1^4 ENGLISH SAGA

With its many imitators it fought against piece-work, overtime,
victimisation and the employment of unapprenticed men,
survived early attempts of impatient employers to destroy it by
lock-outs and taught a hostile bourgeois world to tolerate and
fear, if not to respect it

To the middle-class citizen in his top-hat and castellated
home, the Trade Union was long something of a bogey—a secret
and treasonable society threatening mob violence and plotting
confiscation and revolution. In popular repute its shady path
was attended by a succession of outrages: explosions, stones
and broken glass, striking mobs intimidating honest Britons
out of their property and right to work as they pleased. None
felt this more strongly than the progressive radicals of the north.
" Depend upon it," wrote Cobden," nothing can be got by fratern-
ising with Trade Unions. They are founded upon principles of
brutal tyranny and monopoly. I would rather live under a Dey
of Algiers than a trades committee."1

The law, reflecting middle-class opinion, treated the Unions
with suspicion. Judges, who still regarded them as com-
binations in restraint of trade, refused to protect their funds
from the defalcations of dishonest officials. A Trade Union
was an association to coerce individuals and limit their profits.
It was therefore viewed by a generation educated in laissez-faire
principles as injurious. It was only tolerated because it was
impossible to prevent it. That by improving conditions, remov-
ing the workers' sense of injustice and substituting orderly for
chaotic terms of employment, collective working-class action
might stabilise and so improve trade was still beyond the ken of
mid-Victorian philosophy.

Yet, though* those brought up in the principles of Bentham
tried not to see it, everything that was happening in the crowded
urban world which individual enterprise had created was minimis-
ing the importance of the individual and raising the power of the
herd. The sturdy pupil of self-help, who by his devotion to his
individual interests had created a thriving industrial unit employ-
ing 5000 workers where only fifty had existed before, had un-
consciously called into being a community whose common
hopes and interests must presently dash with his own. For
though the more he prospered the more they multiplied, the more
they did so the more certain became their ultimate triumph over

Cobden, It 339.