>>>

For my own part, I am not the least bit frightened by any of these
questions. If I am asked whether I would tax this or tax that, it may
be proof of great depravity on my part, but I say without hesitation,
that, for a sufficient object, I should not have the least objection
to putting two shillings a quarter on wheat or twopence a pound on
butter.

But I must add that the whole argument nauseates me. What sort
of opinion must these gentlemen have of their fellow countrymen, if
they think that the question of a farthing on the quartern loaf or
half a farthing on the pat of butter is going to outweigh in their
minds every national consideration? And these are the men who accused
Mr. Chamberlain of wishing to unite the Empire by sordid bonds! It is
indeed extraordinary and to my mind almost heartrending to see how
this question of Tariff Reform continues to be discussed on the lowest
grounds, and how its higher and wider aspects seem to be so constantly
neglected. Yet we have no excuse for ignoring them. The Colonial
advocates of Preference, and especially Mr. Deakin, with whose point
of view I thoroughly agree, have repeatedly explained the great
political, national, and I might almost say moral aspects of that
policy. There is a great deal more in it than a readjustment of
duties--twopence off this and a penny on that. I do not say that such
details are not important. When the time comes I am prepared to
show--and I am an old hand at these things--that the objections which
loom so largë in many eyes can really be very easily circumvented. But
I would not attempt to bother my fellow countrymen with complicated
changes in their fiscal arrangements, or even with the discussion of
them, if it were not for the bigness of the principle that is
involved.

I wish to look at it from two points of view. The principle which
lies at the root of Tariff Reform, in its Imperial aspect, is the
national principle. The people of these great dominions beyond the
seas are no strangers to us. They are our own kith and kin. We do not
wish to deal with them, even in merely material matters, on the same
basis as with strangers. That is the great difference between us
Tariff Reformers and the Cobdenites. The Cobdenite only looks at the
commercial side. He is a cosmopolitan. He does not care from whom he
buys, or to whom he sells. He does not care about the ulterior effects
of his trading, whether it promotes British industry or ruins it;
whether it assists the growth of the kindred States, or only enriches
foreign countries. To us Tariff Reformers these matters are of moment,
and of the most tremendous moment. We do not undervalue our great
foreign trade, and I for one am convinced that there is nothing in the
principles of Tariff Reform which will injure that trade. Quite the
reverse. But we do hold that our first concern is with the industry
and productive capacities of our own country, and our next with those
of the great kindred countries across the seas. We hold that a wise
fiscal policy would help to direct commerce into channels which would
not only assist the British worker, but also assist Colonial
development, and make for the greater and more rapid growth of those
countries, which not only contain our best customers, but our fellow
citizens.

UNIONISTS AND SOCIAL REFORM


There has been such a deluge of talk during the last three weeks that
I doubt whether it is possible for me, or any man, to make a further
contribution to the discussion which will have any freshness or value.
But inasmuch as you probably do not all read all the speeches, you may
perhaps be willing to hear from me a condensed summary of what it all
comes to--of course, from my point of view, which no doubt is not
quite the same as that of the Prime Ministër or Mr. Asquith. Now, from
my point of view, there has been a considerable clearing of the air,
and we ought all to be in a position to take a more practical and less
exaggerated view of the situation. Speaking as a Tariff Reformer, I
think that those people, with whom Tariff Reformers agree on almost
all other political questions, but who are strongly and
conscientiously opposed to anything like what they call tampering with
our fiscal system, must by now understand a little better than they
did before what Tariff Reformers really aim at, and must begin to see
that there is nothing so very monstrous or revolutionary about our
proposals. I hope they may also begin to see why it is that Tariff
Reformers are so persistent and so insistent upon their own particular
view.

There is something very attractive in the argument which says
that, since Tariff Reform is a stumbling-block to many good Unionists,
it should be dropped, and our ranks closed in defence of an effective
Second Chamber, and in defence of all our institutions against
revolutionary attacks directed upon the existing order of society.

In so far as this is an argument for tolerance and against
excommunicating people because they do not agree with me about Tariff
Reform, I am entirely in accord with it. I am only a convert to Tariff
Reform myself, although I am not a very recent convert, for at the
beginning of 1903, at Bloemfontein, I was instrumental in inducing all
the South African Colonies to give a substantial preference to goods
of British origin. I was instrumental in doing that some months before
the great Tariff Reform campaign was inaugurated in this country by
its leading champion, Mr. Chamberlain. But while I am all for personal
tolerance, I am opposed to any compromise on the question of
principle. I am not opposed to it from any perverseness or any
obstinacy. I am opposed to it because I see clearly that dropping
Tariff Reform will knock the bottom out of a policy which I believe is
not only right in itself, but is the only effective defence of the
Union and of many other things which are very dear to us--I mean a
policy of constructive Imperialism, and of steady, consistent,
unhasting, and unresting Social Reform.

>>>

But then the opponents of Tariff Reform say: "Yes. That is all very
well. But though you may begin with moderate duties, you are bound to
proceed to higher ones. It is in the nature of things that you should
go on increasing and increasing, and in the end we shall all be
ruined." I must say that seems to me great nonsense. It reminds me of
nothing so much as the fearful warnings which I have read in the least
judicious sort of temperance literature, and sometimes heard from
temperance orators of the more extreme type--the sort of warning, I
mean, that, if you once begin touching anything stronger than water,
you are bound to go on till you end by beating your wife and die in a
workhouse.

But you and I know perfectly well that it is possible to
have an occasional glass of beer or glass of wine, or even, low be it
spoken, a little whisky, without beating or wanting to beat anybody,
and without coming to such a terrible end. The argument against the
use of anything from its abuse has always struck me as one of the
feeblest of arguments. And just see how particularly absurd it is in
the present case. The effect of duties on foreign imports, even such
moderate and carefully devised duties as those to which I have
referred, would, we are told, be ruinous to British trade. It would
place intolerable burdens upon the people. Yet for all that the people
would, it appears, insist on increasing these burdens. Surely it is as
clear as a pikë-staff that, if the duties which Tariff Reformers
advocate were to produce the evils which Free Importers allege that
they would produce, these duties, so far from being inevitably
maintained and increased, would not survive one General Election after
their imposition.

It is not only with regard to Tariff Reform that I think the air is
clearer. The Unionist Party has to my mind escaped another danger
which was quite as great as that of allowing the Tariff question to be
pushed on one side, and that was the danger of being frightened by the
scare, which the noisy spreading of certain subversive doctrines has
lately caused, into a purely negative and defensive attitude; of
ceasing to be, as it has been, a popular and progressive party, and
becoming merely the embodiment of upper and middle class prejudices
and alarms. I do not say that there are not many projects in the air
which are calculated to excite alarm, but they can only be
successfully resisted on frankly democratic and popular lines. My own
feeling is--I may be quite wrong, but I state my opinion for what it
is worth--that there is far less danger of the democracy going wrong
about domestic questions than there is of its going wrong about
foreign and Imperial questions, and for this simple reason, that with
regard to domestic questions they have their own sense and experience
to guide them.

If a mistake is made in domestic policy its consequences are rapidly
felt, and no amount of fine talking will induce people to persist in
courses which are affecting them injuriously in their daily lives. You
have thus a constant and effective check upon those who are disposed
to try dangerous experiments, or to go too fast even on lines which
may be in themselves laudable, as the experience of recent municipal
elections, among other things, clearly shows. But with regard to
Imperial questions, to our great and vital interests in distant parts
of the earth, there is necessarily neither the same amount of personal
knowledge on the part of the electorate, nor do the consequences of a
mistaken policy recoil so directly and so unmistakably upon them.

These subjects, therefore, are the happy hunting-ground of the
visionary and the phrase-maker. I have seen the people of this country
talked into a policy with regard to South Africa at once so injurious
to their own interests, and so base towards those who had thrown in
their lot with us and trusted us, that, if the British nation had only
known what that policy really meant, they would have spat it out of
their mouths.

And I tremble every day lest, on the vital question of
Defence, the pressure of well-meaning but ignorant idealists, or the
meaner influence of vote-catching demagogues, should lead this
Government or, indeed, any Government, to curtail the provisions,
already none too ample, for the safety of the Empire, in order to pose
as the friends of peace or as special adepts in economy. I know these
savings of a million or two a year over say five or ten years, which
cost you fifty or one hundred millions, wasted through unreadiness
when the crisis comes, to say nothing of the waste of gallant lives
even more precious. This is the kind of question about which the
democracy is liable to be misled, being without the corrective of
direct personal contact with the facts to keep it straight. And it is
unpopular and up-hill work to go on reminding people of the vastness
of the duty and the responsibility which the control of so great a
portion of the earth's surface, with a dependent population of three
or four hundred millions, necessarily involves; to go on reminding
them, too, how their own prosperity and even existence in these
islands are linked by a hundred subtle but not always obvious or
superficially apparent threads with the maintenance of those great
external possessions.

>>>

And now at the risk of wearying you there is one other subject to
which I would like specially to refer, lest I should be accused of
deliberately giving it the go-by, and that is the question of old age
pensions. It is not a reform altogether of the same nature as those on
which I have been dwelling, nor is it perhaps the kind of reform about
which I feel the greatest enthusiasm, because I would rather attack
the causes, which lead to that irregularity of employment and that
under-payment which prevents people from providing for their own old
age themselves, than merely remedy the evils arising from it. But I
accept the fact that under present conditions, which it may be that a
progressive policy in time will alter, a sufficient case for State aid
in the matter of old age pensions has been made out, and I believe
that no party is going to oppose the introduction of old age pensions.
But, on the other hand, I foresee great difficulties and great
disputes over the question of the manner in which the money is to be
provided.

I know how our Radical friends will wish to provide the
money. They will want to get it, in the first instance, by starving
the Army and the Navy. To that way of providing it I hope the Unionist
Party, however unpopular such a course may be, and however liable to
misrepresentation it may be, will oppose an iron resistance, because
this is an utterly rotten and bad way of financing old age pensions,
or anything else. But that method alone, however far it is carried,
will not provide money enough, and there will be an attempt to raise
the rest by taxes levied exclusively on the rich. I am against that
also, because it is thoroughly wrong in principle. I am not against
making the rich pay, to the full extent of their capacity, for great
national purposes, even for national purposes in which they have no
direct interest. But I am not prepared to see them made to pay
exclusively. Let all pay according to their means. It is a thoroughly
vicious idea that money should be taken out of the pocket of one man,
however rich, in order to be put into the pocket of another, however
poor.

That is a bad, anti-national principle, and I hope the
Unionist Party will take a firm stand against it. And this is an
additional reason why we should raise whatever money may be necessary
by duties upon foreign imports, because in that way all will
contribute. No doubt the rich will contribute the bulk of the money
through the duties on imported luxuries, but there will be some
contribution, as there ought to be some contribution, from every class
of the people.

And now, in conclusion, one word about purely practical
considerations. We Unionists, if you will allow me to call myself a
Unionist--at any rate I have explained quite frankly what I mean by
the term--are not a class party, but a national party. That being so,
it is surely of the utmost importance that men of all classes should
participate in every branch and every grade of the work of the
Unionist Party.

Why should we not have Unionist Labour members as well
as Radical Labour members? I think that the working classes of this
country are misrepresented in the eyes of the public of this country
and of the world, as long as they appear to have no leaders in
Parliament except the men who concoct and pass those machine-made
resolutions with which we are so familiar in the reports of Trade
Union Congresses. I am not speaking now about their resolutions on
trade questions, which they thoroughly understand, but about
resolutions on such subjects as foreign politics, the Army and Navy,
and Colonial and Imperial questions, resolutions which are always
upon the same monotonous lines. I do not believe that the working
classes are the unpatriotic, anti-national, down-with-the-army,
up-with-the-foreigner, take-it-lying-down class of Little Englanders
that they are constantly represented to be. I do not believe it for a
moment.

I have heard Imperial questions discussed by working men in
excellent speeches, not only eloquent speeches, but speeches showing a
broad grasp and a truly Imperial spirit, and I should like speeches of
that kind to be heard in the House of Commons as an antidote to the
sort of preaching which we get from the present Labour members. And
what I say about the higher posts in the Unionist Army applies equally
to all other ranks. No Unionist member or Unionist candidate is really
well served unless he has a number of men of the working class on what
I may call his political staff. And I say this not merely for
electioneering reasons. This is just one of the cases in which
considerations of party interest coincide--I wish they always or often
did--with considerations of a higher character. There is nothing more
calculated to remove class prejudice and antagonism than the
co-operation of men of different classes on the same body for the same
public end.

And there is this about the aims of Unionism, that they
are best calculated to teach the value of such co-operation; to bring
home to men of all classes their essential inter-dependence on one
another, as well as to bring home to each individual the pettiness and
meanness of personal vanity and ambition in the presence of anything
so great, so stately, as the common heritage and traditions of the
British race.

>>>

My view is, that the sweating system impoverishes and weakens the
whole community, because it saps the stamina and diminishes the
productive power of thousands of workers, and these in their turn drag
others down with them. "Unduly low rates of wages, excessive hours of
labour, insanitary condition of workplaces"--what does all that mean?
It means an industry essentially rotten and unsound. To say that the
labourer is worthy of his hirë is not only the expression of a natural
instinct of justice, but it embodies an economic truth. One does not
need to be a Socialist, not, at least, a Socialist in the sense in
which the word is ordinarily used, as designating a man who desires
that all instruments of production should become common property--one
does not need to be a Socialist in that sense in order to realise that
an industry, which does not provide those engaged in it with
sufficient to keep them in health is essentially unsound. Used-up
capital must be replaced, and of all forms of capital the most
fundamental and indispensable is the human energy necessarily consumed
in the work of production. A sweated industry does not provide for the
replacing of that kind of capital. It squanders its human material. It
consumes more energy in the work it exacts than the remuneration it
gives is capable of replacing. The workers in sweated industries are
not able to live on their wages. As it is, they live miserably, grow
old too soon, and bring up sickly children. But they would not live at
all, were it not for the fact that their inadequate wages are
supplemented, directly, in many cases, by out-relief, and indirectly
by numerous forms of charity. In one way or another the community has
to make good the inefficiency that sweating produces. In one way or
another the community ultimately pays, and it is my firm belief that
it pays far more in the long run under the present system than if all
workers were self-supporting. If a true account could be kept, it
would be found that anything which the community gains by the
cheapness of articles produced under the sweating system is more than
outweighed by the indirect loss involved in the inevitable subsidising
of a sweated industry. That would be found to be the result, even if
no account were taken of the greatest loss of all, the loss arising
from the inefficiency of the sweated workers and of their children,
for sweating is calculated to perpetuate inefficiency and
degeneration.

The question is: Can anything be done? Of the three related
evils--unduly low rates of wages, excessive hours of labour, and
insanitary condition of work-places--it is evident that the first
applies equally to sweated workers in factories and at home, but the
two others are to some extent guarded against, in factories, by
existing legislation. This is the reason why some people would like to
see all work done for wages transferred to factories. Broadly
speaking, I sympathise with that view. But if it were universally
carried out at the present moment, it would inflict an enormous amount
of suffering and injustice on those who add to their incomes by home
work. Hence the problem is twofold. First, can we extend to workers in
their own homes that degree or protection in respect of hours and
sanitary conditions which the law already gives to workers in
factories?

And secondly, can we do anything to obtain for sweated
workers, whether in homes or factories, rates of remuneration less
palpably inadequate? Now it certainly seems impossible to limit the
hours of workers, especially adult workers, in their own homes. More
can be done to ensure sanitary conditions of work. Much has been done
already, so far as the structural condition of dwellings is concerned.
But I am afraid that the measures necessary to introduce what may be
called the factory standard of sanitariness into every room, where
work is being done for wages, would involve an amount of inspection
and interference with the domestic lives of hundreds of thousands of
people which might create such unpopularity as to defeat its own
object.

I do not say that nothing more should be attempted in that
direction, quite the reverse; but I say that nothing which can be
attempted in that direction really goes to the root of the evil, which
is the insufficiency of the wage. How can you possibly make it healthy
for a woman, living in a single room, perhaps with children, but even
without, to work twelve or fourteen hours a day for seven or eight
shillings a week, and at the same time to do her own cooking, washing,
and so on. How much food is she likely to have? How much time will be
hers to keep the place clean and tidy? An increase of wages would not
make sanitary regulations unnecessary, but it would make their
observance more possible.

>>>

Now, if you have followed this rather dry argument, I shall probably
have your concurrence when I say, that the proposal that the State
should intervene to secure, not an all-round minimum wage, but the
same wages for the same work, and nothing less than the standard rate
of his particular work for every worker, is not a proposition that the
State should do something new, or exceptional, or impracticable. It is
a proposal that the State should do for the weakest and most helpless
trades what the strongly-organised trades already do for themselves. I
cannot see that there is anything unreasonable, much less
revolutionary or subversive, in that suggestion.

This proposal has taken practical form in a Bill presented to the
House of Commons last session. Whether the measure reached its second
reading or not I do not know. It was a Bill for the establishment of
Wages Boards in certain industries employing great numbers of
workpeople, such as tailoring, shirtmaking, and so on. The industries
selected were those in which the employes, though numerous, are
hopelessly disorganised and unable to make a bargain for themselves.
And the Bill provided that where any six persons, whether masters or
employes, applied to the Home Secretary for the establishment of a
Wages Board, such a Board should be created in the particular industry
and district concerned; that it should consist of representatives of
employers and employed in equal proportions, with an impartial
chairman; and that it should have the widest possible discretion to
fix rates of remuneration. If Wages Boards were established, as the
Bill proposed, they would simply do for sweated trades what is already
constantly being done in organised trades, with no doubt one important
difference, that the decisions of these Boards would be enforceable by
law. Now that no doubt may seem to many of you a drastic proposition.
But I would strongly recommend any one interested in the subject to
study a recently-published Blue-book, one of the most interesting I
have ever read, which contains the evidence given before the House of
Commons Committee on Home Work. That Blue-book throws floods of light
on the conditions which have led to the proposal of Wages Boards, on
the way in which these Boards would be likely to work, and on the
results of the operation of such Boards in the Colony of Victoria,
where they have existed for more than ten years, and now apply to more
than forty industries. The perusal of that evidence would, I feel
sure, remove some at least of the most obvious objections to this
proposed remedy for sweating.