us by our Divine Master would have prompted the writer and his associates to rejoice over the failure of their sinister prophecy. But such is unhappily not the spirit which dwells in the party whom that letter represented.

What has followed is known to all, and we have no wish to reproduce in these pages the sad and disgraceful narrative. It will for ever remain a blot on the Church of England of the nineteenth century, that there should have been found any of her sons capable of so fatally and fatuously mistaking her mission in the world, as their overt acts, and the columns of their public organs, have testified. It is no small satisfaction to have witnessed the entire and signal discomfiture which they have met with in every quarter from whence they have sought for sanction or encouragement: a satisfaction only alloyed by the timid utterances of some of those who, as Fathers of the Church, ought to have given on this occasion, no uncertain sound.

One would almost imagine that it surpassed even the ingenuity of intolerance to find matter of "scandal" in what passed on that 22nd of June. That any disciple of Christ, not openly dishonouring Him by a vicious life, should by receiving the Sacrament of His Body and Blood be offering an insult to Him, does seem a proposition so utterly at variance with His spoken and written word, that we are at a loss to know how any can maintain it, who take that Word for their rule. That this perplexity is abundantly shared by others, the issue of the ill-starred "memorials " has happily manifested to all. And in presence of this result, we have to thank the "English Church Union" for the good service which they have unwittingly done. They have elicited from good and eminent men on their own side such testimonies to the real work of English Church Union, as were not on record before; and while they thought utterly to discomfit us, they have in no small degree strengthened our hands.

Meantime, that which has passed has taught us a double lesson: of which however both the branches tend one way, and ultimately unite.

The one is, rather to leave the onward steps of our work to the unfolding of God's Providence, than to be restlessly and anxiously devising them for ourselves. Like those who have had to deal with another well-known "religious difficulty," we encounter our greatest trouble not in the matter of deeds, but of words. Let a proposition be once put forth, and it thereby becomes impracticable. Words, like weapons, are soon whetted to keenness when war is in the air. The most important steps towards our great end will be drawn on, one after another, by the deep working of Christian public opinion; in other words, by the wisdom of God's Spirit. They will come in the

train of other and unsuspected designs; they will not be recognised as of great import, till they have passed by. Many a deed is done, many a word is spoken, which not a soul on earth contemplated an hour before, but which, when done or spoken, shifts the level of human thought, and opens a new era for mankind.

It is not that men anxious to prevent

And the second of our lessons is, that great fact to which our last sentences have pointed: that the Spirit of Truth is opening the way before us, both rapidly and surely. In every direction, the barriers of intolerance and exclusiveness are falling. We watch the process from year to year, and we wonder as we gaze. are becoming less faithful, less watchful, less change. At no time has obstruction been so obstructive, as now. Never has exclusiveness been asserted in stronger words, or by more indefatigable champions. But the adverse host, as each conflict arises, crumbles away, and is not found. Public measures have already passed in our day, are now passing, or are contemplated as sure to come, which, a few years since, were but the dreams of the over-sanguine. Truths are now cited in all companies as axioms of the common-sense of mankind, which would in our younger days have been voices in the desert.

And the results are coming thick upon us: not in the unwelcome outbreaks of revolutionary violence, but in the irresistible bearing onward of national conviction: results, compared to which all that we have seen and rejoice over shall seem to those that shall witness them but as the dawn that ushered in the day.

Never was there a time in the course of history, never in the lifetime of the Church, when the intelligent Christian, when the faithful and loyal citizen, had more reason to thank God, and to take courage.

HENRY ALFORD.

STRIKES AND LOCK-OUTS,

FROM THE WORKMAN'S POINT OF VIEW.

THE origin of strikes is in the reluctance of the working-man to barter the exercise of his industry and skill for less money than may suffice for the decent maintenance of himself and his family, leaving something over for the future. The origin of locking-out is in the indisposition of employers to regulate their profits from the combination of capital with labour in due regard to the fair claims of those persons whom they employ. It is not denied that the men may sometimes push their demands too far, may make mistakes in mode, manner, and spirit, as to the assertion of them; nor is it insinuated that the masters are always governed by a greedy and selfish mind in refusing the full of such demands. On the contrary, it is readily admitted that the men, no less than the masters, ought to consider what is due to the other party while insisting upon justice and fairness to themselves.

Disputes between employer and employed began early in the history of the world and continue late. Although Laban was Jacob's father-in-law, the shrewd patriarch (who, it must be confessed, looked well after his own interest) had to complain that he "changed his wages ten times." From the proneness of selfishness to take advantage of dependence, it was found necessary to instruct Moses to lay down as a law, that "the wages of him that was hired should not abide with the hirer all night until the morning," an interdict, by

the-bye, which strikes at the root of all truck. The uncompromising prophet who descended from the same stock as the great lawgiver, pronounced one of his many "woes" upon "him that built his house by unrighteousness, and his chambers by wrong; that used his neighbour's service without wages, and gave him not for his work." The last of the Hebrew prophets, in like manner, was commissioned to declare that his divine Master would be "a swift witness against those that oppressed the hireling in his wages," as guilty of one of the most heinous sins; and, in the most practical of the epistles addressed in the name of Jesus Christ to the Jewish converts, we have this ringing protest against all similar oppression, "Behold, the hire of the labourers which have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth; and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth."

While quoting the sacred Books in seeming admonition of employers who withhold from the employed any portion of their due, it would not be manly to disguise the fact that the same records have a few words of exhortation, or of rebuke, for discontented or improvident hirelings. John the Baptist bade the soldiers of Herod "be content with their wages," though this would hardly have been said if their pay were not adequate to the services rendered; and Haggai the Prophet conveys a lesson by which not a few workingmen of this age and nation might profit, when speaking of "him that earneth wages," as "earning wages to put it into a bag with holes."

To borrow an expressive proverb from the same source, "If these things were done in the green tree, what would be done in the dry?" If, in countries and among nations which have the rigid law of Moses, and even the exalted morality of Christ, the working classes found cause of complaint against those who hired them, what might not be expected in lands and among peoples not hedged in by these restraints, or favoured with these advantages! Along the whole line of human history, therefore, one might expect to observe continuous traces of what are known to ourselves as "trade disputes." But there is neither space nor time, nor any occasion withal, for going over so wide a field of inquiry. Our own island and its inhabitants being the intended sphere and subject of present observation, attention had better be confined to them. Nor, even here, would a farback retrospect be of much use. Enough, and more than enough, that the last hundred years might be too truly spoken of as a chronicle of dissensions betwixt capital and labour, employers and employed. If, however, the nature and the accompaniments of those disagreements in the earlier years of that hundred be impartially compared with the character and consequences of similar misunderstandings of more recent occurrence and present existence, the result of the

comparison will appear to be so much in favour of both parties in this generation as to encourage the hope of a mutual settlement of such differences, and that, perhaps, at no very distant day.

In the face of what has just occurred at Cork, of what preceded it by a few weeks at or near Manchester, and of certain disgraceful facts elicited by the inquiry at Sheffield, it would be wrong, foolish, and unavailing, to affirm that violence and outrage have entirely ceased, or even that the antipathy to machine in aid of hand labour has been wholly appeased. But it is universally acknowledged, at least by all fair-minded and unprejudiced men, that, in the respects named, there is between our time and that of our grandfathers, a difference as palpable as that between light and darkness, or peace and war. Where, now, are the "assassinations" with which working-men used to be taunted? Where the vitriol-throwing, the machine-breaking, and the mill-burning, with which they were once reproached? In the worst of times, none of these were either so numerous, so malignant, or so rife, as in sweeping statements they have been represented to be. At any rate, they have now entirely disappeared, or so nearly so, as that a stray circumstance of the kind only serves in equitable minds to enhance, by the rarity of the exception, the prevalence of a happy rule. Few men understand this subject better than Mr. Brassey, Member for Hastings. "I place," he says, "a firm reliance on the industry and common sense of our workingpeople; and I believe that happier and brighter days are yet in store." In a preface to his able speech, delivered this time last year, he prefixed to the sentence just cited a Latin quotation, which, as Englished by a scholarly friend, means, "As we have endured worse, God will carry us through what remains."

From that speech, in several passages expressing opinions to which working-men might take exception, the strongest corroboration of what has been advanced in favour of their present attitude and temper, may be adduced. Some of the most trusted leaders of the trades' unions, says Mr. Brassey, are averse to strikes; and he instances the Amalgamated Engineers as even "anxious not to waste their money in injudicious conflicts with their employers." He avows the hope, that, when these unions shall have received proper acknowledgment from the State, they will generally act with equal wisdom and discretion. It is, indeed, as benefit societies more especially, that he speaks of them as "having effected, and as capable of very great good. They encourage a noble spirit of self-help. It should, therefore, be the care of a wise statesman diligently to encourage them.” But the eulogy does not stop here.

"Even if a strike should unfortunately occur, it is likely enough," says Mr. Brassey, "that, under the control of a trades' union, the conduct of the