of the fact that they and their class had not had a square
deal.
Yet with the vote in the workman's wallet, time was on their
side. They felt that they had only to open the eyes of the wage
slaves, teach them to combine and to use their latent strength
with discipline and loyalty to obtain their share of the kingdom.
The prejudices against them—the malice and victimisation of
employers, the biased use of the civil arm and even the military
in time of strikes, the snobbery and class treachery of the workers
themselves—were not so strong as the social impulse of the
exploited to combine or perish. Whenever times were hard the
men the Unions battled for, who were oblivious of their efforts
when employment was regular and beer and bread plentiful, were
reminded of how much still remained to be won before there
could be any security for themselves and their dear ones. With-
out the Trade Union there could be only loss of hearth and home
and starvation for the workman who lost his job, and worse for
^X11ic Working*Men's College in London was founded by the Rev.-Frederick
Denison Maurice, in 1854, with a voluntary staff of middle-class "Christian Socialist*
sympathisers who included Ruskin, Tom Hughes—author of Tom Brown's School Days
—Lowes Dickinson, Vernon Lushington, Ford Madox Brown, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
and Edward Burne Jones.