3 1822 01328 5077 LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO 3 1822 01328 5077 l/l/l/A I4~di/u^x- A. Central University Library University of California, San Diego Note: This item is subject to recall after two weeks. Date Due Cl 39 (1/91) UCSDLib. A STUDY OF BRITISH LABOR BY ARTHUR GLEASON NEW YORK HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE 1920 COPYKIQHT, 1920, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC. THE OUINN ft BODEN COMPANY RAHWAV. N. J. CONTENTS PAGE [NTRODUCTION 3 SECTION ONE CHAOS AND ASPIRATIONS CHAPTER I. CHANGE 5 II. A REVOLUTION WITHOUT A PHILOSOPHY 9 III. LABOR THE UNREADY 25 SECTION TWO THE YEAR I. THE BRITISH COAL COMMISSION 33 II. ROBERT SMELLIE 56 III. THE NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL CONFERENCE 70 IV. YOUTH AT THE STIRRUP. THE LABOR PARTY CONFERENCE AT SOUTHPORT 79 V. THE CONGRESS AT GLASGOW 112 VI. THE RAILWAY STRIKE AND THE FOURTEEN .... 136 SECTION THREE THE WAY THEY DO IT I. THE WAY THEY Do IT 147 II. GENTLE REVOLUTION. 1 152 III. GENTLE REVOLUTION. II. . 161 I. WORKERS' CONTROL (BY FRANK HODGES, SECRETARY OF THE MINERS' FEDERATION) 169 II. THE SHOP STEWARDS AND WORKERS' COMMITTEE MOVEMENT (BY J. T. MURPHY) 184 III. THEIR IDEAS (BY J. T. MURPHY) 201 v vi CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE IV. SELF-GOVERNMENT BY RAILWAYMEN (BY C. T. CRAMP, PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL UNION OF RAILWAYMEN) . 212 V. THE ENGLAND THE WORKERS WANT WHEN How (BY ROBERT SMILLIE, OF THE MINERS' FEDERATION) . . . 215 SECTION FIVE PROBLEMS I. WOMEN 223 II. BOTTOMLEY 240 III. WARBLINGTON. THE OLD ENGLAND 243 SECTION SIX THE SUMMING UP 249 APPENDIX SECTION ONE THE EMPLOYERS I. FEDERATION OF BRITISH INDUSTRIES. THE CONTROL OF IN- DUSTRY. REPORT OF THE NATIONALIZATION COMMITTEE . 281 II. EVIDENCE OF THE RIGHT HONORABLE BARON GAINFORD OF HEADLAM TO THE COAL INDUSTRY COMMISSION . . . 302 III. MY DREAM OF A FACTORY (B. SEEBOHM ROWNTREE) . . 306 I. NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL CONFERENCE REPORT (APRIL 4, 1919) 317 II. THE BUILDERS' PARLIAMENT ........ 339 III. JOINT STANDING INDUSTRIAL COUNCILS (THE WHITLEYS) . 358 SECTION THREE THE WORKERS I. MEMORANDUM ON THE CAUSES OF AND REMEDIES FOR LABOR UNREST 37* II. THE NATIONALIZATION OF MINES AND MINERALS BILL . . 304 III. PRECIS OF EVIDENCE (G. D. H. COLE) 409 CONTENTS vii SECTION FOUR THE JUDGMENT CHAPTER PAGE I. COAL INDUSTRY COMMISSION ACT, 1919 (THE SANKEV RE- PORT) 422 II. GOVERNMENT OFFER TO RAILWAYMEN 441 SECTION FIVE THE PUBLIC I. THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS 446 II. ORIGINS OF BRITISH SOCIALISM 455 III. THE NEW CLASS OF GOVERNMENT SERVANT . . . .477 IV. WHAT PEOPLE SAY 487 INDEX ... 507 INTRODUCTION THIS book tells what the workers want, in their own words. It is not an interpretation by an intellectual of what he thinks labor ought to want. It is the human record of British labor as it goes to victory, reported by an American for Americans. It tells what the explosive ideas are which have long lain un- discharged in human consciousness. It tells in their own words who the leaders are, what the strikes meant, what the workers have won, and what they seek. Labor at home is an agitation; in Britain it is forming public opinion. The trade unions are an integral part of the State. The great trade- union Socialists are successfully fighting the sweep of anarchy from Eastern and Central Europe and the murderous bitter- ness of American industrial relations. In this book the writer completes a five years' study of the British. He attended the conferences, met groups of trade unionists, talked personally with the leaders. He sat through the two sessions of the Coal Commission, attended the National Industrial Conference. One of the chapters in the book is by Robert Smillie, miner, founder of the Triple Alliance, most powerful trade-union leader in Europe. Mr. Smillie answers for American readers the questions which millions of people have been asking: "What kind of England do the workers want?" "When? How soon ? " " How ? By bloodshed, universal strikes, or votes ? By public opinion or organized pressure ? " Mr. Smillie describes the revolution now under way, how the vic- tory will be won, and the date of the achievement. He says, " It is a race between Socialism and revolution. Socialism is the only program of reconstruction that is offered." The Appendix gives in full the important documents of the 4 INTRODUCTION social revolution. It gives the famous memorandum of the trade unions to the National Industrial Conference sup- pressed by the Government. It gives the profit-sharing scheme of the Coal Owners ; the payment-by-results scheme of the 16,000 leading firms, known as the Federation of British Industries. It gives the Report of the Builders' Parliament, signed by three employers and the workers, calling for the abolition of " the owner," and the end of profit-making. It gives the demands of the Miners for full workers' con- trol. It details the evidence of the Coal Commission on the new type of Government servant which nationalization demands and which Sidney Webb produces. It places the Middle Class, and shows the origins of British Socialism in the revolutionary mind of the British people. The old British industrial system is dying. It was decaying long before 1914. It was killed by the War. It was the system of private enterprise, directed by the profit-making motive of the ruling group, and operated by the mass of workers, driven by fear and hunger. Through organization the work- ers have obtained such control over industry as to render it unworkable at their will. They refuse to give high produc- tion except on their own terms. Their terms are a new industrial system the Socialist State, 1 with workers' control. They have presented their ultimatum. Step by step the new order is being established. It is being done without armed insurrection, or bloodshed. It is gentle revolution of the good-humored British brand. It may appeal at one or two points to America, torn by hysteria and bitterness. England for centuries has created the institutions which other nations perforce copied in order to survive. England to-day is creating a new great society while the rest of the world is swaying in class-combat, or sunk in despair, or menaced by reaction. defined by the Labor Party. SECTION ONE CHAOS AND ASPIRATIONS CHAPTER I CHANGE BRITAIN is faced by universal unrest in the working class and by a demand that economic power shall be shifted from the owners of capital to the workers. In good faith many men are stating that this social revolution (which is world- wide) is the work of Marx and Sorel, or of a handful of " middle-class politicians," " intellectuals," " agitators," and "Jew Bolshevists." In short, that the conquest of human- ity's thinking which Jesus and his eleven disciples and his multitude of later followers in nineteen hundred years could not accomplish, has been wrought in one generation by a small self-seeking incompetent group; and that the masses of people everywhere (exactly, the human race) has been led astray like sheep. But the causes lie deeper than " Bol- shevik gold." Britain is the text of the world revolution because her history promises that she will devise staunch channels for this new impulse of the human spirit, as she has done down the generations. With many failures she has maintained a tradition of freedom of speech, and of liberty for the indi- vidual, which gives a temperate climate for social revolution. And she possesses a political instinct for compromise and ad- justment, which enables her to construct the machinery for profound change. I venture to predict that England will make an adjustment early and sane, and that she will be the first country to enter the new age equipped and unembittered. The ideas which are now remolding institutions in Eng- 5 6 CHAOS AND ASPIRATIONS land and in Europe have lain hidden in the heart of hu- manity through the ages. They are " high explosives." They are dangerous to established things. They mean the over- throw of privilege. They have a long history. They rode the imagination of several of the Hebrew prophets. They reappeared in a few passages of Plato. They took shape in the " natural law " of the Latins and the Churchmen. They were reborn in the beginnings of England, and flared and flickered from John Ball to the Chartists. They flashed briefly in action a few times in France. It is naive to confuse their origins with the researches of a German exile in the British Museum, or with a middle-class Bergsonian in Boulogne. 1 But they never received a trial. They welled up from man's suffering and aspirations only to be forced back to the deeper regions of his unconscious life, where they con- tinued their subterranean tunneling, a stream seeking the light. The instinct for freedom, the desire for equality, never died. These ideas have taken on the expression of each period in which they struggled for mastery. The expression of them to-day is: The workers wish to be the public servants of community enterprise, not the hired hands of private enterprise. They refuse to work longer for a system of private profits divided in part among non-producers. They demand a share in the control and responsibilities of the work they do (not only welfare and workshop conditions, but discipline and management and commercial administra- tion). They demand a good life, which means a standard of living (in terms of wages and hours) that provides leisure, recrea- tion, education, health, comfort, and security. Or, putting these desires into the compact phrases of agi- tation: The workers are using their economic and political 1 The statement of these ideas, historically, and their pedigree are given in the Appendix, Section 5, Chapter II. CHANGE 7 power to obtain nationalization of key industries, joint con- trol in the management of them, a minimum wage, a basic wage, a shortened working week, a capital levy on war profiteers. Before the War, these ideas about property, profits, privilege, freedom in work, equality, public service, the State, were rapidly approaching their time of testing in action. From the beginning of the twentieth century a revolutionary period was in swing. The War speeded up the pace. The War weakened Government by Parliament or Con- gress. It left naked and unashamed a little inner group of executives ruling the State, which was Government by inner Cabinet. We have even learned (from such partial revela- tions as Henderson and Barnes have made) that not all of this tiny group were fully consulted. Accordingly we saw Government by Lloyd George. For the possession of his person, the great organized groups struggle. Disregarding the debating society of Parliament, and going directly to the sacred presence of the chief of the State, financiers, business men, the press, and trade unions present their de- mands. Public opinion is the timorous cry which the middle class and the unorganized fringes of society make at the spectacle of the struggle. Labor was weakened politically by the War. Its elected representatives were powerless on policy. Its manifestoes were scraps of paper. But its industrial action was amazingly strong an as- tonishment to itself. It needed but the threat of a strike for swift redress in the scale of living. One gesture from Smillie, and Asquith reversed Government policy on coolie labor. Labor had only to shake its puissant locks to see a ripple of respectful wonderment pass over the face of so- ciety. It was not the only factor in production. But it learned that it was one of the indispensable factors. The poor began to dream dreams. From the chambers of their buried life ancient hopes rose again. For the first time in history partly conscious of their power, 8 CHAOS AND ASPIRATIONS the workers now determine to create a social order in which they share the benefits, the responsibility, and the control. Huge arrears of ignorance and incompetence remain to be overcome before this new estate can administer deftly and smoothly. In the transition period, much hangs on the de- cision which individuals of the possessing class will make. If the experts, the men of directive capacity, the managerial group, and other useful members of the middle class are surly at the change, and refuse to work the machinery of pro- duction, there will be more trouble than the western world has yet seen. Only by determined good-will can the next ten years be made even tolerable. CHAPTER II A REVOLUTION WITHOUT A PHILOSOPHY THE " arbiters of contemporary events " are the workers, but they do not fully know it. The center of authority is in labor, but it exercises its authority only in spurts and spasms. Failure to recognize this latent power of labor is to lose track of where " the ball " is and to whom it is being passed. It is to concentrate attention on the blanketed figures at the side lines, who madly dance up and down and scream. Mr. James A. Farrell, president of the United States Steel Corporation (at the sixth National Foreign Trade Convention, April, 1919), said: "Production is always a question of profit," and he called it " a fundamental law." Fundamental laws, like general principles, have a way of escaping under sharp analysis, like a netted jellyfish. That he meant " profit " in its meaning of reward for private effort is proved by his preceding and qualifying sentence in which " he called for such legislation on com- merce as to render the enterprise competitive." The luxury of an incentive of unlimited rewards to induce idle capital to invest has been purchased in Britain by low wages to manual workers and low salaries to managers, technical men, and men of directive and administrative ability. This gamble and adventure of sliding scale returns to capital have been proved to be a luxury. What is more needed is an incentive to managers and to manual workers to give high production. Private enterprise, private owner- ship, which aims at profits for shareholders, has failed to give the needed incentive to workers by hand and brain. Large sections of workers refuse any longer to operate the system of private enterprise: that treadmill of muzzled oxen which grinds out profits for shareholders. The social revolu- 9 10 CHAOS AND ASPIRATIONS tion, now under way in Britain, has been hastened by this fact that the capitalists and employers * have lost control of labor. Labor in certain of the key industries refuses longer to work for a system of " private enterprise " and " private profits." In America " private enterprise " is a religious idea, closely interwoven with the ideas of " God " and " Coun- try." To challenge it is to pass under such scornful censure as met the atheist in the days of State religion. But in Britain, war-profiteering destroyed the last vestige of reverence for " private enterprise " as a religious idea. And intellectual respect for " private enterprise " was undermined by the Coal Commission, where the coal owners were unable to construct a case against the naive questioning of Mr. Smillie and Mr. Sidney Webb. The lords (a Duke, an Earl, and some Marquises) made a better showing in their defense of royalties (for which they give no work, but receive 5^ pence on every ton raised in Britain) than the coal owners made in their defense of profits. The reason was simple. The coal owners waged their combat on facts, and were routed because facts were against them. The lords fell back on mysticism the great tradition of the upper class religion, morality, the sacred- ness of property. The voice of each of them rang with conviction (except the voice of the very charming Marquis of Bute, who lisped). To state a belief in things unseen is an act of faith, and always inspires respect among intelligent persons. So when an engaging red-haired youth, named the Duke of Northumberland, uttered his conviction that England would go down if his unearned income was touched the King's Robing Room rang with applause. The very moderate and minor amendments which the workers have already obtained, arouse a loud cackle of dis- may. When the knife really enters there will be a cry. To obtain a standard of well-being which merely puts them on a level with that of corresponding American workers in pre- 1 With the good-will of labor withdrawn, their " property " loses in value. A REVOLUTION WITHOUT A PHILOSOPHY 11 war days, the British workers have had to take determined action, which is described as revolutionary, and which will dislocate the industrial system as it existed before the War. It will take many years, perhaps a generation, to work out these demands for a decent minimum, and meanwhile pro- duction will suffer, prices in competitive foreign trade will go against the British exporter. It now requires a revolution to accomplish what in a country of richer natural resources, of higher wages, of modern machinery, would have taken place automatically. So long has justice been denied that the simplest changes mean drastic reconstruction, with an upset. So simple and elementary a step as, for instance, the transfer of the key industries to public ownership, will be bitterly fought. Britain was a 29-shilling-a-week country. Year after year and up to the day of the War, men were underpaid. Britain conducted her business (commerce and industry) on a wage scale so low as to give no well-being to the mass of manual workers, and primary poverty to a considerable proportion of them. Now there is going to be poverty for all. The upper classes put off paying the score. They played their system of underpay till it was over-ripe. Now there isn't enough machinery ready to ease them into plenty. Labor is at the door and. demands the greatly higher wage. Too late for gentle adjustment. Now it is pay the wage and lessen the hours, and lose the mo- nopoly grip on foreign markets. It is poverty for all. The price Britain paid for building an economic system on a foundation of human misery is this: 1. Her men of directive managerial administrative ca- pacity loafed on their job. They failed to install sufficient modern standardized machinery in industry. They saved costs by cheap labor, instead of saving costs by high pro- duction through modern machinery and high wages. 2. Sections of the upper middle class and the upper class lived on the community through the ownership of land, royal- ties, wayleaves, speculative shares. A more equalitarian so- ciety would have driven them into the ranks of the producers. 12 CHAOS AND ASPIRATIONS To-day they are being forced to work. As M. Jouhaux, sec- retary of the French Federation of Labor, said on June 26: " The world stands before the bankruptcy of the (middle class." 3. Low wages affected the British working class: (a) by leading to the emigration of some of their sturdy, adventurous, ambitious stock; (b) deterioration in physique of sections of the indus- trial population; (c) the lessening of efficiency not alone through di- minished vitality but also by breeding bad habits of ca' canny, i.e., of slack work, or restricted produc- tion. > (This wide-spread system of trade-union restrictions was of course necessary as a protection against overwork, long hours, the strain of speeding up on impaired reserve strength.) There was a hot time coming to Britain, and it has come. There is nothing that can stop the tumble, for the mass is in motion. The day of reckoning would have come if there had been no war. The middle class are protesting vigorously at being auto- matically abolished. They do not turn their wrath upon the economic system which in its ebbing has left them high and dry, as the tide leaves a boat on the beach. They turn their wrath upon labor, whose high wages are to them the visible sign of their own decay, and therefore seem to them the cause of that decay. But they fail to ask why their own incomes have not lifted. If they had asked the question, they would have found the answer. They cannot better their incomes because they do not " strike." And the reason they do not strike is because they cannot. If they struck, nothing would happen. The crops would still grow, the harvesters would still come bringing in their sheaves. Engineers would roll the Liverpool trains into Euston Station. Coal would be hewn. Girls would still stitch. Folks would continue to be be fed and clothed and transported. The solar system would A REVOLUTION WITHOUT A PHILOSOPHY 13 revolve, and the little wheels of industry would revolve. Life and the human race would go on untroubled, without blinking an eyelash if the middle class rose in a splendid 'fury and established a soviet and the dictatorship of the respectable. Theirs would be a heroic gesture, but a gesture in the void. They are not of the stuff to make earth tremble. Their difficulty is that they do not perform a function which is any longer essential. As their function fails, their " rights " fade away. The Nineteenth Century was the last century of the middle class " that portion of the community to which money is the primary condition and the primary instrument of life." 1 They were the individual middlemen, and that function is being taken over by the vaster organization of distribution, by chain stores, by co-operative societies, by great emporiums. They were the collectors of little individual pools of capital, and that function is being taken over by the big trusts and nationalized industries, which use their own productive effi- ciency in terms of present profits to accumulate for reserves, extensions, and new embarkations. As the process of col- lective expropriation proceeds, through the capital levy, death duties, profits tax and income tax, this section of the middle class is going to be gently and almost painlessly elim- inated. But there are groups in the middle class who do perform a function. What of them? A large section of the " salariat," the black-coated pro- letariat, are already forming their associations and trade unions and getting into the game. Britain has the Railway Clerks' Association of station-masters, agents, and chief clerks. The Post Office and Civil Service has a Postmen's Federation of 65,000 members, a Postal and Telegraph Clerks' Association of 27,000, the Fawcett Association of 6,000, the new Society of Civil Servants, the Association of Staff Clerks, and others. The National Union of Teachers has 100,000, and is so thoroughly organized as to call strikes 1 No definition of the middle class, yet devised, is adequate. 14 CHAOS AND ASPIRATIONS and win wage advances. There is a Union of Engineering Foremen and a Federation of Brain Workers. The Associa- tion of Engineering and Shipbuilding Draughtsmen is a trade union and a part of the labor movement. The Associa- tion of Industrial Chemists is on the way. While the useless and festering mass of the middle class can be extracted without damage to the body politic (without any notice even being taken, except for the momentary cry at the peak of the operation), the same swift skilled treatment is not possible or desirable for these living members, just listed. Neither hot air nor gas could disguise the loss, if anything rude were done to managers, deputies, supervisory grades, professionals, superintendents, foremen, brain work- ers. Many of their associations have joined and are joining the labor movement. Others are resolute in keeping clear. The miners have often kept themselves clear of the labor movement. Thus, when Lloyd George harnessed in the Brit- ish trade unions to the unified purpose of the State (includ- ing later the execution of the secret treaties), the miners refused to sign away their power. Being a key industry, they could enforce their will. It is possible that in these next five years we shall witness similar behavior on the part of powerful professional associations like the doctors. They could not go down to extinction like the bulk of the middle class, because they perform a supremely important function, and it is conceivable that they may prefer a lone Guild or Soviet role to that of affiliation to the Labor Party. On the other hand, the teachers in recent annual confer- ence frankly confessed their debt to labor, and a section of teachers from the Rhondda Valley, avowedly under the in- fluence of the miners' example, successfully led the confer- ence to demand workers' control. I heard the drowned voice of the technical expert at the National Industrial Council; Sir Robert Home and Lloyd George had got their industrial community nicely lined up into two neat compartments employers and workers. And suddenly out of the dim hall came a small voice of protest, A REVOLUTION WITHOUT A PHILOSOPHY 15 and the protestant walked to the platform and spoke his piece of how he represented a large group of technical em- ployees. 1 He was promptly squelched by the Government officials, who implied: "Why is life full of these alien particles? They tear through paper programs. They poison the pipe of peace." At any moment this pathetic invaded little neutral may become the Serbia that precipitates the class war, or the Bel- gium over whose dead body as a moral emblem the Big Ones fight. Always the fight is said to be on behalf of the Little Nation. The royalty owners and coal owners pleaded that rich rewards should go to directive capacity. Then the rec- ords were dug up and it was found that a large percentage of colliery managers received 400 a year. These lively remains of the middle class will have to be incorporated in the new social order. The Guild of Insurance Officials numbers 10,000 and in- cludes all branches of insurance staffs from branch man- agers to junior clerks. There is the Bank Clerks' Union. The Professional Workers' Federation numbers 174,000, and in- cludes the National Union of Teachers, the Incorporated Association of Assistant Masters, the Customs and Excise Federation, the Second Division Clerks' Association, the As- sociation of Assistant Mistresses. The National Union of Journalists, which met in delegate meeting on Good Friday, represented 4,000 members, out for " salaries and hours." A representative said : " The gentleman who turns out the gas- lamps in front of my house is paid more than my colleague; the other gentleman who calls to record the figures on my gas-meter is paid more than I am." These organizations range from group meetings to trade unions, but they are alike in their consciousness of function and in their demand to win representation in the State be- cause of that function. Organized management, organized technical and scientific knowledge and skill is, then, in some 1 The Society of Technical Engineers. 16 CHAOS AND ASPIRATIONS instances, joining the labor movement. In other instances, it is an independent force in industry. These organizations are of more importance than the Middle Classes' Union, recently formed, which will not be effective, because, failing to represent function, it will be unable to exert industrial pressure. So its resolutions will pass into the Morning Post, instead of into law. It has no power to combine, because it does not perform essential serv- ices. If it attempts to break strikes by black-legging, it will create disorder and will be eliminated by any Government which seeks law and order. The organizer of the Middle Classes' Union is Kennedy Jones, M.P. He says: In almost every country in Europe to-day the middle classes are being attacked, i. Who are the middle classes? 2. What can the middle classes do, even if they organize and combine? The middle classes are all those unorganized citizens, from the point of view of voting power, who stand between the organized and federated worker on the one hand and the smaller, but almost equally powerful class, who stand for organized and consolidated Capital on the other. The middle classes are that large body in the nation who work with their heads rather than their hands, and in whom by far the greater part of the national brain is con- centrated. They comprise all the professions, learned and other- wise, shopkeepers, and clerks, and those who help to manage in- dustries and businesses of every sort. To these classes belong both the soldier and the sailor, the stockbroker and the clergyman, the barrister and the architect, the grocer and the solicitor, the author of great works and the men and women whose writings are con- fined to ledgers. At question time a lady asked if there was any objection to younger branches of the aristocracy, " who are as poor as church mice," joining the Union. The chairman replied that if any impoverished earl wished to join the Middle Classes' Union, they would be glad to welcome him. In advertising for members, the Union announces : A REVOLUTION WITHOUT A PHILOSOPHY 17 The Union has been formed to protect the great, hitherto unor- ganized, Middle Classes, against the insatiable demands of Labor, the Power of Capital, the indifference of Governments. There are many definitions of the middle class as seen by itself. Here are a few: Those members of the Community who work with brain and pen. Lying between Capital and Labor. Every one between the artisan and the aristocrat. A state of mind. People with small fixed incomes. Bernard Shaw says that a middle-class man is a man who would refuse anything less than a five-pound fee. The Middle Classes' Union is amusing, but unimportant. It is unimportant because all that is effective in it will seek expression through other groups the professional associa- tions and trade unions. To sum up what has been said on the middle classes. 1 (i) The non-functioning sections are being squeezed out of ex- istence. (2) Some of the supervisory grades are joining the labor movement. (3) Some groups of managers and other brain workers, such as doctors, are keeping themselves clear of either armed camp of capitalist or labor. They are likely to find themselves in the position of a neutral State, lying between two great powers. (4) The artist, research scientist, creator of values, will have the same lot in these next few years as he has always known. The swaying of forces in combat cannot make him more lonely than he has been in the modern world. He will not be less lonely until a free humanity is able to enjoy creative work. His sym- pathies run with the disinherited who now, at long last, climb to power. But he has no illusions that their sympathies will be with him. Certain theorists profess to see in the British labor move- ment pure syndicalism. Thus, I quote from J. W. Scott, 1 See Appendix, Section Five" The Middle Class." 18 CHAOS AND ASPIRATIONS lecturer in moral philosophy in the University of Glasgow: " Syndicalism and Philosophical Realism " : Much current philosophy [by which he means the evolutionism of Bergson and the realism of Bertrand Russell] would, if true, essentially justify what is sometimes spoken of as the new philosophy of Labor. Syndicalism is the voice of the failure of something. The placing of the chief end of men in economics and in the salvation of a class is of the nature of a relapse. It is the failure of the long effort to achieve the good for man as such the good, not of one class, but of all classes. Syndicalism is the failure of the socialistic idea to prove its fitness for po- litical power. It is the very voice of socialism at the confes- sional, confessing its inability to do what it set out to do, namely, run a State. It is true that a few extremists talk in Bergsonian terms of the change. " The march of events." " The revolutionary moment." " The instinctive movement of the masses." They have gone on from Marx to Bergson. In the old patter, the economic conditions were going to ripen inevitably till the proletariat took over power. Now, " the march of events " is " an instinctive movement " of the people. But to imply that British labor is syndicalist is an intellec- tualistic feat which could only have been carried through an entire book by a very young philosopher living in the Clyde area. In general, British labor has no philosophy, 1 no general outlook, but deals in piecemeal gains by compromise and opportunism, with a floundering sureness, like the land- progress of a seal. It has, however, determined on those gains (such as, for instance, to consolidate the wage-gains made during the War), and those gains are ripping the old order into small bits. Labor is at the beginning of the changes which it will put through in the next ten years. 2 Those changes seek to obtain: L Minorities have a philosophy. The passage refers to the mass. 2 And a full generation at least will be required to " constitution- alize" and stabilize the changes. The next few years will see more unrest than Britain has known in a century. A REVOLUTION WITHOUT A PHILOSOPHY 19 1. A higher standard of living than the average wage of any industry yet affords. 2. More leisure than the working day, as set in any in- dustry, yet allows. 3. Housing (actually in brick, not on paper). 4. A regulation of private profits. 5. The nationalization of public utilities. 6. Joint control in management throughout industry. 7. Taxation to distribute the wealth of the community. 8. The elimination of unemployment. 9. The creation of a good life by education. The common people are seeking a cure for what their bril- liant young champion, R. H. Tawney, calls " the sickness of acquisitive society." They are, as Arthur Henderson puts it, in " moral antagonism " to national effort for private gain. They are literally sick to death of the life they have known, as organized and governed by the owners of land and capital, the instigators of war, the manipulators of peace with public phrases and private promises. With them in their quest for a good life are the noblest of the Church, such as William Temple. With them are many of the trained economic and industrial minds of England's elite, such as J. A. Hobson, Tawney, Webb, Cole, Brailsford. But, for all that, the task is gigantic because the status quo has an immense specific gravity, all its own. Inertia is woven into the fiber of human nature. Because of some brilliant pamphlets the friends of labor looked to it for a cavalry charge through the disorganized hosts of privilege. They hoped for a flying squadron, in perfect battle formation, led by some plumed champion, to go spurring and prancing towards a clearly seen objective, while, falling back before them, the old order would be shouting its surrender. Nothing of the sort has happened. The imme- diate gains of labor are being made sectionally and not by the unified movement. They were largely made in 1919 by the power of the Triple Alliance, headed by Robert Smillie, the miner. He is the greatest leader of labor in this gen- 20 CHAOS AND ASPIRATIONS eration. 1 He is simple and homely, of rugged integrity, of a devotion to his followers unmatched since Keir Hardie and Alexander Macdonald. But he and his Triple Alliance, in 1919, acted alone, and then waited for the other millions of labor to catch up and receive the distributed gain. Labor is weaker in influence and slower to act than was anticipated. The clue has not been found. The leader of all is not in sight. The organization is not perfected. So the mass movement drives on under the urge of its instinct to a series of next-steps, after the path has been broken by the miners and railwaymen. There is an utter absence of central government in British trade unionism. If trade unionism had a punch mated to its bulk, it would have knocked out some of its enemies before this. But its punch must be made through the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress, and the P. C. is so perfectly balanced with historical characters, leaders with a past, forlorn hopes, and men to memory dear, that it is rever- ent in the presence of authority, and eminently solid and safe in an age of crisis. It is sometimes in part a blend of bar- tered votes. The ancients are occasionally on it, the dis- credited, the defeated. All the lazy kindliness of English nature wreaks itself on the P. C. There is J. B. Williams, who wails that the littlest union is never listened to. So on to the P. C. he goes. There is W. J. Davis, the oldest active trade unionist. It's a pity not to give it to the fine old man. There's Havelock Wilson. We swatted him proper in three votes. We hate his policy. So, like good fellows, we'll shove him aboard. 2 Then a dashing young leader of British Bolsheviks prances down the aisle and swaps votes for one or two more places. And by the time the consolation prize and auction features are cared for, the membership is buried deep in 1 In personality, Smillie is much like Eugene Debs. But the British democracy has not yet sent him to jail. 8 Until 1919, when they pushed him into the sea. A REVOLUTION WITHOUT A PHILOSOPHY 21 cotton wool, and there is little decisive action for another year. But not only is there this temperamental slowness of the British, there is at the moment a climate of disillusionment. Most of the Government program of reconstruction hous- ing, land, education has temporarily fallen down. Some day it will greatly eventuate, but not to-day. The people after the War had looked for a logical fourth act to the drama, with stern justice meted to the wicked, rewards and happiness to suffering innocents, and a general sense of well-being. But they found that a fever had burned them till they were rest- less instead of satisfied. They found that they had fed on poison so that they were mortified instead of purged. A weariness set in, a carelessness of what comes after, and, as undertone to the celebration of p'eace, " the quiet weeping of the world." A suppressed bitterness of suffering long endured, inequalities of sacrifice, the nag of old wounds, unemployment, and hate these are the deposits of the heady tonic of war. One has the sense of a gathering doom, some- thing slowly cumulative through the four years of prelude, and now thickening for the crash and chaos. The face of the sun is darkened over the earth that is black, and the veil of all the temples is rent. Faith has died with the death of the young men. " Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built." Belief and hope we are beyond those eager projections of man's de- sires. This sadness and despair condition all efforts of group or individual. For the moment, the full devastating vision of the futility of human effort has fallen on Europe. England shares in this. Why believe in the power of labor to redeem a world where all things come to dust? I have a friend in the Ministry of Labor, who, falling under this disillusionment, and seeing with Scotch acumen the limitations of labor, frankly questions its right to rule. He said to me : " I am a little doubtful about accepting labor as the coming power. So I have been putting two questions to 22 CHAOS AND ASPIRATIONS myself recently. Which side would I have been on at the time of the French Revolution? And in an earlier day, would I have been in the mob that cried ' Crucify him ' ? I wonder now if I am making the refusal to accept a gain of the human spirit." But it has become academic to debate whether we shall accept life and labor. The only matter for practical men now to consider is the system to be erected on the ruins of pri- vately owned and controlled industry. Which industries shall be immediately purchased by the community ? How many and which of the functions of management shall immediately pass under the control of the workers? How shall this power of the producers register itself in Parliament? Shall there be a Special House of Producers inside Parliament? Or a Na- tional Industrial Council outside? And what shall be the relation of that to Parliament? As soon as trade-union organization passes 50 per cent (of male adult manual workers), the power of it is so great that it must function directly upon Congress or Parliament, if the State is to remain under constitutional Parliamentary author- ity. Only because the American Federation of Labor con- tains a minority of workers, has Mr. Gompers failed to recog- nize the subversive character of his teachings. If labor does not possess a political party, it must by the law of its own growth break out in unlawful demonstrations. Mr. Gompers, the syndicalists, and the revolutionaries of Switzerland and Italy do not believe in the political expression of labor. But British labor prefers to work along constitu- tional lines, and does not desire to be forced to make its democratic gains by direct action. It was driven to its recent powerful and victorious use of the industrial weapon by the failure of Parliament to carry out its pledges. The miners believe that such theories as Mr. Gompers holds will lead a State to destruction. Let labor organize for the ballot, and vote in the measures it desires. That is why the miners sent some 25 representatives to the House. That is why Mr. Smillie has always devoted a large portion of his time to A REVOLUTION WITHOUT A PHILOSOPHY 23 political propaganda. He believes that the State should rule industry, and that the will of the workers should express itself constitutionally. Occasionally the miners jog the State into remembering some of its promises, by a pointed resolu- tion. In the mass of resolutions passed by labor gatherings, it is sometimes difficult to tell which are significant. There are pious resolutions. Moderate pressure. And direct-action-if-you-disregard-it. Conscription is in the third category. Sending British boys to Russia has recently passed over from the temperate zone of Number Two to the hair-trigger of Three. It is the anger and fierceness of the voice, the fervor of the Hear, Hears, that betray whether the nerve has been touched that vibrates to action. Labor, as a mass, is ignorant of foreign affairs in general, and its policy is often the skilful and sane head-work of its recognized intellectual leaders. Whereupon the Con- gress or Conference dutifully but dully votes Yes, and straightway forgets what manner of policy it thundered to a waiting world. It is doubly hard for an outsider to tell the difference between a blank cartridge, noisy but impotent, and a smokeless Maxim-silenced bullet. Sometimes the poli- ticians go wrong and think that a stick of dynamite is a stick of candy. Mr. Lloyd George picked up conscription and thought it could be chewed. If any other man had been equally playful, it would have blown his head off. At that, it jarred him. The British prefer not to face a thing ahead of time. They rely on their reserve strength to see them through. So, right now, they are working a greater change than their talk about it reveals. And it is going to be done with an accompaniment of severer suffering than they let themselves realize. The impulses and desires of millions of individuals are finding expression. Innumerable transient particulars are drifting in the stream of tendency. We speak of " labor " as if it were a static thing, when often what we mean is a certain fierce- 24 CHAOS AND ASPIRATIONS ness of some of the younger men, or a flicker of brief group- unity in aspiration or resentment. But in spite of all those separate particles of unique disposition, there is a common direction in their striving. Pushed on by the movement itself, they drift toward the sea, and already they are caught in the groundswell of the storm. CHAPTER III LABOR THE UNREADY THE War caught British labor unprepared. It required three years for the workers to find themselves and begin to shape a policy. So it is with the coming of peace. The post-war world demanded a policy, and labor was unready. If there had been a determined program backed by 6,000,000 convinced workers (and their families) it would have won its way against the Government, Parliament, the middle class, and big and little business. And by a program I do not mean a political pamphlet, like Labor and the New Social Order, however brilliant and well- balanced. The authentic aims of labor were stated in that eloquent document, but they are clothed in the terms of political change and Government administration, and their appeal is to the political consciousness. Now the political consciousness of labor is undeveloped, because its political experience is slight. Instinctively it turns to industrial action, because its desires and impulses have long gone out along that track. A labor program would have carried the day, had three " if s " been granted. (1) If British labor had been united. (2) If the leaders had been agreed. (3) If the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress were a central executive of trade-union govern- ment. Actually labor was in disarray, with war-weariness, chronic inertia, large conservative blocs, and little revolutionary cliques moving in various directions. Its leaders were at loggerheads on aim and method (from "more production" to "direct action"). 25 26 CHAOS AND ASPIRATIONS The Trades Union Congress is " an unorganized public meeting unable to formulate any consistent or practical policy," and its Parliamentary Committee represents very perfectly the inertia, the weariness, the conservatism of the membership. A year has gone since peace of-a-sort came to the British Isle. With the beginning of the year sectional strikes broke loose. The aim of the workers was to hold war wages with reduced hours. The miners went further and aimed at a slightly better standard of living than that of pre-war days. But so well tutored in misery and servility were all the work- ers of Britain that no industry asked for an average that should exceed $800 a year, and even these faint-hearted de- mands for a wage of from $600 to $800 a year were called revolutionary. And the same cries of ruin came from the owners of land and capital as had come from their God- fearing ancestors when it was proposed to remove tiny chil- dren and pregnant women from heavy work underground in the mines. Then followed the Coal Commission and the National Joint Industrial Conference; extra-Parliamentary extempo- rized devices to save the face of Parliamentary Government, when the power had moved. The Coal Commission was the tribunal before which the old order humbly appeared. The National Joint Industrial Conference was an affair of em- ployers and workers where the Government figured in the position of referee, second, and sponger-off. It mopped up the spilled, received blows, congratulated each side, and noted how many points had been scored. It finally announced " No decision," and another great expectation faded. Mr. Lloyd George appeared at that conference with all the irrelevance of a beautiful woman on a battlefield. England is slowly building new organs of government (both in legislation and administration) outside of Parliament. Political questions will still be handled at Westminster, but the economic life of the nation will largely function through trade unions, industrial councils, and shop committees. A LABOR THE UNREADY 27 political Parliament is powerless to grapple with these eco- nomic questions, because it is not present where these vital forces are visibly active. What the Russians grabbed for too swiftly in Soviets and workers' committees, England is attaining step by step stumblingly in the Shop Stewards' Movement and shop and pit committees. It is control of industry by the producers (including, of course, foremen, managers, draughtsmen, directors, technical advisors). If by revolution is meant general economic paralysis or riot, the British worker does not wish revolution. If by revo- lution is meant the transfer of economic power from the middle class to the workers, an organic change that change is slowly, sectionally, painfully being made. And the worker does not mean to watch this process eventuate in the fullness of time, himself standing by as a casual spectator. He is determined to see the process fulfilled in this generation. He plays his part in bringing it to pass. He prefers settled order to wholesale experimentation, but he does not prefer settled order to piecemeal experimentation. The British are trying to include all the revolutionary aims at once: the conquest of power, the suppression of counter-revolution, and the smooth working of the new order. (And yet take them one step at a time.) Their method is the persuasion of the intellectuals, the winning over of the salariat, the splitting of the middle class, and the conse- quent inclusion of useful middle-class members in the .Labor Movement. The upper class is negligible. It has never been sharply differentiated. There are few old families. Most are like Smithson, who to his amazement became Duke of Nor- thumberland. Those who have not been graduated from mid- dle-class groceries, tea, beer, and soap are a small group as compared with the community. The Government has been caught as unaware by peace as it was by the German Army pounding down on Paris in August, 1914. Its "schemes," and "approved sites," and " strongly worded circulars," are to the tidal rip of the mass- in-motion, as the British Naval Reserves that went to save 28 CHAOS AND ASPIRATIONS Antwerp were to the Prussian legions and the 1 6-inch guns. I have seen both exhibitions. They are the twittering of sparrows in a thunderstorm. In the London Sunday Times for June 8th, Frederic C. Howe is quoted as saying : " Great Britain has not carried through a single one of the great ideas included in her reconstructive program." He is cor- rect. No houses. A few hundred soldiers settled on the land. The acquisition of land at landlords' prices. The " literature " of any of these subjects is voluminous, the schemes multitudinous. Of action there is little. Of determined policy, none. . Everything is left to drift. It is the first two years of war over again. Then, there were the French to hold the pass, while England groped instinctively toward final resolute action. God has always granted Eng- land time to grope. He is a slow and constitutional worker Himself, using trial and error. The devil is a fiery revolu- tionary. Who will win? The owners of land and capital have made large conces- sions inside the old social structure. These will not suffice. Labor demands a radical change in the division of the prod- uct, and in the terms of ownership and management. Until this is granted, there will be increasing unrest, recurring strikes, and diminished production, leading ever nearer to national financial disaster. To save their country, the own- ers of land and capital must make a sacrifice comparable to that of the volunteer soldiers. The first signs of trouble were manifest last winter, and within three years they will begin to force the issue. I believe that the change will be made peaceably and constitutionally. I believe that the Coal Com- mission will be the precedent for reorganizing the great in- dustries. In short, Smillie (backed by the industrial pressure of the Triple Alliance) was an arbiter of event, and labor or- ganization is the instrument of the British constitutional social revolution. The change, now being wrought, will break into revolution * ^he orthodox revolution of force, with paralysis, riot, and blood- shed. LABOR THE UNREADY 29 if it is thwarted by the employers and the Government. B.ut if the ruling class yield, the change will be made constitu- tionally. The leaders of labor wish to make the transition to. the Socialist State, managed by the workers, without loss of life or loss of productive power. The first step only has been taken in this change. The far greater steps remain to be taken. The younger men wish to take them in the next two years. The older men, say, five, ten, fifteen years. The change, in any case, is being made within the frame- work of a huge debt, worn-out plant, a falling volume of pro- duction, fatigue, and bitterness. The sooner the workers share the knowledge and the responsibility of these menacing fundamental conditions the safer for the structure of society. The War has brutalized and embittered all relationships from family life to political procedure. Violence and immorality are temporarily embedded in the consciousness of some of the nation. So any wildness is possible, but I think bloodshed is improbable. I think the overwhelming force of the trade unions will awe the possessing classes into submission. The workers, once in power, will realize for the first time that, as the legacy of the War, they are faced with primary poverty for the next twenty years. No nationalization, nor workers' control, nor shop committee, can devise a machinery for escape from the iron law of diminished wealth, lessened productivity. But for the first time the workers will sit in at the banquet which now will be dead-sea fruit. The financial situation is the most serious of any since the years following 1815. The debt approaches 8,000,000,000. A daily expenditure of nearly 4,000,000 goes gaily on. Hours are decreased and wages increased on a falling market. Un- employment benefit was paid to half a million persons. Be- tween 10,000 and 20,000 rich persons are spending 50,000,000 or more a year in luxury. 1 And all this orgy is being written off against future productivity. The Government postpones the day of liquidating the War by creating more debt. 1 This is a pre-war estimate, and is probably to-day an under- estimate. 30 CHAOS AND ASPIRATIONS Within three years, two things are inevitable : A capital levy. Hard work and greater production from all the community. But labor will not give its fullest effort until The system of private profits is altered. Workers' share in control is granted. Full facts of industry are revealed by share in management. There is no use in beating the big drum of high production, as Professor Bowley and W. L. Hichens and the rest are doing, unless the division of the product of industry is organ- ized on a new basis. As long as the Dukes and Marquises take royalties from every ton of coal, and Lord Tredegar's "Golden Mile" of railway (3 double tracks, I mile long) pays him, taxes not deducted, 19,000 a year on an original outlay of 40,000, labor will not speed up to pay the interest on war debt. These facts from the Coal Commission are reverberating through the island. The temper of the returned soldier will be the determining factor in all this. The sacredness of life and property no longer deters him from an impatient rush to the thing he wants. Britain has the " Young Men in a Hurry " the 10 to 25 per cent of the workers who demand a new social order without delay. She has the-not-more than 1,000 wild men (in all Britain) who would destroy the present order at a stroke by tying up industry, and would establish a dictatorship on the lines of Lenine. She has the 20 or 25 per cent of " Old Timers " the older order of trade unionists, who desire gradual amelioration in- side the existing order. These men (Walter Appleton, Have- lock Wilson, Sexton, Tillett, Seddon, Stanton, Roberts, Clem Edwards) rank much as Gompers does in America. In between these strata lie the 50 per cent of silent voters, with whom the final decision rests. Whether they move con- LABOR THE UNREADY 31 stitutionally step by step, or instinctively in a swoop, will set the history of the next five years. The giants of the year have been Smillie, Hodges, Clynes, and Henderson. Clynes is the consummate voice of the elder labor statesmen. Hodges is the one young man of British labor expressing the aspiration of workers' control. Smillie is the rugged personality of the order of Lincoln, who by moral authority and human sympathy is the greatest figure in labor of this generation. Henderson is the adept, honest poli- tician who thunders common sense. He is less gifted than Clynes, but he has a policy. He is a battering ram of the center, where Clynes is a brake. The " private enterprise " type of young man is pretty sure to emigrate in these coming years to some one of the busi- ness republics. The socialized miner, railwayman, engineer, shipbuilder, cotton operative, will be the governing class of Britain- national service, good wages, workers' control. The rate of exchange will be determined between a business republic (Canada, United States) and the socialist state 1 of Great Britain; and the relative general level of well-being will then determine the number and quality of emigration. It is safe to predict that a million or more persons will in any case emigrate. But that is only the accumulation of the average rate (200,000 a year for five years of damming up). My trips to the North of England and to the Midlands have convinced me that the situation is more disturbing than Government officials realize. They receive their information from the old-line trade-union officials, and they sit in their barracks at Whitehall exchanging memoranda, writing de- 1 The word " socialism " is used throughout this book in the British sense. It means a progressively changing social organism, where key industries pass one by one under public ownership, where public utilities are municipalized, with areas of industry under voluntary co-operation, and other areas in private hands, and with private prop- erty widely distributed. The British mind is neither syndicalist nor communistic. It will seek to preserve all that is useful in the old order, and is sure to preserve religiously much that is obsolete. 32 CHAOS AND ASPIRATIONS tailed reports. They rarely talk with the militant leaders, with the rank and file, or with the returned soldiers. Thus, at Coventry, I heard George Morris, District Or- ganizer of the Workers' Union (350,000), say of a certain major, who was head of a jam manufactory : He received so much a head for sending the boys out to the front, and now I suppose he is buying back their dead bodies for his jam. The official and upper class tendency is to underestimate the volume of the currents now running. At present they are running under the surface. They are largely instinctive and subconscious. But with an obstacle to dam them, they would swirl up through the crust. They can still be canalized con- stitutionally. God is very good to the English, and he may give them a moratorium. SECTION TWO THE YEAR CHAPTER I THE BRITISH COAL COMMISSION THE sessions were held in the House of Lords. The scene is a beautiful high chamber, of gold, blue, and red the King's Robing Room with scenes from the Round Table on the walls. Fronting each other in informal but dramatic way are the two systems of financial control (private enterprise and nationalization) and the two theories of management (autocratic and democratic). There are twelve commission- ers and a judge. Three commissioners are coal owners, three, miners, three are " impartial " representatives of allied great industries, three are " impartial " economists, representative of democratic ideas. Mr. Justice Sankey is of the new order of judge. He gives liberty to the witnesses to tell their story in their own way, and full scope to the commissioners for cross-examination. There are no restricted areas into which Dwners might pass with their profits discreetly cached or syndicalists with loose, destructive theories of minority con- trol. Sankey has a brisk suavity, with a delightful smile, ind a firm will. He is a thorough gentleman, and in sweet and patient fashion rescues an unlettered and muddled witness and states the worker's case for him. He never employs his rich humor against simple persons, ignorant and sincere. But he shakes with judicially suppressed laughter when Sid- ney Webb goes to the mat with a protesting statistician. Quite right, you are quite within your right in putting the question." When there was wrath at one witness, and the twelve commissioners raised their voices together, the justice, who is a large man, rose and in his blandest tone said, " Thank 33 34 THE YEAR you, gentlemen, thank you for all contributing at once." And when labor, in herd formation, trampled one famous expert to the flatness of his own shadow, Sankey subdivided for them the limits of their death-dealing function : " For questions of the industry, Mr. Smillie; statistical, Sir Leo; policy, Mr. Webb," said he. And he implied that treatment from one of them was enough for any particular authority who wandered into the witness chair, which itself began to take on the atmosphere of the electric chair at Sing Sing. I saw one owner, Mr. Thorneycroft, waiting his turn, eying it with a grizzled gloom. No such latitude of questioning has ever before been permitted in an official industrial inves- tigation. Here you had a miner cross-examining a million- aire employer, and driving him into a corner from which he did not escape. And an owner asking a miner, " What do you really want?" Of the three miners, Robert Smillie will be dealt with in the next chapter. Herbert Smith is the vice-president of the Miners' Federation. Frank Hodges is the secretary; he is a brilliant young miner, associated with the Guild Social- ists and their ideas. He is clean-shaven, brown-eyed, lean, and forceful a workingman with education, and touched with the hope of workers' control. To such a man, represen- tative of the youth of the labor movement, wages loom less largely than the vision of a spiritual freedom through widen- ing functioning. If Smillie is the greatest personality thrown up by the labor movement and the summation of a century of struggle, Hodges represents the promise of the coming generation, which will inherit the power. The Guild Social- ists of the miners, the industrial unionists of the railwaymen and transport workers (fed on the propaganda of the Labor College), and the shop stewards of the metal workers are some of the youth of the labor movement. Already cotton is beginning to stir to the same winds of doctrine. And when these five industries move, Britain alters its center of equi- librium. The young are about to be heard. Typical of the views of Mr. Hodges are the following : THE BRITISH COAL COMMISSION 35 The miners have been excluded from management, although they offered a plan for increasing the output. I assure you that is the root of unrest. We have submitted hundreds of instances of mismanagement ineffective clearance, want of trams. We have the changing ideas of one million men in relation to their industry their wish to be taken into confidence, their wish for directive control. What alternate scheme do you suggest? Do you propose to cast that aspiration away? Of the three keen friends of labor at the table, "it is a work of supererogation " (as President Hadley says) to in- troduce Sidney Webb, the greatest mind in the Labor Move- ment. Sir Leo Chiozza Money was a Coalition Liberal in the last Parliament (he is now of the Labor Party). He was on the Blockade Committee, and the War Trade Advisory Committee, and associated with the Ministry of Munitions. Later he became Parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Shipping. His writings are well known. His facile manipu- lation of statistics gives him the uncanny prestige of a Sher- lock Holmes. Sir Leo is a little Diabolo of Genoese blood; his black eyebrows against the pallor of his face make tiny, incipient horns. He has darting eyes. He is efficient in every motion, selecting his pamphlet out of a pile, and turning the pages with his left hand, doing everything the one best way. He grows impatient with the muddle-headed witnesses, flicks his wrists, crosses his legs and drywashes his hands, irritably implying, "Is this the sad lot we have to deal with?" A little man like a lightning bug. R. H. Tawney is fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, a pro- moter of the Workers' Educational Association, was director of the Ratan Tata Foundation of the University of London, is a writer of studies in economics. His hand is visible in the Report of the Committee on Adult Education and the Report of the Archbishop's Fifth Committee of Inquiry: on Chris- tianity and Industrial Problems. He is in the line of the long English tradition of the governing class university training and established church affiliation. And, like many 36 THE YEAR of the church and the twin universities, he has aimed the tradition at social change. A main drift of his thought is: An acquisitive society reverences the possession of wealth, as a functional society would honor, even in the person of the humblest and most laborious craftsman, the arts of creation. To recommend an increase in productivity as a solution of the indus- trial problem is like offering spectacles to a man with a broken leg, or trying to atone for putting a bad sixpence in the plate one Sunday by putting a bad shilling in it the next. As long as royalty owners extract royalties, and exceptionally productive mines pay 20 per cent to absentee shareholders, there is no valid answer to a demand for higher wages. For if the community pays anything at all to those who do not work, it can afford to pay more to those who do. A functional society would extinguish mercilessly those forms of property rights which yield income without service. There would be an end of the property rights in virtue of which the industries on which the welfare of whole populations depends are administered by the agents and for the profit of absentee shareholders. [The Hibbert Journal, April, 1919.] Abounding in good humor, Tawney hazes each witness, and chortles with merriment when the gentleman, still smil- ing back, sinks in the bog. Thus, an owner testified that profits were needed in order to reward good management. " I know nothing of these things," said Tawney ; " I sup- posed that profits were paid to the capital invested. Tell me, do profits go to the manager ? " No one seeing this care-free, lovable young person would guess that two years ago he lay for thirty hours in No Man's Land, bleeding his life away. What saved him was the fact he had previously drunk his canteen of water, and, being parched, the blood so thickened as to form its own protective clot. When the statement is made of labor conferences, "These are graybeards and fathers in Israel; where are the young and coming leaders?" the answer would include Tawney and Hodges. The three members of the commission representing em- THE BRITISH COAL COMMISSION 37 ployers generally are Arthur Balfour, Sir Arthur Duckham, and Sir Thomas Royden. The three coal owners are: J. T. Forgie, R. W. Cooper, and Evan Williams. 1 These three coal owners make, each in his own way, an impression of sincerity and staunch character, with human compassion. The inquiry reveals simply that they, like the miners, are caught in an obsolete organization, functioning creakily in this new century. On the fourteenth day of the inquiry, like the French nobles they died as gentlemen should, with Justice Sankey, of old-world courtesy, officiating at their last rites. One witness said, " I give my opinion without hesitation " ; but he had not yet crossed the zones of fire. To state it in terms made popular by a world war: The heavy emplace- ments were broken by the 1 6-inch gun of the miners' presi- dent. There was no brushing away the plump of those shells. Then followed the clean long-distance hits of the middle- calibered Hodges gun, carefully aimed, effective at any range. Herbert Smith wheels up about once every eight hours a short, squat howitzer, which rumbles in heavy Yorkshire till it has cleared its throat, then drops a single fat charge, messing the whole landscape, and retires for the day still smoking and grunting. Sidney Webb is the machine-gun, shooting three sharp- nosed ones before the first has sunk into soft flesh a rat-a- tat-tat which mows down everything in sight, with a bright, eager innocence. Smokeless and well-camouflaged, it seems to say, " I am only a little one, and I wouldn't hurt a fly." Tawney isn't a big gun at all. He is the song the sirens sang, that wooed ships to the rocks. He is the pied piper that leads astray. With rumpled hair and the boyish charm of Will Irwin, he lures the witnesses to a Peter Pan chase in the forest far away from their safe home and " Now you are lost," he says. Then he smiles up at Sir Leo Money, 1 Later, the places of Sir Thomas Royden and Mr. Forgie were taken by Sir Allan Smith and Sir Adam Nimmo. 38 THE YEAR that lonely sniper in a tree who picks out the fat heads and cracks them. By the time the tired business man or tangled statistician has received the attentions of labor's Big Six, he is carried away on a stretcher while the half-dozen kindly non-combat- ant financiers, across the table, look distressed, and either Mr. Balfour or Mr. Cooper rushes forward, too late, with a bandage and a stimulant. They had not expected to attend a slaughter. Then Mr. Justice Sankey with the Olympian in- difference to the presence of death of a General Headquar- ters Staff, calls, " Next." The collapse of the coal owners' witnesses was best de- scribed by Mr. Alexander M. Thompson of the Daily Mail: First comes Mr. Smillie, who glares at the poor gentleman from under his shaggy eyebrows like a Yorkshire terrier looking for a nice fat part to get a bite at. There is Mr. Hodges, the terrier's young apprentice, who, whenever his turn comes round, gets his teeth in playfully but usefully. There is Mr. Herbert Smith, bluff and burly, bull-dog type, who does not intervene much, but, when he pounces, sticks. Next sits Mr. Webb, of the suave smile and velvety voice, a fox in lamb's clothing, who purrs on the witness till he has hypnotized his suspicions and then proceeds to snap bits out of him. Mr. Tawney has the public-school accent, and rumpled hair of the predestined Fabian, and he confuses the witness to the verge of distraction by running round and round him, as if looking for a chance to spring at the back of his calves. Finally there is Sir Leo Chiozza Money, black and white, sharp as a needle, with painfully visible teeth, who gets very angry and snarls most fearsomely. Altogether the wtiness has a nasty time. He begins usually with a very self-satisfied air an air of " I've-not-come-to-argue- I'm-telling-you." He oozes facile economic platitudes and looks round for applause. But he doesn't utter many words before he begins to sit up and metaphorically jump. Bit by bit he loses his sweet complacency and gets annoyed. Then the pack severely rebuke him, tell him not to lecture, and bait and badger him till he fidgets wrath fully and looks inclined to gibber. THE BRITISH COAL COMMISSION 39 As one of the witnesses for the coal owners said: We haven't prepared any case. We have come prepared to answer your questions. And the past of these witnesses fluttered into the King's Robing Room like the forgotten wives of a bigamist. Thus Mr. Webb reminded one that he had once prophesied the ruin of the industry if an eight-hour act was passed, but that the output actually equaled under the act what he had said it would be without the act. Over all the conferences presides that spirit of keep-your- shirt-on which is a national characteristic. The authentic voice of Britain spoke when (with 800,000 men voting a strike) Sir Arthur Duckham queried, " Is there any real un- rest in the coal-fields or does friction exist only in this room?" Just so I saw bored British officers adding up ac- count books in Ypres (on November i, 1914, the " first bat- tle of Ypres ") when eight-inch shells were breaking in the city. The unrest that created the Coal Commission is buried deep in more than a century of suffering. It dates back to days when miners were slaves, bound to their pit for a lifetime. It passed on to the little children who spent their childhood in darkness at hard labor. It came through fiercely during the War. In the early months of the struggle, 300,000 miners volunteered with an eager patriotism. They volunteered in such numbers as to limit seriously the supply of coal. Then came the revulsion of feeling when some of their overlords conducted business as usual. It is well reported in the words of Vernon Hartshorn, miners' agent in South Wales, and member of the executive of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain. On November 27, 1916, he wrote : i Our experience of the desire of the coal owners to make undue profits at all costs while the nation has been at death grips with the enemy has resulted during the War in the feeling of the mass of the workmen towards the owners hardening into positive hatred and contempt. In normal times it will be as impossible . for the 40 THE YEAR miners and coal owners of the South Wales coal-fields to work together on the old lines as it will be for the Entente Powers ever to resume relations with Prussian militarism. With the War ended victoriously, with the least danger of injury to the export trade of the last two generations, the miners pressed their case for redress. So Mr. Lloyd George had Parliament set up this Coal Commission. Many commissions have come and gone, in a hundred years, with nothing left of their findings except fat bluebooks in the northwest aisle of the British Museum, where young Fabians come and browse. Several governments have turned hot agitation into tired minutes, and, smiling, put the ques- tion by. In fact, there has been no better device by which embarrassed cabinets could evade action and satisfy an angrily buzzing electorate than to call a royal commission, sitting for six months, with a gentle body of recommendations which come so long after the uproar that no one remembers that any commission has sat with the patience of a hen in the barn-loft. In this way has been built up the literature of the British social revolution. H. G. Wells' young friend, Frederick H. Keeling, who fell in France, found it "a great sensation to feel the stream of British bluebooks flowing through one's brain." But the effects of the radical mind working through a royal commission, though far-reaching, were slow. What was immediately needed with a million miners about to strike was not a nugget of radicalism for Graham Wallas' next book, but a policy, swiftly enacted, for a basic industry. So these innovations were made: 1. This commission was made statutory. "A royal com- mission would not answer the purpose," said Mr. Lloyd George ; " it would not have the necessary powers. We have decided to have a statutory commission with authority of Parliament behind it, with the same power as now rests in a court of justice." 2. Its findings on wages and hours become law, instead of (in the words of Bonar Law) "making reports which in THE BRITISH COAL COMMISSION 41 ordinary circumstances might be put in the waste-paper basket. We are prepared to adopt the recommendations in the spirit as well as in the letter." x 3. On other commissions, impartial persons had been se- lected from the governing class, men committed to " private enterprise." Mr. Smillie insisted that equally impartial per- sons in equal numbers should be selected from groups whose economic theories were not based exclusively on the 1830 school. In short, there is no such thing as an impartial per- son, therefore hold the balance even. 4. The wide area of the terms of reference. In a study of the coal trade (in Tracts on Trade) made in 1830, the statement appeared: The coal owner receives twelve shillings and ninepence. This sum he receives to remunerate him for the labor and capital employed in winning the colliery, to insure him against the risk of the accidents attendant upon this hazardous trade (such as the vicissitudes of explosions and inundations). Such impertinent and extraneous questions as the effect of those expensive " explosions " on the lives of the miners have in this commission intruded into the conference. The trade is now regarded as " hazardous " for the miner as well as for the money. Those old-time commissioners used to be rebuked by wit- nesses, when the commissioners overstepped the terms in which a great landholder or industrial captain should be inter- rogated. Such matters as wages and the personal habits of workers were proper. But profits were not the concern of the community or the Government. For instance, in the Report of the JSelect Parliamentry Committee on Coal (1873) we read: Your committee have not entered into an examination of the profits of colliery proprietors since the rise in prices. 1 Mr. Lloyd George rejected the findings of the Commission on na- tionalization. Almost the entire labor movement has pledged itself to "compel" the Government to enact those findings. 42 THE YEAR But they accepted unsupported statements from coal own- ers of the miners feasting on champagne and making a pound a day. In that Parliamentary committee of 1873, the owner was asked, "If it is a fair question, what were your profits ? " The owner felt it was not a fair question and did not answer it. Those were days before the Webbs, the Ham- monds, Charles Booth, and Seebohm Rowntree had educated Britain. So we find the 1873 committee reporting : As no standard can be laid down to fulfil the conditions of health, social comfort, or moral existence, it must be left to the general feeling of the workmen, improved by education, to pre- scribe the proper limits for their labor. Never has so much of mere human stuff entered into the consideration of important officials as in this 1919 Coal Com- mission. Bonar Law summed its work of the first fortnight as : "A bigger advance at one time by far towards improving the conditions of the men engaged in industry than has ever taken place." What is that advance ? 1. An Easter egg present of $35,000,000 in back pay. 2. " Seven hours " of work underground. 3. Six hours in 1921 "probably." ("Probably" is the official word in the report.) 4. The distribution of an additional sum of $150,000,000 as wages among the colliery workers (2 shillings a day). 5. Voice in management. 6. Condemnation of "the present system of ownership and working." 7. Raises the standard of living, shortens the hours of work, and converts into responsible public servants 1,100,000 men and youths employed in 3,300 mines (comprising with their families between four and five million persons one- ninth of Great Britain). In 1913, the 1,100,000 miners received 82 a year (about $400). With the cost of living increased by 115 per cent, their wages have gone up to 169 a year, which was an in- crease of 106 per cent. To this 169 a year is now to be THE BRITISH COAL COMMISSION 43 added about 27 a year, making 196 a year (about $650, at present exchange). A seven-hour day will mean that the men are underground, taking the average, 7 hours and 39 minutes. Small wonder that the representative business men of the commission have ordered these improvements; $650 is not extravagant pay for the father of a family. Seven and a half hours of some of the hardest and most dangerous work in the world is enough. What was the evidence that swung public opinion against " private enterprise " in mining? 1. Royalties paid to the owners of the soil (who do not own the mines or work them) are $30,000,000 a year. A pure " property " tax at the expense of the miner and the con- suming public. Steadily it was emphasized that on every ton of coal, on every article of manufacture, " there was," in Mr. Webb's words, " a tribute due to property, exclusive of any service rendered to the article." 2. Profits for 1916 were $185,000,000. 3. In June, 1918, 2 shillings sixpence a ton added to the price of coal to lessen the loss to weaker collieries, thus en- hancing the profits of the prosperous collieries ; an instance of " economic rent." The coal controller tacked on this figure at a guess. Sir Arthur Lowes Dickinson, chartered account- ant, Government witness, in answer to Mr. Webb said, " If profits had been pooled it would not have been necessary to put prices up." 4. The need for pooling of wagons. 5. The need for the sinking of new shafts and improve- ment of old ones. 6. A divisional inspector of mines said he " had been down into pits where the roads were very low and inconvenient, and he had told the managers they ought to have bigger roads and bigger tubs." But they usually said they " could not do it and make a profit." When asked if this implied that if they got greater produc- tivity, and the nation got more coal, they would get less profit, the witness replied it was so. 44 THE YEAR Sir Richard Redmayne, chief inspector of mines, the head of the Production Department of the Control of Coal Mines, technical adviser to the controller of coal mines and chairman of the Imperial Mineral Resources Bureau, said: That the present system of individual ownership of collieries is extravagant and wasteful, whether viewed from the point of view of the coal-mine industry as a whole or from the national point of view, is, I think, generally accepted. This is a some- what daring statement, but I am prepared to stand by it. It conduces to cut-throat competition between owners selling coal, and is preventive of the purchase of materials necessary for the carrying on of the separate enterprises at prices favorable to the coal owners. Advantages which would result from collective pro- duction would be (a) enhanced production; (b) diminished cost of production; (c) prevention of waste. These advantages, he explained, would be due to the fol- lowing factors: (1) Prevention of competition, leading to better selling prices for exported coal being secured. (2) Control of freight. (3) Economy of administration by curtailment of managerial expenses. (4) Provision of capital, allowing of quicker and more expen- sive development of backward mines. (5) More advantageous purchase of materials. (6) Reduction of colliery consumption. This is very high in some mines. The average for the United Kingdom is 6 per cent, and the consumption altogether about 16 million tons. (7) More harmonious relations between the workmen and the operators, due to steadier work and adequate remuneration of workmen. (8) Obliteration to a great extent of vested interest and of mid- dlemen. From the collective production of essentials it is a very small step to collective distribution. This would hit hard at the middleman, who is a serious item in the cost to the consumer. (9) Unification of the best knowledge and skill, leading to greater interchange of ideas and comparison of methods. If good THE BRITISH COAL COMMISSION 45 results were obtained at one mine and bad in another, these results would be open for all to benefit therefrom. He added that he had approached the whole question from these points of view the greatest possible production of coal at the least possible cost with the greatest possible safety, the health of the workmen with the highest standard of life, and an increasing standard of life. It was a great mistake to sup- pose that a lower standard of efficiency followed a higher standard of comfort. Mr. Smillie then questioned Sir Rich- ard Redmayne : The miners love their children as much as other people? I have known cases of families, orphaned by mining explosions, whose children have been adopted by other miners who have for- gotten who were their own children and who were the adopted children. From your own experience in mining districts do you feel that the time has come when there ought to be a revolution in the housing of the working-class population, especially amongst miners ? As a house is, so is the individual ; as is the individual, so is the state. Have you in Scotland seen houses owned by mine-owners worse than anything you have ever seen in Durham or Northumber- land? I visited one village in particular in Scotland, and I have seen no houses in any part of the United Kingdom comparable in bad- ness to those particular houses. Take it from me that the average earnings of the adult mining population prior to the war were under 253. a week. Is it pos- sible to raise a family in the state that it ought to be kept? It would be hard. Mr. Smillie remarked that a number of mine owners had assisted the Government during the War in various ways. He asked Sir Richard if he believed they had given as honest service to the Government as they gave to their own business. The witness answered yes. 46 THE YEAR May I take it that if the nation take over the mines we might expect the same gentlemen to give the same service to the nation ? I can only express the pious hope that they would. In answer to Frank Hodges (representing the miners), the witness said there were three alternatives to the present state of affairs. One was nationalization; another was ownership by the owners in combination; the third was ownership by owners and workmen. He dared say there was a fourth, which was known as syndicalism, and which meant owner- ship of the mines by the miners. Mr. Smillie, in a series of questions, submitted that thou- sands of lives had been sacrified before mine owners had been compelled to introduce life-saving machinery, such as winding controllers and apparatus for changing air currents. 7. Accidents, John Robertson, chairman of the Scottish Union of Mine Workers, said, killed 55,000 persons in the mines in fifty years. In the last twenty years, 160,000 per- sons were injured each year, or a total of 3% millions. One in every seven is injured each year. " Mining is more deadly than war. The miner is always on active service. He is always in the trenches." 8. Mr. Roberston gave as an instance of housing Hamilton, with a population of 38,000, of whom 27,000 lived in one- or two-room houses. Some of the miners live in some of the worst houses in Britain. With sincere feeling, Mr. Arthur Balfour said, " If the situation is as you describe, it must be put right." Mr. Forgie questioned a witness about the five-days-a-week policy adopted by the Lanarkshire miners, and asked if the Lanarkshire miner was not unpatriotic in so reducing his work. The witness repudiated the suggestion. He declared, " The Lanarkshire miner is not unpatriotic. He gave 14,000 men, at a bob a day, to fight the Germans. He considers that in working five days a week he has done his duty by the State, and people who complain of miners not working more ought to get their own coal out and have five days underground themselves." THE BRITISH COAL COMMISSION 47 9. Better conditions increase production. In Durham there is the greatest profit in Great Britain, and in Durham there is a shorter working day than the present act of the miners proposes. It was alleged that brains and machinery could double the production. Low wages and long hours lessen production. 10. The life of a miner. Vernon Hartshorn said: The miner never gets more than two hours a day of sun. Every movement he makes in his pit clothes leaves its mark. Twelve years I worked so. I would come home so tired that I lay down on the hearth-stone in front of the fire for hours. In the early morning, to be hauled out of bed was like going to the gallows. One man in seven is injured every year. I have seen six men go out from a little home in the morning, and the six, father, son-in-law, and four sons, brought back charred corpses at eve- ning. Men are blown to pieces. The miner can never ask for an armistice. The miners will no longer consent to be regarded as hands, to turn out profits for idle shareholders. They wish to be useful public servants. State ownership is inevitable. Unless the demand for state ownership is granted, syndicalism or bol- shevism will take the place. If this is not conceded at this time, a movement will be under way that will take another form than nationalization. If an increase in the standard of living cannot be obtained, the miners say, " We'll change jobs." In rebuttal, the coal owners submitted: 1. There is a desire to ruin coal owners, and so create nationalization. 2. Machinery exists for dealing with questions of dis- pute. 3. Best management in the world in British coal mines. 4. Success spread by private enterprise. 5. Where will capital come from? 6. Sterilize all the knowledge of the directors of collieries. 7. Would give miners preponderant representation. Mr. Evan Williams said, " Do you think any Government would dare appoint any minister of mines without consulting Mr. Smillie?" 48 THE YEAR 8. The gigantic scale of collective bargaining was given as one of the causes of unrest. 9. Kill the export trade. 10. Put up the price of iron and steel. 11. The good manager will say, "Why should I worry to keep my neighbor going ? " 12. No poverty among the miners. 13. Conditions for them are being improved. If this rebuttal seems meager to the reader, it is not so slim as the case of the coal owners appeared to a visitor at the in- quiry. The Daily News in a special article has expressed it thus: No one who attends its proceedings can help coming away with the impression that it is the mine-owners, and not the miners, whose case is on trial. So skilfully have Mr. Smillie and his colleagues managed the proceedings that they have become vir- tually a labor tribunal, before which the coal owners and mag- nates from other industries have to plead their cause. More than once, especially when Mr. Smillie or Mr. Webb has let himself go, I have been reminded of reports of the proceedings of revo- lutionary tribunals in France or in Russia. No wonder that one employer, at the end of a long cross-examination, remarked, " I am not at all happy." This atmosphere arises largely from the frankly challenging attitude which the miners' representatives are taking towards the existing industrial system as a whole an attitude which is in- creasingly prevalent throughout the world of labor. Mr. Smillie confiscates mining royalties with a wave of the hand; they are, he says, " stolen property." To arguments about the danger to British trade of granting higher wages and shorter hours, the miners reply that the first necessity is that a reasonable standard of life and leisure should be secured to the miner. In short, if the present industrial system will not bear higher wages and shorter hours, they suggest, not low wages and long hours, but a change in the industrial system. This attitude clearly puzzles some of the employers' witnesses. They do not want, they ex- claim, to keep down wages, provided only that they can be assured that trade will not suffer. They cannot understand Mr. THE BRITISH COAL COMMISSION 49 Smillie when he claims that the workers' demand for a reasonable standard of life takes precedence of the " rights of property." " But that is property," said one witness representing the iron and steel trades and he said it with such an air of puzzled finality that there was nothing more to be said. Fighting desperately, but too late, the owning class pressed into the second session of the coal inquiry. The Commission ceased to be a laboratory for the collecting and classification of facts, and became the battleground of angry opinion. Econ- omists, statisticians, owners, Earls, Marquises, a Duke chal- lenged, pleaded, and defied. Frank Hodges, the miner, said to Harold Cox, the individualist, " Your philosophy wouldn't count much against the determination of a million men." All layers of society were probed strata, imbedded in Eng- lish life since Henry VIII. England passed in review : classes and castes. One learned what they look like, how they talk, and what philosophy of possession cheers them. The first session dealt with advances in wages and a re- duction in hours. The second session dealt with the future organization and government of the industry. At the close of the second session, the chairman, Justice Sankey, declared for nationalization of the mines, with a form of joint control. Throughout both sessions, the capitalist system was on trial. It was condemned. The most dramatic, though the least important, witnesses were the noble lords Durham, Dunraven, Dynevor, London- derry, Tredegar, Bute, Northumberland. It is easy to show why Smillie was right in summoning these lords. Their ex- amination was a farce. They were bored or surly. Questions on their titles were absurd. But the fact that they had to come when summoned by a miner was a moral victory. And the word of it ran through Britain. Smillie was the lord high executioner, the judge, the people's man, and in the name of the people had issued orders to the privileged class, which they unwillingly but humbly obeyed. What one felt in the examination was that Mr. Smillie was the gentleman, and that they were just a little caddish. His 50 THE YEAR wider social experience, knowing the many lives of men, his gentleness of conscious power, his sense of equality, letting pass for a man even a millionaire parasite, all these enabled him to be scorned and patronized and outwitted without at all being defeated, or ceasing to be the head of the table. Smillie let them outplay him and wound him, because every blow they dealt him was aimed at the working class, and revealed their animus. So he was defeated by the lords in the King's Rob- ing Room, but won a victory over them in the nation. Their retorts to his simple questions were swift, skilful, at times witty, and scored a brief success with the immediate audience. But when those answers passed out into the larger audience of the nation, it was found that in winning the skirmish they had lost the War. Such a word was Tredegar's when he said that the military service of the soldiers did not entitle them to land. The Earl of Durham is gray-haired, with gray mustache and tight-packed lips; a tall, alert man. He owns the coal under 12,411 acres of land. He takes 5 pence a ton in royal- ties and a penny a ton for wayleave. DURHAM : No one has disputed my ownership. SMILLIE: We are disputing it now. I am trying to be as fair as possible, to examine without bitterness. We allege that no title deeds exist that justify your ownership. The State is the owner. So, one by one, entered and passed the representatives of ancient families: Lord Dynevor, scholarly, pale, shy, with spectacles, stone deaf in the right ear. Lord Dunraven, feeble, on a cane, white hair at sides, and bald top, white mustache, ruddy face. The Marquis of Londonderry, in khaki, with a long head, and a high forehead. TREDEGAR: [Lord Tredegar, over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, reserved, handsome, bald, smooth-shaven, lean a quite royal person] : " I am rusty about titles because I have been four and a half years at war, and haven't gone into family history." THE BRITISH COAL COMMISSION 51 Later: I don't see why service to the country entitles a man to land. SMILLIE: Landlords claim land because the King gave it for services rendered in war. We wish a more equitable division among those who served hi this war. The Marquis of Bute, a small, dark man, like a Latin, with an abundant, lively mustache, shy, and attractive. He was told that he governed more coal than New Zealand. The Eighth Duke of Northumberland is a small, homely, freckled, sincere man. He has red hair, which makes a rusty leakage upon his neck, inset eyes, a red mustache. He is lean, hard-working, with a well-concealed but intense core of mysticism. His mysticism blends religion, royalty, prop- erty. " I shall do my utmost in the House of Lords to oppose nationalization," he said. " The Miners' Federation don't want nationalization of minerals. I think they want complete control of land and all industries." " I am out for taking over land," said Mr. Smillie. " This plea for nationalization," went on the Duke, " is only a step to something more drastic and revolutionary the con- fiscation of land, and so on. I don't think it will stop at nationalization. Joint control isn't the thing." Sir Leo Chiozza Money asked the noble Duke : " What par- ticular service, as coal owner, do you perform ? " " As owner, no service." He further said : " I object to miners having the monopoly of coal." " Is it right for one man to have such a monopoly as you have?" " I think it an excellent thing." To the Duke of Hamilton's agent, Mr. Smillie said : " Just outside the wall of the Duke's palace on the west side are some of the most miserable homes in Great Britain. From the Hamilton estate, a large number of miners went to war from 52 THE YEAR the collieries. This is their country in what sense? The Duke's royalties were defended by miners. Is it not his duty to watch out for miners' families ? " Ways and Means saw most clearly of any paper that every clever answer given by an Earl to Mr. Smillie was a coffin nail in private property, private enterprise, the profits system. Ways and Means is E. J. Benn's organ of concilia- tion, backed by enlightened employers. It said : Peer after peer has been made to confess that he is the owner of a fortune by reason of the foresight of an ancestor three or four hundred years ago. Lord Durham, for example, is draw- ing an income of a thousand a week out of ancient land, most of which was acquired by various means by his ancestors in a long past century. Lord Dunraven is a more interesting case. He is drawing an income from coal secured under common land; the surface appears to belong to the public and the mines to Lord Dunraven. Those like ourselves who are interested to preserve the basis of society and to save this country from the terrors of anarchy and syndicalism will do well to recognize that there is a good deal more behind the cross-examination of these dukes than the mere question of the future of our coal mines. Mr. Smillie, and more particularly Mr. Sidney Webb and Sir Leo Money, with whom he is acting, are engaged in the first serious round of an organized onslaught upon property of all kinds. These mineral rights, wayleaves, and other relics of mediaeval barbarism will be held up to the world as representative of property, and the case having been established for restoring to the public the property in the coal under common lands will, if great care is not taken, be skilfully twisted into the case for robbing the owners of other forms of property, such, for instance, as industrial capital. It therefore seems to us that the interests of industry are very definitely opposed to those of the present owners of land, andj the best way to preserve the rights of capital employed in useful industrial pursuits is to disown any association with dukes and landowners. Here in this second commission, we have God's plenty. Not only do all social classes come stumbling in and plead for lease THE BRITISH COAL COMMISSION 53 of life, but all kinds of knowledge and opinion, the dogmas of the privileged, and the aspirations of the disinherited. Here for sheer competence of fact-knowledge, held in easy mastery and control, we have the incomparable two Sidney Webb and Sir Richard Redmayne. For the delicate hesitations of the academic scientist, we have a group of economists, with opinions tentative, qualified, unready for a choice of action. Workers' control is debated by Hugh Bramwell, Sir Hugh Bell, Frank Hodges, Evan Williams, and William Straker. Lord Gainford states that the coal owners prefer nationaliza- tion to granting any executive control to the workers. Lord Haldane tells the need of educating a new type of public official an administrator, who will find his expression in serving the community. Miners' wives testify to the condi- tions under which they live. On June 6th, with regard to the 112 witnesses who had been called on this particular part of the inquiry, the analysis of the classes of witnesses was as follows: Coal owners, exporters, merchants, and factors, fifteen wit- nesses ; Mine managers and surveyors, five witnesses; Miners and miners' wives, six witnesses; Consumers, on behalf of employers, seven witnesses; on behalf of the workers, three; Scientific economists, twelve; Finance, three; Costing, two; State control and Civil Service, three; Safety and health, six; Mechanical and electrical improvements in mines, three; State ownership abroad, five ; And the most numerous class of witness listened to the royalty owners, twenty-five. The balance making up the 1 12 are miscellaneous witnesses, who cannot be conveniently grouped in any particular class. The New Statesman (June 28, 1919) said : 64 THE YEAR What at present distinguishes the mining industry from most of these other cases is not that it is more inefficient, but simply and solely that the miners are strongly enough organized and determined enough to make the continuance of the present system impossible. As fast as the workers in other vital industries take up the same attitude as the miners, and are strong enough to do so with effect, national ownership is bound to follow as a neces- sary consequence, and Sir John Sankey, or his successors on future commissions, will be bound to recommend national owner- ship as the only way out of the impasse resulting from private capitalist control. But the wisest word on the Coal Commission is that of Mr. Justice Sankey in his final report: A great change in outlook has come over the workers in the coalfields, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to carry on the industry on the old accustomed lines. The relationship be- tween the masters and workers in most of the coalfields in the United Kingdom is, unfortunately, of such a character that it seems impossible to better it under the present system of owner- ship. Many of the workers think they are working for the capitalist, and a strike becomes a contest between labor and capi- tal. This is much less likely to apply with the State as owner, and there is fair reason to expect that the relationship between labor and the community will be an improvement upon the rela- tionship between labor and capital in the coalfields. Half a century of education has produced in the workers in the coalfields far more than a desire for the material advantages of higher wages and shorter hours. They have now, in many cases and to an ever-increasing extent, a higher ambition of taking their due share and interest in the direction of the industry to the success of which they, too, are contributing. The attitude of the colliery owners is well expressed by Lord Gainford, who, speaking on their behalf as a witness before the Commission, stated: "I am authorized to say on behalf of the Mining Association that if owners are not to be left complete executive control they will decline to accept the responsibility of carrying on the industry, and, though they regard nationalization as disastrous to the country, they feel they would in such event be driven to the only alternative nationalization on fair terms." THE BRITISH COAL COMMISSION 55 It is true that in the minds of many men there is a fear that State ownership may stifle incentive, but to-day we are faced in the coalfields with increasing industrial unrest and a constant strife between modern labor and modern capital. I think that the danger to be apprehended from the certainty of the continuance of this strife in the coal-mining industry out- weighs the danger arising from the problematical fear of the risk of the loss of incentive. CHAPTER II ROBERT SMILLIE THE Coal Commission was Robert Smillie. He created it. His miners nominated four of the twelve members and had the " refusal " or acceptance on approval of two more. It was Smillie who demanded that the first findings should be- come law (instead of being gently shelved, as has been the way with royal commissions for a century). It was he who made sure that the questions discussed would include profits. It was he who held the witnesses fronting the costs and gains of the industry in terms of the human welfare of the miners. What can a statistician say when he is asked, " Is it right ? " And what becomes of a coal owner who has his profits ex- posed in one moment, and, in the next, the tuberculous one- and two-room homes in which he houses his workers? The inquiry was outrageous and unfair. What chance had a man who had never been questioned as to his profits, and the ab- sentee incomes of his stock-holding friends who had dwelt in the secure and favoring play of upper-class conditions, where intimate details are not discussed between gentlemen against representatives of the miners whose houses have been visited by welfare committees, whose budgets have been scru- tinized by expert accountants, whose wives have been taught thrift by the resident Duchess? What fair spirit of sport was it to pit an owner who confessed he could not keep order and good-will among a few hundred of his " hands," against a man who had organized 800,000 two-fisted fighting men into an unbreakable brotherhood, a man who inside of three weeks can change an overwhelming strike vote into a greater major- ity for industrial peace? In future inquiries, it will be de- sirable in the interests of fair play that the captains of in- 56 ROBERT SMILLIE 57 dustry shall put forward representatives who are measurable to the labor leaders. Sir Daniel Macaulay Stevenson, ex-chairman Scottish Coal Exporters' Association, chairman of the Committee for the Sup- ply of Coal to France and Italy, member of the Controller of Coal Mines Consultative Committee, and head of the firm of Messrs. D. M. Stevenson and Company, was called: SMILLIE: I suppose you will agree with me that about 80 per cent of the colliery houses in Lanarkshire owned by the mine owners are not fit to live in and ought to be destroyed. WITNESS: I have not seen them lately, but they were a disgrace to any country. SMILLIE: Then they are worse now if you have not seen them lately. WITNESS: I did wonder whether any new ones had been put up. SMILLIE: No. No new ones have been put up. If any new houses are put up, unless there is some government subsidy, they will be out of the reach of the miner with a small family. Would you tell us as a social reformer in what way you are going to improve the conditions of our people if it is not by giving higher wages and shorter hours. That is our method. What is it you propose? Witness appealed to the chairman on the ground that the question was hardly fair. SMILLIE: But you endeavor to get this commission to report against the miners on the ground that it would kill the export trade. Said the Times: There will be no difference of opinion among dispassionate readers on one point, which is that of the three parties concerned the miners come out far the best. Their case was better pre- sented, but it was also a better case than that of the Government or the mine owners. We do not say that the miners' demands are justified in full, but the coal controller's department and the mine owners cut a sorry figure. 58 THE YEAR Ways and Means, E. J. Benn's organ for enlightened em- ployers, said: Any one who takes the trouble to read the case of the miners as explained by Mr. Smillie to the prime minister must agree that there is no answer to it. It is, of course, possible to argue that sudden changes in wages cause dislocation and have effects far wider than those who ask for them probably understand, but that, after all, is only the argument of expediency and does not affect the bare justice of the case. Mr. Smillie shows that the miner, upon whom the whole of industry depends, has hitherto lived a life of great hardship on a poverty wage, and he is not prepared to continue on those terms. It is as well that these root facts should be recognized and that it should be generally understood that very radical changes must be made. To this extent we are all with the miners. It is important that the American reader should get Smillie into his mind, because the knowledge will make present hap- penings and the events of the next five years intelligible. Robert Smillie is the spear-head of the British labor move- ment. Let me briefly introduce him in picture-postcard fashion : PUBLIC LIFE 1. Has helped to build up the strongest industrial union in the world (800,000 miners). 2. Was head of it. 3. Was head of the strongest industrial combination yet made, one and a half million men of the miners, railwaymen, and transport workers the Triple Alliance. 4. Is the most powerful labor leader in Great Britain. 5. Has been three times offered a governmental position. 6. Member of the statutory government Coal Commission, whose findings became law. 7. Forced the government to appoint half the members subject to the miners' approval. 8. Obtained for his miners the largest single wage increase in amount ever granted in Europe. 9. Ended the system of private ownership of minerals in Great Britain. ROBERT SMILLIE 59 PERSONAL LIFE 1. Was born in Ulster, 63 years ago. 2. Came to Scotland as a lad and has lived there ever since. 3. Began work in a shipyard on the Clyde at the age of fourteen. 4. Became a collier at sixteen years. 5. Supported a family of six in the year 1888 on 16 sh. 6d. a week. 6. Is a Socialist. 7. Can not be bought by money, or place, or flattery. 8. Has great prestige to-day in Britain, but will destroy it to-morrow if he sees an uncompromising unpopular course to steer which he believes will bring a democratic gain. 9. Has taken part in many commissions of inquiry into serious mining accidents fires, explosions, floodings. Has gone into many pits for examinations. 10. Takes his relaxation with an old pipe and a game of billiards. 11. Has seven sons two of whom went into the army, two were conscientious objectors, three worked in the mines. One is now a shop steward. Speaking for the old order, Viscount Esher writes a book, After the War, and addresses it to Robert Smillie (instead of to the public) because " he represents and leads the most advanced sections of the Labor Party." He says : I have not the honor to know you, but here in Scotland they say you are an honest and good man. Your aims I assume to be pure. You have enjoyed the experience of intelligent par- ticipation in improving the lot of your fellow- workers. You see before you, stretching into immeasurable space, a new prospect for those upon whom the labor of the world has fallen heavily. Your sense of duty impels you to take a lead in bringing into relation your considered opinion and the law of the land. You wish, perhaps in arbitrary fashion, to supply the driving force that is required to bring about political and social change, that you believe to be beneficent. I do not share your faith in democracy as a form of government. But we agree in love of our country and fidelity to the men of our race. For their sake, use your influence, to bid your friends and associates pause at 60 THE YEAR the threshold of these undetermined issues, and to make sure before sweeping away any institution deeply rooted in historic soil that it is in truth an obstacle. And later, Esher added : " An eminent authority expressed surprise that the prefatory note should have been addressed to a person of whom he had never heard. He has heard of him now. I selected Mr. Smillie as being, so far as I could judge, the leader of the new democracy into whose hands the supreme control of the destinies of our country was about to fall. I see no reason to change my opinion." Speaking for the Liberals, the Nation said : There are only two personalities in the British trade-union movement to-day round which legend grows and flourishes. One is Mr. J. H. Thomas; but Mr. Thomas suffers as a legendary figure from making too many speeches for much of him to remain unknown. He is a personality, beyond a doubt; but his force depends upon constant expression. He is a powerful speaker, and an extraordinarily able manager of men; but no one, except perhaps Mr. Garvin, could think of him as a " hero." Robert Smillie counts as the biggest man in the labor movement by virtue of just that touch of the " heroic " which Mr. Thomas lacks. He speaks, and speaks well; but his silences count for more than his speech. He has the power of making his presence felt, and exerting his influence, often without doing or saying anything at all. He can do this, not only because, where he does speak, it is usually to the point, but also because his personality can be felt as soon as the man himself is present. What manner of man is this leader of the miners who, holding no official position outside his own federation, has become the real leader of the industrial labor movement in this country? He is a Scotchman, and he still lives, on the mere occasions when he is able to be at home, in a small mining town of Lanarkshire. He approaches all problems first as a miner, and seems as if he widened his view to take in other things by a conscious effort. That effort, however, he almost always successfully makes. Other- wise he could not feel or retain his commanding position not only among the miners but in the whole trade-union world. He ROBERT SMILLIE 61 belongs, of course, to the "left wing," quite apart from any question arising out of the War. He has been, from the beginning, a Socialist, and has played his part in labor politics without los- ing his grip of industrial affairs or his close touch with the rank and file of the trade-union movement. He is not loved by the old school of trade-union leaders, because his conception of trade unionism is essentially active and constructive, whereas they often desire nothing better than to continue in the old rut. He is thus a man of ideals as well as a patient worker for their accomplishment. Those observers who knew only of his newspaper reputation have been surprised at his skill and alacrity in cross-examination on the Coal Commission. He has, no doubt, consciously used his chance for purposes of public propaganda. But, in addition, he has shown an amazing power of asking pertinent and searching questions of every witness. This is no novel development. He has long ago built up a great reputation by his work on other commissions of inquiry, especially commissions on great mining disasters such as the Senghenydd inquiry a few years before the War. He has an excellent technical knowledge of mining and mining law, reinforced by the lessons of a long personal expe- rience. His mind is orderly and logical, and he can be relied on not to lose his clearness of head, no matter how difficult the matter in hand. He knows his job thoroughly, and he never allows his propagandist zeal to get the better of his cautious judgment. He is growing old, of course; and often he gives the impres- sion of being ill and tired. For years he has been constantly overworked endeavoring to deal at once with the affairs of the Scottish miners in Lanarkshire and with those of the Miners' Federation in London. Now he will be fixed permanently in London, and his vigor and power of work should be largely in- creased. His absences in Scotland have always prevented him from taking the place in the administration of the labor move- ment nationally which belongs to him by virtue of influence and personality. In the future he will probably play a much bigger part, not only in the affairs of the miners, but in those of labor as a whole. That he is needed no one can well doubt the labor movement requires above everything the force of a personality strong enough to co-ordinate its isolated groups and infuse it with a clear vision and a common policy. 62 THE YEAR The Observer in a special article says, " One of the great- est barristers of the time has said that Robert Smillie's cross- examinations have been brilliant." Speaking for the landed Tories, the Morning Post says, " Unquestionably the two most powerful figures on the Coal Commission are the chairman, Mr. Justice Sankey, and Mr. Smillie, the dour, sour, and moody, but very able leader of the miners." Benjamin Talbot, of the National Federation of Iron and Steel Manufacturers, is on the stand: Mr. Smillie elicited from the witness that the wages of the iron and steel trade were largely regulated by a sliding scale, and that since the outbreak of war wages had been increased 100 per cent, while the working hours were now being reduced from twelve to eight. SMILLIE : Did you ever hear of the wonderful phrase " scien- tific management" in America? TALBOT: Yes. " Scientific management " means the largest possible output at the smallest possible cost? Cost per ton. The smallest possible cost means the smallest wages to the worker? No, they get higher wages in America. It requires four tons of coal to produce a ton of steel. Can you tell me what the royalty on coal is? Sixpence per ton. So that the idle class gets 2sh. out of every ton of steel manufactured. Have you any idea of asking that that burden should be taken off? That is property. Oh, yes, property is sacred, but life is not sacred. You are anxious to prevent miners from having shorter hours and higher wages, because it will ruin the coun- try, while the idle class, who have never been down a mine to produce coal at all, and have never seen a mine, are getting 2sh. for every ton of steel produced. Is that not a burden on the steel manufacturer? Yes, but I say it is their property. You cannot con- fiscate it. ROBERT SMILLIE 63 Well, it is stolen property. That is a matter of argument. Which is the more humane: the abolition of royalties or the granting of better conditions to miners? The humane part, of course, would be the miners. I do not say for a moment that the workers in the iron and steel trade are too well paid, but is it fair to come here and say that your own workers' wages have been increased by 100 per cent and their hours reduced one-third, and then oppose any claim so far as the miners are concerned? Is that altogether fair? Are you happy in coming here? I am not happy at all. You are representing a very large number of share- holders, directors, and people of that kind? Not many directors, but two or three times as many shareholders as workmen. Do you know if any of them have an income of less than 500 a year? I cannot tell. Are there any of them who have an income of 20,000 a year? I do not know. Do you know anything at all about them? I do not know their private affairs. Do you think it fair to keep practically in starvation and housed worse than swine people that you admire? I hope it is not starvation, Mr. Smillie. It has been in the past. It is with amusement that the trade-union world reads of this " discovery " of their leader. They have known for ten years that they had a representative who could match the leaders of any group. And the discovery matters not at all to Bob Smillie, who walks unrecognized to his day's work down Southampton Row, buys matches of the paralyzed sol- dier in front of the Imperial Hotel, smokes his aged pipe, and listens to what the other man tells him. He is still the simple miner, though president of the federation of the " God Al- 64 THE YEAR mighty Miners" the roughest, strongest, merriest of the workers of Britain, who take their pleasures fiercely, not seeing much of the sun. He has given a new set to the labor movement of Britain. He converted his miners to nationali- zation, preached workers' control, and yet steered them clear of the syndicalist myth. He won the eight-hour day for them, has just won the seven-hour day, and by 1921 will have for them the six-hour day. He is a hater of war who can silence a mob, and who is believed in by the largest following any labor leader has yet had. The Herald says : You see these things as Smillie sees them, quick and vivid, and anger rises in your throat at the horror of perils unaverted and the shame of reward unpaid. When he speaks it is as if the inarticulate millions spoke through him. He insists not on the profit or loss of high wages but. on the shame of not paying them; not on the wisdom or unwisdom of good conditions but on the crime of not conceding them. He does not argue he states, and each statement stabs like a sword-point. He asks no mercy and shows none. I think his eyes have always before them the sordid lives and heartbreaking labor of those men in- the dark underground who breathe the fetid air in which horses may not live and men must. I have been told by those who have followed him around in the lodge meetings how a hush falls on the group when he comes in; the little mark of respect of strong men for the greatest leader of their time. The rank and file has had two recent opportunities to register its opinion of Smillie. One was in electing a full-time president; Smillie's majority was overwhelming. The other was in electing representatives for the Royal Coal Commission, men who should determine the policy and future of the industry; Smillie and two men in sympathy with his ideas were chosen. On recent figures, " Bob wishes it" gives a vote of 75 to 90 per cent in favor; "Bob will not like it" totals 90 per cent against. The Weekly Dispatch says: ROBERT SMILLIE 65 In his dress and general appearance Smillie is plain to the verge of shabbiness. In an old gray suit, a heavy top-coat and light felt hat, he presents anything but an uncommon figure. It is only on looking closely into his face that one realizes the great char- acter behind the grim, set face. It is no secret that when public control of the mines takes place Smillie will have a leading part in whatever executive is established. The head of 300,000 transport workers, Robert Williams, writes, " The one man who can above all others inspire us with confidence and therefore direct the storm is Smillie the man with the proletarian instinct." The " unofficial rank and file " movement, which has torn the engineering trades into temporary disarray, helped to sup- ply driving force to the Miners' Federation because their chief was not an isolated official but a humble-minded member of the movement, who keeps in step with the young genera- tion. A writer in Ways and Means (June 14, 1919) says: The feature which commands the homage paid to him is his class temperament and the enduring fealty which springs from it. He has not merely sympathy with the proletariat; he has fellow feeling. He can be trusted implicitly; he is constitutionally incapable of defection. There is one trait in Smillie which the workman most reveres. He has attained to high distinction, has become a power in the land, and still he lives in the little house in Larkhall which was his home in the days when he was an obscure working miner. It is a neat wee house, now his own property, built for about 70 many decades ago by a building society, its original two rooms multiplied by extensions to four as the family after the fashion of miners' families increased to seven or eight children. The house stands in the village street, a clean respectable " row," but unmistakably a " row." Here Smillie may still be met of a week- end, playing the homely host to his multitude of local friends. He signalizes his escape from the Robing Room atmosphere by discarding cigarettes and briars for the plebeian clay pipe, and assumes the garb proper to the miner seated at his own fireside 66 THE YEAR at the close of his day's work the old pair of trousers and vest with the shirt sleeves rolled-up. He is the canniest negotiator on conciliation boards whom the owners have to face. He can outpoint them on knowledge of the industry, and he has an instinct for knowing when to yield and when to hit hard. His alone of the thirty-three great unions of Britain kept its workers clear of the Treasury Agreement of March, 1915, when Lloyd George induced the labor leaders to sign away their power. Again he struck hard in the name of the Triple Alliance when the Government was going to introduce coolie labor. He warned Mr. Asquith, and the cheap labor did not come. With the same skill he accepted the decisions of the Coal Commission and held the miners from striking. His instinct as a trade unionist is greater than his instinct as a politician. His judgment in politics lacks the long ex- perience of his industrial life. So he sometimes takes extreme positions which offend the middle-of-the-way Briton. His at- titude on the War would have wrecked another public man in Great Britain but it did not lose him one follower. He has a curious modesty; perhaps it is timidity. He does not like to enter new activities ; he likes to move in the areas of his proved competence. Thus, he has in time past refused election to the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress. And yet he could have made that body into a fight- ing force, instead of letting it continue year after year a respectable, powerful, useful, but slow-moving group. Mr. Smillie said to me, " Some of the trade-union leaders have thought their function is that of brakeman, to lessen the speed of the movement. But I think that the leader's job is that of stoker, to bring fire and driving power." He has a native gift of simple English that rises to " rugged eloquence," as the Daily Mail says. When he protested against the blockade because it was starving German children, I heard him say, " It was a disgrace for Germany to kill by hellish machines of war our women and children. It is a disgrace for us now to starve the babies of Germany. All ROBERT SMILLIE 67 children are our children. Yea, and I think of the aged peo- ple; the rank and file who are like ourselves." When Smillie forced Lloyd George to act, he said, " The mine owners say, ' We invested our money in those mines and they are ours.' I say we invest our lives in those mines. . . . We say the miner's time should start when his risk starts. . . . When we are burning coal, either in the domestic grate or for steam- raising or for any other purpose, we are really burning the lives of men. As the old song ' Caller Herrin ' says, ' Ca' them lives o' men ' because of the risk in getting it." Burns and Scott, Dickens and Shakespeare, have been his reading. He knew Keir Hardie, and has felt his influence through many years. Smillie is a Socialist of the " left," a member of the Independent Labor Party, an untiring preacher of the new economics. Thus, " I found," he commented, " that we were cutting coal at 10 pence a ton while a certain Duke was drawing a shilling a ton royalty, and making 210,000 a year out of it. It occurred to me there must be something wrong. ..." When a witness at the coal inquiry spoke of the high cost of building a ship being due in large part to wages, and there- fore that the immense profits to shipowners were justified, Mr. Smillie pointed out, " But the wage-earner receives only one chance, and the profits of the ship continue to come." Said a dapper witness, a city man, " Oh, the Miners' Federa- tion and the miners are not the same," and said it with a giggle and a smirk to the side. " The Miners' Federation are the miners," said Smillie, looking straight at the man. He squirmed, blushed, and went silent. One does not contra- dict a natural forc^. Mr. Smillie leans over the table and watches a witness testifying to the conditions in which miners work and live, seeing his own past days. Particularly as he listened to Vernon Hartshorn and to John Robertson (of the Miners' Executive), he seemed to glow till he was incandescent. He gathers himself slowly, his voice husky as he opens his cross- examination, then booming at its height, but always with a refrain in it of sad and bitter experience : something ominous, 68 THE YEAR and yet something tender, in the tone. He is tall and gaunt. His frame is stooped from threescore years of struggle. There is an overhanging quality to him in his position at the table, in his shoulders, his nose, his eyebrows. His face is seamed from early hardship, with a line down the forehead, and the nose, strong and large, slightly aslant. His is the saddest face I have ever seen, but it is rugged. No one is awkward who has no self-consciousness, and there is a rhythm of natural motion to him in every gesture and as he walks. After the first day, no one doubted who was head of the Coal Commission. The pity of it is that he isn't twenty years younger; great power has come to him when he is old and is indifferent to it. The whole personality is full of suffering, and the voice has a cadence of wistfulness, but the man is set in granite, with a fighter's jaw. He talks to premiers as man to man, and no mob has yet howled him down. He is the voice of a million and a half men, and he will be heard. When he is talking quietly along with you, he suddenly sinks into a silence. And then in a moment he will come up to the sur- face out of that deep still pool in which he lives his real life. When I see him, I think of that line of Carlyle's about the inner life of the old warrior king, " a great, motionless, in- terior lake of sorrow, sadder than any tears or complainings." To the miners, Smillie is a symbol of their dark life un- derground, and of their climb to the sunlight and to power. " Bob will not like it," says a miner at a lodge meeting, and the proposal is squelched. There was a meeting where a famous labor leader was making an attack on the miners, because the leader's union had lent money, as yet unpaid, to the miners. Smillie rose from the balcony over the speaker's head, walked to the balcony rail, and said, " What the miners owe, the miners will pay." It was as effective for the flam- boyant orator and the audience as, " I bring you peace with honor." The moral authority of Lincoln or Mazzini was not in the words spoken or the acts achieved. It rested in the deeper and unconscious being below the threshold. So it is not possible to chart the slowly gathering force of Robert ROBERT SMILLIE 69 Smillie, which, day by day, asserts itself increasingly over keen minds like the leaders of industry and the Government experts at the Coal Commission. It has taken him sixty years to burn his way with a slow fire into the consciousness of Great Britain. The moral authority can be very simply ex- plained. He speaks from a deeper level of being than other men. He was fortunate in being born a man of the common people, who would understand him and follow him. He is misunderstood by the " general public," which wishes a facile opportunism. Speaking of tragic things (of 1,200 deaths a year in the mines, of 150,000 accidents) he troubles our lighter moods. But to those that know him by shared ex- perience, his leadership is unshakable. Keir Hardie had the quality of making large masses of men follow his lead be- cause he believed in men, and Keir Hardie is dead. Of the living labor leaders of England, Smillie is most like him. The future is hearer in Britain than elsewhere. It is just over the horizon line. I heard Smillie say to a labor group, " I am hopeful, aged as I am, to see a free electorate. With us are all the best of the thinkers of the country." This sense of a coming emancipation is strong in him. He believea he is leading men in the last charge of all. And with that is the knowledge that he cannot be touched. The day is gone forever when a champion of democracy can be jailed or si- lenced. Smillie is like Debs in his fierceness for justice, his forthright speech. But he lives in Britain, not in America. Some millions of men would rise if hands were laid on him. As they say in Scotland, " The heather would blaze," and out of Scotland and Wales, Durham, Northumberland, and the 3,000 mines, a fire would come that would not die down. He carries always this sense of the multitude that backs him and the promised land just ahead. Toward the end of March, 1920, the cable brings word that Smillie has resigned from the presidency of the Miners. But, living, he can not remove his personality and influence from the movement. And not even death would undo his work, nor utterly quench the forces released by his prevail- ing will. CHAPTER III THE NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL CONFERENCE FEBRUARY 28, 1919 YESTERDAY the peace parliament of employers and workers convened by the British Government met in the Central Hall. Five hundred workers were present and three hundred em- ployers. The workers represented general workers, the Triple Alliance of miners, transport workers and railway men, the engineering trades, shipbuilding, cotton, and also those trades which have been gathered in under the Whitley council scheme. Of the Whitley councils Sir Robert Home, the new Minister of Labor, said, " The great positive reform to which one looks with the most hope for the prevention of industrial disputes in the future is the scheme which Mr. Whitley's committee submitted to the country not long ago. There can be no question at all that the whole move- ment of modern life is in favor of the workmen being al- lowed some share in the control of industry in future." But it was noticeable at this parliament of producers that the Triple Alliance brought in its own separate proposals, and that the Amalgamated Society of Engineers refused to be bound by any action taken at this conference. The Whitley councils, in other words, while they have al- ready been set up in twenty-six organized trades and are about to spread out over twenty-four more, so that already they are covering the working activities of two and a half million persons, have nevertheless failed to prevail in the storm centers of the industrial world. They have not taken hold of the miners, railway men, shipbuilders, engineers, and TO NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL CONFERENCE 71 cotton spinners and weavers. Conciliation has only been ac- cepted as the necessary climate of these next months in those smaller occupations which are not the pivotal industries of Great Britain. The conference may be the result of a suggestion which Mr. Clynes has been pushing ardently in recent weeks for what he calls an industrial council a council of all the trades employers and unionists. It will be seen that this gathering together of all producers in industry amounts to a super- Whitley council. We have the shop committee, the works committee, the district council, the joint standing national council in the given industry which has come in under the Whitley scheme, and now finally we have this collection of all the trades which have come in under that scheme. Thus gradually some sort of organization is being attempted in the industrial arena, comparable to the organization of the State for matters political. The resolution passed by the conference reads : That this conference, being of opinion that any preventable dis- location of industry is always to be deplored, and in the present critical period of reconstruction may be disastrous to the interests of the nation, and thinking that every effort should be made to remove legitimate grievances and promote harmony and good will, resolves to appoint a joint committee, consisting of an equal num- ber of employers and workers, men and women, together with a chairman appointed by the government, to consider and report to a further meeting of the conference on the causes of the present unrest and the steps necessary to safeguard and promote the inter- ests of employers, workpeople, and the state, and especially to con- sider (i) questions relating to hours, wages, and general condi- tions of employment; (2) unemployment and its prevention; and (3) the best method of promoting co-operation between capital and labor. As industry draws nearer to organization and a constitu- tion, it is interesting to see its constituent parts. Those in- vited to yesterday's meeting were: 72 THE YEAR (1) ALL JOINT INDUSTRIAL COUNCILS. These bodies, which are created in pursuance of the Whitley scheme, are established only in industries in which both the employers and the workpeople are well organized in their respective associations, and they consist of equal numbers of representatives of associations of employers and trade unions. They cover 26 industries. (2) ALL INTERIM RECONSTRUCTION COMMITTEES. These com- mittees have been formed in industries where, owing to various reasons, progress towards the formation of joint industrial coun- cils has been slow. They also consist of equal numbers of repre- sentatives of associations of employers and trade unions, and they cover 35 trades. (3) ALL TRADE BOARDS. These are composed of representatives of the employers and workpeople, with several nominees of the minister of labor. Their primary function is the fixing of legal minimum rates of wages, but they also deal with industrial condi- tions generally. They number 13. (4) THE PARLIAMENTARY COMMITTEE OF THE TRADES UNION CONGRESS. This represents more than 4,000,000 members of British trade unions. (5) THE PARLIAMENTARY COMMITTEE OF THE SCOTTISH TRADES UNION CONGRESS. This represents about 250,000 members of Scot- tish trades councils, Scottish sections of British trade unions, and trade unions with a wholly Scottish membership. (6) THE GENERAL FEDERATION OF TRADE UNIONS. This repre- sents about 800,000 members of trade unions federated mainly for financial purposes. Most of the unions are also affiliated to the Trades Union Congress. (7) THE NATIONAL ALLIANCE OF EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. A body formed at the end of 1916 to promote co-operation of em- ployers and employed for the welfare of the workers and the efficiency of industries. (8) THE FEDERATION OF BRITISH INDUSTRIES. This organiza- tion comprises over 800 individual manufacturing firms and about 170 trade organizations, representing over 16,000 firms in many trades. It was formed since the outbreak of the war to promote the interests of the manufacturing industry, and it is allied with the British Empire Producers' Organization, the British Imperial Council of Commerce, and the British Manufacturers' Corpora- tion. NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL CONFERENCE 73 (9) EMPLOYERS' FEDERATIONS AND TRADE UNIONS COVERING THE FOLLOWING TRADES: Coal-mining, iron and steel, engineering and shipbuilding and ship-repairing, cotton, boot and shoe, railways, docks, and other transport, printing, explosives, lace, tinplate, heat- ing and domestic engineers, and general workers and women workers. Among the eight hundred delegates it was impossible to discriminate between workers and employers, except for " Bob " Williams in a class-conscious flannel shirt and muffler. Sir Allan Smith, president of the Engineering and Employ- ers' Federation, might have been taken by a visitor from Mars for a pale, intense, sincere Clyde revolutionary. And the traveler from New Zealand would have selected Thomas, Brownlie, and Stuart-Bunning as millionaire proprietors, shrewd, far-seeing, conscious of power. Yesterday, just across the street from the Central Hall, Princess Pat was being married. A large crowd was outside the Abbey as the delegates emerged from the grim debate; and Princess Pat appeared, a princess no longer, having stooped to a union with the second son of a Scottish earl instead of mating with the son of a royal house. It was the final gesture of royalty, coinciding with the advent of the workers to a share in power. II The first half of this chapter is left with the date line and the text as it was then written. So, a truer picture (moving picture) of changing events is given. The conference was born in hope. An excellent report was issued by the sub- committee. It will be found in the Appendix. And a strong statement was made by the trade-union half. This also will be found in the Appendix. But of results the summer saw none. Labor began to suspect that the conference, like the Coal Commission, was one more of Mr. George's flashing improvisations a way of getting rid of difficulty by post- ponement 74 THE YEAR In October the trade-union side of the Provisional Joint Industrial Committee issued this statement: Apart from the proposal to form the National Industrial Coun- cil, the most important of the recommendations unanimously agreed to by the employers and Trade Unionists were those deal- ing with hours of labor. It was agreed that a Bill should be introduced, laying down a maximum 48 hours' week, with provi- sions under strict safeguards for variation of the hours in either direction, and that this Bill should " apply generally to all em- ployed persons." This recommendation, together with others, was unanimously accepted by the Second Industrial Conference, which met on April 4th. The whole time between April and now has been spent in a vain endeavor to get the Government to accept these joint pro- posals. The main difficulty has arisen in connection with the Government's desire to exclude altogether from the Hours Bill certain classes of workers, of whom the most important are agri- cultural workers, seamen, and supervisory workers. Apparently this Industrial Council is to fade. But indus- try immediately and imperatively needs some sort of func- tional representation. The Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress is too feeble a body. A careful Government study of the Whitley councils, as now operating, will be found in the Appendix. It will be seen that they are serving a purpose in establishing wages and hours. "A case a very real case can be made out for them in the matter of wages and hours/' said J. J. Mallon (in November, 1919). But they have not functioned in "workers' control" to any such extent as the creators of them hoped. 1 Such per- sons as Mallon, J. A. Hobson, and F. S. Button fashioned them to be a training ground in responsible administration of working conditions, the processes qf production, " discipline and management," the allocation of raw material. Instead of 1 The Builders' Parliament has been the finest flower of the Whitleys as well as one of the roots from which they sprang. The Builders' Report will be found in the Appendix. NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL CONFERENCE 75 expanding in these directions, the councils have tended to concentrate on wages and hours. They have been tardy in forming District Councils and Workshop Committees. In certain instances, they have left all the stiffer work to the old Conciliation Boards, and have regarded their own function as a sort of welfare committee. In other instances, such as the Woollen Board, the vital questions have been handled by a group outside the Whitley council in which the workers were a minority and steadily voted down. In other instances (such as the Packing Case Makers and the Bakers) one side or the other has at least, temporarily withdrawn. For all that, sections of labor have found a redress in Whitleys which they never knew before. The fair-minded student will give them at least two years more of experimen- tation, before ruling them out as impotent. They are now serving as slightly improved Conciliation Boards. If the Whitleys survive, they will demand an all-inclusive body, to tie together their activities. They will demand some such body as this half -realized Industrial Council. Harold Laski (in Chapter I, Section 7, of Authority in the Modern State) writes: Provision must be made for some central authority not less representative of production as a whole than the state would represent consumption. There is postulated therein two bodies similar in character to a national legislature. The extremist view is always of value in shapening the issue. Mr. Tom Mann, secretary of the Amalgamated So- ciety of Engineers, was quoted in the Daily Express of No- vember 14, 1919: I do not want to attack Parliament. It is too silly a game. When we have in our own hands what we want, Parliament, so far as I am concerned, will be welcome to go on dealing with what is left over. Do not forget that we are 90 per cent of the crowd, and when we get going Parliament will be left high and dry. My type of man does not expect to see any parliamentary insti- 76 THE YEAR tution improved. I am in agreement with those who contend that Parliaments, as we have known them, have served their purpose. Present-day evolutionary developments in industry demand at least the supersession of the existing sectional trade unions, and the recognition of the fact that for concerted action to be really effective the whole field of a given industry must be the area on which action must be taken. Our power, when it is obtained, would be primarily one of organization, and in many instances that would manifest itself at the discussion table, and the manifestation would suffice. If not, organization by industry implies a co-relation of all such in- dustrial organizations with a common understanding among all workers in the country. I am not anticipating anything in the nature of a big crash. There would not be much chance for any alternative policy by the time our organization was complete. National Industrial Council, the Whitleys, the Parliamen- tary Committee of the Trades Union Congress, are all part of the one problem: How shall the forces of production the trade unions as they become all-inclusive of the workers function through a central authority? Industry has been a lawless affair in Great Britain. The trade unions have grown in power until they include in their ranks over 60 per cent of all wage-earning men. Keeping step by step with this growth in numbers has come an in- creasing consciousness of power. It is the power of pro- ducers. But unfortunately the modern State has only worked out its machinery for the representation of consumers. As a result the worker has had to act lawlessly outside the channels of government. Thus, the bankers and business men have formed their local Soviets, known as Chambers of Com- merce, and through them have brought pressure to bear on Parliament. Similarly, when Mr. Robert Smillie, representing the Federation of Miners, numbering 800,000, wanted to get something done he did not go to his parliamentary represen- tative. He went and called on the Prime Minister and got it done. NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL CONFERENCE 77 The employers had become as anarchistic as their employees and many of them were speaking of the business or factory "as my business, my factory." These employers had gotten the idea that both the worker and his work were a com- modity to be bought and sold in the open market. They failed also to realize that the product when finished by the factory did not actually belong either to the so-called owner nor yet to the workers, but that it is the product of the community, on which the first charges to be levied are those for the labor spent in its creation, both of hand and brain. The year 1913 and the first half of 1914 saw these two lawless forces of employer and employed marching up ever closer to a battle which would have tied up England, would have destroyed the power of production and lessened the na- tional income. Then came the War, and with it a great wave of patriotic feeling on the part of the workers. So keen were they to help that they signed away the rights and pro- tections which it had taken them a hundred years of struggle to create. The employers were able to temper their own patriotism with a due measure of self-regard and obtain the right to an increased profit of 20 per cent over the piping days of peace. The workers responded to this class con- sciousness on the part of the great owners with the Shop Stewards' movement and the ever-growing demands for workers' control. As Frank Hodges, secretary of the miners, says: A careful and far-seeing statesman would foresee the whole of the possible developments along these lines for the next ten or fifteen years; and he would make provision for creating institu- tions which would give a natural outlet to these desires. So keenly is this aspiration feared by the employing classes that they would willingly declare an armistice in this fight. They have, in fact, offered an armistice in certain industries, and they propose a remedy which will give the workmen some outlet for their de- sires. They come forward with the proposition of Whitley Coun- cils, co-partnership, profit-sharing. A thousand and one schemes are afoot which purport to give the workers some form of con- 78 THE YEAR trol, but which, upon careful analysis, only make them more amenable and more useful in the prolongation of the capitalist system. There can never be any equality, there can never be har- mony (whilst we do not quarrel with individuals), there can never be any real brotherhood existing between those who buy our labor and those who have to sell. But the institutions have not yet been created. CHAPTER IV YOUTH AT THE STIRRUP. THE LABOR PARTY CONFERENCE AT SOUTHPORT [Historically, diplomacy has been the last phase of civil government to yield to democratic control. With the rise of social and economic, no less than dynastic and military, factors in international relations, we are witnessing a shift through- out Europe to what President Wilson called the " counsels of common men." Since the days when a group of British textile operatives sent their message to Abraham Lincoln that they were with the North on the slavery issue, what- ever the effect of the blockade and the stand of the British cotton trade, British labor has groped towards some part in foreign policy. At the close of June, at Southport, the British Labor Party broke the precedents of twenty years in the po- litical labor movement in England, and called on the trade unions to prepare to bring direct action (strikes) to bear on a political issue. That issue was one of foreign affairs self-determination in Russia. What direct action on the British plan means as distinct from revolutionary strikes on the Continent is interpreted in these dramatic debates on nationalization of the mines (political interference with a primary industry) and Russian intervention (industrial inter- ference in political policy). They registered a new stage in the relations of the political and industrial arms of the British labor movement.] THE first annual conference of the British Labor Party since the armistice has built its program for the coming year. The conference moved decisively to the left, but it is a left of 79 80 THE YEAR the British brand. British labor is not a revolutionary mi- nority European sect; it is a great organized group that ex- pects to take over the Government within a few years. It made its fighting issues: 1. To nationalize the mines (as the first step in the na- tionalization of all the great public utilities). 2. To end intervention in Russia, by direct action (of the British brand). This conference was held at Southport that summer city on the western coast on June 25-27. The conference moved to the left because Smillie and Hodges moved it (stated in terms of personality). Or, stated in terms of economic power, it moved to the left because the Triple Alliance drove it Smillie has given the lead to labor, politically and industrially, by his victories in the Coal Commission. And only second to him is the brilliant, moderate young miner, Frank Hodges, who in a speech of five minutes spitted Ben Tillett, the old dockers' leader, who preceded him, and overthrew John Robert Clynes, former food controller, who followed him. Hodges pleaded for direct action (of the British brand) on Russia, and carried the convention by a majority of 958,000 votes. Henderson, through a cold, had lost about three- quarters of his voice, which reduced his volume of tone to that of other delegates. And with the passing of his cast-iron bass, he seemed to have lost a little of his alertness and strategic intuition. He and the others of the Labor Party Executive were ill-advised in not immediately accepting the Hodges statement as party policy. The vote rolled over them as it rolled over the right. And now they must accept it. There is an accent to victorious youth that ought to be recog- nized at the first hearing. The young are not in the saddle, but their foot is on the stirrup. A year ago, in a time of division that split the middle-class parties, Clynes, Henderson, and Thomas represented the heal- ing and concessionary elements which made labor cohere. This year Cramp (with his 450,000 railwaymen), Smillie and Hodges (of the miners) were the forward-pushing leaders YOUTH AT THE STIRRUP 81 behind whom two million out of the three million men repre- sented took up the new lines. When the conference turned to such issues as conscription, Russia, the blockade, the peace treaty, it became clear that so far as the British workers are concerned the War is over. The old wounds dealt and received by " jingo " and " pacifist," " knock-out-blow " and " negotiation " are healing. Indeed that was evident before, at the annual meeting of the trans- port workers, when the scarred warrior, Ben Tillett, made a brave speech calling off his feud against the German people. And the Labor Party now gave great applause to Ramsay MacDonald, for the best speech he has made in five years, when he urged a real league of nations and the acceptance of Germany within it, and the cure for hate, and the healing of the nations. Only one dissentient to an anti-blockade resolu- tion among nearly a thousand delegates was heard the staunch and famous leader of the dockers, James Sexton. But the conference refused to listen to him, and he subsided into that grim humor which carries him through these piping days of peace when he is left stranded on the extreme right the last of the Die-Hards and Bitter-Endians. Then, in the true English tradition, to balance all that thrust and dynamic, the delegates elected, at the head of the poll for the Executive Committee, Sidney Webb, sane, con- stitutional, who works to have the social revolution come as gently as a change of clothes. The British Labor Party has added a half million to its paid membership and now numbers 3,013,129. The trade unions send 2,960,409. There are 389 trade councils and local labor parties, and 4 Socialist societies. The member- ship of the Socialist societies is 52,720; but of that member- ship 80 per cent is trade union. Ben Tillett estimates the trade-union membership of the British Labor Party to be 99 per cent of the total membership. In 1914 the membership was 1,612,147. In the four years of war, the party, instead of splitting like the Liberals, has almost doubled its member- ship. At the recent general election it polled a vote of 2,244,- 82 THE YEAR 945. Its earlier election vote was 505,690. W. H. Hutchin- son, of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, was elected chairman of the party for the coming year. He has a well- balanced trade-union record for a generation. Ramsay MacDonald received forty-six separate nomina- tions, and was unanimously re-elected treasurer. Arthur Henderson remains secretary, the leader of the party. The elements of right, center, and left are so blended in the Ex- ecutive Committee, 1 that all one can say is that it is represen- tative of the entire labor movement. The European right has been waiting for the lead from British labor to quash the Eastern left that takes its inspira- tion from Lenine. And the Italian and French left have been waiting for a strike lead from; the British left. Neither side got satisfaction. British labor agreed to join Italian and French labor in holding demonstrations against Russian inter- vention on July 20 and 21. That is the British substitute. " Demonstrations " meant orderly meetings on Sunday and Monday, as a constitutional release for wrath. On the last day of the conference, a loud-lunged group of ex-soldiers in the gallery bellowed the proceedings to a stand- still till they received the promise that their friend, Bob Williams, should address them on pensions and wages. The episode is one of many hundreds that reveal the state of mind of a type of returned soldier. He demands immediate changes. To get them "he will resort to direct action. The War has imbedded violence in his consciousness. This is a dangerous element in the State; it will require all the tact and the fundamental sanity of the labor leaders to canalize this unruly force. During the War it could be aimed against the enemy; now it is being aimed against institutions, con- ventions, and persons. In private life, it has taken expres- sion in crimes in so large a number of cases that one police commissioner has issued a public warning. Williams is at 1 The women members are Dr. Ethel Bentham, Mary Macarthur, Mrs. Philip Snowden, and Susan Lawrence (a member of the London County Council). YOUTH AT THE STIRRUP 83 this moment busy on a program with the Ministry of Labor to meet the demands of discharged disabled soldiers. It is interesting that the Government has to call on labor leaders of the left to save constitutional government from grave dis- turbance. Labor's vote for direct action on Russia means a series of steps through the Labor Party Executive, Parliamentary Com- mittee of the Trades Union Congress, delegate meeting of the Triple Alliance, the Trades Union Congress itself, and, finally, through the rank and file vote of each union. Labor is well aware that minority action could hold up the business of any government. But the Labor Party does not wish to be scuttled later by its own mutineers. So as it draws near to its day of power, it quits thumbing its nose at authority, and calculates the distant effect of its present action. Such is a summary of the conference. There was nothing wild. But there was profound feeling concerning Russia, a feeling which, should the Government disregard it and con- tinue to send supplies to the anti-Bolshevik generals and admirals, will (not immediately but ultimately) lead to sec- tional strikes. There was a " feeling " that a general election will come fairly soon, and that the miners have supplied a fighting electoral issue in "nationalization." There was a demand for radical leadership, as expressed in the greeting to such men as Cramp, Smillie, Hodges, and Williams. It is in the main the trade unionists who are heading the swing to the left, and not alone the political Socialists (as in the past). But underneath this shift one feels the caution of the British temperament. At least one-quarter of the leaders are of the old wages-and-hours type, to whom swift change is distressing. In addition, there is that immense mass of silent voters who go only as fast as they are convinced. The result will be no sudden political overturn. Election by election the workers will continue to gain seats, till one day the half-way mark is crossed and the balance of political power has passed to them. 84 THE YEAR ii The nineteenth annual conference of the British Labor Party gathered in the Palladium Theater a " palace of varieties " a large modern building with a red-glowing in- terior, which seated delegates on the main floor, and over five hundred visitors in the gallery. The last half hour before the leaders arrived, carpenters and electricians were tinkering with the press tables. A local musician sat at the great organ and filled the building with his music from the Offenbach Barcarole and from Italian opera, submerging us in deep chords. As the delegates gathered, one was impressed by the success of the movement. It is a long stride from the day when labor met in the gloom of the Lambeth Baths. The free gift of the Palladium was one instance, the presence of Southport's mayor in full blue regalia another. J. McGurk, of the Miners' Federation, sought as chair- man to set the keynote by his address, which, like a king's speech, is supposed to be a composite of the responsible beliefs of the full Executive Committee. McGurk is a square, burly, witty Irishman. He would shine in a mass meeting or a small rough-house group; but the present area was slightly beyond his range. He attempted to harmonize differences, but his address rather served to reveal the temper of the conference on Russia, conscription, and direct action. He said: We all deplore the Bolshevist excesses. We all decried the czarist excesses, but the British government did not assist the 1905 revolution by sending men, munitions, and materials to those who were fighting the battle of democracy against autocracy, ... So long as this policy of intervention in Russia is pursued, there can be no question of disarmament, and the alleged need for retaining conscription in this country will remain. If the government counts on being able to bluff the workers indefinitely on these lines, it will be sadly disillusioned. I do not say this by way of a threat; it is a simple and common statement of fact: the workers of Great Britain will not have conscription, and we YOUTH AT THE STIRRUP 85 shall resort to every legitimate means to bring about its with- drawal. In the reception of this passage, it was plain that the chair- man was playing on a live nerve of the majority present. The feeling deepened as he went on: A movement is already afoot to employ the strike weapon for political purposes. This would be an innovation in this country which few responsible leaders would welcome. . . . We are either constitutionalists or we are not constitutionalists. If we are constitutionalists, if we believe in the efficacy of the political weapon (and we do, or why do we have a labor party), then it is both unwise and undemocratic because we fail to get a majority at the polls to turn round and demand that we should substitute industrial action. ... It appears to me to be less likely that they will be ready to give their adhesion to industrial action to enforce political demands and ideas. It would therefore be a misfortune if the movement were to be torn asunder by efforts to force the adoption of the strike policy for political aims. It was clear from the buzz of comment and interruption that the delegates were determined to deal with Russia and direct action. Their repressed feelings began to come through. The liveliness started when the report of the Executive Com- mittee was read. A paragraph told of sending a telegram of welcome to President Wilson. A delegate of the (anti-war) British Socialist Party, William McLaine, protested. He said: President Wilson is the commercial traveler for American capi- talism. It is necessary for him to speak as if he were an idealist, and thus to be used by the Allied imperialists to obtain labor support in their own countries. The old phrases of annexation would not have availed. In America, in President Wilson's own country, Socialists and labor men are in prison, such men as Eugene Debs and Victor Berger. Let President Wilson speak when his house is in order. Labor will do well when it relies on itself instead of on President Wilson. He came into the Wajr 86 THE YEAR when American capital was committed and ready to come. His policy is opposed to that of the working-class. Arthur Henderson here intervened with his note of au- thority : I hope that this debate will not be pursued. When we sent the telegram, we were then hopeful that President Wilson would translate his ideals into terms of the treaty. We sent it in the trust that his ideals might be realized much nearer than they are. It was only a minority of the delegates who were so mis- taken as to believe that Mr. Wilson had acted with hypocrisy. The large majority dismissed the matter in the sympathetic silence given to a well-meaning man who had been outplayed by stronger men. And Henderson's requiem closed the inci- dent. Wilson will not again figure in the deliberations of British labor. No delegate in all the hall applauded his name. A sense of disillusionment in him and in the peace is wide- spread among advanced workers. The same kindliness that covers the Antwerp and the Gallipoli expeditions will surround the sleep of the Fourteen Points. One lasting result the American President has wrought he has altered the vocabu- lary of idealism. At this labor conference, phrases about " open covenants " and " democracy made safe " were scrupu- lously avoided, and the aspirations of the workers were put into pedestrian and realistic words, with the emphasis on ap- plications rather than on general principles. Ideology of language has now been relinquished to the imperialists. One issue became clear. Should British labor use direct action, industrial pressure, the strike, to pull the troops out of Russia? If so, should the Labor Party say so? Or should it be left to the Trades Union Congress ? Should a political ques- tion be settled by the industrial weapon? This is an old and familiar doctrine, but the application of it to the Labor Party is new to British experience. The Executive Committee, in its report, took the ground that if the " British labor movement is to institute a new precedent in our industrial history by YOUTH AT THE STIRRUP 87 initiating a general strike for the purpose of achieving not industrial but political objects, it is imperative that the trade unions, whose members are to fulfil the obligations implied in the new policy and whose finances it is presumed are to be involved, should realize the responsibilities such a strike movement would entail and should themselves determine the plan of any such new campaign." Robert Williams rose from his place as member of the Ex- ecutive Committee of the Labor Party. He is the secretary of nearly 400,000 transport workers, who are sailors, dockers, riverside workers, ship loaders, and vehicular workers. He is a giant of a man, over six feet, in the prime of manhood, with large features big mouth, a jutting nose, a loud voice, and a gift of Kiplingesque language. He wears a drooping tie like a neck-bouquet, and has huge hands. He is the "average sensual man," seen through a magnifying glass, and looks like a super-drummer. In speaking, the touch of charlatan- ism disappears, and the strength that has lifted him from poverty to leadership comes through. He chews his words with vigor and accentuates ch's and c's. He hisses his attacks, bitter and fearless : There are members of the Parliamentary Committee who are more reactionary than the House of Lords. Their action has been a smoke screen to protect the reactionaries of the government. We are told that certain forms of action are unconstitutional. Is the war against Russia a constitutional war? One day that scion of the house of Marlborough, Mr. Churchill, the would-be dic- tator, gloats over the success of the Koltchaks, the Denikines and Manneheims, who seek to crush the Russian workers' republic. And, then, when the Red army wins, Mr. Churchill says, " We're only in a sort of war with Russia." Mr. Churchill has thrown down the challenge, and I am pre- pared to say that at least one million of the pick of the working- class movement will accept his challenge on the maintenance of conscription, and the crushing of a working-class republic. If the leaders don't take action constitutionally, then the rank and file will take action. As a trade union official, I wish no conscription. The government is attempting to get the same power over the 88 THE YEAR workers industrially as in the war. We have a proof in the infamous army circular. [Exposed by the Daily Herald.] But the military cannot be relied on to crush a working-class movement. I am credibly informed that the navy is even less reliable than the army. The police are less reliable than the navy. Let the conference decide whether it is possible to promote indus- trial action for political action to use what our French friends call faction directe. Then followed the demonstration of the three days. A gray, bent man rose in the center of the hall, and acclamation grew till it was a tidal wave. For a moment or two the dele- gates broke into song, while Robert Smillie walked to the front. He came to them from his long battle on the Coal Commis- sion where, with the equal help of Hodges and Sidney Webb, he had won a wage gain and a shortening of hours that give his miners a good life. And more than that he had won; for he had obtained a majority decision in favor of nationalization and workers' share in management, which in the end will make his miners into public servants. He would wrest the minerals from the Dukes and hand the mines over to the com- munity. As the foreign delegates testified, he had given the pace to the labor movement of Europe. The past and present of the man were about him his almost fifty years of strug- gle and his part in the march of labor. He stood a foot away from where I sat. His bent figure and lined face are pa- thetic, but it is not the pathos of failure it is the pathos of the old warrior. " Don't spare 'em, Bob," came a voice from the gallery. Smillie said in part: The Executive Committee has taken the position of every ex- ploiter, capitalist, and politician. What they fear more than any- thing else is direct action. Direct action may be constitutional action. Labor leaders were tied up under the munitions acts and the strike made illegal. The rank and file could only protest. The actions of the trade unions should have been kept free. YOUTH AT THE STIRRUP 89 [Smillie kept the miners free by refusing to enter the Lloyd George Treasury Agreement.] Where do political questions end and industrial questions begin? Politicians say that the nationalization of mines is political, but does the conference condemn the miners who made up their minds they would strike if they did not get nationalization of mines? To me nationalization is a great labor question. Starved and kicked and kept in miserable houses for generations, the miners have been building up fortunes for the privileged class. Are the organized miners not to use the power of their organization to improve their conditions by nationalization of mines? Yea, and our Executive Committee is now congratulating the miners. Is the action of the government constitutional? The present government is sitting through fraud and corruption. They have deceived and lied. Is the labor movement to take no action? But no person proposed a stoppage of work to overthrow the govern- ment. . . . We want to take constitutional means in order to prevent later the taking of unconstitutional means. It will be safer for the trades unions and the Labour Party to meet calmly and constitutionally than to wait until a revolution breaks out in some part of the country, which might sweep from one end of the land to the other. We of the Triple Alliance wanted the whole labor movement to have a voice in deciding the question. The Parliamentary Committee has denied us the right to meet the whole of the trade union movement. So we have called a conference of the three bodies in the Triple Alliance. We would have preferred a wider movement. We do not wish to fight labor's battle sectionally. It is our duty to let the workers know we are behind them. I appeal to the Executive Committee to with- draw this paragraph, because it is a slap in the face to those of us who are working for what we believe to be the rights of the workers. James Sexton replied. Sexton is head of the 50,000 dock laborers. He is the grizzled veteran of many battles for the better condition of the less-skilled and less-organized work- ers. His long years of responsible position have schooled him to patience and the piecemeal gain. He has a constitutional distrust of the radical mind. He has a large forehead with 90 THE YEAR beetling brows over inset eyes. His speech is jerky but forci- ble, given in a rough voice of sincerity. He is respected by labor and possesses a large measure of influence. " Hello, Jimmy, another forlorn hope," said a delegate as Sexton came to the front. Sexton replied: It may be a forlorn hope, but I do not think so. My friend and colleague, Williams, has put the case for direct action. I agree with Mr. Smillie that it is difficult, and sometimes almost impos- sible, to separate political from industrial questions. Is there a man or a woman in the trade union movement who would not take industrial action for the nationalization of the mines? . . . Against conscription no man is stronger than myself. But is there not an easier way of dealing with Mr. Churchill at the next gen- eral election? Four years of good sound agitation [Voice: "How about Russia?"] is better than the risk of civil war. . . . You are letting loose an element now rife in the trade unions which you cannot control. I am a revolutionist of a social character, but I do not believe in letting mad dogs loose. J. Bromley answered him. He is a man in middle life, head of 40,000 men in the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen. In the past his organization has been at odds with the National Union of Railwaymen, but he and Cramp have reached agreement. They and their rank and file are as radical as the miners. Bromley said: I am not going to call men mad dogs. The organized labor movement will have to blend the two political and direct action to save itself from destruction. I compliment the Triple Al- liance on their action. Every one of the government pledges has been broken. Are we to take that lying down? . . . Unless the intelligent and aggressive minority give leadership, the trade union movement is going down in a welter of inaction. . . . The rank and file have backed us in our strikes. Let us show them that we are coming at last. He was followed by W. Brace, M.P., of the South Wales miners. Brace (like T. Richards, McGurk, and Adamson) YOUTH AT THE STIRRUP 91 represents the more conservative element among the miners, just as Smillie, Hodges, Robertson, Straker, Hartshorn, and Herbert Smith represent the majority element. Brace is " a splendid figure of a man" with raven-black hair, big, black mustachios like a benevolent pirate of the Main, and a power- ful physique. Brace regarded the use of industrial action to settle political questions as a " slippery slope," but agreed with Smillie that it is difficult to distinguish between industrial and political questions. He said: The driving power behind nationalization of mines was from organized labor, but to set up the Coal Commission legislative enactment was necessary. It was the political party that set up the statutory commission. These paragraphs in the executive report suggest that the question of direct action should be settled by the trade unions alone. But it should be settled by both the industrial and political sides of the movement. Then Henderson made the second move for the executive and the question was put by, to be fought out when a resolu- tion in the agenda should come up in regular course. It was to return twice more till it was decided. And it was to be decided against Henderson, Brace, Sexton, Tillett, and Clynes, and in favor of Smillie, Hodges, Bromley, Williams. in No labor conference would be happy unless some foreign delegate had been prevented by a government from attend- ing. This time two Frenchmen had been turned back by the French, or the Home Office, or the police. They were Fros- sard and Jean Longuet, the stormy petrel of labor meetings. The conference strongly protested and gave all the more em- phatic applause to Ramsay MacDonald, himself the subject of earlier embargoes, who had recently returned from central Europe. He spoke to a resolution in favor of admitting Ger- many to the League of Nations and the revision of the harsh provisions of the treaty. MacDonald has a personality which 92 THE YEAR appeals to many races and nationalities. It is an international personality, possessed also by Longuet, Vandervelde, and B ranting; Jane Addams has it notably among women. This means that he talks a language understood by humanity, and carries a sympathy which crosses frontiers. Hindus, Irish, and Russians are as much attracted to MacDonald as French and Italians. It " takes it out of him " to speak. A sob broke from him after one of his passages. Henderson is a sincere politician without the artistic touch he persuades and man- ages people. MacDonald carries overtones and moves people. Both men have a quality of healing that banishes hate and division. MacDonald quoted Bolingbroke on the treaty of Utrecht, two hundred years ago : " Each of our Allies thought himself entitled to raise his demands to the most extrava- gant height. They had been encouraged to do this first by the engagements we had entered into with several of them, with some to draw them into the War, with others to prevail upon them to continue in it." The origin of war, said Mac- Donald, was the stupidity of the nations that made peace, and he went on: The iniquitous conduct of Germany against France in 1871 is now being punished. Let it be punished in such a way that there will be no nation, twenty, thirty, or forty years hence, that will rise up and say, " We are going to wipe out the peace of 1919." We could say that if Germany were in our position, she would do worse. I agree that she would. I have never said anything else. Neither in making war nor in making peace am I going to copy militarism. A peace made by Germany never would have been acquiesced in. Another kind of peace is the peace of punishment. Germany must bear the burdens of her acts. That is punishment, but punishment is most effective with a reserve of justice. The man who confuses passion with punishment is not punishing as a judge delivering justice, but as a man destroying his enemy. There is a third peace that settles the problems of Europe and tames those evil passions. There is in Europe a great menace of militarism created by YOUTH AT THE STIRRUP 93 the Scheidemanns and Noskes on the one hand, and the Churchills and Paris conferences on the other. There are still the war-makers old people, with a gouty foot by the fireside, who wish to be heroes and patriots. The League of Nations is the one hope. It is bad as it stands, but we must make it better no longer a league of national execu- tives, but a league of peoples. All our old enemies must be in it. We wish a peace out of the simple heart of man, out of the common experience of man. The old governing order gives way before the simple humanitarian ideas of the common people. They are marching, marching, marching to conquer the land. Over the well-nigh countless graves of Europe the grass is growing. Al- most one can hear the simple soothing murmur of the growing grass, a music rising till the guns are stifled and stilled by it. In our own hearts, in our passions, let it be that peace shall rule. An added proof that the War is over was furnished by the London Times in saying of this speech : " He perceptibly stirred the feelings of some of his hearers. On the whole it was a moderate utterance from such a quarter, and it would probably be endorsed by men of all shades of opinion in the party." On a Thursday afternoon, the stage rilled with friendly visitors from Europe and Asia. McGurk as chairman was gasping for breath in the strange tongues that broke loose at his right and left. The foreign delegates made clear seven things : 1. They voiced the desire for a working-class International. 2. They expressed the wish that England should give the lead to the social movement of Europe. (This appeal to England as the pace-setter is from the elder constitutionalists of the Berne conference, like Branting, who look to Henderson and Stuart- Bunning to keep a steady keel without tipping to the left. It is equally felt by the unrepresented left of Italy and France, who wish the younger blood of England to shake loose from the step by step methods, and indulge in a revolutionary semi-Russian program, looking toward a new International of the Moscow order.) 94 THE YEAR 3. They gave assurance that the Coal Commission had rever- berated throughout Europe and heralded a new social order. The European movement has been stimulated by the miners' victory. 4. They demand that Britain should join Italy and France in demonstrating against Russian intervention. 5. They testified that the international labor movement is the nucleus for a league of peoples. 6. They testified that the paramount need is for peace, bread, and work credits and raw material an end of the twenty-three wars now raging. 7. Unconsciously they revealed sadness, almost despair. Some of them are surrounded by chaos and look ahead to bankruptcy and disaster. Europe is falling to pieces, and looks to England for help and stability. One speaker advanced like a priestess. Annie Besant has returned to her own, after her twenty-six years in India, where she has traveled far toward the " dweller in the inner- most." Wherever she goes, dusky, turbanned Hindus guard her. She has had a hand in three deep-reaching insurgencies. Far back in the '705, she and Bradlaugh stood trial for mak- ing public knowledge to lessen the birth-rate of Great Britain. Years later she was one of those first Fabians, with Webb and Shaw and Bland, who published the volume that " permeated " England, and helped to break ground for last month's Coal Commission. With the aid of the Babus she has given trans- lations of the Hindu writings, including the " rare and precious Lord's Song" of the Bhagavad-Gita. From time to time in the last generation the East has stirred with aspira- tions and the whisper of her name has flown across the con- tinent. Annie Besant stood quietly under the greeting of the dele- gates, an old woman, with thick white hair in waves across her head. She wore a rich robe-like dress of cream-yellow, gracious to the eye, and cunningly wrought at the cuffs and bodice in dyed stuffs of many colors, patterned of tiny threads. " Comrades of the long ago," she began. Her voice caught up the gathering with its rhythm, every sentence taking its YOUTH AT THE STIRRUP 95 full curve. The effect of this strange presence, returned to the West for what unguessed purpose, was compelling on the audience, who ceased to be a labor conference and became for a moment a dumb and waiting people, expectant of the word : ! There are only two ways from serfdom to liberty the way of reform and the way of revolution. Will you not help us in India to reforms that will avoid revolution? Mr. Montagu's bill does not give us a central government. The British Labor Party at Nottingham endorsed India's claim to self-government. We come now to ask you for your help in gaining from Parliament that home rule which you have already declared has long been our right. You may say to us, " But you have the blessings of British rule, and why would you barter that for the winning of home rule?" We want it to secure those things that make a people contented and prosperous for longer lives and shorter hours and food for all. But why should we seek to prove to you why we want home rule? It is for you, if you deny us the right, to prove your right to make the denial. Home rule is the right of every nation, that it may carry out its mission in the world; and you can never have the true Inter- national until you have nations that are able to unite. We would plead with you, the mother of all free institutions to your consciences, your honor, your traditions to you who sheltered Mazzini and welcomed Garibaldi, will you not help us? The League of Nations is a league of white nations to exploit colored nations. It should be a league of free peoples. In India, there is the last autocracy in the world. But when you went out to fight for freedom, India sprang to your side. She has an autoc- racy still, and no date to the ending of it. By the passion of her enthusiasm, then, Britain may judge of her disappointment to-day. Give us some power in the center, and let India through her councils speak. Help us to drive a gap in that citadel of autoc- racy, and India will widen the gap till the walls fall. Some of her children are still-born, and half her population live on one meal a day. You are sorry for your starving enemies. Will you not also be sorry for your friends? Give us freedom, and our people shall not starve. Give us 96 THE YEAR home rule, and we will do for ourselves what you are unable to do for us. Give us a chance of raising a mighty nation, a nation of glorious traditions, and let it go forward with you, a free nation among the free nations that make your common- wealth, and Indians will bless your name in the future, and be glad at last that you landed in India as merchants. IV Henderson and Webb believe that a general election will soon come, and they are pushing nationalization to the front. The resolution with respect to it was therefore one of the two most important to come before the conference. The situation is this: the Coal Commission by a majority found for na- tionalization; Lloyd George and Bonar Law have pledged their word to make its findings law; vested interests inside and outside of Parliament are determined to prevent this. Henderson says : It is a matter of enormous significance that the conference is confronted with a very real working-class achievement in the majority recommendation of the Coal Commission in favor of nationalization of mines and minerals, and recognition of the right of the workers to a share in the control of the industry. . . . They are calculated to hasten the dissolution of the unnatural alliance of parties that masquerade at present as a coalition gov- ernment. They provide labor with a first-class issue upon which to base its electoral campaign. I hope and believe that the con- ference will seize the opportunity presented to it and will rally the whole of the forces of the organized movement to a joint effort to carry these recommendations into effect. Around this issue of nationalization the fight is forming from all sides. It will be the political and industrial issue of the next five years. The Duke of Northumberland and the Morning Post see it as clearly as Henderson and Smillie and Webb. The Morning Post for June 27th says: YOUTH AT THE STIRRUP 97 The old lines of party cleavage have no doubt been obliterated, but only to range in a less artificial antagonism the great, endur- ing conservative elements in the country, who stand for reasoned progress, based upon the established order, and the revolution- aries who, in their impatience to make experiments, would put everything that is worth having to risk. It is time for every man to-day to decide on which side he stands, and no better test could be afforded than this issue of the nationalization of the coal mines. Havelock Wilson of the sailors ranges himself with the Post. A committee of conservative members of the Parlia- mentary Coalition has been formed to fight nationalization. Coal will kill the coalition, the coal report will transform political parties and will force Lloyd George to make his de- cision as to his own future, whether he shall be the radical campaigner, or the rising hope of the ancient landowner. Such was the atmosphere in which the resolution on coal came before the conference. John Baker of the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation (85,000 members) moved the resolu- tion. H. Nixon, of the 20,000 blast furnacemen, seconded it. It was a clever device to have these metal trades, kindred to coal, line up behind the miners. A resolution on national finance was brought in by the I. L. P., the railwaymen, and four local labor parties. It called for a graduated system of conscription of wealth, the taxation of land, accumulated capital, incomes and profits, a national bank. Briefly, the situation is that the national debt amounts to one-half of the pre-war total capital value in land, mines, railways, building and commercial industry. When the troubled and disastrous financial condition of Britain is real- ized as it must be within three years this plank of the labor program will come to the fore. It is a challenge, (i) to the possessors of wealth to hand over a larger fraction of 98 THE YEAR their capital and income; (2) to the captains of industry to mitigate unchecked " private enterprise " and " private prof- its " in order to win the co-operation of labor, which balks at operating under the old system; and (3) to the labor leaders to tell the rank and file that " the new heaven and new earth " has been postponed by the War, and that hard work inside the industrial democracy is a necessity for even a scanty measure of prosperity. The morning of the last day opened with Henderson's reading of a statement that "the delegates of the labor and Socialist movements in Great Britain, France, and Italy, meeting in Southport," had arranged for a general working- class demonstration on July 20 and 21, to take, in each country, " the form best adapted to its circumstances and to its method of operation." This meant that orderly public meetings of protest would be held so far as British labor was concerned. The foreign delegates d'Arragona, Renaudel, Jouhaux, and Branting all of them belonging to the right, had made it clear that working-class feeling against Russian intervention had grown so intense that organized expression must be found. These middle-aged conservative men had sat up late o' nights with the British Executive Committee, revealing the gather- ing storm, and devising a lightning-rod. Then the conference passed on to its most dramatic piece of business the resolution on direct action. Councillor R. J. Davies, of the Manchester and Salford Labor Party, moved it and seconds came from G. Deer, of the British Socialist Party, and C. G. Ammon, of the Fawcett Association of 7,000 post-office employees. Neil Maclean, M.P., one of the Scottish members from the storm center of the Clyde, said : No war has been declared on Russia. No war credits have been voted. The war is unconstitutional on the part of the gov- ernment. We are in the war because 1,600 millions of British YOUTH AT THE STIRRUP 99 capital is invested in Russia. Three cabinet ministers, Sir Eric Geddes, Austen Chamberlain, and Walter Long, have money in- vested in Russia, and wish Koltchak to win. Our troops use weapons made by British armament firms who have money in- vested in Russia, the Birmingham Small Arms Company among them. In the House of Commons men who call the Labor Party Bolshevik hold shares in Russian companies, and allow the boys of the working-class to be sent to fight for their capital. The dowager empress of Russia can enter this country without dif- ficulty, but labor's two delegates from France are turned back. As between the czarist, Koltchak and Bolshevik regime, I stand by the Bolshevik regime. So I call on labor to assist those of us who are in the House of Commons, who wish to withdraw our troops. Up to this point, the more extreme radicals only had spoken. They did not represent a voting strength of more than per- haps 5 per cent of the conference. Ben Tillett spoke for the other extreme. He has a famous history from the days when he and John Burns and Tom Mann fought the dock strike. Tillett still leads the dockers. He is a short, clean- shaven, black-haired, grim-lipped fighting man. He has a square chin and in repose is like a small hunk of granite. In action he is fierce and springy with a panther-swiftness of at- tack. At his best he is magnificent, and he was at his best. A few days before, he had carried the transport workers in his plea for working-class forgiveness of the Germans a noble plea. Now he was brilliant in his defense of the old trade-union way of carrying on the class war. Tillett said: For thirty-five years I have been a direct actionist. From the source that moves this resolution, I have been subjected to the bitterest persecution. This is a political conference. It has no right to ask the industrial movement to take economic action without consulting the members pit, shop, and branches. The words of the resolution are camouflage to cover the sinister intent of the resolution. The trade union movement cannot take this action without exhausting every avenue of reason and argument. There has never yet been a revolution of the workers. Workers 100 THE YEAR have gone blindly into revolutions, led by the middle-class and by professional politicians. Then the workers, like Samson, had their eyes gouged out; the politician benefited and the workers suf- fered. If we are to take revolutionary action, it must be organ- ized, and it must offer a chance of success. Always, the men who have been most blatant for bloodshed have skulked out of trouble. The lions on the platform have been rats when the sol- diery turned out. The Triple Alliance can't do these things. There is too much talk of the Triple Alliance. It is a body subordinate to discipline. Miners and railwaymen and transport workers can't be led by the nose. Their constituents must be consulted before action is taken. The conference should hand over industrial action to the proper body. In Russia to-day no trade union meeting can be held. Under the Trotsky-Lenine government, no life is sacred, no property is stable. There is absolute chaos by direct action. When we go to war for our class rights, we must know what we are doing. When the fighting comes, I shall not be far behind. It is a mistake for this conference to insult the workers. The trade union movement will not allow you to boss them. Tillett was eloquent and witty, throwing his invective at high speed. His was a white-hot speech of deep emotion by a man of native gifts. It was a speech that might have won the conference, if any but two men had tried to reply. The younger of the two rose, and a thousand men broke into applause. Frank Hodges did not hear the applause. He was thinking of the young men absent from this con- ference of the elderly whose voice he was. He is thirty- two years old, grave and determined; sharply-chiseled with a jutting jaw. The young miner from South Wales has a deep, steady voice, with a rolling quality, conveying hints of reserve strength. His record at the Coal Commission was known to every man in the hall. And as he spoke, the words of Tillett seemed " personalities," a little wild and touched with hot feeling. Calmly, but with a sweep of conviction and a measured force of considered argument, Hodges lifted the conference above bickerings. He said: YOUTH AT THE STIRRUP 101 The resolution is an expression of opinion that the labor move- ment, because of its weakness, has not accomplished its hopes with regard to intervention in Russia. And it says, let us acknowl- edge our political weakness and approach the body possessing industrial strength with a view to effective action being taken. Those words must not be misunderstood. They mean that the Parliamentary Committee would be invited to call a Trade Union Congress and put a resolution of this char- acter on the agenda. The experience of the Labor Party Execu- tive and of the Triple Alliance with the Parliamentary Committee offers no hope. But we hope that this conference will succeed where they failed in influencing the committee. It is not sug- gested that the Trades Union Congress can make a declaration as to an immediate strike. The effective action may be such action as each union must determine according to its constitution, but the conference could make a recommendation to the unions leaving them individually to discover the way of carrying it into effect. We have got beyond the discussion of whether we are to sup- plement political action with industrial action. If I understand the position, the parliamentary party would welcome that kind of industrial support which would add to its authority in the House of Commons. The miners' strike found its way on to the floor of the House of Commons. Do the opponents of the reso- lution believe that at no time is it right for the trade union move- ment to go to the aid of the political Labor Party? The two wings of the movement ought to be in harmony. The parliamentary party must not only represent geographical areas. It must represent the strength that has accumulated in the trade union movement. If the resolution fails, we in the Triple Alliance are driven back upon ourselves. We do not wish to be. But if there is no other way, we must use within the constitution of the Triple Al- liance the industrial force concentrated there, and our members will have the authority to give us the sanction to declare what industrial action we shall take. I trust the members of the Parliamentary Committee will heed this resolution. This country can move through to the social revolution differ- ently from any other country, but if you deny it the right to move through constitutional channels, provided by the Labor 102 THE YEAR Party and trade union movement, you bring into being those ele- ments of social chaos and disaster which may not be the best for the country in the long run. This was a clean-cut exhibition of personal power put out in easy mastery of a group. The Executive Committee now made its fourth attempt to turn a tidal wave into a pool. It put forward Clynes. War-time food controller, he is not only head of 350,000 general workers but the most famous representative of the million unskilled and semi-skilled organized workers, who are approaching more and more to amalgamation. He is an op- ponent of direct action for political objects. He has swung powerfully to the right as the Triple Alliance has leaned to the left, and has written and spoken boldly against their ac- tion. He is the most powerful brake in Britain on their course. Clynes never indulges in personalities. He has a cold-chiseled brain, a limpid speech. In mental equipment he is the Elihu Root of the labor movement, with consider- able physical resemblance. He is only outreached when he meets a man of equal moderation, dignity, and clarity, if that man has youth and is for the moment at least the voice of the aspirations of the coming generation. Clynes said (to a ouzz of interruption) : I have always believed that organized labor should use without limit the trade union weapon for industrial ends. When it is a question of wages, or hours of labor, or workshop conditions, there must be no restraint upon the extremest use of the strike weapon. But I refuse to use that weapon for so clear and obvious a political purpose as that mentioned in this resolution. Mr. Hodges has' put a very generous interpretation on the reso- lution. Its purpose is not only " effective action " but " unre- served use of the industrial weapon." [Here came a question from a delegate.] I was in the government for work I was not ashamed to do, and I left the government because I could not separate myself from a movement which, even when I believed it to be wrong, YOUTH AT THE STIRRUP 103 is a movement I want throughout my life to be associated with. The last time we assembled in a labor conference, we were be- ginning a great political struggle and we announced that we had 360 ready for the fight. We went to the constituencies believing in democratic government through parliamentary institutions. In 60 cases only were our candidates returned, and 300 rejected and rejected in the main by the great working-class constituencies where most of our propaganda had been carried on. We should not deceive ourselves by saying that workingmen were deceived by designing knaves and politicians. The true explanation is that the workingmen were not ready. Either we must believe in par- liamentary government or reject it altogether. We must not say that the results are splendid when we succeed and that they are not to be recognized when we fail. We have heard a lot about the " ruling classes " and the " governing classes." The class which has the power to rule in this country is the class represented by this conference. There are twenty million working men and women on the burgess roll. Are we to say that those twenty millions are foolish enough to elect only the weakest of the labor candidates and to reject all the wise ones? In any case those who were returned represent the choice of the rank and file. The conference ought not to shirk its responsibility. It should not throw the responsibility back upon the executives of the dif- ferent unions. We are for the moment the choice of the rank and file. It must be noticed that the conclusion of the resolution is a definite piece of advice and will be interpreted throughout the country as a suggestion to the trade unions to use the strike weapon for political ends. We hope to see the day when, instead of there being a great crowd of capitalists and non-Socialists in the House of Commons, there will be a labor and Socialist government. What, then, would any class which opposed the action of that government be entitled to do? [A voice, " Strike."] Does that mean that any class which had the power should have the right to terrorize a labor government by using whatever means or manoeuvers were at its command? [A voice, "Let them try."] Is that admitted? This course of action would be a blow, not at a government but a blow at democracy. It would do a greater and more permanent harm to the true interests of the working- class than to those of any other class. There would be millions of men in the street, with riot and bloodshed. Do we hope by 104 THE YEAR creating disturbance in this country to secure peace in the world abroad? The more turmoil there is here, the more, surely, will continue the state of distraction which exists in other lands. It is a socialistic principle to educate people to the acceptance of our principles, and I am prepared to preach those principles until they are applied. We are stronger now than the rich. We do not want our peo- ple distracted by this movement, but educated. For thirty years I have been a Socialist. I remain one. I was taught by Keir Hardie. I am willing to go on until those principles prevail, not by blood and tears, but by parliamentary power. In Hodges' speech, note that he did two things. He threw the question, " Do the opponents of the resolution believe that at no time is it right for the trade-union movement to go to the aid of the political Labor Party ? " This was the same sort of challenge which Clynes used a year ago when the question of calling the labor members of the Government out was to the fore : " Are you for the war, or against it ? " Because the question demanded an answer and did not receive it, Hodges, like Qynes twelve months ago, carried the confer- ence. The other keynote of Hodges' speech was : " The Parlia- mentary Party must not only represent geographical areas. It must represent the strength that has accumulated in the trade-union movement." The philosophy of the younger ele- ments of labor is in that passage. It is a statement of func- tional representation, of guild socialism, of industrial union- ism, of producers' share in control, of pluralistic sovereign- ties, of the federal principle. The whole recent impulse and forward thrust of labor is in it. The National Industrial Council and the Coal Commission were a recognition that a geographical Parliament is not enough for groups of citizens with special interests. The old British State shakes with the contest between vast aggregations of capital in the key indus- tries and the new " iron battalions " of organized labor in those key industries. They are not functioning through Par- liament, or a constitution, or a community organization. It YOUTH AT THE STIRRUP 105 is a battle of powerful minorities, unrecognized, unrepre- sented, rebels and franc-tireurs, swaying in the night. A card vote was taken on the resolution for direct action, and 1,893,000 were in favor, and 935,000 against it. So by a majority of 958,000 British labor had swung to the left. The resolution on conscription went through with a whizz, and yet, oddly enough, it called for the same exercise of the power of organized labor as the resolution on Russia. David Kirkwood moved it. He is the well-known shop steward of the Clyde area, who was deported from Glasgow because of his activities. One would expect to find him a fire-eater, of revolutionary mind. Actually, he is a sober, restrained fam- ily man, of open, attractive face, and with the richest accent of burring r's in the labor movement. I have encountered him before, and always he is the quietest performer of the day. ' Each time I see Kirkwood I have the feeling that, if he followed his wish, he would be home with the kiddies out of the turmoil. Fifty years ago, the sort of person he is would have been a pillar of the kirk, saving money for the educa- tion of the bairns, a quiet home-body. He has been forced into his rebellion by the injustice to workers. He made his stand. Being stubborn, he couldn't back down once they started harrying him. They seized him, deported him, and created a labor leader. In the view of the political constitutionalist, Philip Snow- den, the votes registered : Less an approval of the use of industrial action to attain po- litical objects than an intense disapproval of the foreign policy of the Allies. The abstract question of using the industrial weapon for political purposes was not really under discussion. If that had been the issue the vote probably would not have been so decisive. The proposal is to take such means as are at the disposal of labor to achieve the one definite object of stopping Allied intervention in the internal affairs of Russia and Hungary. By direct action the British workers mean first of all a consultation by every trade union of its rank and file. This 106 THE YEAR is a process requiring many weeks. They mean consultations between the committees of the Labor Party and the Trades Union Congress. They mean a thrashing out of the matter on the floor of the congress at Glasgow on September 8th. They mean a house-cleaning in the Parliamentary Committee. They mean Clause 8 of the summarized constitution of the Triple Alliance, which reads: "Joint action can only be taken when the question at issue has been before the members of the three organizations and decided by such methods as the constitution of each organization provides." They mean after that a series of next steps action in support of this process of group judgment. In taking these steps, they mean, to safeguard methodical development, freedom of speech and of the press, the right of assembly, suffrage, a Government responsible to Parliament, the traditional institutions. They would regard it as a calamity if industrial pressure should lead to the abandonment of the political labor movement. They desire a fundamental structural change without the shedding of blood or the loss of productive power. But they mean that British troops shall not longer be used for the numerous and growing wars of the continent. They mean that the pledge to soldiers of return to civilian life shall be fulfilled. They mean that the Government shall not disregard the voice of the British people against special unconstitutional wars as expressed in three recent by-elections. If the war against Russia continues and grows, if trade unionists are conscripted and retained for a political policy on which the electorate was never consulted, then the threat of direct action by the trade unions will so grow in volume and menace (through the constitutional channels listed above) that there will be sectional strikes; and in the end a general election will be forced, and this political question (Russia and conscription) will be solved by political methods. That is direct action of the British brand. The situation out of which sprang this sugar-coated, cotton- wrapped bombshell is this: Labor in the key industries, or- ganized approximately on the lines of industrial unions, have YOUTH AT THE STIRRUP 107 reached for power in the chaos that followed war. The for- ward movement of labor issues from these key industries. The craft unions, and the conservative older trade unionists, are troubled by this forward movement Some oppose it. Some seek for a harmonizing principle inside the old scheme of things. In the end sectional unionism is doomed, and there will be ever-closer co-operation between the industrial unions. The Triple Alliance is the focal point of industrial unionism, as it spreads over increasing areas. There will be many defections. Havelock Wilson has announced his intention of withdrawing his sailors from the Triple Alliance on its political activities. Ben Tillett, James Sexton, and James Wignall are sure to oppose this pressure of the Triple Alliance on the State, and they, with Wilson, are redoubtable fighters, with the honorable scars of many battles in defense of the working class. They have a power- ful following. Few women even rise to try to speak from the floor. It was at the fag end of the opening day that the first woman's voice was heard. My wife, who attended this conference, writes: Like the weak voice of a drowning person pipes through the confusion the appeal of a woman. She wails, phantomlike " Mr. Chairman," over and over. What chance is there for a woman in a man's meeting? None. The man that yells hardest wins out; therefore women will never have a chance. Those that really know the labor movement, like Dr. Mar- ion Phillips the organizer of women tell me that we are wrong in this; that women are preferentially treated. I must leave it as my impression of half a dozen labor con- ferences that women as yet with difficulty gain a hearing. I believe that there is a superiority, a subconscious scorn, on the part of male British labor, just as there is in a large number of the middle class. Finally on the last day, one woman pleaded in despair: " Is a woman allowed to speak ? " It was still largely a conference of middle-aged men. 108 THE YEAR Young Britain was heard only in the voices of the soldiers, and Cramp, Hodges, and a few more. Honesty, sincerity, dogged sure-footedness these are the qualities. Insistent on justice, they are; one voice carries above all the hubbub, car- ries and is understood. A group who cannot be hustled, and cannot be frightened, slow to anger, but dangerous when roused as they well proved in Flanders. Informal, homely, these men take their calling without undue seriousness. Many were smoking their pipes there was pipe-lighting all over the room, one, two, three, matches flaring, and then the glow and smoke-cloud in the dusky background. It was an effect like the lighting of miniature camp fires, one catching from another till sometimes it swept across the room. All sorts of accents filled the air Scotch, Welsh, Irish, and the fifty- seven provincial dialects. Dozens of little splits broke loose among the men. Then the steam roller flattened them into harmony. " For God's sake, unite," became the anxious cry as the hours waned. Henderson is a constitutionalist, moderate, seeking har- mony and unity. His tactics were obvious. He hoped by playing up mine nationalization to divert the ardor of the miners from Russia, and so avoid the question of direct action. But the Triple Alliance is ready to take on other fights than its own, and tactics do not avail in the path of a batter- ing ram. But a momentary difference on method is not unknown to British labor. I have given a wrong impression if any reader thinks that the leaders of the center and right will not line up with Smillie as he forces into law the findings of the Coal Commission. Ben Tillett and Sexton, McGurk and Brace, Clynes and Henderson, will be there. On July 2, Brace informed the House of Commons : The exigencies of the war have made the nationalization of railways, mines, and all the key industries of the land inevitable. Of the conference as a whole, Henderson has written, " In YOUTH AT THE STIRRUP 109 several respects it is the most important gathering in the history of the politically organized movement." Of those who composed it and those others in the movement, the Minister of Labor, Sir Robert Hprne, said on June 23 : The country owes the position of victory which it has accom- plished to the efforts of the trade unions of Britain. The most steadying influence throughout the war and that upon which the government was able most persistently and confidently to rely was the help which it obtained from the great trade unions of this country. It is of high political importance that we in America learn to know these men of labor. For Curzon and Carson, Milner and Churchill are fast becoming spectral, but Clynes and Thomas, Gosling and Hodges, will one day be among the governors of Britain. SIGNOR D'ARRAGONA'S MESSAGE Secretary of the Italian Federation of Labor, belonging to the right of the movement. As such his speech was the most disturbing of the day. A responsible-looking elderly man of fine, Roman features, of high dignity, tall and spare: The Italian organization of labor is one of recent formation, barely a quarter of a century old the product of Socialistic propaganda. As the result of the war, Italy is almost on the verge of bankruptcy. She is in a revolutionary state of mind. To the masses, only one solution seems possible the social revolution. There is no coal, iron, raw materials. Temperament and economic conditions both are at work. The Italian Federation of Labor has demanded a constituent assembly and the socialization of land. They hear that the English miners are obtaining nationalization of mines. Before the war the federation numbered 300,000, and now 800,000. Before the war, the Italian Socialist Party num- bered 50,000, and now 100,000. The Socialists have 42 Deputies, and control 300 communes, including Milan and Boulogne. 110 THE YEAR The situation is so grave that I anticipate in a short time an attempted revolution a revolution with bloodshed. The results may not be large, but a rising is almost inevitable. I belong to the right, but I see no other way out. HJALMAR BRANTING'S MESSAGE One of the useful men of Europe, a Socialist of the old stock, anti-Prussian, anti-Bolshevik, pro- Ally. He is of heavy bulk, and looks like a responsible statesmanlike walrus, with a walrus's mustaches. The fall of the Hohenzollerns has been the cause of a demo- cratic gain in Sweden. I anticipate that both houses of our legis- lature will be social -democratic for the majority of members after the next general election. They will then probably enact an eight- hour bill, and obtain a further reduction of military service. The party has been enormously struck by the report of the British Coal Commission, and the step forward it represents. This report will have an incalculable influence over the world wherever the workers struggle against capitalism. Our Swedish Socialist Party is not going to desert the old lines of Socialist effort for the new formulae offered to-day [the Bol- shevik theory of dictatorship]. PIERRE RENAUDEL'S MESSAGE Ftench Socialist of the moderate right. With vivacity and mental lightness, an inner gleam, he speaks at ever- increasing tempo, till it becomes the roll of a mitrailleuse, piercing, shattering, inciting to action. Jaures predicted that war would be followed by revolution. The revolution is taking different forms in the nations according to the nature of their government. In the autocracies it takes the most violent form. In France, of an older democracy, socialism, pro- gressing, will lead to revolution in forms less violent. The peace treaty and League of Nations do not fulfil the ob- jects and intentions of the working-class. Colonial territories have been annexed without giving Germany a share. YOUTH AT THE STIRRUP 111 M. VAN ROOSBROECK'S MESSAGE Of the Belgian Labor Party. Here chimneys smoke. There they are dead. Trade union membership has increased from 120,000 to 429,000. In politics the situation is not so favorable. We are on the eve of our greatest electoral battle for universal equal suffrage. Hundreds of thou- sands are out of work for lack of machinery and raw materials. M. JOUHAUX'S MESSAGE Secretary of the French Confederation Generate du Travail [the C. G. T. the federation of trade-unions]. A solid individual with a ruddy face set off by close cropped chin whiskers, a long black mustache, black hair. The world stands before the bankruptcy of the middle-class. The principles of labor must now be realized to save the nations from bankruptcy. There must be such a manifestation of the power of the proletariat that all will know they have left behind the period of servitude. The C. G. T. has made its own protest against the peace treaty, and insisted on a peace, free from any annexations however disguised with phrases. CHAPTER V THE CONGRESS AT GLASGOW THE British Trades Union Congress at Glasgow in September reaffirmed the stand taken by the Labor Party at Southport in June. It declared overwhelmingly for nationalization of the mines and for compelling the Government to enact the Sankey report, which called for nationalization. The congress re- fused to vote against direct action and voted itself ready to call a special congress if the Government refuses to national- ize mines, to abolish conscription, and to withdraw the troops from Russia to call it for the purpose of deciding what ac- tion should be taken to enforce its will upon the Government. The men who forged and welded conference opinion on these lines of nationalization, direct action, Russia, and con- scription were Smillie, Hodges, and Clynes, along with Hen- derson as fraternal delegate from the Labor Party. The decisions of the congress are the result of the Smillie- Hodges policy (as definite as the Henderson policy). They are new for the industrial arm of the British labor movement. A struggle is near between labor and the Government. As I brought out in my interpretation of Southport, direct action does not mean a general strike. It means the threat of indus- trial pressure in order to achieve aims (nationalization, Rus- sia, conscription) through the constitutional means of govern- ment and Parliament, forcing, if necessary, a general election. Thus history is in the making at this moment in England, history as significant as the Russian Revolution. Labor is at- tacking the basis of the old British order. That is an im- portant fact. The convention was the little funnel through which slowly gathered forces of the past flowed through into the future. The labor movement has no more unified pro- gram or central government than the Allies in 1914, but it 112 THE CONGRESS AT GLASGOW 113 forms a line-up, and the events of the next five years are al- ready determined and made inevitable by the Coal Commis- sion, Southport, and Glasgow, by the Triple Alliance and by Smillie. For, the policies adopted by the Glasgow Congress mean that the industrial union of miners is the strongest single element in Britain and that it has a masterful technique. But there follows a typical British touch. Lest any one should grow unduly excited, the congress in one of its last acts drove the miners off the Parliamentary Committee, and made of this committee for the coming year as safe and respectable a body as in its days of stodginess. An advanced policy and a slow-stepping executive. The British worker still reserves his right of dissent and protest. He wishes his revolution to come as organic change, gradually, with footnotes and reservations. As yet he has no intention of going out on general strike for a political end. He wishes to use the threat of his industrial power as the method of forcing government to go to the country. No large body of British labor as yet considers striking on a political issue with- out first testing public opinion by a constitutional election. It is perplexing to an outsider but traditional and logical to the British. Force the pace but don't run off the highway. The motivation is the desire for unity. Labor does not mean to split to either the left or the right, but to move only so fast as will hold in unity over five million workers. Eight hundred and forty-eight delegates were in attendance in St. Andrews Hall on September 8, and to the best of their ability they represented 5,265,426 working men and women. In general it has been true that there is nothing slower, surer, and drearier than a trades-union congress. It has always moved like a tortoise but it scrapes along in its hard-shell way to the goal. It would be futile to run down the list of pious, unanimous resolutions presented in the agenda, res- olutions on pensions for mothers, old-age pensions, free trade, control of industry, Parliamentary procedure, care of the blind, amalgamation. For a generation some of them have been duly moved and dully seconded. It is a demonstra- THE YEAR THE CONGRESS Trade Group Delegates Membership Building Trades 35 265,092 Clothing Trades 38 235,886 Cotton Operatives 34 100,106 Dock Laborers and Seamen 69 308,660 Engineering and Shipbuilding 42 575.253 General Laborers 97 M33.548 Metal Workers 101 39O,oo6 Miners 172 683,900 Printing and Paper Trades 32 I37,57<> Railwaymen 22 545,531 Weavers 93 362,584 Miscellaneous Trades 113 526,390 848 5,265,426 tion of the soundness, the sanity of British labor. The Government can be handed over to them to-morrow, to-night. No seismic tremor will follow their advent. They will in- herit the power with all the sobriety of the elder tory rulers. They partake a little of the nature of peasant pro- prietors. They do not wish to spill the beans. Nothing rash, they seem to say; we have a living wage; hours are no longer killing let us build our tabernacle in this place. In truth the young men are not here. The next generation is ten years away, and the returned soldiers remain to be heard from. Poverty and unemployment and cold will begin to strike in with the next three years. Events may disarrange even a level-headed program. Moreover, British labor has no cen- tral government. The congress has no direct executive power. Its Parliamentary Commitee of sixteen members, chosen from as many trades, is not a central executive. Originally it was chosen to serve very much as later the Labor Party functioned. Congress is a statement of the mass opinion of powerful, elderly delegates, and its Parliamentary Committee is the resultant of the ambitions of many separate trades. THE CONGRESS AT GLASGOW 115 The New Statesman on August 30 said : The total trade union membership in the United Kingdom now reaches probably n or 12 per cent of the census population and, taking males only, well over 50 per cent 1 of the whole of the adult male, manual-working wage-earners of the nation. The accumu- lated funds of the British trade unions can not nowadays fall far short of ten millions sterling. Until the Trades Union Congress takes its executive duties a little more seriously and provides, as its steadily growing funds easily enable it to do, for a much stronger secretariat, the trade union movement and every separate union will continue to suffer the consequences of the disorganiza- tion to which they are subject. Trade unionism in this country as an industrial force is suffering seriously from lack of leader- ship. It is the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress that so far as industrial policy is concerned supply that leadership. Furthermore, while the labor group in Parliament has been numerically stronger since the December elections than ever before, it has been lamentably v/eak in leadership, ideas, and the fighting edge of opposition. (The British believe in the opposition as an essential element in government.) The ab- sence of four men in particular left labor in the House of Commons as a feeble voice. W. C. Anderson, that much- loved, sweet-tempered, fearless leader of the left, died. Philip Snowden and Ramsay MacDonald were defeated because of their orthodox Socialist stand on the issue of the War. Hen- derson was defeated in December in a constituency where he was not personally known, which he had little time to visit, and where accordingly misrepresentation could be used in a khaki election. But the mills ground fast for him, and the net result of the last nine months is that his position in Parliament, in political labor, and in trade unionism is stronger than at any previous moment in his life. He radiates power and victory. He is at the beginning of his larger career. Although on the fourth day the results of Widnes were not 1 It is in April, 1920, 60 per cent. 116 THE YEAR known, Henderson came before the congress as fraternal delegate in the unmistakable mood of triumph. Of opposition there was none. He is at the center and heart of British labor, the very loud voice of their common sense. A little of the fervor of labor's welcome to him was due to the talk of the American delegate, J. J. Hynes, who pro- tested against the visit of British labor leaders to preach political labor and reiterated the opposition of American labor to political action. This fell strangely on British ears at a crisis when swift and large political expression is the only lightning rod that will save the constitutional structure from being scorched. The delegates heard him courteously but greeted Henderson with great enthusiasm. Henderson will not be unseated by the A. F. of L. On the fifth day, his victory at Widnes was announced to the clamant joy of the congress. Henderson won, first, on his war record, which converted a tory stronghold into a labor constituency. Since Widnes was established thirty years ago as a constituency, it has sent an unbroken representation of tory-conservative- unionist representation. Henderson turned the large Decem- ber coalition majority into a labor majority of nearly one thousand. He won also because of his campaign on opposi- tion to the Government, particularly on Russian policy. The day is over when lies about pro-Germanism are anything but boomerangs, and when a British army can be retained in Russia. As a fraternal delegate Henderson said : It is time we cease to think and talk in terms of propaganda, and begin to think and talk in terms of constructive responsibility. There are three things I want to ask you to do. First, to make up the leeway between the trades represented at the congress and the numbers represented in the Labor Party. If we can get the two and a half millions added to the three millions it would tell at the next general election. The next thing is greater co-opera- tion between the congress, through its Parliamentary Committee, and the Labor Party through its executive, so that we can go to Geneva next February and bring together the most powerful inter- THE CONGRESS AT GLASGOW 117 national that has ever been created. Representation of the pro- ducers through the Parliamentary Committee, representation of the consumers through the Co-operative International, and repre- sentation of the citizens through the Labor Party then we shall have a force standing for world peace such as we have never had before. Finally, I ask you to use all your influence, through both the industrial and political wings of the movement, to terminate the life of the present government as speedily as you possibly can. I make that demand because the government are doing things with- out the mandate of the people, particularly with regard to Ireland and Russia. We ought to terminate the government's existence and have an appeal to the country on conditions much more nor- mal than the deceptive conditions that prevailed last December. The first outstanding action of the conference was what amounted to a vote of censure (carried by a majority of 710,000) of the Parliamentary Committee for refusing to call a special congress to decide what action, if any, should be taken because of conscription, Russian intervention, the block- ade, and conscientious objectors. In moving the reference back of the Parliamentary Committee's report Robert Smillie said: Personally I feel that the Parliamentary Committee does not have the confidence of the trade union movement. Take the ques- tion of our blockade. Under it hundreds of thousands of old men, women, and children were being starved to death. Whoever were to blame for the terrible war, the young and the aged could not be blamed. These were done to death by our blockade. I always have it in my mind that the time would come again when we shall have to meet the fathers and brothers of those people in the international movement; and that if the voice of British labor was silent on the question, we could hardly raise our eyes and look into the faces of those men and shake them by the hand. The question of Russia was surely of sufficient importance. It might be said that that was a political question with which trade unionists ought not to deal. There is no greater labor question in the world than intervention in Russia. If the capitalists and capitalist governments our own amongst them manage to crush 118 THE YEAR out the Socialist movement in Russia led by Lenine which God forbid and begin to develop with cheap labor, as they intend to do, the enormous natural resources of Russia, they will be able to flood our markets with cheap commodities, without having re- gard to the suffering that might be caused here. Although it was passed with little discussion, one of the most important resolutions of the week was that of the Ware- house and General Workers' Union for the setting up of an industrial parliament of labor. The Parliamentary Commit- tee was instructed to prepare a scheme " whereby the trade- union movement in the future will, on all questions of national and international importance, adopt a common policy and speak with a united voice." The grounds urged in support were the need for industrial adjustments on a national basis ; the co-ordination of labor claims made through existing in- dustrial councils; the prevention of overlapping and under- cutting of demands and " the desirability of reviewing the decisions of industrial councils, such as those that may aim at the ultimate establishment of compulsory arbitration and the riveting upon the nation of a wide system of protective tariffs." The second victory for the miners came in the passage by an immense majority of a resolution reciting that the Gov- ernment had rejected the Sankey coal report and adopted in its place a " scheme of district trustification of the industry," and pledging the congress to " co-operate with the Miners' Federation to the fullest extent with a view of compelling the Government to adopt the scheme of national ownership and commission " and, in the event of the Government's re- fusal, to convene a " special congress for the purpose of de- ciding the form of action to be taken." In urging the nationalization of the mines, and action by the congress to " compel " the Government, Smillie said : It cannot be said that the trade union movement has acted rashly on this question. Since 1882 the congress has passed forty-two resolutions dealing with the general principle of nationalization THE CONGRESS AT GLASGOW 119 sometimes a general collectivist resolution calling for nationaliza- tion, sometimes a land nationalization resolution, and occasionally a mines nationalization resolution. It is over twenty years since the congress affirmed the principle that the minerals lying under the surface of the soil, which was not created by man, ought to be the wealth of the state and not of individuals. I want our fellow-workers to believe that we are endeavoring to be straight and honest with them. We do not desire the na- tionalization of the mining industry for ourselves alone. There is nothing of the syndicalist idea in our claim at the present time. The time may come when the industries of the country, mining and other, may advance a step farther than we are asking at present. But it is not in our interest alone that we are asking for nationalization. The miners were entitled to expect that if the commission recommended nationalization the government would carry out its findings. The miners were twice dissuaded by Frank Hodges and myself from acting on their ballot vote and declaring a strike. They believed that the government would carry out what they thought was its pledge. The government and the press thought that when the prime minister made a statement the matter was ended. This question can only end with the nationalization of the mines. I have no desire to have a strike in any industry. I hoped that common sense would secure justice for them, but while I hold that view I also realize that a time may arrive when it would be criminal for a labor leader to advise anything else than a strike. I have advised strikes when men were being brutally treated by brutal employers. I would do the same again. The miners knew that a long stop of their industry would bring poverty and suffering to thousands of homes outside the mining industry. In view of that they felt it was their duty to carry with them, if they could, the whole trade union movement. If they have established the justice and the necessity for the nationalization of the mines, they ask trade unionists not to leave the fight for it on the shoulders of the miners alone. I have no doubt that, if the miners were of the mind to do it, they could within a month stop every mine in the country until the mines were nationalized. That would lead to the stoppage of the railways and all industries dependent on coal. They do not want that. They believe that 120 THE YEAR the thing ought to be done constitutionally, as it was called by the government. J. H. Thomas followed, and put his 450,000 railwaymen behind the miners: I recognize the importance of output and the seriousness of the situation, but the country is not going to get output, and has no right to ask for output, if there are people whose contribution to output is nil, and who receive the maximum benefit from the out- put of other people. I congratulate the miners on the great service they have rendered to the trade union movement by the conduct of their case before the commission. They have shown themselves statesmen in coming to the congress, because had they attempted to take action " on their own," I should have been the first to condemn them. I believe that state ownership of mines is interwoven with the prosperity of the country, and because I believe that the country is greater than a section, greater than this movement, I second the resolution wholeheartedly. The solitary delegate who opposed was Havelock Wilson, head of the Sailors' and Firemen's Union of 65,000 members. He is pathetically ill with a trembling paralysis. After rising to speak he had to sit down, and from his chair he continued his minority talk with humor and lucid statement. He has an admirably clear and resonant voice, with perfect enuncia- tion, a rhythm of tone and language, and all done naturally and without apparent effort at oratory. But in reality he is an artist, a master of the spoken word. It was not from any lack of respect for his great gifts, his former record as a labor leader, his vigor, his courage, that the congress defeated him in his candidacy for the new Parliamentary Committee and cheered loudly when his downfall was announced. The defeat and the demonstration were administered because his opinions are hostile to the views of 90 per cent of the workers, because of his attempts to split labor, because of his associa- tion with wealthy men, because of his use of the anti-labor press (such as the Morning Post), because of his employment THE CONGRESS AT GLASGOW 121 of direct action against the workers in refusing to carry labor delegates to international gatherings. The enemies of British labor have found in Wilson one of their staunchest, boldest champions. To labor he seems a lost leader, with something of the pathos and shame of Noah. I found myself saddened in this passing of the stricken, gallant, old man. I regretted that any one rejoiced. No one seeing him will forget that quivering, forespent figure. No one who heard him will ever forget the rise and fall of his voice, those unstrained intona- tions that went winged to the furthest gallery. " The State are not the proper people to manage industry," he said. " Can you point to one single thing that it has made a success of?" " The War," boomed a man, and the congress roared its delight. Tom Shaw put the mighty and conservative forces of cot- ton behind the miners, and William Brace, the miners' M.P. of the right, followed him. Smillie then summed up : Mr. Thomas said, and Mr. Brace agreed with him, that the government's reply is likely to be No. Their reply depends upon the determination of this congress. If we approach the govern- ment in that spirit, telling them that we believe they are not going to move, they will not move. That is not the way to move governments. Over 5,000,000 members are represented at this congress. People say that those 5,000,000 have no right to dictate terms to the nation, but what do the 5,000,000 represent? They represent a large part of the nation, and I want the congress to pass this resolution with the determination that the govern- ment must act and the government will act. A card vote was demanded, and resulted as follows: For nationalization 4,478,000 Against 77,000 Of that 77,000, Havelock Wilson's union includes 65,000. The debate shifted to another footing when Tom Shaw, of the textile workers, moved for a declaration against " in- dustrial action in purely political matters." He said: 122 THE YEAR Every one in this country knows that so far as the trade union movement is concerned there are two outstanding figures in the advocacy of industrial action Robert Smillie and Robert Williams. Their idea of industrial action is to create a revolution in this country, and their idea of government is the soviet system of Russia. We were told only yesterday that Lenine was the great teacher of the age. I say that Russia is not free her peo- ple have no chance of determining their own destiny. I say she is not socialistic. If socialism means anything, it means the nationalization of the means of production, distribution, and ex- change, and their administration by the whole nation for the good of the whole nation. That condition of affairs does not obtain, and never has obtained, under the Lenine regime in Russia. To call it a republic is a misuse of terms. I cannot understand the mentality of any man or woman in this congress who pro- claims that state of society a republic in which the people are denied the right to decide their own destiny and are governed literally at the end of a rifle. Arthur Hayday, M.P., of the general workers, seconded Shaw's resolution. James H. Thomas, head of the railway- men, rose to oppose the resolution, but he did it so skilfully that half of the newspapers next morning said he had favored it. It is not the least of Mr. Thomas' faculties this of walk- ing the tight-rope between respectability and revolution. He desires to hold public opinion and also his " radical " rank and file, who are increasingly moved by Cramp, Hodges, Smillie, guild ideas, the London Labor College, and other in- fluences of the left. The vigor of his personality and the volume of his voice disguise the delicate balancing which he has done for a year. Actually he saw and said that labor could not give up its strike weapon, but that the weapon was a dangerous double-blade for the wielder as well as the victim. Frank Hodges, secretary of the Miners' Federation, fol- lowed, and held the tense interest of the delegates as he had done at Southport. Later in the sessions Clynes was to hold it by the same power of reasoned statement from the oppo- site angle. They are separated by a generation in years, and THE CONGRESS AT GLASGOW 123 their addresses put the case for and against direct action for political ends more tellingly perhaps than ever before in the industrial debates that are stirring all England. Mr. Hodges has within the year become the voice of the young radicals of the movement. His influence is already on a level with that of Clynes and Thomas of the center, and of Sexton and Shaw of the right. He revolted from Ruskin Col- lege, and is a graduate of the famous Labor College (the in- stitution of Noah Ablett and W. Craik, where modern Marx- ism is taught and propaganda frankly exploited as an element in workers' education). Only a little past thirty years of age, Hodges has learned one secret of influence the secret that Clynes once gave away in private conversation. Said Clynes : " From my study of Mr. Balfour I learned the lesson that bigoted raillery can never prevail against the carefully cultured self- restraint of a truly forceful personality." Then Clynes watched the contrast between Mr. Asquith and a playful literary Parlia- mentarian. 1 " Never once had I heard Mr. Asquith risk a wit- ticism for the sake of pleasing either the House or himself. Not once has he allowed himself to forget that the safest weapon of leadership in so polyglot a House is dignity, and that the constant exercise of this weapon covers a multitude of sins. The longer a man of intellect sits in the House of Commons, the more certain does he become, that more politicians are undone by their jests than by their somber opinions." Mr. Clynes has put his finger here on one of the sources of his own power over multitudes of men, and that of Hodges, Henderson, Thomas, Cramp, and Gosling. The power lies in high seriousness of tone, moderation in statement, absence of "personalities," cheap, clever phrases, mob oratory. And failure in this has led to a diminished influence in men of such commanding ability as Ben Tillett, with his fierce, un- trammeled invective, and Robert Williams, with his fagade of bright, scarlet phrases. 1 Augustine Birrell. 124 THE YEAR Mr. Hodges said: The present discussion reminds me of a debate which you can hear every week in the average debating society. It is academic: it disposes of nothing. It simply asks this Congress to come to conclusions on an abstract question, when presently you will have an opportunity of coming to conclusions on concrete questions which raise this principle. But as the matter has not been dis- cussed, and we have had a revelation of the mind of Mr. Shaw, it is just as well that the discussion should proceed. Mr. Shaw has revealed what I had suspected was in the minds of many peo- ple who oppose those whom they describe as direct actionists. He said, to my surprise, that the desire of the direct action movement is to establish the Soviet system of government in this country. There is nothing more remote from the truth. / do not believe that with the characteristics of the British race, and with our tra- ditions and institutions, a Soviet system of Government would ever become adaptable to our country. But that does not influence me in analyzing to what extent the labor movement exercises its func- tions in our own country, and whether it exercises them effectively, politically, or industrially. What is the classic argument against direct action? It is the election of November last the new Parliamentary register, which gives twenty million people the vote. Because twenty million people have the vote, and had the opportunity to exercise it last November and failed to rise to the occasion, the opponents of direct action say, " Until you have another election, you must not use industrial pressure upon the instrument you yourselves created last year." That is the classic argument. Let us analyze it. That Parliament was brought into being largely, and admittedly, by the vote of the working class, but a working class that had been buried in ignorance, caused by a system which had oppressed their mentality for generations. They had not developed a political con- sciousness sufficiently to see the value of returning three hundred or four hundred labor men to the House of Commons. Besides, they had no history of achievement to teach them the contrary on the part of the Labor Party of older days. The greatest source of education to a political democracy is the achievement of some power or party which alleges to represent them. If one wished to be vitriolic, one would say to the Labor Party: THE CONGRESS AT GLASGOW 125 "Where are the goods that you are supposed to have de- livered?" Having elected that Government to power, having been taught to believe, in their half-awakened political consciousness, that the Coalition would do for them things that the Labor Party said they would do if they were returned to power, this same elec- torate, after having had months of experience of the work of the Government they created, in my judgment have arrived at a stage of political thought and experience which gives them this new conclusion that "if we had another opportunity, we would not re- turn a Coalition Government to power." But the electorate are denied the opportunity. A by-election here and there will not materially influence a party which has gained power by a misrep- resentation of its own principles. It will not give up authority because of a few internal political dissensions. Its majority sub- stantially is what it was in November of last year, and it con- tinues to act as though it represented the wishes and desires of the electors. I challenge that conception. And it is because no political constitutional channel is opened up for the people that men have to resort to the philosophy and concept of direct action. The Labor Party has done all it is humanly possible to do. I am astonished that, in view of the impotence of the Labor Party, caused by circumstances over which it has no control, it does not more frequently come to the industrial movement and say, " We are overweighted and crushed by a great political despotism. Come to our assistance in order that we may have power at our elbow to shatter the institution and re-mold one on better lines." Mr. Thomas can find no definition which clearly discriminates between a political question and an industrial question. Is a purely political matter one which seems so remote from industrial mat- ters as neither to influence them nor be influenced by them? Let us take an example. Suppose this Government comes to Parlia- ment and says, " We have decided to embark on a new war." That would be a political question, but it would have industrial and social effects, and if such a Parliament did such a thing would it not be morally and socially right for the Labor movement to test its capacity for resistance to the project? It might go down. Its capacity for resistance or attack might not be so great as some of us fondly hope it would be, but to challenge this 126 THE YEAR right to make the attack is to misunderstand the function of a Labor movement, whether it be political or industrial. The con- tinuance of the Defense of the Realm Act, and the continuance of conscription, are purely political questions, but who will deny that they affect us in our industrial lives and in proportion as they affect us industrially they become industrial questions? // at any time in the history of a political institution it prevents the expres- sion of force and power which can be found in an institution out- side it, that institution is responsible for the concept of direct action, and not the Labor movement. The greatest propagandist of direct action is Mr. Lloyd George himself. He teaches us the elements of direct action, and he must accept the consequences of perpetuating a political institution which we believe to have outgrown its functions and become anomalous. On the abstract question of the rights of the workers to use direct industrial action for political purposes, I hold that the workmen's rights are unchallenged and unchal- lengeable. Members of the Labor Party I would warn you because it is politicians for the most part who have urged their philosophy against us I would warn you that the time is not far distant when you yourselves will have to come to the industrial movement and say " we must have your assistance and support to accomplish something which to us is fundamentally right in the interests of humanity." I feel sure that you will come, because circumstances will compel you to come. For these reasons I ask the Congress not to be led into a decision in favor of this resolu- tion because of its academic, abstract, and mischievous character. If you want to express your views on direct action let it come on conscription, on Russia, on military intervention in trade disputes. If you decide that you will not take industrial action on these questions, it will not be because you have accepted the philosophy of continuous political action, it will obviously be because you have come to the conclusion that conscription, military intervention in Russia, and military intervention in trade disputes, are not big enough questions to justify you in action. I ask the Congress to turn down this resolution. When in future a conference is called to give its decision on the question of direct action versus political action, let it be upon a concrete fact, and if that fact is big enough, if it is unsocial enough, if it is sufficiently in antagonism to the best interests of the working THE CONGRESS AT GLASGOW 127 class, I have no fear that the working classes will not say, "We will use to the very fullest capacity the power that we feel we possess to rid society of a tradition and an institution which dwarfs and threatens and thwarts the working class wherever they turn." The antagonism between political and direct action will grow. It wiU reach its pinnacle when the industrial classes chal- lenge the existence of the capitalist system. I warn you in preparation for that day, which may be far distant or may be near: Do not create a new tradition which will effectively prevent you from acting at the great historical moment. It is wise to report Mr. Hodges at length, because he is the most promising and already the most powerful young man in British labor. Unlike most of the older leaders, he has a policy and a philosophy. It is as necessary to learn his mind as that of Lord Robert Cecil and Sidney Webb, if we wish to under- stand modern Britain. After a brisk and brilliant debate, the previous question was put which means " passing the buck," an evasion of the issue. The congress refused to decide against direct action. If they had passed this resolution, it would have put them in this position: if they went to the Prime Minister, and he refused their request, they would then have been pledged not to exert the only pressure immediately open to them. James H. Thomas, in moving the resolution on Russia and the military service acts, and, failing repeal and withdrawal, the calling of a special congress to decide what action shall be taken, said: The unfortunate thing in discussing Russia is that those who demand some clear statement of policy or who protest against men being conscripted for one purpose and used for another, are invariably met, not with a statement of the case, not with a defense of policy, but the war-cry that they are sympathetic to Bolshevist rule. I will only answer that by saying that, so far as this congress and the labor movement are concerned, we refuse to give the right to any government in any country to interfere, to dictate, or attempt to mold that policy which must be the duty of the people themselves. 128 THE YEAR Smillie supported the resolution, saying: It was put by Mr. Shaw that all our efforts in the direction of direct action were for the purpose of endeavoring to bring about a revolution. Personally I give that the lie direct. I am pre- pared to accept that sort of thing from dukes and capitalists, and capitalist newspapers, but it is too mean, too contemptible, for one comrade to say of another. We have been charged also with conspiracy and sedition. Any man who at all times keeps before his eyes the sufferings of his class, and recognizes that capitalism is the cause of that suffering, will always be charged with trying to foment revolution. I have for thirty years preached the necessity of an industrial revolution in this country, and I will go on preaching that, so long as my life continues. Life at the present time, and in the past, has not been worth having, and it is our business to advocate an industrial revolution. I do not desire to see an armed or a bloody revolution. I am an evolutionary revolutionist. Tom Shaw himself followed in support: On the vital issue there is no difference of opinion. Not a man in this congress believes in intervention in Russia. We should not shed one drop of British blood on an internal Russian quarrel. Conscription is bad in essence, and is not to be tolerated in peace. I shall welcome the time when we come to grips with the question whether or not the working people shall adopt direct action. Mr. Smillie will find that I am as keenly with the majority as he can be. Then it was that Clynes answered in a speech, so clear, reasoned, and moving, that the congress responded in round after round of applause. It was entitled to the same respect and received it, as the statement of the new order by Smillie and Hodges. No other man in the British labor movement is comparable to these three in reaching the mind and heart of a multitude with the memories and traditions, the hope and aspirations of their group inheritance, projected in wide survey and touched by personal suffering. Mr. Clynes said: THE CONGRESS AT GLASGOW 129 I do not mind a special Congress being called if an unsatis- factory answer is received from the Government in regard to the great questions referred to in the resolution. When the Congress is called we shall have an opportunity to see what the desires of the rank and file are. Meantime, I hope you will allow some reference now to the other subjects referred to by Mr. Smillie. It is possible for one to get into a habit of mind of believing that he is the only just man in the movement; that when he calls it is to be hoped that all other men will follow; that when he leads the lead must be in the right and wisest way. Now it is possible for that man to be mistaken and not know it. I go as far as any one in the desire to see property nation- alized which should be the property of the nation. The mines, minerals, waterways, land, the whole of the great factors which are the arteries of the national life, ought, in my judgment, to be nationally owned and democratically and nationally controlled. The question is not one of what ought to be done, it is a ques- tion of how you are going to do it, and it is possible for men to have quite honest differences of opinion on matters of policy and questions of method. The older I have got in this work the more I have seen the futility of methods of violence. Mr. Smillie does not want, of course, violent methods at all, but that is the first thing that direct action will get for us. Bring out your millions of men, tell them they are coming out for a day only, a trifle, a strike for twenty- four hours, and perhaps it will run into forty-eight. Having got two days you will want two days more. It is far easier to get your men out than to get them back, and all the time your Gov- ernment and the other remaining parts of the community, you imagine, will be doing nothing. They will simply be waiting for the moment of labor's victory. Surely all experience is against any such lame and impotent conclusion as that. You cannot bring millions of men out to begin a great struggle like this without anticipating a condition of civil war. Your Government would not be standing idly by. The stop- page of the industrial and social life of the community would require on the part of the Government some attempt to keep things going, some attempt to get food and supply the immediate needs of life. In the comparatively small disputes that we have had in this and other countries we have seen how soon the tend- 130 THE YEAR ency to violence has been- manifested, and how soon riot and bloodshed have been the consequences of action of this kind. Direct action is blessed in the possession of an attractive name ; it is blessed in nothing else. It means the breaking of workmen's heads and the breaking of women's hearts. It would give to every other section of the community the right, in the days of a Labor Government, to imitate the bad example which Labor had set. We fought, and have been fighting, for years as long as the oldest man in this Congress remembers, for Labor to capture the political machine. That part of the battle has been won, and as soon as the working man has got the means to capture it we tell him that the course is without hope; we allege literally that he has no sense how to use the enormous voting power which he possesses. You are taking a line which weakens the hand of the Parliamentary Labor Party, you are confusing the mind of our own class in the country, you are alienating the sympathy of the great masses of well-meaning men and women of other classes than our own, without whose sympathy and support you cannot hope to capture the political machine, and become the Gov- ernment in place of the Government you have now in existence. Imagine the Labor Government in power. It is certain that it will not long have been in office before a few millions of people will allege against it that it is exhausting its powers, it has no mandate for this and no authority for that. Do you mean that in those days those who disagree with the action of your Labor Government will have a right to resist your laws, to trample on your decisions, and to resist by unconstitutional action the administrative and legislative acts of the Labor Parliament? Are you going to concede, in the days of Labor's power, to every other class which is put under your authority the right to resist your laws as you say you have the right now to resist them, by the use of the strike weapon? You will, I say, set to all other classes the bad example that you ought to be the first to avoid. Having got your political power your next step is political agita- tion. Do not delude yourselves with the conviction that your class is united. If they are not united enough to go willingly and intel- ligently to the ballot box you deceive yourselves by thinking that you can drag them out of the workshop against their will, or that, having got them out, they will fight as an intelligent and THE CONGRESS AT GLASGOW 131 united body until victory is won. That is the mistake which the direct actionists are making. Taunt me if you will with being more or less of a fogey, if I say that I believe enduring and sure progress must be slow prog- ress. I deliberately assert that that is the doctrine of all history. Do men think so highly of themselves as to believe that in this their time they somehow have been ordained completely to turn the world round, and change the condition of things, so that when they have finished nothing more remains for mankind to do? This is an old country. It is only within the last half century that the working classes have got any power. They have not yet got the consciousness of it, but the power they have got this right to vote, the hallmark of real liberty, the stamp of the free man, which makes the poor equal to the rich nay, which would make him superior to the rich if he would unite and use his right, the right of education, the right to unite and collectively apply the great constitutional power he acquired. All these things are new. We have not yet learned how to use them wisely. I am well content, looking along the centuries, to see that my class in the day in which I happen to live have acquired this enormous power. I am content if I can do a little to teach them how wisely to use the power. Looking ahead I can see Labor in the seats of power, and I want Labor's laws to be respected and observed, just as I ask Labor to observe and respect them now. I agree with all you can say against the Government, for I have said it to their face, in regard to conscription and Russia, and each one of our other grievances. But what a state of social turmoil must there eternally be if each aggrieved class in the country is to claim this right to revolt. To get conferences specially arranged in order that we. might deliver speeches to each other is a waste of trade union money and our own energies. Are we, each time a man's head is full of fine language he would like to hurl at some Minister, to get together a special platform for him? Does it mean that our friend Mr. Robert Williams must have a special public oppor- tunity of selecting the particular adjectives with which he will choose to call Mr. Churchill a liar? We have more important business than this to do. Our business is not so much that of converting our enemies, as of converting our friends, and we will not convert our friends by threats. Labor is only beginning to 132 THE YEAR learn how to govern. We are just on the threshold of the wise use of the enormous authority we have acquired, and while you are asked to use your pressure to get your Government to con- form to your wishes on conscription and Russia, I beg you not to go further and challenge the existence of the State, and claim the right to a class dictatorship. Workmen who say they cannot be driven but can be led must also concede to other Britons of other classes the same feeling. You must lead them, persuade them, guide them, convert them, and when you have done that they will join you in seeking to change the conditions which op- press them equally with yourselves. This is the most comprehensive and exalted expression in the past year of the philosophy of a labor leader of the older generation. There is perhaps no greater debater in the labor movement. The resolution was carried with only two voices raised in protest. " The most important trades-union congress in the history of the British labor movement " came to an end with a debate on the question of Ireland. The question was raised on the following special resolution, moved by J. H. Thomas: This congress views with alarm the grave situation in Ireland, where every demand of the people for freedom is met by military rule. The congress once again reaffirms its belief that the only solution is self-determination, and calls upon the government to substitute military rule by self-determination as the real means whereby the Irish people can work out their own emancipation. This congress expresses its profound sympathy with our Irish brethren in their hour of repression. With the new Parliamentary Committee inclining toward the earlier conception of the function of a trade-union move- ment, the fighting policy (labor is nothing if it is not militant) clearly depends for its dynamic and its direction on the chair- man. J. H. Thomas was elected chairman of the Parliamen- tary Committee and therefore chairman of next year's con- gress, and of any special congress. His summing up of the THE CONGRESS AT GLASGOW 133 congress is of importance because it reveals what he considers the mandate given to him, and shows in what direction he will exercise his leadership. He says: The congress felt that after the appointment of a royal commis- sion to consider and report on this matter (the mines) the gov- ernment were morally bound to accept the findings of the commission. There can be no doubt that the workers are behind the miners in the demand for nationalization, not, let it be ob- served, because of any benefits to accrue to the miners as miners, but on the much broader and sounder ground of a proposition of interest and benefit to the state as a whole. The principle was clearly put that no section of the state is greater than the state as a whole, and it is in that spirit that the proposal was carried. Considerable confusion exists with regard to the vote on direct action. There was no vote for one simple reason, that the word- ing of the resolution submitted could have been construed as giving away the right to strike under any circumstances. On conscription there is only one thing to say we succeeded in crushing German militarism and we were told that among the other advantages would be a reduction on military expenditure. This year's budget gives the answer, and the fact that the number of men volunteers in the army to-day is greater than the pre- war standard is sufficient comment on the situation. In short, the labor movement, through its congress at Glasgow, is not only alive to where we are drifting, but intends to play its part to save the country from ruin. Inside the Parliamentary Committee, in these years of crisis, Thomas has unflinchingly given his vote to the side of inter- nationalism. This coming year, therefore, the Parliamentary Committee can be counted on for five things : 1. To work in closer harmony with the executive of the labor party. 2. To co-operate in the labor and Socialist international. 3. To stiffen up and strengthen the National Industrial Council. 4. To get a move on the Parliamentary Committee in general business. Thomas is a hustler in execution when he receives a mandate. 134 THE YEAR 5. To watch carefully the currents running through the rank and file, and not seek merely to suppress them. It is probable that we shall see either a general election or special congresses within the next few months. Such a special congress might well force a general election. The congress will deal with a " burning issue," not with the abstract ques- tion of direct action. It would prefer a general election to a general strike. It is not ready to substitute the congress for Parliament. But it showed at Glasgow that it is determined to have a representative Parliament and a democratic Gov- ernment. Any one reading this report of congress would gather that Smillie, with the organized power of the miners back of him, was the chief figure of the congress. He was. He had so carried the congress in his stride that the 847 other delegates could do no less in their British self-respect than assert that they, too, were among those present, and defeat the miners' candidates for the Parliamentary Committee, and re-elect most of the group they had just censured. It was either that or make him the lone leader of all labor. This is something they have never done for any man. The Glasgow Herald (an anti-Smillie paper) said on Sep- tember 12, " Events have conclusively shown that Mr. Smillie is the dominating personality of the congress." The New Statesman of September 13 said : However wrong his methods may be, the indisputable fact re- mains that Mr. Smillie has done more than all the parliamentary labor leaders put together to make a continuance of Mr. Churchill's Russian adventure impossible. Without him and his direct actionist friends it is, to say the least, doubtful whether the labor view on this vital question would have obtained any hear- ing at all. There is surely something there to be remedied. Alexander M. Thompson, the labor writer of the Daily Mail, says of the vote for nationalization: THE CONGRESS AT GLASGOW 135 That is the net result of one strong, determined man's grim tenacity to one fixed and unalterable idea. The only possible end to the fight on which he has entered, Mr. Smillie solemnly told the congress, is the nationalization of the mines, and his impassioned advocacy of that end carried the assembly like a rushing mountain torrent. It was a speech of great eloquence, evidently intense feel- ing and persuasive discretion. The result of the vote was never in doubt, but Mr. Smillie's oratory made assurance doubly sure. The difficulty of disposing of Mr. Smillie was that no leader was more in control of his rank and file. Where other leaders have split their following, he had the backing of his miners. They have been resolute constitutionalists in their trade-union and congress proceedings. To attack Smillie personally is im- possible. His honesty in agreements has been testified to by Lord Askwith in the House of Lords. His personal life is the pride of Lanarkshire workers. He is attacked politically by most of the press of Great Britain. The wearing effects of such criticisms are cumulative. All sections of the left had united on Smillie in making him their spokesman. They were pushing him out upon every strategic platform. He had dominated the Coal Commission, the Southport labor conference, and the Glasgow congress. In the quality of his utterances I feel that he is stretching him- self beyond the power of his physique, that he is at the end of his working life and knows it, that we are listening very literally to the " last words " of one who will be a tradition in Britain. CHAPTER VI THE RAILWAY STRIKE AND THE FOURTEEN THE railway strike resulted in a settlement not in a victory for either side. The Government has stabilized wages for the next twelve months, and has opened the whole question for fresh discussion. What is called its " definitive " offer is thus thrown back into the melting-pot. The railwaymen will continue at their war wages till next autumn. For the first time a representative body of trade-union leaders acted as mediators in a wage dispute. They did not make the terms of settlement, but they continued to bring the two parties into negotiating touch with each other. They made the railwaymen and the State " behave." The mental attitude of the committee was expressed by Mr. Clynes, who said that, like all trade-union leaders, he re- garded the terms originally offered to the lower grade rail- waymen as the beginning of a deliberate attempt to bring the general subsistence wage back to the 1914 level, and this return to intolerable conditions he emphatically declared must be resolutely resisted by all classes of organized workers. " The Prime Minister himself has urged us," he said, " to be audacious in our demands. We are too anxious for the prosperity of industry to follow his advice, but we do not think we are showing audacity in insisting that the shameful industrial conditions of pre-war days shall not be restored. For the efficiency of the nation and the welfare of the State we think it our duty to stand firm for the upward progress of the people's standard of life." The fourteen men who brought about peace were appointed by the conference of trade unions called by the Transport Workers' Federation. 136 RAILWAY STRIKE AND THE FOURTEEN 137 Mr. H. Gosling (President, Transport Workers' Federa- tion). Mr. R. Williams (Secretary, Transport Workers). Mr. J. R. Clynes (President, General Workers). Mr. A. Henderson (Secretary, Labor Party). Mr. Muir (Electrical Trades Union). Mr. E. Bevin (Bristol Dockers). Mr. J. O'Grady (Furnishing Trades). Mr. J. T. Brownlie (Engineers). Mr. J. W. Bowen (Postmen). Mr. T. E. Naylor (Printing Trades Federation). Mr. R. B. Walker (Parliamentary Committee, Trades Union Congress). Mr. C. W. Bowerman (Secretary, Trades Union Congress). Mr. F. Hodges (Miners' Secretary). Mr. G. H. Stuart-Bunning (Postmen, Parliamentary Com- mittee, Trades Union Congress). The Westminster Gazette, October 7, 1919, says: To us the experience of this time seems to be something like the discovery of a new principle which ought next time to serve first instead of last. This is the role of the neutral trades, which, acting as mediators between the Government and the railwaymen, found the way out which baffled the disputants. The eleven, or the fourteen, as they subsequently became, played a new part of the utmost importance, and played it, by common consent, with great discretion and moderation. If they became a permanent part of the machinery of conciliation, and it became a regular practice to consult them at a given stage in a dispute, we ought to get rid of a great part of the suspicion which attaches to the ordinary forms of conciliation and arbitration. i Mr. Arthur Henderson handed me this statement on the same point: The " fourteeen " representatives appointed by the Trades Union Congress were all of them connected with Labor Organizations whose interests were affected by the crisis. They held as between 138 THE YEAR the Railwaymen and the Government a position of very great delicacy. They confined their efforts mainly to bringing the two parties together, leaving them to settle the dispute for themselves and taking very little part in the discussion upon the merits of the Railwaymen's case between the Railwaymen and the Govern- ment. But they kept in close touch with both sides, almost from hour to hour, making suggestions to one side or the other, re- starting negotiations which seemed to have broken down, and being present at the joint discussions when, as a result of their efforts, these discussions were resumed. Because of the vast interests involved they were anxious to avoid an extension of the Strike which would have had incalculable consequences, but as the nego- tiations dragged on they became more and more convinced that the original attitude of the Government towards the Railwaymen's claims would have to be considerably modified if a catastrophic breakdown of industry was to be averted. It was a peace without victory a peace with honor, which in my judgment did essential justice to the Railwaymen, and it contained a promise of a generally satisfactory solution of the whole wage question which, as a result of the war, has passed into a new phase. I am not sanguine enough to think that the settlement will prove a millennium, or that the employing classes have undergone a miraculous change of heart. There were many activities in this strike which showed how near we were to a real struggle of class, and showed also how destructive that struggle must be. Many things were said which were better for- gotten, some things were done which ought never to have been possible, but the settlement stands as a prime achievment of re- sponsible Trade Union leaders who intervened in the struggle not simply in the interests of their own class but to serve the best interests of the community. It points the way to that developing partnership of the Trade Unions in the control of industry which is the working class policy. Those Trade Union leaders who have been closely concerned with important industrial events during the present year are com- pelled to recognize that the failure to secure organization of a national industrial council has been nothing short of a disaster. The spirit which pervaded the discussions between employers and Trade Unionists in the joint committee set up by the joint Indus- trial Conference called by the Government last February, en- RAILWAY STRIKE AND THE FOURTEEN 139 couraged the hope that one great defect of our industrial system would be removed. Had the National Council existed, I am con- fident that the dispute between the Government and the Railway- men's Union would never have developed into the actual stoppage. If I am asked why the unanimous recommendations of the Em- ployers' and Workpeoples' representatives have not been carried out, I can only reply that the responsibility does not rest with them but rather with the Government which has been unwilling to regulate the hours of all employed persons by legal enactment. It is of the utmost importance that every effort should be made to remove the bad impression thus created and to restore the con- fidence of organized labor, which will make it possible for the producing classes to feel that they are really partners in in- dustry and that their interests lie in securing the conditions of its success. In the Daily News for October 7 and 8 Mr. Harry Gosling, President of the National Federation of Transport Workers, writes : What men like myself are now setting ourselves to do is to construct a new channel by which the force of the movement may be regulated. Already a proposal has come out of the strike that we should form a central executive empowered to act for the whole body of Trade Unionism in negotiations with the Govern- ment. At present each unit of Labor has a substantial head, but there is no head at all for the whole Labor movement when it comes to a matter of industrial action. This new body would be similar in constitution to the executive of the Trade Union Con- gress but more closely knit, more powerful and more readily brought into action. You may argue that such a body would be a danger to the State, because it would be a rival to the executive of Parliament, which is the Cabinet. My reply is that a gigantic movement calls for a powerful instrument. If no such powerful instrument is in existence the movement will break bounds and chaos result. To put it bluntly, you must either have this or something very much worse. The time has come when the political Cabinet must take an industrial partner. The young men are demanding it, and although 140 THE YEAR it may be easy enough to chloroform old men like myself, you can't chloroform the rising generation. Let us work, then, with all our might to establish co-operation rather than rivalry between these two forces within the one nation. I know a very great authority who has worked out what it cost him to " win " a certain dispute. It cost in the first year after the "victory" something like 30 per cent in depreciation of out- put owing to discontent, and a number of years passed with a declining loss in each, till he got back to the normal. A " vic- tory" for capital involving an unconditional return to work is always at bottom a defeat. Lord Devonport beat us at the Docks in 1912. He won. But ask Lord Devonport to-day how much he won, and if he replies frankly, you will get a surprising answer. Year by year ever since 1912 we have been " getting our own back." It had to be done, but nevertheless it has been a bad thing for Labor, for Capital, for the community. It is my hope that the railway strike will induce the general public to think along these lines. Unless they do, all the efforts of the mediators cannot prevent the coming of a class war. Such a war, if it comes, will be intensified as a result of the great European war. The war showed a great number of men that force is indeed, a very effective thing. It taught them to think of sheer force as the live end of any cause. Moreover, these men who have come back from the war do not regard mere physical consequences quite in the light they did before. We find, therefore, that those who have fought at the front are the most difficult to control and restrain in time of crisis. Let the nation take warning. During the crisis the State laid aside its sovereignty and sacred impersonality and became, very simply, two men, Sir Eric Geddes, representing the employing class, and Mr. Lloyd George representing the middle class. It became a noisy, short-tempered, clever advocate, scoring points; a lively fel- low an amalgam of a grim, strong man, who clicks his teeth as he utters ultimata, and of a charming temperamental man, enjoying the debate. This brisk entity of the State advertised its case in the newspapers, chalked up big snappy RAILWAY STRIKE AND THE FOURTEEN 141 posters on the billboards, and flashed jolly controversial state- ments on the movie screens. The State revealed itself as a very human, likable, one-sided, rather inaccurate person. It finally came as a relief when those eminently judicial persons, Henderson, Gosling, Clynes, Brownlie, entered and lifted the dispute into the atmosphere of statesmanship. As usual of late, Parliament did not act in the crisis. As the British Weekly puts it, "We have had on the one hand the inner Cabinet, and against them the trade unions, and be- tween the two the House of Commons has nearly come to the ground." Parliament has been out of the main current of events during the War. And it was just its luck to be in re- cess at the time of the strike. It would not have been able to function because the industrial struggle selects committees of producers for its arena, but Parliament could have talked. The strike showed that motor transport, as developed by the War, has added a new medium of communication. The Government had secretly organized a skeleton service for transport of food, milk, and other necessaries, and a system of civil helpers. As the result, the paralysis of the railway service was not a paralysis of the daily social life of the com- munity. Of this new organization Mr. Lloyd George said: I have to take this opportunity of thanking the multitudes of volunteers who came to the rescue of the State in these circum- stances. They have come in their thousands and tens of thousands. In February I came to the conclusion that there were signs that this was coming. I felt it my duty to leave the Peace Conference, because matters at home needed our attention. Under the Home Secretary the Government built up a civilian organization to meet the situation. The organization has worked well. Robert Williams, Secretary of the National Federation of Transport Workers, says of this organization: The strike shows that there are hundreds of thousands of able- bodied men who are willing to assist in breaking a strike and 142 THE YEAR contribute some temporary useful service in order to cling to their domination over, and dependence upon, the organized workers. The loafers from the Piccadilly clubs went down to the Under- ground Railways in order to break Trade Unionism, and then to go back to their lotus-eating existence with a feeling of victory over the exploited. That is no new thing. The one encouraging feature in the dispute is that few if any workers blacklegged upon their fellow workers. The blacklegs in the main consisted of military and naval units, together with the young cubs of the middle and upper classes, who hate and fear Trade Union possi- bilities. Out of the dispute there must instantly emerge some organiza- tion which will be sufficiently powerful to challenge all the vested interests organized to prevent Labor's steady progress. The less one says of the Parliamentary Committee the better. The British Weekly, October 9, said: We must get hold of these dukes and earls who helped us with the railway, and set them to work in some other manner. The whole experience has enormously strengthened labor, because it has made clear the fact of class hostility and because it has emphasized the immediate need of labor unity, central government, a general staff, and a mass program. A " light- ning " strike, unannounced to the Triple Alliance, unexpected to other trade unionists, must be made impossible. The effect of the dispute is that trade unionism will strengthen its cen- tral government. This will be done in one of three ways, either by increasing the executive power of the Parliamentary Committee, or by forming a special sub-committee of the National Industrial Council, or by making permanent such a body as " The Fourteen," who engineered the settlement of the railway strike. 1 1 The Trades Union Congress of December, 1919, took steps toward forming a strong central executive body. RAILWAY STRIKE AND THE FOURTEEN 143 Further, the strike has revealed the difficulties of reaching public opinion. The newspapers mainly represent business and middle-class interests. Their handling of the facts, their emphasis on one set of facts as distinct from another set, their appeals to herd instinct, rendered their accounts of the strike ex parte. Of the persons I talked with I found that their opinion of the strike was made up 50 per cent of personal discomfort and 50 per cent from the newspaper which they read. The atmosphere of these days of crisis was passionate rather than temperate. The Times said, " Like the war with Germany, it must be a fight to a finish." J. H. Thomas said, " That the nation was nearer a civil war than it has ever been before cannot be questioned." The immense difficulties of a country which has always paid misery wages to a large proportion of its workers and has maintained a mean standard of living, can be realized by the wage-scale offered to the railwaymen by the Government. Here, for instance, is the " definitive " scale sent by Sir Auckland Geddes on September 19 to the National Union of Railwaymen for the Goods Department: Small Goods Depot Staff London Provinces Places Porters, Sidingmen, Lift Attendants, Gatemen, Watchmen, etc 47/~ 44/~ 4