[731]Mr. Henderson was re-elected to Parliament in 1919 at a bye-election, capturing a strong Conservative seat at Widnes (Lancashire).
[732]A “Joint Board”—from which the General Federation of Trade Unions was afterwards excluded—and, later on, joint meetings of the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress and the Executive Committee of the Labour Party, did something to remove friction.
[733]For the successive experiments in Co-operative Production by Associations of Producers the student is referred to The Co-operative Movement in Great Britain, by Beatrice Potter (Mrs. Sidney Webb) (1891); Co-operative Production, by Benjamin Jones (1894); and, for a more recent survey, the supplement to The New Statesman of February 14, 1914, entitled “Co-operative Production and Profit Sharing.”
[734]See Towards Social Democracy? by Sidney Webb (1916); and for recent surveys, the supplements to The New Statesman of May 30, 1914, and May 8, 1915, entitled, respectively, “The Co-operative Movement” and “State and Municipal Enterprise.”
[735]For a recent survey of Professional Association in England and Wales—the only general study of it known to us—see the supplements to the New Statesman of September 25 and October 2, 1915 (“English Teachers and their Professional Associations”), and April 21 and 28, 1917 (“Professional Associations”). The student will note the distinction between two types of associations among professional brain-workers, one having essentially Trade Union purposes, the other (which we distinguish as the Scientific Society) concerned only for the increase of knowledge.
[736]We add as an Appendix an extract from the concluding chapter of our Industrial Democracy, published in 1897, in which we dealt with this point.
[737]We do not discuss here all the difficulties inherent in the government of a large and populous community—such, for instance, as that of combining a large measure of local autonomy (which is what many people mean by freedom) with the necessary unity of national policy and central control (without which there would be gross inequality, internecine strife, and chaos). This difficulty has to be faced alike by Industrial Unionists, Gild Socialists, and the advocates of Democracy based on geographical constituencies. Nor have we mentioned the problems, in which the Trade Unions have their own wealth of experience, as to the relationship between elected representatives and their constituents; between representative assemblies and executive committees; and between executive committees and the official staff. These problems and difficulties (on which we have written in our Industrial Democracy) are common to all democratic systems of administration, whether based on constituencies of producers, consumers, or citizens. It seems to us that constituencies of producers present special difficulties of their own, such as (i.) that of defining the boundaries between industries or services, and (ii.) the problem, within an industry or a service, of how to provide for the representation of numerically unequal distinct sections, groups, or grades, each with its own technique. The further we go in Democracy the more complicated it becomes, and the greater the need for knowledge.
[738]This is well put by an American economist. “The Trade Union programme, or rather the Trade Union programmes, for each Trade Union has a programme of its own, is not the unrelated economic demands and methods which it is usually conceived to be, but it is a closely integrated social philosophy and plan of action. In the case of most Union types the programme centres indeed about economic demands and methods, but it rests on the broad foundation of the conception of right, of rights, and of general theory peculiar to the workers; and it fans out to reflect all the economic, ethical, juridical, and social hopes and fears, aims, attitudes, and aspirations of the group. It expresses the workers’ social theory and the rules of the game to which they are committed, not only in industry but in social affairs generally. It is the organised workers’ conceptual world” (Trade Unionism in the United States, by R. F. Hoxie, p. 280).