TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE MINERS' MONOPOLY.
THE Government have done well in meeting the demands of the miners by summoning the men with the best brains in the ranks both of Labour and of Capital to discuss the whole of the relations between Employers and Employed, and to endeavour to find some form of industrial readjustment and some method of settling disputes which will avoid the appeal to labour wars—which will, in fact, give us in the civil environment what the League of Nations is being set up to give us in the field of internationalism. That is excellent. But we hope that among the members of the public to be added may be one or two men who are not by profession engaged on either side of the controversy, but who have thought out the questions in the abstract, and who can therefore act as advisers, or say assessors, when difficult and obscure problems of finance, political economy, statistics, and law are involved. We should like also, if there be such a man, to add a pure philosopher, trained thinker, or professional dialectician, who could clo something to clear men's minds of fallacies, misappre- hensions, and paradoxes. Finally, we should like to see an accomplished legal draftsman attached to the Confer- ence, a man able to draw up forms of words which express their particular meaning with the minimum of ambiguity, and do not require interpretation half-an-hour after they have been agreed upon. To be specific—if our readers will not think us fantastic—we should like to see an economist and currency expert like Mr. Hartley Withers placing his knowledge and his brains at the disposal of the Conference ; an expert in economic administration and policy like Professor Adams ; a business man like Sir Robert Kinders- ley, who understands the practical side of finance, though he is not an employer ; a pure thinker like for example Professor Bosanquet ; and an experienced draftsman like Sir Courtenay Ilbert—to act, as we have said, either as colleagues or assessors to the Labour men and the Employers. No doubt many of the persons we have named would, for various reasons, be unable to take part, and a much better selection could possibly be made. We only name them in order to show the kind of independent, outside help which we think ought to be put at the disposal of the Conference to prevent it acting too much in the exhausted receiver of a pure industrialism.
In the meantime, while the country is waiting for this Magnumaancilium or Great Council of Industry to assemble, there are one or two points which we should like to deal with, because they are of vast importance, and yet are in danger of being overlooked in what is called a business solution of the problem. That solution too often means a hurried, one-sided, temporary, and eminently unpractical scheme of action. Let us begin by saying that we are perfectly certain that what the country as a whole wants i3 to obtain justice for the miners ; to understand their case ; to realize the true nature of their claims for better conditions, and when needful for a better way of life ; and to assure them a just and reasonable sham of the profits of the industry in which they are engaged. The nation in fact wants to see that they are getting such re- muneration for their labour as the economic conditions (using these words in their widest meaning) allow, for, argue as we will, and legislate as we will, no man, be he capitalist or hand-worker or brain-worker, can ever get more than that.
When we approach the details of the struggle, the first
thing that strikes the man who tries to keep a really open mind is the fact that the miners are addressing their demands to the Government—in the last resort, that is, to Parliament and the country, and not to the employers. The employers are of course the persons with whom they conduct the negotiations that take place under collective bargaining. Let us hasten to say that we are making no complaint or grievance over this fact ; we realize that the form of ap- proach is largely due to the fact that at the present time the Government control the mines. The miners, however, are not, we think, relying solely on this technical point. They are after bigger game. In any case, this appeal to the Govern: ment involves certain consequences. As long as the miners, or the workers in any other trade, addressed themselves
to those who employed them, they had a right to sly. as they often did say, to the public : You have no cause or claim to interfere in this dispute. The fact that you may he inconvenienced in its development does not concern us. We must consider our own interests and our own position. To do anything less would be to accept a position of economic slavery at the hands of the nation. We should be condemned to sacrifice ourselves in order to make things easy for the country at large. Just as the capitalist is not going to charge half the market-price of interest in order to produce cheaply for the benefit of mankind at large, so we are not going to take wages lower than we have a right to, or could obtain through collective bargaining, merely because the country may be inconvenienced by the result of these wages or by the process involved in obtaining them." That has always seemed to us a perfectly fair thing for the miners or any other Union to say, as long, of course, as the action taken keeps within the law, and does not require any resort to physical force or the impairment of the civil rights of others. We must, however, go further than this, and say also that if the miners choose to appeal to the Govern- ment and Parliament—i.e., to the nation as a whole—they have a perfect right to do so. There is not, and cannot be, any limit set on those who ask a remedy at the hands of Par- liament, which is the great inquest of the nation. But we must remember that those who appeal to the public and ask that their demands should be considered on public grounds must necessarily accept the risk of having those claims adjudicated on with a view to the general interest and not to a sectional interest. Parliament can and ought to take action when it is shown that any particular class of the community is in an unnaturally and unneces- sarily depressed condition, and when, owing to the acci- dental working of the laws of supply and demand, men and women are living under unendurable conditions or condi- tions which render a healthy existence or the maintenance of good citizenship impossible. On the other hand, when the appeal is made to Parliament, Parliament must take care that in assisting a particular section of the people to get better conditions the whole economic and social balance of the country is not upset, and that something is not given to one section which could not be given to all sections of the community without injustice, and without the general injury which injustice is sure to produce. Parliament ought not to rest till it has found a remedy when it can be shown that men and women are being physically used up and destroyed by long hours, low wages, and insanitary conditions in a particular trade, when, in a word, the con- ditions of the trade are so bad as to be incompatible with sound citizenship. But, on the other hand, Parliament could never do for a particular trade what it could not do for all other trades. Take for example the present demand of the miners that the Government should reinstate all miners who come back from the war in a position as good as that which they would now be enjoying if they had never gone to the war, and this whether there are or are not at the moment vacancies in the mines. As we understand the miners' demand, any demobilized ex-miner who does not find a job open to him is to be paid by his late employers full miners' wages till a job appears. Now that principle obviously could not be made to apply to the country as a whole without imposing an economic burden which would go far to ruin the nation, and without leading, human nature being what it is, to the creation of a vast army of unemployed. In the same way, the demand for special treatment for wounded miners is one which cannot be con- sidered in isolation. We are very strongly in favour of most generous treatment being accorded to disabled men, but here again the miners cannot be given privileged treatment.
In short, if the appeal is made to the country, and is not a private settlement between employers and employed, the country must judge the case in view of its effect on the nation as a whole. If the mine-owners and mine-workers put their heads together and agree to some settlement which raises the price of coal, that may be a great national misfortune, but it is one which the nation will have to bear, because it could not interfere without an infringement of the liberty of industrial bargaining. But if the appeal is to the State, the State must hold the balance justly between the miners and every other class. That is a truth which the miners may find it difficult to digest, but it is one with
which they will certainly find themselves confronted if they push their claims too far on the present lines.
The miners are monopolists. We say this with no desire to raise prejudice against them, for in an economic sense they cannot help being monopolists. They did not make themselves so, but became so by the physical conditions. Again, they are by no means the only monopolists in the country. There have been, are, and will be plenty of other monopolists, and whenever such cases occur we shall always find that the monopolist is rendered selfish by his monopoly, and the sense of unrestrained power which he has, or fancies he has, will go to his head, for power is the most intoxicating of all gifts. It is as natural to the monopolist to be greedy, arbitrary, and overreaching as it is for cats to crave for fish or doge for bones. Further, the monopolist never seems able to learn that though it is excellent to have a giant's strength, it is tyrannous to use it like a giant. Moreover, monopolists almost always end by cutting their own throats, or, to put it in a less blood- thirsty way, they use their power so ruthlessly that other powers are called into existence to create that balance which is necessary for the smooth working of all human affairs. The bigger the power, the bigger the resistance which is called in to redress the balance. And so the miners will find if they push their claims unmercifully. They think they have secured the co-operation and sym- pathy of the Railway Union and the Transport Workers, as no doubt they have on paper, and they also think that the rest of the labourers will be satisfied with being told that their turn to hold up the public in general will come next. But unless we are very much mistaken, they will find that when even the two trades we have mentioned, and certainly when the public in general, learn what it means to be in the hands of the miner monopolists, there will be an outburst of indignation which will frighten even the proudest and most ruthless men in the Industrial Baronage. We can imagine how those who are controlling the miners' organizations will smile at what they will call our threats, though threats they are by no means intended to be. In the intimacy of a private talk they would no doubt say that, whether we liked it or not, they had got the power and they meant to use it, just as the capitalists in their day and when they had the power used it for their own benefit. ' We do not profess to be general philanthropists. We are out to benefit our own people, and are not going to be put off by talk. That may be sometimes useful, but at the present moment we are severely practical.' In any case, we are not going to aggravate matters by calling men names or saying harsh things, and to a very considerable extent we sympathize with the miners in their attempt to get all they can. It is however useful to remind them, as we do below, of certain weaknesses in their case, for it may prevent them from headlong action which will reveal these weaknesses, but will only do so by an appalling amount of suffering for the miners and for the country in general.
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