The capital-unit being impersonal can be absolutely
merged for common action with like units. The labour-unit being personal
only surrenders part of his freedom of action and competition to the
Union, which henceforth represents the social side of his industrial
self. How far the necessity of close social action between labour-units
in the future may compel the labourer to merge more of his industrial
individuality in the Union, is an open question which the future history
of labour-movements will decide.
The slow, intermittent, and fragmentary manner in which labour-unions
have been hitherto conducted even in the stronger trades, is a fact
which has perhaps done more to hide the true parallelism in the
evolution of capital and labour. The path traced above has not yet been
traversed by the bulk of English working men, while, as has been shown,
working women have hardly begun to contemplate the first step. But the
uneven rate of development, in the case of capital and labour, should
not blind us to the law which is operating in both movements. The
representative relation between capital and labour is no longer that
between a single employer and a number of individual working men, each
of the latter making his own terms with the former for the sale of his
labour, but between a large company or union of employers on the one
hand, and a union of workmen on the other. The last few years have
consolidated and secured this relation in the case of such powerful
staple industries in England as mining, ship-building, iron-work, and
even in the weaker low-skilled industries the relation is gradually
winning recognition.
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