THE NEW LABOUR DEMAND.
TT is quite evident what the Labour party, with a great body, if not a majority, of the artisans behind them, are consciously or unconsciously driving at. They want the State, with its irresistible strength, to act as arbitrator between masters and men in all serious disputes, calculating, with a good deal of acumen, that, as the men have many votes and the masters few, the State will sway pretty strongly to the side of the former. We do not mean that they contemplate deliberate injustice, for we do not think they do. They only think, like the rest of average man- kind, that what they deem right is right, and that, conse- quently, they only want justice, for justice will always be upon their side. Mr. Keir Hardie, for example, as appears from his questions on Friday week, wishes, as fifty thousand persons are affected by the trade-quarrel in Hull, that Parliament should intervene, and is so sure of the conduct of his clients, the Unions, that he wants the soldiers and police withdrawn ; indeed, does not believe that they would be there were it not that Mr. C. H. Wilson is a Gladstonian Member of Parliament. In other words, Mr. Keir Hardie thinks that the Home Secretary acts, even in the ordinary affairs of his Department, solely with an eye to secure votes ; yet nevertheless wishes Par- liament to be the grand arbiter in Labour disputes. Mr. Keir Hardie is not a very wise man, nor, we should say, in spite of the enormous vote by which he was returned, a very influential one ; but be expresses crudely what hosts of workmen think, and great numbers also of men who— in cultivation, at all events—are far beyond the workmen. A whole party within the House, including some Tories like Sir John Gorst, desire that the State should, up to a certain point, regulate labour ; and they have the support more or less—though, of course, with im- mense differences as to the application of their principle —of men like Mr. Asquith, with a great future lying clear before them. So powerful are they that Mr. Glad- stone, who at heart detests and dreads every approach to Socialism or Collectivism, and who only a few months ago smashed a deputation which asked him for a Statutory Day, felt himself compelled on Wednesday to step alto- gether over the usual boundaries of constitutional etiquette. The Miners' Eight-Hours Bill was on for discussion, and the Premier, while intimating pretty clearly that he disliked the Bill, and thought one of its clauses monstrously unjust, declared that the Home Secretary and a majority of the Cabinet were in favour of it, and he should therefore vote • for the second reading, though he reserved his right of action as to the third. The statement was not, we believe, unconstitutional, the Premier revealing, or keeping, Cabinet secrets, when they do not affect foreign. powers, or the Throne, at his own discretion ; but it was so unusual, that we may judge from it of the force to which even Mr. Gladstone, with his inflexible will, prac- tically yielded. Nor, we imagine, is the drift of opinion thus revealed without some support in the country outside the multi- tudinous ranks of the working people. A great number of Radicals, and some Tories, too, not connected with labour, are very much disposed to think that Parliament should take the Social question in hand ; that it should establish a Legal Day ; that it should fix a legal minimum of wages,—all the declarations against sweating involve that ;—that it should settle a, judicial rent for worknaene houses as well as agricultural farms ; that it should com- pel, guarantee, and aid insurance against old age ; and that it should provide, through guaranteed and aided societies, or otherwise, against accident, sickness, slackness of employ- ment, and defect of medical relief for women. There are sworn advocates of each of these schemes, and some of them are statesmen, men like Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. Asquith, and we believe, though we do not quite know, Lord. Randolph • Churchill. The drift of opinion is therefore, at least, a strong one, and, for our own parts, we do not doubt that it will, after a certain delay, caused partly by respect for Mr. Gladstone, and partly by the chaotic state of the great parties in the face of such new issues, lead to positive pro- posals, and, it may be, to experiments, larger both in their scope and their possible consequences than any which this generation has risked. The tide of Western affairs sets that way, and it has caught, as begins to be evident, some of the men necessary to guide and control the raft. The latter are, many of them, able, and many more energetic ; but what alarms us in their attitude is this,—they seem to see everything except their inevitable destination. They utterly ignore or openly repudiate the certainty that the State which arbitrates forcibly between employers and workmen, or regulates hours of labour, or fixes a minimum rate of wages, must ultimately do all the industrial work itself.
Take, for instance, the mining industry, which is just now so prominent in Parliament. Suppose the masters resist dictation as to hours, and close their mines until that policy is abandoned. Clearly, the State must either allow itself to be defied, and those whom it protects from over- work to be overworked, or it must expropriate the mines and work them for itself. There is no alternative ; nor would there be if capitalists, while quite willing to submit to the will of Parliament, found that in obeying that will they obtained too little interest for their money to compensate their risk and trouble, and so retired from the business. That actually would occur, we are told, on a most extensive scale in the iron-mining business, if profits were much further cut down ; and though coal is more nearly a necessity of life, and th ) community would there- fore bear heavier exactions, it might happen even in this department of mining. It certainly would happen in the case of the textile industries in Lancashire, which are exposed to an Asiatic competition that has already " cut " profits to their lowest point ; and what, in such a contingency caused by State action, could the State do ? It would be driven to the alternatives of letting Lancashire starve, of maintaining the people out of State-aided rates, or of doing the work itself so long as it would pay expenses. The supply of work, in fact, being killed by legislation, the State must supply work, or keep its people on alms. Mr. Keir Hardie, of course, would answer,—' So much the better ; for the State is the only trustworthy employer sure to be kind to a voting population ; ' and that, no doubt, though an inaccurate answer, the State being in practice too strong an employer for the workmen to remain free, is a perfectly logical one. But, then, is it the answer which the English people wish to give P Do they, that is, desire a community in which the State, as sole capitalist, shall be sole employer of labour, and everybody who does not work with his hands must be a salaried State agent, an overseer, in fact, instead of an employer ? Be it observed that we are not calling up any Socialistic bogey, or anticipating bloodshed, or ruin, or any kind of cata- clysmal downfall of industry. We are simply trying to state the result to which a peaceful and philanthropic, but unwise, course of legislation must inevitably lead. As a matter of fact, we freely admit that mining is probably the least risky department in which the experiment could be tried, because mining labour is so hard; that every hour demanded from miners beyond the eight, results in diminished energy, and therefore diminished output. The Legislature is not, therefore, fixing a limit in itself either irrational or inconvenient ; but we oppose it, as does Mr. Gladstone, because it is adopting a principle of action which is both inconvenient and irrational, and which involves con- sequences too riskful for the very slight gain to be achieved. The inconvenience arises from the difference between one mine and another—eight hours meaning totally different things in a deep mine and a shallow one—and the irra- tionality consists in the assumption that miners alone among human beings cannot settle their own affairs for themselves, or will bear long to be told by the State, like schoolboys, when they are to work and when they are all to be sent to bed. Those, however, are minor objections. The solid one is, that if the State crushes an industry necessary either to the community or to the maintenance of its people in comfort, it must carry on that industry for itself,—must become, in fact, at first the grand, and in the end the sole, employer of labour. Do the English people want that ? For, if they do not, they must let masters and men settle their own quarrels about wages and hours, and only see that order is maintained. There is a detail involved in this matter which is not a little interesting to observant politicians, and which has as yet attracted little notice from the public, and that is the absurd difference between the confidence reposed in Mr. Gladstone as a politician and as an economist. His party trust him in the former capacity so completely that, in spite of their traditions, of much hesitation, and many qualms, they are going, on his advice, to vote away a third of the taxable area of the Kingdom ; but in the latter capacity they so distrust him that they vote directly against his obvious, and indeed expressed, opinion. His own Cabinet, by his own avowal, revolts, and the second. reading of an Eight-Hours Bill which he himself crushed in argument last year, and which he plainly regards as a little absurd and unjust, is carried against his judgmenf by a majority of his own party. And yet it is as certain as anything which involves the future can be, that Mr. Gladstone is much greater as an economist than as a politician. The whole country, in fact, is divided as to his merits as a statesman ; while as an economist, there are not ten men who would attempt to deny that he belongs to the front rank, even if he does not stand far in front of all others at the head of the list. Yet men who accept Home-rule because, as one of them said, "My judgment is not to be placed against Mr. Glad- stone's," place their judgments, without hesitation, above i his as regards the Eight-Hours Bill. What s. the reason of that difference ? Men say openly it is because, on economic questions, Mr. Gladstone's mind is "fossilised," and he belongs to a past generation ; but surely that is nonsense. If age has enfeebled the Premier's judgment as to industrial questions, which he knows like his alphabet, a fortiori it has enfeebled his judgment as to Ireland, of which, to judge from his record, he does not know enough to decide permanently on any policy for her whatever. The truth is, we greatly fear, that his colleagues, as to politics, either think for themselves, or take Mr. Gladstone's opinion ; and as to industrial questions, and. especially philanthropic questions, are carried away by the drift of European feeling so rapidly, that they are swept along over their prostrate chief. The tide has got them ; and they yield to it. We can hardly imagine a position of affairs more ominous, or one more certain to lead, sooner or later, to the kind of catastrophe which a nation less vigorous than the English might not survive. A man may make a good. many experiments without destroying his own powers ; but au experiment in cutting his own sinews, to see with how small a remnant he will be able to walk, is scarcely among the number.
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