It will be remembered that the Conference of the Trade
Union Executives at which the history of the general strike was to be threshed out was postponed in order to avoid drawing attention to the Labour split while the coal strike was still unsettled. Mr. John Bromley, secretary to the Associated Society of Loco- motive Engineers and Firemen, has, however, committed the indiscretion—a calculated one, we suppose—of publishing in the LocomotIve Journal the Report which was to have been submitted to the Conference by the Trades Union Congress. The Report is a merciless indictment of the miners' leaders, a history of the repeated but vain attempts of the T.U.C. to persuade the miners to listen to reason :— " It was recognized by the leaders of other Unions (says the Report) that some time or other the mining industry would have to be reorganized before it could continue to pay reasonable wages to the miners, and that it was time some different methods of arriving at that end were adopted than merely that of long strikes periodically with miserable wages in between, for that has only meant degradation to the miners. . . . We suggest that to continue with that line of action was puerile and we say without hesitation that it is not leadership merely to stand by whilst hundreds and thousands of men and their families starve on a slogan."
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