THE OLD UNIONISM AND THE NEW
[1875-1890]

Since 1875 the Trades Union Congress has loomed before the general public with ever-increasing impressiveness as the representative Parliament of the Trade Union world. To the historical student, on the other hand, it has, during the last fifty years, been wanting in significance as an index to the real factors of the Trade Union Movement. Between 1871 and 1875, the period of the struggle for complete legalisation, the Congress concentrated the efforts of the different sections upon the common object they had all at heart. On the accomplishment of that object it became for ten years little more than an annual gathering of Trade Union officials, in which they delivered, with placid unanimity, their views on labour legislation and labour politics. [511] From 1885 to 1890 we shall watch the Congress losing its decorous calm, and gradually becoming the battle-field of contending principles and rival leaders. But throughout its whole career it has, to speak strictly, been representative less of the development of Trade Unionism as such, than of the social and political aspirations of its leading members.

The reader of the Congress proceedings between 1875 and 1885 would, for instance, fail to recognise our description of the characteristics of the movement in these years. The predominant feature of the Trade Union world between 1875 and 1885 was, as we have seen, an extreme and complicated sectionalism. It might therefore have been expected that the annual meeting of delegates from different trades would have been made the debating ground for all the moot points and vexed questions of Trade Unionism, not to say the battle-field of opposing interests. But though the Trades Union Congress, like all popular assemblies, had its stormy scenes and hot discussions, from 1875 to 1885 these episodes arose only on personal questions, such as the conduct of individual members of the committee or the bona fides of particular delegates. On all questions of policy or principle before the Congress the delegates were generally unanimous. This was brought about by the deliberate exclusion of all Trade Union problems from the agenda. The relative merits of collective bargaining and legislative regulation were, during these years, never so much as discussed. The alternative types of benefit club and trade society were not compared. The difficulties of overlap and apportionment of work were not even referred to. No mention was made of Sliding Scales, Wage-Boards, Piecework Lists, or other expedients for avoiding disputes. Piecework itself, when introduced by a delegate in 1876, was dropped as a dangerous topic. The disputes between Union and Union were regarded by the Committee as outside the proper scope of Congress.[512] In short, the knotty problems of Trade Union organisation, the divergent views as to Trade Union policy, the effect on Trade Unionism of different methods of remuneration—all the critical issues of industrial strife were expressly excluded from the agenda of the Congress.

For the narrow limits thus set to the functions of the Congress there was an historical reason. Arising as it did between 1868 and 1871, when the one absorbing topic was the relation of Trade Unionism to the law, it had retained the character then impressed upon it of an exclusively political body. For many years its chief use was to give weight to the Parliamentary action of the standing committee, whose influence in the lobby of the House of Commons was directly proportionate to the numbers they were believed to represent. Publicity and advertisement, the first requisites of a successful Congress, were worse than useless without unanimity of opinion. The deliberate refusal of the Trade Union leaders to discuss internal problems in public Congress under such circumstances was not surprising. Most men in their position would have hesitated to let the world know that the apparent solidarity of Trade Unionism covered jealous disputes on technical questions, and fundamental differences as to policy. They easily persuaded themselves that a yearly meeting of shifting delegates was fitted neither to debate technical questions nor to serve as a tribunal of appeal. But these difficulties could have been overcome. The quinquennial delegate meeting of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers secures absolute frankness of discussion by the exclusion of reporters; and the frequent national conferences of miners achieve the same end by supplying the press with their own abstract of the proceedings. The Miners’ Conference of 1863, which we have already described, had shown, too, how successfully a large conference of workmen could resolve itself, for special questions, into private committees, the reports being laid before the whole conference at its public sittings—a device not yet adopted by the Trades Union Congress. And the London Society of Compositors, which is governed practically by mass meetings, had, for over half a century, known how to combine detailed investigation of complicated questions with Democratic decisions on principles of policy, by appointing special committees to report to the next subsequent members’ meeting. The fact that no such expedients were suggested shows that in these years the jealousy of most workmen of outside interference and their apathy about questions unconnected with their immediate trade interests, made their leaders unwilling to trust them with real opportunities for full Democratic discussion.

We shall therefore not attempt to reconstruct the Trade Union Movement from the proceedings of its annual congresses. The following brief analysis of their programmes and the achievements of the Parliamentary Committee is meant to show, not the facts as to Trade Union organisation throughout the country, with which we have already dealt, but the political and social ideals that filled the minds of the more thoughtful and better educated working men, and the rapid transformation of these ideals in the course of the last decade. [513]

The mantle of the Junta of 1867-71 had, by 1875, fallen upon a group of able organisers who, for many years, occupied the foremost place in the Trade Union world. Between 1872 and 1875 Allan and Applegarth were replaced by Henry Broadhurst, John Burnett, J. D. Prior, and George Shipton.[514] These leaders had moulded their methods and policy upon those of the able men who preceded them. It was they, indeed, aided by Alexander Macdonald and Thomas Burt, who had actually carried through the final achievement of 1875. Like Allan, Applegarth, and Guile, they belonged either to the iron or the building trades, and were permanent officials of Trade Union organisations. A comparison of the private minutes of the Parliamentary Committee between 1875 and 1885 with those of the Conference of Amalgamated Trades of 1867-71 reveals how exactly the new “Front Bench” carried on the traditions of the Junta. We see the same shrewd caution and practical opportunism. We notice the same assiduous lobbying in the House of Commons, and the same recurring deputations to evasive Ministers. For the first few years, at least, we watch the Committee in frequent consultation with the same devoted legal experts and Parliamentary friends.[515] Through the skilful guidance and indefatigable activity of Henry Broadhurst the political machinery of the Trade Union Movement was maintained and even increased in efficiency. If during these years the occupants of the “Front Bench” failed to give so decisive a lead to the Labour Movement as their predecessors had done, the fault lay, not in the men or in the machinery, but rather in the programme which they set themselves to carry out.

This programme, laid before all candidates for the House of Commons at the General Election of 1874, was based, as John Prior subsequently declared, on the principle “that all exceptional legislation affecting working men should be swept away, and that they should be placed on precisely the same footing as other classes of the community.”[516] Its main items were the repeal of the hated Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1871, and the further legalisation of Trade Unionism. The sweeping triumphs of 1875, and the acceptance by the Conservative Government of the proposals of the Junta, denuded the programme for subsequent years of its most striking proposals. There remained over in this department certain minor amendments of law and procedure which occupied the attention of the Committee for the next few years, and were gradually, by their exertions, carried into effect. [517]

But one great disability still lay upon working men as such. By the common law of England a person is liable for the results, not only of his own negligence, but also for that of his servant, if acting within the scope of his employment. The one exception is that, whereas to a stranger the master is liable for the negligence of any person whom he employs, to his servant he is not liable for the negligence of a fellow-servant in common employment. By this legal refinement, which dates only from 1837, and which successive judicial decisions have engrafted upon the common law, a workman who suffered injury through the negligence of some other person in the same employment was precluded from recovering that compensation from the common employer which a stranger, to whom the same accident had happened, could claim and enforce.[518] If by the error of a signalman a railway train met with an accident, all the injured passengers could obtain compensation from the railway company; but the engine-driver and guard were expressly excluded from any remedy. What the workman demanded was the abolition of the doctrine of “common employment,” and the placing of the employee upon exactly the same footing for compensation as any member of the public.

By the influence of the Miners’ National Union and the Amalgamated Society of the Railway Servants (established in 1872) the removal of this disability was, from the first, placed in the foreground of the Trade Union programme. Year after year Employers’ Liability Bills were brought in by the Trade Union representatives in the House of Commons, only to be met by stubborn resistance from the capitalists of both parties. Through the pertinacity of Henry Broadhurst a partial reform[519] was obtained from Gladstone’s Government in 1880, in spite of the furious opposition of the great employers of labour sitting on both sides of the House. The responsibility of the employer for insuring his workmen against the risks of their calling was, for the first time, clearly recognised by Parliament. The report of the Parliamentary Committee for 1880 claimed that the main battle on the subject had been fought, and that “time and opportunity only were now wanting for the completion of this work.” Since then the promotion of claims for compensation for accidents has been one of the most important functions of Trade Unions; and many of the societies, such as the Bricklayers and Boilermakers, have recovered thousands of pounds for injured members or their relatives.[520] But the doctrine of “common employment,” modified by this Act, was by no means abolished. Employers, moreover, were allowed to induce their work-people to “contract out” of the provisions of the Act.[521] An Employers’ Liability Bill, the last remnant of the demands of the Junta, remained, therefore, from 1872 onward a permanent item in the Trade Union programme down to 1896.

With the exception of this one proposal the Parliamentary programme of the Trade Union world was framed, in effect, by the New Front Bench. Curiously devoid of interest or reality, it is important to the political student as showing to what extent the thoughtful and superior workman had, at this time, imbibed the characteristic ideas of middle-class reformers.

The programme of the Parliamentary Committee between 1875 and 1885 falls mainly under three heads. We have first a group of measures the aim of which was the democratisation of the electoral, administrative, and judicial machinery of the State. Another set of reforms had for their end the enabling of the exceptionally thrifty or exceptionally industrious man to rise out of the wage-earning class. A third group of proposals aimed at the legal regulation of the conditions of particular industries.

Complete political Democracy had been for over a century the creed of the superior workmen. It was therefore not unnatural that it should come to the front in the Trades Union Congress. What appears peculiar is the form which this old-standing faith took in the hands of the Front Bench. The Trade Union leaders of 1837-42 had adopted enthusiastically the “Six Points” of the Charter. Even the sober Junta of 1867-71 had sat with Karl Marx on the committee of the “International,” in the programme of which Universal Suffrage was but a preliminary bagatelle. To the Front Bench of 1875-85 Democracy appeared chiefly in the guise of the Codification of the Criminal Law, the Reform of the Jury System, the creation of a Court of Criminal Appeal, and the Regulation of the Summary Jurisdiction of the Magistracy—a curious group of law reforms which it is easy to trace to the little knot of barristers who had stood by the Unions in their hour of trial.[522] We do not wish to deprecate the value of these proposals, framed in the interests of all classes of the community; but they were not, and probably were never intended to be, in any sense a democratisation of our judicial system.[523] When the Congress dealt with electoral reform it got no further than the assimilation of the county and borough franchise—already a commonplace of middle-class Liberalism. The student of Continental labour movements will find it difficult to believe that in the representative Congress of the English artisans, amendments in favour of Manhood Suffrage were even as late as 1882 and 1883 rejected by large majorities.[524] Nor did the Parliamentary Committee put even the County Franchise into their own programme until it had become the battle-cry of the Liberal party at the General Election of 1880. The Extension of the Hours of Polling becomes a subject of discussion from 1878 onward, but the Payment of Election Expenses does not come up until 1883, and Payment of Members not until 1884.

Scarcely less significant in character were the measures of social reform advocated during these years. The prominent Trade Unionists had been converted, as we have already had occasion to point out, to the economic Individualism which at this time dominated the Liberal party. A significant proof of this unconscious conversion is to be found in the unanimity with which a Trades Union Congress could repeatedly press for such “reforms” as Peasant Proprietorship, the purchase by the artisan of his own cottage, the establishment of “self-governing workshops,” the multiplication of patents in the hands of individual workmen, and other changes which would cut at the root of Trade Unionism or any collective control of the means of production. For whatever advantages there might be in turning the agricultural labourer into a tiny freeholder, it is obvious that under such a system no Agricultural Labourers’ Union could exist. However useful it may be to make the town artisan independent of a landlord, it has been proved beyond controversy that wage-earning owners of houses lose that perfect mobility which enables them, through their Trade Union, to boycott the bad employer or desert the low-paying district. And we can imagine the dismay with which the leaders of the Nine Hours Movement would have discovered that any considerable proportion of the engineering work of Newcastle was being done in workshops owned by artisans whose interests as capitalists or patentees conflicted with the common interests of all the workers.

In no respect, however, does the conversion of the Trade Union leaders to middle-class views stand out more clearly than in their attitude to the clamour from the workers in certain industries for the legal protection of their Standard of Life. From time immemorial one of the leading tenets of Trade Unionism has been the desirability of maintaining by law the minimum Standard of Life of the workers, and it was still steadfastly held by two important sections of the Trade Union world, the Cotton Operatives and the Coal-miners. But to the Parliamentary Committee of 1875-85, as to the Liberal legislators, every demand for securing the conditions of labour by legislation appeared as an invidious exception, only to be justified by the special helplessness or incompetency of the applicants. Nevertheless, many of the trades succeeded in persuading Congress to back up the particular sectional legislation they desired. The Tailors asked, on the one hand, for the extension of the Factory Acts to home workers, and, on the other, for compensation out of public funds when interfered with by the sanitary inspector. The Bakers complained with equal pertinacity of the lack of public inspection of bakehouses, and of the hardships of their regulation by the Smoke Prevention Acts. The London Cabmen sought the aid of Congress, not against their employers, the cab proprietors, but against the public. The men in charge of engines and boilers demanded that no one should be allowed to work at their trade without obtaining from the Government a certificate of competency. In the absence of any fixed or consistent idea of the collective interest of the wage-earning class, or of Trade Unionists as such, every proposal that any section demanded for itself was accepted with equanimity by the Congress, and passed on to the Parliamentary Committee to carry out, however inconsistent it might be with the general principles that swayed their minds. [525]

It is not difficult to understand why, with such a programme, the Trade Union world failed, between 1876 and 1885, to exercise any effective influence upon the House of Commons. A few concessions to the wage-earners were, indeed, obtained from the Government. The Employers’ Liability Act of 1880, to which we have already referred, represented, in spite of all its deficiencies, a new departure of considerable importance. Useful little clauses protecting the interests of the wage-earners were, through Broadhurst’s pertinacity, inserted in Chamberlain’s Bankruptcy Act and in his Joint Stock Companies Act.[526] But it was left to Charles Bradlaugh, who had never been a Trade Unionist, to initiate the useful law prohibiting the payment of wages in public-houses, though when it was introduced the Parliamentary Committee (observing that it was unnecessary in respect of organised trades) gave it a mild support. Bradlaugh it was, too, who in 1887 got passed the amendment of the law against Truck—a subject which the Parliamentary Committee had, in 1877, dismissed from their programme on the ground that they were unable, in the trades of which they had knowledge, to find sufficient evidence of its necessity.[527] But the failure of the Parliamentary Committee to induce the Government of the day to legislate for wage-earners as such was naturally most patent in that group of reforms which dealt with the legal regulation of the conditions of labour. To the great consolidating Factory Bill of 1878 they found only four small amendments to propose; and of these only one was carried.[528] The “Sweating System” of home work against which the Tailors and Bootmakers were suggesting stringent but, as we venture to think, ill-considered legislation was permitted to expand free from all regulation. The bakehouses, too, were allowed to slip virtually out of inspection. Deputation after deputation waited on the Home Secretary to press for an increase in the number of factory inspectors, only to be met with the apparently unanswerable argument that it would cost money which the poor taxpayers could ill spare, until the astute and practical leaders of the Lancashire Cotton Operatives grew tired of the monotonous regularity with which their resolutions in favour of further factory inspection and more stringent regulations of the conditions of their trade were passed by Congress, and the little assistance which this endorsement procured for them. A “Northern Counties Factory Act Reform Association” was established in 1886, to do the work which the Trades Union Congress and its Parliamentary Committee had failed to accomplish. We have, in fact, only one important achievement of the Parliamentary Committee to record in this department of social reform. For years Congress had passed emphatic resolutions in favour of the selection of practical working men as Factory Inspectors. Great was the jubilation at the appointment, in 1882, of J. D. Prior, General Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters, and a member of the Parliamentary Committee, to the post of Inspector. [529]

In matters of more general interest the Trade Union leaders were not more successful, though the attempt to reform the law and its administration resulted in some minor improvements. The first outcome of the projects for law reform so dear to the Congresses of 1876-80 was the Justices’ Clerks Act of 1877, which enabled magistrates to remit costs. The passing of the Summary Jurisdiction Act of 1879, which gave defendants the right to claim trial before a jury whenever the penalty exceeded three months’ imprisonment, was, Howell observes, “materially aided by the action of Congress.” But it is needless to inform the reader that the Criminal Law never got itself codified. To this day juries continue to be drawn exclusively from the upper and middle classes. The long agitation for the abolition of the unpaid magistracy ended in an anti-climax. The Liberal Government of 1884 left the system unaltered, but, on the nomination of Henry Broadhurst,[530] placed four Trade Union leaders upon the magisterial bench in certain Lancashire boroughs, a precedent since followed by successive Lord Chancellors.

In one direction the Parliamentary Committee saw their hopes fully accomplished. Their adoption of the particular projects of electoral reform advocated by the Liberal party enabled them to render effective help in the passing of the Acts of 1885, which assimilated the County and the Borough Franchise, effected a redistribution of seats, and made the extended hours of polling universal. But the desire of successive Congresses for effective labour representation continued to be baulked by the extortion from candidates of heavy election expenses, and by the refusal to provide payment for service in Parliament and other public bodies. On the burning question of the land the Parliamentary Committee supported with conscientious fervour Gladstone’s Irish policy of creating small freeholds, and enthusiastically endorsed the proposals of Chamberlain for the extension of similar legislation to Great Britain. The same spirit no doubt entered into their support of the provisions of Chamberlain’s Patent Act, designed to facilitate the taking out of patents by poor inventors. To sum up the situation, we may say that the resolutions of the Trades Union Congress on questions of general politics between 1880 and 1884 were successfully pressed on the Legislature only in so far as they happened to coincide with the proposals of the Liberal party. With the one great exception of the Employers’ Liability Act, nothing seems really to have called out the full energies of the leaders. The manifestoes and published memoranda of the Parliamentary Committee during these years do not differ either in tone or in substance from the speeches and articles in which Chamberlain and other Radical capitalists were propounding a programme of individualist Radicalism. In fact, the draft “Address to the Workmen of the United Kingdom,” which the Parliamentary Committee, in anticipation of the General Election, submitted to the Congress of 1885, fell far short of Chamberlain’s “Unauthorised Programme.” It occurred neither to the Parliamentary Committee nor to the Congress to suggest the obvious answer to Sir William Harcourt’s financial objection to increased factory inspection. No trace is to be discovered of any consciousness on the part of the Trade Union leaders of the existence of a very substantial tribute annually levied upon the industrial world under the names of rent and interest. And even Chamberlain’s modest and tentative proposals of these years, relating to the payment, by the recipients of that tribute, of some contribution by way of “ransom,” found no echo in the official programme of the Trade Union world. Finally, though the Congress had adopted Payment of Election Expenses in 1883, and Payment of Members in 1884, the Parliamentary Committee omitted both these propositions from its draft, and, like Gladstone, could not even bring itself to ask for Free Education. The three latter points were added to the draft by the Congress.

The assimilation of the political creed of the Trade Union leaders with that of the official Liberal party was perfectly sincere. We have already described, in the preceding chapter, how the Junta had begun to be unconsciously converted from the traditional position of Trade Unionism to the principle of Administrative Nihilism, then dominant in the middle class. It is unnecessary for us to argue whether this conception of the functions of law and government is or is not an adequate view of social development. The able and conscientious men who formed the Front Bench of the Trades Union Congress of 1876-85 had grown up without any alternative political theory, and had accordingly erected the objection to legislative interference or Governmental administration into an absolute dogma. [531]

Laisser-faire, then, was the political and social creed of the Trade Union leaders of this time. Up to 1885 they undoubtedly represented the views current among the rank and file. At that date all observers were agreed that the Trade Unions of Great Britain would furnish an impenetrable barrier against Socialistic projects. Within a decade we find the whole Trade Union world permeated with Collectivist ideas, and, as the Times recorded as early as 1893, the Socialist party supreme in the Trades Union Congress.[532] This revolution in opinion is the chief event of Trade Union history at the close of the nineteenth century; and we propose to analyse in some detail the various influences which in our opinion co-operated to bring it about. We shall trace the beginnings of a new intellectual ferment in the Trade Union world. We shall watch this working on minds awakened by an industrial contraction of exceptional character. We shall see it resulting in the revelation of hideous details of poverty and degradation, for which deepening social compunction imperatively demanded a remedy. We shall describe the recrudescence of a revolutionary Utopianism like the Owenism of 1833-34. We shall trace the gradual schooling of the impracticable elements into a sobered and somewhat bureaucratic Collectivism; and finally, we shall watch the rapid diffusion of this new faith throughout the whole Trade Union world. [533]

If we had to assign to any one event the starting of the new current of thought, we should name the wide circulation in Great Britain of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty during the years 1880-82. The optimistic and aggressive tone of the book, in marked contrast with the complacent quietism into which the English working-class movement had sunk, and the force of the popularisation of the economic Theory of Rent, sounded the dominant note alike of the “New Unionism” and of the British Socialist Movement. Henry George made, it is true, no contribution to the problems of industrial organisation; nor had he, outside of the “Single Tax” on land values, any intention of promoting a general Collectivist movement. But he succeeded, where previous writers had failed, in widely diffusing among all classes a vivid appreciation of the nature and results of the landlord’s appropriation of economic rent. It is, in our judgement, the spread among the town artisans of this conception of rent which has so largely transformed the economic views of the Trade Union world, and which has gone far to shift the lines of politics. The land question in particular has been completely revolutionised. Instead of the Chartist cry of “Back to the Land,” still adhered to by rural labourers and belated politicians, the town artisan is thinking of his claim to the unearned increment of urban land values, which he now watches falling into the coffers of the great landlords.

But if Henry George gave the starting push, it was the propaganda of the Socialists that got the new movement under way. The Socialist party, which became reorganised in London between 1881 and 1883, after practically a generation of quiescence, merged the project of Land Nationalisation in the wider conception of an organised Democratic community in which the collective power and the collective income should be consciously directed to the common benefit of all.[534] Whilst Henry George was, almost in his own despite, driving Peasant Proprietorship and Leasehold Enfranchisement out of the political field, the impressive description which Karl Marx had given of the effects of the Industrial Revolution was interpreting to the thoughtful workman the every-day incidents of industrial life. It needed no Socialist to convince the artisan in any of the great industries that his chance of rising to be a successful employer was becoming daily more remote. It required no agitator to point out that amid an enormous increase in wealth production the wages of the average mechanic remained scarcely sufficient to bring up his family in decency and comfort, whilst whole sections of his unskilled fellow-workers received less than the barest family maintenance. Even the skilled mechanic saw himself exposed to panics, commercial crises, and violent industrial dislocations, over which neither he nor his Trade Union had any control, and by which he and his children were often reduced to destitution. But it was the Socialists who supplied the workman with a plausible explanation of these untoward facts. Through the incessant lecturing of H. M. Hyndman, William Morris, and other disciples of Karl Marx, working men were taught that the impossibility of any large section of the working class becoming their own employers was due, not to lack of self-control, capacity, or thrift, but to the Industrial Revolution, with its improvement of mechanical processes, its massing of capital, and the consequent extinction of the small entrepreneur by great industrial establishments. In this light the divorce of the manual workers from the ownership of the means of production was seen to be no passing phase, but an economic development which must, under any system of private control of industry, become steadily more complete. And it was argued that the terrible alterations of over-production and commercial stagnation, the anomaly that a glut of commodities should be a cause of destitution, were the direct result of the management of industry with a view to personal profit, instead of to the satisfaction of public wants.

The economic circumstances of the time supplied the Socialist lecturers with dramatic illustrations of their theory. The acute depression of 1878-79 had been succeeded by only a brief and partial expansion during 1881-83. A period of prolonged though not exceptional contraction followed, during which certain staple trades experienced the most sudden and excessive fluctuations. In the great industry of shipbuilding, for instance, the bad times of 1879 were succeeded by a period during which trade expanded by leaps and bounds, more than twice the tonnage being built in 1883 than in 1879. In the very next year this enormous production came suddenly to an end, many shipbuilding yards being closed and whole towns on the north-east coast finding their occupation for the moment destroyed. The total tonnage built fell from 1,250,000 in 1883 to 750,000 in 1884, 540,000 in 1885, and to the still lower total of 473,000 in 1886. Thousands of the most highly skilled and best organised mechanics, who had been brought to Jarrow or Sunderland the year before, found themselves reduced to absolute destitution, not from any failure of their industry, but merely because the exigencies of competitive profit-making had led to the concentration in one year of the normal production of two. “In every shipbuilding port,” says Robert Knight in the Boilermakers’ Annual Report for 1886, “there are to be seen thousands of idle men vainly seeking for an honest day’s work. The privation that has been endured by them, their wives and children, is terrible to contemplate. Sickness has been very prevalent, whilst the hundreds of pinched and hungry faces have told a tale of suffering and privation which no optimism could minimise or conceal. Hide it—cover it up as we may, there is a depth of grief and trouble the full revelations of which, we believe, cannot be indefinitely postponed. The workman may be ignorant of science and the arts, and the sum of his exact knowledge may be only that which he has gained in his closely circumscribed daily toil; but he is not blind, and his thoughts do not take the shape of daily and hourly thanksgiving that his condition is not worse than it is; he does not imitate the example of the pious shepherd of Salisbury Plain, who derived supreme contentment from the fact that a kind Providence had vouchsafed him salt to eat with his potatoes. He sees the lavish display of wealth in which he has no part. He sees a large and growing class enjoying inherited abundance. He sees miles of costly residences, each occupied by fewer people than are crowded into single rooms of the tenement in which he lives. He cannot fail to reason that there must be something wrong in a system which effects such unequal distribution of the wealth created by labour.”

Other skilled trades had, between 1883 and 1887, a similar though less dramatic experience. At the International Trades Union Congress of 1886, James Mawdsley, the cautious leader of the Lancashire cotton-spinners, speaking as a member of the Parliamentary Committee on behalf of the British section, described the state of affairs in England in the following terms: “Wages had fallen, and there was a great number of unemployed.... Flax mills were being closed every day.... All the building trades were in a bad position; ... ironfoundries were in difficulties, and one-third of the shipwrights were without work.... Steam-engine makers were also slack, except those manufacturers who exported to France, Germany, and Austria. With a few rare exceptions, the depression affecting the great leading trades was felt in a thousand-and-one occupations. Seeing that there was a much larger number of unemployed, the question naturally presented itself as to whether there was any chance of improvement. He considered there was no chance of improvement so long as the present state of society continued to exist.... He did not understand their Socialism; he had not studied it as perhaps he ought to have done. The workmen of England were not so advanced as the workmen of the Continent. Nevertheless they, at least, possessed one clear conception: they realised that the actual producers did not obtain their share of the wealth they created.”[535] We see the same spirit spreading even to the most conservative and exclusive trades. “To our minds,” writes the Central Secretary of the powerful Union of Flint Glass Makers, “it is very hard for employers to attempt to force men into systems by which they cannot earn an honourable living. These unjust attempts to grind down the working men will not be tolerated much longer, for revolutionary changes are beginning to show themselves, and important matters affecting the industrial classes will speedily come to the front. Why, for example, should Lord Dudley inherit coal-mines and land producing £1000 a day while his colliers have to slave all the week and cannot get a living?” [536]

The discontent was fanned by well-intentioned if somewhat sentimental philanthropists, who were publishing their experiences in the sweated industries and the slums of the great cities. The Bitter Cry of Outcast London and other gruesome stories were revealing, not only to the middle class, but also to the “aristocracy of labour,” whole areas of industrial life which neither Trade Unionism nor Co-operation could hope to reach. With the middle class the compunction thus excited resulted in elaborate investigations issuing in inconclusive reports. A Royal Commission on the Housing of the Poor produced nothing more effectual than a slight addition to the existing powers of vestries and Town Councils. Another on the Depression of Trade was absolutely barren. A Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Poor Law failed even to discover the problems to be solved. Another on the Sweating System ended, after years of delay, in an accurate diagnosis of the evil, coupled with a confession of inability to cope with it. In 1885 an Edinburgh philanthropist provided a thousand pounds for a public conference to inquire whether some more equitable system of industrial remuneration could not be suggested: a conference which served only to cast doubt on such philanthropic schemes as profit-sharing and the “self-governing workshop,” whilst bringing into prominence the Socialist proposals.[537] And, more important than all these, Charles Booth, a great merchant and shipowner, began in 1886, at his own expense, a systematic statistical inquiry into the actual social condition of the whole population of London, the impressive results of which eventually reverberated from one end of the kingdom to the other. [538]

The outcome of the investigations thus set on foot was an incalculable impetus to social reform. They had, for the most part, been undertaken in the expectation that a sober and scientific inquiry would prove the exceptional character of the harrowing incidents laid bare by the philanthropists, and unsparingly quoted by the new agitators. But to the genuine surprise alike of the economists and the Trade Union leaders, the lurid statements of the sensationalists and the Socialists were, on the whole, borne out by the statistics. The stories of unmerited misery were shown to be, not accidental exceptions to a general condition of moderate well-being, but typical instances of the average existence of great masses of the population. The “sweater” turned out to be, not an exceptionally cruel capitalist, but himself the helpless product of a widespread degeneration which extended over whole industries. In the wealthiest and most productive city in the world, Charles Booth, after an exhaustive census, was driven to the conclusion that a million and a quarter persons fell habitually below his “Poverty Line.” Thirty-two per cent of the whole population of London (in some large districts over 60 per cent) were found to be living in a state of chronic poverty, which precluded not only the elementary conditions of civilisation and citizenship, but was incompatible with physical health or industrial efficiency. Moreover, Charles Booth’s figures and the report of the House of Lords Committee on Sweating disproved, once for all, the comfortable assumption that all destitution originated in drink or vice. It was impossible, to use the well-known phrase of Burke, to draw an indictment against a third of the people of London, or against two-thirds of the East End.

The daily experience of whole sections of the wage-earners during these years of depression, and the statistical inquiries of the middle class, appeared, therefore, to justify the Socialist indictment of the capitalist system. What was perhaps of more effect was the fact that the Socialists alone seemed inspired by faith in a radical transformation of society, and that they alone offered a solution which had not yet been tried and found wanting. Prior to 1867 it had been possible to ascribe the evil state of the wage-earners to the malignant influence of class government and political exclusion. Cobden and Bright had eloquently described the millennium to be reached through untaxed products. For a whole generation the leaders of a consolidated Trade Unionism had demonstrated the advantageous terms that the artisan might, through collective bargaining and a reserve fund, wring from his employers. But in face of a protracted lack of employment, the extended suffrage, Free Trade, and well-administered Trade Unions proved alike helpless. Twenty years of the franchise had left the town artisan still at the mercy of commercial gamblers and exposed to the extortions of the slum landlord. A Liberal Government was actually in power, wielding an enormous majority, but manifesting no keen desire to remedy the results of economic inequality. No attempt was being made to redress even the admitted wrongs of the necessitous taxpayer. The Tea Duty remained untouched; the Land Tax was left unreformed; whilst the larger question of using some of the nation’s wealth to provide decent conditions of existence for the great bulk of the people was not even mooted. A further Extension of the Franchise, Free Trade, and Popular Education were still the only social and economic panaceas that the Liberal party had to offer. But cheapness of commodities was of no use to the workman who was thrown out of employment; and the spread of education served but to increase his discontent with existing social conditions and his ability to understand the theoretic explanations and practical proposals of the new school of reformers.

The working man found no more comfort in Trade Unionism than in party politics. The mason, carpenter, or ironfounder saw, for instance, his old and powerful Trade Society reduced to little more than a sick and burial club, refusing all support to strikes even against reductions of wages and increase of hours, and only maintaining its out-of-work benefit by running heavily into debt to its more prosperous members.[539] As the lean years followed one on another, he saw the benefits reduced, the contributions raised, and numbers of staunch Unionists left high and dry as members “out of benefit.” The trade friendly society—the “scientific Trade Unionism” of the Front Bench—was in fact becoming rapidly discredited. John Burns and Tom Mann, young and energetic members of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, were, between 1884 and 1889, vigorously denouncing, up and down the country, the supineness of their great amalgamated Union. “How long, how long,” appeals Tom Mann to the Trade Unionists in 1886,[540]“will you be content with the present half-hearted policy of your Unions? I readily grant that good work has been done in the past by the Unions; but, in Heaven’s name, what good purpose are they serving now? All of them have large numbers out of employment even when their particular trade is busy. None of the important societies have any policy other than that of endeavouring to keep wages from falling. The true Unionist policy of aggression seems entirely lost sight of: in fact, the average Unionist of to-day is a man with a fossilised intellect, either hopelessly apathetic, or supporting a policy that plays directly into the hands of the capitalist exploiter.... I take my share of the work of the Trade Union to which I belong; but I candidly confess that unless it shows more vigour at the present time (June 1886) I shall be compelled to take the view—against my will—that to continue to spend time over the ordinary squabble-investigating, do-nothing policy will be an unjustifiable waste of one’s energies. I am sure there are thousands of others in my state of mind.” [541]

“Constituted as it is,” writes John Burns in September 1887,[542]“Unionism carries within itself the source of its own dissolution.... Their reckless assumption of the duties and responsibilities that only the State or whole community can discharge, in the nature of sick and superannuation benefits, at the instance of the middle class, is crushing out the larger Unions by taxing their members to an unbearable extent. This so cripples them that the fear of being unable to discharge their friendly society liabilities often makes them submit to encroachments by the masters without protest. The result of this is that all of them have ceased to be Unions for maintaining the rights of labour, and have degenerated into mere middle and upper class rate-reducing institutions.” [543]

Here we see the beginning of that agitation against the combination of friendly benefits with trade protection aims which subsequently became, for a short time, one of the characteristics of the “New Unionism.” But if the trade friendly society withered up during these years into a mere benefit club, the purely trade society showed no greater vitality. The great depression of 1878-79 had swept out of existence hundreds of little local Unions which lacked the cohesion given by the friendly society side. The Lancashire and Midland Miners’ organisations, which gave no benefits, had either collapsed altogether, or had dissolved into isolated pit clubs, incapable of combined action. The Lancashire cotton operatives, the Northumberland and Durham miners, and a few other essentially trade societies, held together only by surrendering to the employers one concession after another. With capitalists ready at any moment to suspend a profitless business, collective bargaining proved as powerless to avert reductions as the individual contract. In face of a long-continued depression of trade, marked by frequent oscillations in particular industries, both types of Trade Unionism, it seemed, had been tried and found wanting.

These were the circumstances under which the disillusioned working-class politician or Trade Unionist was reached by the lectures and writings of the Socialists, who offered him not only a sympathetic explanation of the ills from which he suffered, but also a comprehensive scheme of social reform, extending from an Eight Hours Bill to the Nationalisation of the Means of Production. In a purely historical essay it is unnecessary for us to discuss the validity of the optimistic confidence with which the Socialists of these years declared that under a system of collective ownership the workers would not only be ensured at all times a competent livelihood, but would themselves control the administration of the surplus wealth of the nation. But in tracing the causes of the New Unionism of 1889-90, and the transformation of the Trade Union Movement from an Individualist to a Collectivist influence in the political world, we venture to ascribe a large share to the superior attractiveness of this buoyant faith over anything offered by the almost cynical fatalism of the old school.

The Socialist agitation benefited between 1886 and 1889 by a series of undesigned advertisements. Meetings of “the unemployed” in February 1886 led to unexpected riots, which threw all London into a panic, and were followed by a Government prosecution for sedition. Hyndman, Burns, Champion, and Williams, as the leaders of the Social Democratic Federation, were indicted at the Old Bailey, and their trial, ending in an acquittal, attracted the attention of the whole country to their doctrines. The “Unemployed” gatherings went on with ever-increasing noise until November 1887, when the Chief Commissioner of Police issued a proclamation prohibiting meetings in Trafalgar Square, which had for a whole generation served as the forum of the London agitator. This “attack on free speech” by a Conservative Government, coming after several minor attempts to suppress open-air meetings by its Liberal predecessor, rallied the forces of London artisan Radicalism to those of the Socialists. A gigantic demonstration on Sunday, November 13, 1887, was held in defiance of the police, only to be repulsed from Trafalgar Square by a free use of the police bludgeon and the calling out of both cavalry and infantry. John Burns and Cunninghame Graham, M.P., were imprisoned for their share in this transaction. A similar agitation on a smaller scale was going on in the provinces. On Tyneside and in the Midlands numerous emissaries of the Social Democratic Federation and the Socialist League were spreading the revolt against the helpless apathy into which the Trade Unions had sunk. In every large industrial centre the indefatigable lecturing of branches of Socialist organisations was stirring up a vague but effective unrest in all except the official circle of the Trade Union world.

To the great army of unskilled, or only partially skilled, workmen concentrated in London and other large cities the new crusade came as a gospel of deliverance. The unskilled labourer was getting tired of being referred, as the sole means of bettering his condition, to the “scientific Trade Unionism” alone recognised by the Front Bench. Trade Societies which admitted only workmen earning a high standard rate, which exacted a weekly contribution of not less than a shilling, and which frequently excluded all but regularly apprenticed men, were regarded by the builders’ labourer, the gas stoker, or the docker, as aristocratic corporations with which he had as little in common as with the House of Lords. “The great bulk of our labourers,” writes John Burns, “are ignored by the skilled workers. It is this selfish, snobbish desertion by the higher grades of the lower that makes success in many disputes impossible. Ostracised by their fellows, a spirit of revenge alone often prompts men to oppose or remain indifferent to Unionism, when if the Unions were wiser and more conciliatory, support would have been forthcoming where now jealousy and discontent prevails.”[544] Even among the skilled workers, the younger artisans, if they had joined their Unions at all, were discontented with the exclusive and apathetic policy of the older members. Thus we find rising up, in such “aristocratic” Unions as the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and the London Society of Compositors, a “New Unionist” party of young men, who vigorously objected to the degradation of a Trade Union into a mutual insurance company, who protested against the exclusion of the lowly paid sections from the organisation of the trade, and who advocated the use of the political influence of the Society in the interests of Social-Democracy. By 1888 the Socialists had not only secured the allegiance of large sections of the unskilled labourers in London and some other towns, but had obtained an important body of recruits in the great “Amalgamated” societies.

At this pass nothing short of strangulation could have kept the new spirit out of the Trade Union Congress. It is interesting to notice that the first sign among the delegates is to be ascribed to the direct influence of Karl Marx. At the 1878 Congress at Bristol we find Adam Weiler, an old member of the “International,” and a personal friend of the great Socialist, reading a paper in which he advocated legislation to limit the hours of labour.[545] At the next Congress Weiler took exception to the resolution in favour of establishing a Peasant Proprietorship moved on behalf of the Parliamentary Committee. But in that year his amendment in favour of Land Nationalisation did not even find a seconder. Three years later the effect of Henry George’s propaganda becomes visible. In 1882, when the land question was again raised, the two ideals were sharply contrasted, and in spite of protests against “communistic principles,” a rider declaring for nationalisation was adopted by 71 votes to 31. The Parliamentary Committee made no change in their attitude on the question, contending that the vote had been taken in the absence of many delegates, and that it did not represent the opinion of the Congress as a whole. This contention was to some extent borne out by the votes of the next five Congresses, at all of which amendments in favour of the principle of nationalisation were rejected, though by decreasing majorities. At length, in 1887, at the Swansea Congress, the tide turned, and a vague addendum in favour of Land Nationalisation was accepted.[546] At the Bradford Congress in 1888 the very idea of Peasant Proprietorship had disappeared. The representatives of the agricultural labourers now asked only for individual occupation of publicly owned allotments. Ultimately the Congress adopted by 66 votes to 5 a distinct declaration in favour of Land Nationalisation, coupled with an instruction to the Parliamentary Committee to bring the proposal before the House of Commons.

Meanwhile Weiler had made another and more successful attempt to enlist the aid of the Congress in the legal regulation of the hours of labour. At the 1883 Congress he moved a resolution which instructed the Parliamentary Committee to obtain the legal limitation to eight hours of the maximum day of all workers in the employment of public authorities, or companies exercising Parliamentary powers. This was seconded by Edward Harford, the General Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, and carried, in a thin meeting, by only 33 to 8. In 1885 the movement had so far gained weight that the Parliamentary Committee thought it expedient to temporise by promoting an investigation into the amount of overtime worked in Government departments, with the result of demonstrating how completely the practice of systematic overtime had neutralised the Nine Hours victory.[547] At the 1887 Congress at Swansea the Parliamentary Committee were instructed to take a vote of the Trade Union world upon the whole question, a vote which revealed the unexpected fact that Applegarth’s own Union, the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, had been converted to an Eight Hours Bill.[548] A second plebiscite, taken at the instance of the following year’s Congress, showed that such old Unions as the Compositors, the Ironfounders, and the Railway Servants were swinging round. [549]

In the meantime the growing divergence of policy among the coal-miners, which we foreshadowed in the last chapter, had brought a powerful contingent of organised workmen to the support of the new party. We have already described the conversion of the leaders of the Northumberland and Durham miners to the principle of the Sliding Scale, involving, as it did, the dependence of the worker’s standard of comfort upon the market price of his product. On another point, too, the two northern counties had broken away from the traditional policy of the Miners’ organisation. Already in 1863 we noted that Crawford, one of the ablest of their leaders, was vigorously objecting, at the Leeds Conference, to an Eight Hours Bill for boys, on the ground that in Northumberland and Durham, where the hewers often worked in two shifts, such a restriction would interfere with the men’s convenience. This resistance to a particular interference with the exceptional circumstances of the local industry gradually developed into a general objection to legal regulation of the hours of adult men. We find, therefore, the Northumberland and Durham miners from 1875 onwards ranging themselves more and more with the leaders of the iron and building trades, who, as we have seen, had become largely converted to the economic conceptions then current among the middle class. The fact that the Northumberland and Durham Associations, almost alone among Miners’ Unions, had successfully weathered the bad times of 1877-79, and the constant presence of one or other of their leaders on the Parliamentary Committee, caused these opinions to be accepted as those of the whole industry.

But the miners elsewhere did not long rest content with the new policy of Durham and Northumberland. In December 1881 the amalgamated South and West Yorkshire Miners’ Associations formally terminated the then existing Sliding Scale, and passed a resolution in favour of the policy of restricting the output. During the following years the Yorkshire employers several times proposed the re-establishment of a scale, but the men insisted on its being accompanied by an agreement for a minimum below which wages should in no event fall—a condition to which the coal-owners uniformly refused their assent. The lead given by the Yorkshire miners was quickly followed by other districts, notably by Lancashire. In this county Trade Unionism among the miners had, as we have seen, gone to pieces in the bad years. Reorganisation in local Unions, came in 1881; and a Lancashire Miners’ Federation was successfully established in the following year. At their Conference of 1883 the delegates of the Lancashire miners resolved, “That the time has come when the working miners shall regulate the production of coal; that no collier or other underground worker shall work more than five days or shifts per week; and that the hours from bank to bank be eight per shift.” Finding it impossible to secure their object by strikes, the Lancashire men turned to that policy of legislative regulation which had marked the proceedings of the Conference of 1863.

With the improvement in trade which began in 1885, the membership and influence of the Lancashire and Yorkshire organisations rapidly increased, and new federations were started throughout the Midlands. The Scotch miners, too, had in 1886-87 a short outburst of organisation, when a national federation was formed with a membership of 23,000. All these Associations adopted the policy of regulating the output, and the Scotch miners, in particular, conducted, in 1887, a vigorous agitation in support of the clause limiting the day’s work to eight hours, which two Scottish members endeavoured to insert in the Mines Regulation Act of 1887.[550] But the Executive of the National Union had, since Macdonald’s death in 1881, fallen entirely into the hands of the Northumberland and Durham leaders. Under their influence it maintained its adherence to the principle of the Sliding Scale and its hostility to the Eight Hours Bill, thereby alienating, not only the new federations, but also the old-established and powerful Yorkshire Miners’ Association. From 1885 to 1888 the battle between the contending doctrines ranged at every miners’ conference.[551] During the latter year the combatants withdrew to separate camps. In September 1888 a conference of the representatives of non-sliding scale districts was called together in Manchester, when arrangements were made for the establishment of a new federation, into which no district governed by a sliding scale was to be allowed to enter. From this time forth the old National Union on the one hand, and the new Miners’ Federation on the other, became rivals for the allegiance of the various district associations, and somewhat unsympathetic critics of each other’s policy and actions. The issue was not long doubtful. The National Union gradually shrank up to Northumberland and Durham, whilst the Miners’ Federation, with its aggressive policy and its semi-Socialistic principles of a minimum wage and a legal day, grew apace. From 36,000 members in 1888, it rose to 96,000 in 1889, 147,000 in 1891, and over 200,000 in 1893, overshadowing in its growth all existing Trade Union organisations. The Socialist advocates of the legal limitation of the hours of labour accordingly enjoyed from 1888 onward, both in the Trade Union Congress and at the polling-booths, the support of a rapidly growing contingent of organised miners, whose solid adhesion has done more than anything else to promote the general movement in favour of an Eight Hours Bill.

It is easy at this distance to recognise, in the altered tone of the rank and file of Congress delegates, a reflection of the wider change of opinion outside. But to the Trade Union Front Bench, as, in fact, to most of the politicians of the time, it was incredible that the new ideas should gain any real footing among the skilled artisans. The Parliamentary Committee regarded the innovations with much the same feeling as that with which they had met the proposals of a little gang which had, in 1882, vainly attempted to foist the principles of fiscal protection upon the Congress.[552] When Congress insisted on passing a resolution with which the Parliamentary Committee found themselves in disagreement, this expression of opinion was sometimes ignored as being nothing more than the fad of particular delegates. It was in vain that the Congress of 1888, after ten years’ deliberation, definitely decided in favour of the principles of Land Nationalisation instead of Peasant Proprietorship. The Parliamentary Committee contented itself with promising that “a well-considered measure” would be put forward by the Committee. The Eight Hours question could not be treated so cavalierly. Direct resolutions in favour of legislative action were therefore staved off by proposals for inquiry. When a vote of the Trade Union world was decided upon, the Parliamentary Committee, in conjunction with many of the General Secretaries, were able practically to baulk the investigation. The voting paper was loaded with warnings and arguments against legislative action. No attempt was made to ensure a genuine vote of the rank and file. In some cases the Executive Committees were allowed to take upon themselves the responsibility of declaring the opinions held by the members of their societies, the total membership of which was then reckoned in the voting. In other instances the Executives were permitted without remonstrance simply to burke the question. The inquiry failed to elicit any trustworthy census of the opinion of the Trade Union world.

An equal lack of sympathy was shown in connection with the growing feeling of the Congress in favour of the participation of British Trade Unionists in International Congresses. At the express command of Congress, the Parliamentary Committee sent delegates to the International gatherings of 1883 and 1886. But though these instructions were complied with, the Parliamentary Committee made it clear, in their annual reports, that far from favouring International action, “the position they assumed was that they were so well organised, so far ahead of foreign workmen, that little could be done until these were more on a level” with the skilled workers of England.[553] The Congress of 1886 nevertheless instructed the Parliamentary Committee to summon an International Conference in London in the following year. Instead of complying with this instruction, the Committee published, in May 1887, a lengthy pamphlet explaining that, owing to the indisposition of foreign workmen to make any pecuniary sacrifices for their Trade Unions, and the consequent lack of any stable working-class organisations, they had decided to refer the whole question again to the forthcoming Trade Union Congress. When the Congress met at Swansea in September 1887, it soon became evident that the Parliamentary Committee, on this question as on others, was quite out of touch with its constituents. In spite of the influence of the Front Bench, a resolution in favour of an International Congress was adopted; and the Committee succeeded only in inducing Congress to impose restrictions which were intended to exclude the delegates of the German Social-Democratic party. The International Congress was held in London in November 1888. Notwithstanding every precaution, a majority of the representatives proved to be of Socialist views, Mrs. Besant, John Burns, Tom Mann, and Keir Hardie appearing among the British delegates. The stiff and unsympathetic attitude of the Parliamentary Committee led to heated and, at times, unseemly controversies; and the resolutions passed were treated by the Committee as of no account whatsoever.

The net result of these proceedings was the loss by the Parliamentary Committee of all intellectual leadership of the Trade Union world. They failed either to resist the new ideas or to guide them into practicable channels. The official Trade Union programme from 1885 to 1889 became steadily more colourless, in striking contrast with the rapid march of politics in the country, which was sweeping the Liberal party forward year by year until in 1891 it adopted the so-called “Newcastle Programme.” This programme formulated, though very inadequately, the national side of that semi-collectivist policy which under the name of Progressivism had superseded Liberalism in the London County Council. All that the Parliamentary Committee did was to abandon, one by one, the proposals for the democratisation of the civil and judicial administration which the Front Bench had so much at heart, without replacing them by the more robust resolutions which the Congress in these years was passing. The Land Question, on which a vigorous advocacy of the creation of small freeholders had been formerly maintained, dwindled to a meaningless demand for undefined reform of the land laws, and finally disappeared altogether on the adoption by the Congress of the principle of nationalisation. The maintenance of the Nine Hours Day, and the further reduction of the hours of labour by means of voluntary combination (a frequent item in the official agenda from 1875 to 1879) gradually dropped out altogether as the new demand for legal regulation gathered strength. In short, the Parliamentary Committee had perforce to give up those items in their programme which were contrary to the new ideas of Congress, whilst they silently abstained from incorporating the new resolutions with which they were personally not in agreement.

It would, however, be unfair to assume that the stock of official Trade Unionism was, during these years, absolutely barren of new developments. To Mr. C. J. Drummond,[554] then Secretary to the London Society of Compositors, and a friend of the Parliamentary Committee, belongs the credit of having taken the first step towards the enforcement, through the Government, of a standard minimum wage. On the revision of the Government printing contract in 1884, Mr. Drummond secured the support of the Parliamentary Committee in an attempt to induce the Stationery Office to adopt, as the basis for the contract, the Trade Union rates of the London compositors. This attempt was, in the main, successful; but the new contract was nevertheless given to a “closed” house, in which no member of the Union could work. The compositors did not let the matter rest. When the President of the Local Government Board (Joseph Chamberlain) issued a circular in January 1886, as to the effects of the depression in trade, Mr. Drummond replied by explicitly demanding the Government’s recognition of the Standard Wage in all their dealings. The idea spread with great rapidity. A general demand was started that public authorities should present a good example as employers of labour by themselves paying Trade Union rates, and insisting on their contractors doing the same. Candidates for Parliament at the General Election of 1886 found themselves, at the instance of the London Society of Compositors,[555] for the first time “heckled” as to their willingness to insist on “Fair Wages”; and it began slowly to dawn upon election agents that it might be prejudicial for their election literature to bear the imprint of “rat houses.” In October 1886 the action of the London School Board in giving its printing contract to an “unfair” house was bitterly resented by the London compositors, who induced the London Trades Council to go on a vain deputation of protest. When, in November 1888, the London School Board election came round, A. G. Cook, a member of the London Society of Compositors, secured election for Finsbury, avowedly as a champion of Trade Union wages; and two members of the Fabian Society, Mrs. Annie Besant and the Rev. Stewart Headlam, won seats as Socialists. By their eloquence and tactical skill these members induced the Board, early in 1889, to declare that it would henceforth insist on the payment of “Fair Wages” by all its contractors, a policy in which the Board was promptly followed by the newly established London County Council.[556] This new departure by the leading public bodies in the Metropolis did much to bring about a common understanding between the official Trade Unionists and the new movement. It is needless to describe in this place how, since that date, the principle of “Fair Wages” has developed. By 1894 a hundred and fifty local authorities had adopted some kind of “Fair Wages” resolution. In 1890, and more explicitly still in 1893, successive Governments found it necessary to repudiate the old principle of buying in the cheapest market, in favour of the now widespread feeling that public authorities as large employers of labour, instead of ignoring the condition of their employees, should use their influence to maintain the Standard Rate of Wages and Standard Hours of Labour recognised and in practice obtained by the Trade Unions concerned.

Though the Front Bench as a whole maintained during these years its policy of contemptuous inactivity, there were, as we have seen, some signs of the permeation of the new ideas. It was under these circumstances a grave misfortune that the inevitable criticism on the Parliamentary Committee began by a scurrilous attack upon the personal character and conduct of its leaders.[557] During the years 1887-89 the conscientious adhesion to the Liberal party of most of the Parliamentary Committee was made the occasion for gross charges of personal corruption. The General Secretaries of the great Unions, men who had for a lifetime diligently served their constituents, found their influence undermined, their character attacked, and themselves denounced, by the circulation all over the country of insidious accusations of treachery to the working classes. These charges found a too ready acceptance among, and were repeated by, those young and impatient recruits of the new movement who knew nothing of the history and services of the men they were attacking. In the year 1889 the friction reached its climax. During the summer the attacks upon the personal character of the Front Bench were redoubled. As the date of the Trade Union Congress approached, it became known that a determined attempt would be made by the Socialist delegates to oust the Parliamentary Committee from office. The Congress met at Dundee, and plunged straight into an angry conflict in which the Socialists were completely routed. The regular attenders of the Congress had, as we have seen, been gradually absorbing many of the new ideas, and were not altogether satisfied with the way their resolutions had been ignored by the Parliamentary Committee. But all discontent or criticism was swept away by the anger which the character of the attack had excited. A great majority of the delegates came expressly pledged to support Broadhurst and his colleagues, and when the division was taken only 11 out of a meeting of 188 delegates were found to vote against him. The Cotton Operatives who had at all times supported factory legislation, the Miners who were demanding an Eight Hours Bill, the Londoners who came from the centre of the Socialist agitation—all rallied to defend the Parliamentary Committee. The little knot of assailants were thoroughly discredited; and the triumph of the “old gang” was complete. [558]