Never had the society enjoyed the advantage of a President who took so much interest in its proceedings. He regularly attended the meetings of the committees. He was almost invariably in the chair at the society's meetings, and rarely failed to add to the interest of the discussion by some illuminating comment, and he was the life and soul of the dinners of the Statistical Club which followed the meetings.
It is difficult to exaggerate the encouragement which a President of Sir Charles Dilke's distinction can give in these various ways to workers in the unpopular and unattractive paths of statistical science.
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APPENDIX II
By Miss Mary Macarthur
The Taff Vale decision struck a vital blow at trade-union organization, and while the case was still finally undecided the leaders of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants called on Sir Charles for advice. Afterwards, when the judgment was upheld, his services were unreservedly at the command of the Parliamentary Committee of the Trade-Union Congress.
He assisted the committee in 1901 at a conference in which Mr. Asquith, Sir Robert Reid, and Mr. Haldane, committed the Liberal party to the initiation of legislation to reverse the Taff Vale decision, and shortly afterwards played a similar part in an interview with Lord James of Hereford and the late Lord Ritchie, who spoke as representing the then Government. The second conference was also satisfactory, since it drew from Lord James the emphatic opinion that workmen on strike were entitled in their own interest to use moral suasion to prevent their places being taken by others.
The Tory party did not, however, take Lord James's view, and a resolution proposing the restoration of the status quo before the Taff Vale judgment was defeated in the House of Commons by a majority of 29. In May, 1903, a Bill introduced by Mr. D. J. Shackleton to legalize picketing shared the same fate; while an even more ominous event was the appointment by the Government of a Royal Commission on which Labour was unrepresented, and before which the leaders of the trade-union movement refused to appear.
Arguments in favour of compromise were put forward at the Trade-Union Congress of 1903, which followed closely on the rejection of Mr. Shackleton's Bill, and during the next three years the position of the unions became continuously more precarious. It looked as though trade- unions were beginning, in the phrase of Mr. Bell, to "exist very much on sufferance."
In this crisis Sir Charles was an inexhaustible source of strength. On everyone he could reach and influence he pressed the policy of standing firm, and the continuing reverses of the Tory party at by-elections played into his hands.