(The text of the act is given in full on pages 215-219 of this report. It was amended and revised by the Trade Disputes Act, 1906.)

1900. THE TAFF VALE DECISION. For a quarter of a century after the passage of the legislation of 1875 and 1876 reinforcing the acts of 1871, British workmen believed they were acting well within the limits of law in their defensive and offensive operations against their employers. Then came another court decree which, more sweeping than any yet made, had a stunning effect on the trade unions. This was the famous Taff Vale case, the final decision of which by the House of Lords completely upset the legal traditions of a generation relative to the legal status of trade unionism.

In June, 1900, the men employed by the Taff Vale Railway Company, in Wales, were urged to strike, by one James Holmes, a local organizer of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, for an advance in wages and to make certain other demands upon the company. The General Secretary of this organization, Richard Bell, whose headquarters were in London, promptly wrote Holmes, declaring that he was exceeding his authority in urging the men to strike. Holmes, nevertheless, continued obdurate, and in addresses to the men at their meetings deliberately encouraged them to strike.

The situation was aggravated by an attempt on the part of the company to transfer a signal man who had been 20 years in the service to a remote part of the system. The signal man was confined to his bed at the time, and was physically unable to make the transfer. Upon his recovery, he was informed that the vacancy had been filled and also that his old position had been filled. The Company offered him another position at a lower rate of pay which he refused to accept and demanded that he be restored to his former place. The Company refused this demand. The men interpreted this as an arbitrary exercise of power on the part of the company and in the nature of a challenge, and they immediately determined to strike unless the employee in question was at once restored to his former position. Bell, the General Secretary, continued to counsel prudence and patience on the part of the men and

again called Holmes' attention to the fact that the movement had not yet received the sanction of the central executive committee and that for the men to strike without its sanction Iwould be in clear violation of the rules of the union. On August 19 the executive committee of the society adopted a resolution censuring the men for having proceeded without its consent, while at the same time condemning the railway company for the removal of the employee referred to. The committee, however, agreed to give financial assistance to the strikers, and Secretary Bell went to Cardiff and took personal command of the strike, which formally began on August 20. The strike itself was of short duration and was settled in ten days by a compromise being effected.

Meantime, however, the Taff Vale Railway Company had determined to test its rights under the law and had brought suit, immediately the men went on strike, against over 200 of their former employees for breach of contract, on the ground that the men had left the company's services without notice or on an insufficient notice. Sixty of the men were fined in the police court £4 each and costs.

The company next applied for an injunction to restrain the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, its officers, and members generally from committing certain acts alleged to be illegal, including picketing, intimidation, and in general interfering with and obstructing the conduct of the company's business. Damages were claimed in the sum of £24,626 ($119,842) for injury done to plaintiffs by loss of business and extra expense arising out of the alleged unlawful and malicious conspiracy of the defendants.

A temporary injunction and restraining order was issued, the writ being made returnable on August 30. Justice Farwell granted an interim injunction and, on September 5, made two orders, one refusing to strike the name of the society out of the action, and the other granting an interim injunction against the society. In so doing, he held, contrary to the contention of the organization, that the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants might be sued as a trade union. The defense set up by the society was that, under the Acts of 1871 and 1876, a trade union being neither a corporation, nor an individual, nor

a limited liability company, was not collectively, as a union, liable for the acts of its members or responsible civilly or criminally for their acts. But Justice Farwell ruled for the plaintiff, deciding that the union, as a union, was an entity which might be reached by process of law, in these words:

Although a corporation and an individual, or individuals may be the only entities known to the common law who can sue or be sued, it is competent to the legislature to give to an association of individuals, which is neither a corporation nor a partnership nor an individual, a capacity for owning property and acting by agents; and such capacity, in the absence of express enactment to the contrary, involves the necessary correlative of liability, to the extent of such property, for the acts and defaults of such agents - in other words, the liability of being sued in its registered name.

If this decision could hold it was by no means a barren victory for the Taff Vale Railway Company, for although many trade unions had no substantial funds which could be attached for damages in the event of a suit going against them, the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants was one of the most prosperous trade unions in the United Kingdom. It had $1,500,000 in its treasury, and it naturally proposed to fight the case to the end. It therefore took an appeal, and the hearing was held in the Court of Appeals November 12, 1900, the question at issue being a simple one as to whether Mr. Justice Farwell had erred in deciding that trade unions could be sued. The court reversed Justice Farwell's decision, holding that if the Legislature had intended to provide in the Trade Union Acts that unions could sue or be sued, "the Legislature well knew how in plain terms to bring about such a result." In conclusion the Master of the Rolls said:

As there is no statute empowering this action to be brought against the union in its registered name, it is not maintainable against the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, eo nomine, and these defendants must therefore be struck out, the injunction against them must be dissolved, and the appeal as regards these defendants must be allowed with costs here and below.

It was now the turn of the railway company to appeal again, which it promptly proceeded to do, taking the case to the highest

court of resort in the Kingdom, the House of Lords. This body reversed the decision of the Court of Appeals and sustained the judgment of Justice Farwell of the lower court.1 The Lord Chancellor, in pronouncing the opinion, said:

In this case I am content to adopt the judgment of Farwell, J., with which I entirely concur; and I can not find any satisfactory answer to that judgment in the judgment of the court of appeal which overruled it. If the legislature has created a thing which can own property, which can employ servants, which can inflict injury, it must be taken, I think, to have impliedly given the power to make it suable in a court of law for injuries purposely done by its authority and procurement. I move your lordships that the judgment of the court of appeal be reversed, and that of Farwell, J., restored.

Defeated in the courts of law, the only appeal now left for the trade unions was to the court of public opinion, and they at once began to put in motion the machinery of agitation and appeal which had served them so effectively in the past and which, as the event has now apparently proved, was to avail for their success again. In 1824, Parliament had passed an act repealing the statutes to prevent the combination of workingmen, but its operation being unsatisfactory, a commission of inquiry was appointed and its deliberations resulted in a new law in 1825; the interpretation placed by the courts upon the act of 1825 being unsatisfactory to those who expected to benefit by it, prolonged agitation brought about the enactment of a new law in 1859; again, the court decisions were unsatisfactory and again, in 1867, a commission was appointed to consider the situation, and its report resulted in the legislation of 1871; once more, a distasteful court decision provoked so much criticism that a commission of inquiry was created to see what should be done about it, and further amendatory legislation was passed on the government's motion in 1875. This legislation remained unchallenged until 1900, but no sooner had the British workingman recovered from the first paralyzing effect of the blow dealt by the Taff Vale decision, than he sought by the orderly processes of law to nullify the decree of the court. He set out, in short, to secure an amendment of the Trade Union

1 The text of the Taff Vale decision by the House of Lords is given in full in Part III of the Annual Report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor for 1906 (p. 232) on the Incorporation of Trade Unions.

Acts in such language as to incorporate into the law that construction of the rights, privileges, and immunities of trade unionism as had been popularly supposed for thirty years was already guaranteed by the statutes.

1901-1906. Mr. Bell, the Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, who was also a member of Parliament, introduced a bill to legalize the conduct of trade disputes. But passage of legislation was postponed, as it had been when similar demands for the amendment of existing law were made on former occasions, pending a formal inquiry into the whole matter which, indeed, was seen to involve many fine points of law as well as of public policy. A royal commission was therefore appointed in June, 1903, and its report, made to the King and transmitted to Parliament in 1906, is printed on the foregoing pages. Its recommendations resulted in a bill being brought in for the government by Sir J. Lawson Walton, the Attorney-General, intended to meet the demands of labor. It had a somewhat stormy passage through the House of Commons. In its original form it sought to define and limit conspiracy, to make peaceful picketing legal; and to safeguard trade union funds from claims for damages, in order to legally restore the status of the unions in this respect to the position of immunity which they had enjoyed for a generation prior to the revolutionary Taff Vale decision.

The labor representatives in Parliament, however, were dissatisfied with the bill in the form in which it was introduced, since the clause safeguarding trade union funds from being mulcted in damages provided that the union should not be made liable unless it could be proved that the action of a trade union official, on account of which damages were claimed, had been duly authorized by the central or executive body of the union. This was one of the important questions involved in the Taff Vale controversy, the strike on the Taff Vale Railway having been instigated and directed by a subordinate local official of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, and directly contrary to the advice of the central executive body of that union, which, indeed, when the strike became an imminent certainty, passed formal resolutions censuring the local leaders responsible for it.