TOPICS OF THE DAY
A VICTORY FOR COMMON-SENSE.
WE are delighted to be able to record that common- sense has prevailed, and that the Labour Party's Unemployed Bill was defeated on Friday week by a majority of 149. But though this is eminently satisfactory, it must at the same time be admitted that there is something approaching a national humiliation in the thought that it required a strenuous effort on the part of a section of the Cabinet and of the Liberal Party to prevent a Bill so mad —we can use no other word—being adopted, at any rate in principle, by the House of Commons. Again, not only did a very considerable number of Liberal Members either vote for the second reading of the Bill, or else abstain from voting against it, but it is an open secret that a large number of those who ultimately obeyed the party Whip were anxious to come to some sort of compromise, and to get rid of the Bill, not by a direct negative, but by the method, so dear to the Parliamentary mind, of killing it with kindness.
A particularly encouraging feature about the debate which preceded the rejection of the Bill is the fact that by far the best speeches against the measure were made by working men. Mr. Maddison, the Member for Burnley, in an admirable speech in which he declared that . he was sick of the notion that the Labour Party had the monopoly of sympathy with the unemployed, pointed out that if under the Bill the unemployed were not paid at the Trade-Union rate, the Bill would simply have the effect of depressing wages. And what was the work to be ? Were they going to set the boilermaker to plough, and weavers, whose hands were as delicate as a woman's, to the bard work of making drains ? Of all the fallacies that prevailed in the House— and they were many—the most ridiculous was that the culti- vation of the land requires no skill. " Put the people back on the land !" was now the great cry. He was a compositor, but he would sooner, he declared, go to gaol than go on the land. The " right to work " could not stand alone. If the "right to work" was admitted, it must be followed up by giving the State a control over the lives of the workers to which no self-respecting people would submit. Mr. Vivian, another working man, who through his schemes for co-operative housing has, we do not hesitate to say, conferred enormous benefits upon his fellow working men and upon the country as a whole, was equally emphatic and equally courageous in his denunciations of the Bill. Mr. Vivian ended his speech by challenging the Labour Party to give a single example, drawn from experience—he cared not how many centuries they went back—where schemes approximating in any degree to this had been a success, nay, which had been anything but melancholy failures. All money spent by Government, national or municipal, must first becollected from the ratepayers or the taxpayers. To take money from the artisan and hand it over to an incompetent Unemployment Committee to waste in some madcap scheme for which they would not have 2s. 6d. in the pound return would not add one day's work to the demand for labour. " Some of the Labour Party in the House," he went on, " regarded almost as enemies of their propa- ganda a workman who acquired capital or made provision for a rainy day. By this Bill they were not making work, but they would destroy the character, the self-reliance, and the moral fibre of the men of this country."
These sensible speeches were supplemented by ' Mr. Burns, who was able to speak with the full knowledge of the facts possessed by the President of the Local Govern- ment Board. It is not too much to say of his speech that it absolutely blew the Bill " out of the water," and that it will remain an armoury from which the opponents of State Socialism will be able to draw facts and arguments for future use. The timid enemies of Socialism have said that Mr. Burns's speech was too aggressive ; but we cannot agree. We believe that he was as wise as he was brave to speak out without fear or favour ; and that so far from losing ground with his fellow working men because of his boldness, be will have fortified himself in their respect and. regard. Englishmen like the man who speaks straight to them, even though at the moment they may answer back and call him hard. names. What we specially admire in Mr. Burns's speech is the fact that he clearly keeps always before his eyes the essential difference between a pauper and an independent labourer, and that he realises that pauperisation is the most terrible of social, evils, and that whenever you have Manufactured a pauper you have ruined a man. In dealing with the question of labour colony experiments Mr. Burns made out an over- whelming case against the Bill. He took Hollesley Bay, which, as he pointed out, is an exact replica of the type of relief-work that would be set up by the Bill. Before that estate became public property a steward with eighteen farm- hands was able to make a small profit or incurred a small loss every year. Since it became a State relief-work, with two hundred and fifty men engaged on it, it has had a net loss of £22,000 a year. The Bill would dot England with such works. At Hollesley Bay the net cost per week per man is from 30s. to 32s., whereas local wages are from 17s. to 18s. a week. The case of South Ockenden Colony is as bad as that of Hollesley Bay. There the cost per week per man is something between 30s. and 32s., or about double the rate of wages paid to the agricultural labourer. At Laindon it is the same thing. Apropos of Laindon he told a most striking story,—a story worth a wilderness of statistics and abstract theories. He went to Laindon and saw an agricultural labourer between sixty and sixty-five years old digging in a field. This man told him that it took him a fortnight to dig an acre. He went across the road and found able-bodied men engaged on public work, on conditions approximating to the " right-to-work " condi- tions, and there it took sixtv-seven men ten days to dig an acre and a half ! "And yet Laindon was a replica of the penal form of labour colonies,"—a place where the " work-shy " are supposed to be forced to work ! They knew as practical men that if once they conceded the principle of this Bill they would have the lanes of our country districts black with men no longer content to receive 15s. or 18s. a week, and coming into our towns and cities where the minimum rate would be 28s. or 30s.
Mr. Burns towards the and of his speech added yet' another example to those with which history is teeming of the astonishing inefficiency of anything in the nature of a public workshop. An experiment in relief-works for women was going on.—Mr. Burns, we believe, is alluding to the small public workrooms opened in London to avoid the evils of home-work, where sempstresses produce ready-made clothes.—They found they had to pay £1,514 for clothes made at these relief-works, whereas better clothes in cut and style, and probably better in quality, could be got for £994. Note that this exactly repeats what happened at the Hotel Cluny when the tailors of Paris in 1848 were organised in a public workshop to make uniforms for the National Guard. In spite of the help and encouragement given by the Government in the way of rent-free premises, &c., it cost 15 francs to make a uniform at the Hotel Cluny—the men only being paid a subsistence wage— whereas the tailoring contractors had been accustomed to pay good wages to the tailors, make a profit for themselves, and yet only charge the Government 11 francs. Mr. Wilson in bringing forward the Unemployed Bill stated that the instance of Paris in 1848 had done duty enough. We cannot agree with him. We hold that that example will be cited, and rightly cited, again and again, in spite of the very disingenuous and persistent attempts which are now being made to represent the Provisional Government in 1848 as having deliberately ruined their own experiment,—a. mis- representation of history which we have already exposed in these columns, and one which, we may remark, would' not be affected even if the aforesaid misrepresentation had been set forth in a Blue-book in 1893. As a matter of fact, the Blue-book makes no assertion that the workshops were meant to fail.
A generation ago Nassau Senior, the economist and protagonist of Poor Law reform, noted the fact so well brought out by Mr. Burns. In one of his writings he points out that pauper labour, parish labour, convict labour, and slave labour—every form of labour resting on compulsion rather than upon free contract—are the same all the world over. They have always a miserably low output. There is only one way of getting people to do good work, and that is to make them feel that they will obtain the benefit of their labour, and that they are working for themselves, not for a taskmaster.
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