The History of Trade Unionism / (Revised edition, extended to 1920)

THE PLACE OF TRADE UNIONISM IN THE STATE
[1890-1920]

In 1890 Trade Union organisation had already become a lawful institution; its leading members had begun to be made members of Royal Commissions and justices of the peace; they were, now and then, given such Civil Service appointments as Factory Inspectors; and two or three of them had won their way into the House of Commons. But these advances were still exceptional and precarious. The next thirty years were to see the legal position of Trade Unionism, actually in consequence of renewed assaults, very firmly consolidated by statute, and the Trade Union claim to participation in all public enquiries, and to nominate members to all governmental commissions and committees, practically admitted. Trade Union representatives have won an equal entrance to local bodies, from Quarter Sessions and all the elected Councils down to Pension and Food and Profiteering Act Committees; an influential Labour Party has been established in Parliament; and most remarkable of all, the Trade Union itself has been tacitly accepted as a part of the administrative machinery of the State.

It is a characteristic feature of Trade Union history, at the end as at the beginning of the record of the past hundred years, that we have to trace the advance of the Movement through a series of attacks upon Trade Unionism itself. It is in this light that we regard the Royal Commission on Labour set up by the Conservative Government of 1891. Its professed purpose was to enquire into the relations between Capital and Labour, with a view to their improvement. But its composition was significantly weighted against the wage-earners. It is true that, in the large total membership, seven Trade Union officials were included, among them being Mr. Tom Mann; but whilst the great employers who sat on the Commission were supported by legislators, lawyers, and economists of their own class, having substantially their own assumptions and opinions, the Trade Unionist minority was allowed no expert colleagues. From the start the Commission set itself—probably quite without any consciousness of bias—to discredit alike the economic basis of the workmen’s combinations, the methods and devices of Trade Unionism, and the projects of social and economic reform that were then making headway in the Trade Union world. In the end, after two years’ exhaustive enquiry, which cost the nation nearly £50,000, the majority of the Commissioners either found it impossible, or deemed it inexpedient, to report anything in the nature of an indictment against Trade Unionism in theory or practice; and could not bring themselves to recommend any, even the slightest, reversal of what had, up to the very date of the report, been conceded or enacted, whether with regard to the recognition of Trade Unions, the collective regulation of wages, the legal prescription of minimum conditions of employment or the political activities of the workmen’s combinations. The majority of the Commissioners—it is significant that they were joined by three out of the seven Trade Unionists—contented themselves with deprecating, and mildly arguing against, every one of the projects of reform that were then in the air. What is interesting is the fact that the most reactionary section of the Commission nearly persuaded their colleagues of the majority to recommend putting Trade Unions compulsorily into the strait-jacket of legal incorporation, involving them in corporate liability for the acts of their officers or agents, with the object of inducing the Unions to enter—not, as is usual in Collective Bargaining, into treaties defining merely minimum conditions—but into legally binding obligations with the employers, in which the Unions would become liable in damages if any of their members refused to work on the collectively prescribed terms. At the last moment the majority of the Commissioners recoiled from this proposal, which was left to be put forward as a separate report over the names of seven Commissioners. The Labour Minority Report, signed by four[651] out of the seven Trade Unionist Commissioners, whilst protesting strongly against any interference with Trade Union freedom, took the form of a long and detailed plea for a large number of immediately practicable industrial, economic, and social reforms, envisaged as step by step progress towards a complete transformation of the social order. [652]

The Commission had no direct results in legislation or administration; but the Board of Trade set up a Labour Department, appointed a number of Trade Unionists as its officials or correspondents, and started the admirably edited monthly Labour Gazette. The next move came in the form of an assault on the legal position of Trade Unionism, which, in one or other manifestation, held the stage for more than a decade.

For a quarter of a century the peculiar legal status which had been conferred upon a Trade Union by the Acts of 1871-76 was not interfered with by the lawyers. At the close of the nineteenth century, when Trade Unionism had by its very success again become unpopular among the propertied and professional classes, as well as in the business world, a new assault was made upon it.

Actions for Damages

The attempt to suppress Trade Unionism by the criminal law was practically abandoned.[653] But officers of Trade Unions found themselves involved in civil actions, in which the employers sued them for damages caused by Trade Union activity which the judges held to be, although not criminal, nevertheless wrongful. What could no longer be punished by imprisonment with hard labour might at any rate be penalised by heavy damages and costs, for which the Trade Unionist’s home could be sold up. The Trade Unions in 1875-80, though, as we have described, warned by their friendly legal advisers, had not realised the importance of insisting that the elastic and indeterminable law of conspiracy should be put on a reasonable footing; and though they were, by 1891, fairly safe from its use to reinforce the criminal law, the lawyers found means, under the figment of “conspiracy to injure,” to bring under the head of torts or actionable wrongs the most ordinary and non-criminal acts of Trade Union officers which would have been, if done by one person only, without conspiracy, no ground for legal proceedings. After-ages will be amazed at the flagrant unfairness with which the conception of a “conspiracy to injure” was applied at the close of the nineteenth century. The greatest possible injury to other people’s income or business, not involving the violation of a recognised legal right, if committed by employers for the augmentation of their profits (even in “restraint of trade,” by means of the deliberate conspiracy of an association), was held not to be actionable.[654] But it was held to be an actionable wrong to the employer for a couple of men to wait in the street, in a town many miles distant, for the purpose of quite quietly and peacefully persuading a workman not to enter into a contract of service. The most pacific “picketing” of an employer’s premises, though admittedly no longer a criminal act, was, if done in concert, held to be an actionable wrong. If a Trade Union Secretary published a perfectly accurate list of firms which were “non-Union,” with the intention of warning Trade Unionists not to take service with them, this gave each of the “blacklisted” firms the right to sue him for damages. It was held to be ground for damages for a Trade Union official merely to request one firm not to supply goods to another; or to ask an employer not to employ any particular person; or even to urge the members of his own Union quite lawfully to come out on strike on the termination of their engagement of service, if the object of the strike was considered by the Court to be to put pressure on the will of some other employer or some other workman. And whilst any solicitation or persuasion to break a contract of service by a Trade Union official was certainly actionable, it became doubtful whether he would not be equally liable if he had carefully abstained from, and had really not intended, any such suggestion, whenever the members of his Society became so influenced by his action, or were thought by the Court to have been so influenced, that they, spontaneously and against his desires, impetuously came out on strike before their notices had expired.[655] It was a further aggravation, of which less advantage was actually taken by employers in this country than by those of the United States, that where the Court was convinced that an actionable wrong was threatened or intended, it was possible very summarily to obtain an injunction against its commission, any breach of which was punishable by imprisonment for contempt of Court. It became, therefore, at least theoretically possible that almost any action by a Trade Union by which an employer felt himself injured might be summarily prohibited by peremptory injunction; and some things were thus prohibited, even in this country.

The Taff Vale Case

All this development of the Law of Conspiracy and the Law of Torts, though it went far to render nugatory the intention of the Legislature in 1871-76 to make lawful a deliberately concerted strike, left unchallenged the position of the Trade Union itself as immune from legal proceedings against its corporate funds, an anomalous position which everybody understood to have been conceded by the Acts of 1871-76. In 1901, after thirty years of unquestioned immunity, the judges decided, to the almost universal surprise of the legal profession as well as of the Trade Union world, that this had not been enacted by Parliament. In 1900 a tumultuous and at first unauthorised strike had broken out among the employees of the Taff Vale Railway Company in South Wales, in the course of which there had been a certain amount of tumultuous picketing, and other acts of an unlawful character. In the teeth of the advice of the Company’s lawyers, Beasley, the General Manager, insisted on the Company suing for damages, not the workmen guilty of the unlawful acts, but the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants itself; and on fighting the case through to the highest tribunal. After elaborate argument, the Law Lords decided that the Trade Union, though admittedly not a corporate body, could be sued in a corporate capacity for damages alleged to have been caused by the action of its officers, and that an injunction could be issued against it, restraining it and all its officers, not merely from criminal acts, but also from unlawfully, though without the slightest criminality, causing loss to other persons. Moreover, in their elaborate reasons for their judgement, the Law Lords expressed the view that not only an injunction but also a mandamus could be issued against a Trade Union, requiring it to do anything that any person could lawfully call upon it to do; that a registered Trade Union could be sued in its registered name, just as if it were a corporation; that even an unregistered Trade Union could be made collectively liable for damages, and might be sued in the names of its proper officers, the members of its executive committees and its trustees; and that the damages and costs could be recovered from the property of the Trade Union, whether this was in the hands of separate trustees or not. The effect of this momentous judgement, in fact, was, in flagrant disregard of the intention of the Government and of Parliament in 1871-76, to impose upon a Trade Union, whether registered or not, although it was still denied the advantages and privileges of incorporation, complete corporate liability for any injury or damage caused by any person who could be deemed to be acting as the agent of the Union, not merely in respect of any criminal offence which he might have committed, but also in respect of any act, not contravening the criminal law, which the judges might hold to have been actionable. The Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, which had not authorised the Taff Vale strike nor any wrongful acts that were committed by the strikers, but which, after the strike had occurred, had done its best to conduct it to a successful issue, and had paid Strike Benefit, was compelled to pay £23,000 in damages, and incurred a total expense of £42,000. [656] It has been estimated that, from first to last, the damages and expenses in which the various Trade Unions were cast, owing to this, and the other judgements against Trade Unions and Trade Union officials personally, amounted to not less than £200,000.

The little world of Trade Union officials, already alarmed at the prospect of being individually sued for damages, was thrown into consternation by the Taff Vale judgement, which seemed to destroy, at a blow, the status that had been, with so much effort, acquired in 1871-76. The full extent of the danger was not at first apprehended. Why, it was asked, should not the Trade Union rules, and the instructions of Trade Union Executive Committees, expressly forbid the commission by officials of any wrongful acts? It was only gradually realised that, under the figment of “conspiracy to injure” that the lawyers had elaborated, even the most innocent acts, which an individual could quite lawfully commit, might be held wrongful and actionable if they were committed by or on behalf of an association to the pecuniary injury of any other person; and that there was no assignable limit, as the cases had shown, either to what might be held to be wrongful acts, or to the nature or amount of the damage that the Courts might hold to have been caused by such acts in the ordinary course of any extensive strike. Moreover, under the ordinary law of agency, the most explicit prohibition of unlawful acts in the rules of the association, coupled with the most scrupulous care in the Executive Committee in framing its instructions to its officials, would not prevent the Trade Union from being held liable for any pecuniary injury that might be caused, even in defiance of instructions and in disobedience to the rules, by any of its officers acting within the scope of their employment; or, indeed, by any member, paid or unpaid, whom the Courts might hold to be acting as the agent of the Union. And as every stoppage of work, however lawful, necessarily involved financial loss to the employers, it could be foreseen that even the most carefully conducted strike might be made at least the occasion for costly litigation, and probably the opportunity for getting the Trade Union cast in swingeing damages. The immediate result was very largely to paralyse the Executive Committees and responsible officials of all Trade Unions, and greatly to cripple their action, either in securing improvements in their members’ conditions of employment or in resisting the employers’ demands for reductions. In particular, the general advances for which the railway workers were asking were delayed. The capitalists did not fail to use the opportunity to break down the workmen’s defences. Trade Unionism had to a great extent lost its sting. [657]

Though it took some time for the Trade Union world to realise the peril, the effect on the Movement was profound. Up and down the country every society, great and small, and practically every branch, rallied in defence of its right to exist. The first result was to make the newly-formed Labour Party, which will be hereafter described, and which had hitherto hung fire, into an effective political force. The effect of the Taff Vale judgement was, in 1902-3, to double, and by 1906-7 to treble the number of adhering Trade Unions, and to raise the affiliated membership of the Party to nearly a million. As the Dissolution of Parliament approached, the Trade Unions organised a systematic canvass of all prospective candidates, making it plain that none would receive working-class support unless they pledged themselves to a Bill to undo the Taff Vale judgement and put back Trade Unionism into the legal position that Parliament had conferred upon it in 1871. When the General Election at last took place, in January 1906, the Labour Party (still known as the Labour Representation Committee) put no fewer than fifty independent candidates in the field, of whom, to the astonishment of the politicians, twenty-nine were at the head of the poll. [658]

The Trade Disputes Act

The first claim of the Labour Party was for the statutory reversal of the Taff Vale judgement, which every one now admitted to be necessary. The question was what should be done. There were, substantially, only two alternatives. One was that, in view of the difficulty of effectually maintaining it against legal ingenuity, the Trade Unions should forgo their position of being outside the law, and should claim, instead, full rights, not only of citizenship, but actually of being duly authorised constituent parts of the social structure, lawfully fulfilling a recognised function in industrial organisation. But for the Trade Union to become, not merely an instrument of defence, but actually an organ of government in the industrial world, required a great advance in public opinion. It assumed an explicit recognition of the legitimate function of the Trade Union, as the basis of a Vocational Democracy, exercising a definite share in the control and administration of industry. It involved a complete transformation of both the criminal and the civil law, so that workmen’s combinations and strikes, together with peaceful picketing in its legitimate form, should be unreservedly and explicitly legalised; the law of civil conspiracy practically abrogated, so that nothing should be unlawful when done in concert with others which would not be unlawful if done by an individual alone; and reasonable limits set to liability for the acts of agents and to the scope for injunctions, so that a Trade Union Executive would be able both to know the law and to be ensured against its perversion. The alternative was to make no claim for the profound advance in Trade Union status that would be involved in such a policy; to forgo any hope of satisfactory or complete amendment of the law, and merely to re-enact the exceptional legislation of 1871, this time specifically insisting that a Trade Union, whether registered or not, should be put outside the law, and made expressly immune from legal proceedings for anything, whether lawful or unlawful, done by its officers or by itself. The outgoing Conservative Government had appointed in 1903 a small Royal Commission to consider the state of the law as to Trade Unionism, before which the Trade Unions had refused to give evidence, because the Commission, which was made up almost entirely of lawyers, included no Trade Unionist. This Commission, it is believed, was told privately not to report until after the General Election, in order that the Conservative Government might not be embarrassed by the dilemma. Early in 1906 it reported in favour of the Trade Union accepting full responsibility for its own actions, subject to considerable, but far from adequate, amendments of the law.[659] This proposal was definitely rejected by the Labour Party, which introduced a Bill of its own, merely restoring the position of 1871. When the Liberal Government brought in a Bill very much on the lines of the Commission’s Report, there was a dramatic exhibition of the electoral power that Trade Unionism, once it is roused, can exercise in its own defence. Member after member rose from different parts of the House to explain that they had pledged themselves to vote for the complete immunity which Trade Unions were supposed to have been granted in 1871. Nothing less than this would suffice; and the most powerful Government hitherto known was constrained, in spite of the protests of lawyers and employers, to pass into law the Trade Disputes Act of 1906. [660]

The Trade Disputes Act, which remains (1920) the main charter of Trade Unionism, explicitly declares, without any qualification or exception, that no civil action shall be entertained against a Trade Union in respect of any wrongful act committed by or on behalf of the Union; an extraordinary and unlimited immunity, however great may be the damage caused, and however unwarranted the act, which most lawyers, as well as all employers, regard as nothing less than monstrous.[661] At the same time the Act, whilst not abrogating or even defining the law as to civil conspiracy, gives three exceptional privileges to Trade Union officials by declaring that, when committed in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute, (1) an act done in concert shall not be actionable if it would not have been actionable if done without concert; (2) attendance solely in order to inform or persuade peacefully shall be lawful; and (3) an act shall not be actionable merely by reason of its inducing another person to break a contract of employment, or of its being an interference with another person’s business, or with his right to dispose of his capital or his labour as he chooses. These exceptional statutory privileges for the protection of Trade Union officials in the exercise of their lawful vocation, and of “pickets” in the performance of their lawful function—in themselves a triumph for Trade Unionism—have ever since excited great resentment in most of those who are not wage-earners. Some friends of the Trade Unions expressed at the time the doubt whether the policy thus forced upon Parliament would prove, in the long run, entirely in the interest of the Movement; and whether it would not have been better to have chosen the bolder policy of insisting on a complete reform of the law, to which, when properly reformed, Trade Unions should be subject in the same way as any other associations. The lawyers, as it proved, were not long in taking their revenge.

The Osborne Judgement

This time the legal assault on Trade Unionism took a new form. The result of the dramatic victory of the Trade Disputes Act, and of the activity of the Labour members in the House of Commons, was considerably to increase the influence of the Labour Party in the country, where preparations were made for contesting any number of constituencies irrespective of the convenience of the Liberal and Conservative parties. The railway companies, in particular, found the presence in Parliament of the secretary of the railwaymen’s principal Trade Union very inconvenient. Within a couple of years of the passing of the Trade Disputes Act, on July 22, 1908, one of the members of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants took legal proceedings to restrain it from spending any of its funds on political objects, contending that this was beyond the powers of a Trade Union. Such a contention found no support among eminent lawyers, several of whom had formally advised that Trade Unions were undoubtedly entitled to undertake political activities if their rules authorised such action and a majority of their members desired it. W. V. Osborne, the dissentient member of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, took a different view; and, liberally financed from capitalist sources, carried his case right up to the highest tribunal. As a result, in December 1909, as in 1825, 1867-71, and 1901-6, every Trade Union in the land found its position and status once more gravely impugned. In what became widely known as the Osborne Judgement, the House of Lords, acting in its judicial capacity as the highest Court of Appeal, practically tore up what had, since 1871, been universally understood to be the legal constitution of a Trade Union. [662]

The decision of the judges in the Osborne case throws so much light, not only on the status of Trade Unionism in English law, but also on the animus and prejudice which the Trade Disputes Act and the Labour Party had excited, that we think it worth treating at some length. Formally this judgement decided only that W. V. Osborne, a member of the Walthamstow Branch of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, was entitled to restrain that Trade Union from making a levy on its members (and from using any of its funds) for the purpose of supporting the Labour Party, or maintaining Members of Parliament. But in the course of that decision a majority of the Law Lords, therein following all three judges of the Court of Appeal, laid it down as law (and thereby made it law until Parliament should otherwise determine), (a) that although Parliament has always avoided any express incorporation of Trade Unions, these were all now to be deemed to be corporate bodies, formed under statute, and not unincorporated groups of individual persons; (b) that it follows, by an undoubted principle of English law, that a body corporate, created under statute, cannot lawfully do anything outside the purposes for which the statute has incorporated it; (c) that as the purposes for which Trade Unions are incorporated have to be found somewhere authoritatively given, the definition which Parliament incidentally enacted in the Trade Union Act of 1876 must be taken to enumerate, accurately and exhaustively, all the purposes which any group of persons falling within that definition can, as a corporate body, lawfully pursue; and (d) that the payment of the salaries and election expenses of Members of Parliament, and indeed, any political action whatsoever, not being mentioned as one of these purposes and not being considered by the judges incidental to them, could not lawfully be undertaken by any Trade Union, even if it was formed, from the outset, with this purpose duly expressed in its original rules, and even if all its members agreed to it, and continued to desire that their organisation should carry it out.

This momentous judgement destroyed, at a blow, the peculiar legal status which Frederic Harrison had devised for Trade Unionism in 1868, and which Parliament thought that it had enacted in 1871-76. The statutes of 1871 and 1876, which had always been supposed to have enlarged the freedom of Trade Unions, were now held to have deprived these bodies of powers that they had formerly enjoyed. It was not, as will be seen, a question of protecting a dissentient minority. Whether the members were unanimous, or whether they were nearly evenly divided, did not affect the legal position. Trade Unions found themselves suddenly forbidden to do anything, even if all their members desired it, which could not be brought within the terms of a clause in the Act of 1876, which Parliament (as Lord James of Hereford emphatically declared) never meant to be taken in that sense. “What is not within the ambit of that statute,” said Lord Halsbury, “is, I think, prohibited both to a corporation and a combination.” This was the new limitation put on Trade Unions. All their educational work was prohibited; all their participation in municipal administration was forbidden; all their association for common purposes in Trades Councils and the Trades Union Congress became illegal. The judges stopped the most characteristic and, as was supposed, the most constitutional of the three customary ways that (as we have shown in our Industrial Democracy) Trade Unions pursued of enforcing their Common Rules, namely, the Method of Legal Enactment; grave doubt was thrown on the legality of some of the developments of their second way, the Method of Mutual Insurance; whilst the way that the House of Lords expressly prescribed was exactly that which used to give rise to so much controversy, namely, the Method of Collective Bargaining, with its concomitant of the Strike. So topsy-turvy a view of Trade Unionism, a view which seems to have arisen from the judges’ ignorance of its two centuries of history, could not have survived open discussion, and therefore could hardly have been taken by even the most prejudiced Parliament.

The Development of English Law

What was the explanation of the view of the Trade Union constitution that the judges took? The English Courts of Justice, it must be remembered, have peculiar rules of their own for the construction of statutes. When the plain man wants to know what a document means, he seeks every available explanation of the intention of the author. When the historian inquires the purpose and intention of an Act of Parliament, he considers all the contemporary evidence as to the minds of those concerned. The Courts of Law, for good and sufficient reasons, debar themselves from going behind the face of the document, and are therefore at the mercy of all the unstudied ineptitudes of House of Commons phraseology. Along with this rigour as to the intention of a statute, the English and American judges combine a capacity for developments of doctrine in the form of legal principles which is, we believe, unequalled in other judicial systems. Now, the subject of corporations is one of those in which there had been, among the past generations of English lawyers, a silent and almost unselfconscious development of doctrine, of which, in Germany, Gierke had been the great inspirer, and Maitland in this country the brilliant exponent.[663] Our English law long rigidly refused to admit that a corporate entity could arise of itself, without some formal and legally authoritative act of outside power. How, it was asked, except by some definite act of creation by a superior, could the persona ficta come into existence? How, otherwise (as Madox quaintly puts it), could this mere “society of mortal men” become something “immortal, invisible, and incorporeal”?[664] As a matter of fact, associations or social entities of all sorts always did arise, without the intervention of the lawyers, and nowadays they arise with amazing ease, without any act of creation by a superior; and when the English lawyers refused to recognise them as existing, it was they who were irrational, and the common law itself that was at fault. Nowadays we live in a world of social entities of all sorts, and of every degree of informality, corporate entities that to the old-fashioned lawyers are still legally non-existent as such—clubs and committees of every possible kind; groups and circles, societies and associations for every conceivable purpose; unions and combinations and trusts in every trade and profession; schools and colleges and “University Extension Classes,” often existing and spending and acting most energetically as entities, having a common purse and a single will, in practice even perpetual succession, and (if they desire such a futile luxury) a common seal, without any sort of formal incorporation. Gradually English lawyers (whom we need not suspect of reading Gierke, or even, for that matter, Maitland) were unconsciously imbibing the legally heterodox view that a corporate entity is anything which acts as such; and so far from making it impossible for the persona ficta to come into existence without a formal act of creation, they had been, by little alterations of procedure and imperceptible changes in legal principles, sometimes by harmless little dodges and fictions of the Courts themselves, coming near to the practical result of putting every association which is, in fact, a social entity, however informal in its constitution, and however “spontaneous” in its origin, in the same position of a persona ficta, for the purpose of suing and of being sued, as if it had been created by a formal instrument of incorporation, decorated by many seals, and procured at vast expense from the post-Reformation Pope himself; or as if it had been expressly incorporated by the Royal Charter of a Protestant King or the private statute of a Victorian Parliament.

Now this development of legal doctrine to fit the circumstances of modern social life is, when one comes to think of it, only common sense. If twenty old ladies in the workhouse club together to provide themselves with a special pot of tea, and agree that one among them shall be the treasurer of their painfully-hoarded pennies as a common fund, they do, in fact, create a social entity just as real in its way as the Governor and Company of the Bank of England. Why should not the law, if it ever comes to hear of the action of the twenty old ladies in the workhouse, deal with the situation as it really is, according to their wishes and intentions, without inquiring by what formal act of external power a persona ficta has been created; and therefore without demanding that the old ladies shall first procure a charter of incorporation from the Pope, from the King, or from Parliament? And considering that Trade Unions were now in fact social entities, often having behind them more than a hundred years of “perpetual succession”; counting sometimes over a hundred thousand members moving by a single will; and occasionally accumulating in a common purse as much as half a million of money, the Law Lords might well think it absurd and irrational of Parliament to have decided in 1871-76, and again in 1906, to regard them as unincorporated groups of persons, having, in a corporate capacity, no legally enforceable obligations and hardly any legally enforceable rights. It may have been absurd and irrational, but what right—so the Trade Unionists asked—had the judges to change the law?

Whatever may be the justification for the momentous change in the law which the Six Judges (namely, the three members of the Court of Appeal, and three out of the five Law Lords, all of whom agreed in the series of propositions that we have cited) suddenly, without Parliamentary authority, of their own motion effected, it created an intolerable situation. There was, in the first place, the application of the doctrine of ultra vires to corporate entities quite unaware of its existence. It was all very well, in order to fit the law to the facts, to throw over the old legal doctrine that the persona ficta of a corporation could only come into existence by some formal act of incorporation by an external authority. But then it plainly would not do to retain, as the Six Judges quite calmly retained, the severe limitations on the action of statutory corporate entities which is involved in the doctrine of ultra vires, and which, as Lord Halsbury put it, was to prohibit them from doing what they liked. The argument for that principle is that such a corporate entity owes its existence entirely to the statutory authority by which it is created; that the legislature has brought it into being for certain definite purposes; that for those purposes and no others the exceptional powers of a corporation have been conferred upon it; that as such it is, in a sense, the agent whom the community has entrusted with the execution of these functions, and who cannot therefore (even if all the constituent members of its body so agree and desire) assume any other purposes or functions. But any such doctrine of ultra vires can have no rational application to the corporate entity formed by the twenty old ladies in the workhouse for their private pot of tea. If we are going, in effect, to treat as corporate entities all sorts of spontaneously arising associations, such as an unregistered Trade Union (and some of the wealthiest and most powerful Trade Unions were still unregistered), or such as an Employers’ Association (which was hardly ever a registered body)—corporate entities which were, in fact, lawfully in existence long before the Act of 1876—we must give up the fiction that the purposes of these associations have been authoritatively fixed and defined in advance by Parliament in such a way that the members themselves, even when they are unanimous and when they are acting in strict accord with their constitution and rules, cannot add to or alter the objects or methods of their organisation. What was logically required, in fact, was not the arbitrary identification of spontaneously arising associative entities with legally created corporations, but the formulation of a new conception as to the functions and legal rights that such spontaneously arising associative entities—to which the limitations of legally created corporations could not be simply assumed to apply—should, as a class, be permitted to exercise.

The Miscarriage of Justice

We come now to the second cardinal feature of the decision of the Six Judges in 1909, in which they showed both prejudice and ignorance. Having found that the Trade Unions were, in fact, corporate entities, and that they had been, in various clumsy ways, dealt with by Parliament very much as if they were legally corporate entities—though Parliament had advisedly abstained from incorporating them, and had, indeed, always referred to them as being what in fact they were, namely already existing and spontaneously arising associations, not created by its will—the Six Judges took the view that some authoritative specification of the objects and purposes of a Trade Union had to be discovered by hook or by crook. It seems to have been by them inconceivable (though Lord James of Hereford, one of their own number, who had personally taken part in all the legislation, expressly told them it was in fact so) that no such specification should exist. They accordingly found it in an enumeration which Parliament had given in the Act of 1876 of all the various bodies which were to be entitled to the privileges conferred by the Act—a definition introduced, so a well-informed writer mentioned in 1878, for the special advantage of Trade Unions[665]—principally to enable them to be registered by the Chief Registrar of Friendly Societies. The Law Lords now held that this definition must be deemed to be an exhaustive enumeration, not merely of the kinds of societies to be eligible for registration, but also of all the objects and purposes that Parliament intended any of those bodies, whether registered or unregistered, to be free at any time to pursue. The result was that all Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations, and, indeed, all informal groups of workmen or employers falling within this definition, suddenly found themselves (to the complete amazement of every one concerned, including the lawyers) rigidly confined in their action, even if all their members otherwise wished and agreed, to matters which were specified in an enumerating clause of an Act of Parliament of a generation before, which had never before been supposed to have that meaning, or to have any restrictive effect at all. We ought to speak with proper respect of the judges, though sometimes, by their curious ignorance of life outside the Law Courts, and especially of “what everybody knows,” they try us hard. But it is necessary to state plainly, with regard to this part of the Osborne Judgement, that to the present writers, as to the whole British working class and many other people, including lawyers, it seemed an astounding aberration, amounting to a grave miscarriage of justice. Again, let it be noted that Lord James of Hereford, who knew what Parliament had intended, and what Trade Unions actually were, expressly dissented from his colleagues on this point, saying that the enumeration clause in the Act of 1876 was never intended to be “a clause of limitation or exhaustive definition” of objects and purposes; and arguing that it did not prevent a Trade Union from having other purposes, or pursuing other methods, not in themselves unlawful, even though these were not enumerated in the definition clause and were not even incidental to the purposes therein enumerated. But what is the history of this definition clause? As it stands in the Act of 1876 it runs as follows:

Now, to the lay mind, this extremely loose enumeration[666] of kinds of societies seems plainly intended to bring within its net, and therefore to admit to the advantages of the Act, a wide range of existing or possible associations of different kinds. It was to include all sorts of Employers’ Associations as well as Trade Unions. It was to include bodies already in existence as well as those to be formed in the future. It was to include bodies seeking to impose restrictive conditions “in restraint of trade,” as well as those having no such unlawful objects. It was to include, therefore, bodies already enjoying a full measure of lawful existence and legal recognition, as well as those for the first time fully legalised by the legislation of 1871-76. To the logician it will be clear that we have here a case of classification by type, not by delimitation. “It is determined,” says Whewell and J. S. Mill, “not by a boundary line without, but by a central point within; not by what it strictly excludes, but by what it eminently includes; by an example, not by a precept.”[667] Accordingly the clause names specifically one by one the various attributes, any one of which is to be typical of the class. It sufficed for the purpose to name only one attribute belonging to each body which it was desired to include. What its other attributes might be was irrelevant. It does not occur to the ordinary reader, any more than to the logician, that the effect of the clause is, not merely to include associations of different kinds, but also to limit the legal freedom of all those associations, with all their varied functions, exclusively to the purposes specified in the definition, which were merely recited in order to bring a number of heterogeneous bodies into one class. On the construction put upon this clause by the Six Judges, the Act of 1876 was a measure which deprived Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations, many of which had been for years lawfully in existence, without any unlawful objects or methods, of a freedom that they had up to then enjoyed; it was an Act rigidly confining their operations to a limited field, and for ever prohibiting them (as Lord Halsbury expressly declared) from doing anything not included in the list of functions incidentally then and there given. It is safe to say that, to any historical student who knows anything of the circumstances of the case, such a supposition is preposterous. No Trade Union and no Employers’ Association was aware in 1876 that its freedom was being thus restricted. Thomas Burt, M.P., and Lord James of Hereford (then Sir Henry James, M.P.), who took part in passing the Act, certainly never dreamed that they were doing anything of the sort. The Home Office officials who prepared it, and Lord Cross (then Home Secretary) who introduced it, quite plainly had not the remotest notion that they were taking away from Trade Unions (which they were anxious to legalise) any of the functions which these Unions were in fact exercising, and which such Trade Unions as were lawful associations were already lawfully exercising; or that they were prohibiting these Trade Unions from doing anything not specified in the incidental enumeration of attributes that was then, merely for the purpose of including various kinds of associations, statutorily enacted. As a matter of fact, the definition clause in the Act of 1876 was enacted merely to correct in one small particular the definition clause in the Act of 1871. That clause had defined a Trade Union as meaning “such combination ... as would, if this Act had not passed, been deemed to have been an unlawful combination by reason of some one or more of the purposes being in restraint of trade.” This was found in practice inconvenient, because it had inadvertently excluded from registration and all the benefits of the Act those Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations which were already lawful associations, free from any unlawful purpose. A Trade Union had to prove that it was (but for the Act) an unlawful body before it could be admitted to the advantages of the Act. It was also inexpedient, because it actually offered an inducement to Trade Unions to have purposes or methods “in restraint of trade,” in order to obtain these advantages. Now, supposing that the Act of 1876 had not been passed, and that the definition clause had remained in the terms of that of the Act of 1871, would the Six Judges have equally construed it as offering a complete and exhaustive enumeration of the permissible activities of a Trade Union, making it actually illegal for the future for any association of workmen or employers to deal with the conditions of employment, except in ways that would (but for the 1871 Act) have been unlawful? And if the definition clause in the 1871 Act cannot be construed as (to use Lord James of Hereford’s words) “a clause of limitation or exhaustive definition” of Trade Union activities, with what consistency can the definition clause of the 1876 Act (which follows the same wording, and merely extends the definition so as to take in lawful as well as unlawful societies) be so construed? Successive Chief Registrars of Friendly Societies, like every one else, had always understood the definition clause to be an enabling clause, not a restricting one; and they had accordingly for a whole generation willingly registered rules presented to them by Trade Unions, including in their objects and purposes all sorts of things not enumerated in the definition, and not even incidental to any of the purposes therein enumerated. It was, in 1909, not at first realised—certainly the Six Judges did not realise—how extensive and how varied were the actually existing operations of Trade Unions that they were rendering illegal. Not political action alone, not municipal action alone, but any work of general education of their members or others; the formation of a library; the establishment or management of “University Extension” or “Workers’ Educational Association” classes; the subscription to circulating book-boxes; the provision of public lectures; the establishment of scholarships at Ruskin College, Oxford, or any other College—all of which things were at the time actually being done by Trade Unions—were all henceforth to be ultra vires and illegal. The two hundred Trades Councils, local federations of different Trade Unions for the purpose of dealing with matters of general interest to workmen, which took no part in the collective bargaining of any particular Trade Union, were probably thereby equally made illegal; though they were in 1876 already a quarter of a century old, and in 1909 numbered nearly a million members. The annual Trade Union Congress itself, then in its fortieth year, and dealing almost exclusively with Parliamentary projects, came under the same ban. The active participation which Trade Unions had here and there taken in technical education, and their co-operation with the Local Education Authorities, which had sometimes been found so useful, were certainly ultra vires. One would suppose, strictly speaking, that a similar illegality was to attach to all the vast “friendly society” side of Trade Unionism, with its sick and accident and out-of-work benefits—not one of them being referred to in the definition which the Six Judges declared to contain an exhaustive enumeration of the purposes and objects that Parliament intended to permit Trade Unions to pursue. But here the Six Judges saved themselves—though in a way logically destructive of their claim that the definition clause itself was one of “exhaustive” enumeration of permissible Trade Union purposes—by holding that these friendly benefits, though not mentioned in the definition clause, were referred to elsewhere in the Act, and might be regarded as incidental to the purpose of regulating the conditions of employment. This, indeed, so far as benefits paid to the workman himself are concerned, was a plausible view. Strike Benefit, in particular, is plainly incidental to striking, and sick benefit might conceivably be held to protect the worker from industrial oppression whilst sick. But the same cannot be said of the most widely spread of all Trade Union benefits, the provision of funeral money on a member’s death. In some cases the Trade Unions were actually paying for the funerals of their deceased members’ widows and orphan children. This was a mere act of humanity to the deceased member’s widow and orphans; and it could not, by any stretch of imagination, be supposed to improve the workers’ bargaining power, or to be in any way incidental to the regulation or restriction of the conditions of employment. Yet Funeral Benefit was in 1909 (as it was in 1876) the one among the so-called “friendly” benefits most universally adopted by Trade Unions. More than a million Trade Unionists were thus effecting through their societies a humble life insurance. This extensive life insurance business of Trade Unions could not be said to be in any way included in the definition clause of the 1876 Act, even if the sick and unemployment benefits were. If the judgements in the Osborne Case were correct, the whole of this life insurance business of Trade Unions (as distinguished from the sick and unemployment benefits), or at least the whole of that relating to widows and orphans, must be held to have been inadvertently prohibited by Parliament in 1871 and 1876, and to have been ever since ultra vires and illegal. It is impossible for the plain man to avoid the conclusion, even though the six other authorities take a contrary view, that Lord James of Hereford was right in declaring that the definition in the Act of 1876 was not meant by Parliament to be “a clause of limitation or exhaustive definition” of the permissible purposes of a Trade Union; and, accordingly, that the Six Judges had—presumably following quite accurately the narrow technical rules of their profession—put upon the statute a construction which Parliament had in no way intended.

What then did Parliament intend to fix and define as the permissible objects and functions of a Trade Union? The answer of the historical student is clear and unhesitating. Parliament quite certainly intended, in 1871 and 1876, to fix and define nothing of the sort; but meant, whether wisely or not, to leave Trade Unions as they then were—as such of them, indeed, as had no unlawful purpose or method had long legally been—namely, as free as any other unincorporated groups of persons to take whatever action they might choose, subject only to their own contractual agreements, and to the general law of the land. From this position we venture, as historians, to say that Parliament did not, in 1871 or 1876, intentionally depart.

Finally, we have the argument of the Six Judges that, seeing that the sole lawful purposes of a Trade Union are “regulating the relations between workmen and masters, or between workmen and workmen, or between masters and masters,” and “imposing restrictive conditions on the conduct of any trade or business,” no action of a Parliamentary or political kind is within the definition, or even incidental to anything therein. This view, to put it bluntly, showed an ignorance of Trade Unionism, British industrial history, and the circumstances not only of 1871-76, but also of 1908-9, which was as remarkable as it was deplorable. On the face of it, to take first the words of the statute, the most usual and the most natural way of “regulating” the relations between people, and the most obvious expedient for “imposing” restrictive conditions on industry, is an Act of Parliament. It was to Acts of Parliament, as we have abundantly shown in Industrial Democracy, that the Trade Unions had for a century been looking, and were in 1871-76, many of them, looking, for a very large part of the “regulating” of industrial conditions, and of the “restrictive conditions” that they existed to promote. What the judges apparently forgot is that conditions of employment include not merely wages, but also hours of labour, sanitary conditions, precautions against accident, compensation for injuries, and what not. If the Six Judges had remembered how, in fact, in Great Britain the great majority of industrial relations were regulated, and how the great mass of restrictive conditions were, in fact, imposed on industry; or if they had had recalled to them the long and persistent struggle of the Trade Unions to get adopted the Factory Acts, the Mines Regulation Acts, the Truck Acts, the Shop Hours Acts, and so many more, they could hardly have argued that such actions as engaging in Parliamentary business, supporting or opposing Parliamentary candidates, and helping members of Parliament favourable to “regulating,” and “imposing restrictive conditions”—actions characteristic of Trade Unions for generations—were not incidental to these legitimate purposes. As a matter of fact, the getting and enforcing of legislation is, historically, as much a part of Trade Union function as maintaining a strike.[668] One Trade Union at least, which no one ever dreamt to be illegal, the United Textile Factory Workers’ Association, has existed exclusively for political action, and had no other functions.[669] This kind of Trade Union action is even antecedent in date to any corporate dealing with employers. During the whole two centuries of Trade Union history, as in Industrial Democracy we have described, the Unions have had at their disposal, and have simultaneously adopted, three different methods of imposing and enforcing the Common Rules which they sought to get adopted in the conditions of employment. From 1700 downwards they have used the Method of Mutual Insurance; from the very beginning of the eighteenth century down to the present day the records show them to have been continuously employing the Method of Legal Enactment; whilst only intermittently during the eighteenth century, and not openly and avowedly until 1824, could they rely on the Method of Collective Bargaining. The Miners’ Unions, and the Agricultural Labourers’ Unions, in particular, had been particularly active in support of the extension of the franchise between 1863 and 1884. Even the expenditure of Trade Union funds on Parliamentary candidatures was practised by Trade Unions at any rate as early as 1868, as soon, in fact, as the town artisans were enfranchised; and the payment of Trade Union Members of Parliament was begun as early as 1874, and had lasted continuously from that date. Yet the Six Judges assumed, apparently without adequate consideration, and certainly on inaccurate information, that Parliament in 1876 intended to authorise Trade Unions to pursue their first and third methods, but intended to prohibit them, from that time forth, from using the Method of Legal Enactment, just at the moment when this latter was being most effectively employed. It is, indeed, almost comic to remember that the Bill which is supposed to have effected this revolution in the Trade Union position was brought in by Lord Cross, then Sir R. A. Cross, M.P., fresh from his election by a constituency in which the Trade Unionists had been, politically, the dominant factor; that it was debated in a House of Commons in which the direct influence of the Trade Unions was at the highest point that it had hitherto reached; that at the General Election of 1874, from which the members had lately come, the Trade Unions, as we have described in the present volume, had worked with might and main for the rejection of candidates opposed to their political claims, and had had a much larger share than political historians usually recognise in the Gladstonian defeat; that two Trade Union members were actually then sitting in the House, one, at least (Thomas Burt), being openly maintained as a salaried representative of his Union, by a salary avowedly fixed on a scale to enable him to sit in Parliament;[670] that the Conservative Government promptly introduced the particular legal enactments to obtain which the Trade Unions had spent their money, namely, the Nine Hours Bill, the Employer and Workman Bill, and the Trade Union Bill; and that the Six Judges ask us to believe that the latter Bill, which the Trade Union members themselves helped to pass, was designed and intended to prevent Thomas Burt from drawing a salary from the Northumberland Miners’ Mutual Confident Society whilst sitting in the House of Commons; to prohibit the Northumberland Miners’ Mutual Confident Society, just because it was a Trade Union, from taking any part in future elections in the Morpeth Division, and to make the action of this and all other Trade Unions in paying for political work and Parliamentary candidatures, even with the unanimous consent of their members, from that time forth illegal.

We have thought it worth while to place on record this analysis of the legally authoritative part of the Osborne Judgement, which, though partly modified by a subsequent statute, has not been overruled, and is still legally authoritative, because it is of historical importance. It is significant as showing how far the Courts of Justice were, as lately as 1909, still out of touch, so far as Trade Unionism is concerned, either with Parliament or with the political economists. The case was, however, of even greater import. The bias and prejudice, the animus and partiality—doubtless unconscious to the judges themselves—which were displayed by those who ought to have been free from such intellectual influences; the undisguised glee with which this grave miscarriage of justice was received by the governing class, and the prolonged delay of a professedly Liberal and Radical Cabinet, and a professedly Liberal and Radical House of Commons in remedying it, had a great effect on the minds of the wage-earners, and contributed notably to the increasing bitterness of feeling against the “governing class,” and against a State organisation in which such a miscarriage of justice could take place. We must, indeed, look behind the legal technicalities of the Six Judges, and consider what was the animus behind their extraordinary judgement. The “subservience” of Parliament to the Trade Unions in passing the Trade Disputes Act of 1906 had excited the deepest resentment of the lawyers. The progress of the Labour Party was causing a quite exaggerated alarm among members of the governing class. What lay behind the Osborne Judgement was a determination to exclude the influence of the workmen’s combinations from the political field. This is really what the Osborne Judgement prohibited. One irreverent legal critic, indeed, went so far as to remark that the Law Lords were so anxious to make it clear that Trade Unions were not to be entitled to pay for Members of Parliament, that they failed to heed how much law they were severally demolishing in the process! It is instructive to examine the arguments adduced by the Law Lords and the judges on this point, apart from their decision as to Trade Union status. These opinions could hardly be deemed to be law, as they all differed one from another, and none of them obtained the support of a majority of the Law Lords. Such as they are, however, they seem not to have been connected with Trade Unionism at all, but with the nature of the House of Commons. One of the Law Lords (Lord James of Hereford) merely objected to Trade Unions paying a Member of Parliament who was (as was quite incorrectly assumed) bound by a rule of the paying body requiring him to vote in a particular way, not on labour questions only, but on all issues that might come before Parliament. Another Law Lord (Lord Shaw), with whom Lord Justice Fletcher Moulton seemed to agree, held that what was illegal was not the payment of Members of Parliament, but their subjection, by whomsoever paid, to a “pledge-bound” party organisation (as the Labour Party was alleged to be). Another judge (Farwell, L.J.) took a different line, and held that it was illegal for a corporate body to require its own members to subscribe collectively towards the support of a Member of Parliament with whose views they might individually not agree. What the historian and the student of political science will say is that these were matters for legislation, not for the sudden intervention of the judiciary. The House of Commons is prompt enough to defend its own honour and its own “privilege”; and the function of the judges will begin when any of the acts referred to has been made an illegal practice. In 1909, as now, the practices complained of, whether or not they were correctly described, and however objectionable to these particular gentlemen they might be, were all lawful; and the judges and Law Lords were abusing the privileges of their office by importing them to prejudice the legal issue.

The Osborne Judgement received the support, not only of the great mass of property owners and professional men, but also, though tacitly, of the Liberal and Conservative Parties. A distinct challenge was thereby thrown down to the Trade Union world. Not only were the activities of their Unions to be crippled, not only was their freedom to combine for whatever purposes they chose to be abrogated, they were to be expressly forbidden to aspire to protect their interests or promote their objects by Parliamentary representation, or in any way to engage in politics. It was this challenge to Organised Labour that absorbed the whole interest of the Trade Union world for the next three or four years.

The experienced Trade Union leaders did not forget that it might well be a matter for Trade Union consideration how far it is wise and prudent for a Trade Union to engage in general politics. We have elsewhere pointed out[671] with some elaboration how dangerous it may become to the strength and authority of a Trade Union if any large section of the persons in the trade are driven out of its ranks, or deterred from joining, because they find their convictions outraged by part of its action. Nothing could be more unwise for a Trade Union than to offend its Roman Catholic members by espousing the cause of secular education.[672] But this is a point which each Trade Union must decide for itself. It is not a matter in which outsiders can offer more than counsel. It is clearly not a matter in which the discretion of the Trade Union, any more than that of an individual employer, can properly be limited by law. For no Trade Union can nowadays abstain altogether from political action. Without co-operating with other Trade Unions in taking Parliamentary action of a very energetic and very watchful kind, it cannot (as long experience has demonstrated to practically all Trade Unionists) protect the interests of its members. Without taking a vigorous part in promoting, enforcing, and resisting all sorts of legislation affecting education, sanitation, the Poor Law, the whole range of the Factories, Mines, Railways, and Merchant Shipping Acts, the Shop Hours, Truck, Industrial Arbitration and Conciliation, and now even the Trade Boards’ Act, the Trade Union cannot properly fulfil its function of looking after the regulation of the conditions of employment. But this is not all. The interests of its members require the most watchful scrutiny of the administration of every public department. There is not a day passes but something in Parliament demands its attention. On this point Trade Union opinion is unanimous. We have never met any member of a Trade Union—and Osborne himself is no exception—who has any contrary view. To suggest that there is anything improper, or against public policy, for a Trade Union to give an annual retaining fee to a Member of Parliament whom its members trust, or to take the necessary steps to get that member elected, in order to ensure that what the Trade Union conceives to be its own interests shall be protected, was to take up a position of extraordinary unfairness. When more than a quarter of the whole House of Commons habitually consists, not merely of individual employers, but actually of persons drawing salaries or stipends from capitalist corporations of one kind or another—when, in fact, the number of companies of shareholders in railways, banks, insurance companies, breweries, ocean telegraphs, shipbuilding yards, shipping companies, steamship lines, iron and steel works, coal mines, and joint stock enterprises of all sorts actually represented in the House of Commons by their own salaried chairmen, directors, trustees, managers, secretaries, or solicitors is beyond all computation—the claim that there is something improper, something inconsistent with our electoral system, something at variance with the honourable nature of the House of Commons, for the workmen’s organisations to retain a few dozen of the Members whom the constituencies (knowing of this payment) deliberately elect, or to help such Members to provide their election expenses, is an argument so extraordinary in its unfairness that it drives the active-minded workman frantic with rage. It is no answer to say that these representatives of capitalist corporations are not expressly paid to sit in Parliament. They are at any rate desired by their employers to sit, and permitted by the law to receive their salaries notwithstanding that they do sit. This was forbidden to representatives of Trade Unions. That it should be illegal for the salaried President or Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants to sit in Parliament, when it is perfectly legal for the much more generously salaried Chairman or Director of a Railway Company to sit there, is an anomaly hard for any candid man to defend; and the anomaly is all the greater in that the interests of the railway company come, almost every year, into conflict with those of the community at large, and the railway chairman is, on these occasions, quite frankly there to promote his own company’s Bill, and to defend the interests of the shareholders by whom he is paid. To say that the workmen’s organisations shall not pay their representatives in the way that suits working-class conditions, whilst railway shareholders may pay their representatives in the way that suits capitalist conditions—to assume a great concern for the wounded conscience of a Liberal or Conservative Trade Unionist who finds his Union paying its Secretary or its President to sit as a Radical or Labour Member of Parliament, and no concern at all for the Socialist or Radical shareholder in a railway company who finds his company paying its Conservative Chairman M.P.—is to be guilty of an amazing degree of class bias, if not of hypocrisy. After all, it is not the Trade Union but the constituency that elects the Member of Parliament. The Trade Union payment only enables him to stand. Whatever may be thought of the policy of the Labour Party, or the particular form of its organisation, if we regard the Trade Union payment as a retaining fee for looking after what the Trade Union members as a whole conceive to be their own interest; if the Trade Union members have the opportunity of choosing, by a majority, which among competing persons (or, for that matter, which among competing groups of persons) they will entrust with this Trade Union task; if the Trade Union assumes no responsibility for and exercises no coercion upon its Parliamentary representative with regard to issues on which it has not voted, no Trade Unionist’s political conscience need be wounded by the fact that, outside the range of the task that the Trade Union has confided to him, the Union’s Parliamentary agent (who must have views of one sort or another) expresses opinions in accord with those of the constituency that elected him, or joins together with other members of like opinions to form a political party. When, three-quarters of a century ago, J. A. Roebuck was the salaried agent in the House of Commons for the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada, no one complained that it was against the dignity of Parliament for him to be thus retained and paid; and so long as he attended faithfully to Canadian business it was never contended that the tender conscience of any Canadian Conservative was offended by the ultra-Radical utterances or extremely independent political alliances of the Member for Bath.