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umes on "The Museums and Ruins of Rome" which visitors to Rome,whether hasty tourists or painstaking students-will find extremely useful. They are of convenient pocket size, and fully illustrated,-the Museums with 170 and the Ruins with 98 illustrations, besides plans. Dr. Walter Amelung writes of the Museums, and has added to the present edition three chapters which are not contained in the original German edition; and Professor Heinrich Holtzinger describes Ruins. Both are competent students and critics, and the fruit of their joint labor is far enough from the ordinary hack work of the professional maker of guide-books. All the memorials which remain in Rome of its splendid past, all its collected antiquities and works of art, all its historic sites and ruins are described and pictured in these two volumes with a lucidity, a just appreciation and a sense of proportion which leave nothing to be desired.

Among early forthcoming publications of E. P. Dutton & Co. is "Sidelights on the Home Rule Movement," by Sir Robert Anderson. Sir Robert is the son of Mr. Matthew Anderson, who was Crown Solicitor in the City of Dublin, and the younger brother of the late Sir Samuel Lee, who succeeded his father in the office. To these two men, Samuel and Robert, the stability of the British government in Ireland Owes more than to any other individual. They were, in office, moved by the most stern sense of duty, and "wise as serpents"; and on their social side, they were "harmless as doves." They were both when very young men, influenced by a deep sense of religion;

earnest, yet silent and modest men.. The present author was a man in his. boyhood. He has the entire workings of the Fenian movement at his fingers' ends. When only twenty-six, he was called to London as adviser to the Home Office in matters of political crime, and occupied a position of great influence and responsibility. He has retired from office.

Two narratives of travel make up the twenty-first volume of the reprint of Early Western Travels, published by the Arthur H. Clark Company of Cleveland. Both relate to adventures and explorations in Oregon in the fourth decade of the last century, but they are written with quite a different purpose. The first is the now very rare monograph "Oregon, or a Short History of a Long Journey," written by young John B. Wyeth, of Cambridge, who accompanied the Oregon expedition of his stouter-hearted cousin Nathaniel J. Wyeth, in 1832, but abandoned it en route, and wrote this narrative quite as much as a deterrent against like enterprises as an account of his own experiences and observations. The narrative, naturally, has a vivacity not usual in graver travel-records; and, in spite of the temper in which it is written, its interest justifies its inclusion in this series. The second monograph is John K. Townsend's Narrative of a Journey Across the Rocky Mountains to the Columbia River. This is an account of a second expedition, partly commercial and partly scientific, made in 1833 and 1834, under Wyeth's leadership. It is graphic and well-written and gives a more serious account of Wyeth's enterprise than that written by his disheartened young kinsman.

SEVENTH SERIES

VOLUME XXXII.)

No. 3244 Sept. 8, 1906.

FROM BEGINNING
Vol.
CCXLX.

CONTENTS.

1. The Political Powers of Labor: Their Extent and Their Limita

II.

III.

IV.

tions. By W. H. Mallock.

589

NINETEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER 579
The Laying Waste of Pleasant Places. GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE
Wild Wheat. Chapter XIX. Prue. Chapter XX. Solemn Vows. By
M. E. Francis. (To be continued.) LONGMAN'S MAGAZINE 594
Citizens of To-morrow. By Margaret McMillan

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v.

VI.

VII.

The Shadow of Good Fortune. By Nellie K. Blissett. TEMPLE BAR
The Mind of a Dog. By S. Alexander
CORNHILL MAGAZINE
International Art: A Duologue. By F. P. Seeley

609

612

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THE POLITICAL POWERS OF LABOR

THEIR EXTENT AND THEIR LIMITATIONS

I.

WHAT IS MEANT BY LABOR IN CURRENT CONTROVERSY

The presence in Parliament, for the first time in any considerable numbers, of a party claiming par excellence to represent what is called Labor, is a fact whose significance has been thus far very inaccurately understood both by the Labor members themselves and by others who either sympathize with or are hostile to them. This misunder

standing has in each case the same origin, which consists of the looseness of the ideas associated with the word "labor." Labor, of course, means some form of human activity, or it means nothing, but it is evident also that, as used in the present connection, the form of activity meant by it must be of some special and limited kind. Otherwise a party which claimed to represent Labor would not be specifically distinguishable from a party, for example, which represented the interests of active capital. What, then, in the minds of the Labor members themselves does labor stand for as that which is specially and distinctively represented by them?

It would be difficult to give a definition of this which did not require qualifications in respect of exceptional cases; but, broadly speaking, we may say that it means for them first and foremost what is commonly called manual labor. But here at once the need for exceptions arises. The writing of a book, the drafting of an Act of Parliament, the painting of a great picture, all involve labor of the hands. The painting of a picture is essentially inseparable from this. But the Labor members in Parliament certainly do not claim to represent the in

terests of a Millais or an AlmaTadema. The root-idea which the Labor members form of labor may be best described as those forms of muscular and manual activity of which all normal men are capable to an approximately equal degree, and which the majority of men in all ages have, from the nature of things, been obliged to exercise. Such labor, no doubt, approximately equal though it may be in a general way, admits of, and requires different degrees of skill; and we find in labor, consequently, certain different grades, which are elicited in accordance with the talents of the individual laborers. So much our Labor members would without doubt concede; but all forms of labor, according to their conception of it, are alike in this-that each is an exertion of manual and muscular energy on the part of men as individuals, which is applied to the performance of separate industrial tasks. That such is the conception of Labor prevalent among the party as a body is illustrated by the occupations of the great majority of its members. According to an interesting statement published in The Review of Reviews for June, eleven of them are coal-miners; six are mechanics employed in various metal industries; four are mill hands; four are farm-laborers; three are railway employees; there is a bargebuilder, a bootmaker, a stonemason, several printers' employees, and a maker of watch-cases. In men thus occupied we have the bulk of the party, and it is in virtue of occupations such as these that they make their claims to represent labor directly.

Labor, then, translated from ab- the mining population in Wales enjoys stract into concrete terms, means that the reputation of possessing excepsection of the population whose one tional gifts for music; but the miners distinguishing characteristic consists in who have been sent to Parliament by this-that its members individually de- the Welsh mining constituencies lay no vote to individual industrial tasks claim to represent the distinctive interthose manual and muscular energies ests of musicians. If labor stands for which such tasks demand, and in re- anything distinctive of any comprespect of which all normal men are, ap- hensive class, and if the Labor memproximately at least, equal. Members bers represent this class in any disof this class may have other faculties tinctive sense, the word labor, as used also, as, indeed, of course, they have; in current political discussion, means but, in so far as such faculties are the application of ordinary hands and those which are possessed and exer- muscles to tasks of the kind just indicised by the human race generally, cated-such as the extraction of so these faculties are in no way distinc- much coal, the hammering of so many tive of the laboring class as such. They rivets, the setting up of so much type, belong to its members as representa- or the ploughing of so many furrows. tives, not of labor, but of humanity. It is only by using the word labor in On the other hand, if members of the this specific sense that such phrases laboring class, as many doubtless do, as "the Labor members," "the Labor possess, in addition to the average fac- party," or "the cause of labor" can ulties of labor, faculties of other kinds, have any specific meaning. And such which are above the average and ex- is the sense, though for the most part ceptional, such men represent in virtue not consciously defined, which is acof these, not the labor which makes tually attributed to the word in the pothe whole class one, but some kind of litical discussion of to-day, both by the superiority which separates a part of public generally and by the Labor that class from the rest of it. Thus members themselves.

II.

ILLUSIONS OF LABOR AS TO THE NATURE OF ITS OWN IMPORTANCE What, then, is the real significance of the rise of the Labor party? Within what limits does it stand for a legitimate political force, with reasonable and practicable ends? And how far do its own ambitions and the fears of those who are out of sympathy with it, lie beyond the region of what is inherently possible? We shall find that for a party representing the interests of labor as such, there is a very distinct and legitimate field of action; but the more clearly we realize what the character of this field is, the more clearly shall we realize how far outside its borders the aspirations of many of the Labor members lie, and how much

smaller is the efficient force at the back of them, than they themselves, or than those who fear them, suppose.

The intelligible and legitimate functions which may conceivably be fulfilled by a party representing the interests of the laboring as distinct from all other classes, are obvious enough, as a few examples will show us, and arise from the broad fact that a variety of social questions really do concern the laboring classes either exclusively or in a special way. Thus the fencing of machinery in factories, the construction of factories with due regard to sanitation, the obligation of employers to compensate employees injured in their

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