(FromThe Times, by permission.)
I am very glad to come here to-night to wish good luck in the New Year to the Liberals of Birmingham. Good luck is founded on good pluck, and that is what I think you will not fail in. Birmingham Liberals have for twenty years been over-weighted by the influence of remarkable men and by the peculiar turn of events. This great city, which used to be the home of militant Radicalism, which in former days supplied with driving power the cause of natural representation against hereditary privilege, has been captured by the foe. The banner of the House of Lords has been flung out over the sons and grandsons of the men who shook all England in the struggle for the great Reform Bill; and while old injustice has but been replaced by new, while the miseries and the privations of the poorcontinue in your streets, while the differences between class and class have been even aggravated in the passage of years, Birmingham is held by the enemy and bound to retrogression in its crudest form.
But this is no time for despondency. The Liberal Party must not allow itself to be overawed by the hostile Press which is ranged against it. Boldly and earnestly occupied, the platform will always beat the Press. Still less should we allow ourselves to be perturbed by the fortuitous and sporadic results of by-electoral warfare. I suppose I have fought as many by-elections as most people, and I know that all the advantages lie with the attacking force. The contests are complicated by personal and local influences. The discussions turn upon the incidents of current legislation. There are always grievances to be urged against the Government of the day. After a great victory, all parties, and particularly the Liberals, are prone to a slackening of effort and organisation; after a great defeat all parties, and especially the Tories, are spurred to supreme exertions.
These factors are common to all by-elections, under all Governments; but never, I venture to say, has it been more important toan Opposition to gain by-electoral successes than during the present Parliament. It is their only possible line of activity. In the House of Commons they scarcely show their noses. In divisions they are absent; in debate—well, I do not think we need say much about that; and it is only by a combination of by-electoral incidents properly advertised by the Party Press on the one hand, and the House of Lords' manipulation upon the other, that the Conservative Party are able to keep their heads above water. And when I speak of the importance to the Opposition of by-elections, let me also remind you that never before have by-electoral victories been so important, not only to a great Party, but to a great trade.
Therefore, while I am far from saying that we should be content with recent manifestations of the opinion of the electorate, while I do not at all deny that they involve a sensible reaction of feeling of an unfavourable character, and while I urge the most strenuous exertions upon all concerned in party organisation, I assert that there is no reason, as the history of this country abundantly shows, why a general election, at a well-chosen moment,and upon some clear, broad, simple issue, should not retrieve and restore the whole situation.
There could be no question of a Government, hitherto undisturbed by internal disagreement and consistently supported in the House of Commons by a large, united, and intact majority, being deflected one hair's breadth from its course by the results of by-elections. We have our work to do, and while we have the power to carry it forward, we have no right, even if we had the inclination, to leave it uncompleted. Certainly we shall not be so foolish, or play so false to those who have supported us, as to fight on any ground but that of our own choosing, or at any time but that most advantageous to the general interest of the Progressive cause.
The circumstances of the period are peculiar. The powers of the House of Lords to impede, and by impeding to discredit, the House of Commons are strangely bestowed, strangely limited, and still more strangely exercised. There are little things which they can maul; there are big things they cannot touch; there are Bills which they pass, although they believe them to be wrong; there are Bills which theyreject, although they know them to be right. The House of Lords can prevent the trams running over Westminster Bridge; but it cannot prevent a declaration of war. It can reject a Bill prohibiting foreign workmen being brought in to break a British strike; it cannot amend a Bill to give old-age pensions to 600,000 people. It can thwart a Government in the minute details of its legislation; it cannot touch the whole vast business of finance. It can prevent the abolition of the plural voter; but it could not prevent the abolition of the police. It can refuse a Constitution to Ireland, but not, luckily, to Africa.
Lord Lansdowne, in his leadership of the House of Lords during the present Parliament, has put forward claims on its behalf far more important and crude than ever were made by the late Lord Salisbury. No Tory leader in modern times has ever taken so high a view of its rights, and at the same time no one has shown a more modest conception of its duties. In destroying the Education Bill of 1906 the House of Lords asserted its right to resist the opinion of a majority of members of the House of Commons, fresh from election, upon a subject which had been one of the most prominent issues ofthe election. In rejecting the Licensing Bill of 1908 they have paraded their utter unconcern for the moral welfare of the mass of their fellow-countrymen.
There is one feature in the guidance of the House of Lords by Lord Lansdowne which should specially be noticed, and that is the air of solemn humbug with which this ex-Whig is always at pains to invest its proceedings. The Nonconformist child is forced into the Church school in single-school areas in the name of parents' rights and religious equality. The Licensing Bill is rejected in the highest interests of temperance. Professing to be a bulwark of the commercial classes against Radical and Socialistic legislation, the House of Lords passes an Old-Age Pensions Bill, which it asserts will be fatal alike to public finance and public thrift, a Mines Eight Hours Bill, which it is convinced will cripple British industry, and a Trades Disputes Bill, which it loudly declared tyrannous and immoral. Posing as a Chamber of review remote from popular passion, far from the swaying influences of the electorate, it nevertheless exhibits a taste for cheap electioneering, a subserviency to caucus direction, and a party spirit upon a level with many of the least reputableelective Chambers in the world; and beneath the imposing mask of an assembly of notables backed by the prescription and traditions of centuries we discern the leer of the artful dodger, who has got the straight tip from the party agent.
It is not possible for reasonable men to defend such a system or such an institution. Counter-checks upon a democratic Assembly there may be, perhaps there should be. But those counter-checks should be in the nature of delay, and not in the nature of arrest; they should operate evenly and equally against both political parties, and not against only one of them; and above all they should be counter-checks conceived and employed in the national interest and not in a partisan interest. These abuses and absurdities have now reached a point when it is certain that reform, effective and far-reaching, must be the necessary issue at a general election; and, whatever may be the result of that election, be sure of this, that no Liberal Government will at any future time assume office without securing guarantees that that reform shall be carried out.
There is, however, one reason which would justify a Government, circumstanced and supported as we are, in abandoningprematurely the trust confided to us by the country. When a Government is impotent, when it is destitute of ideas and devoid of the power to give effect to them, when it is brought to a complete arrest upon the vital and essential lines of its policy, then I entirely agree that the sooner it divests itself of responsibilities which it cannot discharge, the better for the country it governs and the Party it represents. No one who looks back over the three busy years of legislation which have just been completed can find any grounds for such a view of our position; and although we have sustained checks and vexations from circumstances beyond our control which have prevented us settling, as we otherwise would have done, the problems of licensing and of education, no lover of progress who compares the Statute-book as it stands to-day with its state in 1905, need feel that he has laboured in vain.
No one can say that we have been powerless in the past. The trade unionist as he surveys the progress of his organisation, the miner as the cage brings him to the surface of the ground, the aged pensioner when he visits the post office with his cheque-book, the Irish Catholic whose son sees the rangesof a University career thrown open, the child who is protected in his home and in the street, the peasant who desires to acquire a share of the soil he tills, the youthful offender in the prison, the citizen as he takes his seat on the county bench, the servant who is injured in domestic service, all give the lie to that—all can bear witness to the workings of a tireless social and humanitarian activity, which, directed by knowledge and backed by power, tends steadily to make our country a better place for the many, without at the same time making it a bad place for the few.
But, if we have been powerful in the past, shall we then be powerless in the future? Let the year that has now opened make its answer to that. We shall see before many months are passed whether his Majesty's Government, and the House of Commons, by which it is supported, do not still possess effective means to carry out their policy, not only upon those important political issues in which we have been for the time being thwarted, but also in that still wider and, in my opinion, more important field of social organisation into which, under the leadership of the Prime Minister, we shall now proceed to advance.
I do not, of course, ignore the fact that the House of Lords has the power, though not the constitutional right, to bring the government of the country to a standstill by rejecting the provision which the Commons make for the financial service of the year. That is a matter which does not rest with us, it rests with them. If they want a speedy dissolution, they know where to find one. If they really believe, as they so loudly proclaim, that the country will hail them as its saviours, they can put it to the proof. If they are ambitious to play for stakes as high as any Second Chamber has ever risked, we shall not be wanting. And, for my part, I should be quite content to see the battle joined as speedily as possible upon the plain, simple issue of aristocratic rule against representative government, between the reversion to protection and the maintenance of free trade, between a tax on bread and a tax on—well, never mind. And if they do not choose, or do not dare to use the powers they most injuriously possess, if fear, I say, or tactics, or prudence, or some lingering sense of constitutional decency, restrains them, then for Heaven's sake let us hear no more of these taunts, that we, the LiberalParty, are afraid to go to the country, that we do not possess its confidence, and that we are impotent to give effect to the essential purposes of our policy.
Subject to such a constitutional outrage as I have indicated, his Majesty's Government will claim their right and use their power to present the Liberal case as a whole to the judgment of the whole body of electors. That case is already largely developed. How utterly have all those predictions been falsified that a Liberal Government would be incapable of the successful conduct of Imperial affairs! Whether you look at our position in Europe, or at the difficult conduct of Indian administration, or the relations which have been preserved, and in some cases restored, with our self-governing Colonies, the policy of the Government has been attended with so much success that it has not only commanded the approval of impartial persons, but has silenced political criticism itself.
It was in South Africa that we were most of all opposed and most of all distrusted, and by a singular inversion it is in South Africa that the most brilliant and memorable results have been achieved. Indeed, I think that the gift of the Transvaal andOrange River Constitutions and the great settlement resulting therefrom will be by itself as a single event sufficient to vindicate in the eyes of future generations the administration of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and to dignify his memory in Parliaments and periods which we shall not see. But our work abroad is not yet completed, has not yet come to its full fruition. If we should continue, as I expect we shall, to direct public affairs for the full five years which are the normal and the healthy period of British Administrations, we may look for a further advance and improvement in all the great external spheres of Imperial policy. We may look in India for a greater sense of confidence and solidarity between the people and the Government. We shall salute the sunrise of South Africa united under the British Crown. And in Europe I trust that Sir Edward Grey will have crowned his work at the Foreign Office by establishing a better and kindlier feeling between the British and the German peoples. That will be the record of policy beyond the seas on which we shall appeal for judgment and for justice.
If it be said that, contrary to general expectation, our policy has prospered betterabroad than at home, you have not far to look for the reason. Abroad we have enjoyed full responsibility, a free hand, and fair-play; at home we have had a divided authority, a fettered hand, and the reverse of fair-play. We have been hampered and we have been harassed. We have done much; we could have done much more.
Our policy at home is less complete and less matured than it is abroad. But it so happens that many of the most important steps which we should now take, are of such a character that the House of Lords will either not be able or will not be anxious to obstruct them, and could not do so except by courting altogether novel dangers. The social field lies open. There is no great country where the organisation of industrial conditions more urgently demands attention. Wherever the reformer casts his eyes he is confronted with a mass of largely preventable and even curable suffering. The fortunate people in Britain are more happy than any other equally numerous class have been in the whole history of the world. I believe the left-out millions are more miserable. Our vanguard enjoys all the delights of all the ages. Our rearguardstraggles out into conditions which are crueller than barbarism. The unemployed artisan, the casual labourer, and the casual labourer's wife and children, the sweated worker, the infirm worker, the worker's widow, the under-fed child, the untrained, undisciplined, and exploited boy labourer—it is upon these subjects that our minds should dwell in the early days of 1909.
The Liberal Party has always known the joy which comes from serving great causes. It must also cherish the joy which comes from making good arrangements. We shall be all the stronger in the day of battle if we can show that we have neglected no practicable measure by which these evils can be diminished, and can prove by fact and not by words that, while we strive for civil and religious equality, we also labour to build up—so far as social machinery can avail—tolerable basic conditions for our fellow-countrymen. There lies the march, and those who valiantly pursue it need never fear to lose their hold upon the heart of Britain.
[13]In the interval between this and the preceding speech the House of Lords had rejected the Licensing Bill.
[13]In the interval between this and the preceding speech the House of Lords had rejected the Licensing Bill.
(FromThe Manchester Guardian, by permission of the Editor.)
We are met together at a time when great exertions and a high constancy are required from all who cherish and sustain the Liberal cause. Difficulties surround us and dangers threaten from this side and from that. You know the position which has been created by the action of the House of Lords. Two great political Parties divide all England between them in their conflicts. Now it is discovered that one of these Parties possesses an unfair weapon—that one of these Parties, after it is beaten at an election, after it is deprived of the support and confidence of the country, after it is destitute of a majority in the representative Assembly, when it sits in the shades of Opposition without responsibility, or representative authority, under the frown, so to speak, of the Constitution, nevertheless possesses aweapon, an instrument, a tool, a utensil—call it what you will—with which it can harass, vex, impede, affront, humiliate, and finally destroy the most serious labours of the other. When it is realised that the Party which possesses this prodigious and unfair advantage is in the main the Party of the rich against the poor, of the classes and their dependants against the masses, of the lucky, the wealthy, the happy, and the strong against the left-out and the shut-out millions of the weak and poor, you will see how serious the constitutional situation has become.
A period of supreme effort lies before you. The election with which this Parliament will close, and towards which we are moving, is one which is different in notable features from any other which we have known. Looking back over the politics of the last thirty years, we hardly ever see a Conservative Opposition approaching an election without a programme, on paper at any rate, of social and democratic reform. There was Lord Beaconsfield with his policy of "health and the laws of health." There was the Tory democracy of Lord Randolph Churchill in 1885 and 1886, with large, far-reaching plans of Liberal and democraticreform, of a generous policy to Ireland, of retrenchment and reduction of expenditure upon naval and military armaments—all promises to the people, and for the sake of which he resigned rather than play them false. Then you have the elections of 1892 and 1895. In each the Conservative Party, whether in office or opposition, was, under the powerful influence of Mr. Chamberlain, committed to most extensive social programmes, of what we should call Liberal and Radical reforms, like the Workmen's Compensation Act and Old-Age Pensions, part of which were carried out by them and part by others.
But what social legislation, what plans of reform do the Conservative Party offer now to the working people of England if they will return them to power? I have studied very carefully the speeches of their leaders—if you can call them leaders—and I have failed to discover a single plan of social reform or reconstruction. Upon the grim and sombre problems of the Poor Law they have no policy whatever. Upon unemployment no policy whatever; for the evils of intemperance no policy whatever, except to make sure of the public-house vote; upon the question of the land, monopolised as it is inthe hands of so few, denied to so many, no policy whatever; for the distresses of Ireland, for the relations between the Irish and British peoples, no policy whatever unless it be coercion. In other directions where they have a policy, it is worse than no policy. For Scotland the Lords' veto, for Wales a Church repugnant to the conscience of the overwhelming majority of the Welsh people, crammed down their throats at their own expense.
Yet we are told they are confident of victory, they are persuaded that the country has already forgotten the follies and even the crimes of the late Administration, and that the general contempt and disgust in which they were dismissed from power has already passed away. They are already busy making their Cabinet, who is to be put in and, what is not less important, who is to be put out. Lists of selection and lists of proscription are being framed. The two factions into which they are divided, the Balfourites and the tariff reformers, are each acutely conscious of one another's infirmities, and, through their respective organs, they have succeeded in proving to their apparent satisfaction what most of us have known, and some of us have said fora long time past, that they are an uncommonly poor lot all round.
It would be bad enough if a Party so destitute, according to its own statement, of political merit were to return with the intention of doing nothing but repeating and renewing our experiences under Mr. Balfour's late Administration, of dragging through empty sessions, of sneering at every philanthropic enthusiasm, of flinging a sop from time to time to the brewers or the parsons or the landed classes. But those would not be the consequences which would follow from the Tory triumph. Consequences far more grave, immeasurably more disastrous, would follow. We are not offered an alternative policy of progress, we are not confronted even with a policy of standstill, we are confronted with an organised policy of constructive reaction. We are to march back into those shades from which we had hoped British civilisation and British science had finally emerged.
If the Conservative Party win the election they have made it perfectly clear that it is their intention to impose a complete protective tariff, and to raise the money for ambitious armaments and colonial projectsby taxing the poor. They have declared, with a frankness which is, at any rate, remarkable, that they will immediately proceed to put a tax on bread, a tax on meat, a tax on timber, and an innumerable schedule of taxes on all manufactured articles imported into the United Kingdom; that is to say, that they will take by all these taxes a large sum of money from the pockets of the wage-earners, by making them pay more for the food they eat, the houses they live in, and the comforts and conveniences which they require in their homes, and that a great part of this large sum of money will be divided between the landlords and the manufacturers in the shape of increased profits; and even that part of it which does reach the Exchequer is to be given back to these same classes in the shape of reductions in income-tax and in direct taxation. If you face the policy with which we are now threatened by the Conservative Party fairly and searchingly, you will see that it is nothing less than a deliberate attempt on the part of important sections of the propertied classes to transfer their existing burdens to the shoulders of the masses of the people, and to gain greater profits for theinvestment of their capital by charging higher prices.
It is very natural that a Party nourishing such designs should be apprehensive of criticism and of opposition; but I must say I have never heard of a Party which was in such a jumpy, nervous state as our opponents are at this present time. If one is led in the course of a speech, as I sometimes am, to speak a little firmly and bluntly about the Conservative tariff reformers, they become almost speechless with indignation. They are always in a state of incipient political apoplexy, while as for the so-called Liberal Unionists, whenever they are criticised, they never leave off whining and say that it is unchivalrous to attack them while Mr. Chamberlain is disabled. Sorry I am that he is out of the battle, not only on personal, but on public grounds. His fiercest opponents would welcome his re-entry into the political arena, if only for the fact that we should then have a man to deal with, and some one whose statement of the case for his side would be clear and bold, whose speeches would be worth reading and worth answering, instead of the melancholy marionettes whom the wire-pullers of the Tariff Reform League areaccustomed to exhibit on provincial platforms. But I hope you will not let these pretexts or complaints move you or prevent you from calling a spade a spade, a tax a tax, a protective tariff a gigantic dodge to cheat the poor, or the Liberal Unionist party the most illiberal thing on record.
But if the tariff reformers are so touchy and intolerant that they resent the slightest attack or criticism from their opponents as if it were sacrilege, that is nothing to the fury which they exhibit when any of their friends on the Conservative side begin to ask a few questions. One would have thought at least that matters of such gravity and such novelty should be considered fairly on their merits. But what does Mr. Austen Chamberlain say? He tells us that no hesitation will be tolerated from Unionist Members of Parliament in regard to any tariff reform proposals which may in a future Parliament be submitted—by whoever may be the Chancellor of the Exchequer. No hesitation will be tolerated. Not opposition, not criticism, not dissent, but no hesitation will be tolerated. The members of the Unionist Party are to go to the next Parliament, not as honest gentlemen, free to use their mindsand intelligences. They are to go as the pledged, tied-up delegates of a caucus, forced to swallow without hesitation details of a tariff which they have not even seen; denied the right which every self-respecting man should claim, to give their vote on grand and cardinal issues according to their faith and their conscience. And in order that those who would refuse to be bound by these dishonouring conditions may be smelt out and excluded from the House of Commons, a secret society of nameless but probably interested busybodies is hard at work in all the dirtiest sewers of political intrigue.
But, after all, these methods are an inseparable part of the process of carrying a protectionist tariff. The whole question resolves itself into a matter of "business is business," and the predatory interests which have banded themselves together to finance and organise the tariff campaign cannot be expected to put up with the conscientious scruples and reasonable hesitations of Members of Parliament. It will be a cash transaction throughout, with large profits and quick delivery. Every little would-be monopolist in the country is going to have his own association to run his own particulartrade. Every constituency will be forced to join in the scramble, and to secure special favours at the expense of the commonwealth for its special branches of industry. All the elections of the future will turn on tariffs. Why, you can see the thing beginning already. That egregious Tariff Commission have been dividing all the loot among themselves before the battle has been won—dividing the lion's skin while the beast lives—and I was reading only the other day that the Conservatives of Norwood have decided that they could not support their Member any longer, because, forsooth, he would not pledge himself to vote for a special tax on foreign imported chairs and window panes. It is the same in every country.
Such is the great conspiracy with which the British democracy is now confronted—an attempt to place the main burden of taxation upon the shoulders of wage-earners and not on income-drawers, a disastrous blow at the prosperity, the freedom, the flexibility, and the expansive power of British industry, and a deadly injury to the purity of English public life. The Conservative Party tell us that if they win the victory they will screw a protective tariff on our necks. What do we say? What ofthe House of Lords? We say that if we win, we will smash to pieces the veto of the House of Lords. If we should obtain a majority at the next election—and I have good hopes that if we act with wisdom and with union, and, above all, with courage, we shall undoubtedly obtain an effective majority—the prize we shall claim will be a final change in the relations of the two Houses of Parliament, of such a character as to enable the House of Commons to make its will supreme within the lifetime of a single Parliament; and except upon that basis, or for the express purpose of effecting that change, we will not accept any responsibility for the conduct of affairs.
But there is another issue which must not be overlooked. I mean the social issue. We have taken a great step already. I must say that he is rather a sour kind of man who can find nothing to notice in the Old-Age Pensions Act except its little flaws and petty defects. I think you will feel, on the contrary, that the establishment of the pensions system is a marvellous and impressive example of the power which British Governments possess. Without a hitch, perfectly smoothly, punctual to the minute,regular as clockwork, nearly 600,000 aged persons are being paid their pensions every week. That is a wonderful and beneficent achievement, a good job well worth some risk and sweat to finish. Nearly eight millions of money are being sent circulating through unusual channels, long frozen by poverty, circulating in the homes of the poor, flowing through the little shops which cater to their needs, cementing again family unions which harsh fate was tearing asunder, uniting the wife to the husband, and the parent to the children. No; in spite of Socialistic sneer and Tory jeer and glorious beer, and all the rest of it, I say it is a noble and inspiring event, for which this Parliament will be justly honoured by generations unborn. I said just now that a Tory tariff victory meant marching backwards, but there are some things they cannot undo. We may be driven from power. We may desire to be released from responsibility. Much of our work may be cut short, much may be overturned. But there are some things which Tory reaction will not dare to touch, and, like the settlement and reconciliation of South Africa, so the Old-Age Pensions Act will live and grow and ripen as the years roll by, far beyond thereach of Party warfare and far above the changing moods of faction.
There are many political injustices in this country and many absurd, oppressive, or obsolete practices. But the main aspirations of the British people are at this present time social rather than political. They see around them on every side, and almost every day, spectacles of confusion and misery which they cannot reconcile with any conception of humanity or justice. They see that there are in the modern state a score of misfortunes that can happen to a man without his being in fault in any way, and without his being able to guard against them in any way. They see, on the other hand, the mighty power of science, backed by wealth and power, to introduce order, to provide safeguards, to prevent accidents, or at least to mitigate their consequences. They know that this country is the richest in the world; and in my sincere judgment the British democracy will not give their hearts to any Party that is not able and willing to set up that larger, fuller, more elaborate, more thorough social organisation, without which our country and its people will inevitably sink through sorrow to disaster and our name and fame fade upon the pages of history.
We have done some of that work, and we are going to do more. In moving forward to this great struggle which is approaching, we are going to carry our social policy along with us. We are not going to fight alone upon the political and constitutional issue, nor alone upon the defence of free trade. We are going, fearless of the consequences, confident of our faith, to place before the nation a wide, comprehensive, interdependent scheme of social organisation—to place it before the people not merely in the speeches or placards of a Party programme, but by a massive series of legislative proposals and administrative acts. If we are interrupted or impeded in our march, the nation will know how to deal with those who stand in the path of vital and necessary reforms. And I am confident that in the day of battle the victory will be to the earnest and to the persevering; and then again will be heard the doleful wail of Tory rout and ruin, and the loud and resounding acclamations with which the triumphant armies of democracy will march once again into the central place of power.
It is a serious national evil that any class of his Majesty's subjects should receive in return for their utmost exertions less than a living wage.
It was formerly supposed that the workings of the laws of supply and demand would in the regular and natural course of events, and by a steady progression, eliminate that evil, and achieve adequate minimum standards. Modern opinion has found it necessary greatly to refine upon these broad generalisations of the truth, and the first clear division that we make to-day in questions of wages, is that between a healthy and unhealthy condition of bargaining.
Where, as in the great staple trades of this country, you have powerful organisations on both sides, with responsible leadersable to bind their constituents to their decisions, conjoined with automatic scales, or arbitration or conciliation in case of a deadlock, there you have a healthy condition of bargaining, which increases the competitive power of the industry, which continually weaves more closely together the fortunes of Capital and Labour, and which enforces a constant progression in the standards of living and of productive power. But where, as in what we call "Sweated trades," you have no organisation at all on either side, no parity of bargaining between employers and employed, where the good employer is continually undercut by the bad, and the bad again by the worse; where the worker whose whole livelihood depends on the trade is undercut by the worker to whom it is only a second string; where the feebleness and ignorance of the workers and their isolation from each other render them an easy prey to the tyranny of bad masters, and middlemen one step above them upon the lowest rungs of the ladder, and themselves held in the grip of the same relentless forces—there you have a condition not of progress but of progressive degeneration. And just as in the former case the upward tendency willbe constant if it is not interrupted by external power, so in the latter case the demoralisation will continue in a squalid welter for periods which are quite indefinite so far as our brief lives are concerned.
We have seen from the investigations of the last twenty years, when the phenomena of sweating have been under close and scientific review, that there is no power of self-cure within the area of the evil. We have seen that while the general advance in the standards of work and wages has on the whole been constant, these morbid and diseased patches, which we call the Sweated Trades, have not shared in that improvement, but have remained in a state of chronic depression and degeneration. The same shocking facts, in some cases the same pitiful witnesses, were brought before the Select Committee last year as before Lord Dunraven's Committee in 1888. Indeed I am advised that in some respects wages and conditions are worse than they were twenty years ago. Nor are these melancholy facts confined to any one country. Sweating is not a peculiarity of Great Britain. Practically the same trades experience the same evils in all other industrial countries. France, Germany, Austria, and Americareproduce with great exactness under similar economic conditions the same social evils, and in those countries, as in ours, Sweated Industries—by which I mean trades where there is no organisation, where wages are exceptionally low, and conditions subversive of physical health and moral welfare—cast dark shadows in what is, upon the whole, the growing and broadening light of civilisation.
There is a clear reason for this, which is in itself at once a justification for the special treatment which we propose for these trades, and a means of marking them off more or less definitely from the ordinary trades. In the case of any great staple trade in this country, if the rate of wages became unnaturally low compared to other industries, and the workers could not raise it by any pressure on their part, the new generation at any rate would exercise a preference for better pay and more attractive forms of industry. The gradual correction of depressed conditions over large periods of time is thus possible. But in these sweated industries there is no new generation to come to the rescue. They are recruited from a class rather than from a section of the community. The widow,the women folk of the poorest type of labourer, the broken, the weak, the struggling, the diseased—those are the people who largely depend upon these trades, and they have not the same mobility of choice, exerted, tardily though it be, by a new generation, but which is undoubtedly operative upon the great staple trades of the country. That is an explanation which accounts for the same evils being reproduced under similar conditions in different countries, separated widely from one another and marked by great differences of general conditions.
I ask the House to regard these industries as sick and diseased industries. I ask Parliament to deal with them exactly in the same mood and temper as we should deal with sick people. It would be cruel to prescribe the same law for the sick as for the sound. It would be absurd to apply to the healthy the restrictions required for the sick. Further, these sweated trades are not inanimate abstractions. They are living, almost sentient, things. Let the House think of these sweated trades as patients in a hospital ward. Each case must be studied and treated entirely by itself. No general rule can be applied.There is no regulation dose which will cure them all. You cannot effect quicker cures by giving larger doses. Different medicines, different diets, different operations are required for each; and consideration, encouragement, nursing, personal effort are necessary for all. Great flexibility and variety of procedure, and a wide discretionary power, entrusted to earnest and competent people, must characterise any attempt to legislate on this subject.
The central principle of this Bill is the establishment of Trade Boards, which will be charged with the duty of fixing a minimum wage. I am very anxious to give these Trade Boards the utmost possible substance and recognition. They will be formed on the principle of equality of representation for employers and employed, with a skilled official chairman or nucleus. That is the principle I have adopted in the new Arbitration Court recently established. That is the principle which will govern the system of Labour Exchanges, shortly to be introduced, and other measures which may come to be associated with Labour Exchanges, and I think it is an excellent principle.
At the same time, do not let us supposethat these Trade Boards will, in the first instance, be very strong or representative bodies. They are to be formed in trades mainly worked by women, where no organisation has ever yet taken root, where there are as yet no means of finding and focusing an effective trade opinion. Where possible, they will be partly elective; in many cases they will, I expect, have to begin by being almost entirely nominated. In some cases it will be upon the official members alone that the main burden will fall. I could not ask the House to confer upon bodies of this nebulous character, not representative, not elective in any democratic sense, responsible not to constituents, nor to a public department, nor to Parliament itself in any way, the absolute and final power of enforcing by the whole apparatus of the law any decision, whether wise or foolish, upon wage questions to which they may come by the narrowest majority. The work which we entrust to them wholly and finally is sufficiently difficult and important. We direct them by this Bill to prescribe minimum rates of wages. They are to find the minimum rate. For that purpose they are as well qualified as any body that we could devise.In this sphere their jurisdiction will be complete. The Board of Trade will not retry the question of what is the right minimum rate. Another and quite different question will be decided by the Board of Trade. They will decide whether the minimum rate which has been prescribed by the Trade Board commands sufficient support in the trade to make its enforcement by inspection and prosecution likely to be effective.
That is the division between the responsibility which the Trade Boards will have and the responsibility which we shall reserve to ourselves. I shall be quite ready in Committee to express that intention, which is in the Bill, in a simpler and stronger manner, and to make the function of the Board of Trade a positive and not a negative one, so that when the Trade Board has fixed the minimum rate of wages it shall, after an interval of six months, acquire the force of law, and shall be enforced by compulsory powers, unless in the meanwhile the Board of Trade decides or rules otherwise. For my part, I gladly give an assurance that it is our intention to put the compulsory provisions of this Bill into full effect upon at least one of the trades in the schedule,at as early a date as possible, in order to bring about the fulfilment of a much-needed and long-overdue experiment.
Now I come to the probationary period, and I know that there are a great many who have stated that it is mere waste of time. I, on the contrary, have been led to the opinion that it is vital to any practical or effective policy against sweating. It is no use to attempt, in trades as complex and obscure as these with which we are dealing, to substitute outside authority for trade opinion. The only hope lies in the judicious combination of the two, each acting and reacting upon the other. A mere increase of the penal provisions and inspection would be a poor compensation for the active support of a powerful section within the trade itself. It is upon the probationary period that we rely to enable us to rally to the Trade Board and to its minimum wage the best employers in the trade. In most instances the best employers in the trade are already paying wages equal or superior to the probable minimum which the Trade Board will establish. The inquiries which I have set on foot in the various trades scheduled have brought to me most satisfactory assurances from nearly all theemployers to whom my investigators have addressed themselves.
For the enforcement of this Act, and for the prevention of evasion and collusion, I rely upon the factory inspectors, who will report anything that has come to their notice on their rounds and who will make themselves a channel for complaints. I rely still more upon the special peripatetic inspectors and investigators who will be appointed under the Act by the Board of Trade, who will have to conduct prosecutions under the Act, and who will devote all their time to the purposes of the Act. These officers will incidentally clothe the Trade Boards with real authority, once the rate has been enforced, in that they will be responsible to the Trade Board, and not to some powerful Department of Government external to the Trade Board itself. I rely further upon the support of the members of the Trade Boards themselves, who will act as watch-dogs and propagandists. I rely upon the driving power of publicity and of public opinion. But most of all I put my faith in the practical effect of a powerful band of employers, perhaps a majority, who, whether from high motives or self-interest, or from a combination of the two—they are notnecessarily incompatible ideas—will form a vigilant and instructed police, knowing every turn and twist of the trade, and who will labour constantly to protect themselves from being undercut by the illegal competition of unscrupulous rivals.
An investigator in the East End of London writes: