status to contract, politically from despotism to democracy, industrially from slavery to freedom.

The long struggle has been between the property rights of the selfish special privilege of a favored few, and the personal rights of the dispossessed many. But property rights and the power of wealth have always given political, social and industrial power over the lives of others. From the days of Rome to modern England and America, most of the laws have been framed for the protection of property rather than personality. A review of the gradual evolution of labor in Europe should fill us with sympathy for the workers in Asia who are suffering today from the same low wages, long hours and bad working conditions that prevailed in the West a century ago. It should fill us with hope for the future in East and West alike. It should nerve us with the resolve that we shall not rest while poverty, want and oppression exist, anywhere in the world, side by side with exorbitant wealth, luxury and privilege unshared.

CHAPTER VI

THE BRITISH LABOR MOVEMENT

The Labor Movement in Great Britain was the child of the industrial revolution. It represented the effort of the workers to protect themselves against the encroachment of the machine upon human life, to win for the present better conditions in industry, and for the future a new social order. The logic of fact drove the workers to organize in sheer self-protection against the inhuman conditions which we have described in the last chapter.

Colonel Perronet Thompson describes the condition of the Lancashire cotton workers during the first half of the nineteenth century in "the squalid misery, the slow, mouldering, putrefying death by which the weak and feeble of the working classes are perishing." The doctrine of laissezfaire had left every man for himself and the devil to take the hindmost.

Following the industrial revolution the merciless competition of an individualist society gradually gave place to the more co-operative life of the collective community. In all departments men began to unite and organize for a better life. One function after another that had once been left to individual direction or private profit was taken over by the community. Paving, lighting and street cleaning; protection against violence, robbery, fire or flood; the public supply and distribution of man's great common needs of water, gas and electric power, and even in some cases of

1 Cambridge Modern History, Vol. XII, p. 730.

130

milk and other food; the means of transportation and communication, posts and telegraph; the public care of the sick, the aged, the infirm, of widows and orphans, cripples and defectives; the protection of childhood and maternity, education for children and adults; the provision of libraries, museums, galleries, parks and playgrounds for the people; co-operation in agriculture and industry; the provision of labor exchanges for unemployment, the settlement of industrial disputes and the administration of justice, civil and industrial-these and a score of other activities and functions have been in various degrees taken over by the community in collective or co-operative organization.1 Consciously or unconsciously, in theory or practice, men began to learn that the ultimate law of social life is not competition, but co-operation and association. Men were driven inevitably to organize in all departments of life, political, religious, social and industrial. As the neediest section of the community it behooved labor to organize also.

The British Labor Movement developed along four parallel lines: (1) The Trade Union Movement, as an organization of producers to protect or raise the standard of their industrial life; (2) The Co-operative Movement, as an organization chiefly of consumers to safeguard the working class against high prices and profiteering, and to improve their material conditions; (3) The Labor Party, as the political organization of the workers by hand or brain, to obtain by legislation and constitutional means a better life for all classes alike; and (4) The Workers' Educational Movement to train themselves for democracy and for full citizenship in a new social order.

1. The first of these, the Trade Union Movement, as we

1 Cambridge Modern History, Vol. XII, p. 735.

have already seen, developed in England in the eighteenth century in self-protection against the ominous advance of the industrial revolution.

The last decade has witnessed a remarkable growth of the Trade Union Movement in Britain. In 1910 the number in organized unions was 2,435,704; at the close of the war in 1919, it was 8,023,761.1 A trade union had been defined as "a continuous association of wage earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the conditions of their working lives." As the name implies, they were first organized for a simple trade, or "craft," often uniting only workers employed in a single occupation. The same necessity for protection which drove certain individual workers to unite in a craft union, finally drove other workers to combine in more comprehensive "industrial" unions, uniting all the workers engaged in a single industry. The movement toward combination was further developed by the enlarging aims of labor toward the "democratic control of industry" on the one hand, and the political control of the government on the other. There is at the present time a steady development in amalgamation and solidification in the Trade Union Movement of Great Britain.

Running horizontally across industry are the craft unions, vertically within particular industries are the industrial unions. The Miners' Federation, the National Union of Railwaymen and the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation are examples of industrial unions. There is

The figures for 1868 represent only those represented at the first Trade Union Congress. Labor International Handbook, 1921, p. 256.

likely to be a pitched battle between these two types of unions, but the present tendency is toward the development of the greater strength and unity of the industrial union.. The Triple Industrial Alliance, formed in 1915 of all organized miners, railwaymen and transport workers, showed a tendency of unions representing related industries to form still larger combinations.

Practically all of the unions are combined in the annual Trade Union Congress, which seeks to enable the whole movement to function as a unit for industrial action, and to promote legislation.1 At Portsmouth in 1920 the writer was struck with the contrast between two epochs as he passed from the deck of Nelson's old flagship, the Victory, to the platform of the Trade Union Congress. The one represented the imperialism, militarism and conquest on land and sea of an old order that is doomed to perish. The Congress in its resolution for peace, constitutionalism and democracy in industry and government, universal education, self-determination for all mature peoples and world brotherhood, stood for the new social order that must be built in the future if civilization is to be saved.

The Trade Union Act of 1913 enabled the unions to take a direct part in politics. The action of the government gave them increased prestige during the war and both government and large employers found it to their advantage to negotiate with organized labor that could keep its contracts rather than with masses of discontented, unorganized workers in a continual ferment of strikes.

There are today over a thousand trade unions in Britain with memberships running from a score to several hundred

It affiliates all important trade unions of manual workers and a few brain workers. First organized in 1868 with thirty-four delegates representing 118,367 workers, by 1920 it had 955 delegates representing 6,505,482 workers. In the years following it suffered a heavy decline during the period of unemployment and financial depression.