THE SEAMEN'S STRIKE AS SEEN THROUGH AUSTRALIAN SPECTACLES.
150 THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR...1 Srs,—The perspective of distance has sometimes an exaggera- tive effect, and the seamen's strike in England may help to sober English judgment as to labour troubles in Australia. Suppose the cables had reported that, say in Melbourne or, Sydney, the seamen had gone on strike ; mail ships swung idle at their moorings; perishable goods were left to rot; food in the cities affected rose to famine prices ; there was open conflict, lasting for hours, between the police and mobs ; hundreds of police, with squadrons of cavalry and infantry, were being hurried to the scene of trouble ; the strike was spreading, like fire in prairie grass, from one trade to another, &o. News such as this would arrest the attention of the whole, Empire ; to the alarmed vision of critics 12,000 miles away it would seem as if the very frame of society in Australia were on the point of dissolution. But all this has happened, and is happening, in England, yet nobody sesma to be particularly •
alarmed. Pleasure is as eager, politics as noisy, and trade everywhere—except in the particular cities affected—is as absorbed as ever. The newspapers hardly expend a leading article on the strike. On the troubles betwixt Turkey and Montenegro, or on the appearance of a German cruiser in a remote and almost unknown African port, the English journals spill seas of editorial ink. But the seamen's strike, with its flaming circle of sympathetic strikes, seems to the journalistic mind here a matter of quite secondary interest. English editors must be trusted to understand their own business ; but if they are right in their estimate of the importance—or of the want of importance—of the industrial conflict which has broken out in English seaports, and has spread so fast, and yielded a victory for the men so signal, an Australian may be forgiven for exhorting them to measure by the same sober arithmetic the next story of industrial troubles in Australia which reaches them.
But is the present seamen's strike, with its ring of collateral strikes and the entirely unexpected and almost instant victory won by the men, quite so insignificant an occurrence as many anxiously optimiatie critics try to persuade themselves is the case? At this point Australian experience may help to interpret English facts. We in Australia have learned that the two most sensitive spots in the whole area of labour are precisely those represented by seamen and carriers. A strike in either of these two classes affects the whole community more instantly and vitally than any other form of industrial conflict. It resembles the sharp stab of a lancet on some nerve-centre of the body ; or it. may be compared to a disease which affects the whole circulatory system. The great seamen's strike in Australia some fifteen years ago threatened the very destruction of society. The carriers' strike in Adelaide less than a. year ago reduced the whole community in the space of a. few hours almost to the condition of a besieged city. No cart was allowed to traverse the streets except authorized by a "permit" issued by the Trades Hall. Supplies had to be taken to the hospitals in vehicles flying the Geneva Cross, and the experience of the last. few days in England at this point exactly corroborates Australian ex- perience. Food at Hull for a brief period rose well nigh to famine prices ; almost every branch of manufacturing industry was arrested. The strike, if A had lasted. would have brought social life to a standstilL Now Great Britain resembles a great citadel with no maga- zines; if it lost the command of the sea it would be driven to surrender by the mere logic of famine; and, the seamen's strike, if general and sustained, would be as fatal to the fortunes of Great Britain as the defeat of all her fiesta by a foreign enemy.
In Australia the most ominous feature of labour troubles is the speed with which a strike—begun at any point and in any trade—spreads in every direction and to all trades. No disease known to medical science has the energy of con- tagion which belongs to a strike. The loyalty of the workers to each other—in itself a noble sentiment--brings all the trades, no matter how remote from each other in geography and occupation, into active and militant alliance. If there is a strike, for examphn in a coal mine, and free labourers are employed, the coal produced is treated as an infected article ; no one must handle it, carry, it, use it, touch it; and exactly this feature has made its appearance in the present strike in England. The dockers struck to help the seamen, the carriers to help the dockers; there were signs that the railway men would have struck to mate the circle of strikes complete.
Now in all strikes there are not two, but three, forces con- cerned—labour, capital, and the general public—and the inno- cent general public is usually the greatest sufferer of the three Each of the other parties to the fray hopes to succeed by the amount of loss and inconvenience it can inflict on the com- munity at large. And who can deny the right of the com- munity to interfere, through its oneinstrumentof government —the Parliament—to enforce industrial peace? In the last resort the community surely has the right to protect its own existence.
In the present dispute it is clear that the employers in the shipping trade miscalculated the strength of the forces opposed to them, and they failed to recognize in sufficient time the element of justice there must have been in the claims of the men. The concessions as to wages which they have made as the price of defeat, and with all the loss of prestige which defeat carries with it, if made in advance, and before open conflict broke out, would probably have saved the whole conflict. But the sense of victory is just now running like wine in the blood of the strikers. The victory they have won has kindled the imagination of unionists every- where. There is perhaps hardly a trade in the kingdom in which the men are not thinking of framing new demander, and often very unreasonable demands. One lesson Australia has learned and England apparently not yet quite learned is that the frank, uncompelled recognition of all plainly just claims on the part of the workers is not only the wisest policy for the employers, it is also the most economical policy.
In Australia the most effective weapon used in a strike is the organized public opinion of the working class as a whole, and that sentiment is apt to be nothing less than cruel in temper. A trade union can be as intolerant and as ruthless in its intolerance as theRoman Inquisition. There is always a minority against a strike ; but its members find it impos. Bible to stand up against the sentiment of their class—a senti- ment grown bitter with hate and with vehemence enough for a battlefield. Anybody who consents to take up the tools which a striker has flung down is branded as a " scab " and a "blackleg." He is looked upon as a pariah, and shunned like a leper. Unionists will refuse to sleep under the same roof with him. If the leaders of the unions could carry out their policy no man in Australia would be allowed to earn his bread except he joined a union and accepted its politics. This policy is, of course, mere despotism, and is as hateful as every despotism must be. It has, indeed, some special hatefulness of its own ; for what can be more cruel than the despotism of a crowd ? And if the newspapers-
in England are wise they will refuse to serve this latest form of despotism by giving currency to those epithets which are its most deadly weapons. Why consent to describe a workman who refuses to join a strike as a " scab " or a " blackleg "k He is a free workman, and has a right to respectful treatment.
History is "philosophy teaching by examples " ; and if we may argue from Australian experience British politics are entering on a new stage. The workers as a class will crystallize into a political party, with separate ideals of its own and with a scale as yet undreamed of. This will change the whole stratification of British politics, and may well prove to be the most profoundly important event in the political history of this
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