[353] The Labour Exchange at Liverpool has actually decasualized the whole of the system of dock labour in that port. Credit for this is due to Mr. Rowland Williams, of the Exchange, and Mr. Lawrence D. Holt, a local shipowner. The machinery established by the Act has done what private effort had for a generation found beyond its strength.
[354] Liberalism and the Social Problem, 316. These speeches are by far the best expression of the philosophy of the new Liberalism.
[355] Churchill, op. cit., 82.
[356] Mr. Harold Spender, in Mr. Philip Snowden's Living Wage, x.
[357] It should be remembered that in the peculiar case of women Trade Unionism is almost impossible. Without the State, they have no means of raising their wages as men have raised theirs by combination.
[358] Social Statics (1851), 325.
[359] A great proportion of this surplus wealth is spent on giving fictitious values to works of art and curiosities. A china jar which cost £500 fifty years ago may be bought for £5,000 to-day. The increase represents no real increase in value, but simply an increased capacity of millionaires to bid against each other. The price will again fall, as incomes are reduced.
[360] Accusations of moral corruption are most rarely made by those who are best acquainted with political history. But what other term is to be applied to this action, of which I am informed on the best possible authority? For several days before the day on which the Woman Suffrage amendment was moved to the Franchise Bill, a Liberal Member, who had refused to pledge himself to either side, was "bombarded" with requests from pledged Suffragist Members that he would vote against them and defeat the amendment. We hang soldiers who commit this offence in military warfare.
[361] Sir Almroth Wright's notorious pamphlet has of course been repudiated by the saner women Anti-Suffragists. But it certainly represents the opinions of the average man Anti-Suffragist.
[362] I cannot deal seriously with the argument that the vote is merely an expression of physical force, that a minority only yields to a majority because it would be beaten in a civil war, that substantially all women might vote on one side at an election and substantially all men on the other, that the women outnumber the men and would therefore be able to procure the legislation which they wanted, that the men would refuse to obey the law, that civil war would follow, that the women would be beaten, and that society would be dissolved. Those politicians who believe in the possibility of such a succession of miracles had better retire each to a separate desert island. They will not find in any society of human beings a constitution which does not admit, on similarly logical grounds, of the same dreadful disasters. Such an absurd and pedantic example of reasoning away from human nature has not been seriously maintained in England since the time of Cartwright.