Gladstonian Ghosts

by Cecil Chesterton

Meanwhile the Labour men on municipal bodies should make the fullest use of such powers as they already possess and push forward vigorously with their campaign of municipal socialism in such a manner that the workman may perceive its direct benefits. His Housing should be visibly cheaper and better, his trams visibly quicker, less expensive and more comfortable, his gas and water supply visibly improved on account of their transfer to a public body. At the same time of course the labour employed by the municipality in conducting these industries should receive what we may call (to borrow a phrase from diplomacy) “most favoured employé” treatment. It may be remarked that it is not desirable that municipal undertakings should aim at large profits. Theoretically this is indefensible for it means that the consumer pays more than his fair share of the rates; practically it is undesirable, since it tends to obscure the real benefits of municipal enterprise.

In national affairs the progress of definite socialism cannot perhaps be so rapid. But the Labour party might well press for the nationalisation of mines, especially of coal fields (already demanded by the Trade Union Congress), the state regulation and ultimate nationalisation of railways, canals and other means of transit, and should insist on government departments doing their own work wherever possible and paying not less than the standard rate of wages.[10]

But legislation of this kind has only an indirect effect upon the real problem that confronts the people of this country,—the people of all countries which have developed along the lines of industrial civilisation. With the appalling evidences of physical degeneration confronting us, we cannot, whether we are Socialists or Labourites or only decently humane and patriotic Englishmen, do without a social policy. In the last resort, all progress, all empire, all efficiency depends upon the kind of race we breed. If we are breeding the people badly neither the most perfect constitution nor the most skilful diplomacy will save us from shipwreck.

What are we to do with the great masses of unskilled, unorganised labour in our big towns? That is the question which intelligent thinkers are now asking themselves; and, as Carlyle said “England will answer it, or on the whole England will perish.” We have drained our country side and destroyed our agriculture to a great extent deliberately in order to obtain this vast city proletariat. Its condition is appalling; it is starved at school, over-worked when it is just growing into manhood, and afterwards drifts into the ghastly back-waters of our towns, now sweated, now unemployed, always an open sore, a contamination, a menace to our national life. That is what fifty years of applied Liberalism have made of about a third of the English people.

Well, the first thing we must do is to try to save the next generation if we cannot save this one. The child at any rate must be protected. One of the first and most urgent of the social reforms needed is the feeding of children in public elementary schools. To teach unfed or underfed children is a sheer piece of profitless brutality. Compulsory and free feeding is as necessary to us as compulsory and free teaching—more necessary in fact for more could in the long run be made of an ignorant people that was fit and healthy physically than of a race of white-faced cripples, whom society had crammed with book-learning to satisfy its theories as barbarously as it crams geese with food to satisfy its palate. We are entitled therefore to demand the free feeding of all children attending Public Elementary Schools. Of course all sorts of less drastic proposals will be made—proposals for feeding destitute children only, or for making a charge, or for recovering the cost of the meals from the parents. Some of these proposals will be better than others, and we must take the best we can get. But none of them will solve the problem. Nor will the problem be solved by any merely permissive legislation, giving local authorities the power to feed children without compelling them to use it. A local authority has no more right to underfeed its children than a parent has. All local authorities must be held responsible for the proper feeding of school children with their areas of administration, as they are already held responsible for their proper instruction.

At the same time another policy might be adopted the results of which would indirectly be of perhaps still greater value. I suggest that while these experiments are proceeding there should be a periodical physical examination of all the children in the elementary schools by duly authorised medical officers. This would be a good test of the success of the new feeding policy and might form the basis for an extension of the principle of grants in aid to encourage those municipalities which were most zealous in looking after the physical well-being of the children. But its usefulness would not end there; it would provide us with what we most want a really reliable collection of sociological data upon which future reforms could be based.

But when the child leaves school the need of protection by no means ceases. Our factory code already recognises that the setting of children to hard commercial work before their minds and bodies have had time to develop is as wasteful (from a national point of view) as it is inhuman. But the application of the principle is still half-hearted. Children over eleven can in some parts of the Kingdom be employed in factories provided that they put in one school attendance per day; the age at which even this provision ceases to operate is fourteen, after which the children are held to become “young persons,” and may work sixty hours or more per week. This is clearly very little security for the physical and moral development of the race. No child should, under any circumstances whatever, be allowed to work for wages until he or she is—say fourteen. From fourteen to twenty the “half-time” arrangement might be made to apply, and, as has already been suggested, we could use the time so gained in order to give the young people effective technical, and, in their latter years, also military training, thereby immensely improving their physique and at the same time forming a national reserve of almost invincible strength.

But after all most social problems come back in the end to the wages problem. If the workers received better wages many of the questions which now perplex us would solve themselves. And here we are brought directly to what Mr. Sidney Webb has called “the policy of the National Minimum.” The principle of the national minimum has been long ago embodied in legislation, and is in reality the root idea of factory acts, public health acts, restrictions on over-crowding and most other social reforms of the last century. But its possibilities are by no means exhausted. We must develop it further along the same lines until it gives us what we most want, a statutary minimum wage for labour. This has been partially established in a few of the most prosperous of our staple industries by the development of Trade Unionism. Its much needed application to the unskilled trades where the rankest sweating abounds can only be made possible by the exertion of state authority. To those who are soaked in the Liberal tradition of “free contract” of course the legal minimum wage will seem a piece of odious tyranny, but there is, as it seems to me, no essential difference between the fixing of maximum hours by law and the fixing of minimum wages. It is at least as important to the community that its citizens should not be underpaid as that they should not be overworked.

The Trade Unions to which we owe nearly all that betterment of the condition of the workers which Liberals absurdly attribute to Free Trade, cannot possibly be allowed to remain in the impossible position in which recent legal decisions have placed them. But that is no reason for agitating for what is called the status quo ante, which is neither practicable nor desirable. The sound demand is that the law should be made clear; that it should put single employés and combinations of workmen on an equal footing; that legal disabilities of Trade Unions should be removed; and that the liability of Trade Unions should be definitely confined to those authorised acts of its servants or agents for which a corporate body may fairly be held responsible. This on the face of it is reasonable, and should be applicable to employers’ associations also, so that when the time comes for the enactment of a Compulsory Arbitration Law (as in Australia)—that is when the trade unionists themselves recognise the desirability of such a measure, the machinery for its execution will be available.

Then there is the perennial and apparently impenetrable problem of the Unemployed. This is one of the problems which in all probability cannot be finally solved except by a complete reorganization of society. But, wisely handled, it can be palliated and reduced to more manageable proportions. In discussing this question a distinction must always be made between the temporary unemployment to which all workmen are liable, and the permanent or chronic unemployment of the great masses of the unfit which our social system is always throwing off. These poor wretches are no more to be blamed for their idleness and worthlessness (from the social standpoint) than the rich shareholder is to be blamed for his. But their presence unquestionably complicates the problem and their treatment must inevitably be different. The first thing to do is to get at the facts. For this purpose there should be a Labour Bureau in connection with every considerable local authority which should keep a record of the state of the labour market from time to time. These bureaus should be in constant communication with a Department of Labour at Westminster, which is one of the most pressing needs of the hour. As to relief works, Mr. Long’s farm colonies are good so far as they go; schemes for re-afforestation and the reclamation of fore-shores are perhaps even better. But it is well to keep in mind that the great aim of all social reformers should be to eliminate the “unemployable” class altogether. Mr. Webb’s “national minimum” policy if carried out in all its branches would practically do this.