116 RETURN TO NEW YORK. the Brunnens of Nassau," was the most popular work in America when I was there; and had made every reading man in the States, as it were, his personal friend. In conclusion I should say, that the first overtures of the Canadians for a federation with Uncle Sam, let them be made when they may, will be received by him much in the same way as the early proposals of the Genoese deputies to Louis XIV., when at the height of his prosperity; it was on occasion of that petty state offering "to give itself away to France, that these memorable words were uttered by that haughty monarch:-Messieurs, vous vous donnez à moi, et moi je vous donne au diable! "Gentlemen, you give yourselves up to me, and I send you all to the devil! Having now arrived at the Albany Steam-boat Wharf on the East River, I took leave of my companionable fellow voyagers, including the anti-Irish monomaniac, who, up to the time I left him, had not bitten any one. QUESTION OF UNIVERSAL FREEDOM. 117 LETTER IX. TRADES' UNIONS-AMERICAN POLITICS. THE great German poet Schiller, who carried his early notions about liberty almost to licentiousness, as his play of "the Robbers" testifies, has left it on record, as the sober and well-matured opinion of his riper years, that mankind, however great their love of liberty, can never be long free; because, in almost all ardent natures, the passionate love of freedom for their own actions, is allied to a restless desire of controlling the actions of others. Thus it is that government has always moved in a vicious circle; setting out in absolute despotism, it by and by is mitigated, then ameliorates into comparative freedom to that succeeds licence, then comes anarchy, then despotism again, in one eternal round. His conclusion is, that the bulk of men do not deserve to be free. America has been long held up by many as an exception to this,-an exception considered by some strong enough to break the rule. Be this as it may, a desire to examine personally the working of the social machine in the United States, where, to use the words of Washington in his correspondence with Jefferson, 118 66. "the grand experiment was being tried, what measure of liberty men could be entrusted with for their own benefit"-this desire, not uncommon, had descended even so low as to me. I will not, however, pretend to say that this was my chief motive for going thither, but still it counted for somewhat in my mind. Up to manhood, politics was a subject I had neither had time nor inclination to think much aboutthe Revolution of 1830 in France made me a kind of politician. I then was, or thought myself, a passive radical; which colour of politics was, in a manner, natural to me, as I had insensibly adopted it from my father and those most intimate with him→→→ radicalism had naturally succeeded to the republican notions of the times of his youth; for he was a “persecuted patriot" of 1794. Perhaps I may have occasion to speak of him again. Meantime, from what I saw and heard of the doings of the Trades' Unions of America on first stepping, as it were, on the threshold of the country, it was plain to me that the individuals composing them (or rather their leaders) were not unwilling here, as elsewhere, to deprive certain of their fellow-labourers of the control of their own actions... to dispossess the working man of the first and most important "liberty" to him, that of carrying his labour to the most eligible market. With regard to the worse than inutility of trades' combinations, my mind had been long made up; I had seen too much of its withering effects on individual prosperity and comfort, in the business which I had been appren DOINGS OF THE TRADES' UNIONS. 119 ticed to. I have heard it sportively said, that when you cannot obtain a desired thing yourself, the next best thing is to prevent another from getting it; and truly my brother co-operatives had worked together in such a way, by having "scales" (not well balanced) of payment for work-by rigidly enforcing one fixed rate of remuneration, no matter whether it were well or ill done, they had successfully brought things to such a dead level, that the veriest bungler, both in amount of work dealt out to him, and in its price, could insist on an equality with the accomplished workman. Thus did the round balls of dung, floating cheek-by-jowl with the fruit in the inundated farmyard of the fable, say, "How we apples swim!" And the masters dared not interfere. It wanted not that black affair of the cotton-spinning factory-men of the north-who so nearly spun a halter for themselves the other day-to convince me of the pernicious effects of the combination system to the industrious and pains-taking mechanics themselves. But I had had no information that it extended to America; I had always thought it the creature of the ignorance and abuses of older societies. I was therefore not a little astonished to hear of the perfect organization of Trades' Unions there; the great general periodical meetings, the continual private conclaves of delegates, the deputations from town to town crossing and re-crossing each other at all the populous points of the Union-the journals, the pamphlets, the manifestoes, &c. This unquiet state of things, accom. panied with disturbances that had taken place in 120 BALTIMORE ANARCHISTS. different towns, was not a little staggering to me, who had heard so much of the prosperity, the hap piness, and above all the tranquillity of America. A few days before my arrival, a dreadful riot had taken place at Baltimore, somewhat similar to that of Bristol in 1832. The pretext was, one of the savings. banks having stopped payment. I say the pretext, although the failure was an infamous business, because the devastations that ensued were, as usual, committed by the from hand-to-mouth part of the community, scarce one of whom could have lost a cent by it. But then the mob are great sticklers for abstract rights-upon this occasion, the authorities of the city (so called, perhaps, from having no authority at such crises), seemed to have a great respect for popular rights also, and they were much blamed by many for looking on, and allowing the rioters to follow their own "sweet will." The truth is, they dared not interfere; they were too weak to do so with effect: an evil this, the result of too "cheap government,”—a subject which I shall have some occasion to enlarge on hereafter. Meantime, my present business is with the American Trades' Unions. Scarce had I returned to New York, when, on making further anxious inquiries as to what was going on among the unionists, a pamphlet was shown me, entitled " Constitution of the Trades' Union of the City and County of Philadelphia, with the By-laws and Names of Trades: Instituted March 1834." This production opened with the following preamble: |