[534]See Mr. H. M. Hyndman’s England for All, 1881.
[535]Report of the International Trades Union Congress at Paris, 1886, by Adolphe Smith, 1886.
[536]Flint Glass Makers’ Magazine, November 1884.
[537]Report of the Industrial Remuneration Conference, 1885.
[538]The results of twenty years of patient labour by Charles Booth and his assistants are embodied in the magnificent work, Labour and Life of the People(London, 1st edition, 2 vols., 1889-91; 2nd edition, 4 vols., 1893), reissued in greatly enlarged form as Life and Labour in London, 18 vols.; Pauperism and the Endowment of Old Age(London, 1893); The Aged Poor (1894); Old Age and the Aged Poor(1899); Industrial Unrest and Trades Union Policy(1913). In Charles Booth: a Memoir(1918) Mrs. Booth has given a personal biography (1840-1914) of a tireless investigator who, merely by the instrument of social diagnosis, got accomplished reforms of a magnitude that seemed at first wholly impracticable.
[539]The funds of the Stonemasons had been completely exhausted by the great strike of 1878. In January 1879 the Society determined, on a proposition submitted by the Central Executive, to close all pending disputes (including a general strike at Sheffield against a heavy reduction without due notice); and between that date and March 1885, though many of the branches struggled manfully, and in some cases successfully, against repeated reductions of wages, increases of hours, or infringements of the local bye-laws, no strike whatever was supported from the Society’s funds. The case of the Stonemasons is typical of the other great trade friendly societies.
[540]What a Compulsory Eight Hours Working Day means to the Workers, by Tom Mann (1886), 16 pp.
[541]Mr. Tom Mann, one of the outstanding figures in the New Unionist Movement, was born at Foleshill, Warwickshire, in 1856, and apprenticed in an engineering shop at Birmingham, whence he came to London in 1878, and joined the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. Eagerly pursuing his self-education, he became acquainted first with the Co-operative Movement, and then with the writings of Henry George. In 1884 he visited the United States, where he worked for six months. On his return he joined the Battersea Branch of the Social Democratic Federation, and quickly became one of its leading speakers. His experience of the evils of overtime made the Eight Hours Day a prominent feature in his lectures, and in 1886 he published his views in the pamphlet, What a Compulsory Eight Hours Working Day means to the Workers(1886, 16 pp.), of which several editions have been printed. In the same year he left his trade in order to devote himself to the provincial propaganda of the Social Democratic Federation, spending over two years incessantly lecturing, first about Tyneside, and then in Lancashire. Returning to London early in 1889, he assisted in establishing the Gas-workers’ Union and in organising the great dock strike, on the termination of which he was elected President of the Dockers’ Union. For three years he applied himself to building up this organisation, deciding to resign in 1892, when he became a candidate for the General Secretaryship of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. After an exciting contest, during which he addressed meetings of the members in all the great engineering centres, he failed of success only by 951 votes on a poll of 35,992. In the meantime he had been appointed, in 1891, a member of the Royal Commission on Labour, to which he submitted a striking scheme for consolidating the whole dock business of the port of London, by cutting a new channel for the Thames across the Isle of Dogs. On the establishment in 1893 of the London Reform Union he was appointed its secretary, a post which he relinquished in 1894 on being elected secretary of the Independent Labour Party. This he presently relinquished to emigrate to New Zealand; and there and in Australia he threw himself energetically into Trade Union agitation. Returning to England in 1911, he became a fervent advocate of Syndicalism; and then became an organiser for various General Labour Unions. In 1919 he was elected General Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, after an exhaustive ballot of its great membership.
[542]Article in Justice, September 3, 1887.
[543]Mr. John Burns, in many respects the most striking personality in the Labour Movement, was born at Battersea in 1859, and was apprenticed to a local engineering firm. Already during his apprenticeship he made his voice heard in public, in 1877 being actually arrested for persistently speaking on Clapham Common, and in 1878 braving the “Jingo” mob at a Hyde Park demonstration. As soon as he was out of his time (1879) he joined the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and became an advocate of shorter hours of labour. An engagement as engineer on the Niger, West Africa, during 1880-81, gave him leisure to read, which he utilised by mastering Adam Smith and J. S. Mill. Returning to London, he worked side by side with Victor Delahaye, an ex-Communard, who was afterwards one of the French representatives at the Berlin Labour Conference, 1891, and with whom he had many talks on the advancement of labour. In 1883 he joined the Social Democratic Federation, and at once became its leading working-class member, championing its cause, for instance, in an impressive speech at the Industrial Remuneration Conference in 1885. In the same year he was elected by his district of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers as its representative at the quinquennial delegate meeting of the Society, where he found himself the youngest member. At the General Election of 1885 he stood as Socialist candidate for West Nottingham, receiving 598 votes. For the next two years he became known as the leader of the London “unemployed” agitation. His prosecution for sedition in 1886 (with three other prominent members of the Social Democratic Federation) aroused considerable interest, and on his acquittal his speech for the defence, The Man with the Red Flag, had a large sale in pamphlet form (1886; 16 pp.). At the prohibited demonstration at Trafalgar Square on “Bloody Sunday” (November 13, 1887), in conjunction with Mr. Cunninghame Graham, M.P., he broke through the police line, for which they were both sentenced to six weeks’ imprisonment. In January 1889 he was elected for Battersea to the new London County Council, on which he became one of the most useful and influential members. His magnificent work in the dock strike and in organising the unskilled labourers is described in the text. At the General Election of 1892 he was chosen, by a large majority, M.P. for Battersea, and at the Trades Union Congress in 1893 he received the largest number of votes for the Parliamentary Committee, of which he accordingly became Chairman. In 1906 he was appointed President of the Local Government Board in Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman’s Government, with a seat in the Cabinet—thus becoming the first working-man Cabinet Minister—a post which he held until August 1914, when he resigned on the outbreak of war. He retained his seat in Parliament until 1918, when he retired.