Beatrice Webb

“ Lord Shaftesbury, the lifelong advocate of factory legislation, was praying that “the working people may be emancipated from the tightest thraldom they have ever yet endured. All the single despots, and all the aristocracies that ever were or ever will be, are as puffs of wind compared with these tornadoes, the Trade Unions.” ”

“ It is, therefore, necessary to define Liberty before talking about it; a definition which every man will frame according to his own view of what is socially desirable. We ourselves understand by the words ‘Liberty’ or ‘Freedom,’ not any quantum of natural or inalienable rights, but such conditions of existence in the community as do, in practice, result in the utmost possible development of faculty in the individual human being. Now, in this sense democracy is not only consistent with Liberty, but is, as it seems to us, the only way of securing the largest amount of it. ”

“ Thus, the twenty millions sterling now spent annually in the United Kingdom on the mere relief of destitution do practically nothing to prevent the creation, year by year, of new masses of destitution. ”

“ It is vital that the Local Education Authority should be empowered and required to search out and ensure, quite irrespective of the family's destitution, whatever Parliament may prescribe as the National Minimum of nurture and training for all children, the neglect of which will otherwise bring these children, when they grow up, themselves to a state of destitution. It is becoming no less clear that some Authority—we say a National Authority—must register and deal with the man who is unemployed, long before extended unemployment has demoralised him and reduced his family to destitution. ”

“ When, as in 1833-34, 1872, and 1889, a wave of enthusiasm sweeps the unskilled labourers into the Trade Union ranks, it is obviously necessary to form, at any rate in the first instance, organisations which make no greater tax upon their miserable earnings than a penny or twopence per week. The apparent rhythm of alternations between the two types of organisation is due, therefore, not to any general abandonment of one for the other, but to the accidental prominence, in certain crises of Trade Union history, of the Unions belonging to particular trades or classes of wage-earners. ”

“ We think the time has come when the nation should definitely adopt the principle of using all its powers to prevent the occurrence of destitution, instead of the principle of merely relieving it after it has occurred. Destitution, as we know, is a social disease, as destructive to the health of the community as phthisis is; quite as dangerous to the individual attacked, once it has gained a firm hold, but fortunately as gradual as phthisis in its attack. ”

“ But, peaceful or violent, the great social revolution of the nineteenth century is at hand, and if fighting should be necessary the workers may at least remember the profound historical truth that ‘Force is the midwife of progress delivering the old society pregnant with the new,’ and reflect that they are striving for the final overthrow of a tyranny more degrading than the worst chattel slavery of ancient times. ”

“ It is remarkable how slow the Trade Union world is to recognise the importance, to administrative or political efficiency, of the constitution of a hierarchy, a group or a team. Where a great society has a salaried staff of half-a-dozen to a score of officials—under such designations as General Secretary, Assistant Secretaries, President, Members of Executive Council or District Delegates, Organisers or Investigators—it is almost invariable to find them all separately elected by the whole body of members, or what is even more destructive of unity, by different district memberships. ”

“ This policy of "less eligibility," into which any Poor Law Authority is only too apt to be driven in dealing with the able-bodied, seems to us so futile and so barbarous in its inhumanity, and leads to such demoralising forms of parasitism on the labour of women and children, on begging and vagrancy, and even on a career of crime, that we should regard its introduction into Scotland, by the new Public Assistance Authorities that our colleagues propose, as nothing less than a national disaster. ”

“ Now, it becomes more and more apparent that it is a useless extravagance to adopt the policy of curative and restorative treatment, unless we are prepared to "search out" the cases [288] that need dealing with,—the infants and children who are just beginning to be neglected by their parents and guardians, the persons of all ages who are just beginning to suffer from disease, the feeble-minded lacking ameliorating care, the man just smitten with unemployment—at the stage in their complaint at which the application of our treatment has, at any rate, some chance of yielding effective results. ”

“ But the working classes were suffering, in addition, from a calamity which no mere politician of that time grasped, in the effects of the new machine and factory industry, which was blindly crushing out the old methods by the mere brute force of competition instead of replacing it with due order and adjustment to the human interests involved. This phenomenon was beyond the comprehension of its victims. Each of them knew what was happening to himself as an individual; but only one man—a manufacturer—seems to have understood what was happening to the entire industry of the country. ”

“ Finally, in the case of able-bodied and able-minded men and women in health, whose distress arises merely from their being without wage-earning employment—whatever may be the cause of such unemployment—it will, we think, be wholly impracticable to obtain, for a Destitution Authority, any powers of compulsory segregation. To compel, by law, able-bodied men and women to become paupers against their will; to force upon them a degrading status with the stigma of pauperism, when they do not even apply for public assistance ”

“ Democracy is an expedient—perhaps the only practicable expedient—for preventing the concentration in any single individual or in any single class of what inevitably becomes, when so concentrated, a terrible engine of oppression. The autocratic emperor, served by a trained bureaucracy, seems to the Anglo-Saxon a perilously near approach to such a concentration. If democracy meant, as early observers imagined, a similar concentration of Knowledge and Power in the hands of the numerical majority for the time being, it might easily become as injurious a tyranny as any autocracy. ”

“ The policy of the Central Authority at this date, in short, deliberately excluded any use of the workhouse for the curative, reformatory, or educational treatment of any class whatsoever. There was only to be one institution in each Union for all classes of paupers. It was to be a place which, whilst it provided the full requirements of physical health, starved both the will and the intelligence, and forced the pauper into a condition of blank-mindedness. ”

“ But this is a point which each Trade Union must decide for itself. It is not a matter in which outsiders can offer more than counsel. It is clearly not a matter in which the discretion of the Trade Union, any more than that of an individual employer, can properly be limited by law. For no Trade Union can nowadays abstain altogether from political action. Without co-operating with other Trade Unions in taking Parliamentary action of a very energetic and very watchful kind, it cannot (as long experience has demonstrated to practically all Trade Unionists) protect the interests of its members. ”

“ In the modern Trade Union, on the contrary, we find, not an association of entrepreneurs, themselves controlling the processes of their industry, and selling its products, but a combination of hired wage-workers, serving under the direction of industrial captains who are outside the organisation. The separation into distinct social classes of the capitalist and the brainworker on the one hand, and the manual workers on the other—the substitution, in fact, of a horizontal for a vertical cleavage of society—vitiates any treatment of the Trade Union as the analogue of the Craft Gild. ”

“ As an Elector—still more as a chosen Representative—in his parish, in his professional association, in his co-operative society, or in the wider political institutions of his state, the ‘average sensual man’ is perpetually impelled to appreciate and to decide issues of public policy. The working of democratic institutions means, therefore, one long training in enlightened altruism, one continual weighing, not of the advantage of the particular act to the particular individual, at the particular moment, but of those ‘larger expediencies’ on which all successful conduct of social life depends. ”

“ The “leisure class”—the men and women who live by owning and not by working, a class increasing in actual numbers, if not relatively to the workers—seem to the great mass of working people to be showing themselves, if possible, more frivolous and more insolent in their irresponsible consumption, by themselves and their families, of the relatively enormous share that they are able to take from the national income. It is coming to be more and more felt that the continued existence of this class involves a quite unwarranted burden upon their fellow-citizens working by hand or by brain. ”

“ It is impossible to deny that the perpetual liability to end in a strike or a lock-out is a grave drawback to the Method of Collective Bargaining. So long as the parties to a bargain are free to agree or not to agree, it is inevitable that, human nature being as it is, there should now and again come a deadlock, leading to that trial of strength and endurance which lies behind all bargaining. ”

“ Throughout all the various struggles of these years the Trade Union leaders kept steadily in view the definite aim of getting rid of a law which they regarded, not only as hampering their efforts for better conditions of employment, but also as an indignity and an insult to the hundreds of thousands of intelligent artisans whom they represented. The whole history of this agitation proves how completely the governing classes were out of touch with the recently enfranchised artisans. ”

“ To Owen himself we may allow the privilege of his genius, which did not prevent him from being an extravagantly bad captain for a working-class movement. But in his leading disciples ignorance of industrial conditions, contemptuous indifference to facts and figures, and incapacity to measure, even in the smallest actions, the relation between the means and the end, stand in as marked contrast to the sober judgment of men like John Burns as they did to the cautious shrewdness of Allan and Applegarth. ”

“ We can all give a little, and each one may encourage his neighbour to follow his example. The conflict may be a severe one. It is for freedom and liberty to unite as we have done. We have reaped some of the advantages of our Unions; we must assist them to establish theirs, and not allow the ray of hope that now shines across the path of our patient but determined fellow-toilers to be darkened by the blind folly of their employers, who, being in a measure slaves to the powers above them, would, if they could, even at their own loss, consign all below them to perpetual bondage. ”