Chapter VI: Sectional Developments (2)

The organised Trade Unions rallied promptly to the support of the labourers, and contributed largely to their funds. The farmers met the men’s demand by a widespread lock-out of Unionist labourers, which called forth the support of Trades Councils and individual societies all over the country.[477] George Howell, then Secretary of the Parliamentary Committee, George Shipton, the Secretary of the newly revived London Trades Council, and many other leaders, gave up their nights and days to perfecting the labourers’ organisations. The skilled trades, indeed, furnished many of the officials of the new Union. Joseph Arch found for his headquarters an able general secretary in Henry Taylor, a carpenter, whilst the Kentish labourers, organised in the separate Kent Union, enjoyed the services of a compositor. This help, together with the funds and countenance of influential philanthropists, made the outburst less transient than that of 1833-34. In many villages the mere formation of a branch led to an instantaneous rise of wages. But, as in 1833-34, the audacity of the field labourer in imitating the combinations of the town artisan provoked an almost indescribable bitterness of feeling on the part of the squirearchy and their connections. The farmers, wherever they dared, ruthlessly “victimised” any man who joined the Union. It is needless to say that they received the cordial support of the rural magistracy. In aid of a lock-out near Chipping Norton, two justices, who happened both to be clergymen, sent sixteen labourers’ wives, some with infants at the breast, to prison with hard labour, for “intimidating” certain non-Union men. An attempt to punish the leaders of a meeting at Farringdon, on the ground of “obstruction of the highway,” was only defeated by bringing down an eminent Queen’s Counsel from London to overawe the local bench. The “dukes”--notably those of Marlborough and Rutland--denounced the “agitators and declaimers” who had “too easily succeeded in disturbing the friendly feeling which used to unite the labourer and his employer in mutual feelings of generosity and confidence.” Innumerable acts of petty tyranny and oppression proved how far the landed interest had lagged behind the capitalist employers in the matter of Freedom of Combination. Nor was the Established Church more sympathetic. At the great meeting held at Exeter Hall on behalf of the labourers, when the chair was taken by Samuel Morley, M.P., the only ecclesiastic who appeared on the platform was Archbishop (afterwards Cardinal) Manning. In fact, the spirit in which the rural clergy viewed this social upheaval is not unfairly typified by the public utterance of a learned bishop. On September 2, 1872, Dr. Ellicott, the Bishop of Gloucester, speaking at a meeting of the Gloucester Agricultural Society, significantly suggested the village horsepond as a fit destination for the “agitators,” or delegates sent by the Union to open new branches. And the farmers, the squires, and the Church were supported by the army. When the labourers in August 1872 struck for an increase of wages, the officers, in Oxfordshire and Berkshire, placed the soldiers at the disposal of the farmers for the purpose of getting in the harvest and so defeating the Union.

This insurrection of the village and the autocratic spirit which it aroused in the owners of land and tithe had, we believe, a far-reaching political effect. With its results upon the agitation for Church disestablishment and the growing Radicalism of the counties we are not here concerned. We trace, however, from these months, the appearance in the Trade Union programme of the proposals relating to the Land Law Reform and the Summary Jurisdiction of the Magistrates, which seem, at first sight, unconnected with the grievances of the town artisan. But though the agricultural labourer had his effect upon the Trade Union Movement, Trade Unionism was not, at this time, able to do much for him. Funds and personal help were freely placed at his service by his brother Unionists. The minute-books and balance-sheets of the great Unions and the Trade Councils show how warm and generous was the response made to his appeal by the engineers, carpenters, miners, and other trades. The London Trades Council successfully exerted itself to stop the lending of troops to the farmers, and procured a fresh regulation explicitly prohibiting for the future such assistance “in cases where strikes or disputes between farmers and their labourers exist.”[478] The public disapproval of the sentence in the Chipping Norton case was used by the Trade Union leaders as a powerful argument for the repeal of the Criminal Law Amendment Act.

But all this availed the agricultural labourer little. The feverish faith in combination as a panacea for all social ills gradually subsided. The farmers, after their first surprise, during which the labourers, in many counties, secured advances of from eighteenpence to as much as four shillings per week, met the Union demands and successes by a stolid resistance, and took every opportunity to regain their ground. In 1874 the Agricultural Unions sustained their first severe defeat. Some of those in Suffolk asked for an advance of wages from 13s. to 14s. for a 54-hours week. The farmers’ answer was an immediate lock-out, which was rapidly taken up throughout the Eastern and Midland counties, no fewer than 10,000 members of the Union being thus “victimised.” The struggle had to be closed in July 1874, after an expenditure by the National Union of £21,365 in strike pay. After this the membership rapidly declined. Every winter saw the lock-out used as a means for smashing particular branches of the Union. And in this work of destruction the farmers were aided by their personal intimacy with the labourer. It was easy to drop into the suspicious mind of the uneducated villager a fatal doubt as to the real destination of the pennies which he was sending away to the far-off central treasury. Nor was the Union organisation perfect. Difficulties and delays occurred in rendering aid to threatened branches or victimised men. The clergyman, the doctor, and the village publican were always at hand to encourage distrust of the “paid agitator.” Within a very few years most of the independent Unions had ceased to exist, whilst Arch’s great national society had dwindled away to a steadily diminishing membership, scattered up and down the midland counties, in what were virtually village sick and funeral clubs. With the decline of prosperity of British farming, which set in about 1876-77, men were everywhere dismissed, grass replaced grain over hundreds of thousands of acres, and the demand for agricultural labour fell off; and even Joseph Arch had repeatedly to advise the local branches to acquiesce in lower wages. By 1881 the National Union could claim only 15,000 members, and in 1889 only 4254.[479]

We have, therefore, in the sudden growth and quick collapse of this revolt “of the field” a marked likeness to the meteoric career of the general Trades Unions of 1833-34. But the expansion of the Trade Union Movement in 1871-75 had another point of resemblance to previous periods of inflation. In 1871-75, as in 1833-34 and in 1852, the project of recovering possession of the instruments of production seizes hold of the imagination of great bodies of Trade Unionists. Again we see attempts by trade organisations to establish workshops of their own. The schemes of Co-operative Production of 1871-75 bore more resemblance to those of 1852 than to Owen’s crude communism. In the Trade Unionism of 1833-34 the fundamental Trade Union principle of the maintenance of the Standard of Life was overshadowed and absorbed by the Owenite idea of carrying on the whole industry of the country by national associations of producers, in which all the workmen would be included. But in the more practical times of 1852 and 1871-75 the project of “self-employment” remained strictly subordinate to the main functions of the organisation.[480] Whatever visions may have been indulged in by individual philanthropists, the Trade Union committees of both these periods treated the co-operative workshop either as merely a convenient adjunct to the Union, or as a means of affording to a certain number of its members a chance of escape from the conditions of wage-labour.[481] The failure of all these attempts belongs, therefore, rather to the history of Co-operation than to that of Trade Unionism. For our present purpose it suffices to note that the loss in these experiments of tens of thousands of pounds finally convinced the officials of the old-established Unions of the impracticability of using Trade Union organisations and Trade Union funds for Co-operative Production. The management of industry by associations of producers still remains the ideal of one school of co-operators, and still periodically captures the imagination of individual Trade Unionists. But other ideals of collective ownership of the means of production have displaced the Owenism of 1833-34 and the “Christian Socialism” of 1852. Of co-operative experiments by Trade Societies, in their corporate capacity, we hear practically no more.[482]

On the whole the contrast between the Trade Union expansion of 1873-74 and that of 1833-34 is more significant than any likeness that may be traced between the two periods. The Trade Unionists of 1833-34 aimed at nothing less than the supersession of the capitalist employer; and they were met by his absolute refusal to tolerate, or even to recognise, their organisation. The new feature of the expansion of 1873-74 was the moderation with which the workmen claimed merely to receive some share of the enormous profits of these good times. The employers, on the other hand, for the most part abandoned their objection to recognise the Unions, and even conceded, after repeated refusals, the principle of the regulation of industry by Joint Boards of Conciliation or impartial umpires chosen from outside the trade. From 1867 to 1875 innumerable Boards of Conciliation and Arbitration were established, at which representatives of the masters met representatives of the Trade Unions on equal terms. In fact, it must have been difficult for the workmen at this period to realise with what stubborn obstinacy the employers, between 1850 and 1870, had resisted any kind of intervention in what they had then regarded as essentially a matter of private concern. When the Amalgamated Society of Engineers offered, in 1851, to refer the then pending dispute to arbitration, the master engineers simply ignored the proposal. The Select Committees of the House of Commons in 1856 and 1860 found the workmen’s witnesses strongly in favour of arbitration, but the employers sceptical as to its possibility. Nor did the establishment of A. J. Mundella’s Hosiery Board at Nottingham in 1860, and Sir Rupert Kettle’s Joint Committees in the Wolverhampton building trades in 1864, succeed in converting the employers elsewhere. But between 1869 and 1875 opinion among the captains of industry, to the great satisfaction of the Trade Union leaders, gradually veered round. “Twenty-five years ago,” said Alexander Macdonald in 1875, “when we proposed the adoption of the principle of arbitration, we were then laughed to scorn by the employing interests. But no movement has ever spread so rapidly or taken a deeper root than that which we then set on foot. Look at the glorious state of things in England and Wales. In Northumberland the men now meet with their employers around the common board.... In Durhamshire a Board of Arbitration and Conciliation has also been formed; and 75,000 men repose with perfect confidence on the decisions of the Board. There are 40,000 men in Yorkshire in the same position.”[483]

But though the establishment, from 1869 onwards, of Joint Boards and Joint Committees represented a notable advance for the Trade Unions, and marked their complete recognition by the great employers, yet this victory brought results which largely neutralised its advantages.[484] As in the case of the political triumphs, the men gained their point at the cost of adopting the intellectual position of their opponents. When the representatives of the employers and the delegates of the men began to meet to discuss the future scale of wages, we see the sturdy leaders of many Trade Union battles gradually and insensibly accepting the capitalists’ axiom that wages must necessarily fluctuate according to the capitalists’ profits, and even with every variation of market-prices.[485] At Darlington, for instance, we watch the shrewd leader of the employers, David Dale, succeeding in completely impressing John Kane and a whole subsequent generation of ironworkers with a firm belief in the principle of regulating wages according to the market price of the product. The high prices of 1870-73 removed the last scruples of the workmen as to the new doctrine. In 1874 a delegate meeting of the Northumberland Miners decided to use the formal expression of the Executive Committee,[486] “that prices should rule wages”--a decision expressly repeated by delegate meetings in 1877 and 1878. In 1879, when prices had come tumbling down, we find the Executive still maintaining that “as an Association we have always contended that wages should be based on the selling price of coal.”[487] In an interesting letter dated February 1, 1878, Burt, Nixon, and Young (then the salaried officers of the Northumberland Miners), in describing the negotiations for a Sliding Scale, take occasion to mention that they had agreed with the employers that there should be no Minimum Wage.[488] And though the practical difficulties involved in the establishment of automatic wage-adjustments hindered the spread of Sliding Scales to other industries, the principle became tacitly accepted among whole sections of Trade Unionists. The compulsory maintenance, in good times and bad, of the workman’s Standard of Life was thus gradually replaced by faith in a scale of wages sliding up and down according to the commercial speculations of the controllers of the market.

The new doctrine was not accepted without vigorous protests from the more thoughtful working-men leaders. Lloyd Jones, writing in 1874, warns “working men of the danger there is in a principle that wages should be regulated by market prices, accepted and acted on, and therefore presumably approved of by Trades Unions. These bodies, it is to be regretted, permit it in arbitration, accept it in negotiations with their employers, and thus give the highest sanction they can to a mode of action most detrimental to the cause of labour.... The first thing, therefore, those who manage trade societies should settle is a minimum, which they should regard as a point below which they should never go.... Such a one as will secure sufficiency of food and some degree of personal and home comfort to the worker; not a miserable allowance to starve on, but living wages.... The present agreements they are going into on fluctuating market prices is a practical placing of their fate in the hands of others. It is throwing the bread of their children into a scramble of competition where everything is decided by the blind and selfish struggles of their employers.”[489] “I entirely agree,” writes Professor Beesly, “with an admirable article by Mr. Lloyd Jones[490] in a recent number of the _Beehive_, in which he maintained that colliers should aim at establishing a minimum price for their labour, and compelling their employers to take that into account as the one constant and stable element in all their speculations. All workmen should keep their eyes fixed on this ultimate ideal.”[491]

Nor was this view confined to friendly allies of the Trade Union Movement. We shall have occasion to notice how forcibly both the Cotton Operatives and the Boilermakers protested against the dependence of wages on the fluctuations of the market. Alexander Macdonald himself, though he approved of Joint Committees, instinctively maintained an attitude of hostility to the innovating principle of a sliding scale.[492] And, as we shall hereafter see, the conflict between Macdonald’s teaching with regard to both wages and the hours of labour, and the economic views of the Northumberland and Durham leaders, presently divided the organised miners into two hostile camps.

The Trade Union world of 1871-75 was therefore more complicated, and presented many more difficult internal problems than was imagined, either by the alarmed employers or the triumphant Trade Unionists. It needed only the stress of hard times to reveal to the Trade Unionists themselves that they were not the compact and well-organised army described by the National Federation of Associated Employers, but a congeries of distinct sections, pursuing separate and sometimes antagonistic policies.

The expansion of trade, under the influence of which Trade Unionism, as we have seen, reached in 1873-74 one of its high-water marks, came suddenly to an end. The contraction became visible first in the coal and iron industries, those in which the inflation had perhaps been greatest.[493] The first break occurred in February 1874, when the coal-miners of the East of Scotland submitted to a reduction of a shilling a day. During the rest of the year prices and wages came tumbling down in both these staple trades. In January 1875 a furious conflict broke out in South Wales, where many thousand miners and ironworkers refused to submit to a third reduction of ten per cent. The struggle dragged on until the end of May, when work was resumed at a reduction, not of ten, but of twelve and a half per cent, with an understanding that “any change in the wage rates ... shall depend on a sliding scale of wages to be regulated by the selling price of coal.”[494] In the following year the depression spread to the textile industries, and gradually affected all trades throughout the country. The building trades were, however, still prosperous; and the Manchester Carpenters chose this moment for an aggressive advance movement. The disastrous strike that followed early in 1877, and lasted throughout the year, resulted in the virtual collapse of the General Union of Carpenters and Joiners, at that time the third in magnitude among the societies in the building trades, and left the Manchester building operatives in a state of disorganisation from which they never fully recovered. In April 1877 the Clyde shipwrights demanded an increase of wages, to which the employers replied by a general lock-out of all the operatives engaged in the shipbuilding yards, in the expectation that this would cause pressure on the shipwrights to withdraw their claim. For more than three months the main industry of the Clyde was at a standstill, the dispute being eventually ended, in September 1877, by submission to the arbitration of Lord Moncrieff, in which the men were completely worsted. In July 1877 a conflict broke out between the stonemasons and their employers, in which Bull & Co., the contractors for the new law courts in London, caused the bitterest resentment by importing German workmen as blacklegs. The demand had originally been for an increase of wages and reduction of hours for the London men; but as the obstinate struggle progressed it became, in effect, a battle between the Stonemasons’ Union and the federated master builders throughout the country. Large levies were raised, and over £2000 collected from other trade societies; but in March 1878, after eight months’ conflict, the remnant of the strikers returned to work on the employers’ terms. The cotton trade, too, was made the scene of one of the greatest industrial struggles on record. After several minor reductions of wages during 1877, which resulted in local strikes, in March 1878, as the _Times_ reports, “all the way through a centre of 70 miles, where 250,000 cotton operatives are employed, notices have been posted giving a month’s notice of ten per cent reduction in wages.” A colossal strike ensued, which brought into prominence the rival theories of the cotton operatives and their employers. It was conceded by the men that the millowners were losing money, and that some change had to be made. But as the employers admitted that their losses arose from the glutted state of the market, the operatives contended that the proper remedy was the cessation of the over-production; and they therefore offered to accept the 10 per cent reduction on condition that the mills should only work four days a week. A heated controversy ensued, but the millowners persisted in their demand for the unconditional surrender of the men, and refused all proposals for arbitration. The cause of the men was unfortunately prejudiced by serious riots at Blackburn, at which the house of Colonel Raynsford Jackson, the leader of the associated employers, was looted and burnt. After ten weeks’ struggle the men went in on the employers’ terms.[495]

The great struggles of 1875-78 were only the precursors of a general rout of the Trade Union forces. The increasing depression of trade culminated during 1878-79 in a stagnation which must rank as one of the most serious which has ever overtaken British industry. The paralysis of business was intensified, especially in Scotland, by the widespread ruin caused by the failure of the City of Glasgow Bank. From one end of the kingdom to the other great firms became bankrupt, mines and ironworks were stopped, ships lay idle in the ports, and a universal feeling of despondency and distrust spread like a blight into every corner of the industrial world. Every industry had its crowds of unemployed workmen, the proportion of men on the books of the Trade Unions rising, in some cases, to as much as 25 per cent. The capitalists, as might have been expected, chose the moment of trial for attempting to take back the rest of the concessions extorted from them in the previous years. “It has appeared to employers of labour,” stated the private circular issued by the Iron Trade Employers’ Association in December 1878, “that the time has arrived when the superfluous wages which have been dissipated in unproductive consumption must be retrenched, and when the idle hours which have been unprofitably thrown away must be reclaimed to industry and profit by being redirected to reproductive work.” The result is reflected in the Trade Union reports. “All over the United Kingdom,” states the Monthly Report of the Amalgamated Carpenters for January 1879, “notices of reductions in wages and extended hours of labour come pouring in from employers with an eagerness and audacity which contrast strangely with the lessons of forbearance and moderation so incessantly dinned into the ears of the British workman in happier times.” “At no time in our history,” reports the Executive Council of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, “have we had such a number of industrial disturbances throughout the country. Bad trade has prevailed; and our employers, now better organised than ever before, seem to have made it their aim to raise as many points of contention with us as ever possible. In one place sweeping reductions of wages would be carried out or attempted; and in others the rates paid for overtime were sought to be reduced, while in many cases the hours of labour have been attacked, and in the Clyde district successfully, three hours being, as a result, added to the week’s work all over Scotland.... Another notable feature of the depression has been the continued oppression by the employers of the men in the most submissive districts, where conciliatory measures were adopted, and where little objection was made to any innovation. The Clyde district has been a notable example of this fact, passing in the first instance through two considerable reductions of wages almost passively, only to be almost immediately after the victims of desultory attacks upon the hours question. Irregular attack appears almost to have been the system adopted by the employers in preference to the development of any general movement by their Associations.”[496] The years 1878-1880 witnessed, accordingly, a great increase in the number of strikes in nearly all trades,[497] most of which terminated disastrously for the workmen. Sweeping reductions of wages occurred in all industries. The Northumberland miners, whose normal day’s earnings had been 9s. 1½d. in March 1873, found themselves reduced, in November 1878, to 4s. 9d. per day, and in January 1880 to 4s. 4d. Scotch mechanics suffered an even more sudden reduction. The Glasgow stonemasons, for instance, who had been earning 9d. and 10d. per hour during 1877, dropped by the end of 1878 to 6d. per hour, and found it difficult to find employment even at that figure. A still more dangerous encroachment was made in connection with the hours of labour. Employers on all sides sought to lengthen the working day. The mechanics on the Clyde lost the fifty-one hours week which they had won. The Iron Trades Employers’ Association, whose circular we have quoted, resolved upon a general attack on the Nine Hours Day. “It has been resolved,” writes the secretary, “by a large majority of the Iron Trades Employers’ Association, supported by a general agreement among other employers, to give notice in their workshops that the hours of labour shall be increased to the number prevailing before the adoption of the nine hours limit.”[498] The concerted action of the associated employers was, however, baulked by the energy of John Burnett, then General Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. Placed in possession of the Circular for a couple of hours, he promptly reproduced it in an ably reasoned appeal to his own members, which was sent broadcast to the press. Publicity proved fatal to the employers’ plans, and no uniform or systematic action was taken. Isolated attempts were, however, made in all directions by the master engineers to revert to fifty-seven or fifty-nine hours per week; and only by the most strenuous action was the normal fifty-four-hours week retained in “society shops.”

Other trades were not equally successful in maintaining even their nominal day. In many towns the carpenters had two or three hours per week added to their working time.[499] More serious was the fact that in numerous minor trades the very conception of a definitely fixed normal day was practically lost. Even among such well-organised trades as the Engineers, Carpenters, and Stonemasons the practice of systematic overtime, coupled with the prevalence of piecework, reduced the normal day to a nullity.[500] In the abundant Trade Union records of these years we watch the progress and results of these economic disasters. The number of men drawing the out-of-work benefit steadily rises, until the societies of Ironfounders and Boilermakers, which in 1872-73 had scarcely 1 per cent unemployed, had in 1879 over 20 per cent on their funds. The Amalgamated Society of Engineers paid away, under this one head, during the three years 1878-80, a sum of no less than £287,596. The Operative Plumbers had to exclude, in the two years 1880-82, nearly a third of their members for non-payment of contributions. The Ironfounders, who in 1876 had accumulated a fund of over £5 per member, paid away every penny of it by the end of 1879, and were only saved from actual stoppage by the numerous loans made to the society by its more prosperous members. The Stonemasons’ Society drained itself equally dry, and resorted to the same expedient to avoid default. The Scottish societies had to meet the crisis in an even more aggravated form. The total collapse which followed the City of Glasgow Bank failure absolutely ruined all but half a dozen of the Scotch Trade Unions, a blow from which Trade Unionism in Scotland did not recover for the rest of the century.

The year 1879, indeed, was as distinctly a low-water mark of the Trade Union Movement as 1873-74 registered a full tide of prosperity. The economic trials through which Trade Unionism passed in 1879 are only to be paralleled by those through which it had gone in 1839-42. But the solid growth which we have described prevented any such total collapse as marked the previous periods. The depression of 1879 swept, it is true, many hundreds of trade societies into oblivion. The Unions of agricultural labourers, which had sprung up with such mushroom rapidity, either collapsed altogether or dwindled into insignificant benefit clubs. Up and down the country the hundreds of little societies in miscellaneous trades which had flourished during the good years, went down before the tide of adversity. Widespread national organisations shrank up practically into societies of local influence, concentrated upon the strongholds of their industries. The great National Union of Miners, established, as we have seen, in 1862-63, survived, after 1879, only in Northumberland, Durham, and Yorkshire. Its younger rival, the Amalgamated Association of Miners, which had, up to 1875, dominated South Wales and the Midlands, broke up and disappeared. The National Amalgamated Association of Ironworkers, also established in 1862, which in 1873 numbered 35,000 members in all parts of the country, was reduced in 1879 to 1400 members, confined to a few centres in the North of England.[501] In some districts, such as South Wales, Trade Unionism practically ceased to exist.[502] The total membership of the Trade Union Movement returned, it is probable, to the level of 1871. But despite all these contractions the backbone of the movement remained intact. In the engineering and building trades the great national societies, though they were denuded of their reserve funds, retained their membership. Nor was it only the trade friendly societies that weathered the storm. The essentially trade organisations of the cotton operatives, and of the Northumberland and Durham miners, maintained their position with only a temporary contraction of membership. The political organisation of the movement was, moreover, unaffected. The local Trades Councils went on undisturbed. The annual Trades Union Congress continued to meet, and to appoint its standing Parliamentary Committee. In short, though many individual Unions disappeared, and many others saw their balances absorbed and their membership reduced, the trials of 1879 proved that the Trade Union Movement was at last beyond all danger of destruction or collapse, and that the Trade Union organisation had become a permanent element in our social structure.

We see, therefore, that the work which Allan and Applegarth had done towards consolidating the Trade Union Movement had not been fruitless. But along with increasing consolidation and definiteness of purpose had come an increasing differentiation of policy and interest. Each trade was working out its own industrial problems in its way. Whilst the miners and the cotton operatives, for instance, were elaborating their own codes of legislative regulation of the conditions of labour, the engineering and building trades were becoming pledged to the legislative _laissez-faire_ of their leaders. Under the influence of the able spokesmen of the northern counties the coal-miners and ironworkers were accepting the principle that wages must follow prices; whilst the cotton operatives, and to some extent the boilermakers,[503] were making a notable stand for the contrary view that the Standard Rate of Wages should be a first charge on industry. And while the miners and cotton operatives regarded their organisations primarily as societies for trade protection, there was growing up among the successors of the Junta in the iron and building trades a fixed belief that the really “Scientific Trade Unionism” consisted in elaborate friendly benefits and judiciously invested superannuation funds. So long as trade was expanding, and each policy was pursued with success, no antagonism arose between the different sections. The cotton operatives cordially approved the Nine Hours Movement of the engineers, whilst these, in their turn, supported the Factory Bill desired by the Lancashire spinners. The miners applauded the gallant stand made by the cotton operatives against the reductions of 1877-79, whilst the cotton operatives saw no objection to the acquiescence of the miners in the dependence of wages on prices. And though all Trade Unions regarded with respect the high contributions and accumulated funds of the Amalgamated Engineers, they were equally respectful of the success with which the Northumberland coal-miners, through bad times and good, had for half a generation maintained a strong Union with exclusively trade objects. Thus the divergences of policy, which were destined from 1885 onward to form the battle-ground between what has been once more termed the “Old” Unionism and the “New,” did not at first prevent cordial co-operation in the common purposes of the Trade Union Movement. It was in the dark days after 1878-79, when every Union suffered reverses, that internal discontent as to Trade Union policy became acute, and a new spirit of criticism arose. Not until the purely trade society, on the one hand, had been found lacking in stability, and the trade friendly society, on the other, had been convicted of apathy in trade matters; not until the Lancashire and Yorkshire coalminers had been driven to protest against the constant reductions brought about by the sliding scales, and some of the leaders of the Lancashire cotton operatives hesitated in their advocacy of the legal day; finally, not until a powerful section of the miners opposed any further extension of the Mines Regulation Acts, and a section of the engineers and building operatives began to advocate the legal fixing of their own labour day--do we find it declared that “the two systems cannot co-exist; they are contradictory and opposed.”[504]

In more than one direction, therefore, the depression of trade was bringing into prominence wide divergences of opinion upon Trade Union policy. But the adverse industrial circumstances of the time were revealing, in certain industries, a more invidious cleavage. As manufacturing processes develop and change with the progress of invention and the substitution of one material for another--iron for wood in shipbuilding, for instance--the skilled members of one trade find themselves superseded for certain work by the members of another. A modern Atlantic liner, practically a luxuriously-fitted, electric-lighted floating hotel, built of rolled steel plates, would obviously not fall within the work of a shipwright like Peter the Great. But the old-fashioned shipwright naturally refused to relinquish without a struggle the right to build ships of every kind. The depression of 1879 was severely felt in the shipbuilding and engineering trades, every one of which had a large percentage of its members unemployed. The societies found, as we have seen, the out-of-work donation a serious drain on their funds, and were inclined to look more narrowly into cases of “encroachment” upon the work which each regarded as the legitimate sphere of its own members. Disputes between Union and Union as to overlap and apportionment of work become, in these years, of frequent occurrence; and to the standing conflict with the employers was added embittered internecine warfare between the men of one branch of trade and those of another. The Engineers complained of the monopoly which the Boilermakers maintained of all work connected with angle-iron. The Patternmakers protested vigorously against the Carpenters presuming to make any engineering patterns. At Glasgow the Brassfounders objected to the Ironmoulders continuing to make the large brass castings which the workers in brass had at first been unable to undertake. The line of demarcation in iron shipbuilding between the work of a shipwright and that of a boilermaker was a constant source of friction. The disregard of the ordinary classification of trades by the authorities of the Royal Dockyards created great discontent among the Engineers, who saw shipwrights put to do fitters’ work, and Broadhurst brought the matter in 1882 before the House of Commons.[505] Nor were the disputes confined to the puzzling question of the lines of demarcation between particular trades. In 1877 the recently formed Union of “Platers’ Helpers” complained bitterly to the Trades Union Congress that the whole force of the Boilermakers’ Society had been used to destroy their organisation. The Platers’ Helpers, it may be explained, constitute a large class of labourers in shipbuilding yards, who are usually employed and paid, not by the owners of the yards, but by members of the Boilermakers’ Society. In the building trades numerous cases of friction were occurring between bricklayers and masons on the one hand, and the builders’ labourers on the other. The introduction of terra cotta led to a whole series of disputes between the bricklayers and the plasterers as to the trade to which the new work properly belonged. Disputes of this kind were, of course, no new thing. What gave the matter its new importance was the dominance of the great trade friendly societies in the skilled occupations. The loss of employment by individual members became in bad times a serious financial drain on Unions giving out-of-work pay. In place of the bickerings of individual workmen we have the conflicts of powerful societies, each supporting the claim of its own members to do the work in dispute. “When men are not organised in a Trade Union,” says the general secretary of a large society, “these little things are not taken much notice of, but the moment the two trades become well organised, each trade is looking after its own particular members’ interests....”[506]

We have in our _Industrial Democracy_ analysed the history, character, and extent of this rivalry among competing branches of the same trade. Here we need do no more than record its result in weakening the bond of union between powerful sections of the Trade Union world. The local Trades Councils, which might have attained a position of political influence, were always being disintegrated by the disputes of competing trades. The powerful Shipping Trades Council of Liverpool, for instance, which played an important part in Samuel Plimsoll’s agitation for a new Merchant Shipping Act, was broken up in 1880 by the quarrel between the separate societies of Shipwrights, Ship-joiners, and House Carpenters over ship work. The minutes of every Trades Council, especially those in seaports, relate innumerable well-intentioned attempts to settle similar disputes, almost invariably ending in the secession of one or other of the contending Unions. These quarrels prevented, moreover, the formation of any effective general federation. An attempt was made in 1875 by the officers of the Amalgamated Engineers’, Boilermakers’, Ironfounders’, and Steam-Engine Makers’ Societies to establish a federation for mutual defence against attacks upon the Nine Hours System. After a few months, the disputes between the Engineers and Boilermakers on the one hand, and between the members of the Amalgamated Society and the Steam-Engine Makers’ Society on the other, led to the abandonment of the attempt.[507] A similar movement initiated by the Boilermakers in 1881 equally failed to get established.[508]

Wider federations met with no better success than those confined to the engineering and shipbuilding trades. The Trades Union Congress repeatedly declared itself in favour of universal brotherhood among Trade Unionists, and the formation of a federal bond between the different societies. But the inherent differences between trade and trade, the numerous distinct types into which societies were divided, the wide divergences as to Trade Union policy which we have been describing, and, above all, the rivalry for members and employment between competing societies in the same industry, rendered any universal federation impossible. After the Sheffield Congress in 1874, representatives of the leading Unions in the iron and building trades set on foot a “Federation of Organised Trade Societies,” which all Unions were invited to join for mutual defence. But the Cotton-spinners, with their preference for legislative regulation, refused to have anything to do with a federation which contemplated nothing but strike benefits. The whole scheme was, indeed, more a project of certain Trade Union officials than a manifestation of any general feeling in favour of common action. Each trade was, as we have said, working out its own policy, and attending almost exclusively to its own interests. Under such circumstances any attempt at effective federation must necessarily have been still-born. Nevertheless the Edinburgh Congress of 1879 called for a renewed attempt; and the Parliamentary Committee circulated to every Trade Union in the kingdom their proposed rules for another “Federation of Organised Trade Societies,” To this invitation not half a dozen replies were received.[509] At the Congress of 1882, when the resolution in favour of a universal federation was again proposed, it found little support. The representatives of the local Trades Councils urged that these bodies furnished all that was practicable in the way of federation. Thomas Ashton, the outspoken representative of the cotton-spinners, was more emphatic. “For years,” he said, “the Parliamentary Committee and others had been trying to bring about such an organisation as that mentioned in the resolution, but it had been found utterly impossible.... It was all nonsense to pass such a resolution. It was impossible for the trades of the country to amalgamate, their interests were so varied and they were so jealous with regard to each other’s disputes.”[510]

The foregoing examination of the internal relations of the Trade Union world between 1875 and 1879, though incomplete, demonstrates the extent to which the movement during these years was dominated by a somewhat narrow “particularism.” From 1880 to 1885 the various societies were absorbed in building up again their membership and balances, which had so seriously suffered during the continued depression. The annual Trades Union Congress, the Parliamentary Committee, and the political proceedings of these years constitute practically the only common bond between the isolated and often hostile sections. In all industrial matters the Trade Union world was broken up into struggling groups, destitute of any common purpose, each, indeed, mainly preoccupied with its separate concerns, and frequently running counter to the policy or aims of the rest. The cleavages of interest and opinion among working men proved to be deeper and more numerous than any one suspected. In the following chapter we shall see how an imperfect appreciation of each other’s position led to that conflict between the “Old Unionists” and the “New” which for some years bade fair to disintegrate the whole Labour Movement.

FOOTNOTES:

[442] Address of Alexander Macdonald to the Leeds Conference, 1873. Alexander Macdonald, the son of a sailor, who became a miner in Lanarkshire, was born at Airdrie in 1821, and went to work in the pit at the age of eight. Having an ardent desire for education he prepared himself as best he could for Glasgow University, which he entered in 1846, supporting himself from his savings, and from his work as a miner in the summer. Whilst still at the University he became known as a leader of the miners all over Scotland. In 1850 he became a mine manager, and in 1851 he opened a school at Airdrie, an occupation which he abandoned in 1855 to devote his whole time to agitation on behalf of the miners. On the formation, in 1863, of the National Union of Miners, he was elected president, a position which he retained until his death. Meanwhile he was, by a series of successful commercial speculations, acquiring a modest fortune, which enabled him to devote his whole energies to the promotion of the Parliamentary programme which he had impressed upon the miners. He gave important evidence before the Select Committee of 1865 on the Master and Servant Law. In 1868 he offered himself as a candidate for the Kilmarnock Burghs, but retired to avoid a split. At the General Election of 1874 he was more successful, being returned for Stafford, and thus becoming (with Thomas Burt) the first “Labour Member.” He was shortly afterwards appointed a member of the Royal Commission on the Labour Laws, and eventually presented a minority report of his own on the subject. He died in 1881. A history of the coal-miners which he projected was apparently never written, and, with the exception of numerous presidential addresses and other speeches, and a pamphlet entitled _Notes and Annotations on the Coal Mines Regulation Act, 1872_ (Glasgow, 1872, 50 pp.), we have found nothing from his pen. A eulogistic notice of his life by Lloyd Jones appeared in the _Newcastle Chronicle_, November 17, 1883, most of which is reprinted in Dr. Baernreither’s _English Associations of Working Men_, p. 408.

[443] Address to the Miners’ National Conference at Leeds, 1873.

[444] The Conference appointed a sub-committee to compile and publish its proceedings, “a thing,” as the preface explains, “altogether unparalleled in the records of labour.” And indeed the elaborate volume, regularly published by the eminent firm of Longmans in 1864, entitled _Transactions and Results of the National Association of Coal, Lime, and Ironstone Miners of Great Britain, held at Leeds, November 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14, 1863_, with its 174 pages, its frontispiece representing the pit-brow women, and its motto on the title-page extracted from the writings of W. E. Gladstone, formed a creditable and impressive appeal to the reading public.

[445] For this militant Chartist (1805-79), see _Life of Joseph Rayner Stephens_, by G. J. Holyoake, 1881.

[446] _Transactions and Results of the National Association of Coal, Lime, and Ironstone Miners of Great Britain, held at Leeds, November 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14, 1863_, p. 14.

[447] _Transactions and Results of the National Association of Coal, Lime, and Ironstone Miners of Great Britain, held at Leeds, November 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14, 1863_, p. 17. In Northumberland and Durham the hewers very largely work in two shifts, whilst there used to be only one shift of boys.

[448] Section 29 of Mines Regulation Act of 1860.

[449] Normansell _v._ Platt. John Normansell, the agent of the South Yorkshire Miners’ Association, stands second only to Macdonald as a leader of the miners between 1863 and 1875. The son of a banksman, he was born at Torkington, Cheshire, in 1830, and left an orphan at an early age. At seven he entered the pit, and when, at the age of nineteen, he married, he was unable to write his own name. Migrating to South Yorkshire, he became a leader in the agitation to secure a checkweigher, which the local coal-owners conceded in 1859. Normansell was elected to the post for his own pit, and rapidly became the leading spirit in the district. After the lock-out of 1864 he was elected secretary to the Union, then counting only two thousand members. Within eight years he had raised its membership to twenty thousand, and built up an elaborate system of friendly benefits. Normansell was the first working-man Town Councillor, having been triumphantly elected at Barnsley, his Union subscribing £1000 to lodge in the bank in his name, in order to enable him to declare himself possessed of the pecuniary qualification at that time required. On his death the amount was voted to his widow. Normansell gave evidence in 1867 before the Select Committee on Coal-mining, and before that on the Master and Servant Law, in 1868 before the Royal Commission on Trade Unions, and in 1873 before that on the Coal Supply.

[450] The best and indeed the only exact account of these cotton lists is that prepared for the Economic Section of the British Association by a committee consisting of Professor Sidgwick, Professor Foxwell, A. H. D. (now Sir Arthur) Acland, Dr. W. Cunningham, and Professor J. E. C. Munro, the report being drawn up by the latter. (_On the Regulation of Wages by means of Lists in the Cotton Industry_, Manchester, 1887; in two parts--Spinning and Weaving.) See _History of Wages in the Cotton Trade during the Past Hundred Years_, by G. H. Wood, 1910; _A Century of Fine Cotton Spinning_, by McConnel & Co., 1906; and _Standard Piece Lists and Sliding Scales_, by the Labour Department of the Board of Trade, Cd. 144, 1900.

The principles upon which the lists are framed are so complicated that we confess, after prolonged study, to be still perplexed on certain points; and though Professor Munro clears up many difficulties, we are disposed to believe that even he, in some particulars, has not in all cases correctly stated the matter. We have discussed the whole subject in our _Industrial Democracy_.

[451] _Bolton and District Net List of Prices for Spinning Twist, Reeled Yarn or Bastard Twist, and Weft, on Self-actor Mules_ (Bolton, 1887; 85 pp.).

[452] Birtwistle was, in 1892, at an advanced age, appointed by the Home Secretary an Inspector in the Factory Department, under the “particulars clause” (sec. 24 of the Factory and Workshops Act, 1891), as the only person who could be found competent to understand and interpret the intricacies of the method of remuneration in the weaving trade.

[453] _Beehive_, February 23, 1867. The circular announcing the resolution is signed by the leading officers of the Cotton-spinners’ and Cotton-weavers’ Unions of the time.

[454] Report of the Parliamentary Committee to the Trades Union Congress, January 1873.

[455] Circular of December 11, 1871, signed on behalf of the preliminary meeting by Thomas Mawdsley--not to be mistaken for James Mawdsley, J.P., a subsequent secretary.

[456] Thomas Ashton, J.P. (died 1919), then secretary of the Oldham Spinners, often made this statement. On the 26th of May 1893 the _Cotton Factory Times_, the men’s accredited organ, declared, with reference to the Eight Hours Movement, that “now the veil must be lifted, and the agitation carried on under its true colours. Women and children must no longer be made the pretext for securing a reduction of working hours for men.”

[457] Speech at Trades Union Congress, Bristol, 1878.

[458] “From what I have heard,” writes Professor Beesly in the _Beehive_, May 16, 1874, “I am inclined to think that no single fact had more to do with the defeat of the Liberal Party in Lancashire at the last election than Mr. Fawcett’s speech on the Nine Hours Bill in the late Parliament.”

[459] Report of Trades Union Congress, Sheffield, January 1874.

[460] John Burnett, who was born at Alnwick, Northumberland, in 1842, became, after the Nine Hours Strike, a lecturer for the National Education League, and joined the staff of the _Newcastle Chronicle_. In 1875, on Allan’s death, he was elected to the General Secretaryship of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. He was a member of the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress from 1876 to 1885. In 1886 he was appointed to the newly-created post of Labour Correspondent of the Board of Trade, in which capacity he prepared and issued a series of reports on Trade Unions and Strikes. On the establishment of the Labour Department in 1893 he became Chief Labour Correspondent under the Commissioner for Labour, and was selected to visit the United States to prepare a report on the effects of Jewish immigration. He retired in 1907 and died 1914.

[461] A full account of this conflict is given by John Burnett in his _History of the Engineers’ Strike in Newcastle and Gateshead_ (Newcastle, 1872; 77 pp.). A description by the Executive of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers is given in their “Abstract Report” up to December 31, 1872. The _Newcastle Daily Chronicle_, from April to October 1871, furnishes a detailed contemporary record. The leading articles and correspondence in the _Times_ of September 1871 are important.

[462] See the _Times_ leader of September 11, 1871. This leader, which pronounced “the conduct of the employers throughout this dispute as imprudent and impolitic,” called forth the bewildered remonstrance of Sir William (afterwards Lord) Armstrong, writing on behalf of “the Associated Employers.” “We were amazed,” writes the great captain of industry, “to see ourselves described in your article as being in a condition of hopeless difficulty; and we really felt that, if the League themselves had possessed the power of inspiring that article, they could scarcely have used words more calculated to serve their purposes than those in which it is expressed. The concurrent appearance in the _Spectator_ of an article exhibiting the same bias adds to our surprise. We had imagined that a determined effort to wrest concessions from employers by sheer force of combination was not a thing which found favour with the more educated and intelligent classes, whose opinions generally find expression in the columns of the _Times_” (_Times_ September 14, 1871).

[463] Here the “International” was of use. At Burnett’s instigation, Cohn, the Danish secretary in London, proceeded to the Continent to check this immigration, his expenses being paid by the Amalgamated Society of Engineers.

[464] With regard to overtime, Burnett informed us that “it was found impossible to carry a Nine Hours Day pure and simple at the time of the strike of 1871, and that overtime should still be worked as required was insisted upon as a first condition of settlement by the employers.”

[465] Meeting of London pattern-makers to seek advance of wages, _Beehive_, October 21, 1865.

[466] Letter from “Amalgamator,” _Beehive_, January 19, 1867.

[467] The rank and file were more sympathetic than the Executive. The machinery for making the collections was mostly furnished by the branches and committees of the Society.

[468] An “Assistant Secretary” was subsequently added, and eventually another. But these assistants were, like the General Secretary himself, recruited from the ranks of the workmen, and however experienced they may have been in trade matters, were necessarily less adapted to the clerical labour demanded of them. The great Trade Friendly Societies of the Stonemasons, Bricklayers, and Ironfounders long continued to have only one assistant secretary, and no clerical staff whatever.

[469] Question 827 in Report of Trade Union Commission (March 26, 1867).

[470] _Bookbinders’ Trade Circular_, January 1866.

[471] In 1892 the Amalgamated Engineers provided themselves, not only with district delegates, like those of the Boilermakers, but also with a salaried Executive Council. The Amalgamated Society of Carpenters has since started district delegates, and the other national societies gradually followed suit.

[472] Mention should here be made of the Manchester and District Association of Trade Union Officials, an organisation which grew out of a joint committee formed to assist the South Wales miners in their strike of 1875. The frequent meetings, half serious, half social, of this grandly named association, known to the initiated as “the Peculiar People,” served for many years as opportunities for important consultations on Trade Union policy between the leaders of the numerous societies having offices in Manchester. It also had as an object the protection of Trade Union officials against unjust treatment by their own societies (see _History of the British Trades Union Congress_, by W. J. Davis, vol. i., 1910, p. 89)

[473] Report of the Trades Union Congress, Sheffield, 1874. A table printed in the Appendix to the present volume gives such comparative statistics of Trade Union membership as we have been able to compile.