July 5, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
Past and Future — IV 
Developments of Industrial Life 
By Jason 
II 
IT is difficult to see how we cotild have waged a long 
and exhausting war without the Trade Unions. They 
were invaluable in the days of voluntary recruiting ; 
they have helped to organize and stimulate our resources 
for production, they have dealt with the trouble of 
absenteeism and irregular work, and they have eased all the 
Strain and burden which a great war throws upon admini- 
stration. 
This war has been the undertaking and the responsibility 
of a democracy, whereas the great war with France a cen- 
tury ago was the undertaking and responsibility of the ruling 
class. At that time Trade Unions were illegal associations 
and the mass of the people were excluded from every share 
of control in the affairs -of the nation. In this war our 
strength has been the strength of a society in which all classes 
recognised the justice and the importance of their cause and 
the necessity for common sacrifice. Where we have had 
failure or difficulty in collecting and using our power, the , 
cause has been a reluctance to take the Trade Unions into 
full partnership and a tendency to rely on methods un- 
suitable to democracy. The important fact to note is that 
the support of the Trade Unions .has been essential to the 
prosecution of the war; and that the Trade Union is as in- 
tegral a part of our national life as the House of Commons. 
In this way the war, though it has involved the temporary 
surrender by Trade Unions of important rights, a surrender 
which causes great and growing anxiety among the work- 
people, has confirmed and established the position of the 
Trade Union as a public institution. ;. , 
It was contended in an earlier article in this series that the 
war had destroyed the convention that regarded the workman 
as the mere instrument of the capitalist system. It has 
spread through the ranks of industry a spirit of rebellion 
against that tradition which had already begun among 
thinking workmen before the war. It has stimulated a 
sense of personal dignity and independence which is fatal to 
the Victorian ideas of the industrial system. We have 
now to find some new conception of that system which will 
satisfy those human instincts ; to devise some form for in- 
dustry that will be compatible with the spirit of democracy. 
We may adapt President Wilson's words and say we have 
to make the mdustrial system a place where democracy can 
live in safety. 
What part will the Trade Union play in this new economy ? 
A century ago Trada Unions were illegal associations. The 
Combination Laws, passed about the time that Napoleon 
won the great battle of Marengo, made it a crime for work- 
men to attempt any concerted action to improve their 
position. These laws put the workmen absolutely at the 
mercy of the employer. Readers of the report on the 
working of those Acts published in 1824 will note the 
case of a Stockport spinner, a man who had been in Sir 
John Moore's army at Corunna, who spent a couple of years 
in prison because he left his employment with some twenty 
other workmen when their wages were reduced. Consequently 
Trade Unions were virtually secret societies with all kinds 
of oaths and ceremonies binding their members to mutual 
loyalty. Many of them were disguised as Friendly 
Societies. The Home Office and the magistrates made the 
atmosphere of these institutions still more bitter by their 
employment of spies, who often became agents provocateurs. 
The most famous of their spies come into the scathing 
poem by Charles Lamb, called "The Three Graves." 
All this time wages were falling, and those combinations 
were largely directed to mitigating a terrible decUne in the 
workman' s standard of life. But they were not solely con- 
cerned with wages nor were they exclusively defensive. 
There were elements in the atmosphere that encouraged a 
more revolutionary temper. Great changes were at work in 
industry, and the new system, with the sharp discipline of 
the factory, presented a forbidding look to men and women 
who had lived in relative freedom in the days of cottage 
industry. The war had brought high prices and great 
distress ; universal causes of revolution. The agitation for 
reform which culminated in the passing of the Act of 1832 
set men thinking on all kinds of questions. All those in- 
fluences are to be seen in the history of the Trades Unions, 
which for some time nursed ideas and ambitions that went 
far beyond increases of wages. Ideas that we now call 
syndicalist ideas found expression in The Voice of the People, 
an early workmen's ])aper published at Manchester, and the 
discontent of the workpeople supplied material for the 
teaching of Robert Owen and the propaganda of the Chartists. 
This revolutionary temper virtually disappeared from the 
Trade Union world after this first phase of propaganda for 
something like half a century. The Trade Union struggle 
went on, and during the years associated with the Sheffield 
outrages, the Commission of Inquiry and the Acts giving 
Trades Unions effective freedom, passed in 1871 and 1875. 
Trades Llnions occupied an important place in controversial 
politics. But the Trades Unions as a whole were not discussing 
any new theory of their relations to industry, or their 
relation to the State. They were building up their organisa- 
tion and strengthening their resources. In fighting for their 
charter, the Act of 1871 and 1875, they were fighting for 
the very means of existence. 
Social Progress 
In the late eighties there was a great development of what 
we may call Socialist thinking in this country. Social questions 
begun to thrust themselves into politi.cs and at the same 
time they began to enter with a wider range into the imagi- 
nation of the Trade Union world. The London County 
Council, set up by a Unionist Government; seemed to suggest 
infinite possibilities of reform and progress by means of pubUc 
control, and everybody became hopeful and interested in this 
new and vigorous institution. The great Dock strike made 
a powerful impression on the conscience" of London, and 
more important, it led to new developments in the Trade Union 
world, for it showed that even in unorganised industries 
men could combine with effect. Reformers in the middle classes 
who had looked mainly to politics began to expect something 
from direct action by the State in redressing social evils, 
and the pressure of poverty with the creation and develop- 
ment of rnore general labour unions, began to stimulate the 
Trade Union world to ask for more than its conventional 
demands. The Independent Labour Party was the concrete 
expression of this new spirit. For nine reformers out of ten 
the key to social reform was Nationalisation. Make the State 
the employer and the social problem is solved. This in a 
greater or less degree was the remedy demanded by almost 
everybody who was tired of the spectacle of waste andpoverty. 
The more ardent spirits of the time lived like the early Chris- 
tians in an atmosphere of dehghtful illusion, believing that 
every wrong could be righted by this simple expedient arid 
looking forward to the municipal millennium. 
This phase has passed. Much had happened before the 
war to belie its early promise, and of the new experiments 
in State action many had provoked little enthusiasm 
if not active dislike. The multiplication of officials had 
proved very unpopular, and though some measures, such as 
the Trade Board Acts, had immediate and beneficent results» 
others such as the Insurance Act seemed to make a positive 
virtue of red tape in a country which takes very unkindly 
to government by regulation and order. But if State control 
was not too popular before the war, it would be difficult 
to find language that would do justice to its unpopularity 
to-day. The war made an immense extension of State 
control inevitable, and citizens in general, besides employers 
and workmen, have accepted it as part of the business of 
prosecuting the war. But nobody likes to have his business, 
his daily life and all his habits arranged and regulated -by a 
Government official, and when officials have extraordinary 
powers and are working under special pressure their ad- 
ministration does not err on the side of tolerance or patience. 
A very significant incident occurred in a strike this spring. 
The men in a munition factory who had had a sharp quarrel 
with their employers, replied, when the Government proposed 
to intervene, that they would rather negotiate with their 
employers, bitter though their relations were, than accept 
an arrangement made by the Government. Oire thing is 
certain. The workman after the war will not be content 
with the system in force before the war, but he certainly will 
not want to substitute for the system the control of a 
State Department, qualified only by its responsibihty to 
Parliament. It is not by State control that democracy will 
find a safe place in the industrial system. 
At this juncture it is natural that workmen, and not 
workmen only, should begin to take a wider view of the scope 
and opportunities of the workmen's representative insti- 
tutions, and to ask whether the answer to the problem is not 
to be found in clothing Trade Unions with new powers and 
responsibilities. A hundred years ago everybody thought 
