TOPICS OF THE DAY.
LABOUR AND LIBERTY. '
TEE attitude taken up by the Labour Party to- wards the Osborne judgment is one of the most significant, and at the same time one of the most regrettable, incidents in the progress of the Socialist movement. It is impossible to read the speeches made by prominent Labour leaders, such as Mr. Ramsay Mac- Donald and Mr. Philip Snowden, without seeing that the ruling spirits in the Labour Party have no conception of the human need for liberty. They absolutely ignore any consideration of the right of the individual to have his private liberty respected. They assert that the majority of a Trade Union has the right to take whatever course it chooses, and that the whole duty of the minority is to obey.
We will point out in a moment the grave practical inconveniences which must follow from such a doctrine as this. The particular point we wish first to press is the unfortunate failure of men of the calibre of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald and Mr. Snowden to feel instinctively what we can only call the immorality of the position they have taken up. It is the old story of the subordination of the means to the end. The leaders of the Labour Party believe that it is only through the success of their party that the salvation of humanity can be secured, and there- fore, in order to attain that success, they are willing to sacrifice the very ends which humanity has always striven to attain. For what, after all, is the end which Socialists set before them ? It is to secure the greater well-being of the mass of mankind. But freedom is an essential element in well-being, and if freedom may be ruthlessly sacrificed in the progress towards Socialism, we may be quite certain that it would be equally sacrificed if Socialism were attained. The Labour leaders are thus by their present attitude confirming the impression which most liberty-loving Englishmen have formed of Socialism,— namely, that its ideals are limited to purely material well-being, and that the Socialists have no conception of that higher well-being of which individual liberty is the necessary basis.
With regard to the practical aspects of the new demand of the Labour Party, the situation is happily so clear that we feel there is very little danger of its being misunder- stood by the country. A Trade Union is a combination formed by men working in the same trade for the defence and advancement of their common trade interests. It is not necessarily a combination of employees. Masters as well as men are at liberty to form trade combinations, and in many cases have done so. On both sides the advantages of the Trade Union movement can hardly be exaggerated. Although Trade Unions are in many ways organised as belligerent bodies, they have in practice, especially in later years, acted more often as peace- makers than as fomenters of strife, and by their influence have succeeded in obtaining by peaceful methods sub- stantial advantages for the wage-earning classes. This aspect of Trade Unionism is now fully recognised by many employers who were previously bitterly opposed to Trade Unionism, and in well-organised trades representative bodies of employers and men are able to meet together and discuss and settle in an amicable spirit points which might otherwise have led to prolonged industrial war. The destruction of this system of trade combination would be a national disaster and it was solely to ward off the alleged danger of this disaster that Parliament in 1906 took the remarkable step of exempting Trade Unions from one of the most important provisions of our common law.
Whether this measure was justifiable we need not now consider. Our views on the subject are well known to our readers. The practical point is that the privi- leges then conferred were given to bodies constituted for a special purpose, and cannot be extended to bodies having other purposes in view. The Socialists, however, are now claiming that the majority of a Trade Union may at will convert what is legally a trade society into a political organisation. Their claim goes even further. Mr. Snowden, for example, declares that "Trade Unionism must be unfettered by legal injunctions as to the way it shall spend its money in advancing its interests.' We can hardly believe that Mr. Snowden fully foresees the consequences of the claim he puts forward. If, for example, in a, particular district a clergyman or a None conformist minister took an active part in advocating Trade Unionism, it might be profitable to the Trade Union to reciprocate by aubsidising the church. In such a case, according to Mr. Snowden's theory, the Executive Committee of the Union would be justified, with the approval of the majority of members, in spending the money of the society on a particular form of religion. Even more curious is Mr. Snowden's apparent incapacity to see that if such powers as these are conferred upon Unions of working men, they must also be conferred upon Unions of masters. Not long ago there was a grave out- cry in the Press because the directors of a railway company had subscribed to the funds of an organisation in London which aimed at reforming municipal administration. The defence of the directors was that the railway company was a large ratepayer, and that the reform of municipal administration would diminish the burden falling upon the shareholders of the company. This defence was almost universally condemned as insufficient on the simple ground that though the motive of the directors might have been to reduce the expense of rates, their action involved the spending of the shareholders' money on what was, partially at any rate, a political movement, and that this was unjustifiable, because the shareholders included persons of all political opinions. Exactly the same consideration applies to Trade Unions. The Labour Party is a distinct political organisation with a very definite creed which separates it both from the Liberal Party and from the Conservative Party. That creed may be conceived in the interests of the working classes, but many Trade Unionists do not think so. Many men who are enthusiastic supporters of their trade society are equally enthusiastic in support either of the Liberal Party or of the Conservative Party, and it is clearly unjust that their money, subscribed for an industrial end, should be diverted to a political end of which they disapprove. This, indeed, is the answer to the contention of the Labour leaders that Trade Unions have for many years been spending money in maintaining candidates without opposition or legal pro- hibition. Until quite recently Trade Union representatives were not as such pledged to any political party. They were simply pledged to their Union, and therefore, though it is possible that the Courts, if the case had then been presented to them, would have condemned even this amount of political action, it is clear that the practical injustice was insignificant in comparison with that which has now been created. The essence of the new regime is that every Member of Parliament who accepts Trade Union support must sign a pledge that he will vote with the Labour Party in the House of Commons. He becomes the servant of a purely political organisation. This has been made abundantly clear by the campaign which the Labour Party has directed unsuccessfully against Messrs, Burt and Fenwick, and successfully against Mr. Richard Bell. The last-named has been driven out of Parliament and driven out of his Union solely because, as a man of independent character, he refused to pledge himself to vote according to the dictates of the Labour Party. We could have no better proof of what is the real issue at stake. The Labour Party has succeeded in capturing the bulk of the Trade Unions in the country, and demands power to spend their funds for its political ends. How any man professing to be a Liberal can hesitate in forming an opinion on such an issue we confess we find it difficult to understand, and we are particularly surprised to note that Colonel Seely, speaking at Ilkeston the other day, apparently regarded the reversal of the Osborne judgment by Act of Parliament as an open question. Colonel Seely has fought so gallantly for liberty in other political spheres that we can only assume that in this case he has suffered from an inadequate report of his speech.
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