Lectures and Essays

by Goldwin Smith

To the labour movement, mainly, we owe those efforts to establish better relations between the employer and the employed, which are known by the general name of co-operation. The Comtists, in the name of their autocrat, denounce the whole co-operative system as rotten. Their plan, if you get to the bottom of it, is in fact a permanent division of the industrial world into capitalists. And workmen; the capitalists exercising a rule controlled only by the influence of philosophers; the workmen remaining in a perpetual state of tutelage, not to say of babyhood. A little acquaintance with this continent would probably dissipate notions of a permanent division of classes, or a permanent tutelage of any class. It is true that great commercial enterprises require the guidance of superior intelligence with undivided counsels as well as a large capital, and that co-operative mills have failed or succeeded only in cases where very little policy and very little capital were required. As to co-operative stores, they are co-operative only in a very different sense: combinative would be a more accurate term; and the department in which they seem likely to produce an alteration, is that of retail trade, an improvement in the conditions of which, economical and moral, is assuredly much needed. But if we are told that it is impossible to give the workmen an interest in the enterprise, so as, to make him work more willingly avoid waste and generally identify him self with his employer the answer is that the thing has been done both in England and here. An artisan working for him self and selling the produce of his individual skill has an interest and a pride in his work for which it would seem desirable to find if possible some substitute in the case of factory hands whose toil otherwise is mere weariness. The increased scale of commercial enterprise however is in itself advantageous in this respect. In great works where an army of workmen is employed at Saltaire or in the Platt works at Oldham there must be many grades of promotion and many subordinate places of trust and emolument to which the workmen may rise by industry and probity without capital of his own.

The general effect of the labour movement has been as I have said the industrial emancipation of the workmen. It has perhaps had an effect more general still. Aided by the general awakening of social sentiment and of the feeling of social responsibility, it has practically opened our eyes to the fact that a nation and humanity at large is a community the good things of which all are entitled to share while all must share the evil things. It has forcibly dispelled the notion in which the rich indolently acquiesced that enjoyment leisure culture refined affection high civilization are the destined lot of the few while the destined lot of the many is to support the privileged existence of the few by unremitting coarse and jobless toil. Society has been taught that it must at least endeavour to be just. The old ecclesiastical props of privilege are gone. There is no use any longer in quoting or misquoting Scripture to prove that God wills the mass of mankind to be always poor and always dependent on the rich. The very peasant has now broken that spell and will no longer believe the rector if he tells him that this world belongs to the squire and that justice is put off to the next. The process of mental emancipation has been assisted by the bishop who was so rash as to suggest that rural agitators should be ducked in a horse pond. Hodge has determined to find out for himself by a practical experiment what the will of God really is. No doubt this is an imperfect world and is likely to remain so for our time at least; we must all work on in the hope that if we do our duty it will be well for us in the sum of things and that when the far off goal of human effort is at last reached, every faithful servant of humanity will have his part in the result; if it were not so, it would be better to be a brute, with no unfulfilled aspirations, than a man. But I repeat, the religion of privilege has lost its power to awe or to control, and if society wishes to rest on a safe foundation, it must show that it is at least trying to be just.

Wealth, real wealth, has hardly as yet much reason to complain of any encroachment of the labour movement on its rights. When did it command such means and appliances of pleasure, such satisfaction for every appetite and every fancy, as it commands now? When did it rear such enchanted palaces of luxury as it is rearing in England at the present day? Well do I remember one of those palaces, the most conspicuous object for miles round. Its lord was, I daresay, consuming the income of some six hundred of the poor labouring families round him. The thought that you are spending on yourself annually the income of six hundred labouring families seems to me about as much as a man with a heart and a brain can bear. Whatever the rich man desires, the finest house, the biggest diamond, the reigning beauty for his wife, social homage, public honours, political power, is ready at his command. Does he fancy a seat in the British House of Commons, the best club in London, as it has been truly called? All other claims, those of the public service included, at once give way. I remember a question arising about a nomination for a certain constituency (a working man's constituency, by the way), which was cut short by the announcement that the seat was wanted by a local millionaire. When the name of the millionaire was mentioned, surprise was expressed. Has he, it was asked, any political knowledge or capacity, any interest in public affairs, any ambition? The answer was "None." "Then why does he want the seat?" "He does not want it." "Then why does he take it?" "Because his wife does." Cleopatra, as the story goes, displayed her mad prodigality by melting a pearl in a cup, out of which she drank to Antony. But this modern money-queen could throw into her cup of pleasure, to give it a keener zest, a share in the government of the greatest empire in the world.

If the movement, by transferring something from the side of profits to that of wages, checks in any measure the growth of these colossal fortunes, it will benefit society and diminish no man's happiness. I say it without the slightest feeling of asceticism, and in the conviction that wealth well made and well spent is as pure as the rill that runs from the mountain side.

Real chiefs of industry have generally a touch of greatness in them and no nobleman of the peerage clings more to his tinsel than do nature's noblemen to simplicity of life. Mr. Brassey with his millions never could be induced to increase his establishment his pride and pleasure were in the guidance of industry and the accomplishment of great works. But in the hands of the heirs of these men colossal fortunes become social nuisances waste labour breed luxury create unhappiness by propagating factitious wants too often engender vice and are injurious for the most part to real civilization. The most malignant feelings which enter into the present struggle have been generated especially in England by the ostentation of idle wealth in contrast with surrounding poverty. No really high nature covets such a position as that of a luxurious and useless millionaire. Communism as a movement is a mistake but there is a communism which is deeply seated in the heart of every good man and which makes him feel that the hardest of all labour is idleness in a world of toil and that the bitterest of all bread is that which is eaten by the sweat of another man's brow.

The pressure is hardest not on those who are really rich but on those who have hitherto on account of their education and the intellectual character of their callings been numbered with the rich and who are still clinging to the skirts of wealthy society. The best thing which those who are clinging to the skirts of wealthy society can do is to let go. They will find that they have not far to fall and they will rest on the firm ground of genuine respectability and solid comfort. By keeping up then culture they will preserve their social grade far better than by struggling for a precarious footing among those whose habits they cannot emulate and whose hospitalities they cannot return. Then income will be increased by the whole cost of the efforts which they now make it the sacrifice of comforts and often of necessaries to maintain the appearances of wealth. British grandees may be good models for our millionaires but what most of us want are models of the art of enjoying life thoroughly and nobly without ostentation and at a moderate cost. It is by people of the class of which I am speaking that the servant difficulty that doleful but ever recurring theme is most severely felt. Nor would I venture to hold out much hope that the difficulty will become less. It is not merely industrial out social. There is a growing repugnance to anything like servitude which makes the female democracy prefer the independence of the factory to the subordination of the kitchen, however good the wages and however kind the mistress may be. We must look to inventions for saving labour, which might be adopted in houses to a greater extent than they are now. Perhaps when the work has been thus lightened and made less coarse, families may find "help," in the true sense, among their relatives, or others in need of a home, who would be members of the family circle. Homes and suitable employment might thus be afforded to women who are now pining in enforced idleness, and sighing for Protestant nunneries, while the daily war with Bridget would be at an end.

I would not make light of these inconveniences or of the present disturbance of trade. The tendency of a moment may be good, and yet it may give society a very bad quarter of an hour. Nor would I attempt to conceal the errors and excesses of which the unions have been guilty, and into which, as organs of corporate selfishness, they are always in danger of running. Industrial history has a record against the workingman as well as against the master. The guilds of the Middle Ages became tyrannical monopolies and leagues against society, turned callings open to all into mysteries confined to a privileged few, drove trade and manufactures from the cities where they reigned to places free from their domination. This probably was the cause of the decay of cities which forms the burden of complaint in the preambles to Acts of Parliament, in the Tudor period. Great guilds oppressed little guilds: strong commercial cities ruled by artisans oppressed their weaker neighbours of the same class. No one agency has done so much to raise the condition of the workingman as machinery; yet the workingman resisted the introduction of machinery, rose against it, destroyed it, maltreated its inventors. There is a perpetual warning in the name of Hargreaves, the workingman who, by his inventive genius, provided employment for millions of his fellows, and was by them rewarded with outrage and persecution.

Flushed with confidence at the sight of their serried phalanxes and extending lines, the unionists do like most people invested with unwonted power; they aim at more than is possible or just. They fancy that they can put the screw on the community, almost without limit. But they will soon find out their mistake. They will learn it from those very things which are filling the world with alarm—the extension of unionism, and the multiplication of strikes. The builder strikes against the rest of the community, including the baker, then the baker strikes against the builder and the collier strikes against them both. At first the associated trades seem to have it all their own way. But the other trades learn the secret of association. Everybody strikes against everybody else, the price of all articles rises as much as anybody's wages, and thus when the wheel has come full circle, nobody is much the gainer. In fact long before the wheel has come full circle the futility of a universal strike will be manifest to all. The world sees before it a terrible future of unionism ever increasing in power and tyranny, but it is more likely that in a few years unionism as an instrument for forcing up wages will have ceased to exist. In the meantime the working classes will have impressed upon themselves by a practical experiment upon the grandest scale and of the most decisive kind the fact that they are consumers as well as producers, payers of wages as well as receivers of wages, members of a community as well as workingmen.

The unionists will learn also after a few trials that the community cannot easily be cornered, at least that it cannot easily be cornered more than once by unions any more than by gold rings at New York or pork rings at Chicago. It may apparently succumb once being unable to do without its bread or its newspapers or to stop buildings already contracted for and commenced, but it instinctively prepares to defend itself against a repetition of the operation. It limits consumption or invents new modes of production, improves machinery, encourages non union men, calls in foreigners, women, Chinese. In the end the corner results in loss. Cornering on the part of workingmen is not a bit worse than cornering on the part of great financiers; in both cases alike it is as odious as anything can be, which is not actually criminal; but depend upon it a bad time is coming for corners of all kinds.

I speak of the community as the power with which the strikers really have to deal. The master hires or organizes the workmen, but the community purchases their work; and though the master when hard pressed may in his desperation give more for the work than it is worth rather than at once take his capital out of the trade the community will let the trade go to ruin without compunction rather than give more for the article than it can afford. Some of the colliers in England, we are informed, have called upon the masters to reduce the price of coal, offering at the same time to consent to a reduction of their own wages. A great fact has dawned upon their minds. Note too that democratic communities have more power of resistance to unionist extortion than others, because they are more united, have a keener sense of mutual interest, and are free from political fear. The way in which Boston, some years ago, turned to and beat a printers' strike, was a remarkable proof of this fact.