The Printing Dispute
For more than four months the dispute between the London Master Printers' Association and the London Society of Compositors has been hampering the pro- duction of many London periodicals and for seven weeks it has made publication a matter of uncertainty from week to week. The readers of the Spectator who receive this emergency issue, and advertisers whose announcements are held over must be as heartily sick of the dispute as are the staff of the Spectator, who have to bring out the paper under conditions which change from day to day, and which are difficult all the time. The situation might be less intolerable if we were not help- less in the face of this disgraceful failure of the process known as " collective bargaining "—as helpless as are the North London householders when the gas is cut off or as the citizens who recently had to get to work as best they could because the busmen were striking. We can only apologise once more for an issue which is reduced in size and which may reach some readers late, and repeat that, so far as the Spectator is concerned, there will in no case be any relaxation of the effort to come out without interruption each week, whatever the difficulties may be.
