THE OLD UNIONISM AND THE NEW
[1875-1890]
Since 1875 the Trades Union Congress has loomed before the general
public with ever-increasing impressiveness as the representative
Parliament of the Trade Union world. To the historical student, on
the other hand, it has, during the last fifty years, been wanting
in significance as an index to the real factors of the Trade Union
Movement. Between 1871 and 1875, the period of the struggle for
complete legalisation, the Congress concentrated the efforts of the
different sections upon the common object they had all at heart. On
the accomplishment of that object it became for ten years little more
than an annual gathering of Trade Union officials, in which they
delivered, with placid unanimity, their views on labour legislation and
labour politics.[511] From 1885 to 1890 we shall watch the Congress
losing its decorous calm, and gradually becoming the battle-field of
contending principles and rival leaders. But throughout its whole
career it has, to speak strictly, been representative less of the
development of Trade Unionism as such, than of the social and political
aspirations of its leading members.
The reader of the Congress proceedings between 1875 and 1885 would,
for instance, fail to recognise our description of the characteristics
of the movement in these years. The predominant feature of the Trade
Union world between 1875 and 1885 was, as we have seen, an extreme
and complicated sectionalism. It might therefore have been expected
that the annual meeting of delegates from different trades would
have been made the debating ground for all the moot points and vexed
questions of Trade Unionism, not to say the battle-field of opposing
interests. But though the Trades Union Congress, like all popular
assemblies, had its stormy scenes and hot discussions, from 1875 to
1885 these episodes arose only on personal questions, such as the
conduct of individual members of the committee or the _bona fides_ of
particular delegates. On all questions of policy or principle before
the Congress the delegates were generally unanimous. This was brought
about by the deliberate exclusion of all Trade Union problems from the
agenda. The relative merits of collective bargaining and legislative
regulation were, during these years, never so much as discussed. The
alternative types of benefit club and trade society were not compared.
The difficulties of overlap and apportionment of work were not even
referred to. No mention was made of Sliding Scales, Wage-Boards,
Piecework Lists, or other expedients for avoiding disputes. Piecework
itself, when introduced by a delegate in 1876, was dropped as a
dangerous topic. The disputes between Union and Union were regarded by
the Committee as outside the proper scope of Congress.[512] In short,
the knotty problems of Trade Union organisation, the divergent views
as to Trade Union policy, the effect on Trade Unionism of different
methods of remuneration--all the critical issues of industrial strife
were expressly excluded from the agenda of the Congress.
For the narrow limits thus set to the functions of the Congress there
was an historical reason. Arising as it did between 1868 and 1871, when
the one absorbing topic was the relation of Trade Unionism to the law,
it had retained the character then impressed upon it of an exclusively
political body. For many years its chief use was to give weight to the
Parliamentary action of the standing committee, whose influence in
the lobby of the House of Commons was directly proportionate to the
numbers they were believed to represent. Publicity and advertisement,
the first requisites of a successful Congress, were worse than useless
without unanimity of opinion. The deliberate refusal of the Trade Union
leaders to discuss internal problems in public Congress under such
circumstances was not surprising. Most men in their position would
have hesitated to let the world know that the apparent solidarity of
Trade Unionism covered jealous disputes on technical questions, and
fundamental differences as to policy. They easily persuaded themselves
that a yearly meeting of shifting delegates was fitted neither to
debate technical questions nor to serve as a tribunal of appeal. But
these difficulties could have been overcome. The quinquennial delegate
meeting of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers secures absolute
frankness of discussion by the exclusion of reporters; and the frequent
national conferences of miners achieve the same end by supplying
the press with their own abstract of the proceedings. The Miners’
Conference of 1863, which we have already described, had shown, too,
how successfully a large conference of workmen could resolve itself,
for special questions, into private committees, the reports being
laid before the whole conference at its public sittings--a device
not yet adopted by the Trades Union Congress. And the London Society
of Compositors, which is governed practically by mass meetings, had,
for over half a century, known how to combine detailed investigation
of complicated questions with Democratic decisions on principles
of policy, by appointing special committees to report to the next
subsequent members’ meeting. The fact that no such expedients were
suggested shows that in these years the jealousy of most workmen of
outside interference and their apathy about questions unconnected with
their immediate trade interests, made their leaders unwilling to trust
them with real opportunities for full Democratic discussion.
We shall therefore not attempt to reconstruct the Trade Union
Movement from the proceedings of its annual congresses. The following
brief analysis of their programmes and the achievements of the
Parliamentary Committee is meant to show, not the facts as to Trade
Union organisation throughout the country, with which we have already
dealt, but the political and social ideals that filled the minds of
the more thoughtful and better educated working men, and the rapid
transformation of these ideals in the course of the last decade.[513]
The mantle of the Junta of 1867-71 had, by 1875, fallen upon a group
of able organisers who, for many years, occupied the foremost place in
the Trade Union world. Between 1872 and 1875 Allan and Applegarth were
replaced by Henry Broadhurst, John Burnett, J. D. Prior, and George
Shipton.[514] These leaders had moulded their methods and policy upon
those of the able men who preceded them. It was they, indeed, aided by
Alexander Macdonald and Thomas Burt, who had actually carried through
the final achievement of 1875. Like Allan, Applegarth, and Guile, they
belonged either to the iron or the building trades, and were permanent
officials of Trade Union organisations. A comparison of the private
minutes of the Parliamentary Committee between 1875 and 1885 with those
of the Conference of Amalgamated Trades of 1867-71 reveals how exactly
the new “Front Bench” carried on the traditions of the Junta. We see
the same shrewd caution and practical opportunism. We notice the same
assiduous lobbying in the House of Commons, and the same recurring
deputations to evasive Ministers. For the first few years, at least,
we watch the Committee in frequent consultation with the same devoted
legal experts and Parliamentary friends.[515] Through the skilful
guidance and indefatigable activity of Henry Broadhurst the political
machinery of the Trade Union Movement was maintained and even increased
in efficiency. If during these years the occupants of the “Front
Bench” failed to give so decisive a lead to the Labour Movement as
their predecessors had done, the fault lay, not in the men or in the
machinery, but rather in the programme which they set themselves to
carry out.
This programme, laid before all candidates for the House of Commons at
the General Election of 1874, was based, as John Prior subsequently
declared, on the principle “that all exceptional legislation affecting
working men should be swept away, and that they should be placed on
precisely the same footing as other classes of the community.”[516]
Its main items were the repeal of the hated Criminal Law Amendment Act
of 1871, and the further legalisation of Trade Unionism. The sweeping
triumphs of 1875, and the acceptance by the Conservative Government of
the proposals of the Junta, denuded the programme for subsequent years
of its most striking proposals. There remained over in this department
certain minor amendments of law and procedure which occupied the
attention of the Committee for the next few years, and were gradually,
by their exertions, carried into effect.[517]
But one great disability still lay upon working men as such. By the
common law of England a person is liable for the results, not only
of his own negligence, but also for that of his servant, if acting
within the scope of his employment. The one exception is that, whereas
to a stranger the master is liable for the negligence of any person
whom he employs, to his servant he is not liable for the negligence
of a fellow-servant in common employment. By this legal refinement,
which dates only from 1837, and which successive judicial decisions
have engrafted upon the common law, a workman who suffered injury
through the negligence of some other person in the same employment
was precluded from recovering that compensation from the common
employer which a stranger, to whom the same accident had happened,
could claim and enforce.[518] If by the error of a signalman a railway
train met with an accident, all the injured passengers could obtain
compensation from the railway company; but the engine-driver and guard
were expressly excluded from any remedy. What the workman demanded was
the abolition of the doctrine of “common employment,” and the placing
of the employee upon exactly the same footing for compensation as any
member of the public.
By the influence of the Miners’ National Union and the Amalgamated
Society of the Railway Servants (established in 1872) the removal of
this disability was, from the first, placed in the foreground of the
Trade Union programme. Year after year Employers’ Liability Bills
were brought in by the Trade Union representatives in the House of
Commons, only to be met by stubborn resistance from the capitalists of
both parties. Through the pertinacity of Henry Broadhurst a partial
reform[519] was obtained from Gladstone’s Government in 1880, in spite
of the furious opposition of the great employers of labour sitting
on both sides of the House. The responsibility of the employer for
insuring his workmen against the risks of their calling was, for
the first time, clearly recognised by Parliament. The report of the
Parliamentary Committee for 1880 claimed that the main battle on the
subject had been fought, and that “time and opportunity only were now
wanting for the completion of this work.” Since then the promotion
of claims for compensation for accidents has been one of the most
important functions of Trade Unions; and many of the societies, such as
the Bricklayers and Boilermakers, have recovered thousands of pounds
for injured members or their relatives.[520] But the doctrine of
“common employment,” modified by this Act, was by no means abolished.
Employers, moreover, were allowed to induce their work-people to
“contract out” of the provisions of the Act.[521] An Employers’
Liability Bill, the last remnant of the demands of the Junta, remained,
therefore, from 1872 onward a permanent item in the Trade Union
programme down to 1896.
With the exception of this one proposal the Parliamentary programme
of the Trade Union world was framed, in effect, by the New Front
Bench. Curiously devoid of interest or reality, it is important to
the political student as showing to what extent the thoughtful and
superior workman had, at this time, imbibed the characteristic ideas of
middle-class reformers.
The programme of the Parliamentary Committee between 1875 and 1885
falls mainly under three heads. We have first a group of measures the
aim of which was the democratisation of the electoral, administrative,
and judicial machinery of the State. Another set of reforms had for
their end the enabling of the exceptionally thrifty or exceptionally
industrious man to rise out of the wage-earning class. A third group of
proposals aimed at the legal regulation of the conditions of particular
industries.
Complete political Democracy had been for over a century the creed
of the superior workmen. It was therefore not unnatural that it
should come to the front in the Trades Union Congress. What appears
peculiar is the form which this old-standing faith took in the hands
of the Front Bench. The Trade Union leaders of 1837-42 had adopted
enthusiastically the “Six Points” of the Charter. Even the sober
Junta of 1867-71 had sat with Karl Marx on the committee of the
“International,” in the programme of which Universal Suffrage was
but a preliminary bagatelle. To the Front Bench of 1875-85 Democracy
appeared chiefly in the guise of the Codification of the Criminal
Law, the Reform of the Jury System, the creation of a Court of
Criminal Appeal, and the Regulation of the Summary Jurisdiction of the
Magistracy--a curious group of law reforms which it is easy to trace
to the little knot of barristers who had stood by the Unions in their
hour of trial.[522] We do not wish to deprecate the value of these
proposals, framed in the interests of all classes of the community; but
they were not, and probably were never intended to be, in any sense a
democratisation of our judicial system.[523] When the Congress dealt
with electoral reform it got no further than the assimilation of the
county and borough franchise--already a commonplace of middle-class
Liberalism. The student of Continental labour movements will find
it difficult to believe that in the representative Congress of the
English artisans, amendments in favour of Manhood Suffrage were even
as late as 1882 and 1883 rejected by large majorities.[524] Nor did
the Parliamentary Committee put even the County Franchise into their
own programme until it had become the battle-cry of the Liberal party
at the General Election of 1880. The Extension of the Hours of Polling
becomes a subject of discussion from 1878 onward, but the Payment of
Election Expenses does not come up until 1883, and Payment of Members
not until 1884.
Scarcely less significant in character were the measures of social
reform advocated during these years. The prominent Trade Unionists had
been converted, as we have already had occasion to point out, to the
economic Individualism which at this time dominated the Liberal party.
A significant proof of this unconscious conversion is to be found in
the unanimity with which a Trades Union Congress could repeatedly
press for such “reforms” as Peasant Proprietorship, the purchase by
the artisan of his own cottage, the establishment of “self-governing
workshops,” the multiplication of patents in the hands of individual
workmen, and other changes which would cut at the root of Trade
Unionism or any collective control of the means of production. For
whatever advantages there might be in turning the agricultural labourer
into a tiny freeholder, it is obvious that under such a system no
Agricultural Labourers’ Union could exist. However useful it may be
to make the town artisan independent of a landlord, it has been proved
beyond controversy that wage-earning owners of houses lose that perfect
mobility which enables them, through their Trade Union, to boycott the
bad employer or desert the low-paying district. And we can imagine the
dismay with which the leaders of the Nine Hours Movement would have
discovered that any considerable proportion of the engineering work of
Newcastle was being done in workshops owned by artisans whose interests
as capitalists or patentees conflicted with the common interests of all
the workers.
In no respect, however, does the conversion of the Trade Union leaders
to middle-class views stand out more clearly than in their attitude
to the clamour from the workers in certain industries for the legal
protection of their Standard of Life. From time immemorial one of
the leading tenets of Trade Unionism has been the desirability of
maintaining by law the minimum Standard of Life of the workers, and
it was still steadfastly held by two important sections of the Trade
Union world, the Cotton Operatives and the Coal-miners. But to the
Parliamentary Committee of 1875-85, as to the Liberal legislators,
every demand for securing the conditions of labour by legislation
appeared as an invidious exception, only to be justified by the special
helplessness or incompetency of the applicants. Nevertheless, many of
the trades succeeded in persuading Congress to back up the particular
sectional legislation they desired. The Tailors asked, on the one hand,
for the extension of the Factory Acts to home workers, and, on the
other, for compensation out of public funds when interfered with by the
sanitary inspector. The Bakers complained with equal pertinacity of the
lack of public inspection of bakehouses, and of the hardships of their
regulation by the Smoke Prevention Acts. The London Cabmen sought the
aid of Congress, not against their employers, the cab proprietors, but
against the public. The men in charge of engines and boilers demanded
that no one should be allowed to work at their trade without obtaining
from the Government a certificate of competency. In the absence of any
fixed or consistent idea of the collective interest of the wage-earning
class, or of Trade Unionists as such, every proposal that any section
demanded for itself was accepted with equanimity by the Congress,
and passed on to the Parliamentary Committee to carry out, however
inconsistent it might be with the general principles that swayed their
minds.[525]
It is not difficult to understand why, with such a programme, the
Trade Union world failed, between 1876 and 1885, to exercise any
effective influence upon the House of Commons. A few concessions to
the wage-earners were, indeed, obtained from the Government. The
Employers’ Liability Act of 1880, to which we have already referred,
represented, in spite of all its deficiencies, a new departure of
considerable importance. Useful little clauses protecting the interests
of the wage-earners were, through Broadhurst’s pertinacity, inserted
in Chamberlain’s Bankruptcy Act and in his Joint Stock Companies
Act.[526] But it was left to Charles Bradlaugh, who had never been a
Trade Unionist, to initiate the useful law prohibiting the payment of
wages in public-houses, though when it was introduced the Parliamentary
Committee (observing that it was unnecessary in respect of organised
trades) gave it a mild support. Bradlaugh it was, too, who in 1887 got
passed the amendment of the law against Truck--a subject which the
Parliamentary Committee had, in 1877, dismissed from their programme
on the ground that they were unable, in the trades of which they had
knowledge, to find sufficient evidence of its necessity.[527] But the
failure of the Parliamentary Committee to induce the Government of the
day to legislate for wage-earners as such was naturally most patent
in that group of reforms which dealt with the legal regulation of the
conditions of labour. To the great consolidating Factory Bill of 1878
they found only four small amendments to propose; and of these only one
was carried.[528] The “Sweating System” of home work against which the
Tailors and Bootmakers were suggesting stringent but, as we venture to
think, ill-considered legislation was permitted to expand free from all
regulation. The bakehouses, too, were allowed to slip virtually out of
inspection. Deputation after deputation waited on the Home Secretary
to press for an increase in the number of factory inspectors, only to
be met with the apparently unanswerable argument that it would cost
money which the poor taxpayers could ill spare, until the astute and
practical leaders of the Lancashire Cotton Operatives grew tired of the
monotonous regularity with which their resolutions in favour of further
factory inspection and more stringent regulations of the conditions of
their trade were passed by Congress, and the little assistance which
this endorsement procured for them. A “Northern Counties Factory Act
Reform Association” was established in 1886, to do the work which the
Trades Union Congress and its Parliamentary Committee had failed to
accomplish. We have, in fact, only one important achievement of the
Parliamentary Committee to record in this department of social reform.
For years Congress had passed emphatic resolutions in favour of the
selection of practical working men as Factory Inspectors. Great was
the jubilation at the appointment, in 1882, of J. D. Prior, General
Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters, and a member of the
Parliamentary Committee, to the post of Inspector.[529]
In matters of more general interest the Trade Union leaders were
not more successful, though the attempt to reform the law and its
administration resulted in some minor improvements. The first outcome
of the projects for law reform so dear to the Congresses of 1876-80 was
the Justices’ Clerks Act of 1877, which enabled magistrates to remit
costs. The passing of the Summary Jurisdiction Act of 1879, which gave
defendants the right to claim trial before a jury whenever the penalty
exceeded three months’ imprisonment, was, Howell observes, “materially
aided by the action of Congress.” But it is needless to inform the
reader that the Criminal Law never got itself codified. To this day
juries continue to be drawn exclusively from the upper and middle
classes. The long agitation for the abolition of the unpaid magistracy
ended in an anti-climax. The Liberal Government of 1884 left the system
unaltered, but, on the nomination of Henry Broadhurst,[530] placed four
Trade Union leaders upon the magisterial bench in certain Lancashire
boroughs, a precedent since followed by successive Lord Chancellors.
In one direction the Parliamentary Committee saw their hopes fully
accomplished. Their adoption of the particular projects of electoral
reform advocated by the Liberal party enabled them to render effective
help in the passing of the Acts of 1885, which assimilated the County
and the Borough Franchise, effected a redistribution of seats, and made
the extended hours of polling universal. But the desire of successive
Congresses for effective labour representation continued to be baulked
by the extortion from candidates of heavy election expenses, and by
the refusal to provide payment for service in Parliament and other
public bodies. On the burning question of the land the Parliamentary
Committee supported with conscientious fervour Gladstone’s Irish
policy of creating small freeholds, and enthusiastically endorsed the
proposals of Chamberlain for the extension of similar legislation to
Great Britain. The same spirit no doubt entered into their support of
the provisions of Chamberlain’s Patent Act, designed to facilitate the
taking out of patents by poor inventors. To sum up the situation, we
may say that the resolutions of the Trades Union Congress on questions
of general politics between 1880 and 1884 were successfully pressed
on the Legislature only in so far as they happened to coincide with
the proposals of the Liberal party. With the one great exception of
the Employers’ Liability Act, nothing seems really to have called
out the full energies of the leaders. The manifestoes and published
memoranda of the Parliamentary Committee during these years do not
differ either in tone or in substance from the speeches and articles
in which Chamberlain and other Radical capitalists were propounding
a programme of individualist Radicalism. In fact, the draft “Address
to the Workmen of the United Kingdom,” which the Parliamentary
Committee, in anticipation of the General Election, submitted to
the Congress of 1885, fell far short of Chamberlain’s “Unauthorised
Programme.” It occurred neither to the Parliamentary Committee nor to
the Congress to suggest the obvious answer to Sir William Harcourt’s
financial objection to increased factory inspection. No trace is to be
discovered of any consciousness on the part of the Trade Union leaders
of the existence of a very substantial tribute annually levied upon
the industrial world under the names of rent and interest. And even
Chamberlain’s modest and tentative proposals of these years, relating
to the payment, by the recipients of that tribute, of some contribution
by way of “ransom,” found no echo in the official programme of the
Trade Union world. Finally, though the Congress had adopted Payment
of Election Expenses in 1883, and Payment of Members in 1884, the
Parliamentary Committee omitted both these propositions from its
draft, and, like Gladstone, could not even bring itself to ask for
Free Education. The three latter points were added to the draft by the
Congress.
The assimilation of the political creed of the Trade Union leaders
with that of the official Liberal party was perfectly sincere. We have
already described, in the preceding chapter, how the Junta had begun
to be unconsciously converted from the traditional position of Trade
Unionism to the principle of Administrative Nihilism, then dominant
in the middle class. It is unnecessary for us to argue whether this
conception of the functions of law and government is or is not an
adequate view of social development. The able and conscientious men
who formed the Front Bench of the Trades Union Congress of 1876-85 had
grown up without any alternative political theory, and had accordingly
erected the objection to legislative interference or Governmental
administration into an absolute dogma.[531]
_Laisser-faire_, then, was the political and social creed of the
Trade Union leaders of this time. Up to 1885 they undoubtedly
represented the views current among the rank and file. At that date
all observers were agreed that the Trade Unions of Great Britain
would furnish an impenetrable barrier against Socialistic projects.
Within a decade we find the whole Trade Union world permeated with
Collectivist ideas, and, as the _Times_ recorded as early as 1893,
the Socialist party supreme in the Trades Union Congress.[532] This
revolution in opinion is the chief event of Trade Union history at the
close of the nineteenth century; and we propose to analyse in some
detail the various influences which in our opinion co-operated to
bring it about. We shall trace the beginnings of a new intellectual
ferment in the Trade Union world. We shall watch this working on
minds awakened by an industrial contraction of exceptional character.
We shall see it resulting in the revelation of hideous details of
poverty and degradation, for which deepening social compunction
imperatively demanded a remedy. We shall describe the recrudescence of
a revolutionary Utopianism like the Owenism of 1833-34. We shall trace
the gradual schooling of the impracticable elements into a sobered and
somewhat bureaucratic Collectivism; and finally, we shall watch the
rapid diffusion of this new faith throughout the whole Trade Union
world.[533]
If we had to assign to any one event the starting of the new current
of thought, we should name the wide circulation in Great Britain
of Henry George’s _Progress and Poverty_ during the years 1880-82.
The optimistic and aggressive tone of the book, in marked contrast with
the complacent quietism into which the English working-class movement
had sunk, and the force of the popularisation of the economic Theory
of Rent, sounded the dominant note alike of the “New Unionism” and
of the British Socialist Movement. Henry George made, it is true, no
contribution to the problems of industrial organisation; nor had he,
outside of the “Single Tax” on land values, any intention of promoting
a general Collectivist movement. But he succeeded, where previous
writers had failed, in widely diffusing among all classes a vivid
appreciation of the nature and results of the landlord’s appropriation
of economic rent. It is, in our judgement, the spread among the town
artisans of this conception of rent which has so largely transformed
the economic views of the Trade Union world, and which has gone far to
shift the lines of politics. The land question in particular has been
completely revolutionised. Instead of the Chartist cry of “Back to the
Land,” still adhered to by rural labourers and belated politicians,
the town artisan is thinking of his claim to the unearned increment of
urban land values, which he now watches falling into the coffers of the
great landlords.
But if Henry George gave the starting push, it was the propaganda of
the Socialists that got the new movement under way. The Socialist
party, which became reorganised in London between 1881 and 1883, after
practically a generation of quiescence, merged the project of Land
Nationalisation in the wider conception of an organised Democratic
community in which the collective power and the collective income
should be consciously directed to the common benefit of all.[534]
Whilst Henry George was, almost in his own despite, driving Peasant
Proprietorship and Leasehold Enfranchisement out of the political
field, the impressive description which Karl Marx had given of the
effects of the Industrial Revolution was interpreting to the thoughtful
workman the every-day incidents of industrial life. It needed no
Socialist to convince the artisan in any of the great industries
that his chance of rising to be a successful employer was becoming
daily more remote. It required no agitator to point out that amid
an enormous increase in wealth production the wages of the average
mechanic remained scarcely sufficient to bring up his family in decency
and comfort, whilst whole sections of his unskilled fellow-workers
received less than the barest family maintenance. Even the skilled
mechanic saw himself exposed to panics, commercial crises, and violent
industrial dislocations, over which neither he nor his Trade Union had
any control, and by which he and his children were often reduced to
destitution. But it was the Socialists who supplied the workman with a
plausible explanation of these untoward facts. Through the incessant
lecturing of H. M. Hyndman, William Morris, and other disciples of
Karl Marx, working men were taught that the impossibility of any large
section of the working class becoming their own employers was due, not
to lack of self-control, capacity, or thrift, but to the Industrial
Revolution, with its improvement of mechanical processes, its massing
of capital, and the consequent extinction of the small _entrepreneur_
by great industrial establishments. In this light the divorce of the
manual workers from the ownership of the means of production was
seen to be no passing phase, but an economic development which must,
under any system of private control of industry, become steadily
more complete. And it was argued that the terrible alterations of
over-production and commercial stagnation, the anomaly that a glut of
commodities should be a cause of destitution, were the direct result of
the management of industry with a view to personal profit, instead of
to the satisfaction of public wants.
The economic circumstances of the time supplied the Socialist
lecturers with dramatic illustrations of their theory. The acute
depression of 1878-79 had been succeeded by only a brief and partial
expansion during 1881-83. A period of prolonged though not exceptional
contraction followed, during which certain staple trades experienced
the most sudden and excessive fluctuations. In the great industry of
shipbuilding, for instance, the bad times of 1879 were succeeded by a
period during which trade expanded by leaps and bounds, more than twice
the tonnage being built in 1883 than in 1879. In the very next year
this enormous production came suddenly to an end, many shipbuilding
yards being closed and whole towns on the north-east coast finding
their occupation for the moment destroyed. The total tonnage built
fell from 1,250,000 in 1883 to 750,000 in 1884, 540,000 in 1885, and
to the still lower total of 473,000 in 1886. Thousands of the most
highly skilled and best organised mechanics, who had been brought to
Jarrow or Sunderland the year before, found themselves reduced to
absolute destitution, not from any failure of their industry, but
merely because the exigencies of competitive profit-making had led to
the concentration in one year of the normal production of two. “In
every shipbuilding port,” says Robert Knight in the Boilermakers’
Annual Report for 1886, “there are to be seen thousands of idle men
vainly seeking for an honest day’s work. The privation that has been
endured by them, their wives and children, is terrible to contemplate.
Sickness has been very prevalent, whilst the hundreds of pinched and
hungry faces have told a tale of suffering and privation which no
optimism could minimise or conceal. Hide it--cover it up as we may,
there is a depth of grief and trouble the full revelations of which, we
believe, cannot be indefinitely postponed. The workman may be ignorant
of science and the arts, and the sum of his exact knowledge may be
only that which he has gained in his closely circumscribed daily toil;
but he is not blind, and his thoughts do not take the shape of daily
and hourly thanksgiving that his condition is not worse than it is;
he does not imitate the example of the pious shepherd of Salisbury
Plain, who derived supreme contentment from the fact that a kind
Providence had vouchsafed him salt to eat with his potatoes. He sees
the lavish display of wealth in which he has no part. He sees a large
and growing class enjoying inherited abundance. He sees miles of costly
residences, each occupied by fewer people than are crowded into single
rooms of the tenement in which he lives. He cannot fail to reason that
there must be something wrong in a system which effects such unequal
distribution of the wealth created by labour.”
Other skilled trades had, between 1883 and 1887, a similar though
less dramatic experience. At the International Trades Union Congress
of 1886, James Mawdsley, the cautious leader of the Lancashire
cotton-spinners, speaking as a member of the Parliamentary Committee
on behalf of the British section, described the state of affairs
in England in the following terms: “Wages had fallen, and there
was a great number of unemployed.... Flax mills were being closed
every day.... All the building trades were in a bad position; ...
ironfoundries were in difficulties, and one-third of the shipwrights
were without work.... Steam-engine makers were also slack, except those
manufacturers who exported to France, Germany, and Austria. With a few
rare exceptions, the depression affecting the great leading trades was
felt in a thousand-and-one occupations. Seeing that there was a much
larger number of unemployed, the question naturally presented itself
as to whether there was any chance of improvement. He considered there
was no chance of improvement so long as the present state of society
continued to exist.... He did not understand their Socialism; he had
not studied it as perhaps he ought to have done. The workmen of England
were not so advanced as the workmen of the Continent. Nevertheless
they, at least, possessed one clear conception: they realised that
the actual producers did not obtain their share of the wealth they
created.”[535] We see the same spirit spreading even to the most
conservative and exclusive trades. “To our minds,” writes the Central
Secretary of the powerful Union of Flint Glass Makers, “it is very
hard for employers to attempt to force men into systems by which they
cannot earn an honourable living. These unjust attempts to grind down
the working men will not be tolerated much longer, for revolutionary
changes are beginning to show themselves, and important matters
affecting the industrial classes will speedily come to the front. Why,
for example, should Lord Dudley inherit coal-mines and land producing
£1000 a day while his colliers have to slave all the week and cannot
get a living?”[536]
The discontent was fanned by well-intentioned if somewhat sentimental
philanthropists, who were publishing their experiences in the sweated
industries and the slums of the great cities. The _Bitter Cry of
Outcast London_ and other gruesome stories were revealing, not only
to the middle class, but also to the “aristocracy of labour,” whole
areas of industrial life which neither Trade Unionism nor Co-operation
could hope to reach. With the middle class the compunction thus excited
resulted in elaborate investigations issuing in inconclusive reports.
A Royal Commission on the Housing of the Poor produced nothing more
effectual than a slight addition to the existing powers of vestries
and Town Councils. Another on the Depression of Trade was absolutely
barren. A Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Poor Law failed
even to discover the problems to be solved. Another on the Sweating
System ended, after years of delay, in an accurate diagnosis of the
evil, coupled with a confession of inability to cope with it. In 1885
an Edinburgh philanthropist provided a thousand pounds for a public
conference to inquire whether some more equitable system of industrial
remuneration could not be suggested: a conference which served only
to cast doubt on such philanthropic schemes as profit-sharing and
the “self-governing workshop,” whilst bringing into prominence the
Socialist proposals.[537] And, more important than all these, Charles
Booth, a great merchant and shipowner, began in 1886, at his own
expense, a systematic statistical inquiry into the actual social
condition of the whole population of London, the impressive results
of which eventually reverberated from one end of the kingdom to the
other.[538]
The outcome of the investigations thus set on foot was an incalculable
impetus to social reform. They had, for the most part, been undertaken
in the expectation that a sober and scientific inquiry would prove
the exceptional character of the harrowing incidents laid bare by
the philanthropists, and unsparingly quoted by the new agitators.
But to the genuine surprise alike of the economists and the Trade
Union leaders, the lurid statements of the sensationalists and the
Socialists were, on the whole, borne out by the statistics. The stories
of unmerited misery were shown to be, not accidental exceptions to a
general condition of moderate well-being, but typical instances of the
average existence of great masses of the population. The “sweater”
turned out to be, not an exceptionally cruel capitalist, but himself
the helpless product of a widespread degeneration which extended
over whole industries. In the wealthiest and most productive city in
the world, Charles Booth, after an exhaustive census, was driven to
the conclusion that a million and a quarter persons fell habitually
below his “Poverty Line.” Thirty-two per cent of the whole population
of London (in some large districts over 60 per cent) were found to
be living in a state of chronic poverty, which precluded not only
the elementary conditions of civilisation and citizenship, but was
incompatible with physical health or industrial efficiency. Moreover,
Charles Booth’s figures and the report of the House of Lords Committee
on Sweating disproved, once for all, the comfortable assumption that
all destitution originated in drink or vice. It was impossible, to use
the well-known phrase of Burke, to draw an indictment against a third
of the people of London, or against two-thirds of the East End.
The daily experience of whole sections of the wage-earners during
these years of depression, and the statistical inquiries of the middle
class, appeared, therefore, to justify the Socialist indictment of
the capitalist system. What was perhaps of more effect was the fact
that the Socialists alone seemed inspired by faith in a radical
transformation of society, and that they alone offered a solution which
had not yet been tried and found wanting. Prior to 1867 it had been
possible to ascribe the evil state of the wage-earners to the malignant
influence of class government and political exclusion. Cobden and
Bright had eloquently described the millennium to be reached through
untaxed products. For a whole generation the leaders of a consolidated
Trade Unionism had demonstrated the advantageous terms that the artisan
might, through collective bargaining and a reserve fund, wring from
his employers. But in face of a protracted lack of employment, the
extended suffrage, Free Trade, and well-administered Trade Unions
proved alike helpless. Twenty years of the franchise had left the town
artisan still at the mercy of commercial gamblers and exposed to the
extortions of the slum landlord. A Liberal Government was actually in
power, wielding an enormous majority, but manifesting no keen desire to
remedy the results of economic inequality. No attempt was being made to
redress even the admitted wrongs of the necessitous taxpayer. The Tea
Duty remained untouched; the Land Tax was left unreformed; whilst the
larger question of using some of the nation’s wealth to provide decent
conditions of existence for the great bulk of the people was not even
mooted. A further Extension of the Franchise, Free Trade, and Popular
Education were still the only social and economic panaceas that the
Liberal party had to offer. But cheapness of commodities was of no use
to the workman who was thrown out of employment; and the spread of
education served but to increase his discontent with existing social
conditions and his ability to understand the theoretic explanations and
practical proposals of the new school of reformers.
The working man found no more comfort in Trade Unionism than in party
politics. The mason, carpenter, or ironfounder saw, for instance,
his old and powerful Trade Society reduced to little more than a
sick and burial club, refusing all support to strikes even against
reductions of wages and increase of hours, and only maintaining
its out-of-work benefit by running heavily into debt to its more
prosperous members.[539] As the lean years followed one on another,
he saw the benefits reduced, the contributions raised, and numbers
of staunch Unionists left high and dry as members “out of benefit.”
The trade friendly society--the “scientific Trade Unionism” of the
Front Bench--was in fact becoming rapidly discredited. John Burns and
Tom Mann, young and energetic members of the Amalgamated Society of
Engineers, were, between 1884 and 1889, vigorously denouncing, up and
down the country, the supineness of their great amalgamated Union. “How
long, how long,” appeals Tom Mann to the Trade Unionists in 1886,[540]
“will you be content with the present half-hearted policy of your
Unions? I readily grant that good work has been done in the past by
the Unions; but, in Heaven’s name, what good purpose are they serving
now? All of them have large numbers out of employment even when their
particular trade is busy. None of the important societies have any
policy other than that of endeavouring to keep wages from falling. The
true Unionist policy of _aggression_ seems entirely lost sight of:
in fact, the average Unionist of to-day is a man with a fossilised
intellect, either hopelessly apathetic, or supporting a policy that
plays directly into the hands of the capitalist exploiter.... I take my
share of the work of the Trade Union to which I belong; but I candidly
confess that unless it shows more vigour at the present time (June
1886) I shall be compelled to take the view--against my will--that
to continue to spend time over the ordinary squabble-investigating,
do-nothing policy will be an unjustifiable waste of one’s energies. I
am sure there are thousands of others in my state of mind.”[541]
“Constituted as it is,” writes John Burns in September 1887,[542]
“Unionism carries within itself the source of its own dissolution....
Their reckless assumption of the duties and responsibilities that
only the State or whole community can discharge, in the nature of
sick and superannuation benefits, at the instance of the middle
class, is crushing out the larger Unions by taxing their members to
an unbearable extent. This so cripples them that the fear of being
unable to discharge their friendly society liabilities often makes them
submit to encroachments by the masters without protest. The result of
this is that all of them have ceased to be Unions for maintaining the
rights of labour, and have degenerated into mere middle and upper class
rate-reducing institutions.”[543]
Here we see the beginning of that agitation against the combination of
friendly benefits with trade protection aims which subsequently became,
for a short time, one of the characteristics of the “New Unionism.” But
if the trade friendly society withered up during these years into a
mere benefit club, the purely trade society showed no greater vitality.
The great depression of 1878-79 had swept out of existence hundreds of
little local Unions which lacked the cohesion given by the friendly
society side. The Lancashire and Midland Miners’ organisations, which
gave no benefits, had either collapsed altogether, or had dissolved
into isolated pit clubs, incapable of combined action. The Lancashire
cotton operatives, the Northumberland and Durham miners, and a few
other essentially trade societies, held together only by surrendering
to the employers one concession after another. With capitalists ready
at any moment to suspend a profitless business, collective bargaining
proved as powerless to avert reductions as the individual contract.
In face of a long-continued depression of trade, marked by frequent
oscillations in particular industries, both types of Trade Unionism, it
seemed, had been tried and found wanting.
These were the circumstances under which the disillusioned
working-class politician or Trade Unionist was reached by the
lectures and writings of the Socialists, who offered him not only a
sympathetic explanation of the ills from which he suffered, but also a
comprehensive scheme of social reform, extending from an Eight Hours
Bill to the Nationalisation of the Means of Production. In a purely
historical essay it is unnecessary for us to discuss the validity of
the optimistic confidence with which the Socialists of these years
declared that under a system of collective ownership the workers would
not only be ensured at all times a competent livelihood, but would
themselves control the administration of the surplus wealth of the
nation. But in tracing the causes of the New Unionism of 1889-90, and
the transformation of the Trade Union Movement from an Individualist to
a Collectivist influence in the political world, we venture to ascribe
a large share to the superior attractiveness of this buoyant faith over
anything offered by the almost cynical fatalism of the old school.
The Socialist agitation benefited between 1886 and 1889 by a series of
undesigned advertisements. Meetings of “the unemployed” in February
1886 led to unexpected riots, which threw all London into a panic,
and were followed by a Government prosecution for sedition. Hyndman,
Burns, Champion, and Williams, as the leaders of the Social Democratic
Federation, were indicted at the Old Bailey, and their trial, ending
in an acquittal, attracted the attention of the whole country to their
doctrines. The “Unemployed” gatherings went on with ever-increasing
noise until November 1887, when the Chief Commissioner of Police issued
a proclamation prohibiting meetings in Trafalgar Square, which had for
a whole generation served as the forum of the London agitator. This
“attack on free speech” by a Conservative Government, coming after
several minor attempts to suppress open-air meetings by its Liberal
predecessor, rallied the forces of London artisan Radicalism to those
of the Socialists. A gigantic demonstration on Sunday, November 13,
1887, was held in defiance of the police, only to be repulsed from
Trafalgar Square by a free use of the police bludgeon and the calling
out of both cavalry and infantry. John Burns and Cunninghame Graham,
M.P., were imprisoned for their share in this transaction. A similar
agitation on a smaller scale was going on in the provinces. On Tyneside
and in the Midlands numerous emissaries of the Social Democratic
Federation and the Socialist League were spreading the revolt against
the helpless apathy into which the Trade Unions had sunk. In every
large industrial centre the indefatigable lecturing of branches of
Socialist organisations was stirring up a vague but effective unrest in
all except the official circle of the Trade Union world.
To the great army of unskilled, or only partially skilled, workmen
concentrated in London and other large cities the new crusade came
as a gospel of deliverance. The unskilled labourer was getting tired
of being referred, as the sole means of bettering his condition, to
the “scientific Trade Unionism” alone recognised by the Front Bench.
Trade Societies which admitted only workmen earning a high standard
rate, which exacted a weekly contribution of not less than a shilling,
and which frequently excluded all but regularly apprenticed men, were
regarded by the builders’ labourer, the gas stoker, or the docker, as
aristocratic corporations with which he had as little in common as
with the House of Lords. “The great bulk of our labourers,” writes
John Burns, “are ignored by the skilled workers. It is this selfish,
snobbish desertion by the higher grades of the lower that makes success
in many disputes impossible. Ostracised by their fellows, a spirit
of revenge alone often prompts men to oppose or remain indifferent
to Unionism, when if the Unions were wiser and more conciliatory,
support would have been forthcoming where now jealousy and discontent
prevails.”[544] Even among the skilled workers, the younger artisans,
if they had joined their Unions at all, were discontented with the
exclusive and apathetic policy of the older members. Thus we find
rising up, in such “aristocratic” Unions as the Amalgamated Society
of Engineers and the London Society of Compositors, a “New Unionist”
party of young men, who vigorously objected to the degradation of a
Trade Union into a mutual insurance company, who protested against
the exclusion of the lowly paid sections from the organisation of the
trade, and who advocated the use of the political influence of the
Society in the interests of Social-Democracy. By 1888 the Socialists
had not only secured the allegiance of large sections of the unskilled
labourers in London and some other towns, but had obtained an important
body of recruits in the great “Amalgamated” societies.
At this pass nothing short of strangulation could have kept the new
spirit out of the Trade Union Congress. It is interesting to notice
that the first sign among the delegates is to be ascribed to the
direct influence of Karl Marx. At the 1878 Congress at Bristol we find
Adam Weiler, an old member of the “International,” and a personal
friend of the great Socialist, reading a paper in which he advocated
legislation to limit the hours of labour.[545] At the next Congress
Weiler took exception to the resolution in favour of establishing a
Peasant Proprietorship moved on behalf of the Parliamentary Committee.
But in that year his amendment in favour of Land Nationalisation
did not even find a seconder. Three years later the effect of Henry
George’s propaganda becomes visible. In 1882, when the land question
was again raised, the two ideals were sharply contrasted, and in
spite of protests against “communistic principles,” a rider declaring
for nationalisation was adopted by 71 votes to 31. The Parliamentary
Committee made no change in their attitude on the question, contending
that the vote had been taken in the absence of many delegates, and
that it did not represent the opinion of the Congress as a whole. This
contention was to some extent borne out by the votes of the next five
Congresses, at all of which amendments in favour of the principle of
nationalisation were rejected, though by decreasing majorities. At
length, in 1887, at the Swansea Congress, the tide turned, and a vague
addendum in favour of Land Nationalisation was accepted.[546] At the
Bradford Congress in 1888 the very idea of Peasant Proprietorship had
disappeared. The representatives of the agricultural labourers now
asked only for individual occupation of publicly owned allotments.
Ultimately the Congress adopted by 66 votes to 5 a distinct declaration
in favour of Land Nationalisation, coupled with an instruction to the
Parliamentary Committee to bring the proposal before the House of
Commons.
Meanwhile Weiler had made another and more successful attempt to
enlist the aid of the Congress in the legal regulation of the hours of
labour. At the 1883 Congress he moved a resolution which instructed
the Parliamentary Committee to obtain the legal limitation to eight
hours of the maximum day of all workers in the employment of public
authorities, or companies exercising Parliamentary powers. This was
seconded by Edward Harford, the General Secretary of the Amalgamated
Society of Railway Servants, and carried, in a thin meeting, by only
33 to 8. In 1885 the movement had so far gained weight that the
Parliamentary Committee thought it expedient to temporise by promoting
an investigation into the amount of overtime worked in Government
departments, with the result of demonstrating how completely the
practice of systematic overtime had neutralised the Nine Hours
victory.[547] At the 1887 Congress at Swansea the Parliamentary
Committee were instructed to take a vote of the Trade Union world
upon the whole question, a vote which revealed the unexpected fact
that Applegarth’s own Union, the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters
and Joiners, had been converted to an Eight Hours Bill.[548] A second
plebiscite, taken at the instance of the following year’s Congress,
showed that such old Unions as the Compositors, the Ironfounders, and
the Railway Servants were swinging round.[549]
In the meantime the growing divergence of policy among the coal-miners,
which we foreshadowed in the last chapter, had brought a powerful
contingent of organised workmen to the support of the new party.
We have already described the conversion of the leaders of the
Northumberland and Durham miners to the principle of the Sliding Scale,
involving, as it did, the dependence of the worker’s standard of
comfort upon the market price of his product. On another point, too,
the two northern counties had broken away from the traditional policy
of the Miners’ organisation. Already in 1863 we noted that Crawford,
one of the ablest of their leaders, was vigorously objecting, at the
Leeds Conference, to an Eight Hours Bill for boys, on the ground that
in Northumberland and Durham, where the hewers often worked in two
shifts, such a restriction would interfere with the men’s convenience.
This resistance to a particular interference with the exceptional
circumstances of the local industry gradually developed into a general
objection to legal regulation of the hours of adult men. We find,
therefore, the Northumberland and Durham miners from 1875 onwards
ranging themselves more and more with the leaders of the iron and
building trades, who, as we have seen, had become largely converted to
the economic conceptions then current among the middle class. The fact
that the Northumberland and Durham Associations, almost alone among
Miners’ Unions, had successfully weathered the bad times of 1877-79,
and the constant presence of one or other of their leaders on the
Parliamentary Committee, caused these opinions to be accepted as those
of the whole industry.
But the miners elsewhere did not long rest content with the new policy
of Durham and Northumberland. In December 1881 the amalgamated South
and West Yorkshire Miners’ Associations formally terminated the then
existing Sliding Scale, and passed a resolution in favour of the policy
of restricting the output. During the following years the Yorkshire
employers several times proposed the re-establishment of a scale, but
the men insisted on its being accompanied by an agreement for a minimum
below which wages should in no event fall--a condition to which the
coal-owners uniformly refused their assent. The lead given by the
Yorkshire miners was quickly followed by other districts, notably
by Lancashire. In this county Trade Unionism among the miners had,
as we have seen, gone to pieces in the bad years. Reorganisation in
local Unions, came in 1881; and a Lancashire Miners’ Federation was
successfully established in the following year. At their Conference of
1883 the delegates of the Lancashire miners resolved, “That the time
has come when the working miners shall regulate the production of coal;
that no collier or other underground worker shall work more than five
days or shifts per week; and that the hours from bank to bank be eight
per shift.” Finding it impossible to secure their object by strikes,
the Lancashire men turned to that policy of legislative regulation
which had marked the proceedings of the Conference of 1863.
With the improvement in trade which began in 1885, the membership
and influence of the Lancashire and Yorkshire organisations
rapidly increased, and new federations were started throughout the
Midlands. The Scotch miners, too, had in 1886-87 a short outburst of
organisation, when a national federation was formed with a membership
of 23,000. All these Associations adopted the policy of regulating the
output, and the Scotch miners, in particular, conducted, in 1887, a
vigorous agitation in support of the clause limiting the day’s work to
eight hours, which two Scottish members endeavoured to insert in the
Mines Regulation Act of 1887.[550] But the Executive of the National
Union had, since Macdonald’s death in 1881, fallen entirely into the
hands of the Northumberland and Durham leaders. Under their influence
it maintained its adherence to the principle of the Sliding Scale
and its hostility to the Eight Hours Bill, thereby alienating, not
only the new federations, but also the old-established and powerful
Yorkshire Miners’ Association. From 1885 to 1888 the battle between the
contending doctrines ranged at every miners’ conference.[551] During
the latter year the combatants withdrew to separate camps. In September
1888 a conference of the representatives of non-sliding scale districts
was called together in Manchester, when arrangements were made for the
establishment of a new federation, into which no district governed by
a sliding scale was to be allowed to enter. From this time forth the
old National Union on the one hand, and the new Miners’ Federation on
the other, became rivals for the allegiance of the various district
associations, and somewhat unsympathetic critics of each other’s
policy and actions. The issue was not long doubtful. The National
Union gradually shrank up to Northumberland and Durham, whilst the
Miners’ Federation, with its aggressive policy and its semi-Socialistic
principles of a minimum wage and a legal day, grew apace. From 36,000
members in 1888, it rose to 96,000 in 1889, 147,000 in 1891, and over
200,000 in 1893, overshadowing in its growth all existing Trade Union
organisations. The Socialist advocates of the legal limitation of the
hours of labour accordingly enjoyed from 1888 onward, both in the Trade
Union Congress and at the polling-booths, the support of a rapidly
growing contingent of organised miners, whose solid adhesion has done
more than anything else to promote the general movement in favour of an
Eight Hours Bill.
It is easy at this distance to recognise, in the altered tone of the
rank and file of Congress delegates, a reflection of the wider change
of opinion outside. But to the Trade Union Front Bench, as, in fact,
to most of the politicians of the time, it was incredible that the new
ideas should gain any real footing among the skilled artisans. The
Parliamentary Committee regarded the innovations with much the same
feeling as that with which they had met the proposals of a little gang
which had, in 1882, vainly attempted to foist the principles of fiscal
protection upon the Congress.[552] When Congress insisted on passing
a resolution with which the Parliamentary Committee found themselves
in disagreement, this expression of opinion was sometimes ignored as
being nothing more than the fad of particular delegates. It was in vain
that the Congress of 1888, after ten years’ deliberation, definitely
decided in favour of the principles of Land Nationalisation instead of
Peasant Proprietorship. The Parliamentary Committee contented itself
with promising that “a well-considered measure” would be put forward
by the Committee. The Eight Hours question could not be treated so
cavalierly. Direct resolutions in favour of legislative action were
therefore staved off by proposals for inquiry. When a vote of the
Trade Union world was decided upon, the Parliamentary Committee, in
conjunction with many of the General Secretaries, were able practically
to baulk the investigation. The voting paper was loaded with warnings
and arguments against legislative action. No attempt was made to ensure
a genuine vote of the rank and file. In some cases the Executive
Committees were allowed to take upon themselves the responsibility of
declaring the opinions held by the members of their societies, the
total membership of which was then reckoned in the voting. In other
instances the Executives were permitted without remonstrance simply
to burke the question. The inquiry failed to elicit any trustworthy
census of the opinion of the Trade Union world.
An equal lack of sympathy was shown in connection with the growing
feeling of the Congress in favour of the participation of British
Trade Unionists in International Congresses. At the express
command of Congress, the Parliamentary Committee sent delegates to
the International gatherings of 1883 and 1886. But though these
instructions were complied with, the Parliamentary Committee made it
clear, in their annual reports, that far from favouring International
action, “the position they assumed was that they were so well
organised, so far ahead of foreign workmen, that little could be
done until these were more on a level” with the skilled workers
of England.[553] The Congress of 1886 nevertheless instructed the
Parliamentary Committee to summon an International Conference in London
in the following year. Instead of complying with this instruction, the
Committee published, in May 1887, a lengthy pamphlet explaining that,
owing to the indisposition of foreign workmen to make any pecuniary
sacrifices for their Trade Unions, and the consequent lack of any
stable working-class organisations, they had decided to refer the
whole question again to the forthcoming Trade Union Congress. When
the Congress met at Swansea in September 1887, it soon became evident
that the Parliamentary Committee, on this question as on others, was
quite out of touch with its constituents. In spite of the influence of
the Front Bench, a resolution in favour of an International Congress
was adopted; and the Committee succeeded only in inducing Congress to
impose restrictions which were intended to exclude the delegates of the
German Social-Democratic party. The International Congress was held in
London in November 1888. Notwithstanding every precaution, a majority
of the representatives proved to be of Socialist views, Mrs. Besant,
John Burns, Tom Mann, and Keir Hardie appearing among the British
delegates. The stiff and unsympathetic attitude of the Parliamentary
Committee led to heated and, at times, unseemly controversies; and
the resolutions passed were treated by the Committee as of no account
whatsoever.
The net result of these proceedings was the loss by the Parliamentary
Committee of all intellectual leadership of the Trade Union world. They
failed either to resist the new ideas or to guide them into practicable
channels. The official Trade Union programme from 1885 to 1889 became
steadily more colourless, in striking contrast with the rapid march
of politics in the country, which was sweeping the Liberal party
forward year by year until in 1891 it adopted the so-called “Newcastle
Programme.” This programme formulated, though very inadequately, the
national side of that semi-collectivist policy which under the name of
Progressivism had superseded Liberalism in the London County Council.
All that the Parliamentary Committee did was to abandon, one by one,
the proposals for the democratisation of the civil and judicial
administration which the Front Bench had so much at heart, without
replacing them by the more robust resolutions which the Congress
in these years was passing. The Land Question, on which a vigorous
advocacy of the creation of small freeholders had been formerly
maintained, dwindled to a meaningless demand for undefined reform of
the land laws, and finally disappeared altogether on the adoption by
the Congress of the principle of nationalisation. The maintenance of
the Nine Hours Day, and the further reduction of the hours of labour by
means of voluntary combination (a frequent item in the official agenda
from 1875 to 1879) gradually dropped out altogether as the new demand
for legal regulation gathered strength. In short, the Parliamentary
Committee had perforce to give up those items in their programme which
were contrary to the new ideas of Congress, whilst they silently
abstained from incorporating the new resolutions with which they were
personally not in agreement.
It would, however, be unfair to assume that the stock of official
Trade Unionism was, during these years, absolutely barren of new
developments. To Mr. C. J. Drummond,[554] then Secretary to the
London Society of Compositors, and a friend of the Parliamentary
Committee, belongs the credit of having taken the first step towards
the enforcement, through the Government, of a standard minimum wage. On
the revision of the Government printing contract in 1884, Mr. Drummond
secured the support of the Parliamentary Committee in an attempt to
induce the Stationery Office to adopt, as the basis for the contract,
the Trade Union rates of the London compositors. This attempt was,
in the main, successful; but the new contract was nevertheless given
to a “closed” house, in which no member of the Union could work.
The compositors did not let the matter rest. When the President of
the Local Government Board (Joseph Chamberlain) issued a circular
in January 1886, as to the effects of the depression in trade, Mr.
Drummond replied by explicitly demanding the Government’s recognition
of the Standard Wage in all their dealings. The idea spread with
great rapidity. A general demand was started that public authorities
should present a good example as employers of labour by themselves
paying Trade Union rates, and insisting on their contractors doing the
same. Candidates for Parliament at the General Election of 1886 found
themselves, at the instance of the London Society of Compositors,[555]
for the first time “heckled” as to their willingness to insist on “Fair
Wages”; and it began slowly to dawn upon election agents that it might
be prejudicial for their election literature to bear the imprint of
“rat houses.” In October 1886 the action of the London School Board in
giving its printing contract to an “unfair” house was bitterly resented
by the London compositors, who induced the London Trades Council
to go on a vain deputation of protest. When, in November 1888, the
London School Board election came round, A. G. Cook, a member of the
London Society of Compositors, secured election for Finsbury, avowedly
as a champion of Trade Union wages; and two members of the Fabian
Society, Mrs. Annie Besant and the Rev. Stewart Headlam, won seats as
Socialists. By their eloquence and tactical skill these members induced
the Board, early in 1889, to declare that it would henceforth insist
on the payment of “Fair Wages” by all its contractors, a policy in
which the Board was promptly followed by the newly established London
County Council.[556] This new departure by the leading public bodies in
the Metropolis did much to bring about a common understanding between
the official Trade Unionists and the new movement. It is needless to
describe in this place how, since that date, the principle of “Fair
Wages” has developed. By 1894 a hundred and fifty local authorities
had adopted some kind of “Fair Wages” resolution. In 1890, and more
explicitly still in 1893, successive Governments found it necessary
to repudiate the old principle of buying in the cheapest market,
in favour of the now widespread feeling that public authorities as
large employers of labour, instead of ignoring the condition of their
employees, should use their influence to maintain the Standard Rate of
Wages and Standard Hours of Labour recognised and in practice obtained
by the Trade Unions concerned.
Though the Front Bench as a whole maintained during these years its
policy of contemptuous inactivity, there were, as we have seen,
some signs of the permeation of the new ideas. It was under these
circumstances a grave misfortune that the inevitable criticism on
the Parliamentary Committee began by a scurrilous attack upon the
personal character and conduct of its leaders.[557] During the years
1887-89 the conscientious adhesion to the Liberal party of most of
the Parliamentary Committee was made the occasion for gross charges
of personal corruption. The General Secretaries of the great Unions,
men who had for a lifetime diligently served their constituents, found
their influence undermined, their character attacked, and themselves
denounced, by the circulation all over the country of insidious
accusations of treachery to the working classes. These charges found
a too ready acceptance among, and were repeated by, those young
and impatient recruits of the new movement who knew nothing of the
history and services of the men they were attacking. In the year 1889
the friction reached its climax. During the summer the attacks upon
the personal character of the Front Bench were redoubled. As the
date of the Trade Union Congress approached, it became known that a
determined attempt would be made by the Socialist delegates to oust the
Parliamentary Committee from office. The Congress met at Dundee, and
plunged straight into an angry conflict in which the Socialists were
completely routed. The regular attenders of the Congress had, as we
have seen, been gradually absorbing many of the new ideas, and were not
altogether satisfied with the way their resolutions had been ignored
by the Parliamentary Committee. But all discontent or criticism was
swept away by the anger which the character of the attack had excited.
A great majority of the delegates came expressly pledged to support
Broadhurst and his colleagues, and when the division was taken only 11
out of a meeting of 188 delegates were found to vote against him. The
Cotton Operatives who had at all times supported factory legislation,
the Miners who were demanding an Eight Hours Bill, the Londoners
who came from the centre of the Socialist agitation--all rallied to
defend the Parliamentary Committee. The little knot of assailants
were thoroughly discredited; and the triumph of the “old gang” was
complete.[558]
The victory of the Parliamentary Committee was hailed with satisfaction
by all who were alarmed at the progress of the new ideas. For a moment
it looked as if the organised Trade Unions of skilled workers had
definitely separated themselves from the new labour movement growing
up around them. Such a separation would, in our opinion, have been an
almost irreparable disaster. The Trade Union Congress could claim to
represent less than 10 per cent of the wage-earners of the country.
Many of the old societies were already shrinking up into insignificant
minorities of superior workmen, intent mainly on securing their sick
and superannuation benefits. Any definite exclusion of wider ideals
might easily have reduced the whole Trade Union organisation to nothing
more than a somewhat stagnant department of the Friendly Society
movement. This danger was averted by a series of dramatic events which
brought the new movement once more inside the Trade Union ranks. At the
moment that Henry Broadhurst was triumphing over his enemies at Dundee,
the London dock-labourers were marching to that brilliant victory over
their employers which changed the whole face of the Trade Union world.
The great dock strike of 1889 was the culmination of an attempt to
organise the unskilled workers which had begun in London two or three
years before. The privations suffered by the unemployed labourers
during the years of depression of trade, and the new spirit of
hopefulness due to the Socialist propaganda, had led to efforts being
made to bring the vast hordes of unskilled workmen in the Metropolis
into some kind of organisation. At first this movement made very little
progress. In July 1888, however, the harsh treatment suffered by the
women employed in making lucifer matches roused the burning indignation
of Mrs. Besant, then editing _The Link_, a little weekly newspaper
which had arisen out of the struggle for Trafalgar Square. A fiery
leading article had the unexpected result of causing the match-girls
to revolt; and 672 of them came out on strike. Without funds, without
organisation, the struggle seemed hopeless. But by the indefatigable
energy of Mrs. Besant and Herbert Burrows public opinion was aroused
in a manner never before witnessed; £400 was subscribed by hundreds
of sympathisers in all classes; and after a fortnight’s obstinacy the
employers were compelled, by sheer pressure of public feeling, to make
some concessions to their workers.