The movement for direct electoral action remained without official support from Trade Unions as such until at the 1874 Congress Broadhurst was able to report that the miners, ironworkers, and some other societies had actually voted money for Parliamentary candidatures. At the General Election which ensued no fewer than thirteen “Labour candidates” went to the poll. In most cases both Liberal and Conservative candidates were run against them, with the result that the Conservatives gained the seats.[432] But at Stafford and Morpeth the official Liberals accepted what they were powerless to prevent; and Alexander Macdonald and Thomas Burt, the two leading officials of the National Union of Miners, became the first “Labour members” of the House of Commons.
It is significant of the electioneering attitude of the Conservative leaders that, with the advent of the new Conservative Government, the Trade Unionists appear to have assumed that the Criminal Law Amendment Act would be instantly repealed. Great was the disappointment when it was announced that a Royal Commission was to be appointed to inquire into the operation of the whole of the so-called “Labour Laws.” This was regarded as nothing more than a device for shelving the question, and the Trade Union leaders refused either to become members of the Commission or to give evidence before it. Thomas Burt absolutely refused a seat on the Commission. It needed the most specific assurances by the Home Secretary that the Government really intended the earliest possible legislation to induce any working man to have anything to do with the Commission. Ultimately Alexander Macdonald, M.P., allowed himself to be persuaded to serve, together with Tom Hughes; and George Shipton, the Secretary of the London Trades Council, Andrew Boa, the Secretary of the Glasgow Trades Council, and a prominent Birmingham Trade Unionist gave evidence. The investigation of the Commission was perfunctory, and the report inconclusive. But the Government were too fully alive to the new-found political power of the Unions to attempt to play with the question. At the beginning of 1875 the imprisonment of five cabinetmakers employed at Messrs. Jackson & Graham, a well-known London firm, roused considerable public feeling, and led to many questions in Parliament.[433] In June the Home Secretary, in an appreciative and conciliatory speech, introduced two Bills for altering respectively the civil and criminal law. As amended in Committee by the efforts of Mundella and others, these measures resulted in Acts which completely satisfied the Trade Union demands. The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1871 was formally and unconditionally repealed. By the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act (38 and 39 Vic. c. 86), definite and reasonable limits were set to the application of the law of conspiracy to trade disputes. The Master and Servant Act of 1867 was replaced by an Employers and Workmen Act (38 and 39 Vic. c. 90), a change of nomenclature which expressed a fundamental revolution in the law. Henceforth master and servant became, as employer and employee, two equal parties to a civil contract. Imprisonment for breach of engagement was abolished. The legalisation of Trade Unions was completed by the legal recognition of their methods. Peaceful picketing was expressly permitted. The old words “coerce” and “molest,” which had, in the hands of prejudiced magistrates, proved such instruments of oppression, were omitted from the new law, and violence and intimidation were dealt with as part of the general criminal code. No act committed by a group of workmen was henceforth to be punishable unless the same act by an individual was itself a criminal offence. Collective bargaining, in short, with all its necessary accompaniments, was, after fifty years of legislative struggle, finally recognised by the law of the land. [434]
The paramount importance of the legal and Parliamentary struggle from 1867 to 1875 has compelled us to relegate to the next chapter all mention of striking contemporary events in Trade Union history. The sustained efforts of this decade, too often ignored by a younger generation of Trade Unionists, are even now referred to by the survivors as constituting the finest period of Trade Union activity. For over eight years the Unions had been subjected to the strain of a prolonged and acute crisis, during which their very existence was at stake. Out of this crisis they emerged, as we have seen, triumphantly successful, “liberated,” to use George Howell’s words, “from the last vestige of the criminal laws specially appertaining to labour.” [435]
This tangible victory was not the only result of the struggle. In order to gain their immediate end the Trade Union leaders had adopted the arguments of their opponents, and had been led to take up a position which, whilst it departed from the Trade Union traditions of the past, proved in the future a serious impediment to their further theoretic progress. To understand the intellectual attitude of the Junta and their friends, we must consider in some detail the position which they had to attack. From the very beginning of the century the employers had persistently asserted their right to make any kind of bargain with the individual workman, irrespective of its effect on the Standard of Life. They had, accordingly, adopted the principle, as against both the Trade Unionists and the Factory Act philanthropists, of perfect freedom of contract and complete competition between both workers and employers. In order to secure absolute freedom of competition between individuals it was necessary to penalise any attempt on the part of the workmen to regulate, by combination, the conditions of the bargain. But this involved, in reality, a departure from the principle of legal freedom of contract. One form of contract, that of the collective bargain, was, in effect, made a criminal offence, on the plea that, however beneficial it might seem to the workmen, it cut at the root of national prosperity. It will be obvious that in urging this contention the employers were taking up an inconsistent position. Their pecuniary interest in complete competition outweighed, in fact, their faith in freedom of contract.
Meanwhile the astute workmen who led the movement were gradually concentrating their forces upon the only position from which they could hope to be victorious. They had, it must be remembered, no means of imposing their own view upon the community. Even after 1867 their followers formed but a small minority of the electorate, whilst the whole machinery of politics was in the hands of the middle class. Powerless to coerce or even to intimidate the governing classes, they could win only by persuasion. It was, however, hopeless to dream of converting the middle class to the essential principle of Trade Unionism, the compulsory maintenance of the Standard of Life. In the then state of Political Economy the Trade Unionists saw against them, on this point, the whole mass of educated opinion in the country. John Bright, for instance, did but express the common view of the progressive party of that time when he solemnly assured the working man that “combinations, in the long run, must be as injurious to himself as to the employer against whom he is contending.”[436] Lord Shaftesbury, the lifelong advocate of factory legislation, was praying that “the working people may be emancipated from the tightest thraldom they have ever yet endured. All the single despots, and all the aristocracies that ever were or ever will be, are as puffs of wind compared with these tornadoes, the Trade Unions.”[437] The Sheffield and other outrages, the rumours of constant persecution of non-Unionists, the hand-workers’ perpetual objection to machinery, the restrictions on piecework and apprenticeship—all these real and fancied crimes had created a mass of prejudice against which it was hopeless for the Trade Unionists to struggle.
The Union leaders, therefore, wisely left this part of their case in the background. They avoided arguing whether Trade Unionism was, in principle, useful or detrimental, right or wrong. They insisted only on the right of every Englishman to bargain for the sale of his labour in the manner he thought most conducive to his own interests. What they demanded was perfect freedom for a workman to substitute collective for individual bargaining, if he imagined such a course to be for his own advantage. Freedom of association in matters of contract became, therefore, their rejoinder to the employers’ cry of freedom of competition.
It is clear that the Trade Unionists had the best of the argument. It was manifestly unreasonable for the employers to insist on the principle of non-interference of the State in industry whenever they were pushed by the advocates of factory legislation, and at the same time to clamour for the assistance of the police to put down peaceful and voluntary combinations of their workmen. The capitalists were, in short, committed to the principle of laissez-faire in every phase of industrial life, from “Free Trade in Corn” to the unlimited use of labour of either sex at any age and under any conditions; and what the workmen demanded was only the application of this principle to the wage contract. “The Trade Union question,” writes, in 1869, their chosen representative and most powerful advocate, “is another and the latest example of the truth, that the sphere of legislation is strictly and curiously limited. After legislating about labour for centuries, each change producing its own evils, we have slowly come to see the truth, that we must cease to legislate for it at all. The public mind has been of late conscious of serious embarrassment, and eagerly expecting some legislative solution, some heaven-born discoverer to arise, with a new Parliamentary nostrum. As usual in such cases, it now turns out that there is no legislative solution at all; and that the true solution requires, as its condition, the removal of the mischievous meddling of the past.”[438] This doctrine “that all men may lawfully agree to work or not to work, to employ or not to employ, on any terms that they think fit,” forms the whole burden of the speeches and petitions of the Trade Union leaders throughout this controversy. “We do not,” say the official representatives of Trade Unionism in their memorial to the Home Secretary in April 1875, “seek to interfere with the free competition of the individual in the exercise of his craft in his own way; but we reserve to ourselves the right either to work for, or to refuse to work for, an employer according to the circumstances of the case, just as the master has the right to discharge a workman, or workmen; and we deny that the individual right is in any way interfered with when it is done in concert.”
The working men had, in fact, picked up the weapon of their opponents and left these without defence. But in so doing the leading Trade Unionists of the time drifted into a position no less inconsistent than that of the employers. When they contended that the Union should be as free to bargain as the individual, they had not the slightest intention of permitting the individual to bargain freely if they could prevent him. Though Allan and Applegarth were able conscientiously to inform the Royal Commission that the members of their societies did not refuse to work with non-society men, they must have been perfectly aware that this convenient fact was only true in those places and at those periods in which society men were not in a sufficiently large majority to do otherwise. The trades to which Henry Broadhurst and George Howell belonged were notorious for the success with which the Unions had maintained their practice of excluding non-society men from their jobs. The coal-miners of Northumberland and Durham habitually refused to descend the shaft in company with a non-Unionist. [439]
We have shown, in our Industrial Democracy, that this universal aspiration of Trade Unionism—the enforcement of membership—stands, in our opinion, on the same footing as the enforcement of citizenship. But, however this may be, it is evident that the refusal of the Northumberland miners to “ride” with non-society men is, in effect, as coercive on the dissentient minority as the Mines Regulation Act or an Eight Hours Bill. The insistence upon the Englishman’s right to freedom of contract was, in fact, in the mouths of staunch Trade Unionists, perilously near cant; and we find Frederic Harrison himself, when dealing with other legislation, warning them that it would be suicidal for working men to adopt as their own the capitalist cry of “non-interference.”[440] The force of this caution must have been evident to the Junta, who had had too much experience of the workings of modern industry not to realise the need for a compulsory maintenance of the Standard of Life. No Trade Unionist can deny that, without some method of enforcing the decision of the majority, effective trade combination is impossible.
It must not be inferred from the above criticism of the theoretic position taken by the men who steered the Trade Union Movement through its great crisis that they were conscious of their inconsistency with regard to State intervention, or that they deliberately set to work to win their case upon false premises. No one can study the history of their leadership without being impressed by their devotion, sagacity, and high personal worth. We must regard their inconsistency as a striking instance of the danger which besets a party formed without any clear idea of the social state at which it is aiming. In the struggle of these years we watch the English Trade Unionists driven from their Utopian aspirations into an inconsistent opportunism, from which they drifted during the next generation into the crude “self-help” of an “aristocracy of labour.” During the whole of this process there was no moment at which the incompatibility of their Individualist and Collectivist views was perceived. Applegarth and Odger, for instance, saw no inconsistency in becoming leading officials of the “International” on a programme drafted by Karl Marx, and at the same time supporting the current Radical demand for a widespread peasant proprietorship. But it was inevitable that the exclusive insistence upon the Individualist arguments, through which alone the victory of 1875 could be won, should impress the Individualist ideal upon the minds of those who stood round the leaders. Other influences, moreover, promoted the acceptance by the Trade Unionists of the economic shibboleths of the middle class. The failure of the crude experiments of Owen and O’Connor, the striking success of the policy of Free Trade, the growing participation of working men in the Liberal politics of the time, and, above all, the close intimacy which many of them enjoyed with able and fertile thinkers of the middle class, all tended to create a new school of Trade Unionists. In a subsequent chapter we shall describe the results of this intellectual conversion upon the Trade Union Movement. First, however, we must turn to the internal development of these years, which our description of the Parliamentary struggles of 1867-75 has forced us temporarily to ignore. [441]