The victory of the Parliamentary Committee was hailed with satisfaction by all who were alarmed at the progress of the new ideas. For a moment it looked as if the organised Trade Unions of skilled workers had definitely separated themselves from the new labour movement growing up around them. Such a separation would, in our opinion, have been an almost irreparable disaster. The Trade Union Congress could claim to represent less than 10 per cent of the wage-earners of the country. Many of the old societies were already shrinking up into insignificant minorities of superior workmen, intent mainly on securing their sick and superannuation benefits. Any definite exclusion of wider ideals might easily have reduced the whole Trade Union organisation to nothing more than a somewhat stagnant department of the Friendly Society movement. This danger was averted by a series of dramatic events which brought the new movement once more inside the Trade Union ranks. At the moment that Henry Broadhurst was triumphing over his enemies at Dundee, the London dock-labourers were marching to that brilliant victory over their employers which changed the whole face of the Trade Union world.
The great dock strike of 1889 was the culmination of an attempt to organise the unskilled workers which had begun in London two or three years before. The privations suffered by the unemployed labourers during the years of depression of trade, and the new spirit of hopefulness due to the Socialist propaganda, had led to efforts being made to bring the vast hordes of unskilled workmen in the Metropolis into some kind of organisation. At first this movement made very little progress. In July 1888, however, the harsh treatment suffered by the women employed in making lucifer matches roused the burning indignation of Mrs. Besant, then editing The Link, a little weekly newspaper which had arisen out of the struggle for Trafalgar Square. A fiery leading article had the unexpected result of causing the match-girls to revolt; and 672 of them came out on strike. Without funds, without organisation, the struggle seemed hopeless. But by the indefatigable energy of Mrs. Besant and Herbert Burrows public opinion was aroused in a manner never before witnessed; £400 was subscribed by hundreds of sympathisers in all classes; and after a fortnight’s obstinacy the employers were compelled, by sheer pressure of public feeling, to make some concessions to their workers.
The match-girls’ victory turned a new leaf in Trade Union annals. 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.