LORD PENRHYN AND HIS QUARRYMEN.
WE have always a great dread of the interference of the Press in the quarrels between capitalists and labourers. There is a good deal of danger of doing mischief from the necessary inaccuracy of its information and the very probably inadequately scrutinised character of its motives. It is so easy to take the wrong side, and so much easier still to take the right side in a wrong fashion. We all feel so deep a sympathy with a number of poor working men unexpectedly thrown out of employ- ment, that we are very apt to imagine that we can do no harm by expressing that sympathy in a fashion which may encourage them to persevere in an unreasonable and almost tyrannical attitude towards their employers, when they find that they have the public sympathy (which, after all, is very far from omnipotent) behind them ; and thus irreparable mischief may be done not only to the master but to the men themselves. And there is a special danger • of doing injustice in some of these quarrels. We are all very apt to assume that the educated capitalist, with an experienced manager behind him, is sure to have a great advantage over his workmen in the statement of his case against a number of labourers who have much less experience in stating their case plausibly, and a much less central position for avoiding those minor inconsistencies into which a considerable number of different witnesses, all looking at a quarrel from the same point of view, are apt to fall. As a matter of fact this assumption is often quite wrong. The capitalist is really very often extremely precipitate in getting at the facts. He is in the hands of two or three necessarily prepossessed advisers, who rely with great confidence on what they have learned from a few not always trustworthy informants. And with his sense of proprietary right and individual responsibility, and not seldom also a strong sense of tradi- tional liberality, behind him, the proprietor speaks with an air of absolute knowledge which is not really justified, but which he thoroughly believes to be beyond question or dispute. Nothing is more remarkable than the ease with which capitalists are betrayed into errors respecting the facts of the case by their few advisers,—advisers who are themselves often misled by subordinate informants of a much less trustworthy character than themselves. We believe that all these sources of error [have crept into the accounts which have gradually oozed out of the differences between Lord Penrhyn and his workmen. Some correspondents have Accepted his own authoritative statements with far too much confidence in their accu- racy, though not in their honesty. Lord. Penrhyn and his manager have been more or less indignant against their workmen, and more or less misled by their indigna- tion into accepting statements which wanted a great deal more sifting. Very possibly the men also have been mis- led in the same fashion. It is not easy to sift out facts in quarrels of this sort without an amount of caution and acuteness which very few investigators can command. But on one or two points, at all events, it is perfectly obvious that Lord Penrhyn has not been nearly careful enough to check the sources of his own statements, too confident as he was in that sense of authority and respon- sibility which the mere fact of ultimate ownership inevit- ably carries with it.
In the first place, no error could have been greater than not to allow the men the presence of their own shorthand reporter at the interview between himself and the Com- mittee who represented his quarrymen. He had his own reporter there, and, therefore he had the means of checking any of those misunderstandings or results of bias which so often creep into the drift of a report. The owner in such a quarrel as this is not less likely, perhaps even more likely, to misinterpret the drift of what his men say than they ave to misinterpret the drift of what he or his manager says. He is even less likely to distrust himself and his advisers than they are. And he ought, if he is wise, to secure himself even more carefully against hasty mistakes of implied meaning than they, for he begins with a very natural sense of impatience and outraged feeling at what he regards as the deflanceihe has received, which they can hardly share in any equal degree. Lord Penrhyn, if he had been wise, would have invited the men to bring their own shorthand reporter with them, making a condition that the two reports should afterwards be very minutely compared in the presence of the master, manager, and select members of the men's Committee. In repudiating this valuable means of sifting both the facts and temper of the discussion, it appears clear to us that Lord. Penrhyn made a serious mistake.
And, again, we hold that he made a serious mistake in objecting to the presence of a representative of the Board of Trade at the interview between himself and his work- men. He regarded Cott as a sort of admission that the Board of Trade had a right to meddle between himself and his workmen. But that surely is a very mistaken view of the matter. Parliament has been anxious to bring about reconciliations between capitalists and labourers, and has thought that the assistance of a skilled depart- mental officer at the interviews in which grievances are discussed, would probably contribute greatly to the avoiding of serious misunderstandings ; nor can we doubt that it would. Such an impartial mediator would often see the probable misinterpretation of a remark on either side, and put a question which would remove it. Again, he would often see better than either side where the trace of un- trustworthy evidence came in, and suggest questions which would. develop that trace of shady motive into certainty. To our mind, if Lord Penrhyn had. understood his own interest well, he would have been as anxious for the presence of a. skilled departmental officer from the Board of Trade at his interviews with his workmen, as those workmen were themselves, and very likely might have gained as much or more by it. In all these questions concerning whether his men were paid their wages directly by his own agents, or were paid by contractors or sub- contractors, or whether even when they had been paid directly by his own agents, the contractors or sub- contractors managed subsequently to extract from them a fraction of their wages as consideration for favourable notice, the presence of an impartial observer who cared only to get at the exact truth, would have been invaluable. No doubt Lord Penrhyn would say that the departmental officer would not be perfectly impartial, that he would be inclined to side with the popular view and get credit for defending the poor locked-out workmen against a " tyrannical ' employer. We cannot say that it would not be so. Everybody must own that it might be so in a society of strong democratic leanings. But we do not think it at all probable in England. After all, Par- liament has not only not taken away, but so far as we see, till the State takes all private property into its hands, never can take away, the right of the capitalist to close his works. What use would it be to order an unwilling capitalist to work a quarry he did not choose to work, against his own wish, even if there were any legal power to do so ? Thus the capitalist has always the last word. in his own power, and the desire of the Board of Trade must always be at bottom to bring about a reasonable reconciliation, and not to puff up the men with an exaggerated. sense of their own strength. Lord. Penrhyn would never deny that property has its duties as well as its rights. And if the Board. of Trade knows its own business as well as we believe that it does, it would certainly not wish to exaggerate those duties or to attenuate those rights. If there were an officer of the Board of Trade who was inclined to flatter the men and humiliate the owner, depend upon it that the authorities would take very good. care to keep such an officer at routine work and not to send him down to inflame the democratic passions of a labourers' Committee. We are far from assuming that all the right has been on the wPrkmen's side and all the error on Lord Penrhyn's. Out- siders are quite incompetent to pass any such judgment. But, so far as we can Judge, Lord Penrhyn has certainly not felt sufficient self-distrust of his own sources of in- formation, and would have been far wiser to admit the workmen's reporter as well as his own to the discussion between himself and his workmen and not only to allow, but cordially to invite, the mediation of a Board of Trade office, at such interviews.
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