The rise and fall of ‘trust’ in Victorian trade union movement 1870–8

Gladstone’s first ministry endowed trade unions with the voluntary right of ‘trust’ and encouraged Victorians to demonstrate altruistic and humanitarian virtues on the ‘voluntary’ boards of conciliation and arbitration. Victorian newspapers and journals disclosed the dilemmas of public opinion in the face of the decline of ‘trust’. This article aims to delineate the transformation of the Liberal party’s progressive policy, which restored the utilitarian discourse of political economy after John Stuart Mill’s recantation of the wage-fund theory, and to question conventional historiography, which tended to understate the role of positivist moral philosophy in the course of trade union law reforms.