MR. TOM MANN'S EVIDENCE. T HE evidence given by Mr. Tom
Mann before the Labour Commission, on Monday and Tuesday, was unusually interesting. He is believed to be quite honest, he has great practical acquaintance and influence with half-skilled and unskilled labourers, and he evidently struggled hard to express clearly ideas as to a wiser method of organising industry than that which prevails under competition. Those ideas, too, have a visible con- nection with the notions which are just now afloat in European society, and which, under different names, all tend towards a scheme perhaps best described as the municipalisation alike of capital and industry. Mr. Mann is so moderate, and allows so much time for the working out his views, that he would be considered by Continental workmen a half-hearted reformer ; and, indeed, on one point, he is half-hearted. He evidently doubts whether the people collectively can, at present, be entirely trusted to be at once sensible and unselfish, and postpones some plans until their moral condition has been greatly improved, which is not an advanced idea at all, but rather that of the greatly despised advocates of reliance upon moral and religious education. He has, however, been fairly captured by the collectivist idea, and whatever is substantial in his view comes under that description. When he lost hold of that, he talked a great deal of nonsense,—as, for instance, when he denounced all export business, and maintained, in the face of the great facts of Nature, that each nation should p-oduce all that was necessary for its own maintenance, and no more. Is he prepared to do without sugar, or with what, if we manufacture nothing for export, does he pro- pose to pay the £30,000,000 or so which imported sugar costs ? Does he never smoke, and will he, in the interests of general comfort, taboo tobacco ? We might find a dozen similar absurdities in his evidence ; but we hold it rather hard, when trying gravely to ascertain the views of a representative working man, to make too much of ideas based evidently on pure ignorance. The object is not to show him up, but to discern what he is driving at within the area covered by his experience. This, in Mr. Tom Mann's case, it is possible to discern. He wants the ratepayers of London, and therefore of every other city, to tax themselves, in order to gain possession of all the trades employing much labour ; to prohibit com- petition with the Municipality, as is done in the case of the Post Office ; and then to work these huge businesses, including, as a beginning, the provision of gas and water, the means of locomotion, wharfage, the erection of buildings, the making of clothes for all public servants, and the supply of cheap literature, newspapers included, so as to secure two ends. First, that all these things should be sold to the community as cheap as possible, the notion of profit being excluded ; and, secondly, that the labour involved should be so distributed, especially by a gradual shortening of hours, that the whole population should be employed at comfortable wages, wages rather higher than at present, for, says Mr. Mann, with a superb contempt for ordinary men's ideas, " wages would rise with shorter hours." He firmly believes that so vast an em- ployer as the Municipality would be able to " dovetail " the work so that nobody should be idle,—this is a fixed idea, and he therefore approves great " Syndicates " and " Trusts " as steps towards it,—and he meets the objec- tion that the Municipality might find some of its trades unprofitable by frankly replying that he does not care. The object is work, and, if needed, the Municipality must pay any losses on its work out of its own pocket.
This is Mr. Mann's scheme, as it is in its essence the scheme of all the Collectivists, and nobody can deny that it is in one way definite enough. The difficulty is not to understand it, but to answer it, when it seems so com- pletely to answer itself. Besides some other difficulties— one being the treatment he would propose for the crowd of those who will not work, criminals, for instance, and " sponges "—Mr. Mann makes no attempt to answer the first of all, the big, brutal obstacle which, if he were dic- tator, would at once arrest his action. Where is the money to come from ? His whole scheme rests, as we suppose he would admit, upon the employment of the general wealth for the greater comfort of Labour. Without the support of that wealth to provide the wages, he could not keep his vast businesses going for a day, even if he took them without compensation—a point which he leaves doubtful—and this wealth must be procured for his benevolent purpose some- where. But where ? when Mr. Mann has himself arrested all its sources. He nationalises all the land, and munici- palises all industries, and settles that no industry shall make a profit beyond wages and the price of raw material, and then asks the ratepayers to make up all deficiencies. But what ratepayers are left ? There are none ; for nobody, not even the newspaper proprietor, makes any money, except the workmen, who are to be paid com- fortable wages,—out of what ? Nothing, except the profit of goods sold at cost price ! There are to be no profitable trades, the very idea of the scheme being cheapness for the consumer, who is to get everything at the price it would cost if profit for the capitalist did not come in. The labourer, who is to be everybody, would get wages, for this is to be the great element of cost- price ; but beyond wages, there would be no surplus for any purpose whatever, least of all for paying, as Mr. Mann hopes will be done, the whole enormous expense of providing locomotion. He really proposes this, holding as an ideal that, in a well-organised community, free seats in railways and omnibuses, and the like, would be provided for everybody " as free education " is now !
The truth is, we presume, that Mr. Mann, like most of the English Collectivist workmen, has become bewildered through considering the case of particular trades. He sees, for instance, that the building trade almost stops for three months in the year, when thousands of hands are thrown upon other resources, or swell the ranks of the army of " unemployed." He con- siders that unfortunate situation, and decides that it might be prevented if the Municipality were the grand, or rather the sole, builder in the Metropolis. It would then either so distribute work that it went on all the year round, or would pay wages during the slack time out of rates. The building trade would then be comfortable, with every- body belonging to it receiving wages all the year round ; and consequently, that must be the scheme which would suit all trades, even that of the men who provide newspapers. He makes that generalisation easily, and does not generalise its consequences ; but fancies that the municipalisation of one trade would be identical in result with the municipalisation of all. Because the whole population can pay fifteen thousand policemen, he thinks the whole population could employ the whole popula- tion as policemen, and still remain prosperous enough. It is an odd blunder for a man to make who is representative enough to be seated by a great Government on a Commis- sion of Inquiry into the Labour question ; but the blunder is made, and we do not know that it is more impossible than the blunders often made in the discussion on Free- trade. There are thousands of men in England, many of them far above Mr. Mann in wealth and attainments, who believe firmly that if the country exported much and imported nothing, it would rapidly grow rich beyond the dreams of avarice. They would laugh if they were told to try the experiment in their own affairs ; but they simply do not see that imports are only payments for exports under another name. Neither does Mr. Mann see that if he, as ratepayer, pays himself to produce work sold at rates yielding only his wages, he never will be one step forwarder in the path of prosperity, and must, if any check arrives, be a hopelessly ruined man. We may be asked, with some apparent force, why we discuss ideas so absurd as those propounded by Mr. Mann ; but the answer is simple. He puts forward crudely ideas which, when expressed in more subtle forms, are bewil- dering an immense number of minds. The creed of the masses does not cease to be important because it tends to be Socialistic. The truth is, the progressive impulse which for some generations has marked English society, is just now stirring the nation to busy itself with the question of the distribution of wealth. The upper class thinks that distribution possibly unfair, and the lower class thinks it certainly oppressive, and both alike are inclined, if:possible, to introduce great or small modifications. That movement, like the movement for liberty, and the movement for the redistribution of power, and the movement for education, is sure to produce great results, many of which will pro- bably be highly beneficial. But it will certainly accom- plish nothing until it has emerged into the light of day, has been thoroughly discussed, and has compelled " re- formers" to consider fully what they want, and what they are determined to avoid. This has not been done yet, the conspicuous feature of the movement at present being its vagueness alike as to objects, means, and principles of action. Some of its advocates want a Social Revo- lution, and some only a new Poor-Law, and between those two objects lie a thousand schemes, each one of them vaguer than the last. We welcome any one, therefore, who, being possessed of experience and entitled to a voice, will reduce pulpy thought into solid proposal, even if the proposal should prove to be unwise. Mr. Mann has honestly tried to do that, and though the result is bewildering, still it is not without its value, if only because it reveals to us the mental confusion in which such men can live. One grows, at least, less bitter when one sees how difficult he finds full expression to be, and how terribly his thought is hampered by ignorance of facts. It is not a dangerous con- spirator, but a muddle-headed economist, who, pleading for Labour before a Royal Commission, can make a statement of his belief like this :—" I do not think it desirable that England should continue to be the workshop of the world ; therefore, I am not desirous of seeing England get the largest possible proportion of the world's trade. I am quite prepared to see Frenchmen, Germans, Americans, and the peoples of every other country, producing what they require for their own sustenance and development, and my own country doing the same and not more than that." Mr. Mann should act on that economic idea, and see how be likes its working,—that is, he should work at his own trade in his own house, let nothing and nobody go out of doors, and see at the end of a week what his dinner would be like.
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