[574]In this development some share is to be attributed to the work of the Fabian Society, which, established in 1883, began in 1887 to exercise a growing influence on working-class opinion. The publication, in 1889, of Fabian Essays in Socialism, the circulation between 1887 and 1893 of three-quarters of a million copies of its series of “Fabian tracts,” and the delivery of several thousand lectures a year in London and other industrial centres, contributed largely to substitute a practical and constitutional policy of Collectivist reform for the earlier revolutionary propaganda. Tom Mann, Ben Tillett, and other Trade Union leaders were, from 1889 onwards, among the members of the parent Fabian Society, whilst the ninety independent local Fabian Societies in the provincial centres usually included many of the delegates to the local Trades Councils. Some account of the Society and its work will be found in Zum socialen Frieden, by Dr. von Schulze Gaevernitz (Leipzig, 1891, 2 vols.); in Englische Socialreformer, by Dr. M. Grunwald (Leipzig, 1897); in La Société Fabienne, by Edouard Pfeiffer (Paris, 1911); in Geschichte des Socialismus in England, by M. Beer (Stuttgart, 1913), republished in different English form as History of British Socialism(vol. i., 1918; vol. ii., 1920); in Socialism, a Critical Analysis, by O. D. Skelton, 1911; and in Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the Present Day, by Ernest Barker, 1915. A superficial survey of the development of opinion is given in Socialism in England, by Sidney Webb (1st edition, 1889; 2nd edition, 1893). See History of the Fabian Society, by Edward R. Pease (1915).
[575]Trade Unionism Old and New, 1891, passim.
[576]Thus the Dock, Wharf, and Riverside Labourers’ Union soon gave Funeral Benefit—usually the first to be added; whilst many of the branches started their own sick funds. Some of the branches of the National Union of Gas-workers and General Labourers promptly added local benefit funds, and the addition of Accident Benefit by the whole society was presently adopted.
CHAPTER VIII
THE TRADE UNION WORLD
[1890-1894]
When we were engaged, between 1890 and 1894, in investigating the history and organisation of all the several Unions, no complete statistics as to the extent of the membership were in existence. We accordingly sought to obtain, not only an analysis of the Trade Union world as it then was, but also a complete census of Trade Unionism from one end of the kingdom to the other. We retain this analysis practically as it stood in the first edition of the book in 1894, as a record of the position as it then was—in subsequent chapters tracing the principal changes and developments of the last thirty years.
To deal first with the aggregate membership, we were convinced in 1894 that, although a certain number of small local societies might have escaped our notice, we had included every Union then existing which had as many as 1000 members, as well as many falling below that figure. From these researches we estimated that the total Trade Union membership in the United Kingdom at the end of 1892 certainly exceeded 1,500,000 and probably did not reach 1,600,000. Our estimate was presently confirmed. Working upon the data thus supplied, the Labour Department of the Board of Trade extended its investigations, and now records a Trade Union membership for 1892 of 1,502,358.[577] The Trade Unionists of 1892 numbered, therefore, about 4 per cent of the Census population.
But to gauge the strength of the Trade Union world of 1892 we had to compare the number of Trade Unionists, not with the total population, but with that portion of it which might conceivably be included within its boundaries. Thus at the outset we had to ignore the propertied classes, the professions, the employers and the brain-workers of every kind, and confine our attention exclusively to the wage-earners engaged in manual work. Even of the working-class so defined we could exclude the children and the youths under twenty-one, who are not usually eligible for Trade Union membership. The women present a greater difficulty to the statistician. The adult female wage-earners engaged in manual labour in 1891 were estimated to number between two and three millions, of which only about 100,000 were even nominally within the Trade Union ranks. To what extent the men’s Trade Unionism was weakened by its failure to enrol the women workers was a matter of dispute. From the industrial point of view the answer depends on complicated economic considerations, such as the extent to which women compete with men in particular industries, or women’s trades with those in which men are employed. Owing to the exclusion of women from the Parliamentary franchise until 1918 their absence from the Trade Union world detracted little from its political force. We have dealt elsewhere[578] with the relation of women workers to the Trade Union organisation. Meanwhile we omit the women as well as the young persons under twenty-one from our estimate of the place occupied by Trade Unionism in working-class life.
We know of no exact statistics as to the total numbers of the manual-working class. The figures collected by Leone Levi, and those of Sir Robert Giffen, together with the inferences to be drawn from the census and from Charles Booth’s works, led us to the conclusion—at best only hypothetical—that of the nine millions of men over twenty-one years of age in 1891, about seven millions belonged to the manual-working class. Out of every hundred of the population of all ages we could roughly estimate that about eighteen are in this sense working men adults. Accepting for the moment this hypothetical estimate, we arrived at the conclusion that the Trade Unionists numbered at this date about 20 per cent of the adult male manual-working class, or, roughly, one man in five.
But this revised percentage is itself misleading. If the million and a half Trade Unionists were evenly distributed among all occupations and through all districts, a movement which comprised only 20 per cent of working men would be of slight economic or industrial importance, and of no great weight in the political world. What gave the Trade Union Movement its significance even thirty years ago and transformed these million and a half units into an organised world of their own, was the massing of Trade Unionists in certain industries and districts in such a way as to form a powerful majority of the working-class world. The Trade Unionists were aggregated in the thriving industrial districts of the North of England. The seven counties of England north of the Humber and the Dee contained at least 726,000 members of trade societies, or almost half of the total for the United Kingdom. At a considerable distance from these followed the industrial Midlands, where the seven counties of Leicester, Derby, Notts, Warwick, Gloucester, Northampton, and Stafford included a total Trade Union membership of at least 210,000, whilst South Wales, including Monmouthshire, counted another 89,000 members of trade societies. The vast agglomeration of the London district, in which we must reckon Middlesex, the subsidiary boroughs of West Ham, Croydon, Richmond, and Kingston, as well as Bromley in Kent, yielded not more than 194,000 Trade Unionists.