represented by its opponents. The opponents of Tariff Reform have a
very easy method of arguing with its supporters. They say that any
departure whatsoever from our present fiscal system necessarily
involves taxing raw materials, and must necessarily result in high and
prohibitive duties, which will upset our foreign trade, and will be
ruinous and disorganising to the whole business of the country. But
Tariff Reformers are not going to frame their duties in order to suit
the argumentative convenience of Mr. Asquith. They are going to be
guided by wholly different considerations from that. It is curious
that everybody opposed to Tariff Reform says that Tariff Reformers
intend to tax raw material, while Tariff Reformers themselves have
steadily said they do not. I ask you in that respect to take the
description of a policy of Tariff Reform from those who advocate it,
and not from those who oppose it. And as for the argument about high
prohibitive duties, I wish people would read the reports or summaries
of the reports of the Tariff Commission. They contain not only the
most valuable collection that exists anywhere of the present facts
about almost every branch of British industry but they are also an
authoritative source from which to draw inferences as to the
intentions of Tariff Reformers. Now the Tariff Reform Commission have
not attempted to frame a complete tariff, a scale of duties for all
articles imported into this country, and wisely, because, if they had
tried to do that, people would have said that they were arrogating to
themselves the duties of Parliament. What they have done is to show by
a few instances that a policy of Tariff Reform is not a thing in the
air, not a mere thing of phrases and catchwords, but is a practical,
businesslike working policy. They have drawn up what may be called
experimental scales of duties, which are merely suggestions for
consideration, with respect to a number of articles under the
principal heads of British imports, such as, for instance,
agricultural imports and imports of iron and steel. These experimental
duties vary on the average from something like 5 per cent. to 10 per
cent. on the value of the articles. In no one case in my recollection
do they exceed 10 per cent.
But then the opponents of Tariff Reform say: "Yes. That is all very
well. But though you may begin with moderate duties, you are bound to
proceed to higher ones. It is in the nature of things that you should
go on increasing and increasing, and in the end we shall all be
ruined." I must say that seems to me great nonsense. It reminds me of
nothing so much as the fearful warnings which I have read in the least
judicious sort of temperance literature, and sometimes heard from
temperance orators of the more extreme type--the sort of warning, I
mean, that, if you once begin touching anything stronger than water,
you are bound to go on till you end by beating your wife and die in a
workhouse. But you and I know perfectly well that it is possible to
have an occasional glass of beer or glass of wine, or even, low be it
spoken, a little whisky, without beating or wanting to beat anybody,
and without coming to such a terrible end. The argument against the
use of anything from its abuse has always struck me as one of the
feeblest of arguments. And just see how particularly absurd it is in
the present case. The effect of duties on foreign imports, even such
moderate and carefully devised duties as those to which I have
referred, would, we are told, be ruinous to British trade. It would
place intolerable burdens upon the people. Yet for all that the people
would, it appears, insist on increasing these burdens. Surely it is as
clear as a pike-staff that, if the duties which Tariff Reformers
advocate were to produce the evils which Free Importers allege that
they would produce, these duties, so far from being inevitably
maintained and increased, would not survive one General Election after
their imposition.
It is not only with regard to Tariff Reform that I think the air is
clearer. The Unionist Party has to my mind escaped another danger
which was quite as great as that of allowing the Tariff question to be
pushed on one side, and that was the danger of being frightened by the
scare, which the noisy spreading of certain subversive doctrines has
lately caused, into a purely negative and defensive attitude; of
ceasing to be, as it has been, a popular and progressive party, and
becoming merely the embodiment of upper and middle class prejudices
and alarms. I do not say that there are not many projects in the air
which are calculated to excite alarm, but they can only be
successfully resisted on frankly democratic and popular lines. My own
feeling is--I may be quite wrong, but I state my opinion for what it
is worth--that there is far less danger of the democracy going wrong
about domestic questions than there is of its going wrong about
foreign and Imperial questions, and for this simple reason, that with
regard to domestic questions they have their own sense and experience
to guide them.
If a mistake is made in domestic policy its consequences are rapidly
felt, and no amount of fine talking will induce people to persist in
courses which are affecting them injuriously in their daily lives. You
have thus a constant and effective check upon those who are disposed
to try dangerous experiments, or to go too fast even on lines which
may be in themselves laudable, as the experience of recent municipal
elections, among other things, clearly shows. But with regard to
Imperial questions, to our great and vital interests in distant parts
of the earth, there is necessarily neither the same amount of personal
knowledge on the part of the electorate, nor do the consequences of a
mistaken policy recoil so directly and so unmistakably upon them.
These subjects, therefore, are the happy hunting-ground of the
visionary and the phrase-maker. I have seen the people of this country
talked into a policy with regard to South Africa at once so injurious
to their own interests, and so base towards those who had thrown in
their lot with us and trusted us, that, if the British nation had only
known what that policy really meant, they would have spat it out of
their mouths. And I tremble every day lest, on the vital question of
Defence, the pressure of well-meaning but ignorant idealists, or the
meaner influence of vote-catching demagogues, should lead this
Government or, indeed, any Government, to curtail the provisions,
already none too ample, for the safety of the Empire, in order to pose
as the friends of peace or as special adepts in economy. I know these
savings of a million or two a year over say five or ten years, which
cost you fifty or one hundred millions, wasted through unreadiness
when the crisis comes, to say nothing of the waste of gallant lives
even more precious. This is the kind of question about which the
democracy is liable to be misled, being without the corrective of
direct personal contact with the facts to keep it straight. And it is
unpopular and up-hill work to go on reminding people of the vastness
of the duty and the responsibility which the control of so great a
portion of the earth's surface, with a dependent population of three
or four hundred millions, necessarily involves; to go on reminding
them, too, how their own prosperity and even existence in these
islands are linked by a hundred subtle but not always obvious or
superficially apparent threads with the maintenance of those great
external possessions.
I say these are difficulties which any party or any man, who is
prepared to do his duty by the electorate of this country, not merely
to ingratiate himself with them for the moment, but to win their
confidence by deserving it, by telling them the truth, by serving
their permanent interests and not their passing moods, is bound to
face. For my own part, I have always been perfectly frank on these
questions. I have maintained on many platforms, I am prepared to
maintain here to-night and shall always maintain, although this is a
subject on which it may be long before my views are included in any
party programme--I say I shall always maintain that real security is
not possible without citizen service, and that the training of every
able-bodied man to be capable of taking part, if need be, in the
defence of his country, is not only good for the country but good for
the man--and would materially assist in the solution of many other
problems, social and economic. But being, as I am, thus
uncompromising, and quite prepared to find myself unpopular, on these
vital questions of national security, and of our Imperial duties and
responsibilities, I can perhaps afford to say, without being suspected
of fawning or of wishing to play the demagogue myself, that in the
matter of domestic reform I am not easy to frighten, and that I have a
very great trust in the essential fair-mindedness and good sense of
the great body of my fellow countrymen with regard to questions which
come within their own direct cognisance. And therefore it was most
reassuring to me at any rate--and I hope it was to you--to observe,
that that large section of the Unionist Party which met at Birmingham
last week, not so much by any resolutions or formal programme--for
there was nothing very novel in these--as by the whole tone and temper
of its proceedings, affirmed in the most emphatic manner the
essentially progressive and democratic character of Unionism. The
greatest danger I hold to the Unionist Party and to the nation is that
the ideals of national strength and Imperial consolidation on the one
hand, and of democratic progress and domestic reform on the other,
should be dissevered, and that people should come to regard as
antagonistic objects which are essentially related and complementary
to one another. The upholders of the Union, the upholders of the
Empire, the upholders of the fundamental institutions of the State,
must not only be, but must be seen and known to be, the strenuous and
constant assailants of those two great related curses of our social
system--irregular employment and unhealthy conditions of life--and of
all the various causes which lead to them.
I cannot stay here to enumerate those causes, but I will mention a
few of them. There is the defective training of children, defective
physical training to begin with, and then the failure to equip them
with any particular and definite form of skill. There is the irregular
way in which new centres of population are allowed to spring up, so
that we go on creating fresh slums as fast as we pull down the old
rookeries. There is the depopulation of the countryside, and the
influx of foreign paupers into our already overcrowded towns. There is
the undermining of old-established and valuable British industries by
unfair foreign competition. That is not an exhaustive list, but it is
sufficient to illustrate my meaning. Well, wherever these and similar
evils are eating away the health and independence of our working
people, there the foundations of the Empire are being undermined, for
it is the race that makes the Empire. Loud is the call to every true
Unionist, to every true Imperialist, to come to the rescue.
And now at the risk of wearying you there is one other subject to
which I would like specially to refer, lest I should be accused of
deliberately giving it the go-by, and that is the question of old age
pensions. It is not a reform altogether of the same nature as those on
which I have been dwelling, nor is it perhaps the kind of reform about
which I feel the greatest enthusiasm, because I would rather attack
the causes, which lead to that irregularity of employment and that
under-payment which prevents people from providing for their own old
age themselves, than merely remedy the evils arising from it. But I
accept the fact that under present conditions, which it may be that a
progressive policy in time will alter, a sufficient case for State aid
in the matter of old age pensions has been made out, and I believe
that no party is going to oppose the introduction of old age pensions.
But, on the other hand, I foresee great difficulties and great
disputes over the question of the manner in which the money is to be
provided. I know how our Radical friends will wish to provide the
money. They will want to get it, in the first instance, by starving
the Army and the Navy. To that way of providing it I hope the Unionist
Party, however unpopular such a course may be, and however liable to
misrepresentation it may be, will oppose an iron resistance, because
this is an utterly rotten and bad way of financing old age pensions,
or anything else. But that method alone, however far it is carried,
will not provide money enough, and there will be an attempt to raise
the rest by taxes levied exclusively on the rich. I am against that
also, because it is thoroughly wrong in principle. I am not against
making the rich pay, to the full extent of their capacity, for great
national purposes, even for national purposes in which they have no
direct interest. But I am not prepared to see them made to pay
exclusively. Let all pay according to their means. It is a thoroughly
vicious idea that money should be taken out of the pocket of one man,
however rich, in order to be put into the pocket of another, however
poor. That is a bad, anti-national principle, and I hope the
Unionist Party will take a firm stand against it. And this is an
additional reason why we should raise whatever money may be necessary
by duties upon foreign imports, because in that way all will
contribute. No doubt the rich will contribute the bulk of the money
through the duties on imported luxuries, but there will be some
contribution, as there ought to be some contribution, from every class
of the people.
And now, in conclusion, one word about purely practical
considerations. We Unionists, if you will allow me to call myself a
Unionist--at any rate I have explained quite frankly what I mean by
the term--are not a class party, but a national party. That being so,
it is surely of the utmost importance that men of all classes should
participate in every branch and every grade of the work of the
Unionist Party. Why should we not have Unionist Labour members as well
as Radical Labour members? I think that the working classes of this
country are misrepresented in the eyes of the public of this country
and of the world, as long as they appear to have no leaders in
Parliament except the men who concoct and pass those machine-made
resolutions with which we are so familiar in the reports of Trade
Union Congresses. I am not speaking now about their resolutions on
trade questions, which they thoroughly understand, but about
resolutions on such subjects as foreign politics, the Army and Navy,
and Colonial and Imperial questions, resolutions which are always
upon the same monotonous lines. I do not believe that the working
classes are the unpatriotic, anti-national, down-with-the-army,
up-with-the-foreigner, take-it-lying-down class of Little Englanders
that they are constantly represented to be. I do not believe it for a
moment. I have heard Imperial questions discussed by working men in
excellent speeches, not only eloquent speeches, but speeches showing a
broad grasp and a truly Imperial spirit, and I should like speeches of
that kind to be heard in the House of Commons as an antidote to the
sort of preaching which we get from the present Labour members. And
what I say about the higher posts in the Unionist Army applies equally
to all other ranks. No Unionist member or Unionist candidate is really
well served unless he has a number of men of the working class on what
I may call his political staff. And I say this not merely for
electioneering reasons. This is just one of the cases in which
considerations of party interest coincide--I wish they always or often
did--with considerations of a higher character. There is nothing more
calculated to remove class prejudice and antagonism than the
co-operation of men of different classes on the same body for the same
public end. And there is this about the aims of Unionism, that they
are best calculated to teach the value of such co-operation; to bring
home to men of all classes their essential inter-dependence on one
another, as well as to bring home to each individual the pettiness and
meanness of personal vanity and ambition in the presence of anything
so great, so stately, as the common heritage and traditions of the
British race.
SWEATED INDUSTRIES
Oxford, December 5, 1907
This exhibition is one of a series which are being held in different
parts of the country with the object of directing attention, or rather
of keeping it directed, to the conditions under which a number of
articles, many of them articles of primary necessity, are at present
being produced, and with the object also of improving the lot of the
people engaged in the production of those articles. Now this matter is
one of great national importance, because the sweated workers are
numbered by hundreds of thousands, and because their poverty and the
resulting evils affect many beside themselves, and exercise a
depressing influence on large classes of the community. What do we
mean by sweating? I will give you a definition laid down by a
Parliamentary Committee, which made a most exhaustive inquiry into
the subject: "Unduly low rates of wages, excessive hours of work, and
insanitary condition of the workplaces." You may say that this is a
state of things against which our instincts of humanity and charity
revolt. And that is perfectly true, but I do not propose to approach
the question from that point of view to-day. I want to approach it
from the economic and political standpoint. But when I say political I
do not mean it in any party sense. This is not a party question; may
it never become one. The organisers of this exhibition have done what
lay in their power to prevent the blighting and corrosive influence of
party from being extended to it. The fact that the position which I
occupy at this moment will be occupied to-morrow by the wife of a
distinguished member of the present Government (Mrs. Herbert
Gladstone), and on Saturday by a leading member of the Labour Party
(Mr. G.N. Barnes, M.P.), shows that this is a cause in which people of
all parties can co-operate. The more we deal with sweating on these
lines, the more we deal with it on its merits or demerits without
ulterior motive, the more likely we shall be to make a beginning in
the removal of those evils against which our crusade is directed.
My view is, that the sweating system impoverishes and weakens the
whole community, because it saps the stamina and diminishes the
productive power of thousands of workers, and these in their turn drag
others down with them. "Unduly low rates of wages, excessive hours of
labour, insanitary condition of workplaces"--what does all that mean?
It means an industry essentially rotten and unsound. To say that the
labourer is worthy of his hire is not only the expression of a natural
instinct of justice, but it embodies an economic truth. One does not
need to be a Socialist, not, at least, a Socialist in the sense in
which the word is ordinarily used, as designating a man who desires
that all instruments of production should become common property--one
does not need to be a Socialist in that sense in order to realise that
an industry, which does not provide those engaged in it with
sufficient to keep them in health is essentially unsound. Used-up
capital must be replaced, and of all forms of capital the most
fundamental and indispensable is the human energy necessarily consumed
in the work of production. A sweated industry does not provide for the
replacing of that kind of capital. It squanders its human material. It
consumes more energy in the work it exacts than the remuneration it
gives is capable of replacing. The workers in sweated industries are
not able to live on their wages. As it is, they live miserably, grow
old too soon, and bring up sickly children. But they would not live at
all, were it not for the fact that their inadequate wages are
supplemented, directly, in many cases, by out-relief, and indirectly
by numerous forms of charity. In one way or another the community has
to make good the inefficiency that sweating produces. In one way or
another the community ultimately pays, and it is my firm belief that
it pays far more in the long run under the present system than if all
workers were self-supporting. If a true account could be kept, it
would be found that anything which the community gains by the
cheapness of articles produced under the sweating system is more than
outweighed by the indirect loss involved in the inevitable subsidising
of a sweated industry. That would be found to be the result, even if
no account were taken of the greatest loss of all, the loss arising
from the inefficiency of the sweated workers and of their children,
for sweating is calculated to perpetuate inefficiency and
degeneration.
The question is: Can anything be done? Of the three related
evils--unduly low rates of wages, excessive hours of labour, and
insanitary condition of work-places--it is evident that the first
applies equally to sweated workers in factories and at home, but the
two others are to some extent guarded against, in factories, by
existing legislation. This is the reason why some people would like to
see all work done for wages transferred to factories. Broadly
speaking, I sympathise with that view. But if it were universally
carried out at the present moment, it would inflict an enormous amount
of suffering and injustice on those who add to their incomes by home
work. Hence the problem is twofold. First, can we extend to workers in
their own homes that degree or protection in respect of hours and
sanitary conditions which the law already gives to workers in
factories? And secondly, can we do anything to obtain for sweated
workers, whether in homes or factories, rates of remuneration less
palpably inadequate? Now it certainly seems impossible to limit the
hours of workers, especially adult workers, in their own homes. More
can be done to ensure sanitary conditions of work. Much has been done
already, so far as the structural condition of dwellings is concerned.
But I am afraid that the measures necessary to introduce what may be
called the factory standard of sanitariness into every room, where
work is being done for wages, would involve an amount of inspection
and interference with the domestic lives of hundreds of thousands of
people which might create such unpopularity as to defeat its own
object. I do not say that nothing more should be attempted in that
direction, quite the reverse; but I say that nothing which can be
attempted in that direction really goes to the root of the evil, which
is the insufficiency of the wage. How can you possibly make it healthy
for a woman, living in a single room, perhaps with children, but even
without, to work twelve or fourteen hours a day for seven or eight
shillings a week, and at the same time to do her own cooking, washing,
and so on. How much food is she likely to have? How much time will be
hers to keep the place clean and tidy? An increase of wages would not
make sanitary regulations unnecessary, but it would make their
observance more possible.