„ SHOOTING NIAGARA

Yet the advance of Socialism was nearly always anticipated by
the premature retreat of the individualist. Before the vanguard
of the red revolutionaries reached each successive barricade the
capitalists were already receding. Many of the demands of
organised Labour were granted by Liberal and Tory politicians—
quick to sense the changing wind of electoral favour—long
before its Socialist representatives were in a position to enforce
them. Successive Employers' Liability Acts limited and largely
abrogated the old legal doctrine of common employment.
Under pressure from the Unions the scope of the Factory Acts
was steadily extended.1 The Workmen's Compensation Act of 1897
made an employer theoretically liable for all the risks of his
workers' employment. Charity, now invested with the prim
pince-nez of the statistical bureaucrat, was restored to its former-
place as a civic obligation. The stigma of pauperism was re-
moved and those in receipt of poor law relief were admitted to
the franchise. Labour Exchanges were established at the expense
of the taxpayer to help find work for the unemployed. Small
holdings were provided for agricultural labourers.

' The Socialist principle that the State as the ultimate owner of
all property had the right to tax capital as well as income was
admitted by the imposition of Death Duties in Sir William
Harcourt's Liberal budget of 1893. Fourteen years later Mr.
Asquith introduced the distinction between earned and unearned
incomes and a new impost on very rich men called super-tax. In
order to finance a nation-wide scheme of old-age pensions and
other "rare and refreshing fruit for the parched lips of the
multitude," the new levy was extended to all incomes of more
than .£5000 a year, by the Liberal Chancellor, David Lloyd
George. To a modern reformer, saddened by the omnipresent
spectacle of human greed, injustice and muddle, such modest
measures of working-class amelioration, now taken for granted,
may appear trifling. To a Liberal of the 'sixties they would have
seemed a revolutionary interference with the laws of supply and
demand and a half-way step to wholesale confiscation and Com-
munism. To many old-fashioned persons like the Conservative
die-hard peers, who sacrificed the powers of their own House in
a last desperate attempt to stay the new electoral will, they seemed
so even in 1910.

1 Within a few jrears of bringing the dockers within the scope of the Acts, the
number of dock accidents was halved.

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