June 28, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
II 
Past and Future — III 
The Causes and the Meaning of Industrial Discontent 
By Jason 
THE years immediately preceding the outbreak of 
war were marked by a series of striKes extending 
from the best organised classes of workpeople like 
the miners to the worst, like the carters and the 
dockers. There was a great railway strike, a great coal strike, 
a great transport strike, and a strike in Dublin,, which con- 
tained a lesson of its own, for it was a reminder, unhappily 
unheeded, that there comes a point at which human nature 
must either revolt against brutalising conditions of life or 
accept sentence of despair and degradation. (Some day the 
jiistorian will be able to trace the relation of that neglected 
warning to the more tragical catastroi)he of last year). 
Everybody began to discuss this disquieting phenomenon of 
labour unrest, wondering whetlier we were on the eve of some- 
thing like civil war, and whether it was beyond the power of 
our statesmanship to allay this threatening and bewildering 
trouble. 
It is possible that none of these great strikes was really 
quite so significant as a strike which probably most peop'e 
have quite forgotten. Ifi December, iqi2, an engine driver 
of (Jateshcad was brought before a magistrate on a charge of 
drunkenness and convicted. The manager of the North 
Eastern Railway, in accordance with the settled and intelligible 
pohcy of the company, reduced him to the position of pilot 
driver. To the ordinary middle-class observer, the matter 
ended there. It is manifestly important that a man wlio 
drives the engine of a passenger train should be sober and 
clear headed. He may be a murderer or a thief, or a gambler, 
or a bigamist without danger to the public, but there is an 
obvious danger to the public if his habits are such as to cloud 
his mind or his sight, for the lives of hundreds of people may 
depend on the accuracy and prcmptness of his attention. If a 
man gets drunk when off duty he may miss a signal or overrun 
the points when in charge of a train travelling sixty miles an 
hour. In this case, the driver of an express train had been 
convicted and there seemed nothing improper' in his tem- 
porary suspension from the charge of liis engine. 
To the workmen tJie matter was not quite so simple, and 
the decision of tlie manager was followed by a demand from 
the local branch of the Amalgamated Society of Railway 
Servants for the reinstatement of the engine driver. The 
demand was refused, and there followed a strike on the 
North Eastern system. The men challenged the justice of 
the conviction, and on a re-examination of the -case by a 
London magistrate sent down by the Home Office, it proved 
that the men were right. The engine driver, Knox, had a 
peculiar walk and a policeman had blundered. Knox was 
reinstated, the strike was at an end, and the men, to the 
general surjirise, agreed to forfeit six days' pay for their 
conduct in t^ecuring the redress of injustice. 
In th.is case there was behind the conduct of the nien a 
motive which goes far to explain the spirit of unrest as it has 
developed in particular duiing the last few m:mths. These 
railwaymen felt tliat one of their coftirades liad suffered an 
• injustice and that his personal rights had been infringed. 
He had been punished twice for an offence he had not com- 
mitted, and the second punishment represented a claim on 
the part of an employer over the life of a workman outside 
of his employment which every trade unionist had lo watch 
very carefully. His fellow unionists were, therefore, prepared 
to use all their power to secure him justice, and though not 
one of them had any direct or financial interest at stake, they 
were ready to make a very considerable financial sacrifice for 
that purpose. This was, in fact, the use by a union of its 
collective strength for the defence of the rights of an in- 
dividual member. It was in the eyes of the trade union a 
blow struck for personal iiljerty. Observers called it a per- 
verse proceeding to striKe against a railwav company and to 
In't the public as a protest against the mistake of a magistrate, 
but tlie men answered that they had no ctner weapon. 
Tiie Knox strike should have opened the eyes of observers 
\/ho are inclined to regard all labour dis]iutes as wage dis- 
putes, and to tljink that every strike is a quarrel between 
employers and employees over the distribution of profits. 
it illustrates the growing jealousy of their personal inde- 
pendence wliich is an e.-;sential feature of the discontent bf the 
workmen. Yet it has often /been assumed during the troubles 
that have been smouldering for many months tliat all that tlie 
munition workers cared about was an increase of wages. 
Ministers themselves have been tempted to act on the assump- 
tion tliat the workpeople are prepared to accept any and 
every kind of restriction so long as employment is ccuVstant 
and wages are kept up. To understand the spirit of the 
labour world, it is necessary to give a brief account of the 
history of munitions. 
Of the patriotism of the working classes in this war, there 
can be no question. The facts of voluntary recruiting are 
overwhelming evidence. Not less important to those who 
appreciate trade union history has been the surrender of 
trade union customs. Here again we have to be on our 
guard against the hasty judgments of those who see in these 
customs nothing but devices for protecting the status of this 
or that craft or this or that species of monopoly in industry. 
That there is this element of trade union regulations is, of 
course, true. The skilled trade unionist feels about the intro- 
duction of an unskilled worker on his own job as a qualified 
doctor feels about the introduction of an unqualified doctor, 
and the fitter draws a jealous line between his province and 
the province of the plumber, just as a barrister draws a jealous 
line between his province and the province of the solicitor. 
But if there were no more than this in trade union customs 
and regulations, generations of men and women who have 
no special province and no special status to protect would 
not have endured all the privations of strikes for no other 
])urpose than to secure the recognition of trade unions. No ; 
the body of trade union custom is sacred to the trade union 
W>orkman, because it is the<charter of his freedom in the world 
where jmwerful forces are continuallv threatening his free- 
dom. That code may be compared for its moral effect on the 
industrial population with the civil code that gave to the 
victims of feudal power on the Continent a century ago a 
status and rights before the law. 
The Changed Spirit 
What then has happened to change the spirit of the work- 
people so that instead of the outburst of enthusiasm which 
filled the recruiting stations in the autumn of 1914 and made 
possible the relaxation of trade union law we find in the third 
year of the war something like a general strike in the Munition 
Works ? There is no single answer, but we may reply in 
general that, whereas the workpeople were prepared to make 
any concession so long as they were treated as responsible 
partners in the national effort, they look with a different 
temper on a pohcy which seems to them to be demanding 
great sacrifices on some quite different principle and to 
be treating them more and more as instruments and less and 
less as citizens. Suspicion is like a microbe which, invading 
the blood at some point, gradually spreads over the entire 
system. Let a man come to suspect the Ministry of Munitions 
for one reason or another, and he will learn to suspect the whole 
policy associated with the treatment of which he complains. 
I The working classes are not pacifist in the sense of accepting 
Mr. E. D. Morel's whitewash of German conduct and German 
intentions, but there is a growing element in the industrial 
population which is uneasy and bewildered about our war aims, 
because they judge those aims by the spirit of measures 
which they see and feel. And the more they see of the' 
administration of munitions the more Suspicious have they 
become. Why ? 
I When dilution was first proposed the Government of tlie 
day realised that they were asking a momentous surrender 
from the trade unions. Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd George 
both made a most solemn promise that trade union customs 
should be restored after the war, and secondly, that dilution 
should only apply to war work. Tiiese promises occupy 
an important place in the history of industrial discontent; 
, it was with that guarantee that the engilieers accepted dilu- 
tion. 
But it seemed to the authorities that dilution was not 
enough to guarantee the output of munitions. That output 
might be interrupted by strikes, by disputes, by the obser- 
vance of minor trade union customs, by slackness, irregularity, 
drunkenness, and a hundred and one causes that may obstruct 
industrial efficiency. How were these influences to be 
checked ? It was here we think that the first serious mistake 
was made. There were, roughly speaking, two methods by 
which peace and discipline could be obtained ; the first the 
method of democracy, the second that of bureaucracy. As it 
ha])]),med the machinery for the first method was ready to hand 
in the form of joint committees representing employers and 
rinployed in the chief industrial areas. In the early montl>s 
of iqi.S a North East Coast Committee w,ts set up to consider 
the wli.ile i^rnblem of organising and mobilising labour for tlie 
