Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/30

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12
A THOUSAND YEARS HENCE.

wages. More than anything else did he deprecate the narrow and unjust monopoly involved in the apprentice limitation principle, and in other respects also the ungenerous and unbrotherly walls of mutual exclusion which the different trades too jealously built up against each other. As to picketing, rattening, and such like, they were with Yellowly beneath contempt, and hardly to be even spoken of with common patience. At a Brickmakers' Union one evening, when one of the members was recounting his success in so disabling the hands of certain non-unionists, by putting needles into the clay, that their families were likely to starve for some weeks to come, Yellowly, as he told us, could with difficulty resist smashing the teeth of the vulgar ruffian, as he leered complacently over his ghastly and traitorous story.

On Future Amelioration of Labour Conditions.

Yellowly was full of other schemes for the advance of his class, and that of society generally. He had large hopes from the effects of the universal education now being enforced; and again he had further hopes in other directions from all kinds of co-operation, by which, in brief, the present scant comfort of working-class life might be doubled, and at one-half the present expense of working-class living. He fully expected that the unions, under the better regulations of the future, would promote more of a sentiment of honour in regard to conduct and character, and particularly as to the prevalent evil of intemperance. On this subject, he would fain that his class, as the party chiefly affected, took a more leading charge of