One very remarkable result may be noticed.  Formerly, the Lord Mayor of London was elected by the whole of the commonalty.  All the citizens assembled at Paul’s Cross, and there, sometimes with tumult and sometimes with fighting, they elected their mayor for the next year.  But since every man in the City was compelled to belong to his own Company, to speak of the commonalty meant to speak of the Companies.  Every man who voted for the election of Lord Mayor was therefore bound to be a liveryman—­i.e., a member of a Company.  This restriction is still in force; that is to say, the City of London, the richest and the greatest city in the world, now allows eight thousand liverymen, or members of the Companies, to elect their chief magistrate.

Why do I tell over again this old threadbare tale?  Perhaps, however, it is not old or threadbare to you:  perhaps there are some here who learn for the first time that association, trade union, combination, is a thousand years old in this ancient city.  I have told it chiefly, however, because the history should be a warning to you of London; because it shows that association itself may be made the very weapon with which to destroy its own objects; in other words, because you must find in this history an illustration or the great truth that the forms of liberty require the most unceasing vigilance to prevent them from becoming the means of destroying liberty.  The Companies failed because they could be, and were, used to destroy the freedom of the very men for whose benefit they were founded.  At present, as you know, some of them are very poor indeed:  those which are rich are probably doing far more good with their wealth in promoting all kinds of useful work than ever they did in all their past history.

There followed, I said, a long period in which association among working men was absolutely unknown.  The history of this period, from a craftsman’s point of view, has never been written.  It is, indeed, a most terrible chapter in the history of industry.

Imagine, if you can, crowded districts in which there were no schools, or but one school for a very few, no churches, no newspapers or books, a place in which no one could read; a place in which every man, woman and child regarded the Government of the country, in which they had not the least share, as their natural enemy and oppressor.  Among them lurked the housebreaker, the highway robber, and the pickpocket.  Along the riverside, where many thousands of working men lived—­at St. Katherine’s, Wapping, Shadwell, and Ratcliff—­all the people together, high and low, were in league with the men who loaded and unloaded the ships in the river and robbed them all day long.  What could be expected of people left thus absolutely to themselves, without any power of action, without the least thought that amendment was possible or desirable?  Can we wonder if the people sank lower and lower, until, by the middle of the last century, the working men of London had reached a depth of degradation that terrified everyone who knew what things meant?  Listen to the following words, written in the year 1772: