THE RIGHT TO BE DRUNK OFF DUTY.
THE strike on the North-Eastern Railway is the strangest instance that has yet been seen of con- fusion of industrial thought. That, at least, is the proper description of it if the alleged cause is to be accepted as the real one. It is quite possible, indeed, that it is not the real one. The men may have merely seized on the first dismissal of an engine-driver as supplying an occasion for a strike which they desire for other reasons. But if we put this explanation aside and take the case on its merits, we find ourselves at once in a sea of irreconcilable con- tentions. At one moment the men's position seems a simple one. Knox was not drunk. But in the next we have an admission that, though Knox may have been drunk, he was drunk at a time when in the sacred interest of individual liberty he had a right to be drunk. Finally, it appears that the wrong done to him, either by a false charge or by a charge which, if true, was irrelevant, is so great that it can only be met by disregarding the conditions of a contract into which the men had freely entered. Nor is it only a general principle of law that has been disregarded. The strikers have also broken the rules expressly framed by the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants to meet cases like the present. According to these rules any dispute between the men and the company which employs them is first of all to be referred to arbitration. If this method fails, a strike ballot is to be taken. And if the requisite majority of votes is in favour of striking, the men are to tender their notices, but not to leave work till they have expired. In the present case not one of these conditions has been satisfied. There has been no arbitration and no strike ballot. What the Amalgamated Society makes the final step in the transaction has been taken first, and the strike has begun before a single one of the methods designed to delay and if possible to prevent it has been so much as spoken of. The Amalgamated Society itself has not escaped this epidemic. The meeting of the Executive on Monday disclosed a similar array of conflicting opinion among the officials. Discipline must be maintained, but the situation is too difficult for its application. The pre- cipitancy with which the men have acted is condemned, but the leaders must not make the mistake of censuring them; since to do this would be to destroy whatever influence they still exercise over the rank and file. Au influence which cannot be exerted in case of need without killing it is hardly worth keeping alive.
To our thinking this act on the part of the Gateshead rail- waymen should have been met with a plain non possumus. The North-Eastern Railway did the right thing when they refused to allow Knox to go on driving the engines of main-line trains. It is not clear why he should have been allowed to drive even a pilot engine. Even that has capacities of doing mischief when it is badly guided ; and if an express were to come into collision with a pilot engine in the wrong place, it would be poor comfort to the injured passengers to know that the driver of their engine was a man of proved sobriety. They might wish with some reason that the ordinance had been extended to the driver of every kind of engine. Nor is it clear why Knox should have been promised reinstatement when he can prove that he has been sober for a year. The case of an engine-driver is so peculiar, the safety of so many passengers depends upon his being in the full possession of every faculty of observation and decision, that it is wiser to keep on the safe side and to make proved intoxication even in a single instance an absolute disqualification for that department of railway service. If these concessions were meant to avert the strike they have proved useless, and we hope that they will not be offered again. The contentions of the strikers are so unreasonable that it would have been better to meet them at once with a flat refusal. No doubt the consequences to the trade of the district and to that large public to which Christmas is a season of special travelling will be very serious. But capitu- lation now can only make a similar strike certain whenever a case of the same kind arises. If the men win this time they will know that at the best they will have struck drunkenness out of the list of disqualifying offences, and that at the worst they will begin their next fight with a previous victory to their score. It is hard to say which of the points on which the strikers rest their case has the least relation to the real facts. The manifesto of their committee sets out that the men are absolutely convinced that Driver Knox " is innocent of the charge of drunkenness of which he has been convicted." But of what value is their conviction that Knox was sober against the conviction of the New- castle Bench that he was drunk ? The justices have taken the unusual step of making a public statementthat they "had not the slightest doubt upon the evidence adduced before them that the defendant was guilty of the offence of being drunk and disorderly, and they convicted him accordingly." And as regards the charges of assault brought at the same time they " considered the evidence unsatisfactory and accordingly acquitted the defendant," it is clear that they had no feeling against Knox beyond what was generated by the force of the testimony against him. However sincere, therefore, may be the feeling of the strikers that be was unjustly condemned, it must, except in a very few cases, be the feeling of men quite ignorant of the facts and wholly unaccustomed to weigh evidence. The second point in the manifesto seems to show some suspicion on the part of the framers that up to this time they have not advanced anything to upset the decision of the Newcastle justices. They now assure the public that " it is not their desire or intention to defend any habitual drunkard." Had Knox been drunk once a week they would not, we may infer, have objected to the Company's action. They are even willing to make a further concession. They will not defend a man whose use of alcohol interferes with the performance of his duties. The relative importance assigned to these two forms of intoxication is curious. We should have thought that a man whose use of alcohol " interferes with the performance of his duties" would be a more dangerous man to entrust with an engine than a habitual drunkard who may conceivably so time his excesses that he is not visibly unfit for duty in the intervals. This is not, however, a matter of any importance, since either kind of drunkenness ought to operate as a total disqualification for the work with which Knox was charged.
In a later presentation of the men's case the argument is lifted to a higher level. The strike is justified on the ground that "the liberty of the individual is involved" in it. This is apparently a more magniloquent form of the position that a use of alcohol which does not interfere with the performance of a man's duties is no disqualifi- cation for an engine-driver. In one sense no doubt this is trite. No reasonable person would maintain that the daily consumption of a pint of beer with his meals would unfit an ordinary man for any work that may be assigned him. Even here, indeed, there are exceptional cases—cases in which even this modest use of alcohol would properly operate as a disqualification. There are men in whom half this quantity will visibly affect their full command of their faculties, and for this reason a railway company would be fully justified in making a rule that they would employ no engine-driver who was not a total abstainer. It is plain, however, that when the men talk of interference with the liberty of the individual what they have in view is the distinction between being on duty and off duty. If Knox had been drunk when in charge of an engine he would have found no sympathizers among his comrades. But what business had the company to take any notice of the manner in which be spent the hours during which he had no engine to look after ? The answer to this lies in the well-known fact that a man may be far less capable of doing responsible work properly when he is recovering from a drunken fit than when he is in the middle of one. In the latter case he may be kept on the alert by exceptional excitement. In the former he may be feeling good. for nothing, and may carry the depression caused by that feeling into every- thing that he puts his hand to. If individual liberty is to be invoked to protect a man in this condition, the door may as well be thrown open to drunkenness in all its stages. Nothing is gained by affixing a special stigma to one stage when in some cases this is the very one which is likely to be the least injurious. No doubt if Knox's conviction can be proved wrong the whole case comes to an end. But it should be made quite clear that this plan is not made to appear a mere expedient for whitewashing an offender whose conviction has proved unexpectedly inconvenient. Such a conclusion would be the worst of all possible ways out of the difficulty, since it would. degrade the administration of justice for no better reason than giving a large number of people their Christmas trains, their Christmas fires, and their Christmas dinners: In that case they will pay heavily at a future day for the avoidance of some present discomfort.
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