TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE MINERS' RESPONSIBILITY TO THE NATION.
fliE the day when these pages appear the Interim Report NJ of the Coal Industry Commission—on wages and hours, remember, and not on Nationalization, a matter which was clearly reserved for the final Report—will have been pre- sentea. The miners will be engaged in making their decision as to whether that Report (or the Report of the majority, if unanimity cannot be achieved) is to be accepted, or whether they shall proceed to what, considering the circumstances of the hour and the vital character of the Trade, can only be called a revolutionary strike. We do not use the word " revolutionary " to prejudice the case of the miners. We should be the last people in the world to say that revolutions can never be justified, or that it is impossible that the miners can have wrongs which would justify revolutionary action. All we say is that a strike, if it does take place now, must be revolutionary in its character, and must, like treason, justify itself by success and by the inherent soundness of its action. Granted a successful strike, a strike which it can be shown the miners could not have forgone without abandoning their very natural and in itself perfectly legitimate desire to better their condition, the nation will soon forget and forgive the inconvenience which it must suffer if a strike takes place. But though we hold this view, and consider that it should be held by all fair-minded men, we would warn the miners that, like all who declare war upon the State, they must be prepared to take the full consequences of their action if that action is in the end unsuccessful. If after a bitter and terrible struggle, in which the sufferings both of the rich and the capitalists and of the vast majority of the population will be indescribable, and in which the poor and the weak, as in all wars, will suffer the most, the miners are not only beaten but are unable, as may very possibly turn out, to make good their claim that they had no course but to strike and to hold up the nation at a time when there was so great a need for peace, amity, and the con- sideration of general rather than of particular interests, the nation as a whole will never forgive or forget their crime.
The miners if they are wise will remember also that though their calling is both arduous and dangerous, and deserves therefore to be not only well paid but to have special consideration as regards hours of labour, freedom, and enjoyment, they are not as a whole a popular class. Rightly or wrongly, fairly or unfairly, the mass of the population are inclined to think that the miners played a somewhat selfish part in the war. No doubt thousands of the best of the miners flocked to arms at the nation's call and did magnificently in the field. But these brave men are not the miners who are threaten- ing to seize this moment of the country's peril and embarrassment and make it their opportunity. Of the fighting miners many, alas ! lie for ever silent in the fields of France and Flanaers, on Judaean hills, by the Aegean Sea, or in the plains of Mesopotamia. Others again are in hospital or are disabled from working at their old em- ployment. The mass of the miners who are now threaten- ing to hold up the nation consist either of the men who for various reasons, many of them doubtless good reasons, did not go oversee, or of the men who took to or re- turned to mining in order to avoid military service, who went underground rather than "over the top." No doubt the miners can plead that in many cases they were urged by the Government to keep to so absolutely necessary a work as mining, and were told directly that they would be doing a better patriotic duty by digging coal than by digging trenches. We agree, and do not think that enough attention is paid to this fact or to these circumstances by the public in general. But what we are dealing with now is not our own view, but the view of the man in the street and the soldier, whether mobilized or demobilized. The view of the man in the street undoubtedly is not one of unconditional sympathy with the miners. Nothing suc- ceeds like success, but, again, nothing fails like failure, and we are sure that failure after a bitter struggle would, as we have said, leave the miners in a position of extreme unpopularity. And here the miners may well reflect that if it comes to a fight to a finish between them and the State, the State is bound to win, even though the fact remains that they and their allies may cause the State a week or a fortnight of great suffering and of terrible losses— losses which it may take years to redeem.
We have spoken plainly to the miners, not because we are against them or on the side of their employers, but because they are the side which lain power, the side which has got to choose whether it shall be Peace or War. If it were a case of a lock-out, or of an ordinary refusal on the part of the employers to give better wages or better conditions of labour, we should speak as plainly to the capitalist. But that is not the position with which we are now confronted. We are face to face with an altogether novel situation in which the miners in the last resort tell us that they will not suffer the work of the nation, which depends on the hewing of coal, to go on unless the coal-mining industry is taken over by the State. In circumstances so strange and so dangerous per se we claim that we are not taking sides if we warn the miners to look before they leap, and to make quite sure that they are able to do what they are setting out to do ; to bear in mind that the appeal to arms can only be justified by success, and that, to adopt Confucius's war motto, "If I fight, I win." In this context we should like to say for ourselves that we admit the altogether special and peculiar nature of the miner's industry. We hold that its perils ought to be well paid for, and that the miner who has to toil in damp and narrow passages underground should when he is above ground have an extra share of the amenities of life. It is only just and right that we should all pay more for our coal, and more for the things that coal makes—these are almost everything—in order to give the miner a bates time, and that we ought, if possible, in the exceptional case to strive to give him more than the economic conditions allow. Therefore we want higher wages and shorter hours for the miners, but above all, whether the miners them- selves and their wives want them or not, better housing con- ditions. We are to be counted among those who think that in the last resort it is the slum that makes the slummer, and we would compel those who hire other men to work to give the workers good houses, airy houses, sanitary houses, and good gardens, and to see to it that those who sink a mine remember that it is a part of their duty, which will be sternly exacted by the State, not to create a desert of smutty misery. We would not let the coal-owners plead, however true in fack.that some, or even many, of the miners do not want, and would not thank them for, good cottages and cheerful and pleasant or even aesthetic sur- roundings. The miners should be made to have them whether they like them or not, and even if they have to suffer a little in pocket thereby. And this would be no infringement of industrial liberty, for it is as certain as that the sun will rise to-morrow that in a year or two the men who had lived in the homes we are considering would refuse to live in any less good. Taking mankind and womankind in the mass, nothing raises the standard of civilization more than a house so good that no one will dare to let it get dirty and untidy.
Unquestionably the coal-owners and mining companies have much to answer for in the matter of housing, and in regard to their neglect to make a well-ordered life possible for those whom they employed. Had they attended to these things, especially in Wales and in Scotland, they would have cut a much better figure before the Commission, have been far better able to uphold what is from many points of view a very strong ease, and would also have received much greater popular sympathy. Their indifference to the conditions under which the miners lived, and their willingness to take the purely academic view that the miners were inde- pendent men and must conduct their lives as they like, are now meeting with their due reward. But unfortunately, as so often happens, the reward falls not only upon the sinner, but almost as much upon persons perfectly inno- cent ;—unless indeed we say, and we are not altogether disinclined to say so, that the State ought long ago to have seen to it that the miners' villages were not the sinks of squalor that they have too often become. Even if the colliery-owners had been willing to adopt such a line, -we should not have allowed them to say in effect "Our best policy is to pay high wages and leavethe meti to spend them
exactly as they like. If they prefer keeping bull-pups, fighting-cocks, homing-pigeons, and following 'Captain Coe's ' tips to paying the rent required for decent housing, that is their affair, not ours. Let them make their own choice." But though we have always had, and still have, a leaning towards a strike against slums, a strike intended ultimately to procure nationalization is a very different matter. That is the kind of strike against which we are retesting.
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