What has happened, then?  Why did this essentially democratic Company—­in which all were subject to rules for the general good, and none should undersell his brother, and the rate of wages and the hours of labour were regulated—­so completely fail?

For many reasons, some of which concern ourselves:  it failed, because the members themselves forgot the original reason of their combination, and neglected to look after their own interests; it failed, because the members were too ignorant to remember, or to know, that the Company was founded for the interests of the Craft itself, and not for those of the masters alone or the men alone.  Now every Association must needs, of course, have wardens or masters; it must needs elect to those posts of dignity and responsibility such men as could understand law and maintain their privileges if necessary before the dread Sovereign, his Highness the King.  The men they necessarily elected were therefore those who had received some education, master-workmen—­their own employers—­not their fellows.  It speedily came about, therefore, that the masters, not the men, ruled the hours of work, the wages of work, the quantity and quality of work:  the masters, not the craftsmen, admitted members and limited their number.  Do you now understand?  The officers ruled the Company of the Craftsmen for the benefit of the masters and not the men.  Nay, they did more.  Since in some trades the men showed a disposition, on dimly perceiving the reality, to form a union within a union, the masters were strong enough to put down all combinations for the raising of wages as illegal; to attempt such combinations was ruled to be conspiracy.  And conspiracy all unions of working men have remained down to the present day, as the founders of the first Trades Unions in this country discovered to their cost.  So the men were gagged; they were silenced; they were enslaved by the very institution that they had founded for the insurance of their own freedom.  The thing was inevitable because they were ignorant, and because, if you put into any man’s hands the power of robbing his neighbour with impunity, that man will inevitably sooner or later rob his neighbour.  I fear that we must acknowledge the sorrowful fact that not a single man in the whole world, whatever his position, can be trusted with irresponsible and absolute power—­with the power of robbery coupled with the certainty of immunity.

Well, in this way came about the first enslavement of the working man.  It lasted for three hundred years.  Then followed a time of comparative freedom, when, the wealth and population of the city increasing, the craftsmen found themselves pushed out beyond the walls, and taking up their quarters beyond the power of the Companies.  But it was a freedom without knowledge, without order, without forethought.  It was the freedom of the savage who lives only for himself.  For they were now unable to combine.  In the long course of centuries they had lost the very idea of combination; they had forgotten that in an age we call rude and rough they possessed the power and perceived the importance of combination.  The great-grandchildren of the men who had formed this union of the trade had entirely forgotten the meaning, the reason, the possibility, of the old combination.  In this way, then, the Companies gradually lost their craftsmen, but retained their property.