Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, speaking at Bristol on Wednesday, at the
annual banquet of the Bristol Chamber of Commerce, ventured to think that the more carefully labour was organised in England, the less we should hear of the mischievous effect of struggles between capital and labour. He attributed these straggles chiefly to a defective organisation of labour. Even the recent strikes meant that English labour is not fully organised, and has not the full means of judging what is just and what is unjust, what is prudent and what is imprudent, in adjusting the relations between capital and labour. Sir Michael Hicks-Beach held that as the organisation of labour becomes more and more complete, the quarrels between the labourers and the capitalists will become fewer and fewer, and much more easy of settlement. And he held that the results of the Berlin Conference would convince working men that England is a good deal ahead of the rest of the world as regards the protection of labour, and that there is no excuse, at least in England, for the kind of violence of which the labour party in the various Continental States are often guilty. That is a hopeful though, we trust, not a sanguine view of the matter.
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