It was of no use.  The men’s wages went up twenty per cent.; and there was an end of the bonuses.  The coal famine continued.  The masters, instead of making profits, made immense losses.  The price of iron went down.  The mills stood idle for two months.  The result was, that when the masters next met the workmen in public meeting, Mr. Waterhouse, the auditor, reported that “while the gross earnings of the year have exceeded the expenditure on materials, wages, and trade charges, they have been insufficient to cover the full amounts to be provided under the co-operative scheme for interest on capital, depreciation, and the reserve for bad debts; and that consequently it was his duty to declare that no amount was at present payable as bonus either to employers or employed.”  No further report was issued in 1875, excepting an announcement that there was no dividend, and that the firm did not intend to continue the co-operative scheme any longer.  During the time that it lasted, the employes had received about eight thousand pounds in bonuses.

Since then, Sir Joseph Whitworth has announced his intention of giving his workmen a bonus upon his profits; but the principle of the division has not yet been announced.  On hearing of his intention, Mr. Carlyle wrote the following letter to Sir Joseph:—­

“Would to heaven that all the captains of industry in England had a soul in them such as yours.  The look of England is to me at this moment abundantly ominous, the question of capital and labour growing ever more anarchic, insoluble altogether by the notions hitherto applied to it—­pretty sure to issue in petroleum one day, unless some other gospel than that of the ‘Dismal Science’ come to illuminate it.  Two things are pretty sure to me.  The first is that capital and labour never can or will agree together till they both first of all decide on doing their work faithfully throughout, and like men of conscience and honour, whose highest aim is to behave like faithful citizens of this universe, and obey the eternal commandments of Almighty God, who made them.  The second thing is, that a sadder object than even that of the coal strike, or any other conceivable strike, is the fact that—­loosely speaking—­we may say all England has decided that the profitablest way is to do its work ill, slurily, swiftly, and mendaciously.  What a contrast between now and say only a hundred years ago!  At the latter date all England awoke to its work—­to an invocation to the Eternal Maker to bless them in their day’s labour, and help them to do it well.  Now, all England—­shopkeepers, workmen, all manner of competing labourers—­awaken as with an unspoken but heartfelt prayer to Beelzebub,—­’Oh, help us, thou great Lord of Shoddy, Adulteration, and Malfeasance, to do our work with the maximum of sluriness, swiftness, profit, and mendacity, for the devil’s sake.  Amen.’”

Fortunately, there is not a great deal of truth in this letter, nor in the “heartfelt prayer” to Shoddy.  The Right Hon. Mr. Forster ought to know something of labour and capital, and at a recent meeting of the Cobden Club he stated that “they were often told that they had a war within their borders between labour and capital; but as an employer of labour ever since he came to manhood, he would only say that he never knew a time in which employer and employed were on better terms.”