[666]It should be recorded, as an instance of the prescience of Sir Charles Dilke, that he is reported to have declared at the time that “the trade union Acts were spoilt during their passage through the House by the insertion of obscure definition clauses” (Conflicts of Capital and Labour, by G. Howell, 1890, p. 479).
[667]Whewell, History of Scientific Ideas, vol. ii. p. 120; J. S. Mill, System of Logic, vol. ii. p. 276.
[668]George Howell, in his Conflicts of Capital and Labour, 1890, gives a list, three pages long, of Acts which, as he expressly testifies from personal knowledge, were promoted or supported by the Trade Unions; and in his Labour Legislation, Labour Movements and Labour Leaders, 1902, pp. 469-73, a still longer one.
[669]Industrial Democracy, pp. 124, 251, 258-60.
[670]A Great Labour Leader[Thomas Burt], by Aaron Watson, 1908.
[671]Industrial Democracy, by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, 1897, pp. 838-40.
[672]For this reason the Trades Union Congress now refuses to entertain any motion on this subject.
[673]If the main object of a newspaper is political, any expenditure by a Trade Union upon it (including the purchase of shares) is itself political (Bennett v. National Amalgamated Society of Operative Painters (1915), 31 T.L.R. 203).
[674]3 George V. c. 30.
[675]“The average weekly earnings of railway servants, as given by the Board of Trade, were lower in 1910 than in 1907” (Trade Unionism on the Railways, by G. D. H. Cole and R. Page Arnot, 1917, pp. 21-22).