Hitherto success had been in almost exact proportion to the workers’
strength. It was a new experience for the weak to succeed because of
their very weakness, by means of the intervention of the public. The
lesson was not lost on other classes of workers. The London gas-stokers
were being organised by Burns, Mann, and Tillett, aided by William
Thorne, himself a gas-worker and a man of sterling integrity and
capacity. The Gas-workers and General Labourers’ Union, established
in May 1889, quickly enrolled many thousands of members, who in the
first days of August simultaneously demanded a reduction of their
hours of labour from twelve to eight per day. After an interval of
acute suspense, during which the directors of the three great London
gas companies measured their forces, peaceful counsels prevailed, and
the Eight Hours Day, to the general surprise of the men no less than
that of the public, was conceded without a struggle, and was even
accompanied by a slight increase of the week’s wages.[559]
The success of such unorganised and unskilled workers as the
Match-makers and the Gas-stokers led to renewed efforts to bring the
great army of Dock-labourers into the ranks of Trade Unionism. For two
years past the prominent London Socialists had journeyed to the dock
gates in the early hours of the morning to preach organised revolt
to the crowds of casuals struggling for work. Meanwhile Benjamin
Tillett, then working as a labourer in the tea warehouses, was
spending his strength in the apparently hopeless task of constituting
the Tea-workers and General Labourers’ Union. The membership of this
society fluctuated between 300 and 2500 members; it had practically
no funds; and its very existence seemed precarious. Suddenly the
organisation received a new impulse. An insignificant dispute on the
12th of August 1889 as to the amount of “plus” (or bonus earned over
and above the five-pence per hour) on a certain cargo, brought on an
impulsive strike of the labourers at the South-West India Dock. The men
demanded sixpence an hour, the abolition of sub-contract and piecework,
extra pay for overtime, and a minimum engagement of four hours. Tillett
called to his aid his friends Tom Mann and John Burns, and appealed
to the whole body of dock labourers to take up the fight. The strike
spread rapidly to all the docks north of the Thames. Within three
days ten thousand labourers had, with one accord, left the precarious
and ill-paid work to get which they had, morning after morning,
fought at the dock gates. The two powerful Unions of Stevedores (the
better-paid, trained workmen who load ships for export) cast in their
lot with the dockers, and in the course of the next week practically
all the river-side labour had joined the strike. Under the magnetic
influence of John Burns, who suddenly became famous as a labour leader
on both sides of the globe, the traffic of the world’s greatest port
was, for over four weeks, completely paralysed. An electric spark of
sympathy with the poor dockers fired the enthusiasm of all classes of
the community. Public disapproval hindered the dock companies from
obtaining, even for their unskilled labour, sufficient blacklegs to
take the strikers’ place. A public subscription of £48,736 allowed
Burns to organise an elaborate system of strike-pay, which not only
maintained the honest docker, but also bribed every East End loafer
to withhold his labour; and finally the concentrated pressure of
editors, clergymen, shareholders, ship-owners, and merchants enabled
Cardinal Manning and Sydney (afterwards Lord) Buxton, as self-appointed
mediators, to compel the Dock Directors to concede practically the
whole of the men’s demands, a delay of six weeks being granted to allow
the new arrangements to be made. As in the case of the match-girls
in the previous year, the most remarkable feature of the dockers’
strike was the almost universal sympathy with the workers’ demands. A
practical manifestation of that sympathy was given by the workmen of
Australia. The Australian newspapers published telegraphic accounts of
the conflict, with descriptions of the dockers’ wrongs, which produced
an unparalleled and unexpected result. Public subscriptions in aid
of the London dockers were opened in all the principal towns on the
Australian continent; and money poured in from all sides. Over £30,000
was remitted to London by telegraph--an absolutely unique contribution
towards the strike subsidy which went far to win the victory ultimately
achieved.[560]
The immediate result of the dockers’ success was the formation of a
large number of Trade Unions among the unskilled labourers. Branches
of the Dock, Wharf, and Riverside Labourers’ Union (into which
Tillett’s little society was now transformed) were established at
all the principal ports. A rival society of dockers, established at
Liverpool, enrolled thousands of members at Glasgow and Belfast. The
unskilled labourers in Newcastle joined the Tyneside and National
Labour Union, which soon extended to all the neighbouring towns. The
Gas-workers’ Union enrolled tens of thousands of labourers of all
kinds in the provincial cities. Organisation began again among the
farm labourers. The National Union of Agricultural Labourers, which
had sunk to a few thousand scattered members, suddenly rose in 1890
to over 14,000. New societies arose, which took in general as well
as farm labourers; such as the Eastern Counties Labour Federation,
which, by 1892, had 17,000 members; and the smaller societies centring
respectively on Norwich, Devizes, Reading, Hitchin, Ipswich, and
Kingsland in Herefordshire.[561] The General Railway Workers’ Union,
originally established in 1889 as a rival to the Amalgamated Society
of Railway Servants, took in great numbers of general labourers. The
National Amalgamated Sailors and Firemen’s Union,[562] established in
1887, expanded during 1889 to a membership of 65,000. Within a year
after the dockers’ victory probably over 200,000 workers had been added
to the Trade Union ranks, recruited from sections of the labour world
formerly abandoned as incapable of organisation. All these societies
were marked by low contributions and comprehensive membership. They
were, at the outset, essentially, if not exclusively, devoted to
trade protection, and were largely political in their aims. Their
characteristic spirit is aptly expressed by the resolution of the
Congress of the General Railway Workers’ Union on the 19th of November
1890: “That the Union shall remain a fighting one, and shall not be
encumbered with any sick or accident fund.” “We have at present,”
reports the General Secretary of the National Union of Gas-workers and
General Labourers in November 1889, “one of the strongest labour Unions
in England. It is true we have only one benefit attached, and that is
strike pay. I do not believe in having sick pay, out-of-work pay, and a
number of other pays.... The whole aim and intention of this Union is
to reduce the hours of labour and reduce Sunday work.”[563]
A wave of Trade Unionism, comparable in extent with those of 1833-34
and 1873-74, was now spreading into every corner of British industry.
Already in 1888 the revival of trade has led to a marked increase in
Trade Union membership. This normal growth now received a great impulse
from the sensational events of the Dock strike. Even the oldest and
most aristocratic Unions were affected by the revivalist fervour of the
new leaders. The eleven principal societies in the shipbuilding and
metal trades, which had been, since 1885, on the decline, increased
from 115,000 at the end of 1888 to 130,000 in 1889, 145,000 in 1890,
and 155,000 in 1891. The ten largest Unions in the building trades,
which between 1885 and 1888 had, in the aggregate, likewise declined
in numbers, rose from 57,000 in 1888 to 63,000 in 1889, 80,000 in
1890, and 94,000 in 1891. In certain individual societies the increase
in membership during these years was unparalleled in their history.
We have already referred to the rapid rise between 1888 and 1891 of
that modern Colossus of Unions, the Miners’ Federation. The Operative
Society of Bricklayers, established in 1848, grew from a fairly
stationary 7000 in 1888, to over 17,000 in 1891. The National Society
of Boot and Shoe Operatives, established in 1874, went from 11,000 in
1888 to 30,000 in 1891. And, to turn to quite a different industry,
the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, a trade friendly society
of the old type, established in 1872, rose from 12,000 in 1888 to
30,000 in 1891. Nor was the expansion confined to a mere increase in
membership. New Trades Councils sprang up in all directions, whilst
those already existing were rejoined by the trades which had left
them. Federations of the Unions in kindred trades were set on foot,
and competing societies in the same trade sank their rivalry in the
formation of local joint committees.
The victory of the London Dockers and the impetus it gave to Trade
Unionism throughout the country at last opened the eyes of the
Trade Union world to the significance of the new movement. It was
no longer possible for the Parliamentary Committee to denounce the
Socialists as a set of outside intriguers, when Burns and Mann,
now become the representative working-men Socialists, stood at the
head of a body of 200,000 hitherto unorganised workmen. The general
secretaries of the older Unions, forming a compact official party
behind the Front Bench, were veering around towards the advanced
party. Their constituencies were becoming permeated with Socialism.
In many instances the older members now supported the new faith. In
other cases they found themselves submerged by the large accessions
to their membership which, as we have already seen, resulted from the
general expansion. The process of conversion was facilitated by the
genuine admiration felt by the whole Trade Union world for the great
organising power and generalship shown by the leaders of the new
movement, and by the cessation of the personal abuse and recrimination
which had hitherto marred the controversy. At the Dundee Congress of
1889, as we have seen, Henry Broadhurst, and his colleagues on the
Parliamentary Committee, had triumphed all along the line. Within a
year the situation had entirely changed. The Stonemasons, Broadhurst’s
own society, had decided, by a vote of the members, to support an Eight
Hours Bill, and Broadhurst, under these circumstances, had perforce
to refuse to act as their representative. The Executive Council of
the Amalgamated Society of Engineers chose Burns and Mann as two out
of their five delegates, impressing upon them all a recommendation
to vote for the legal limitation of the hours of labour. Both the
old-established societies of Carpenters gave a similar mandate. The
Miners’ Federation this time led the attack on the old Front Bench,
and the resolution in favour of a general Eight Hours Bill was
carried, after a heated debate, by 193 to 155. Broadhurst resigned his
position as Secretary of the Parliamentary Committee on the ground
of ill-health. George Shipton, the secretary of the London Trades
Council, publicly declared his conversion to the legal regulation of
the hours of labour. The Liverpool Congress was as decisive a victory
for the Socialists as that of Dundee had been for the Parliamentary
Committee. The delegates passed in all sixty resolutions. “Out of these
sixty resolutions,” said John Burns, “forty-five were nothing more
or less than direct appeals to the State and Municipalities of this
country to do for the workman what Trade Unionism, ‘Old’ and ‘New,’
has proved itself incapable of doing. Forty-five out of the sixty
resolutions were asking for State or Municipal interference on behalf
of the weak against the strong. ‘Old’ Trade Unionists, from Lancashire,
Northumberland, and Birmingham, asked for as many of these resolutions
as the delegates from London; but it is a remarkable and significant
fact that 19 out of 20 delegates were in favour of the ‘New’ Trades
Union ideas of State interferences in all things except reduction of
hours, and even on this we secured a majority that certainly entitles
us Socialists to be jubilant at our success.”[564]
But whilst the new faith was being adopted by the rank and file of
Trade Unionists the character of the Socialist propaganda had been
undergoing an equal transformation. The foremost representative
of the Collectivist views had hitherto been the Social-Democratic
Federation, of which Burns and Mann were active members. Under the
dominant influence of Mr. H. M. Hyndman, this association adopted the
economic basis and political organisation of State Socialism. Yet
we find, along with these modern views, a distinct recrudescence of
the characteristic projects of the revolutionary Owenism of 1833-34.
The student of the volumes of _Justice_ between 1884 and 1889 will
be struck by the unconscious resemblance of many of the ideas and
much of the phraseology of its contributors, to those of the _Poor
Man’s Guardian_ and the _Pioneer_ of 1834. We do not here allude to
the revival, in 1885, of the old demand for an Eight Hours Bill, a
measure regarded on both occasions as a “mere palliative.” Nor need we
refer to the constant assumption, made alike by Robert Owen and the
Social-Democratic lecturers, that the acceptance of the Labour-value
theory would enable the difficulty of the “unemployed” to be solved
by organising the mutual exchange of their unmarketable products.
But both in _Justice_ and the _Pioneer_ we see the same disbelief
in separate action by particular Trade Unions, in contrast to an
organisation including “every trade, skilled and unskilled, of every
nationality under the sun.”[565] “The real emancipation of labour,”
says the official manifesto of the Social-Democratic Federation to
the Trade Unions of Great Britain in September 1884, “can only be
effected by the solemn banding together of millions of human beings
in a federation as wide as the civilised world.”[566] “The day has
gone by,” we read in 1887, “for the efforts of isolated trades....
Nothing is to be gained for the workers as a class without the complete
organisation of labourers of all grades, skilled and unskilled....
We appeal therefore earnestly to the skilled artisans of all trades,
Unionists and non-Unionists alike, to make common cause with their
unskilled brethren, and with us Social-Democrats, so that the workers
may themselves take hold of the means of production, and organise a
Co-operative Commonwealth for themselves and their children.”[567]
And if the “scientific Socialists” of 1885 were logically pledged to
the administration of industry by the officials of the community at
large, none the less do we see constantly cropping up, especially among
the working-class members, Owen’s diametrically opposite proposal
that the workers must “own their own factories and decide by vote
who their managers and foremen shall be.”[568] Above all we see the
same faith in the near and inevitable advent of a sudden revolution,
when “it will only need a compact minority to take advantage of some
opportune accident that will surely come, to overthrow the present
system, and once and for all lift the toilers from the present social
degradation.”[569] “Noble Robert Owen,” says Mr. Hyndman in 1885,
“seventy years ago perceived ‘the utter impossibility of succeeding
in permanently improving the condition of our population by any
half-measures.’ We see the same truth if possible yet more clearly
now. But the revolution which in his day was unprepared is now ripe
and ready.... Nothing short of a revolution which shall place the
producers of wealth in control of their own country can possibly change
matters for the better.... Will it be peaceful? We hope it may. That
does not depend upon us. But, peaceful or violent, the great social
revolution of the nineteenth century is at hand, and if fighting should
be necessary the workers may at least remember the profound historical
truth that ‘Force is the midwife of progress delivering the old society
pregnant with the new,’ and reflect that they are striving for the
final overthrow of a tyranny more degrading than the worst chattel
slavery of ancient times.”[570] “Let our mission be,” he writes in
1887, “to help to band together the workers of the world for the great
class struggle against their exploiters. No better date could be chosen
for the establishment of such international action on a sound basis
than the year 1889, which the classes look forward to with trembling
and the masses with hope. I advocate no hasty outbreak, no premature
and violent attempt on the part of the people to realise the full
Social-Democratic programme. But I do say that from this time onwards
we, as the Social-Democratic Labour Party of Great Britain, should make
every effort to bear our part in the celebration by the international
proletariat of the First Centenary of the great French Revolution, and
thus to prepare for a complete International Social Revolution before
the end of the century.”[571]
The year 1889, instead of ushering in a “complete International Social
Revolution” by a universal compact of the workers, turned the current
of Socialist propaganda from revolutionary to constitutional channels.
The advent of political Democracy had put out of date the project
of “a combined assault by workers of every trade and grade against
the murderous monopoly of the minority.”[572] For a moment, at the
very crisis of the dockers’ struggle, the idea of a “General Strike”
flickers up, only to be quickly abandoned as impracticable. When the
problems of administration had actually to be faced by the new leaders
the specially Owenite characteristics of the Socialist propaganda
were quietly dropped. In January 1889 John Burns was elected a member
of the London County Council, and quickly found himself organising
the beginnings of a bureaucratic municipal Collectivism, as far
removed from Owen’s “national companies” as from the conceptions of
the Manchester School. Tom Mann, as president of the Dockers’ Union,
could not help discovering how impracticable it was to set to work
his unemployed members, accustomed only to general labour, in the
production for mutual exchange of the bread and clothing of which
they were in need. And whether working in municipal committees, or at
the head office of a great Union, both Burns and Mann had perforce to
realise the impossibility of bringing about any sudden or simultaneous
change in the social or industrial organisation of the whole community,
or even of one town or trade.
Under these circumstances it is perhaps not surprising that Burns
and Mann left the Social Democratic Federation, and found themselves
hotly denounced by their old comrades.[573] With the defection of the
New Unionists, revolutionary Socialism ceased to grow; and the rival
propaganda of constitutional action became the characteristic feature
of the British Socialist Movement. Far from abusing or deprecating
Trade Unionism or Co-operation, the constitutional Collectivists urged
it as a primary duty upon every working-class Socialist to become
a member of his Trade Union, to belong to the local Co-operative
Society, and generally to take as active a part as possible in all
organisations. Instead of denouncing partial reforms as mischievous
attempts to defeat “the Social Revolution,” the New Unionist leaders
appealed to their followers to put their own representatives on Town
Councils, and generally to use their electoral influence to bring
about, in a regular and constitutional manner, the particular changes
they had at heart. Instead of circulating calumnies against the
personal character of Trade Union leaders, they flooded the Trade Union
world with Socialist literature, dealing not so much in rhetorical
appeals or Utopian aspirations as in economic expositions of the actual
grievances of industrial life. The vague resolutions of the Trades
Union Congresses were worked out in practical detail, or even embodied
in draft bills which the local member of Parliament might be invited to
introduce, or driven to support.
The new policy, adopted as it was by such prominent Socialists as
Burns, Mann, and Tillett, and Mrs. Besant, appeared, from 1889 onward,
increasingly justified by its success. The Collectivist victories
on the London School Board and County Council, the steady growth
of municipal activity, and the increasing influence exercised by
working-men members of representative bodies, went far to persuade
both Socialists and Trade Unionists that the only practicable means
of securing for the community the ownership and control of the means
of production lay in a wide extension of that national and municipal
organisation of public services towards which Parliament and the Town
Councils had already taken the first steps. In those industries in
which neither national nor municipal administration was yet possible,
the Socialists demanded such a regulation of the conditions of
employment as would ensure to every worker a minimum Standard of Life.
The extension of the Factory Acts and the more thorough administration
of the Sanitary Law accordingly received a new impulse. In another
direction the drastic taxation of Rent and Interest, pressed for by
Land Nationalisers and Socialists alike, was justified as leading
eventually to the collective absorption of all unearned incomes. In
short, from 1889 onward, the chief efforts of the British Socialist
Movement have been directed, not to bringing about any sudden,
complete, or simultaneous revolution, but to impregnating all the
existing forces of society with Collectivist ideals and Collectivist
principles.[574]
With the advent of the “New Unionism” of 1889-90 we close this chapter.
We shall see, in subsequent chapters to what extent, and in what way,
the Trade Union Movement was permanently affected by the new movement.
But we append at this point a brief account of what seem to us, first,
the ephemeral features and, secondly, the more durable results of an
impulse which did not wholly spend its force for a whole decade.
If we were to believe some of the more enthusiastic apostles of the
“New Unionism,” we should imagine that the aggressive trade society
of unskilled labourers, unencumbered with friendly benefits, was
an unprecedented departure in the history of labour organisation.
Those who have followed our history thus far will know better than
to entertain such an illusion, itself an old characteristic of Trade
Unionist revivals. The purely trade society is as old as Trade Unionism
itself. Throughout the whole history of the movement we find two
types of societies co-existing. At special crises in the annals of
Trade Unionism we see one or other of these types taking the lead,
and becoming the “New Unionism” of that particular period. Both trade
society and friendly society with trade objects were common in the
eighteenth century. Legal persecution of trade combination brought to
the front the Union cloaked in the guise of a benefit club; and it
was mainly for organisations of this type that Place and Hume won the
emancipation of 1824-1825. In 1833-34 we find Place deploring as a
mischievous innovation the growth of the new “Trades Unions” without
friendly benefits. Twenty years later we see the leadership reverting
to the “new model” of an elaborate trade friendly society which, for
a whole generation, was vehemently denounced by employers as a fraud
on the provident workman. The “New Unionism” of 1852, described by so
friendly a critic as Professor Beesly as a novel departure, became,
in its turn, the “Old Unionism” of 1889, when the more progressive
spirits again plumed themselves on eliminating from their brand-new
organisations the enervating influences of friendly benefits.
A closer examination of the facts shows that this almost rhythmical
alternation of type has been only apparent. The impartial student will
notice that whilst the purely trade society has been persistently
adhered to by certain important industries, such as the Coal-miners
and the Cotton-spinners, other trades, like the Engineers and the
Ironfounders, have remained equally constant to the trade friendly
society; whilst others, again, such as the Compositors and the
Carpenters, have passed backwards and forwards from one model to the
other. But besides this adaptation of type to the circumstances of
particular industries, we see also a preference for the purely trade
society on no higher ground than its cheapness. The high contributions
and levies paid by the Cotton-spinners to their essentially trade
society are as far beyond the means of the Agricultural Labourer or
the Docker as the weekly premiums for superannuation, sick, and other
benefits charged to the Amalgamated Engineer. When, as in 1833-34,
1872, and 1889, a wave of enthusiasm sweeps the unskilled labourers
into the Trade Union ranks, it is obviously necessary to form, at
any rate in the first instance, organisations which make no greater
tax upon their miserable earnings than a penny or twopence per
week. The apparent rhythm of alternations between the two types of
organisation is due, therefore, not to any general abandonment of one
for the other, but to the accidental prominence, in certain crises of
Trade Union history, of the Unions belonging to particular trades or
classes of wage-earners. When, for instance, the cotton-spinners, the
builders, and the unskilled labourers of 1834 loomed large to Francis
Place as a revolutionary force, the purely trade society appeared to
him to be the source of all that was evil in Trade Unionism. When,
in 1848-52, the iron trades were conspiring against piecework and
overtime, it was especially the illicit combination of trade and
friendly society which attracted the attention of the public, and
called forth the denunciations of the capitalist class. And when in
1889 the dockers were stopping the trade of London, and the coal-miners
and cotton-spinners were pressing upon both political parties their
demands for legislative interference, we see George Howell voicing
the opposition to exclusively trade societies as dangerously militant
bodies.[575]
If the purely trade society is no new thing, still less is the
extension of Trade Unionism to the unskilled labourer an unprecedented
innovation. The enthusiasm which, in 1872, enrolled a hundred thousand
agricultural labourers in a few months, produced also numerous small
societies of town labourers, some of which survived for years before
absorption into larger organisations. The London and Counties Labour
League, established as the Kent and Sussex Agricultural and General
Labourers’ Union in 1872, has maintained its existence down to the
present day. The expansion of 1852 led to the formation in Glasgow of
a Labourers’ Society, which is reputed to have enrolled thousands of
members. But it is with the enthusiasm of 1833-34 that the movement
of 1889-90 has in this respect the greatest analogy. The almost
instantaneous conversion to Trade Unionism after the dock strike of
tens of thousands of the unskilled labourers of the towns recalls,
indeed, nothing so much as the rapid enrolment of recruits among
the poorest wage-earners by the emissaries of the Grand National
Consolidated Trades Union.
But however strongly the outward features of the wave of 1889-90 may
remind the student of those of 1833-34, the characteristics peculiar
to the new movement significantly measure the extent of the advance,
both in social theory and social methods, made by the wage-earners in
the two intervening generations. Time and experience alone will show
how far the empirical Socialism of the Trade Unionist of 1889, with
its eclectic opportunism, its preference for municipal collectivism,
its cautious adaptation of existing social structure, and its modest
aspirations to a gradually increasing participation of the workmen in
control, may safely be pronounced superior in practicability to the
revolutionary and universal Communism of Robert Owen. In truth, the
radical distinction between 1833-34 and 1889-90 is not a matter of
the particular social theories which inspired the outbursts. To the
great majority of the Trade Unionists the theories of the leaders at
either date did but embody a vague aspiration after a more equitable
social order. The practical difference--the difference reflected in
the character and temper of the men attracted to the two movements,
and of the attitude of the public towards them--is the difference of
method and immediate action. Robert Owen, as we have seen, despised
and rejected political action, and strove to form a new voluntary
organisation which should supersede, almost instantaneously and in
some unexplained way, the whole industrial, political, and social
administration of the country. In this disdain of all existing
organisations, and the suddenness of the complete “social revolution”
which it contemplated, the Owenism of 1833-34 found, as we have seen,
an echo in much of the Socialist propaganda of 1884-89. The leaders
of the New Unionists, on the contrary, sought to bring into the
ranks of existing organisations--the Trade Union, the Municipality,
or the State--great masses of unorganised workers who had hitherto
been either absolutely outside the pale, or inert elements within it.
They aimed, not at superseding existing social structures, but at
capturing them all in the interests of the wage-earners. Above all,
they sought to teach the great masses of undisciplined workers how
to apply their newly acquired political power so as to obtain, in a
perfectly constitutional manner, whatever changes in legislation or
administration they desired.
The difference in method between the “New Unionism” of 1833-34
and that of 1889-90 may, we think, be ascribed in the main to the
difference between the circumstances under which the movements arose.
To Robert Owen, whose path was blocked on the political line by the
disfranchisement of five out of six of the adult male population,
open voting under intimidation, corrupt close corporations in the
towns and a Whig oligarchy at the centre, the idea of relying on the
constitutional instrument of the polling-booth must have appeared
no less chimerical than his own programme appears to-day. The New
Unionists of 1889-90, on the other hand, found ready for their use
an extensive and all-embracing Democratic social structure, which it
was impossible to destroy, and would have been foolish to attempt
to ignore. The efforts of two generations of Radical Individualists
and “Old Trade Unionists” had placed the legislative power and civil
administration of the country in the hands of a hierarchy of popularly
elected representative bodies. The great engine of taxation was, for
instance, now under the control of the wage-earning voters instead
of that of the land-owning class. The Home Secretary and the factory
inspector, the relieving-officer and the borough surveyor, could be
employed to carry out the behests of the workers instead of those of
the capitalists. And thus it came about that the methods advocated
by the New Unionists of 1889-94 resemble, not those of the Owenites
of 1833-34, but much more the practical arts of political warfare so
successfully pursued by the Junta of 1867-75.
We shall see the change which had come over the English working-class
movement in the course of sixty years if we compare the leaders of the
two movements which we have been contrasting. To Owen himself we may
allow the privilege of his genius, which did not prevent him from being
an extravagantly bad captain for a working-class movement. But in his
leading disciples ignorance of industrial conditions, contemptuous
indifference to facts and figures, and incapacity to measure, even in
the smallest actions, the relation between the means and the end, stand
in as marked contrast to the sober judgment of men like John Burns as
they did to the cautious shrewdness of Allan and Applegarth. It would
indeed be easy to find many traits of personal likeness between Burns
and Mann on the one hand, and Allan and Applegarth on the other. High
personal character, scrupulous integrity, dignity or charm of manner,
marked all four alike, and the resemblance of character is heightened
by a noticeable resemblance in the nature of their activity. The day’s
work of Tom Mann at the head office of the Dockers’ Union from 1889 to
1892, and that of John Burns in the London County Council and the lobby
of the House of Commons from 1892 to 1906, were close reproductions
of Allan’s activity at the general office of his Engineers, and
Applegarth’s assiduous attendance to Parliamentary Committees and
Royal Commissions. In short, the ways and means of the leaders of
the “New Unionism” remind the student, not of the mystic rites and
skeleton mummery of the Owenite movement, but rather of the restless
energy and political ingenuity of the Junta or the Trades Union
Congress Parliamentary Committee in those early days when the old Trade
Unionists were fighting for legislative reforms with a faith which was
as wise as it was fervent and sincere.
Some of the secondary characteristics of the New Unionism of 1889
promptly faded away. The revulsion of feeling against the combination
of friendly benefits with Trade Union purposes quickly disappeared,
though the difficulty of levying high contributions upon ill-paid
workers prevented the complete adoption of the contrary policy.[576]
The expansion of trade which began in 1889 proved to be but of brief
duration, and with the returning contraction of 1892 many of the
advantages gained by the wage-earners were lost. Under the influence
of this check the unskilled labourers once more largely fell away
from the Trade Union ranks. But just as 1873-74 left behind it a far
more permanent structure than 1833-34, so 1889-90 added even more
than 1873-74. The older Unions retained a large part, at any rate, of
the two hundred thousand members added to their ranks between 1887
and 1891. But this numerical accession was of less importance than
what may, without exaggeration, be termed the spiritual rebirth of
organisations which were showing signs of decrepitude. The selfish
spirit of exclusiveness which often marked the relatively well-paid
engineer, carpenter, or boilermaker of 1880-85, gave place to a more
generous recognition of the essential solidarity of the wage-earning
class. For example, the whole constitution of the Amalgamated Society
of Engineers was, in 1892, revised for the express purpose of opening
the ranks of this most aristocratic of Unions to practically all
the mechanics in the innumerable branches of the engineering trade.
Special facilities, moreover, were offered by this and the other
great societies to old men and artisans earning wages insufficient
to pay for costly friendly benefits. Nor was this all. The plumber
vied with the engineer, the carpenter with the shipwright, in helping
to form Unions among the labourers who work with or under them. And
the struggling Unions of women workers, which had originally some
difficulty in gaining admittance to Trades Councils and the Trade Union
Congress, gratefully acknowledged a complete change in the attitude
of their male fellow-workers. Not only was every assistance now given
to the formation of special Unions among women workers, but women
were, in some cases, even welcomed as members by Unions of skilled
artisans. A similar widening of sympathies and strengthening of bonds
of fellowship was shown in the very general establishment of local
joint committees of rival societies in the same trade, as well as of
larger federations. Robert Knight’s failures to form a federal council
representing the different Unions concerned in shipbuilding were
retrieved in 1891 by his successful establishment of the Federation of
the Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades, which maintained a permanent
existence. The increased sense of solidarity among all sections of
wage-earners, moreover, led to a greatly increased cordiality in
international relations. The Coal-miners, the Glass Bottle Makers, and
the Textile Operatives established more or less formal federations
with their fellow-workers on the Continent of Europe. At the frequent
international Congresses of these trades, as well as at the Socialist
Congress of the workers of all countries, the representatives of the
British Trade Unions largely laid aside that insular conceit which
led the Parliamentary Committee of 1884 to declare that, owing to
his superiority, the British Trade Unionist derived no benefit from
international relations. All this indicates a widening of the mental
horizon, a genuine elevation of the Trade Union Movement.
FOOTNOTES:
[511] See the _History of the British Trades Union Congress_, by W.
J. Davis, of which two volumes have been issued by the Parliamentary
Committee (1910 and 1916). William John Davis, one of the most
successful Trade Union administrators, was born in 1848, at Birmingham.
In 1872, when the National Society of Amalgamated Brassworkers was
established in a trade hitherto entirely unorganised, he became General
Secretary, a post which, except for one short interval, he has ever
since retained. Within six months he obtained from the employers the 15
per cent increase which they had refused to the unorganised men, and
established branches throughout the kingdom; and presently he completed
the difficult and laborious task of constructing a list of prices for
all brasswork, for which he obtained the employers’ recognition. He
was elected to the Birmingham School Board in 1876, and to the Town
Council in 1880. In 1883 he accepted appointment as Factory Inspector,
but six years later returned to his former post at the urgent request
of the workmen, whose Union had in his absence sunk almost to nothing,
a condition from which he was able quickly to restore it to far more
than its highest previous strength; and to take on, in addition,
the secretaryship of the Amalgamated Metal Wire and Tube Makers’
Society. He was made a J.P. in 1906. Since 1881 he has been elected
twenty-six times to the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union
Congress. He is the author, in addition to the _History of the British
Trades Union Congress_, of _The Token Coinage of Warwickshire_ and
_Nineteenth-Century Token Coinage_ (_The Life Story of W. J. Davis_, by
W. B. Dalley, 1914).
[512] In 1878, for instance, the Parliamentary Committee resolved that
Congress ought not to interfere either between the English and Scottish
Tailors’ Societies or between the Boilermakers and the Platers’ Helpers.
[513] The Congress, from 1871, annually elected a Parliamentary
Committee of ten members and a secretary. The members of the Committee
were always chosen from the officials of the more important Unions,
with a strong tendency to re-elect the same men year after year.
Between 1875 and 1889 the composition of the Committee was, in fact,
scarcely changed, except through death or the promotion of members to
Government appointments. George Potter was secretary from 1869-71;
George Odger in that year; and George Howell, afterwards M.P., from
1872-75. Henry Broadhurst was for fourteen years annually re-elected
secretary without a contest, temporarily ceding the post, whilst Under
Secretary of State for the Home Department in 1886, to George Shipton.
He was succeeded by Charles Fenwick, M.P., from 1890-93; then followed
S. Woods, M.P., from 1894-1904; W. C. Steadman, M.P., from 1905-10; and
the Right Honourable C. W. Bowerman, M.P., from 1911 onwards.
[514] Odger died in 1877, Guile in 1883, and Coulson (who had retired
many years before) in 1893.
[515] To the counsels of Frederic Harrison, E. S. Beesly, H. Crompton,
and A. J. Mundella was, from 1873, frequently added that of Mr.
(afterwards Justice) R. S. Wright, who rendered invaluable service as a
draughtsman. Henry Crompton supplied us with the following account of
the subsequent separation between the Positivists and the Trade Union
leaders:
“In the year 1881 the connection of the Parliamentary Committee with
the Positivists was modified. There was not the same occasion for their
services as there had been. After 1883, in which year Mr. F. Harrison
and Mr. H. Crompton attended the Congress by invitation, the connection
ceased altogether, though there was no breach of friendly relations.
Till 1881 there had been entire agreement between them both as to
policy and means of action. The policy of the Positivists had been to
secure complete legal independence for workmen and their legitimate
combinations; to make them more respected and more conscious of their
own work; to lift them to a higher moral level; that they should become
citizens ready and desirous to perform all the duties of citizenship.
The means employed was to consolidate and organise the power of the
Trades Societies, through the institutions of the annual Congress and
its Parliamentary Committee; to use this power, as occasion served, for
the general welfare as well as for trade interests. That the measures
adopted or proposed by the Congress should be thoroughly discussed in
the branches, and delegates well posted in the principal questions. To
express it shortly--organisation of collective labour and political
education of individual workmen.
“The condition of this effective force was that, while it was being
used in furtherance of political action, it should be kept quite clear
and independent of political parties. The divergence came with the
advent of the Gladstonians to office. The Liberal Government began
a policy of coercion in Ireland. Combination was to be put down by
the very same mechanism which had been invented to repress labour
combinations--by the law of conspiracy. The very ruling of Baron
Bramwell as to the Tailors’ strike was employed to concoct a law to
convict Mr. Parnell and his coadjutors. As a result law was laid down
by the Irish judges as to political combinations, which is binding in
England, and has still to be resisted or abolished. The Positivists
endeavoured to the utmost of their ability to rouse the working
classes to a sense of the danger of these proceedings, and to offer
an uncompromising resistance to the suspension of the Habeas Corpus
Act. The Parliamentary Committee would have none of it. They no doubt
believed that the interests of their clients would be best served
by a narrower policy, by seeking the help and favour of the eminent
statesmen in office. Instead of a compact, powerful force, holding the
balance between the parties and the key of the situation, dictating its
terms, they preferred to be the tag end of a party. In the end they did
not get much, but the Congress was successfully captured and muzzled by
the Gladstonian Government.”
[516] Report of Trades Union Congress, Dublin, 1880, p. 15.
[517] The working of the Trade Union Act of 1871 revealed some
technical defects in the law, which were remedied by an amending Act in
1876 (39 and 40 Vic. c. 22). Rules for the execution of the Employers
and Workmen Act were framed by the Lord Chancellor in the same year.
[518] This defence of “common employment,” which practically deprived
the workman in large undertakings of any remedy in case of accidents
arising through negligence in the works, was first recognised in the
case of Priestly _v._ Fowler in 1837 (3 Meeson and Welby). Not until
1868 did the House of Lords, as the final Court of Appeal, extend it
to Scotland. The growth of colossal industrial undertakings, in which
thousands of workmen were, technically, “in common employment,” made
the occasional harshness of the law still more invidious.
[519] Act 43 and 44 Vic. c. 52 (1880).
[520] The annual Parliamentary returns for the next fifteen years
showed that between three and four hundred cases came into court every
year, the amount of compensation actually awarded reaching between
£7000 and £8000. But a large number of cases were compromised, or
settled without litigation. Meanwhile the relative number of accidents
diminished. Whereas in 1877 one railway employee in 95 was more or less
injured, in 1889 the proportion was only one in 195. Whereas between
1873 and 1880 one coal-miner in 446 met his death annually, between
1881 and 1890 the proportion was only one in 519; although there was
apparently less improvement, if any, as regards non-fatal accidents in
the mine.
[521] By “contracting out” was meant an arrangement between employer
and employed by which the latter relinquish the rights conferred upon
them by the Act, and often also their rights under the Common Law.
The Act was silent on the subject; but the judges decided, to the
great surprise and dismay of the Trade Union leaders, that contracting
out was permissible (see Griffiths _v._ Earl of Dudley, 9, Queen’s
Bench Division, 35). The usual form of “contracting out” was the
establishment of a workman’s insurance fund to which the workmen were
compelled to subscribe, and to which the employer also contributed.
Among the coal-miners, those of Lancashire, Somerset, and some
collieries in Wales generally contracted out. The employees of the
London and North-Western, and London and Brighton Railway Companies
also contracted out. In one or two large undertakings in other
industries a similar course was followed. But in the vast majority
of cases employers did not resort to this expedient. Particulars are
given in the _Report and Evidence of the Select Committee on Employers’
Liability_, 1866; the publications of the Royal Commission on Labour,
1891-94; and _Miners’ Thrift and Employers’ Liability_, by G. L.
Campbell (Wigan, 1891); and our _Industrial Democracy_.
In 1893-94 a further amending Bill passed the House of Commons which
swept away the doctrine of common employment, and placed the workman
with regard to compensation on the same footing as any other person.
A clause making void any agreement by which the workman forewent his
right of action, or “contracted out,” was rejected by the House of
Lords, and the Bill was thereupon abandoned. The question was settled
in 1896 by the passage, under the Unionist Government, of the Workmen’s
Compensation Act, giving compensation in all cases, irrespective of the
employers’ default.
[522] The legal advisers of the Junta realised that the triumph of
1875, though it resulted in a distinct strengthening of the Trade Union
position, was mainly a moral victory. Though Trade Unions were made
legal, the law of conspiracy was only partially reformed, whilst that
relating to political combinations, unlawful assemblies, sedition,
etc., remained, as it still remains, untouched. Expert lawyers knew
in how many ways prejudiced tribunals might at any time make the law
oppressive. The legal friends of Trade Unionism desired, therefore,
to utilise the period of political quiet in simplifying the criminal
law, and in removing as much of the obsolete matter as was possible.
And though State Trials recommenced in Ireland in 1881, and criminal
prosecutions of Trade Unionists continued in England down to 1891, the
interval had been well spent in clearing away some of the grosser evils.
[523] In the proposed reform of the Jury laws, for instance, the
Parliamentary Committee for several years did not venture to ask
explicitly for that payment of jurymen which alone would enable working
men to serve, and contented themselves with suggesting a lowering of
the qualification for juryman. In 1876, indeed, John Burnett, then a
prominent member of the Committee, strongly opposed the Payment of
Jurymen on the ground that it might create a class of professional
jurors (Trades Union Congress Report, 1876, p. 14).
[524] See, for instance, the report of the 1876 Congress, p. 30; that
of the 1882 Congress, p. 37; that of the 1883 Congress, p. 41; and
_History of the British Trades Union Congress_, by W. J. Davis, vol.
i., 1910.
[525] In this connection may be mentioned the extensive agitation
promoted by Samuel Plimsoll for further legislation to prevent the loss
of life at sea. At the 1873 Trades Union Congress Plimsoll distributed
copies of his book, _Our Merchant Seamen_, and enlisted, during the
next three years, practically the whole political force of the Trade
Union Movement in support of his Merchant Shipping Acts Amendment
Bill. The “Plimsoll and Seamen’s Fund Committee,” of which George
Howell became secretary, received large financial help from the Unions,
the South Yorkshire Miners’ Association voting, in 1873, a levy of a
shilling per member, and contributing over £1000. The Parliamentary
Committee gave Plimsoll’s Bill a place in their programme for the
General Election of 1874, and this Trade Union support contributed
largely to Plimsoll’s success in passing a temporary Act in 1875, and
permanent legislation in 1876, against the combined efforts of a strong
Conservative Government and the shipowners on both sides of the House.
(See _Labour Legislation, Labour Movements, and Labour Leaders_, by G.
Howell, 1902.)
[526] Congress Reports, 1882 and 1883.
[527] Parliamentary Committee’s Report, September 17, 1877.
[528] That extending to factory scales and measures the provisions of
the Weights and Measures Act relating to inspection, etc.
[529] The appointment was first offered to Broadhurst, who elected to
continue his work as Secretary of the Parliamentary Committee, and who
suggested Prior (_Henry Broadhurst, the Story of his Life_, by himself,
1901).
[530] _Ibid._ p. 136.
[531] It may be mentioned that the Trades Union Congress, which at
first had welcomed addresses from the middle and upper class friends
of Trade Unionism, was, between 1881 and 1883, gradually restricted to
Trade Unionists. At the Nottingham Congress in 1883, where Frederic
Harrison read a paper on the “History of Trade Unionism,” and Henry
Crompton one on the “Codification of the Law,” when Frederic Harrison
proposed to take part in the discussion on the Land Question, he was
not permitted to do so; and this rule has since been rigidly adhered
to. At the Aberdeen Congress of 1884 Lord Rosebery was allowed to
deliver an address on the “Federalism of the Trades Union Congress,”
but this was the last time that any one has been invited to read a
paper.
[532] _Times_ leader on the Congress of Belfast, September 11, 1893,
which deplores the remarkable “subservience to Mr. John Burns and
his friends” manifested by the Congress--a subservience marked by
the election of Mr. Burns for the Parliamentary Committee at the
head of the poll, and by the adoption of a programme which included
the nationalisation of the land and other means of production and
distribution.
[533] The following description of the rise of the “New Unionism” of
1889 is based on minutes and reports of Trade Union organisations, the
files of _Justice_, the _Labour Elector_, the _Trade Unionist_, the
_Cotton Factory Times_, the _Workman’s Times_, and other working-class
journals. The documentary evidence has been elucidated and supplemented
by the reminiscences of most of the principal actors in the movement,
and by the personal recollections of the authors themselves, one of
whom, as a member of the Fabian Society, observed the transformation
from the Socialist side, whilst the other, as a disciple of Herbert
Spencer and a colleague of Charles Booth, was investigating the
contemporary changes from an Individualist standpoint.
[534] See Mr. H. M. Hyndman’s _England for All_, 1881.
[535] _Report of the International Trades Union Congress at Paris,
1886_, by Adolphe Smith, 1886.
[536] _Flint Glass Makers’ Magazine_, November 1884.
[537] _Report of the Industrial Remuneration Conference_, 1885.
[538] The results of twenty years of patient labour by Charles Booth
and his assistants are embodied in the magnificent work, _Labour
and Life of the People_ (London, 1st edition, 2 vols., 1889-91; 2nd
edition, 4 vols., 1893), reissued in greatly enlarged form as _Life and
Labour in London_, 18 vols.; _Pauperism and the Endowment of Old Age_
(London, 1893); _The Aged Poor_ (1894); _Old Age and the Aged Poor_
(1899); _Industrial Unrest and Trades Union Policy_ (1913). In _Charles
Booth: a Memoir_ (1918) Mrs. Booth has given a personal biography
(1840-1914) of a tireless investigator who, merely by the instrument of
social diagnosis, got accomplished reforms of a magnitude that seemed
at first wholly impracticable.
[539] The funds of the Stonemasons had been completely exhausted by
the great strike of 1878. In January 1879 the Society determined,
on a proposition submitted by the Central Executive, to close all
pending disputes (including a general strike at Sheffield against a
heavy reduction without due notice); and between that date and March
1885, though many of the branches struggled manfully, and in some
cases successfully, against repeated reductions of wages, increases
of hours, or infringements of the local bye-laws, no strike whatever
was supported from the Society’s funds. The case of the Stonemasons is
typical of the other great trade friendly societies.
[540] _What a Compulsory Eight Hours Working Day means to the Workers_,
by Tom Mann (1886), 16 pp.
[541] Mr. Tom Mann, one of the outstanding figures in the New
Unionist Movement, was born at Foleshill, Warwickshire, in 1856, and
apprenticed in an engineering shop at Birmingham, whence he came to
London in 1878, and joined the Amalgamated Society of Engineers.
Eagerly pursuing his self-education, he became acquainted first
with the Co-operative Movement, and then with the writings of Henry
George. In 1884 he visited the United States, where he worked for six
months. On his return he joined the Battersea Branch of the Social
Democratic Federation, and quickly became one of its leading speakers.
His experience of the evils of overtime made the Eight Hours Day a
prominent feature in his lectures, and in 1886 he published his views
in the pamphlet, _What a Compulsory Eight Hours Working Day means
to the Workers_ (1886, 16 pp.), of which several editions have been
printed. In the same year he left his trade in order to devote himself
to the provincial propaganda of the Social Democratic Federation,
spending over two years incessantly lecturing, first about Tyneside,
and then in Lancashire. Returning to London early in 1889, he assisted
in establishing the Gas-workers’ Union and in organising the great
dock strike, on the termination of which he was elected President of
the Dockers’ Union. For three years he applied himself to building
up this organisation, deciding to resign in 1892, when he became a
candidate for the General Secretaryship of the Amalgamated Society
of Engineers. After an exciting contest, during which he addressed
meetings of the members in all the great engineering centres, he failed
of success only by 951 votes on a poll of 35,992. In the meantime
he had been appointed, in 1891, a member of the Royal Commission on
Labour, to which he submitted a striking scheme for consolidating the
whole dock business of the port of London, by cutting a new channel for
the Thames across the Isle of Dogs. On the establishment in 1893 of
the London Reform Union he was appointed its secretary, a post which
he relinquished in 1894 on being elected secretary of the Independent
Labour Party. This he presently relinquished to emigrate to New
Zealand; and there and in Australia he threw himself energetically
into Trade Union agitation. Returning to England in 1911, he became
a fervent advocate of Syndicalism; and then became an organiser for
various General Labour Unions. In 1919 he was elected General Secretary
of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, after an exhaustive ballot of
its great membership.
[542] Article in _Justice_, September 3, 1887.
[543] Mr. John Burns, in many respects the most striking personality in
the Labour Movement, was born at Battersea in 1859, and was apprenticed
to a local engineering firm. Already during his apprenticeship he
made his voice heard in public, in 1877 being actually arrested for
persistently speaking on Clapham Common, and in 1878 braving the
“Jingo” mob at a Hyde Park demonstration. As soon as he was out of
his time (1879) he joined the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and
became an advocate of shorter hours of labour. An engagement as
engineer on the Niger, West Africa, during 1880-81, gave him leisure
to read, which he utilised by mastering Adam Smith and J. S. Mill.
Returning to London, he worked side by side with Victor Delahaye, an
ex-Communard, who was afterwards one of the French representatives at
the Berlin Labour Conference, 1891, and with whom he had many talks
on the advancement of labour. In 1883 he joined the Social Democratic
Federation, and at once became its leading working-class member,
championing its cause, for instance, in an impressive speech at the
Industrial Remuneration Conference in 1885. In the same year he was
elected by his district of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers as its
representative at the quinquennial delegate meeting of the Society,
where he found himself the youngest member. At the General Election of
1885 he stood as Socialist candidate for West Nottingham, receiving
598 votes. For the next two years he became known as the leader of
the London “unemployed” agitation. His prosecution for sedition in
1886 (with three other prominent members of the Social Democratic
Federation) aroused considerable interest, and on his acquittal his
speech for the defence, _The Man with the Red Flag_, had a large sale
in pamphlet form (1886; 16 pp.). At the prohibited demonstration at
Trafalgar Square on “Bloody Sunday” (November 13, 1887), in conjunction
with Mr. Cunninghame Graham, M.P., he broke through the police line,
for which they were both sentenced to six weeks’ imprisonment. In
January 1889 he was elected for Battersea to the new London County
Council, on which he became one of the most useful and influential
members. His magnificent work in the dock strike and in organising the
unskilled labourers is described in the text. At the General Election
of 1892 he was chosen, by a large majority, M.P. for Battersea, and at
the Trades Union Congress in 1893 he received the largest number of
votes for the Parliamentary Committee, of which he accordingly became
Chairman. In 1906 he was appointed President of the Local Government
Board in Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman’s Government, with a seat in the
Cabinet--thus becoming the first working-man Cabinet Minister--a post
which he held until August 1914, when he resigned on the outbreak of
war. He retained his seat in Parliament until 1918, when he retired.
[544] Address to Trade Unionists in _Justice_, January 24, 1885.
[545] Weiler was the delegate of the Alliance Cabinetmakers’ Society,
and came from London. The Congress Report gives the following account
of his paper: “After reviewing the position of the working classes
under the present system, and comparing it with the state of things
eighty years ago, he contended that the best means of bettering their
position was to reduce the hours of toil. The result of this would
be, first, to give every worker a better chance of employment, and
thus lessen that sort of competition which was caused by hunger and
want; secondly, it would give them time and opportunity for rest and
amusement, and that cultivation of their minds which would enable
them to prepare themselves for the time when the present system of
production would collapse, and the time of this collapse was not so
distant as some supposed.” The paper was received with much applause,
and Weiler received the thanks of Congress. No resolution was passed.
[546] _History of the British Trades Union Congress_, by W. J. Davis,
vol. i. p. 133.
[547] The Return moved for by George Howell regarding the Woolwich and
Enfield engineering works showed that, during 1884 and 1885, more than
half the artisans worked overtime, the average per week for each man
varying from 9.4 hours in some shops to 17.8 in others.
[548] 11,966 of its members voted for an Eight Hours Day, and of these
9209 declared in favour of the enforcement of the eight hours limit by
law. The total votes given for an Eight Hours Law was 17,267; against
it, 3819.
[549] The votes in favour of an Eight Hours Day were 39,656; against
it, 67,390, of which 56,541 were cast on behalf of the Cotton-spinners
and Weavers. In favour of an Eight Hours Law, 28,511; against it,
12,283. The votes of the different trades, and a summary of the
Congress proceedings on this subject, are given in _The Eight Hours
Day_, by Sidney Webb and Harold Cox, 1891; see also _History of the
British Trades Union Congress_, by W. J. Davis, vol. ii. pp. 7-8.
[550] The clause was moved by S. Williamson, Liberal Member for
Kilmarnock, and seconded by J. H. C. Hozier, Conservative Member for
South Lanarkshire. It received no support from the “Labour Members,”
and was rejected by 159 to 104. See the _Eight Hours Day_, by Webb and
Cox, 1891, p. 23.
[551] The “National Conferences” of the miners are a feature peculiar
to the industry. Besides the periodical gatherings of the separate
federations, the miners, since 1863, have had frequent conferences
of delegates from all the organised districts in the kingdom. These
conferences were, until 1889, held under the auspices of the National
Union; subsequently they were summoned by the Miners’ Federation. The
meetings, from which reporters are now excluded, are consultative
only, and their decisions are not authoritative until adopted by the
separate organisations. See _Die Ordnung des Arbeitsverhältnisses in
den Kohlengruben von Northumberland und Durham_, by Dr. Emil Auerbach
(Leipzig, 1890, 268 pp.).
[552] The “Fair Trade” attack had arisen in the following manner. At
the Bristol Congress in 1878, certain delegates, who were strongly
suspected of being the paid agents of the organisation then agitating
for the abolition of the foreign bounties on sugar, attempted to force
this question upon the Congress, and made a serious disturbance.
These delegates afterwards became the paid representatives of the
“Fair Trade League,” an association avowedly composed of landlords
and capitalists with the object of securing a reimposition of import
duties. The Front Bench steadfastly refused to allow the Congress to be
used for promotion of this object, and were exposed in return to what
the Congress in 1882 declared to be “a cowardly, false, and slanderous
attack, ... an attempt at moral assassination.” Instead of fighting
the question of Free Trade _versus_ Protection, the emissaries of the
Fair Trade League developed an elaborate system of personal defamation,
directed against Broadhurst, Howell, Shipton, and other leaders. For
instance, Broadhurst’s administration of the Gas Stokers’ Relief Fund
in 1872 was made the pretext for vague insinuations of malversation
which were scattered broadcast through the Trade Union world. At the
Congress of 1881 the “Fair Trade” delegates were expelled, on it
being proved that their expenses were not paid by the Trade Union
organisations which they nominally represented. A renewed attack on the
Congress of 1882 ended in the triumphant victory of the Parliamentary
Committee, the complete exoneration of Broadhurst and his colleagues,
and the final discomfiture of the “Fair Trade” delegates. See _Henry
Broadhurst: the Story of his Life_, by himself, 1901; _History of the
British Trades Union Congress_, by W. J. Davis, vol. i., 1910.
[553] Report to Congress of 1884. This is another instance of the
abandonment of the more generous views of Applegarth and Odger.
[554] Mr. Drummond, who resigned his secretaryship in 1892, was in the
following year appointed to the staff of the Labour Department of the
Board of Trade, from which he retired in 1918.
[555] See its Circular of June 1886.
[556] Some isolated protests against the employment of non-Unionists
are of earlier date. Thus, the minutes of the Birmingham Trades Council
show that, on July 3, 1880, at the instance of a painters’ delegate,
it passed a resolution protesting against the employment of “non-Union
and incompetent men” by the local hospital. And in the same month the
Wolverhampton Trades Council had successfully protested against the
employment of non-Unionist printers upon a new Liberal newspaper about
to be established.
[557] The chief medium for the attack was the _Labour Elector_, a penny
weekly journal published, from September 1888 to April 1890, by Mr.
H. H. Champion, an ex-officer of the Royal Artillery, who (prosecuted
in 1886, as we have seen, with H. M. Hyndman, J. Burns, and Williams,
for sedition) had at one time been a leading member of the Social
Democratic Federation, from which he was excluded on a difference of
policy. He afterwards emigrated to Melbourne, where he still (1920)
resides.
[558] _Henry Broadhurst: the Story of his Life_, by himself, 1901, pp.
218-24; _History of the British Trades Union Congress_, by W. J. Davis,
vol. i., 1910.
[559] The men employed by two of the gas companies in London, and most
of those engaged by provincial municipalities, have retained this boon.
But in December 1889 the South Metropolitan Gas Company insisted,
after a serious strike, on a return to the twelve hours’ shift. A
scheme of profit-sharing was used to break up their men’s Union
and induce them to accept individual engagements inconsistent with
Collective Bargaining. This example (which is not unique) confirmed
the Trade Unions in their objection to schemes of “Profit-sharing” or
“Co-partnership.”
[560] This strike had the good fortune to find contemporary historians
who were themselves concerned in all the phases of the struggle. _The
Story of the Dockers’ Strike_, by Mr. (afterwards Sir) Hubert Llewellyn
Smith and Vaughan Nash (1890, 190 pp.), gives not only a detailed
chronicle of the highly dramatic proceedings, but also a useful
description of the organisation of the London Docks.
[561] This movement was much assisted by the “Red Van” campaigns of
the English Land Restoration League, 1891-94, which coupled Land
Nationalisation propaganda with the formation of local unions of the
labourers in the Southern and Midland Counties of England. In the
agricultural depression of 1894-95, when staffs were further reduced
and wages again lowered, nearly all these new Unions sank to next to
nothing, or entirely dissolved. Most information as to them is to be
gained from _The Church Reformer_ for 1891-95; _History of the English
Agricultural Labourer_, by W. Hasbach, 1907; and Ernest Selley’s
_Village Trade Unions of Two Centuries_, 1919.
[562] Short-lived and turbulent combinations among seamen have existed
at various periods for the past hundred years, notably between 1810 and
1825, on the north-east coast, where many sailors’ benefit clubs were
also established. In 1851, again, a widespread national organisation
of seamen is said to have existed, having twenty-five branches between
Peterhead and London, and numbering 30,000 members. This appears to
have been a loose federation of practically autonomous port Unions,
which for some years kept up a vigorous agitation against obnoxious
clauses in the Merchant Shipping Acts of 1851-54, and fought the
sailors’ grievances in the law courts. In 1879 the existing North
of England Sailors and Sea-going Firemen’s Friendly Association was
established, but failed to maintain itself outside Sunderland. In
1887 its most vigorous member, J. Havelock Wilson, convinced that
nothing but a national organisation would be effective, started
the National Amalgamated Sailors and Firemen’s Union, which his
able and pertinacious “lobbying” made, for some years, an effective
Parliamentary force.
[563] Address to members in First Half-Yearly Report (London, 1889).
The spirit of the uprising is well given in _The New Trade Unionism_,
by Tom Mann and Ben Tillett, 1890; on which George Shipton was moved to
write _A Reply to Messrs. Tom Mann and Ben Tillett’s Pamphlet entitled
“The New Trade Unionism,”_ 1890.
[564] _Speech delivered by John Burns on the Liverpool Congress,
September 21, 1890_ (1890, 32 pp.).
[565] _Justice_, November 7, 1885.
[566] Printed in _Justice_, September 6, 1884.
[567] “The Decay of Trade Unions,” by H. M. Hyndman, _Justice_, June
18, 1887.
[568] “The Trade Union Congress,” by John Burns, _Justice_, September
12, 1885.
[569] _Justice_, July 11, 1885.
[570] _Justice_, July 18, 1885. The identity of purpose and methods
between the two movements is indeed elsewhere directly asserted; see
“Socialism in ’34,” _ibid._, April 19, 1884, and the extracts from the
Owenite journals in the issue for July 25, 1885.
[571] _Ibid._, August 6, 1887.
[572] _Justice_, July 25, 1885.
[573] From 1889 onwards the columns of _Justice_ abound in abuse and
denunciation of the leaders of the New Unionism. We may cite, not so
much because it summarises this denunciation and abuse, but because of
the details of the movement that it incidentally gives, _The Rise and
Progress of a Right Honourable_, by Joseph Burgess (1911).
[574] In this development some share is to be attributed to the work
of the Fabian Society, which, established in 1883, began in 1887 to
exercise a growing influence on working-class opinion. The publication,
in 1889, of _Fabian Essays in Socialism_, the circulation between
1887 and 1893 of three-quarters of a million copies of its series
of “Fabian tracts,” and the delivery of several thousand lectures a
year in London and other industrial centres, contributed largely to
substitute a practical and constitutional policy of Collectivist reform
for the earlier revolutionary propaganda. Tom Mann, Ben Tillett, and
other Trade Union leaders were, from 1889 onwards, among the members
of the parent Fabian Society, whilst the ninety independent local
Fabian Societies in the provincial centres usually included many of the
delegates to the local Trades Councils. Some account of the Society and
its work will be found in _Zum socialen Frieden_, by Dr. von Schulze
Gaevernitz (Leipzig, 1891, 2 vols.); in _Englische Socialreformer_, by
Dr. M. Grunwald (Leipzig, 1897); in _La Société Fabienne_, by Edouard
Pfeiffer (Paris, 1911); in _Geschichte des Socialismus in England_,
by M. Beer (Stuttgart, 1913), republished in different English form
as _History of British Socialism_ (vol. i., 1918; vol. ii., 1920);
in _Socialism, a Critical Analysis_, by O. D. Skelton, 1911; and in
_Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the Present
Day_, by Ernest Barker, 1915. A superficial survey of the development
of opinion is given in _Socialism in England_, by Sidney Webb (1st
edition, 1889; 2nd edition, 1893). See _History of the Fabian Society_,
by Edward R. Pease (1915).
[575] _Trade Unionism Old and New_, 1891, _passim_.
[576] Thus the Dock, Wharf, and Riverside Labourers’ Union soon gave
Funeral Benefit--usually the first to be added; whilst many of the
branches started their own sick funds. Some of the branches of the
National Union of Gas-workers and General Labourers promptly added
local benefit funds, and the addition of Accident Benefit by the whole
society was presently adopted.