“Industrial unrest” is apt to be regarded in many quarters as something new and strange, an alarming phenomenon of the present age due to the sudden irruption of mysterious and hitherto unheard-of qualities in man. Frequent allusions are made to the “present unrest.” All manner of solutions, plans, and proposals are offered in the hope that labour troubles will disappear in the same mysterious fashion that they came. There is, too, a persistent belief in certain minds that “industrial unrest” will “blow over” as though it were merely a passing fashion, akin to the rebellion of the day scholars at Ipswich when Mr. Nupkins was magistrate and Mr. Pickwick a visitor. After they had conspired to break the windows of an obnoxious apple-seller, had hooted the beadle, and pelted the constabulary—“an elderly gentleman in top-boots, who had been called out to repress the tumult,” the latter was able to announce the retirement of the rioters in the memorable words, “Popular feeling has in a measure subsided, in consekens o’ the boys having dispersed to cricket.”