MR. FORSTER ON THE UNION OF CAPITALISTS.
[TO THE EDITOR OF TEE " SPECTATOR:1
Sin,—In your article on "Mr. Forster on the Union of Capi- talists" you say :—" The truth is, that nothing can be more practically mischievous than to attempt to remove the economic question between capital and labour out of the special conditions proper to each particular place and each particular trade, and to treat it in abstract and general terms, in which, properly speaking,
it ceases to have a meaning The moment you pass from the conditions of any trade or manufacture at one place to the conditions even of the same trade or manufacture at another place, a number of causes of variation of real magnitude come into the account. . . . In the first place, the profits of a trade in one place
are often greater than the profits of the same trade in another But the mischiefs which arise in organising the labour or capital of the same trade in different places into contralised leagues, are as nothing to the mischiefs which would attend the attempt to organize the labour or capital of different trades in either the tame or different places into such leagues."
May I ask what comes, then, of the abstractions or generalisa- tions respecting the rates of wages and profits which are known as "the average rate of wages" and "the average of profit," and which are based on the assumption that competition equalises both profits and wages all over the kingdom in all trades? Of these abstractions or fictions the Spectator has been the constant
[The Spectator has maintained that this equalisation is the ten- ilencyvand that Political Economy is a science of tendencies,— tendencies never more than partially realised. Unions do not deal so much with tendencies an with minute local facts. Where is the contradiotion 2—ED. Spectator.]
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