| Males. | Females. | Total both sexes. | |||||
| Under 16 years. | Over 16 years. | Total | Under 16 years. | Over 16 years. | Total | ||
| Below Ground | 43,862 | 625,773 | 669,635 | — | — | — | 669,635 |
| Above Ground | 15,623 | 135,985 | 151,608 | 643 | 4,681 | 5,324 | 156,932 |
| Total | 59,485 | 761,758 | 821,243 | 643 | 4,681 | 5,324 | 826,567 |
With coal-mining organized with due regard to national welfare, there would be no boys, fewer men, and more machines in the depths of our mines, while the employment of girls and women even in surface work would be unthinkable. It is true that private capital may not now, as it did in the 'forties, employ young girls and boys under ten in its "dens of darkness." But it deliberately sacrifices hundreds of lives every year by using inefficient plant and by the use of explosives, and still we permit boys to go down the pits. In the holocaust in the Rhondda in 1905 many children perished. Not infrequently three generations of a single family may be found working in the same colliery. Few people out of the industry know that 44,000 boys work in our coal-pits.
With our collieries in our own hands we should not only keep boys out of the mines, but use every possible mechanical appliance to reduce the number of men required to get the coal. We should seek for new appliances to displace labour from such an unhealthy and dangerous calling. To the same end we should seek to prevent the waste of coal in every direction. Shot-firing would of course go, and after undercutting the coal by electrical or hydraulic machinery we should bring it down by hydraulic pressure.
Having secured an economical production, in which we should no longer commit the crime of killing a thousand miners every year, we should distribute the coal cheaply to our local authorities, who would act as distributing agents. The army of coal merchants and their clerks and the thousand and one artful dodges of the retail coal trade would disappear, and the public would secure their coal economically.
What is the alternative to public ownership of common services? The alternative is the rule of the "combine" or "trust," for it cannot be too clearly realized that the organization of production and distribution must proceed. But organization by private hands,—the combination of industrial units into great trusts economizing management, production and distribution,—cannot safely be tolerated. It means the wielding of the chief power in the State by monopolists who will use their power for private ends. The era of private competition is closing. On every hand capital is combining with capital in restraint of competition. Such combinations threaten the public welfare in several directions. They can make it practically impossible for new capital to enter an industry. They can, while economizing labour, keep the profits arising from economy in their own hands, and build up gigantic fortunes while increasing unemployment. They can offer such opposition to trades unionism as to wield untrammelled power over their employees. They can accentuate that Error of Distribution which it should be our chief purpose to modify and remove.
Finally, the organization of services under public control is the only remedy for unemployment, for unemployment is but a phase of poverty. Underpaid or not paid at all, wrongfully employed or unemployed, overworked or underworked, these conditions are the inevitable accompaniment of a state of society in which individuals make bargains with individuals with a view not to service but to profit. To the individual the unemployed workman is a pitiable object—that is all. To the nation the unemployed workman is something more than pitiable; he is a dead loss. Unless physically or mentally unfit, and therefore entitled to gratuitous service, he should be employed in the scheme of the nation's work. The community needs the service of all its members; there is none superfluous, none. While yet one uncomfortable house rears its head, while yet one person goes ill-clad, while yet one rod of area remains unused, there is work to do, but to utilize the work of every man economically and wisely in the performance of necessary work is only possible through organization. We may delude ourselves how we will with palliatives; we shall find no remedy for unemployment short of the control by the community of the essential work of the community. While we leave the direction of labour in the hands of a few rich men there will ever be a surplus of labour left for our hapless "government" to deal with wastefully. While the community resigns its right to decide its own destinies by submitting to the rule of the rich, there will remain the problem of poverty of which unemployment is not the worst part.
Let it be clearly understood that, as things are, there is only one real form of government that matters, and that is the rule of the employed by the employer. The real arbiters of our destinies are not the King's Ministers, but the few men who have power of life and death over their fellows through the giving or withholding of employment. The majesty of the law decides what a man shall not do. The majesty of the employer decides what a man shall do. The time has come when we must govern ourselves, not negatively by way of restraint, but positively by way of action. It is time that we determined where our roads should run and in what fashion and in what employments we should engage ourselves. It is time that we took stock of the lives and the homes of our people and resolved to abolish their poverty by organizing their labour.
[54] It it a melancholy fact that those employed in the service of waste are often better paid than those engaged in useful production. In a recent action brought by a cloak-room attendant at a fashionable restaurant it came to light that in two cloak-rooms each of four attendants drew as his share of the "tips" over £3 per week.
[55] I hope that no manual workman who reads these lines will deduce from what I have written that, as things are now, his labour is necessarily more useful than that of the clerk, the lawyer or the shopkeeper. For every unnecessary distributing agent referred to above several producing agents could be named whose work is useless or harmful in the national economy. This I endeavoured to make clear in Chapter 11.
[56] "Condition of Labour," page 90.