THE FRENCH STRIKES.
THE threatened strike in France of the bakers, butchers, restaurant-keepers, and indeed all who supply food, is of considerable importance, not only because it may reduce the people of a civilised State to great inconvenience, but because the Government has decided that it must in such cases lay down fixed rules for the regulation of strikes ; and the decision of France on such a subject will be accepted throughout the Continent as the counsel of wisdom. Opinion there upon the whole subject of strikes is still a little fluid. No statesman, we think, now goes quite the length of affirming that strikes are in as offences against public order. Governments it is true, dread them as possible occasions of disorder in the streets, and large employers detest them as falsifying estimates, while the peasantry dislike them as tending to raise the prices of things which they do not sell. Still, no one denies in the abstract that artisans have a right to strike if they think themselves oppressed. The right is involved in the right of combine, tion, which is no longer in theory denied, and combination is palpably necessary to place the two parties to labour contracts on something like equality. Nevertheless, there are a good many points on which neither statesmen nor people have clearly made up their minds, one of them being the ultimate claim of the community to regulate on certain occasions the exercise of the right.
The French Government, for example, has just now prohibited a strike of persons in official employ, alleging through M. Clemenceau that such persons have sold their abstract right as employ& for the sake of pensions which merely as employs they would not be entitled to receive. That argument is incomplete, inasmuch as pensions when contracted for beforehand are practically part of wages, and almost invariably operate in reduction of them. But it seems to satisfy Frenchmen, and officials will for the present probably content themselves with arguments and rather exaggerated protests. The official plea might, however, be made much more perfect and more demo- cratic. No class can have a right for its own advantage to injure the whole community, and there an many classes among State employes which by striking could injure or endanger an entire nation. This is admitted on all hands as regards soldiers, who therefore throughout the Continent are forbidden to strike on penalty of death ; and it would be admitted as regards the police, if the police were not precluded from striking by the value they place on their appointments, and the readiness with which their places could be filled. No State, in fact, will allow itself to be exposed to the risk of conquest, or of an anarchy with criminals at the top, merely to uphold a logical principle. So far, although the argu- ment is not perhaps conclusive in absolute logic, the right of the State to make slaves being always question- able, the minds of the majority of men are made up, and there is no more case for discussion than upon any other question of self-defence.
There axe, however, cases which are by no means so clear. Several classes, especially those who distribute water or supply food, or control the elaborate sanitary arrangements by which modern society has altered the laws of health, in reality hold the lives of the community in their hands. If they struck cm mama people would die in large numbers, and the question arises whether they do not, by accepting pay for such service, part with something of their independence as citizens. They cannot be suddenly replaced, nobody denies the possible consequences of their action, and the State, which means the majority of citizens, seems there- fore to have the right which is exercised in restricting the sale of poisons or forbidding dangerous nuisances. We cannot see an answer to this proposition, and very few persons other than faddists, like the anti-vaccination men, would attempt to controvert it. But then comes the question of the method of prevention., We shoot soldiers. who mutiny, a remedy which, if violent, or it may be even immoral, is at least final, and, except in the rarest cases, invariably successful, so successful that mutiny has become dishonourable in the eyes of the potential mutineers. It is quite impossible, however, to carry out so drastic a system in the case of civilians, and Continental Governments are seeking hungrily for a more moderate device. They protect competitors, who are stigmatised by the workmen as "black-legs," with a certain severity. They allow soldiers to be ordered to do the work—for example, military engineers helped to defeat the recent strike of electricians in Paris—and they threaten rather vaguely in extreme cases to inflict penalties not justified by law. There are conceivable cases, however, in which the community would be seriously endangered by strikes. Suppose the doctors struck for higher fees, or the chemists for larger profits, or the milkmen refused to sell or carry milk, or the salt-miners to dig any longer, or, as is now apparently happening in France, the bakers declined to bake any longer, Or the butchers to cut up and sell carcases. The suggestion seems partly comic; but as a matter of fact great cities might be reduced to a condition such as has been often realised in sieges, with the result, first of compelling submission, and secondly of greatly impairing the kind of nervous health which is the best prophylactic of insanity. What is a Government to do in such a case? In practice most Governments on the Continent would arrest the ringleaders, or if that did not suffice, would shoot them ; but these are very brutal devices, sure to exasperate the doubt, always lingering in the working classes, whether their freedom is sufficiently respected. Something much milder seems to be required, and to find that something is a very serious and difficult problem,—one which, if M. Clemenceau can solve it, will amazingly increase his repute in Europe as an inventive legislator.
We shall be greatly interested to see what he proposes. For ourselves, but for the Trade Disputes Act of last year, we should have been inclined to suggest that the best pre- ventive of strikes obviously dangerous to the community would be to treat the strikers as corporate bodies, and deal with them through the civil law. That remedy is, unfortunately, not now open to us here, but it is cer- tainly worth the consideration of Continental statesmen. Strikes are always commenced with the hope of gain, and to render those who carry them out liable for damages either to the State or municipality as well as to individual sufferers would be at least a very strong check on such combinations. The sympathy of 'juries could be relied on in such cases, and on the Continent, at all events, the fear of loss of money through civil process is exceedingly strong. This would not meet every case, for the process would require time, and there are one or two instances, notably the supply of water, in which the effect would be almost too rapid for anything except the most despotic action. The habit of strikes is, however, spreading, and if the communities can but make up their minds as to the just limits of their own right of interference, we can have little doubt that sufficient remedies will be found. It is because the conflict will help towards that invaluable decision that we would ask all our readers to watch anxiously the struggle between the Radical Government of France and the associated workmen. It is at least as complex and as important as any struggle between the State and the capitalists, and, with the first principles of democracy once acknowledged, is much more difficult to settle. One could hang a great capitalist ; but to control, say, all sinkers of oil wells, all distributors of oil, and all makers of oil lamps is a much more complicated affair, especially as Judge Lynch would probably arise in his evil strength before the villages had been left a fortnight without light.
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