The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Volume 2

by Stephen Lucius Gwynn

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"Of his activities in Parliament, I remember most vividly those in which I was personally concerned. In two such cases I was on the opposite side; in two I worked with him. The Trade Disputes Act of 1906 was in reality carried by Dilke and Shackleton, for the Government were hopelessly compromised by the two voices with which nearly all their leaders had spoken. Again in 1907, when I was trying to plead for Preferential Trade, he marshalled against it all the force of his wide knowledge and ripe experience.

"On the other hand, in 1909 the luck of the ballot enabled me to bring in a private member's Bill, and I introduced Dilke's Sweated Industries Bill. Dilke was to second it. When the Bill came on I was laid up with influenza, but I was determined to go to the House, and got out of bed to do so, though when I got there I was only capable of a few sentences and had to return to bed. But the effect of the introduction of Dilke's Bill was to stir up the Government, so much so that a few days later Winston Churchill introduced his Bill, which, being a Government Bill, took precedence of ours and became law as the Trade Boards Act. In 1910 again, on the Home Office Vote, an occasion on which Dilke always made a masterly review of the industrial history of the year, he asked me to second him, and to deal particularly with lead-poisoning in the Potteries. He always tried to detach Labour questions from party. It was entirely owing to him that I took an interest in the subject.

"I never actually worked with him, but I should imagine that he worked at a pace that few could follow. He was wonderful at mastering facts, and he had the instinct of knowing what facts were important. His method must have been somewhat unconventional, for not only did he tear the heart out of a book, but he frequently tore pages out as well. He had got what he wanted, and the rest was waste paper."

III.

The testimony of Mr. Hills has touched on several objects for which Sir Charles worked till his death, but of these one upon which he struggled to establish an international understanding—that of the minimum wage— claims a fuller consideration. The interdependence of Labour was always apparent to him, and under the sympathy for suffering which inspired his action on such questions as the native races or the treatment of the alien Jew, there lay the sense that the degradation of any class of labour in one country affected its status in all, and that to be insular on industrial questions was to undermine everything that the pioneers of English Labour had fought for and achieved.

The wages of many workers were left untouched by the imperfect development of trade-unionism. Sweating was the result. To check this evil, machinery must be created by legislation to deal with low wages, while international understanding was essential here, as in other questions of Social Reform, to enable the democracies of the various countries to keep abreast.

The question of the minimum wage had occupied Sir Charles Dilke's attention from the days of his discipleship to John Stuart Mill. He had been much impressed by the debates which took place during his presidency in 1885 at the Conference on Industrial Remuneration. A few years later he had been present at a meeting convened by the Women's Trade-Union League during the Trade-Union Congress at Glasgow, and the impression made on him by that meeting he thus described:

"I had long been used to Labour meetings, but was then brought face to face with hopeless difficulties, heartbreaking to the organizer, because of a rooted disbelief among the workers in the possibility of improvement. There is a stage in which there is hope—hope for the improvement of wages and of conditions, possibly to be won by combined effort. There is a stage, familiar in the East End of London, when there is no hope for anything, except, perhaps, a hired feather and the off-chance of an outing. Yet even the roughest trades employing women and children in factories or large workshops, to be found in the East End or in the outskirts of Glasgow, have in them the remote possibility of organization. Home industries in many cases have not even that bare chance. There is in them a misery which depresses both the workers and those who would help them. The home life of the poorest class of factory workers is not much, but it means, nevertheless, a great deal to them. The home life of the home worker is often nothing. The home becomes the grinding shop. Factory slavery finds a refuge even in a hard home. 'Home' slavery has none…. It is in this class, utterly incapable of fixing a minimum wage for itself, that the evil of its absence stands revealed in its worst form."

Turning, as was his custom, to our colonies for successful experiment and example, he discussed with Mr. Deakin (the Victorian Minister of whom he prophesied in 1887 that he would be the First Prime Minister of that federated Australia which was then called "Deakin's Dream") the example of a Wages Board which was being introduced in Victoria. An Anti-Sweating League had been formed in 1893 in Victoria, and had adopted this scheme, carrying it into law in 1895. The vital part of the scheme was the creation of Conciliation Boards on which representatives of employers and employed were represented—Boards which should discuss wages and fix a minimum rate in the trade concerned.