Letters to
the Editor WHY NOT OPERATE THE SAMUEL REPORT ? - [To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—Whenever any action is taken in public affairs, voices are raised to declare that disaster must follow. Every change in our electoral system, every constitutional amend- ment, every measure affecting social or industrial conditions, has been denounced as a peril, as an almost certain cause of delay. Yet- if we study history with open minds, we find that very nearly all great calamities have been caused not by action but by inaction, not by doing but by leaving undone. A vague, uneasy sense of this is working in the public mind just now. The disappointment with the present ministry, which has been made manifest at recent by-elections, is due not to anything which the Government has accomplished, but to its having made no effort in several important directions to accomplish anything at all. The nation feels that some vigorous attempts to reduce general unemployment were called for; 'it has not got over its surprise at the omission to apply Government aid to the badly needed reorganization of the coal industry.
Whether by putting into operation the Report of the Samuel Commission just on three years ago Mr. Baldwin (who at that time certaiiily.intended this) could have prevented the. painful and ruinous consequences of the coal struggle, it is impossible to say—and it would be unfruitful to discuss. But, looking to the future instead of the past, it does seem worth while to ask, in view of the widespread anxiety for some permanent improvement in the miners' condition, why that Samuel Commission Report should not be made operative now Let me recall briefly its character. Drawn up, after five months of industrious inquiry, by four men eminent in their separate spheres, it won immediate respect ; it was welcomed as a contribution of real value towards the solving of a very difficult problem. • Sir Herbert Samuel, as politician, Sir William Beveridge, as political economist, Sir Herbert Lawrence, as banker, Mr. Kenneth Lee, as captain of industry, approached that problem with a strong desire to apply to it unprejudiced intellects and to handle it in a business-like way. Their Report seemed to the mass of the nation to be all the more admirable because neither of the disputants liked it. The colliery owners grumbled at the prospect of " being interfered with " ; the miners shied at the threat of reduced wages, even though it was stipulated that reduction should only affect the better- paid men.
Interest in the Report was so vivid that the Stationery' Office could not print it fast enough. A cheap threepenny reprint sold in very large numbers. ' Hope that a way out of the slough of peril had been found rose high ; a fortnight after the Report had been issued Mr. Baldwin announced its acceptance by the Government. He was prepared to buy out the owners of mines and to make these the property of the nation. He was ready to put the Government behind the arrangements for amalgamation of coal properties which the CoMinissioners declared to be necessary and to hasten that closer connexion between mining and its allied industries which the Report so strongly recommended. He raised no objection to establishing co-operative sale agencies, to en- couraging the sale of coal by municipalities, to the setting-up of a National Fuel and Power Committee. It seemed for a moment that the waste Caused by burning raw coal, the reckless throwing-away , of by-products, the darkening of the atmosphere, all of which were' deplored in the Spectator last week, were about to be abolished. Only for a moment . unhappily. For Mr. Baldwin soon made known that he attached to his acceptance of the Report the condition that both owners and miners should agree to work it, a condition which had no chance whatever of being fulfilled.
Still, hope did not all at once die down. Possibly, it was thought, Mr. Baldwin might do what Lord Oxford as Mr. Asquith did in 1912. He broke through a deadlock not unlike this one by passing a Minimum Wage Bill over the heads of both miners and owners, a resolute move which . • .
will shine always in the record of his career; The way was
even easier for Mr. Baldwin than it had beer for his pre- decessor. Mr. Ramsay MacDonald made it clear that Labour would not oppose. " If the changes are good, why," he asked in the House of Commons, should they not be made on their own merits ? "
Even Mi. Herbert Smith, the miners' less foolish leader, urged the Prime Minister to " abide by the report • of the Conuhission which he had himself appointed." To which Mr. Baldwin replied that " he would have to get his party to swallow many things they did not like and he thought the others should do the same." It was reported at the time, and not denied, that the colliery owners had invited the Government to " stand aside and let them give the miners a damned good hiding." At all events, so coldly impartial a witness as the Annual Register testified that " in the light of subsequent developments this conditional acceptance of the Report came to be viewed by many as a lamentable error and as being largely responsible for the econcmic calamities of the next few months."
However that may be, the Report was dropped. After a month's fruitless negotiation Mr. Baldwin told both owners and miners that " they had tied themselves up into a pretty knot and it was his business to get it untied or cut or otherwise disposed of." But he did not mention the Report. Nor, when he was urged after the General Strike to legislate on the lines recommended by the Commissioners, did he make any answer to the suggestion. That was the last heard of a document which on its appearance had been hailed as a lamp in the darkness, as a guide that might lead us out of a labyrinth of present and future woe.
Why have proposals admitted to be sensible and remedial been thus allowed to sink out of sight ? Has the need for putting them into practice passed ? By no means, although some few steps have been made in the directions indicated, the necessity for " doing something " remains as great as ever it was. Signs of revival in the coal industry should not be disregarded. It cannot, in the opinions of the most competent judges, such as Sir Richard Redmayne, recover itself. Now, when the patient shows that strength is returning, is the time to augment his energy. I believe that nothing more helpful could be done by the Government that to take up again and put into operation the Report of its own investigators. It would be a popular act, too.—I am, Sir,
Previous page
