One good consequence the Labour Commission will produce. . It will
encourage the workmen to bring forward their wilder secret ideas into the light of day, so that the whole body of the community may understand and discuss them. That will do more towards the enlightenment of the ignorant than any- amount of repression of their views, which only produces. discontent. Who would have imagined, for instance, that any body of workmen held that the State should by penal enact- ment prevent all men over sixty from working for wages, and that such men should receive pensions from the community of 30s. a week ? Yet this was the doctrine explained on Wednesday to Lord Derby by Mr. Quelob, representative of the rougher labourers of the south side of the Thames. Lord Derby listened quietly while Mr. Quelch denounced machinery and advocated municipal workshops, but the direct interference with liberty involved in the prohibition of work for the old staggered even his long experience, and he cross- examined upon the point. Mr. Quelcb, however, had the courage of his opinions, and repeated his suggestion, which was endorsed in principle by Mr. Falvey, representing the corn-porters of Rotherhithe. The idea of witnesses like these is, that to give work for pay is to present a benefaction
to the community, for which the community owes them grati- tude and a pecuniary reward. They reject with a certain scorn the whole idea of liberty, one of them observing that there was no liberty, except perhaps in an African desert.
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