September 14, 1916 
LAND & WATER 
13 
A Prelude to Reconstruction 
By Joseph Thorp 
RECONSTRUCTION, as applied to Labour prob- 
lems, is the new word in the air. It is less 
vague in content than similar words, such as 
Organisation and Efficiency, that have been in 
vogue. It contains the implication not merely that 
"something must be done," but that radical changes 
are necessary and immediately necessary if we are to 
deal with the after-war chaos in the industrial world. 
Nor is this all. There is a widespread conviction 
among employers of labour, both of the more liberal 
and the more reactionary mould, among the cooler- 
headed and the extremists in the ranks of the leaders of 
Labour, among detached bourgeois students who stand 
in neither camp, that there is something more to be 
faced than the merely transitorj' problem of the recon- 
stitution of the industrial world on normal ante-bellum 
lines. The unprecedented destruction of capital 
consumed in unproductive work, the depreciation 
of plant by overspeeding or by hurried and 
wasteful conversion, the complex problem of rein- 
statement of the demobilised and the provision lor those 
to be displaced by that reinstatement — these would 
seem to create a sufficiently desperate situation. That 
situation is complicated by pledges as to the restoration 
of Trade Union privileges in the matter of restriction 
of output and of the " dilution " by unskilled labour of 
jobs hithertojjealously guarded by the skilled. 
And below all this is a very vehement conviction, 
heightened in many ways by the experiences of the war, 
a conscious and reasoned conviction on the part of the 
more long-headed of the leaders, a vaguer but not less 
real perception on the part of rank and file, and, most 
significant of all, among the more alert employers a 
readiness to allow h t there are flaws and futilities in 
our industrial system that must be swept awa}'. It 
has also been made clear, and may be brought home. to 
labour when it is in a mood to listen, that there are 
items in its programme that are against not only the 
national, but its own best interests. But this must wait 
upon some more fundamental concessions. 
It is a current commonplace that the war has made 
the working man conscious of his importance not as a 
soldier — as soldier he is no better and no worse, only 
more numerous, than any other type of citizen — but as a 
producer. He might be tempted to argue that in any 
similar emergency he could hold the nation in the hollow 
of his hand. And it is certain that many of those whose 
attitude to labour is generally narrow and unsympathetic, 
have realised with a distinct shock this importance. 
The sensitive imagination of this type envisages an 
England ruined by a class which, having been successfully 
kept out of its inheritance for so long, now comes to its 
own, and is not likely to let go any too easily. 
Certainly in a day when there is practically no unem- 
ployment, and when countless families have for the 
first time enjoyed a tolerable standard of Hving, many 
must have begun to realise that what they were assured 
was impossible — a general " national minimum"^ — ^is not 
impossible. The argument is not unassailable, but the 
force of it, felt by many other than the underfed, lies in 
the fact that we shall never again be able to say so glibly 
that such and such an essential reform, say, in the de- 
partments of health, housing or education, costs too 
much money. And this is substantially true. We 
shall carry the reform and then cast about for the means 
to pay for it. Which is by no means to say that a policy 
of doles is to be the root ideal of the new order. 
Nothing seems clearer to sympathetic students of 
modern labour problems than that what self-conscious 
labour leadership is striving after is not primarily wages, 
but status — the status of men not " hands." The 
reaction against the policy of doles (with regimentation, 
a necessary accompaniment of doles) is all but complete 
among the thoughtful laboi;ring men. They see that 
it is leading to the permanent establishment of an inferior 
caste, docile, reasonably well-fed (perhaps better than 
now), but essentially servile. And the revolt against 
the tendencies manifest in the new benevolent bureau- 
^ cracy is one of the wholesomest signs to those who care 
for liberty and are glad to see their fellow coun rymen 
preoccupied with the safeguarding of it for themselves. 
This spirit of revolt, which manifests itself against the 
doles system, takes the form in the workshops of resent- 
ment at the complete domination of the conditions of 
work by management and capital. " I must be master 
in my own works," cries the employer. " It depends 
on what you mean by master," retorts labour. " If 
mastery means, for instance, 'scientific management,' 
to the point of prescribing every movement and every 
pause to be made by your men, then we won't have it. 
We are men not machines, and the preservation of our 
manhood is a good deal more important, not only to us 
but to the nation, than speed of output or higher wages 
or your increased profits. If we, as partners in pro- 
duction, were generally consulted on these points, if we 
were interested enough in them to adopt them, or to- 
demand them ourselves, as preventing fatigue and 
waste, as speeding up production (always subject to 
more human considerations), and as increasing our 
share, we might be willing to consider the matter." 
Labour's Attitude 
Can any one fairly say that such an attitude is un- 
reasonable ? Not any one certainly who had taken the 
trouble to look at the matter from the other fellow's 
point of view. For labour is emphatically " the other 
fellow." We -may not be in the main captains of in- 
dustry. But we are investors. And, more subtly, we 
are steeped in the assumptions and inevitable prejudices 
of our environment, an environment of employers and 
managers in the main. The absolutely essential prelude 
to save reconstruction in the industrial field is under- 
standing of the point of view of the working man. That 
understanding is notably absent in our current talk. He 
is commonly assumed to be an, ignorant, queer-t(?mpered 
fellow, perverse for the sake of being perverse, giving as 
little as he can for as much as he can get. Who troubles 
to express the action of capital in those terms as ex- 
tracting as much work and making as much profit as 
possible by paying as low wages as possible. The plain 
fact proves on investigation, what it might reasonably 
be assumed to be on abstract principles, that self-interest 
dictates a good deal of the actions of both parties. Tl^e 
same fundamental virtues and vices appear in all classes, 
modified in form not in essence by the environment in 
which each has developed. And that really is a pro- 
found discovery. Fronj its more comfortable altitude 
capital can often give its self-interest a more enUghtened 
form and genuinely attempt to better conditions and 
terms of labour. The working man's i(Jealism takes 
the form of sacrifices for his mates, for his class. Every 
strike brings out a heroism of determination, or stead- 
fastness in pursuit of a non-selfish ideal which we are 
apt to miss who see it as an often irrational piece of 
obstruction, tyranny, or greed. It may have all these 
unpleasant elements in it. Likely enough. But it 
has vastly more. 
And that more, it is desperately aesential for us 
outsiders to understand. How many look upon the 
Trade Union as much other than a nuisance, " outside 
the law," tyrannical in its refusal to admit the right of 
free labour ? Corporations of doctors or lawyers, strict 
Trade Unions, are by no means so readily understood 
by us to have the same faults. The simple truth is that 
the aggressive and inconvenient attitudes of the Trade 
Unions have been adopted as defences to meet a dom- 
ineering attitude of capital. Sometimes a false economic 
theory such as that if more than a certain amount of 
work is done by one man there will be less work to go 
round, the assumption being that there is a certain 
fixed quantity of work to be allotted, may produce an 
attitude unreasonable .in itself, but not seen by the 
men themselves to be unreasonable. Limitation of out- 
put (take piece-work which is obviously against the 
immediate selfish interests of the worker) is due to the 
bitter experience that when higher wages are made than 
seems good to the employer the rate is reduced and the 
