^^
Fabian Tradl No. 49.
A PLAN OF CAMPAIGN FOR LABOR
Containing the Substance of the Fabian Manifesto entitled*
"To Your Tents, O Israel!" ("Fortnightly Review,"
Nov. 1893) ; WITH Practical Proposals for
Labor Representation.
Published by
THE FABIAN SOCIETY.
PRICE TWOPENCE.
LONDON :
To be obtained of the Fabian Society, 276 Strand, W.C.
January, 1894.
'O^^^
University of California • Berkeley
Gift of
LUCILE HEMING KOSHLAND
and DANIEL EDWARD KOSHLAND
A PLAN OF CAMPAIGN FOR
LABOR.
Part I.— THE GOVERNMENT AND LABOR.
/i\^ the first of November, 1893, the Fabian Society published, mil ^" ^^^ Fortnightly Review, a manifesto entitled " To \^^ your Tents, O Israel," charging Mr. Gladstone's Govern- ment with having failed to make good the professions of friendliness to Labor which gained its majority at the General Election of 1892, and recommending the working-classes, through their trade organizations, to take matters into their own hands at the next General Election by sending fifty working men as in- dependent Labor members to Parliament.
Is the Government a "■ Fair House " ?
The first stroke was to convict the Cabinet of sweating, and at the same time to make a clean sweep of the excuse that the Government was only prevented from shewing its goodwill to Labor by the opposition of the Conservative and Unionist party in the House of Commons. The following long extract from the Fortnightly Review article will explain how this was done : —
" Liberals who discuss politics in first or second-class railway carriages cannot reasonably ask Mr. Gladstone why he has not dis-established the Welsh Church, ended or mended the House of Lords, or saved them, for the future, the bother of attending to registration. Everybody knows that Mr. Gladstone has not had time — that ' Tory obstruction ' and the Home Rule Bill have made it impossible, under the existing procedure of the House of Commons, to accomplish any legislation of a controversial sort. But these considerations, which at once excuse the minister to his middle-class followers and inflame their party zeal, do not apply to the case put by the trade unionist. For him the Government is, before everything else, an employer of labor, far and away the largest of all employers, raised high above that commercial competition which drives private capitalists to beat down the price of labor, and holding in one hand the standard of life of the State laborer, and in the other that fiscal power which can throw the cost of all im- provements on shoulders well able and morally bound to bear it. The first question the trade unionist asks of a government is, 'Are you a " rat" house or are you a fair house ? ' And by this he means, ' Do you pay starvation wages and keep your men working sweaters' hours ; or do you pay trade union rates, prohibit overtime, and observe the eight-hour day ? ' The present Government can claim the distinction of being the first that ever came into power in England on the understanding that it was a fair house. We have already described how the London School Board election of November, 1888, and the London County Council election of January, 1889, both of them fought on Progressive lines, were followed by an immediate consideration of the wages paid by the contractors working for those bodies, and by the passing of resolutions to give contracts only to fair houses, thereby making an end of the infamous ' lowest tender ' system under which an employer's chances of getting a public contract were in direct ratio to the poverty of the men to be employed on the job. The Liberals won the general election solely by committing themselves to Progressivism as against the Manchesterism of the ' lowest tender ' school, now known as ' Moderate.'
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Mr. Campbell- cJannerman, speaxing in the name of the Government in the House of Commons on the 6th March, 1893, solemnly abjured competition wages for State employees ; and no Conservative dared gainsay him. 'We mean,' he said, ' that the Government should show themselves to be amongst the best employers in the country.'
" Unluckily for the Government, and happily for the nation, the pledge to act as a fair house cannot be put off on the ground of factious opposition or want of time. A few strokes of the pen from the heads of the departments, with due provision in the Budget, which must be brought in, obstruction or no obstruction, time or no time, and the thing is done. If, after sixteen months, it has net been done, the Liberal Ministers have broken their pledges to the trade unionists. No evasion or denial is possible : the conditions are clear, and the facts beyond controversy. Let us see now how Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet has acted on this question of the wage-earner's standard of life, which the working- classes, after years of struggling, have at last forced into politics as the most vital of all questions, and the most infalhble touchstone of the good faith of a party professing to be the friend of labor.
THE POST OFFICE.
'* Let us begin with the Post Office under the command of Mr. Arnold Morley, of whom we are told that he is ' unimpeachable in his Liberalism,' and who enjoys the distinction of having been specially selected by Mr. Gladstone to administer a department employing 117,000 persons. His predecessors, Mr. Raikes and Sir James Fergusson, had incurred much odium for turning a deaf ear to all the complaints of Post Office ' sweating,' and for rigorously putting down every attempt by the employees to better their condition. Mr. Arnold Morley, as a member of a Government which had come to overthrow the Tory oppressors of labor, was expected at least to reinstate the 'victimised' trade unionist postmen and telegraphists, as a preliminary to the adoption of the London County Council minimum of twenty-four shillings a week, as the Department's lowest rate of pay for adult men.* He could then have modified the contracts under which the mail- cart drivers work fourteen hours a day, and promised to bring the men eventually into direct public employment, taking care at the same time to make the postmen's nominal eight hours day a reality, and to extend its operation to the artisans in the Post Office and Telegraph stores and workshops. All this lay ready to his hand. Had he done it, he might perhaps have been forgiven for turning a deaf ear to Mr. Henniker Heaton's demand for a penny post to the Colonies, and other postal reforms — perhaps even for making no arrangements for the technical education of the telegraph boys, of whom many are now turned adrift when they outgrow their duties. But, although Mr. Arnold Morley has recognised the right of his staff to hold meetings without official spies, he has reinstated only some, not all, of the dismissed trade unionist postmen and telegraphists, thereby effectually maintaining the old official intimidation of Trade Unionism ; and except for some fractional increases of what were starvation wages and are still hardly worthy a better title, he has done nothing else. The most Conservative of new brooms could hardly have swept less clean than he.
THE WAR OFFICE.
'* Let us turn to the War Office. Here Mr. Campbell-Bannerman, who uses fair words about the eight-hours day, might at once have established it in all the War Department arsenals, factories, and stores, and have replaced the present competitive wages of seventeen shillings to twenty shillings a week by at least the minimum on which a family can be maintained in decency. He might have stopped the nibbling at trade union wages that goes on at Woolwich, and acceded to the repeated demands of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers for the recogni- tion of its standard rate ; he might have withdrawn all Government custom from the worst kind of sweating dens by expanding the army clothing factory so as to produce, under its comparatively healthful conditions, and with the additional advantage of an eight-hours day, not only some, but all the clothing required for
♦ The rent of a decent single room in London is quite four shillings a week.
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the army and militia, il not also that for other public departments and local authori- ties and for the volunteers ; he might have further superseded the sweater by establishing a State factory for all saddlery and accoutrements ; he might have cleared the ' rat shops ' out of the War Office list of contractors ; he might have faced the industrial problem presented by the annual recruiting of the unskilled labor market by short service army reserve men, or seen to it that these were turned out competent artisans instead of half-skilled handy-men ; and he might have put a stop to the wantonly inconsiderate practice, long and vainly complained of, by which so many War Office pensioners are tempted to become pauper drunkards, coming out of the workhouse every three months to drink away, in one rapturous bout, the quarterly payment that should, in common prudence and humanity, be divided into weekly allowances.
" Mr. Campbell-Bannerman, with these opportunities, has done nothing,t being content with the distinction conferred on his tenure of office by the appointment of the Duke of Connaught to the most important military command in the British Islands.
THE ADMIRALTY.
"Lord Spencer, at the Admiralty, also had his opportunities. The scandal ot the starvation wages at the Deptford and other victualling yards had become too great to be any longer ignored; and this amiable peer actually did set himself to play the good employer. Like his colleagues, he enjoyed plenty of good advice and some excellent examples. The Government's brand-new Labor Department made him a special report as to what he ought to pay, and brought forcibly to his notice the damning facts as to what he did pay.* Like Mr. Acland, in the Science and Art Department, he might frankly have accepted for all the dockyard workmen, the recognised standard rates of the various trade unions concerned. Like the London County Council, he might have resolved to pay no wage on which a family could not decently exist. He might have put a stop to the practice, recently exposed in a tragic case, of not paying the laborers until their wages are a week overdue, thus driving them to the pawnbroker to borrow at heavy interest the money due to them by the British Government, which pays them no interest at all on the compulsory loan. He might have ' abolished ' the middleman who at Deptford drove poor Pluck to suicide at the very moment of the departmental inquiry, and taken all the Admiralty workmen into direct public employment. He might have established the eight-hours day in all the Government dockyards. He might have rescued from the sweater the manu- facture of navy and coast-guard uniforms by setting up a navy clothing factory. He might have introduced weekly payments to sailors' wives and weekly re- mittances of navy pensions.
" It is pleasant to be able to add that Lord Spencer has actually done some- thing. He has raised the wages of the shipwrights, not to the standard rate of the Associated Society of Shipwrights, but to something below it. He has given the coopers in the London Victualling Yards, not the standard price list settled between the Coopers' Trade Union and the Master Coopers' Association, but the prospect of a shilling or two towards that minimum. He has raised the Admiralty laborers to nineteen shillings a week, those in Woolwich and Deptford being graciously accorded one shilling more than their provincial brethren, to pay the trebled rent of a London lodging. The result, in short, of the Government's protracted inquiries, during which some of the men died of underfeeding, is that Lord Spencer, far from adopting the ' docker's tanner ' or the London County Council ' moral minimum ' of twenty-four shillings a week, has deliberately put the London laborers of the Admiralty a shilling below Mr. Charles Booth's ' poverty line ' of a guinea per week, under which a family can scarcely exist in London with decency.
t This is the only statement in the Fortnightly article which has been successfully disputed. Mr. Campbell-Bannerman raised the minimum wages in the Ordnance Stores at Woolwich from seventeen to nineteen shillings a week.
* The report was of such a character that the Cabinet, after pi>blicly announcing that it had been called for, persistently declined to publish it.
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THE COLONIAL AND INDIA OFFICES.
" It may not have occurred to Lord Ripen at the Colonial Office, or to Lord Kimberley at the India Office, that any labor reforms were expected from them. That, perhaps, is why they have not refused to contract for supplies with firms not observing trade union conditions ; not directed the Crown Agents for the Colonies to put the model London County Council clauses against sweating into their numerous contracts executed in this country ; not taken the clothing required for the Crown colonies out of the hands of the English sweater ; and not established the eight hours day in the London wharves and workshops of the Indian Store Department.
THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD.
" Mr. Fowler, at the Local Government Board, came into a splendid position — one in which he might, by merely administrative Acts, have covered up all the shortcomings of his colleagues. Great reforms usually require legislation : even Mr. Acland has to submit his Education Code to the ordeal of House of Commons objections. But, practically, the whole structure of the system of Poor Relief rests only upon Orders of the Local Government Board. By a few strokes of the pen, Mr. Fowler could have swept away the worst anomalies and inhumani- ties of our Poor Law. To begin with, he might have virtually abolished the 'nominated guardians ' by refusing to appoint any; and transformed the Metro- politan Asylums Board by putting on Collectivist County Councillors instead of Whig Justices of the Peace. A stirring circular to Boards of Guardians might have led to a widespread system of pensions for the aged, by driving into the minds of all his inspectors and clerks, and through them into Boards of Guardians everywhere, the lesson that the objections to outdoor relief do not apply to the aged, and that what would in effect be honourable pensions ought to be freely given from poor-law funds to destitute veterans of labor. By another series of Board circulars and inspectors' instructions he might have revolutionised the work- house and the casual ward in every Union throughout the country — might, for example, as regards the wards for the aged and infirm, have improved the diet ; insisted on liberal provision of tobacco, games, and newspapers ; and peremp- torily forbidden the present imprisonment in ' the house,' for weeks at a time, of well-conducted aged paupers, to whom a walk every fine day is as necessary as it is to other people, and would be as pleasant were it not for the hateful special pauper garb, which Mr. Fowler could equally have abolished. By calling in the now jealously excluded inspectors of the Education Department into the shamefully backward Poor Law schools ; by insisting on the employment of trained teachers and their proper remuneration ; and by threatening to disallow the cost of all schools falling below a certain standard, the level of efficiency of these State nurseries could have been enormously raised and thorough technical education, extending up to at least fifteen years of age, secured for every pauper child. For a moment, indeed, Mr. Fowler took heart of grace, and reduced the guardians' qualification to ;^5. Then he sat down to wait for the report of a Royal Com- mission, so constituted that no democratic reform can possibly come out of its lucubrations; and with that. Poor Law Reform, for Mr. Fowler's term of office, came to an end.
" Had Mr. Fowler been but a little less than a quarter of a century behind his time, what a field he would have found in other directions ! Had he been really in sympathy with the House of Commons' repeatedly-expressed desire to put down ' sweating,' what a circular he could have issued to all the local authorities in the Kingdom, commending to their notice the model clauses of the London County Council ; stimulating them to the establishment of an eight hours day for all their employees ; and urging them to follow the House of Commons in abandon- ing the competitive rate for a living wage ! * And with local authorities every- where eager for guidance on the menacing problem of the Unemployed, what really democratic President of the Local Government Board would have let himself be put to open shame by ignoring the very existence of Acts of Parliament
♦ Sir George Trevelyan might have sent a similar circular to the local authorities in Scotland.
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enabling the guardians to set the poor to work, or have refused to come to any decision as to whether local authorities should or should not be allowed to try their own experiments in this direction ?
" It can hardly add much to the evidence of his conspicuous failure as a member of a Government depending on a working-class electorate, to add that, as regards London, Mr. Fowler has achieved the unexpected distinction of causing everyone to sigh for the return of Mr. Ritchie. Whenever the London County Council has approached him, it has got a snub for its pains. Whenever it has asked for any- thing, it has been told that what it seeks is impossible — as, indeed, it is to Mr. Fowler, who could not even carry out the transfer of further Government powers to local authorities actually drafted by Mr. Ritchie, and requiring no more than the formality of a Provisional Order Bill. It has needed only the final disappointment over the Equalisation of Rates Bill, thoroughly to convince Progressive London that its hard-earned conquest of twelve Conservative seats had been thrown away by the disaffected weak Whiggery of the respectable family solicitor to whom Mr. Gladstone was infatuated enough to entrust the Local Government Board.
THE EDUCATION OFFICE.
" After Mr. Fowler, some relief is necessary. Let us, thereiore, take Mr. Acland next. He has been one of the successes of the present Government, and has done pretty nearly as well at the Education Office as Sir William Harcourt would allow. And yet even Mr. Acland has not been able to destroy the existing sectarian monopoly of training colleges ; nor seen his way to requiring the systematic public audit of the accounts of all schools aided from public funds ; nor stepped in to prevent such scandalous pieces of administration as the diversion by the Charity Commissioners of the great endowments of St. Paul's School from the poor to the rich ; nor struck at the exclusion of his inspectors from Poor Law schools* ; nor abolished the old, bad system of payment by results in the Science and Art Depart- ment. What has hindered him from carrying out these administrative reforms ? After his excellent administration of the Free Schools Act ; his startling new depar- ture in the Evening Schools Code ; his prompt decision — how unlike his colleagues ! — that no workman in his department should receive less than trade union wages, or work more than trade union hours — after all this, who will pretend that anything but lack of backing from the Cabinet, and especially from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, has been standing in the way of the other reforms ?
THE HOME OFFICE.
" At the Home Office, the change from Mr. Henry Matthews to Mr. Asquith has- been so beneficial that even the Conservatives must as human beings share the general relief; and Mr. Asquith's credit might stand the Liberals in good stead, had he not, forgetting Mitchelstown, allowed official feeling to betray him over the fatal affair at Featherstone. It may be too much to expect from a Liberal Home Secretary that he should ' hesitate to shoot' ; but he might at least gauge the situation better than to omit the apology which would certainly be forthcoming if the Lee-Metford bullets, of whose effects the Lancet has given us so revolting a description, had found their billets in one of the capitalists upon whose initiative this particular labor war arose, and who, as Mr. Asquith well knows, have been left practically undisturbed by the Liberal Lord Chancellor in their magisterial monopoly of the power of calling for troops to fire on the public. But except for this lapse of tact Mr. Asquith has done very well. His administration of the Factory Acts has been able and spirited ; his appointment of working-men sub- inspectors and women inspectors was dead in the teeth of permanent officialism , his vigorous inquiry into unhealthy trades will save scores of women from such incidents of Capitalism as 'lead colic,' 'wrist drop,' and "phossyjaw"; and he restored Trafalgar Square to the London workmen. The most striking contrast, however, between him and his colleagues comes out in what he drafts. When an old-fashioned Whig minister is at last screwed up to proposing a reform^ his main pre-occupation seems to be how he can cut it down to the least the reformers will stand. When Mr. Asquith, aided by Mr. Haldane, produced
* Also from industrial, rtformatcry and army schools.
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"his Employer's Liability Bill, the trade union leaders recognised with relief that it gave them everything they had for thirty years been fighting for — absolute compulsion, no contracting out, and universal application, excluding neither Government workmen nor seamen.*
THE LORD CHANCELLOR.
" It will perhaps sound extravagant to suggest that a Lord Chancellor can do anything useful ; but the fact remains that Lord Herschell might have appointed as many Democratic J.P.'s in the other counties as Mr. Bryce has done in Lan- cashire ; he might, under the Judicature Act, have expanded the existing rule providing for the payment of juries in certain cases, f into one covering all suits, thus enabling working men to serve; and instead of putting one or two working men on each borough bench, he might have taken care that at least one-third of the magistrates in all industrial centres belonged to the class which makes up four-fifths of the population.
THE DUCHY OF LANCASTER.
*' And Mr. Bryce himself, in addition to setting that excellent example which Lord Herschell has not followed, might, as Chancellor of the Duchv of Lancaster, have seen to it that two. if not four, representatives of the Liverpool dock laborers were appointed by the Crown on the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board; X might have instigated a rule establishing payment of juries in the local Palatine Courts of Justice ; and might have taken care that the local benches of magistrates comprised, not alone one or two working-men. but at least enough to make up one-third of their numbers. That would hardly have over-represented the five-sixths of the men of Lancashire who live by manual labor.
THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER.
" Sir William Harcourt we pass by for want of words to convey any adequate idea of the impulse he has given to the cause of Independent Labor organization by discrediting Liberalism with everyone whose income is less than ;£"50o a year. It would be absurd to pretend that the Cabinet as a whole was anxious to go ahead, but there was all the less need for Sir William to pull it back. However, if a formal indictment is wanted, it may be mentioned that he might, as the virtual head of the Treasury Board, have insisted on all public departments paying trade union wages, and in no case less than 24s. a week ; he might have greatly mitigated the difficulties of the unemployed by directing, in a Treasury circular, every department to aim at regularity of work, and at equalising the seasonal demand for labor ; he might have stepped in, as ultimately responsible for the Revenue Department, to put an end to the starvation wages paid to the unfortunate out-door Customs' officers and boatmen ; he might have put his foot down against the refusal of the Stationerv Office to exclude ' unfair ' houses from its list of tenderers, as well as against its practice of employing middlemen to do its cartage, and thus to ' sweat ' the carmen and drivers who work in its service ; he might have carried out the declared wish of the House of Commons for payment of members by putting the necessary item in the Civil Service Estimates; and he might have drafted the Budget with at least some reference to the financial pledges of the Newcastle program. A ' Free
* The railway directors and other capitalists, sitting on both sides of the House, tried hard to ■kill the measure ; and twenty Liberals voted against their party on the vital question of ' contracting out.' As we go to press, the House of Lords, at the instance of these same railway directors and capitalists, is mangling the Bill.
+ Rule of Court No. 49' (Reg. Gen. Hil. Term. 1853) already gives to common jurymen, under certain circumstances, five shillings a day, with five shillings extra for refreshment. This could be extended to other cases without statutory authority, perhaps even to all of them.
X Under the ' Consolidated Mersey Docks and Harbour Acts, 1857 and 1858,' the three mini- stere of the Crown who are ' Conservators of the Mersey ' (at present Mr. Bryce, Lord Spencer, and Mr. Mundella), jointly appoint four nominees to the Board which administers the Liverpool Docks, and which is otherwise made up exclusively of shipowners and merchants elected by ship- owners and merchants. Lord Spencer also nominates three members of the Humber Conservancy Commission (39 and 40 Vic. cap. clxii), two members (for life) of the Tyne Improvement Commis- sion (38 and 39 Vic. cap. xxiii), and three members of the Tees Conservancy Commission (15 and 16 Vic. cap. clxii).
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Breakfast Table,' and the taxation of ground values, if only by the simple expedient of adding a special penny or so to Schedule A of the Income Tax, was surely not too much to expect from the future leader of the Liberal party.*
"Above all, he might have encouraged and facilitated the departmental reforms set on foot by Mr. Acland, Mr. Asquith, and Mr. Mundella, instead of snubbing them, and publicly declaring his continued allegiance to the old Whig ideal of reducing the functions of Government to the keeping of a ring for Capital and Labor to fight in.f
" Here we have a formidable list of omissions, which cannot be put down to the loquacity of Messrs, Bowles and Bartley, or the obstructive wiles of Mr. Chamberlain. Had the will existed, there would have been no difficulty about the way, as was shown by Mr. Acland, when he insisted on the payment of trade union wages to his South Kensington mechanics. :J It is, by the way, significant of the whole feeling of the Liberal leaders that in recommending the Liberal party, as their custom is, to the gratitude of the country, they have never alluded to this action of Mr. Acland's. They are probably ashamed of it ; and they will certainly have no other feeling concerning their failure to follow his example than one of self- congratulation on having escaped the appalling violations of Manchester principles suggested in our lists of ' might have dones.' "
Eminent Counsel for the Defence.
To this indictment of the Liberal ministers as employers of labor, the defence offered by the Government was a speech made by Sir Charles Russell to the London Liberal and Radical Union, in which, after pleading that the War Office had tried to prevent sweating under its contracts, he laid great stress on the fact that the Admiralty had raised wages.
This is no answer to the Fabian charges, but virtually an admission of their unanswerableness. The Fortnightly article not only stated that the Government had raised wages at the Admiralty, but went on to do what Sir Charles did not dare — that is, to give in plain figures the scandalously inadequate sums to which the wages of the unfortunate employees of the Govern- ment had been raised. We will now clinch the matter by the following exact particulars and references.
" Starvation \A/'ages."
On the 6th March, 1893 (see Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, vol. 9, page 1,127, &c.), ^^- Campbell-Bannerman, speaking in the name of the Government in the House of Commons, said : —
" When we say we agree to the proposition contained in the amendment, we mean that the Government should show themselves to be among the best employers
* It is an open secret — Sir William has indeed boasted of it — that the draft Budget which represented the utmost that he could have brought himself to lay before the House of Commons, even if Mr. Gladstone had allowed him to take time for it, contained neither of these reforms, and was confined to the one proposal of making the freeholder pay as heavy a Death Duty as the leaseholder. [The defence of the Government which appeared in the Contemporary Review for December, 1893, contains the following startling contradiction of this footnote: — " If Sir William Harcourt had been permitted, he would have introduced, instead of an act of vulgar oppression of the poorer taxpayer, an equalisation of the death duties, steeply graduated against the larger estates; and he would also have provided for payment of members. The veto on the project un- questionably came from Mr. Gladstone, and was urged partly on a constitutional plea, partly on the ground of want of time." If the Contemporary writer is well informed, th«n the Government, instead of improving a bad budget, deliberately spoiled a good one ; and the offender was not the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but the Prime Minister himself.]
f See his Budget Speech, 2nd April, 1893,
t Speech in the House of Commons, 31st July, 1893
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of labor in the country; that they should, if I may use the expression, be in the first flight of employers. ... I accept in the fullest sense the principle that the terms of Government employment should be beyond reproach. . . . We have ceased to believe in what are known as competition or starvation wages.'^
This was the promise. Now for the performance. From the House of Commons return, No. 386, dated the 23rd August, 1893, we learn the following facts as to the Navy Establishment. The " established " unskilled laborers are to get eighteen shillings a week, with a shilling extra at Deptford and Woolwich.
The ** hired " unskilled laborers are to get seventeen shillings the first year, eighteen the next, standard rate nineteen shillings^ with a shilling extra at Deptford and Woolwich. " Skilled laborers hired " are to get twenty shillings for the first year, rising by a shilling at a time to a maximum of twenty-seven shillings. Bricklayers and masons are to get twenty-eight shillings a week if "■ established," and thirty-one if ** hired."
It is hardly necessary to remind those who worked to establish the London County Council's minimum of twenty-four shillings a week and an eight-hour day for unskilled labour, that a " standard rate" of nineteen shillings (classed by Mr. Charles Booth as a " chronic poverty " wage), accompanied by a refusal of the eight- hour day, is not a satisfactory fulfilment of the promise to place the Government ** in the first flight of employers." "
What the Government's own Supporters Admit.
By far the ablest reply to the Fabian Manifesto that has yet appeared is the article, already quoted (see note, page 9), from the Contemporary Review, December, 1893. I'he author, Mr. H. W. Massingham, has set forth every scrap of administra- tive reform that can be placed to the credit of the Government. We shall give a list of these later on. Meanwhile, here is Mr. Massingham's own summing-up of his case on behalf of the Government : —
" But here arises the one vital question of policy with which the Fabian Manifesto, occupied mainly with the ingenious manipulation of facts to serve an obvious end, does not deal. On what principle are the wages of State employees to be regu- lated? Are we to follow the language of Sir John Gorst's resolution, and afford *• an example" to private employers throughout the country, or, in Mr. Campbell- Bannerman's exegesis, is the Government to be " among the best employers in the country," and to take rank " in the first flight " of employers ? Or are we to go a step further, and to use the whole moral force of the Government, in its capacity of employer, as a lever to heighten the living wage and raise the standard of remuneration for the entire body of unskilled and skilled labour ? I think there can be no doubt that it would pay a state organised on democratic lines to give its workers 10 per cent, above the level of the best kind of private employment.
* It may be well to mention here that Sir Charles Russell's speech to the London Liberal and Radical Union was delivered on the 6th November, and was immediately claimed by the Gladstonian papers as " a splendid record of good work actually accomplished in the interests of Liberalism " and a humiliating refutation < f the Fabian Manifesto. The meeting, however, was adjourned to the 13th. on which date Sir Charles Russell abruptly resigned his chairmanship of the Liberal and Radical Union, confessing that his position as a member of Mr. Gladstone's Government was incompatible v.'ith the presidency of the London Radicals. Nothing has since been heard from the admirers of Sir Charles's defence.
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The Government, however, have set themselves a much more moderate level of achievement, and I think there can be no doubt whatever that they have not achieved it. The only sound interpretation of a model employer is a man who pays trade-union rates of wages, observes the trade-union limit of hours, and deals with " fair," as opposed to " unfair," houses. Apply all these tests, and the Government unquestionably breaks down on every one of them. The eight-hours day, or forty-eight-hours week, has not been accepted by the Admiralty, and, according to Mr. Robertson, it has no immediate chance of being adopted. The standard rates of wages have not been proclaimed in the case of the coopers and ship-wrights ; and the result is that the ;^3o,ooo odd which has been added to the Admiralty wages-list, as the result of a careful but still inadequate revision, stands for no clear principle, and does not represent the moral leverage of which the industrial reformer stands in need.*
Still clearer is the case for the eight-hours day. The results of the experiments in the cartridge factory at Woolwich coincide with those which the great majority of private adherents of the eight-hours day have put on record. There has been no reduction, but rather an increase, of output, and there has been a perceptible increase of efficiency. If the Government, therefore, are to rank in Mr. Campbell- Bannerman's " first flight " of employers, the least they can do is to follow the example of Liberal capitalists like Mr. Mather, Mr. Brunner, Mr. Beaufoy, Mr. Keith, and Mr. William Allan. Against these shining records we have still to place such absolutely indefensible tyranny as that involved in the treatment of the Thames water guards, whose tale of twenty-four hours' work is now and then extended to forty hours ; we have the fact that the Treasury has discouraged the process of turning the Queen's Government into a " fair house " ; that the Stationary Office has done nothing ; that the sub-contractor has not been abolished ; that fifty-four hours a week are worked in many Government factories where the forty-eight hours rule could very well be substituted; and that large printing jobs are given to the non-unionist houses which have been properly barred out of the contract for the Labour Gazette.'''
The Contemporary goes on to complain of " something very like betrayal " of the people by the Government on the Budget; but we have no space for further quotations. The above sample will suffice to shew that the supporters of the Government have actually added to our charges against the Cabinet in the very act of defending it against us.
The Government's Legislative Record.
The Fortnightly article, having shewn the sort of employers Liberal ministers are, proceeded to deal with them as legislators, as follows : —
WATERING DOWN THEIR PROMISES.
" Let US now pass from the administrative disappointments to the legislative ones and from the trade-union point of view to that of the middle-class electorate. And here the ardent Gladstonian will, no doubt, begin to breathe again, feeling that in the department his defence of ' Tory obstruction ' and want of time is ready and efficient. We need not meet this by pointing out that there has been no want of time, but only a monstrous waste of time by a government so con- servative that it will face a storm of obloquy for ♦ gagging ' and ' guillotining ' rather than make these measures unnecessary by bringing the standing orders of the House of Commons up to date, and making an end of its insufferable
* The inferiority of the Government's scale of wages, as compared with that prevailing on the London County Council, is decisively shown by a comparison of the sums paid to park and open spaces' employees. Thus a Government inspector gets 6 to 14 per cent, less wages with more hours' work than a County Council inspector ; park constables get 10 per cent, less ; park foremen 23 per cent, less ; propagators 7^ to 12 per cent, less ; garden labourers 25 per cent, less and longer hours ; men in greenhouses 16 per cent. less. [Mr. Massingham's own note.]
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exhibitions of speechmaking and of those silly traditions of ' the best club in London' which the country has now far outgrown. We can substantiate our case without resorting to that argument, because the delays of the Opposition, though they may have retarded legislation, have not prevented this most maladroit of Governments from boasting of what it would do if it only had time. It has thus announced beforehand that it is going — when it has time — to offer its political creditors a penny in the pound in settlement of its Newcastle liabilities. The great Reform Bill, which was to include not only One Man One Vote, but payment of the returning officers' expenses and payment of members, as 'necessary parts of the Liberal programme,' and 'the only means of securing an adequate representation of labor in the House of Commons,' now turns out to be a Bill for shortening the registration period to three months, and nothing else, not even remedying the exclusion of lodgers from the County Council franchise. Comment on this must be either uncivil or inadequate : let it suffice to con- gratulate the Conservatives on the impossibility of underbidding their opponents in this direction. Next we come to ' Home Rule for London,' the promised Act for cutting at the monstrous monopoly by which the ground landlords of that great city, which we now know by Mr. Booth's terrible 'poverty maps,' as vve never knew it before, take annually over ;£'i6,ooo,ooo absolutely for the use of the bare ground. This august metropolitan charter has now dwindled to a petty measure for a small further equalisation of the London rates. As it will not cost the ground landlords one farthing, nor relieve any ratepayer except at the expense of another, it may be taken as the, most carefully conservative instalment of reform that even a Whig Government could decently propose. The one advantage of its inadequacy is, that no one has professed any great concern for its fate since the Government deliberately refused to secure it a second reading (which was quite feasible), and condemned it to the indefinite postponement of a future session. If the London ratepayer goes to the poll at the general election with undimmished burdens, he owes this fate in the main to the active hostility of iSir William Harcourt, and the weak complaisance of the President of the Local Government Board.
THE BUDGET.
" It must be confessed that the shock of this double disappointment had been largely broken by the Budget, which served as an indirect but unmistakeable announcement that the Newcastle programme had been taken up merely to catch votes, and that the Cabinet, as a whole, had neither a touch of its spirit in them nor any intention of even pretending to act up to the letter of it. The Budget was really a masterstroke of disillusion. It was eagerly looked forward to for the redemption of the three great vote-compelling promises of the Government. First, the ' free breakfast table ' with its cheapened tea, coffee, chicory, cocoa, currants, raisins, prunes, &c. &c. Next, the shifting of at least the final straws oi our fiscal burdens from the struggling tradesman to the receivers of the ;£'50o,ooo,ooo of our national income which goes to those to whom Mr. Chamberlain applied the saying ' they toil not; neither do they spin,' or, as Prince Bismarck put it, ' who have only to clip coupons with a pair of scissors, or write rent receipts.' The Liberals, though not bound by the observations of Mr. Chamberlain or Prince Bismarck, are responsible to the ratepayers for the hopes founded on Mr. Morley's speech at the Eighty Club in November, 1889, and Mr. Gladstone's oration at the Memorial Hall on the 2gth July, 1887, with its significant allusion to ' your magnificent Embankment, made, not as it should "have been, at the expense of the permanent proprietary interests, but charged, " every shilling of it, upon occupants : that is to say, mainly, either upon the wages "of laboring man in full, necessary for his family, or upon the trade and industry, "and enterprise which belong of necessity to a vast metropolis like this." Finally, there was the question of questions, ' payment of members,' provision for which in the Budget was, as the Radicals showed unanswerably, perfectly feasible. A majority of the Cabinet stood pledged to this reform ; and Mr. Gladstone's letter already quoted was either a promise of payment of members or a deliberate equivocation.
" Probably there never was a Budget from which the Radicals expected so much as from this first one after the triumph of the Newcastle programme. The
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moment of parturition came amid breathless expectation ; and the papers next morning announced that Sir William Harcourt had been delivered of an extra penny on the Income Tax. Nothing else — absolutely nothing but an extra penny all round, undifferentiated between the idler and worker ; ungraduated between the millionaire and small tradesman. The Fabian Society can only ask the public, with sardonic satisfaction at the complete fulfilment of its own prophecies, whether anything is likely to save a party hampered by such a Chancellor of the Exchequer. Can the most thoroughgoing Liberal partisan keep his countenance whilst pretending that even if a miraculous conversion of the Opposition to Home Rule gives the Government unlimited time and unlimited opportunity, the Glad- stonian Radicals will be allowed to take one step forward except under the most ignominious compulsion from their infuriated dupes of the Newcastle program ? "
The Parish Councils Bill.
A word now as to the Parish Councils Bill. In our desire to give the more progressive members of the Cabinet their due, we did not say a word in disparagement of the Employers' Liability Bill or the Parish Councils Bill. Whilst the Liberal Press was still unblushingly trying to persuade the country that we had ignored both Bills, the Gladstonians were very unpleasantly taken aback by a letter in the Westminster Gazette (6th Nov., 1893) from the Rev. W. Tuckwell, " the Radical parson," a tried supporter of the Liberal party. What had he to say of the Bill which we had spoken smoothly of as " the great success of the session," and *' the most serious attempt yet proposed to provide the agricultural laborer with a means of escape from his dreary serfdom " ? We have not space for his whole letter ; but here is his summing up : —
" Other defects in the Bill might be condoned if the allotment clauses were satisfactory; unless amended in Committee they are a mockery of all our promises, showing little or no improvement upon the worthless Allotment Acts of the late Government. In its present form the laborers will look upon the Bill as a betrayal. They will not vote Tory; for Toryism is to them synonymous with oppression ; but they will stay away from the polls — and they will be wise."
This time there was no attempt at denial. Without pretending to defend his own Bill, Mr. Fowler gave notice of his intention to amend it to Mr. Tuckwell's order by a clause empowering Parish Councils to hire land for allotments compulsorily.
Suppression of Swine Fever.
Every possible eftort has been made by the supporters of Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet to convict the Fabian Society of injustice and misrepresentation in the above criticisms of the Government's legislative and financial record. These efforts were summed up in an article by Mr. Michael Davitt in the Nineteenth Century for De- cember 1893, entitled "Fabian Fustian," and in Mr. Massingham's "The Government and Labor" in the Contemporary Review of the same date. We shall now give a complete list of the reforms, administrative and legislative, claimed as having been carried out by the Government and omitted from the Fabian article. First, however, in order that these reforms may be compared with those promised in the Newcastle Program, we reproduce verbatim et literatim the version of that document issued by the Liberal party at the last General Election.
[COPY.]
Liberal Leaflet, No. 1,589. [14,692] [Price 3s. per 1,000.
NEWCASTLE PROGRAMME.
At their Fourteenth Annual Meeting held at Newcastle-on-Tyne in October, i8gi, the National Liberal Federation declared itself in favour of the following
LIBERAL REFORMS:
Home Rule for Ireland such as shall fully satisfy the just demands of Ireland and leave the Imperial Parliament free to attend to the pressing demands of Great Britain for its own reforms.
The Disestablishment and Disendowment of the Church of England
in Wales, and the application of the tithes to the public purposes of the Principality.
Full Municipal Powers for the London County Council, and all other
municipalities, including the control of its own gaS and Water SUppliCS,
markets and police ; the taxation of ground values and other
financial reforms. A Free School within reasonable reach of every family, and public representative control of all SchOOlS supported by public money.
The Amendment of the Registration Laws, the reduc tion of the qualifying period to the three months, and the abolition of disqualifications now attaching to removal ;
One Man, One Vote ;
Shorter Parliaments ;
Returning Officers' Expenses placed upon the Rates ;
All Elections on one and the same day ;
A recognition of the payment Of members (as the only means of securing an
adequate representation of labour in the House of Commons). District and Parish Councils popularly elected ; Compulsory powers to local authorities to acquire and hold land for Allotments, Small Holdings, Village Halls, Places of Worship, Labourers' Dwellings, and other public purposes ; The reform of existing Allotment Acts, together with the right of full compensation for all improvements. Reform of the Land Laws, such as will secure— The Repeal of the Laws of Primogeniture and Entail ; Freedom of
Sale and Transfer ; The just taxation of Land values and ground rents ; Compensation to town and country tenants, for both disturbance and improvement ;
The Enfranchisement of Leaseholds.
The direct popular veto on the Liquor traffic ;
The Disestablishment and Disendowment of the Established Church in Scotland ;
The Equalisation of the Death Duties upon real and personal property ; The just division of rates between owner and occupier ;
The taxation of Mining Royalties ; A '*Free Breakfast Table;"
The extension of the Factory ActS ; and
The " mending or ending " of the HoUSC Of LordS-
The Tory Programme, if they have one, is a mixture of Coercion, Rebellion, "Fair Trade," and Vested interests.
If they deny this, challenge them to produce a programme of much needed Reforms which they will pledge themselves to undertake. They will not respond to the challenge, so
Vote for the Candidate who supports THE NEWCASTLE PROGRAMME.
Published by the Liberal Publication Department (in connection with the National Liberal
Federation and the Liberal Central Association), 41 and 42, Parliament Street,
Westminster, S.W., and Published by the National Press Agency, Limited,
13, Whitefriars Street, London, E.G.
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As an instalment of the legislation thus promised, the Westminster Gazette offers the following list of measures passed by the Government : —
" Railway Servants' Hours Act (giving Board of Trade powers of fixing hours).
Education Acts (Amendment) Act (virtually raising the compulsory age to ii).
Swine Fever Suppression Act (giving larger powers of slaughtering).
Abolition of Indian Presidential Commands Act.
Naval Defence Act (carrying out original Act).
Gold Coinage Rehabilitation Act (making of grant for the rehabilitation of the
gold coinage). Agricultural Fertilisers and Feeding stuffs Act (amending the law in regard to
their sale). Statute Law Revision Acts (two Acts). North Pacific Sealing Agreement Act. Savings Banks Amendment Act (raising the total which can be placed ip Savings
Banks from £^0 to ;£^5o)."
The list given in Mr. Michael Davitt's article is a copy of the above, except that he omits the Swine Fever Suppression Act, feeling, no doubt, that the joke of representing such routine measures as popular reforms is one that should not be carried too far. The others he modestly describes as ** not heroic, it is true, but of a serviceable character."
The Westminster Gazette also gave a list of administrative reforms. Omitting those for which credit has already been allowed in the Fortnightly article, as well as a list of promises (which have not been redeemed), it runs thus : —
"Introduction of the eight hours day in the cartridge department at Woolwich.
(Experimental). Fixing tne minimum wage at igs. at Woolwich. Arrangement of short time at Enfield during slack periods, in order to prevent
wholesale dismissal of workmen. Interference to protect trade-unionists in Messrs. McCorquodales' workshop. Departmental Committee on half-time and child labour in general. A Committee on teachers' pensions.
Inquiry by Labour Department into the means of relieving the unemployed. Vigorous work against the expensive Railway Rates."
Here the Fabian Society is convicted of a single error — that of declaring that Mr. Campbell-Bannerman had ''done nothing," whereas he had fixed 19s. as the minimum wage of the laborers in the Ordnance Stores at Woolwich. To this we must now add his concession of the eight hour day in the Ordnance Factories, announced by him in reply to Mr. John Burns in the House of Commons on the 5th January, 1894. It may seem ungracious to receive such a reform by a simple " Thank you for nothing " ; but there is no reason to suppress the fact that it was not granted until the experiment of putting the Woolwich cartridge department and the Enfield Small Arms Factory on short time had proved that the change would not cost a farthing. Where this cannot be proved, the reform is flatly refused. When Mr. Kearley asked the Civil Lord of the Admiralty in the House of Commons, on the 15th November, 1893, whether the eight hour day would be granted in the naval establishments (the dockyards, &c.), Mr. Robertson replied on behalf of the Government that " the matter has been
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carefully considered ; and it is not proposed at present to alter the existing arrano^ements." The rest of the Westminster Gazette list consists of trifles. In the solitary case of Messrs. McCorquodale, who wished to dismiss certain employees for forming a Trade Union, the Government was compelled to interfere, after betraying an in- disposition to do so, by the action of a Labor member, Mr. Sam Woods, in the House of Commons ; and the effect of the inter- ference was to protect the Unionist printers from dismissal. But we have already (page ii) quoted Mr. Massingham's complaint that " large printing jobs are still given to non-Unionist houses which have been properly barred out of the contract for the Labour Gazette.'' As to the unemployed, the historical blue book issued by the Labor Department, though highly interesting and instructive to students, has not helped a single hungry man to a job. The practical action of the Government has been politely summed up by Mr. Massingham as " Mr. Fowler's fairly sound, if narrow, enumeration of the powers of local councils" in ** two circulars on the unemployed question." We take the word of the West- minster Gazette for the "vigorous work against excessive Railway Rates." No doubt the Government will get due credit for it as soon as the rates are actually reduced.
Home Rule.
We now pass on to a paragraph in the Fortnightly article which gave great offence to the Home Rulers. Here it is : —
" The result of the General Election was remarkable. Home Rule was neither a success nor a failure in England ; the masses were simply indifferent to it. The Newcastle programme, as expounded by the Collectivist Radicals and Socialists, won twelve seats in London, and was successful wherever it was whole-heartedly advanced. The Liberal candidates who confined themselves to Home Rule and Disestablishment, and were obviously reactionary on social questions— some of them being actually opposed to Trade Unionism — made no headway. Without the Collectivist Radical vote Mr. Gladstone would have been in a minority on English questions, just as without the Irish vote he would have been in a minority on Home Rule. It was plain from the day after the election that since the House of Lords, by throwing out the Home Rule Bill, was certain to send him back to the country, it was only by combining Home Rule with the most popular measures in the Newcastle programme that he could rally the English wage-workers (who did not and do not care a dump one way or the other about Irish Home Rule) against the Peers. The position was so obvious that no preoccupation with the Irish question could have prevented the Liberal leader from grasping it if only he had been in touch with the political movement on which he had just come into power."
When the Fabian Society says that *• the English wage-workers did not and do not care a dump one way or the other about Home Rule," it simply faces deplorable facts which the Gladstonians are running away from. At the General Election of 1886, the Conserva- tives went to the country with a program of Unionism without Coercion. The Liberals opposed them with a program of Home Rule, and were routed at the polls. When the Conservatives treated their election pledges of No Coercion much as the Liberals have so far treated their Newcastle Program pledges, the English Radicals were indignant. They detested Mr. Balfour's regime of Coercion ;
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his Suppression of Free Speech and Right of Public Meeting; his imprisonments of political opponents in Tullamore Jail ; his batonings, and shootings, and " removable magistracy." But there is all the difference in the world between an anti-Coercion agitation such as sprang up in England in the years 1887-9, and a Home' Rule agitation. The moment Coercion slackened, the English feeling on the Irish question slackened too ; and when the General Election came, the result was exactly as described in the above extract from the Fortnightly Review.
The truth is that though the English working man may be a determined opponent of Coercion in Ireland as well as in England, eager for reforms in both countries, and a good hater of the jingo spirit of national domination to which Lord Salisbury openly appeals on the Irish question, it does not follow that he will vote against Labor Candidates for the sake of capitalist manufacturers who are notoriously hostile to his class, and who can be relied on for nothing except to vote for Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill. Why should he assume that only Mr. Gladstone's capitalist sup- porters are to be trusted with the settlement of the Irish Question? Are the present Labor members less to be depended on in matters affecting the Irish working class than those Liberals who vote with the Conservatives on Employers' Liability ; or who, in the last parliament, supported the directors of the Cambrian Railway in dismissing a station master for giving evidence before the Labor Commission ; or who, to go a step farther back, have a record for Coercion in Ireland in the past from which the Labor movement is entirely free? The answer to the question is so plainly in favor of increased Labor representation that it would be astonish- ing to find sincere Radicals opposing Labor in the Liberal interest, were it not for the fear that many of them avowedly entertain that the working class is incapable of winning seats, and that the only effect of Labor interference will be to split the vote and allow the Unionist candidates to get in. It will be seen later on, when we come to deal with the method of organizing Labor candidatures, that we do not propose mere election wrecking, and that what has proved possible in Battersea, South West Ham, and Middles- borough, is equally possible elsewhere. But if the Liberals believe that a three-cornered fight must mean the triumph of the Conservative, they are quite welcome to withdraw the Liberal opponent of Labor in the fifty constituencies on condition that the Labor candidate pledges himself to vote for Home Rule. That will satisfy both the Labor party and the Irish party perfectly.
To sum up, the proposal of the anti-Labor Home Rulers, stripped of all rhetoric, is simply that the government of the kingdom for six years after the next general election shall be competed for by two sets of capitalists, one backing " Integrity of the Empire" and the other Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill, the working classes abstaining from all further claim to representation. The proposal of the Fabian Society is that the working classes, numbering four-fifths of the electorate, shall have fifty seats, all of which are likely to
f I^ )
be filled by men far more in sympathy with popular claims, whether in Ireland or England, than the men they will replace. We leave the two proposals to speak for themselves without further argument, only reaffirming our conviction that Home Kule cannot win an English Election unless coupled with reforms which affect the English people as well as the Irish, and that if the Irish members understand their own interests they will take care that Collectivist working men rather than Manchester School capitalists shall be selected as the Home Rule candidates for English constituencies for the next House of Commons.
The Newest Government always the Best.
Our next quotation will be a paragraph which grievously discon- certed those Liberals who feel that they have said everything that is necessary when they point out that the present Government has gone further than any previous one, as if that were not neces- sarily true of every Government that doe? not absolutely turn about and go backward.
" The present Gladstone Government is not more superior to the Conservative Government of 1886 — 92 than that was to the Liberal Government of 1880 — 85, or that again to the BeaconsfieM Government of 1874—80. Ever since 'the unparalleled political treachery' of 1867, when the Conservatives trumped the Reform Bill they had just defeated by a more advanced one, which enfranchised the town artisans, the Government of the day has always been (from the Labor point ot view) better than its forerunner. And it is as certain as anything in politics can be that if Lord Salisbury were to return to power to-morrow, his Government will, if only the working classes keep up their pressure, prove itself a better Goverrnient than the present in such moments as it can spare from passing an Irish Local Government Bill which will, in everything but the name, be a considerable advance on Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill. This, be it observed, is not an argument in favour of bringing in the Conservatives, for the next Government will equally be a better one even if it be another Gladstonian one. Pending the formation of a Labor party, the working classes need not greatly care which party divides the loaves and fishes, provided only the Government has a sufficiently nar- row majority to make it highly sensitive to pressure from without. The only advan- tage offered by Conservative Governments as such is that the workers press them rather more vigorously; whilst the objection to them is that the Liberals are never more believed in than when in opposition. But at present the Conservative advan- tage is reinforced by the furious disappointment caused by the virtual abandonment of the Newcastle program, and the anti-labor bias in the administration of those public departments which have fallen to the 'old gang ' Ministers."
Here we may leave those sections of our Manifesto which contain our indictment of the Cabinet. After much swagger, bluster, abuse, ridicule, and reckless misrepresentation from the friends of the Government, they remain as they stood at first, unanswered and unanswerable. There is one way, and one way only, in which Mr. Gladstone can rally Labor to his side after such an exposure; and that is by abolishing the departmental abuses complained of, and making the next Budget a really Radical one. And how can he do this (even if he were willing) without breaking up his party, which is still so dominated by capitalist interests that he cannot keep it together even on so antiquated a measure as the Employers' Liability Bill ? If Labor does not help itself at the next General Election, it will have Lord Salisbury and Mr. Balfour back for a second six years' instalment of those " Twenty years of resolute government" of which we have alreadv had a foretar.te.
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Fart II.— CONSTRUCTIVE PROPOSALS.
We now come to that part of the Fortnightly article without which all the rtst would have been worse than useless :
" The Fabian Society, as has been intimated, cnn afford to keep its tenpcr, being in a position to prove that it was tco wise before the event to be among the dupes. In the various editions of The Workers^ Political Program (1887-1891), in the Fabian Essay entitled The Political Outlook (i88g), and in the Fabian Manifesto for the General Election of 1^92, ample \\arning will be found as to what was to be expected. The Manifesto, though it attained a large circulation, was received in sullen silence, because of its bitter but well-deservt d reproaches to the working class for allowing another general election to find it unprepared for anything except trusting to the promises of a Government dominated by men so hopelessly out of touch with the aspirations of the new electorate as Messrs. Morley and Fowler, Lords Spencer and KimVerley— above all. Sir William Harcourt and Mr. Gladstone.* One passage from the Maniftsto may be quoted here : —
" ' If the Liberal party obtains a majority at the general election, much will depend on the sort of men who compose that majority. If they aie a fleck of subservient Gladstonians to whom the Newcastle programme is noih ng but a trap to catch woiking class votes in, then the great disappointment of 1880 will be repeated ; and we shall again find out how little there is to chrose between W hig capitalists and Tory ones.' "
"Well, the great disappointment has been repeated, with the result as prophesied; but the present situation diflers in one all important particular from that dealt with by the Manifesto. Then, on the eve of the election, it was too late to do an) thing but tell the workers that since they were not ready to take the field themselves, they had better do the best they could with the Newcastle program, as being, at least, better than the No Program at all with which the Con- servatives were foolish enough to go to the poll. Now thtre is time for action. Let us make one more quotation from a Fabian Tract (No. 41)! on the point.
"'The official leaders of the Liberal party cannot now turn their followers back ; they can only refuse to lead them and sit as tight as they can under the circumstances. The Radicals are at last conscious that the leaders are obstructing them ; and they are now looking for a lead in attacking the obstruction. They ?ay to us, in effect, "Your policy of permeation has been successful : we are permeated ; and the result is that we find all the money and all the official power of our leaders, who are not permeated, and cannot be permeated, arrayed against us. Now show us how to get rid of those leaders or to fight them.' "
WANTED, ^30,000.
♦' But the Fabian Society's function ceases when the permeation has been carried to saturation point. That point was indicated by the election last Sep- tember of a CoUectivist parliamentary committee by the Trade Union Congress. The trade unions must do the rest ; and by the rest we mean provision of a parliamentary fund of at least ;^3o,ooo, and the running of fifty independent Labor candidates at the next general election. This is clearly the right policy, not only from the independent-labor point of view, but from every other point ot view possible in the working class. To working class Home Rulers it is the only chance of keeping the Irish question in the hands of Mr. Gladstone by bringing up a labor contingent in Parliament to rescue liberalism from the reaction produced by the conduct of its leaders. To the Unionists it is the only safeguard against the likelihood of a Conservative majority taking advantage of the ' integrity of the Empire ' to abuse its powers in the interests of the rich classes. Those who are superstitiously afraid of ' splitting the Liberal vote ' may comfort themselves with the reflection that no harm can be done by that in attacking a ' safe Tory seat,'
* The advice given in this Manifesto, which is still on sale for a ptrny as Fabian Tract No. 40, holds good wherever it may prove impossible to run a Labor candidate— that is to say, unfortu- nately, in the majority of constituencies.
1 "The Fabian Society; What it has done, and how it has done it. " One Penny.
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in which category the throwing over of the Newcastle program has practically placed the whole country for the next election. If the Liberals fear the sp^'t vote, they had better at once address themselves to passing a Second Ballot Bill, as ' Do not hesitate to split ' will most assuredly be a labor watchword for some years to come.
LABOR IN PARLIAMENT.
" To those working men who look solely to the interests of labor we need not address any lengthy argument for putting the Reform Bill of 1885 to its proper use, by largely increasing the representation of labor in Parliament. The fact that in a House of Commons governing a country where four men out of every five are wage-workers, only fifteen out of six hundred and seventy are Labor members, is altogether disgraceful to our great labor organizations.* How long will the four hundred thousand employees of the railway companies be content to allow Employers' Liability Bills and Railway Regulation Acts to be mangled by the fifty-three directors having seats in the House of Commons, not to mention fifty in the House of Lords ? The Operative Society cf Bricklayers finds its advantage in maintaining one of its members as an Alderman of the London County Council. Would it not be still more useful to have its own representative in the assembly which controls the whole of the Government works ? Do the compositors enjoy having their funds drained by seasonal irregularity of employment, which a better distiibutionof the vast public printing orders would greatly mitigate ? And if, as is probable, the next Parliament sees the renewal of the Government printing contract, now given to a ' closed house,' will the twenty-three thousand members of the three Typographical Associations and the London Society of Compositors leave their in- terests to be watched by the representatives paid for by the miners and seamen ? Does the Amalgamated Society of Tailors really want to put down sweating ? It so, had not its seventeen thousand members better send their own representative to the assembly which alone can amend the Factory Acts, and insist on their being carried out ? And may we not without offence ask the astute council of the United Textile Workers Association whether it is quite worthy of them to go, cap in hand, whenever they want an amendment of the Factory Acts, to the fifty-five capitalists who sit for Lancashire constituencies; and to wait abjectly until the employers put up some Lancashire member willing to introduce the Cotton Spinners' Eight Hours Bill ? We might multiply such questions beyond all patience if we had enough space at our disposal. The case for the fifty candidates, the ;^3o,ooo, and the prompt and energetic organization of the labor vo'.e, is unanswerable. The question is, who is to do it ?
TRADE UNIONISM TO THE RESCUE.
" There is, unfortunately, no such thing as completely effective and general organisation of the working classes in this or in any other country. But there is one organising agency which is so much more effective and advanced than any other, that its superior fitness for the political work in hand is beyond all question ; and that is the Trade Union organisation. There is nothing in the labor world that can compare even distantly with it. Before the ' New Unionism' movement, which was begun by the London gas workers in 1889, and brought prominently before the public by the London Dock strike of the same year, the Trade Union organisation was limited by the high contributions and special quali- fications required from its members to little more than half-a-million men ; but even at this figure it was enormously richer, more numerous, better officered with men of administrative ability and experience, and consequently moie powerful and more deeply responsible for the condition of the labor movement than any other body
* There are already six members of Parliament maintained directly from the funds of their respective trade unions. The Northumberland and Durham Miners' Associations send three ; the Miners' Federation two; and the National Union of Seamen and Firemen one. The Amalga- mated Society of Engineers, by vote of its 71,000 members, ha'i declared itself ready for a threepenny levy for parliamentary expenses, which will raise over £'8co. The National Society of Boot and Shoe Operatives, with 30,000 members, has voted to maintain one member. The Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, having 29,000 members, is also seeking a repre- sentative; whilst the National Union of Teachers has decided to run two candidates, who, as regards general politics, will be one Liberal and the other Conservative.
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in the country. Since that time the great unions have adopted new arrangements which practically enable every wage-earning voter in the country to belong to the union of his trade, even if he can only afford to join the ' trade section.' This change, and the establishment of a great number of unions in formerly unorganised trades, has about trebled the numbers, and greatly increased the political power, and with it the political responsibility, of the Trade Union organisation. There is no other combination able to cope with a general election. Attempts have been made, and are still being made from time to time, especially by Socialists, to establish general societies of the whole working class, to relieve the trade unions of their political duty ; but at the present moment, if the unions polled their entire voting strength at a general election, they could put not less than two thousand voters into the field for every single voter in the ranks ot the most successful of their rivals.
" The money difficulty, which is the great bar to parliamentary representation of the working class, does not exist for bodies which can raise a thousand pounds by a levy of from a penny to sixpence per member. A subscription of a penny a week for a year from every member of a trade union in the country would produce at least upwards of ;£"300,ooo; and though such a subscription is not completely practicable, the calculation shows how easily the great unions alone, with their membership of a million, could provide ;^30,ooo to finance fifty Labor candidates at ;£"6oo apiece, and to force forward the long-deferred legislation for payment ot members and Election expenses.
" On the whole, then, we may take it that the representation of the working classes at the General Election will depend on the great national trade unions, and not on the Socialist bodies ; neither the Fabian Society nor the Social- Democratic Federation, neither the Labor Electoral Association nor the society known as the Independent Labor Party, has the slightest prospect of mustering enough money to carry through three serious candidatures, much less fifty. Their part will be to provide the agitation which will enable the trade union leaders to obtain the support of the rank and file in rising to the occasion. Much remains to be said as to details of organisation; and none of this will be missing when, a month hence, the Fabian Society converts this article into a Manifesto, and sends it throughout the length and breadth of the Labor world in the form of a Fabian tract. In its present state it will suffice to let our Liberal friends, whose warm acquaintance we made in the heyday of the Newcastle program, know what to expect when they next go forth to war. Our success in forecasting the action of the Gladstonian Cabinet encourages us to hope that we may not have miscalculated the moment at which Labor is likely to take the field. But it remains with the workers themselves to make our words good ; and it is to them, and not to us, that the Liberal leaders and journalists had better address any remonstrances that may occur to them."
To this we must now add emphatically that if the workers do not make our words good, the Conservative party, which will in that case reap all the advantage of the general disappointment with the Liberals, will probably feel itself justified, when it comes into power, in treating the workers exactly as it treated them from 1886 to 1892. Even as it is, Mr. Gladstone cannot be reasonably blamed by the working classes for dropping the Newcastle Program, which was only adopted by him in deference to a supposed Labor movement. When the General Election resulted in the addition of exactly three English Labor members to the House of Commons, bringing up the total Labor representation to fifteen,'-' including two Irish members, he probably
* Messrs. W. Abrahams (Rhondda), Joseph Arch (N.W. Norfolk), Michael Austin (West Limerick), Thomas Burt (Morpeth), John BurnB (Battersea), W. R. Cremer (Haggerston), J. E, Crean (Queen's County), C. Fenwick (Wansbeck), G. Howell (Bethnal Green), Keir Hardie (South West Ham), Ben Pickard (Normanton), J. Rowlands (East Finsbury), John Wilson (Mid. Durham), Havelock Wilson (Middlesborough) and Sam Woods (Ince).
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came to the conclusion that the Labor movement was a bogey with which the National Liberal Federation had foolishly allowed itself to be scared, and that English working men on the whole preferred to be represented by the lawyers, railway directors, and coal owners, who make up so large a part of his majority.
Can it be Done ?
Yet no part of the Fabian Manifesto has been received with more confident ridicule than the proposal to return fifty Labor members. It has been asserted that there are not fifty men fit to contest a parliamentary seat among the eight million adult males working for weekly wages in England, including, among the million and a half Trade Unionists alone, hundreds of salaried officials who are themselves the pick of tens of thousands of branch officers, and of whom, nevertheless, the Trade Union Congress, with its hundreds of delegates and its Cabinet called the Parliamentary Committee, is by no means exclusively composed. The fact is that any well-informed politician can point out fifty constituencies in which the workers can return their own representative if they choose. And any person who knows the working-class world can name, among Trade Union officials alone, more than fifty tried men quite as capable of doing their duty in parliament as the gentlemen whose places they might take there, without counting the organizers and agitators who have become publicly known by the part they have taken in the industrial and political struggles of our time. The only real difficulty in the way is the apathy of the workers themselves, who have not as yet realized the power given them by the Reform Bill of 1884, which has been lying in their hands practically unused for nine years, during which their weakness in the House of Commons has compelled them to protect themselves by strikes which have imposed untold privations on them, and cost in hard money more than enough to contest every constituency in the country at a General Election, and leave an income sufficient to pay their members on a handsome scale afterwards.
Existing Independent Labor Organizations.
We may now proceed to consider how the contest can best be organized. There are already in the field a few political organizations, such as The Independent Labor Party,* the Social- Democratic Federation, and the Labor Electoral Association, besides
* This body was formed in January, 1893, when a large number of delegates from local Indepen- dent Labor Societies throughout the country held a conference at Bradford under the presidency of Mr. Keir Hardie, M.P., ana formed a Federation, with a central administrative council, entitled The Independent Labor Party. Here, therefore, and wherever else the phrase " The Independent Labor Party " occurs above, it must be taken to mean these federated societies only, and not to include the many persons in favor of independent Labor representation who are to be found in all sorts of associations. Socialist, Radical, Trade Union, Liberal, Conservative, or unattached.
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local bodies, which exist wholly or partly for the purpose of forming an independent Labor or Social-Democratic party in Parliament. The relations between these and the Trade Unions need not be otherwise than entirely friendly, provided only all the political societies work loyally for increasing the representation of Labor in Parliament, each coming into the field as the ally, not as the rival, of all the other organizations moving in the same direction. If at such a moment as the present any society were to declare that it is the only genuine organ of labor representation, that its program is the only genuine labor program, that its candidates are the only genuine candidates, and that all other societies, programs and candidates are frauds, it would give a signal proof, not only of political incompetence, but of that sectarian bigotry which is the greatest moral obstacle to the solidarity of the working classes. The Fabian Society has appealed to the Trade Unions rather than to any political society because, as it is urging that fifty candidates should be run, it must turn to some organization which has the means of carrying out that large order. The Fortnightly article said that " neither the Fabian Society nor the Social-Democratic Federation, neither the Labor Electoral Association nor the society known as the Independent Labor Party, has the slightest prospect of mustering enough money to carry through three serious candidatures, much less fifty." Even if this prove a miscalculation, and the bodies mentioned can and will run fifty candidates apiece, we shall still urge the Trade Unions to run fifty more. So far, there is no evidence that we are mistaken. It has been claimed that the late municipal elections shew that The Independent Labor Party can depend on the votes of from 30 to 45 per cent, of the electorate in the great centres of industry ; but if nothing but votes were needed, there would be a Labor majority in Parliament already. The Independent Labor Party, at its forthcoming annual Conference at Manchester, or on some other convenient occasion, should announce the number of properly financed candidates it can send to the poll — in shorty name the constituencies it can answer for at the next General Election. There is no proposal to interfere with such candidates : on the contrary, when they are Trade L^nionists, their Union may reasonably be asked for a levy to help with their expenses. The same course should be taken by all the political societies. The right method is for each body to take an electoral map of England and mark on it the seats it is prepared to contest efficiently. The Indepen- dent Labor Party is already, we presume, in a position to guarantee contests at Barrow, West Bradford, North East Manchester, Colne Valley, Huddersfield, Halifax, and South West Ham. The Battersea Labor League will guarantee a victory at Battersea ; and the Woolwich and District Labor League at least a first-rate contest at Woolwich. Newcastle-on-Tyne and Dover will look after themselves ; the National Seamen's and Firemen's Union will guarantee Middlesborough ; and the Social-Democratic Federation is pledged to send its candidates to
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the poll at Burnley, Salford and Walworth." If any of these bodies can do more than this, so much the better; but it is clear that even if they do twice or even three times as much, the Trade Unions must still come to the rescue if the total of fifty is to be made up. Therefore it is the business of all to declare definitely what each can undertake to do,, and to call on the Unions to come into the field with their comparatively magnificent resources to make up the deficiency.
In constituencies where they are not strong enough themselves to run candidates, local or branch Independent Labor Parties and Social-Democratic Federation branches may do excellent work by agitating for a demand signed by a thousand registered working electors for a Labor candidate. Such a demand, if forwarded to any large Union which had a powerful branch in the constituency, would probably lead to the Union financing a candidate from its trade. We desire to lay great stress on this suggestion, because the Unions are much more likely to act on an application from a constituency than on their own initiative.
On the whole then we may take it that the Election will, financially at least, depend on the great national Unions. They have them- selves formally acknowledged their responsibility by voting, at the last Trade Union Congress (Belfast, 1893), for the appointment of a committee charged with the dut}' of establishing a separate fund for the purpose of assisting independent candidates in local and parliamentary elections, and giving financial assistance to candi- dates selected by the localities and pledged to support the principle of collective ownership and control of all the means of produc- tion and distribution, and the Labor program as agreed upon from time to time by the Trade Union Congress. The committee, however, was not actually nominated ; and the matter now rests in the hands of the Parliamentary Committee, consisting of Messrs. John Burns, M.P. (chairman), Henry Broadhurst, J. Mawdsley, E. Cowey, J. Havelock Wilson, M.P., W. Inskip, D. Holmes, J. M. Jack, Ben Tillett, J. Hodge, and Charles Fenwick (secretary).
The Trades Councils.
Now if this committee is to act on behalf of the Unions with the greatest attainable effect, it must avoid any appearance of taking the elections out of the hands of the constituencies. For example, if the Amalgamated Engineers were to say, in effect, *' We wish to have a representative in Parliament ; and we will make use of Newcastle for that purpose ", Mr. Fred Hammill would at once
* None of these candidatures can be successful without warm support and pecuniary help from sympathizers outside the ranks of the bodies named, backed up at the polls by the votes of thousands of working men who call themselves Liberals or Conservatives at present. All that is meant is that the bodies have undertaken to secure that support and to organize the candidature. The list given does not include Scotch or Irish constituencies, and is not offered as complete for England and Wales.
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become, not the representative of the entire working class in Newcastle, but simply the Engineers' candidate, in which case a considerable body of small employers and other non-unionists and middle-class voters might hold aloof; and even the unionists in other trades might regard him with more or less jealousy. Clearly the candidate must be the candidate of the whole working class in the constituency, and not of a section only, however powerful and well organized that section may be throughout the country. The great Unions would be the first to recognize this if the central councils of the Independent Labor Party or the Social- Democratic Federation were to thrust a candidate of their own upon any constituency. But the Engineers may quite properly say to Newcastle, " If you will run a Labor candidate who, as a member of our union, would represent us as well as you, we will come to the rescue if you cannot find the requisite funds." It is evident, then, that whilst the great unions will be virtually masters of the situation, they will do well to act through local bodies composed of delegates from all the local trades. Suitable bodies already exist in the Trades Councils, originally established for just such purposes. Unfortunately, owing to the want of any concerted political action between the trades, the Trades Councils have in some towns been much neglected, a few of the most highly organized trades ignoring them altogether, and others treating the selection of delegates to them as a matter of no great importance. The result is that at present, though there are about too Trades Councils in existence, some of them are hardly fit to undertake the responsibility of acting on behalf of Labor at a General Election. The high officials of the great unions thrust them aside when there is important work to be done ; and in the worst cases, instead of being the peacemakers and political organizers of the Labor world, they are little better than cockpits in which the local trades fight out their petty squabbles through delegates who cannot see beyond the separate interests of their own trade, and have standing quarrels with whole sections of the electorate. Men who have shewn no political instinct, and are behind the times in their view of the scope and future of the Labor movement, or who are bigoted partisans of the Conservative or Liberal parties in politics, are, in some towns and by some socie- ties, considered quite good enough to send to the Trades Council. There are even cases in which the Councils have not yet entirely rid themselves of members who are personally so self-indulgent that they are respected neither inside nor outside Trade Union circles. But even if all the Councils were as bad as this, they would still be the only bodies so constituted as to form a centre of political action for all the organized labor of the district. Their short- comings can easily be cured. The leaders of Trade Unionism have only to give the word, and the defective Councils can be swept and garnished ; made completely representative and authoritative by the arrival of delegates from the great unions which now ignore them ; and manned by delegates fit for the emergency which is coming. It is much shorter and easier to do
( ^6)
this than to form new bodies which would necessarily be nothing but Trades Councils over again under some other name.
The only valid objection to Trades Councils as centres of political organization is their exclusion of all employers and of those sympathizers in the professional and middle-classes of whom a few are to be found everywhere doing good work in the Labor movement. But the election committee formed by the Council need not be exclusive. It can invite any Socialist Society, or Independent Labor Party branch, or Radical or Labor Club, to qualify itself for representation on the committee by contributing to the election fund.
The Case of London.
An important exception to this rule of acting through the Trades Council is London, where the fact that there is only one Trades Council for sixty constituencies makes it necessary to form special local associations like the Battersea and the Woolwich District Labor Leagues, or representative bodies composed of delegates from all the suitable local associ- ations, such as the Labor Electoral Councils of Hackney and Poplar. But even in London the Trades Council will be able to play an important part. There are two powerful organizations, the Building Trades Federation (45,000 members), and the London Society of Compositors (g,8oo), which belong to London alone; whilst at least six of the great national unions, the Amalgamated Engineers (8,620 London members) ; the Amalgamated Tailors (2,610) ; the Amalgamated Railway Servants (3,650) ; the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives (5,660) ; the Boilermakers (2,575) 5 ^^^ ^^^ Gasworkers and General Laborers (15,100), have strong branches in the metropolitan district. With the support of the 93,000 wage workers enumerated above, the London Trades Council can appoint a Committee to do for London exactly what the Labor Representation Committee of the Trade Union Congress is to do for the whole country (see page 24). That is to say, if the local associations were to select officials or other well known members of these Trades as candidates, the Trades Council might raise a special London parliamentary fund, sufficient to enable it to guarantee the Returning Officers' expenses in at least four, if not in half-a-dozen constituencies.
Another exception to the rule is the case of constituencies where one single trade is in such a huge majority (mining or agricultural labor, for instance) that the national or county union of that one trade can properly instruct its local branch to act on its own responsibility as being sufficiently representative of local labor. But whether the organizing body be a local London Labor League, a Trade Union, or a Trades Council, the local conditions of organ- ization will be much the same. And as Labor will probably have to rely mainly on the Trades Councils, it will be best to describe the method of action through them as the typical method for the forthcoming election.
( 27) How to Begin.
The first step to be taken by the Trades Council is to form a committee to prepare for action. This committee should at once draw up a requisition to be signed by working-class voters, expressing their wish to be represented by a Labor candidate at the next general election, and promising to support a good one if he can be found. At least a thousand signatures should be procured, beginning, of course, with those of the members of the Unions represented in the Council, and as many more as can be added by the efforts of the Independent Labor Party, the Fabian Society, the Social-Democratic Federation, and any other friendly bodies or individuals. No signatures should be taken except those of registered electors ; and the most jealous care should be taken to make the document a genuine one and to prevent deadhead signatures being passed for the sake of making a show. An election fund should then be opened in the name of three or more trustees of known integrity ; and from that time forward all subscriptions whatever should be paid to these trustees, and on no account to the candidate himself or any irresponsible person. The committee should not consider itself in a position to act on the requisition until it is reasonably certain of being able to cover the Returning Ofiicer's expenses, and so guarantee that the candidate will really go to the poll. A candidate who withdraws at the last moment and leaves the Labor electorate in confusion is worse than no candidate at all. Candidates "for the sake of propaganda " should be sternly discouraged. Propaganda under false pretences defeats its own object.
The moment it becomes known that the committee is in funds, a crowd of men in difficulties will suddenly appear, offering their services as speakers, canvassers, collectors, clerks, or in any other capacity in which they can transfer some of the money to their own pockets. The claims of old acquaintance and pathetic hard-upness will be urged on the committee. To these appeals the members must harden their hearts and shut their ears. The rule must be voluntary service and pay your own expenses in the Labor cause. If, later on, a few paid men should be needed, they should be carefully selected for their competence, and well paid, preference being deliberately given to men whose ability and character would enable them easily to obtain other work, and who are there- fore not in the least likely to be objects of charitable consideration.
'' Tory Gold."
Great as is the circumspection that will have to be exercised in spending money, even greater will be needed in receiving it. Most of the Labor candidatures will be organized in constituencies which usually return a Liberal, because these constituencies are supposed to be the most advanced, and therefore the most favor- able to Labor. This gives the Conservatives a strong incentive to
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encourage Labor candidatures ; for a seat that is always safe for the Liberal as long as the Progressive vote is cast solidly for him, may often be easily vv^on by a Conservative if the Progressive vote is divided between a Labor candidate and a Liberal. The Liberal Government has been repeatedly warned of this difficulty, and urged to remove it by introducing the simple electoral reform known as Second Ballot. The warning has been disregarded ; and there can be no doubt now that in the majority of cases the Liberals will insist on running their candidates in opposition to the Labor candidates, and will accuse the Labor candidates of being subsidized by " Tory gold " to split the Progressive vote and let the Conserva- tive in. And they will point out, as evidence of the charge, the fact that the Labor Party, as a rule, "attacks" Liberal seats and not Conservative ones, adding, in proof of their friendly feeling towards Labor, the handsomest offers from Liberal headquarters to give way to Labor candidates in constituencies where neither a Liberal nor a Labor candidate has the smallest chance against the Conservative.
The Conservatives will not be slow to improve the occasion. It may confidently be expected that offers of pecuniary support for Labor candidates will be received from the " men in the moon " who negotiate between the Conservative officials and the working classes in such emergencies. The temptation to spoil the Egyptians will be great; but it must be resolutely resisted on the ground of expediency even by those who cannot see any principle at stake in the matter, because the experience of 1885, when two Socialist candidates, running avowedly with Conservative money in London, got 59 votes between them, as well as that of 1892, when a " Labor" candidate, under suspicion of the same, polled 19 votes, proves conclusively that Conservative money utterly destroys a candidate's chances instead of helping him, owing to the existence of a strong public opinion that such negociations are discreditable intrigues, and stamp the candidate concerned as either corrupt or too deficient in judgment to be worthy of support. The committee should rely mainly on union levies and small subscriptions from individuals. It should accept no donations from outside the Labor ranks except those which come from tried sympathizers ; and in the event of a suspicious offer coming, not only should it be refused, but the letters or minutes recording the offer and refusal should be at once sent to the Press. Once such an offer has been made, a moment's concealment, even of its refusal, is dangerous.
The only assistance from the Conservative officials that can be accepted without discredit is an offer to withdraw their candidate. From the Conservative Party, in its full sense of all the electors who habitually vote for Conservative candidates, a considerable portion of the Labor vote has admittedly been drawn at recent parliamentary and municipal elections. The Conservative working man, though he cannot be persuaded to vote Liberal, can and will be persuaded to vote Labor.
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Election Expenses.
The amount required to carry the election through effectively varies from constituency to constituency, according to the area to be covered. In a compact town, where a comparatively small number of polling stations will accommodate the entire electorate, and where a few dozen posters, properly placed, will come under the notice of the whole town, ^250 will do more than £1,000 would in a big county constituency where the voters are scattered into little groups in villages miles apart. On that account it will be necessary to confine the efforts of the Labor Party chiefly to the compact towns. Roughly speaking, the election expenses, even with abundance of voluntary help, will run from £200 to £600. A thorough Labor candidature ought not to cost the candidate a single farthing; and in the event of his winning the seat he should be paid regular wages sufficient to maintain him in the position of a member of Parliament, pending the establishment, by legislation, of Payment of Members out of public funds. The leading Trade Unions pay their parliamentary representatives from £5 to £10 a week ; and this would not be considered decent pay for the same class of work by any professional man. However, when money runs short an underpaid member is better than no member.
The Right Sort of Candidate.
The next step is to select a candidate, which of course cannot be done without reference to the policy of the Labor party. As this has already been defined as Collectivist in principle by the Trade Union Congress (see page 24), no difficulty is likely to arise at the next election as to the main features of the Labor program. Since the candidate will have to oppose both Conservatives and Liberals — the only probable exception being where he may be able to drive one or the other out of the field — he is pretty sure to be either a Socialist or a Collectivist Radical differing from a Socialist only in name. Therefore the danger is not that the candidate may not be advanced enough, but rather that he may have quarrelled with everybody outside his own particular section for not being as advanced as himself. A candidate who makes enemies on his own side is out of the question : nevertheless there is great danger of Labor candidates falling into this mistake, especially those who have made their reputation as agitators. Ten years ago, in order to wake up the Labor world from its apathy, and to combat the reactionary quietism which had stolen over the Trade Union movement since 1874 (in which year the working class vote did much to throw out the Liberals for their refusal to repeal their own Criminal Law Amendment Act, under which Trade Unionists were being imprisoned for picketting), it was necessary for Socialists to make a rousing attack on the whole Labor world, sparing neither Radicals, Trade Unionists, Co-operators, nor
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any other section. That attack soon achieved its object. The pupils of the Socialists of ten years ago are now the majorities in the Unions ; the Radical and Trade Union programs are often more scientifically Collectivist than the cruder Socialist ones ; and the Old Unionism has embraced the New, Mr. Henry Broadhurst being now in line with Mr. John Burns on the question of Eight Hours. Unfortunately many Socialists do not yet realize the change they have them- selves brought about. From mere force of habit, which is as strong in public speakers as in other people, they treat their converts as if they were still scoffers, and seem to like those Radicals who are now their zealous rivals in Collectivist propa- ganda no better than in the old times when they were opponents. A Socialist who is behind his time in this way is perhaps the worst candidate the Labor Party can have. He is almost certain to begin his campaign by a violent and indiscriminate denunciation of " the Liberal Party," forgetting that all the working men in the con- stituency who voted Liberal in 1892, and whose votes he must get if he is to make a respectable show at the poll, will take mortal offence at his attacks ; whilst Mr. Gladstone, Sir William Harcourt, Mr. Morley, Lord Kimberley, and the rest of the official leaders to whom his remarks do really apply, will never hear a word of them. A man who habitually speaks in public as if the 2,461,874 men who voted for Mr. Gladstone at the last General election are one and all reactionary Whig factory owners, may be of some use in waking up sleepy districts which are not within five years of even beginning to organize for political action ; but in a constituency advanced enough to undertake a serious Labor candidature he is worse than useless. The same argument applies with equal force to Radicals and Trade Unionists. Ten years ago it was the fashion among Radicals to abuse the Socialists very heartily. Even so able a Radical leader as Charles Bradlaugh once referred to them as " a few poets, a few idiots, and some for whom he could not use such kindly words." Now just as there are Socialists who still keep up the old attitude of hostility to Radicalism, so there are Radicals and Trade Unionists who still hold the old language towards Socialists. Such men cannot win parliamentary seats ; and it is waste of time and money to run them as candidates. A man who cannot pick up one working man's vote without dropping another's should confine himself to agitating. The vote of the Radical absolutely must be joined to the vote of the Socialist in the Labor contest, or failure and disgrace will be the result. The first question put to a candidate might well be : — Do you insist on everyone who votes for you agreeing with you in everything, or are you prepared to do your best to conciliate and unite all the men in the constituency who have reason to prefer you, on the whole, to either of your opponents?
The Labor Program.
When the candidate is selected he must go to the constituency with a program. Those who need the financial assistance of the
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Parliamentary Committee of the Trade Union Congress are already bound " to support the principle of collective ownership and control of all the means of production and distribution " ; and it is probable that most Labor candidates will declare their loyalty to this principle, either by a general declaration in favor of Nationaliza- tion of the Land and of all the Means of Production, Distribu- tion and Exchange, or, more shortly, by announcing themselves as Socialists, or Social-Democrats. Such a general declaration, however, will not do instead of a program. Men are sent to Parliament, not to declare general aims and principles, but to make laws ; and the Socialist must explain what are the particular measures he proposes to support in the next Parliament if he wishes sober citizens to vote for him, especially nowadays when everybody knows that Socialists are not all agreed as to the method of bringing about Socialism. If a body of voters who are agricultural laborers, or miners, or cotton operatives, or shop assistants, ask how the candidate would propose to deal with their special grievances, nothing is easier than to answer that the only really effective and fundamental remedy is for the community to take over the land, the mines, the factories, and the shops, and work them for the common benefit of all, thereby abolishing wagedom altogether, and establishing a state of things in which all persons will be able to provide for themselves amply by working only four hours a day. But such a reply is mere mockery to men who know perfectly well that the next Parliament will not be in a position even to discuss this program, much less carry it out ; and that meanwhile they must continue to suffer unless they are helped by immediately practicable legislation extending the control of the community over their industry as it stands to-day, and not as it may stand in the twentieth century. Again, it is con- ceivable that the next election may find the public mind full, not of industrial and agrarian questions, but of South Africa, or Ireland, or the Church, or the Drink Traffic, or Sanitation, including the Vaccination question. The sort of candidate who would reply to all questions on these subjects by explaining that he was in favour of the Abolition of Capitalism, with the disappearance of which, war, drunkenness, and disease must vanish from the earth, and the Church question be settled for ever by the advent of ''true Christianity" in the shape of Communism, had better be avoided, as the enthusiasm of his meetings would most certainly not be borne out at the polling station. Fortunate as it is for the Labor Party and for the world that Labor questions are coming so fast to the front at elections, it would not be wise for Labor to place itself in the hands of candidates who would have nothing to say for themselves if a European war or an epidemic cut the Labor platform from beneath their feet at the critical moment. Even if nothing occurs to distract public attention at the last moment from industrial matters, there will be a certain number of questions before the country which are quite independent of the Labor
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question, but upon which, taking them one with another, a few scores and perhaps a few hundreds of votes will turn, even among the wage-working class, in each constituency. These votes may decide the election ; and they are not likely to be gained by a candidate who has nothing to say for himself on these extra subjects. In short, the candidate must be governed by local circumstances in embodying his principles in a detailed practical program ; and even when this has been wisely done, his success will depend much less on printed programs and principles than on pleasant manners, high personal character, a level head, and a tight grip of the fact that the issue at the General election will lie, not between the present dispensation and the millennium, but between Parliament as it is to-day and Parliament with an energetic Collectivist minority acting as a separate party in the interests of Labor.
The voters should, however, be reminded that they need not yet demand from the Labor party a complete Ministerial policy. There is no possibility of the next election sending Labor members to Parliament in an actual majority of the House. If fifty Labor members are returned, the Queen will not thereby be compelled to send for a Labor leader and request him to form a Labor Ministry and undertake the Government of the country. Consequently there can be no question of foreign policy and imperial statesmanship being thrown into the hands of the Labor Party yet awhile. The Labor candidate may therefore justifiably occupy himself mainly with Labor questions, taking care that he has something practical to say upon them, and that he shews an open mind and maintains a reasonable and sympathetic attitude towards voters who are mainly interested in other points-
Summary and Conclusion.
It is impossible to lay down any further conditions for Labor candidatures without coming to those points which will differ according to local circumstances from constituency to constituency, and on which, therefore, no general rule can be laid down. The indispensable requirements are : —
1. A compact industrial constituency, with its trades well organized, and working-class opinion ripe for independent action.
2. The support of the organized trades, acting through a representative committee convened, if possible, by the Trades Council.
3. A requisition for a Labor candidate at the next election, signed by at least a thousand registered electors.
4. An election fund vested in trustees of known integrity, and sufficient to insure the Returning Officer's expenses.
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5. A candidate able to conciliate all sections of working- class opinion, and likely not only to win the seat, but to receive the financial support of one of the great national Unions, or of the Parliamentary Committee of the Trade Union Congress.
These conditions are easily within the reach of the working classes if they are in earnest in their demand for political power. But there is no time to be lost. The Labor candidates should be in the field before the opposing parties have chosen their men and begun their campaigns. The General Election may come upon us at any moment ; and if Labor suffers itself to be again caught unprepared, it will not have another chance in the nineteenth century.
G. Standring, Printer (T.U.), 7 & 9i Finsbury Street, E.C.
WALTER SCOTTS LIST.
THE CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE SERIES.
Edited by Havelock Ellis. Croivn Svo, Cloth, 3/6 each; Half Morocco, 6s. 6d. Illustrated.
THE EVOLUTION OF SEX. By Prof.
Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson. ELECTRICITY IN MODERN LIFE. By
G. W. de Tiinzelmann. THE ORIGIN OF THE ARYANS. By Dr.
Taylor. PHYSIOGNOMY AND EXPRESSION. By
P. Mantegazza. EVOLUTION AND DISEASE. By J. B.
Sutton, F.R.C.S. THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY. By G. L.
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