Twenty-five years ago Trade Unionism was vaguely apprehended in the polite world as a growing force in industry, useful to the working-class and even legitimate if kept within proper bounds. Wise employers recognised its value and treated with it; the unenlightened fought against it or accepted it with a bad grace. Many even of its friends and allies, the Socialists—and not a few of these were themselves Trade Unionists—rated it very low, as being, in fact, a mere "palliative of the Capitalist system." To-day it is safe to assert that there is no institution in the country which bulks larger in the public eye than the Trade Union movement. In numbers, wealth, solidarity, and power it has developed out of all recognition. Its leaders sit and bargain on equal terms with Ministers of the Crown, take their places on public committees and Royal Commissions as of right, even threaten, amid the angry protests of adversaries who were once their masters, to destroy the foundations of the established social order. The aims and activities of the Trade Unions vie with the "crime wave" for first place in the columns of the newspapers; they are discussed in trains and clubs and drawing-rooms. And, in short, the organisation, which but a few years since was regarded as a more or less private affair of workmen and their employers, now appears as the biggest problem that the State has to face—as something that may even, as many will have it, supersede the State itself.
It is hardly necessary, in these circumstances, to dilate on the importance of a new edition, containing an account of the developments during the last thirty years, of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb's History of Trade Unionism. When the book appeared in 1894 it was welcomed not only by intelligent minds in the working-class, but by all students of social history, abroad as well as in this country, as a remarkable piece of work; it took its place, and has kept its place, as a classic. Yet it had a far smaller public than it deserved; by 1911 under 10,000 copies had been sold. Of this new volume no less than 19,000 copies in a special edition have been bought by Trade Unionists before publication—a notable sign of the times. We have called this edition a new volume—and that it certainly is, for not only have Mr. and Mrs. Webb revised the work throughout and at some points slightly amplified it, but they have added three chapters, covering actually some two hundred and fifty pages.
The increase of Trade Union membership has been, as everyone knows, enormous. In 1892, after more than two centuries of growth, the number of Trade Unionists in the United Kingdom was not much over a million and a half. At the outbreak of the war it was under four millions; at the present moment it is above six millions—perhaps nearer seven than six—and includes "probably as many as 60 per cent. of all the adult manual working wage-earners." But what is of peculiar interest to note is the increase in certain industries and among certain sections of the community. The organisation of "unskilled labour" has in the last few years been prodigious, and so also has that of women of all sorts from the "braincombers in the learned professions" to domestic servants and the chief "hands" in the sweated trades. The female membership of Trade Unions, which in the year before the war was in round figures 361,000, has risen now to over three-quarters of a million, and it is still rising. Very remarkable also is the increasing organisation of the "black-coated proletariat"—civil servants, clerks, managers, supervisors, technicians, and the rest. This, as Mr. and Mrs. Webb rightly insist, is an important indication of the lines on which industry is likely to be shaped in the future. But with this vast growth of numbers, and a corresponding growth of amalgamation and federation, there has been singularly little change in the central machinery of the movement. The weakest point, indeed, is at the top. The Trades Union Congress, as Mr. and Mrs. Webb put it, "remains, as we have described it in its early years, rather a parade of the Trade Union forces than a genuine Parliament of Labour." Its executive body, the Parliamentary Committee, does not provide that "general staff" which the movement badly needs, and Mr. and Mrs. Webb's criticism both of this and of the whole question of what may be called the Trade Unions' "civil service" is very much to the front.
The history of Trade Unionism in this century, however, is by no means exhausted by the records of its membership and organisation. Side by side with this it has won an enhanced status, and not the least interesting of the three new chapters is devoted to an account of this achievement. Mr. and Mrs. Webb give us an elaborate criticism of the famous Taff Vale judgment; they discuss the Osborne case and the Trade Union Act of 1913, the relations of the Unions and the Government during and after the war. And last, but not least, they describe the "revolution in thought," the influence of Syndicalist and of Guild Socialist theories in shaping the demand for "self-government in industry" and in determining the attitude of the workman to strikes and Parliamentary action.
The final chapter deals with the political side—the rise of the Labour Party, from its stormy birth just over twenty years ago, to the new era which opened for it at the election of 1918. Mr. and Mrs. Webb have much friendly criticism to offer on the subject of the present political organisation of the Labour movement. It suffers, they observe, not merely from a lack of "Party loyalty" on the part of Trade Unionists, but also from a confusion of central machinery. It suffers too (some say these are its chief shortcomings) from a failure to develop a staff of trained political officers and from a scarcity of trained Parliamentary representatives. But these weaknesses, we suppose, are on the way to be remedied, if the Party as a whole, as well as its leaders, is alive to them.
The reader is not to look in this history, as its authors remark, for any argued judgment on the validity of Trade Union assumptions or ultimate ideals. Nevertheless, what little they have to say on this hand is of profound interest. "The object and purpose of the workers, organised vocationally in Trade Unions and Professional Associations, and politically in the Labour Party," they warn us, "is no mere increase of wages or reduction of hours. It comprises nothing less than a reconstruction of Society, by the elimination, from the nation's industries and services, of the Capitalist profit-maker, and the consequent shrinking up of the class of functionless persons who live merely by owning." What form in that reconstructed Society is the organisation of industry to take? Mr. and Mrs. Webb expect to see "the supreme authority in each industry or service vested, not in the workers as such, but in the community as a whole.... The management of industry ... will not be the sole sphere of either producers or consumers, but is clearly destined to be distributed between them—the actual direction and decision being shared between the representatives of the Trade Union or Professional Society on the one hand and those of the community in Co-operative Society, Municipality, or National Government on the other." They do not see eye to eye in every detail with the Guild Socialist. But still less do they see eye to eye with that fabulous monster who stalks through the writings and speeches both of Revolutionaries and Conservatives—the bureaucratic Fabian Webb, harbinger of the Servile State! There may be some, we suppose, who will find a less "detached" outlook in this volume than in the original edition. If there is a difference of outlook, it is natural enough, for Mr. and Mrs. Webb are more "inside" the Labour movement now than they were in 1894, and their judgments and criticisms must inevitably show a subtle difference of tone. But this is not to accuse them of undue partiality. No man can write an "impartial" history that is worth reading of his own time and his own friends. And we need not regret that Mr. and Mrs. Webb, in their detailed descriptions, for example, of the great railway strike or the miners' dispute of last year, put the workmen's case confidently and strongly since they see it as their own case also and that of the nation. The appearance of these three new chapters, we do not hesitate to say, constitutes an event in the world of politics and of letters. The History of Trade Unionism will remain, as it has been, a work which every student of industry and every man of affairs must read and re-read and inwardly digest.
MY SECOND COUNTRY (FRANCE). By Robert Dell. Lane. 7s. 6d.
This study of the people and institutions and spirit of France is in a class apart from the volumes of "impressions" of foreign lands with which "week-enders" and passing travellers are prone to favour us. "France," says Mr. Dell, "has been my home for more than twelve years, but it was already my second country long before I went to live there. Indeed I cannot remember a time when France had not a large place in my affections." It is with an intimate knowledge, therefore, as well as with a profound sympathy that he discusses the many phases of French life. But his book is by no means a mere panegyric. He is throughout candid and critical—often bitterly critical. He exposes ruthlessly the undemocratic character of the "Democratic Administration," the impotence of Parliament, the demoralising influence of small property, the evils of the petit bourgeois spirit, the avarice and egotism of the grande bourgeoisie. How far his view of all these things is a just one will be a matter of controversy. Some may say he is violently prejudiced; no one, after reading this book, could deny that many of his judgments are biased. In the final chapters there is really no pretence of impartiality; he argues his case and "maintains his propositions," like Doctor Pancrace in the play, Pugnis et calcibus, unguibus et rostro. Mr. Dell is a Socialist, but not an "Etatiste"; he is a "libertine" and a revolutionary, with an equal dislike of bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie. And his feelings in this matter are so strong that we may venture to doubt his predictions as to how the Revolution will come. For the rest, Mr. Dell is a determined Rationalist. "La France de Voltaire et de Montesquieu," he says with M. Anatole France, "celle-là est la grande, la vraie France." For "religious" France he has no use—neither for "irreligious" orthodoxy, nor political Catholicism, nor Modernism. Bergsonism, too, he holds to be a baneful influence, as reactionary as the Church which eschews it. But the old superstitions and the new philosophies, he believes, are losing their hold; "the spirit of the true France is coming into its own again, and the young intellect of France is returning to the rationalism of Voltaire." In all this, and much else, he may be wrong, but he has given us a book that is at any rate profoundly interesting.