• STICK TO THE QUESTION.
AT the first view it might seem that the public could have no in- terest in the dispute between the Amalgamated Engineers and their employers, no power, and no right even of intervention : but public opinion is invited, by the statements which both sides are careful to make ; and the anxiety to obtain the judgment of the pub- lic confesses a certain degree of power. And, in truth, the public has a very deep interest in the matter ; for the regulation of industry in reference to production lies at the bottom of the dispute. It is therefore very, desirable that the public, which is invited to judge, should know the substance of that on which it is to pass judgment; and for that reason we regret the persevering endeavours to pre- sent a case on one side or the other. It would be well if each party should restrict itself to the statement of facts on its own side. Such, however, has not been the conduct of the dis- cussion; and we are bound to say that the employers have on their side a lamentable excess of incrimination and unsound ex- position. The press, from whatsoever cause—possibly from the natural sympathy of social station, and an unequal sense of the im- portance of capital as compared with labour—has too generally adopted the representations on one side as identical with the facts, and, with an obstinate perseverance in this apprehension, has con- tinued to disguise the true question by false issues. For example, the men engaged in the movement, ' whether as leaders or followers, are represented as demanding the dismissal of certain workmen of an unskilled class : now that does not appear to form any item in the demands for which the men are united, and it is-only confusing the public mind to pretend that it does. Again, the men are represented as contemplating some kind of in- timidation or compulsion: but if we stick to the admitted record there is no evidence of such purpose. There has, as we before stated,
been personal violence in the case of two men at Leeds, who were punished ; and there has been a demand for the dismissal of ,certain persons by the hands of a particular factory at Oldham, to which the owner of the factory agreed ; but it is as unreason- able to charge such individual or local acts on the whole body of Amalgamated Engineers or its central committee as it would be to charge the eccentricities of Keighley and. its committee, upon Parliament and the whole constituency of the kingdom. The
demands of Amalgamated Engineers, as we understand them, appear to bciNhese —the abolition of piece-work, and the discon- tinuance of systematic over-time. The associated work-shops even are not to be mixed up with the original dispute, since they are but the counter-movement to the closing of shops by the masters. The extent to which the public has been mystified is shown in the letter of Lord Cranworth to Lord Ishburthn ; a composition which shows that Lord Cranworth himself has been misled ; and then, by a reduplication of the confusion, he is represented as a final authority, not only on account of his high judicial character, but on account of his having been selected as arbiter by the men themselves. Now the foot is not to be overlooked that Lord Oran- worth expressly declined to accept the character of arbitrator. The engineers at one time made overtures to the masters, for referring their dispute to arbitration, and men of high character were named as eligible arbitrators including Lord Shaftesbury, Mr. Gladstone and Lord Cranworth; but the masters refused. Meanwhile, Lord Cranworth had been asked whether he would be willing to act, and his reply, declining, has been seized as an au- thority. But if anything be founded on his judicial character, those who do so must remember that he declined to assume that character, that he speaks without its responsibility, and that he speaks on evidence not taken by himself, nor in the presence of the contending parties. The partial nature of his data appears from his supposing that the engineers were demanding "that the masters shall not employ unskilled labourers." Thus Lord Cran- worth's judgment is worth no more than that of an intelligent reader of the Times and of the ex-parte statement Again, he expresses an opinion that the employer should have perfect liberty in fixing the conditions of his employment,—an opinion in which most economists will concur ; but the public must dis- criminate between the opinion of an individval peer on a question of economy and that of a judge on a point of equity. These dis- tinctions are not technical; they are substantial and essential to a right understanding of the case. In the harshly-worded and incriminatory " representation " of the case put forth by the masters, they claim to be "let alone," "to do what they like with their own," to make their own condi- tions of the employment which they are to give with their capital, the risk of which is theirs. This right, as we have said before, must be recognized; but, we repeat, the correlative right of the men must be equally recognized : if capital is the masters', labour is the men's ; and they have an exactly equivalent right to do what they like with their own—to fix their own conditions, to withhold their labour if they please, and to act in concert with each other. The rights are exactly correlative ; and it is both irrational and unjust in those who arrogate the right on one side, to describe the ex- ercise of the right on the other side as an aggression or a culpable offence.
We abstain from touching on the merits of the case, or of the measure to which the men have resorted in establishing work- shops of their own : on the dispute itself we have said all that it appears to us proper to be said,* and we certainly approach the social question involved in the Original dispute with no bias in favour of the policy adopted by the men. But in a matter which profoundly interests society, as an essay towards the practical em- pirical working out of a difficult problem, a matter to which the attention of the public has been repeatedly invited, we deprecate the systematic misapprehension which obscures the real subject and is perpetually interposed between the facts and the public view.
•• Spectator, January 10, 1852.
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