SHOOTING NIAGARA J2Q5

sympathy of the public, proved stronger than the fa^
weapon of starvation. For two months the docks remaine
closed. Then the dockowners gave way.. Not only was "the
docker's tanner" won but a great Union of " unskilled" labour—
the Dock, Wharf and Riverside Labourers' Union—had been
founded.

Yet by itself Trade Unionism was not enough. In a society
seeking profits through world trade and based on economic
fluctuation, an army of surplus labour was inescapable. Under
the existing system its periodic unemployment was attended by
the extreme of destitution and degradation. This hard rock of
unorganised and soulless poverty was a constant threat to the
Trade Union movement. In the highly-skilled trades, the aristo-
crat of labour could present a solid front to the capitalist aggres-
sor. But elsewhere the employer could always count on the
amorphous mass of starving poverty from which to draft non-
Union or " free" labour into his factories and so break a strike.
The bitterness of Union feeling against the "blackleg"—
generally some poor down-and-out in need of a meal—and the
sullen insistence on the rightfulness of peaceful picketing sprang
from this.

Before labour could secure its full rights, the working class
as a whole needed to be redeemed from extreme poverty and
given self-respect, knowledge and esprit de corps through better
housing, education and above all some sort of living wage. Organ-
ised Labour could not stand erect so long as it rested on the social
morass of the submerged tenth. State action was necessary to
give the workers' organisations—Trades Unions and co-operative
societies—a secure field of operation. Otherwise the capitalist,
with his constant recourse to new machinery displacing skilled
men by unskilled, might beat them in the end.

It was the recognition of this that inspired the foundation in
1885 of the Fabian Society. It began as a little group of youthful
radicals—drawn mostly from the middle-class—who had repudi-
ated the laissez-faire tenets of utilitarianism but who retained the
utilitarian's contempt for the inefficient and illogical. One of the
members was a young, red-haired Irishman named Bernard Shaw
who about this time electrified a conference of intellectuals and
highbrow politicians by reading a paper to prove that the land-
lord, the capitalist and the burglar were equally the enemies of
society. The Fabian thesis was that before social revolution could