gotten, makes the fortune of the Indian producer. " Cheap
Every one who has a head to think and a heart to feel silver a nuisance," said a Mysore coffee-planter recently, must agree that the ideal arrangement would be that "why, I pay sixpence and get ninepence. That suits me every person injured in the work of industrial production, at all events." The effort to control exchange has failed, no matter what the cause, should receive compensation. and the true course now is, we believe, to remit from the Under the new Employers' Liability Bill, however, very Indian side as much as possible of the money wanted. little indeed will be done to bring about so desirable a There is one other point which we desire, for the second state of things. The Bill, in effect, only makes the em- time, to press on the attention of the India Office. They ployer liable to pay compensation when the injury done are dreaming, we believe, that the export of cheap silver to the workman was due either to the fault of the em- to India, which, as Lord Lansdowne admits, has been one ployer in not providing proper machinery and proper main cause of the defeat of their experiment in safeguards, or to the carelessness of a foreman or of a exchanges, will rapidly fall off—perhaps cease altogether. fellow-workman, provided that the injured man did not They may be right, but they are bound to reckon on the contribute to the injury by his own negligence. This possibility that they are under a delusion. There are means that to make good a claim for compensation the sixty millions of households in India, and in every one of injured man has got to make out that there was careless- them uncoined silver is an object of passionate desire, not ness on the part of others, and no contributory negligence only for its value, but its look, as the one pretty thing, on his own part. But the cases of injury in which any which, while it sets off women and children and household such allegations could be sustained are comparatively few utensils, also indicates respectability, and resources in number. The majority of cases are those in which against the next occurrence of a family wedding. Those the workman, by his own carelessness, has caused the willing purchasers will go on buying, as we believe, while accident. To say this does not imply any special reek- silver is cheap, and the extent of their demand must lessness on the part of the workmen. Every one must always from their mere numbers be enormous, large know instances of how men, usually perfectly steady enough to affect even the world's present glut of the and wide-awake, will, in a moment of forgetfulness, metal. Those purchases tend, of course, to keep up the do something which will bring on them the most terrible price of silver, which, indeed, without that demand for injuries. One may know exactly how to adjust a set of India and China, would sink out of sight, but they library-steps, and may have been accustomed to use them also operate to kill the demand for other forms of with perfect safety for twenty years. Some day, however, remittance from London. The Indian Government it may happen that one is absurdly careless in their use, in all cases. They forbid employers and workmen to agree to substitute an insurance fund out of which compensation shall be paid in all cases, for the legal liability laid on the employer to pay whenever carelessness on his part, and no contributory negligence on the workman's, can be proved in a court of law. Surely whatever else may be right, this must be wrong. No doubt, it would not be fair to the workman to allow the employer to shuffle off his respon- sibility by setting up an illusory scheme of insurance. But no one proposes to do this. Those who oppose the forbidding of contracting out have again and again declared, in the clearest possible way, that they would be willing to accept the strictest limitations and restrictions —restrictions which would make contracting out in every case more and not less beneficial to the working-men, and which would also secure the approval of the workers to any scheme proposed. As Mr. Balfour said, " Limit your plan as you like, take care that there shall be no trade per- mitted to contract out of the Act where the men are incapable, from the circumstances of the trade, or from the special difficulties of their position, of giving a perfectly free, a perfectly untrammelled, and perfectly secret vote on this question ; insist that two-thirds of the men of any trade, under any employer, shall be required as a majority before any plan is adopted ; take care that the voting shall Ibe by ballot, have the regulations of the ballot revised by the Board of Trade, multiply your precautions to any extent you please, but do not in the madness of your attempted reform destroy the method by which the inevitable shortcomings of the Government Bill may be supplemented, do not check the movement which is not for the benefit of the employers, not for the benefit of the capitalists, but primarily for the benefit of the operatives, and for those among the operatives who most need our aid, who most command our sympathy."
Mr. Balfour did good service in bringing out yet another feature of the proposals of the Government. People hardly realise how strongly those workmen who belong to in- surance funds cling to them, and how great will be their disgust and dissatisfaction if they are forbidden by law to enter into contracts which will induce the masters to support the insurance funds. According to Mr. Balfour's calculations, there are half-a-million of our operative population—men, women, and children—who benefit by these voluntary arrangements, and who are " passionately attached to them ; " who will not give them up until they are absolutely obliged to , do so by Parliament, and who mean to fight for them to the last. "Do these men not deserve your sympathy ? Are these men whose interests are to be lightly cast aside, and are we, if we cast them aside, to do it in the supposed interest of the opera- tives of Great Britain ? " That is the question which Mr. Balfour asked his constituency. It is one which the Gladstonian Party have determined to answer un- favourably; but if we mistake not, they are not in their answer representing the constituencies. The mass of the working-men want compensation for all injuries, and com- pensation which shall be obtained not after " plodding with attorneys," but automatically, and as a matter of course. They imagine that the new Bill is a step in this direction, and so support it ; but if they realised that, on the contrary, it is a step backward, as far as automatic compensation is concerned, they would have nothing more to do with the measure. We must give yet one other quotation from Mr. Balfour's masterly speech. It is from the passage in which he dealt with a specific instance of what would happen under the Bill— the case of the employes of the London and North-Western Railway Company. " Are we," he asked, " who live after all in a free country, are we deliberately going to say that we refuse to these men compensation for their injuries, which they otherwise would get ? It really passes my under- standing." " Ought we," he went on, " to content ourselves with a Bill obviously imperfect, as the present Bill is, for dealing with all the injuries of workmen, without allowing voluntary arrangements to supplement it ? If you think there should be no voluntary arrangements, then make your Bill perfect ; have a system of universal insurance covering, if you please, all kinds of injuries to working- men. But if you elect deliberately to frame a law which can only compensate those injuries to which the workman himself has contributed nothing by his carelessness, a law under which the workman has got to go into Court and to prove his case before a jury, then I say a law so limited, so circumscribed, so incapable of carrying out the full object which it is intended to meet, is one which we ought to permit voluntary associations to supplement, if they can, and wherever they can and however they can do it. Cir- cumscribe your regulations so that there will be no abuse, make what limitations you please on the principle I plead for, but at all events do not bereave the men who value what they have got, do not bereave them in the name of the work- ing-men of this country of something they so highly value." A more statesman-like handling of a great and important subject than that afforded by Mr. Balfour's speech could hardly be found. There is not a trace of pasty animus in it ; but every line is suffused with the larger and wider statesmanship—the sense of the responsibility which rests on those who make the laws which govern men. This temper of mind affords an admirable contrast to that of the men, on both sides of the House, whose notion seems to be that law-making is a matter for very little trouble or consideration, and who are prepared, on any and every occasion, to knock together an Act of Parliament to prevent this or that fancied inconvenience. Mr. Balfour is neither for making nor breaking laws with a light heart. At the same time he is no mere non-possumus Tory. Whatever some of his followers may be, he is a true Liberal, and, in the best sense of the word, a true Democrat.
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