A survey of human progress, towards higher civilization - Softcover

Reseña del editor

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1862 Excerpt: ... Now almost every employment or kind of work in a civilized community is labour of a kindred nature performed for wages with implements, machinery, or means previously prepared, and owned by others, and which must have cost the wages which had supported the producers with families, all of which past outlay has to be repaid from the ultimate profits of the compound labour. Thus the masons and carpenters who build a house, or railway station, or a bridge, perform but a small fraction of the whole work expended on the undertaking. To prepare and bring to the locality the materials--as stone, bricks, lime, iron, wood--there had been employed numerous quarriers, brickmakers, woodcutters, carters, with the use of roads, railways, and possibly of ships, and with the co-operation of expensively-educated miners, mariners, contractors, builders, &c., directing the less educated workmen, and with the stores of necessaries or money expended during the progress of the work. If the operative masons and carpenters, then, receive the rate of wages for their labour which the market decides as just, according to the supply and demand, as explained in § 40, they are justly and sufficiently paid. Let it now be supposed that a certain number of the operative fishermen of a town on the coast had formed themselves into a club or union, and, conspiring together, were to say to the master fishermen, or owners of the nets, "We demand from you so much a day more wages, or we shall strike--that is, shall cease working your nets--and shall use means to prevent any other fishermen from working in our stead, so that, if you refuse our demand, your nets will remain unused and may fall into decay." Such a proceeding in most civilized countries would be immediately punished as an outrag...