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on the principle that anything is fair in war, any advantage may be taken of an employer. At the bottom of all this lies a very defective sense of the essential wickedness and meanness of deceit,-its sinfulness in itself, as well as in its consequences. Deceit is a bad thing, it is thought, if it involves one's equals in trouble; but by no means a bad thing if it helps a comrade out of a difficulty, or saves one from a scolding. We cannot think it is possible to apply too widely the maxim: "Honesty is the best policy." Transparent truthfulness is a beautiful thing. Let every workman that wishes to rise declare war against all deceit and dishonesty, and live so that it may be said of him when he dies, "His word was as good as his oath."

This leads us to notice another thing most essential to comfortable and successful work, viz., a spirit of sympathy between employers and employed-for innumerable evils of a most serious kind arise from the want of this spirit. A workshop, like a garden, needs sunshine and genial warmth to develop freely the qualities that are looked for in it. A kindly, genial master supplies the sunshine, and it will be a shame and a sin on the part of the men under him, if there be not in his establishment, in the willing, cheerful spirit of the men, something like the fragrance and beauty which sunshine causes in a

garden. A hard, ungenial master, on the other hand, is like frost in a garden; he chills, freezes, hardens everything, and makes it as difficult for a workman to act well, as it is for a plant to develop freely under a biting frost. Very much of the alienation between masters and men is due, we are sure, to this cause. We have got a phrase now-a-days which shows too expressively the common notion entertained of workmen we mean the phrase "hands;" it is to our ears a most repulsive phrase; we shrink from hearing men called "hands;" that is, machines with five pair of fingers, self-acting and self-regulating; very useful for particular kinds of work, as long as the said five pair of fingers are not chopped off, or are not stiff or feeble, but not men, not brothers, not recognised as partakers of the same nature as their employers. Christian duty requires servants to be faithful even to froward and tyrannical masters, and there is really nothing but the spirit of Christianity that can secure fidelity and cheerfulness in such difficult circumstances. The natural and ordinary result of such a state of things is, that the master receives no hearty or cheerful compliance with his wishes. Behind his back, there is no end of fretting, complaining, and evil-speaking. A constant skirmishing goes on between master and servant, and often an open quarrel

and abrupt dismissal terminate the miserable connexion. The same spirit, on a wider basis, leads to fierce party strifes, and often to terrible revolutions. The alienation in France between the nobles and the people culminated at length in the Revolution and the Reign of Terror. A spirit of bitter alienation between class and class would be more formidable for Great Britain than the fitting out of a fleet of ironsides at Cherbourg; while the spirit of conciliation and sympathy, on the other hand, would do more for our welfare than even a whole army of volunteers.

But all masters and employers are not of the hard, unsympathizing type. And servants should consider this. We fear they sometimes do not discriminate enough between a good master and a bad. If they did, a slight advance of wages would never tempt them away from a master who was like a father to them, to one who would never trouble himself about anything beyond their doing their work and receiving their wages. The same temptation would not draw a female servant from a family where a most friendly interest was shown in her welfare, to one where she would be treated almost as if she belonged to an inferior creation. An able writer says of Sir Walter Scott, who, so far as this world was concerned, was an excellent master: "The

people dependent on him were happier, I imagine, than you could have made them if you had made them independent. If you could have distributed, as it were, Scott's worldly prosperity, you cannot easily conceive that it would have produced more good than when it fell full on him, and was forthwith radiated to all around him. . . . We must, I think, attribute much of this admirable bearing in Scott to an essential kindliness of nature, and a deep sense of humanity. If he had possessed no peculiar gifts of expression or imagination, and quietly followed the vocation of his father, a writer to the signet, he would have been loved in his office, as he was on his estate, and old clerks would have been Laidlaws and Tom Purdies to him."1

No human being that has travelled on a railway can have failed to make some acquaintance with "Price's Patent Candle Company." The staring placard with the picture of the Belmont Works, haunts us whether we will or no, at every railway station in the kingdom. Not quite so many persons, we fancy, though doubtless a great many, are familiar with the beautiful and most interesting arrangements which the managers of that Company made some years ago, and for aught we know carry on still, for the benefit of their men. It would take

1 The Claims of Labour, pp. 262, 263.

more than a whole lecture to tell of all that Mr. James Wilson, one of the managers, has done for this end. A great admirer of the late Dr. Arnold of Rugby, he had drunk in (as many others have done) his earnest views on our social system, and was deeply impressed with the importance of endeavouring, by the interchange of friendly offices, to lessen the widening breach between the employer and the employed. The Candle Company employ a great number of boys and girls; and their first step for their improvement was, the establishment of evening schools for each sex, where they might carry on their education when not employed in labour. The next of the Belmont institutions was a cricketfield, where master and men and boys joined in healthy sport, drinking in, from the animated game, both health for the body, and a kindly, genial spirit towards one another. Then followed excursions to the country, and many other friendly arrangements, including, among other things, very judicious and kindly provision for the religious improvement of all; the whole carried out in a spirit of kindliness that charms even the distant reader, and must have had a most delightful effect upon the people themselves. People treated thus would do anything for their masters. The managers of the Company found that, even in a money point of view, their outlay for

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