million engaged in factories, 420 only were killed and 8,527 injured; an excess for the railways of 208 killed and 1,074 injured with the twentieth part of the numbers that are engaged in factories. Since 1874 up to November 1898 there have been 10,000 deaths and 45,000 injuries connected with railway rolling stock. This does not include the 1,422 killed and the 115,920 injured in other departments of the railways, and making in all about 12,000 killed and 160,000 injured in eighteen years. At shunting and kindred work in 1891, 160 lives were lost and 1,671 were injured. Taking an average of killed and injured over the 14,000 men engaged it will be found, on the standard of 1891, that over seven years 1,120 are killed and 11,690 injured, or 80 per cent. of 14,000 men in this department are offered up every seven years as a sacrifice to the long hours of those engaged and to the increase of the unemployed. An eight hours day would reduce this preventible slaughter by 50 per cent., and if applied to the whole of the railways would absorb 100,000 men. This means a diminution of dividend of 1 per cent., but to a great extent this would be met by a reduction in taxation and other ways. It is not too large a price for the railways to pay for packing the House of Commons in the interests of their monopolies. The tramways and 'bus companies, in spite of plucky strikes by the men, are still working their men excessive hours, and will con tinue to do so till the law prevents them. At the present moment the number of carmen and unemployed men accustomed to vehicular work is large, and the necessities of the passenger traffic in London that could be better served by two shifts of men are neglected, so that rival companies can ruin each other, and kill their horses and men by insane competition. Fortunately for all, the County Council and other local authorities are taking possession of these monopolies, and their ownership will not only mean convenience to all and less obstruction, but a relief to the overstocked labor market in London. It is very difficult to suggest remedies that will at once affect the workless women. Relief works suitable for men are not possible for them, although there is much work that each family in its own way could do to help those immediately around them. For the mass of women and girls, in the interests of humanity, apart from a means of giving work to others, legislation should at once be adopted that would put a stop to home work and sweating. All home industries should be transferred to healthy workshops and factories, under public sanitary supervision and Factory Acts that cannot be enforced where domestic conditions lead to their evasion. The inclusion of laundries within the Factory Acts would extend the area of employment. This, if accompanied by legislative reduction of hours for all women as well as men to eight per day, would for some time find nearly all with employment who desire it. The gradual raising of the age of children engaged in factories, and the gradual elimination of married women from factory occupations altogether, would help to the provision of work and the raising of wages and the standard of comfort both for men and women. But whatever may be done of a gradual and tentative character in the towns or cities by public works or by reduction of the hours of labor will be permanently useless till the influx from the countryside is stopped, and machinery is made the servant and not, as now, the master of men. How this is to be done it is difficult to say, and apparently nothing but the justifiable appropriation by the rural authorities of the uncultivated land will do it. In the general interests of the country something must be attempted to prevent the land lying idle. Year by year the community looks on as field after field is added to sporting estates, and men give way to deer. In many country districts peasants rot while the pheasants rule; and game is master where man is hunger's sport. The creation of parish and district councils must stop this, and, let us hope, will furnish the laborer and farmer with the means not only of cultivation where now desolation reigns, but will provide the means for more attractive life on the soil, higher wages, and that steadiness of work that will stem the exodus to the towns, to the physical detriment of the nation, and to the addition to London's burdens and poverty which now goes on. In the foregoing I have ventured as a municipal councillor to put forth suggestions that by their adoption will relieve distress arising from want of work. My practical experience convinces me that they can be adopted almost at once. Certainly some attempt for their introduction must be undertaken. The reason why I have confined myself to the practically possible is because I have no faith in the fiscal, charitable, or economic nostrums that are hourly preached for the redemption of mankind. Of these, labor colonies are the least scientific. A labor colony presupposes male labor. What have the unemployed working women done to be thus ignored? It also means manual unskilled labor being mainly employed. From whence to be drawn? Not from the skilled trades that in the main are engaged on foreign work and most liable to fluctuation and depression, but from the laborers in the building trades, gasworks, agricultural labor, and other internal occupations of the manual labor class. The labor colony has no room for the spinner, weaver, lace-maker, jeweller, engineer, and others, the bulk of whose work goes abroad. It is intended rather for the relief of men whom I would rather see repairing roads, cleansing streets, reclaiming foreshores, purifying rivers and canals, pulling down unsanitary areas and rebuilding, emptying dustbins, general sanitary work, and other useful and reproductive employ ment on which they could use their labor to greater advantage to themselves and the community than on farm work, that is, supposing they would stay, which in ninety cases out of a hundred they would not. This is proved by the experience of all labor colonies, which shows that they can only be conducted by earnest, intelligent, unselfish men, enthused by the highest spiritual or social ideals, or by the most absolute discipline, on a prison labor basis, to which your out-of-work, who would leave his home and the town, would not voluntarily submit, and which, for different reasons, the honest unemployed wou not tolerate. The fact is, labor colony advocates assume the absence of home ties, associations and the strong and laudable desire in genuine unemployed men to be so situated in their temporary work in depressed times as would permit of them seizing the first opportunity to leave and return to their proper industries, conditions impossible in labor colonies. Men destitute of these qualities lack the essentials for continuous work, and generally would be a source of demoralisation. The labor colony, as a remedy for the unemployed, is, I maintain, foredoomed to failure, and is nothing but the revival in another form of the hated casual ward with all its physical and moral iniquities. If municipalisation of agriculture is intended, that is something I can understand, but that for years is not likely to prove a remedy for the workless. Rather will it come after easier things have been undertaken and accomplished-the abolition of overwork, the reduction of the hours of labor, and the reorganisation of labor in every trade, that is now going on-too slowly, I admit-in the right direction by trade union, municipal and parliamentary action. And should the municipalisation of agriculture be undertaken on Socialist lines, its initial stage must be conducted not by the unskilled unemployed plus an in-and-out army of loafers, casuals, and wastrels, but by the best of labor attracted by those better conditions which would accompany such an undertaking started by people with brains along the lines followed by the L.C.C. in doing its own work. A pious wish to get the townsman into the country will not help us. The fact is, sentiment and personal repugnance to country labor is often the cause of rural depopulation, assisted, of course, by increased use of machinery, cheaper foreign food stuffs, and other causes. The argument that the produce of labor colonies should be used and consumed inside, and should not be sold to people outside, is absurd, and presupposes that the colony is sufficiently large to include the numerous trades that are required to supply the wants of a workingclass population, and that the organisation should be such as could only be arrived at after years of experiment. It therefore fails to touch the problem of providing employment at once for those who are without. The labor colony products must be sold and exchanged outside if the colony is to succeed. If this is done, what will be the effect on the displacement of agricultural labor is shown by Mr. W. E. Bear, an agricultural authority, who says: Around Nottingham, where there is an excellent market for vegetables and fruit, small and large market gardens are numerous. The evidence of those engaged in the industry many of whom I visited in their homes or in the market, was generally depressing. They said that the market had become glutted in recent years, so that prices had become barely remunerative, and that rail rates were so high that the bulky produce of their gardens could not profitably be sent to distant markets. One reason of the depression given was that thousands of the working men of Nottingham had acquired allotments, on which they not only grew all the vegetables they required, and so ceased to be customers to the market gardeners, but also frequently had a surplus to sell, thus becoming competitors. This being so, the establishment of labor colonies outside every town would only accentuate the unemployed difficulty, and lead to the permanent degradation of agriculture and its labor. Agricultural laborers now at work will be displaced by the labor of the colonists. unless protection is adopted with its greater train of evils; just as Salvation Army brickmakers are displacing honest brickmakers at the present moment, and prison, pauper, reformatory and industrial school labor is displacing and destroying several trades. Besides this objection, the cost of labor colonies must come from some source. The only one available is the consumer and producer. Is it not better that the cost of keeping the unemployed should be borne, not by spending money in creating superfluous farms and municipal workshops, but by slightly adding to the cost of production if necessary in all trades by absorbing the unemployed through the reduction of hours of all and the employment at all trades of their now surplus workers? Any attempt at labor colonies, unemployed settlements, elevators, farm colonies, municipal workshops, and other social will-o'-the-wisps will fail, as they have always done. Man is even in social and political reform a gregarious animal, and loathes separation or isolation from his fellows, even for his own improvement. Into the mass of the industrial army the ragged regiments of the unemployed must be absorbed. Over trade, commerce, agriculture, and labor the cost, not of finding merely work for the workless, but rather of reducing the hours of all that are overworked, should be spread. It needs no change, is the simplest way, avoids friction, displacement and migration. In this way every consumer at home and abroad in the price of the product he buys will, through the added cost of shorter hours, pay equally with the manufacturer and producer for the maintenance of people that without these shorter hours would be unemployed, and the cost of which would be borne by the producers alone. Absorption of the unemployed by general reduction of hours, this followed by municipalisation of industry and nationalisation of monopolies, is the line of least resistance for all. It is regulation or riot, reduction or revolution. Whatever is undertaken must be boldly and promptly done by those concerned. But to even attempt the solution of this question, it requires the greatest political foresight and courage for all political parties who till now have always shirked the permanent solution of the unemployed question. In the next Parliament and for years to come it will be the chief question for discussion. The world moves on its belly; and politicians will find that the people have longer memories than formerly, especially when the possessors of the empty bellies have votes. We are passing through a transition period. Laisser faire has been abandoned, and for the first time in the history of the human race the working people possess universally the power through elective institutions to embody in law their economic and material desires. Concurrently with the growth of personal independence is the desire for State aid and municipal effort when individual action is futile. The unemployed movement embodies the growing desire for useful healthy lives. It is the protest of Labor against charitable palliation of a social system that in all countries is breaking up, and must either by force or steady change, such as I have indicated, give place to the organised and collective domination by the people of their social life through municipal administration and political development. boyoba di BOOKS AND AUTHORITIES. (REVISED 1905) ON the subject of provision for the unemployed, the following books, etc., among many others, may be consulted. (a) General Books. ALDEN, PERCY.-The Unemployed: a National Question. King; 1905. Is. net. HIGGS, MARY.-How to deal with the Unemployed. Brown, Langham & Co.; 1904. 2s. HOBSON, J. A.-The Problem of the Unemployed. Methuen; 2nd ed.; 1905. 2/6. MACKENZIE, F. A.-Famishing London: a Study of the Unemployed and Unemployable. Hodder; 1903. IS. (6) Pamphlets. PATON, J. B., D.D.—The Unemployable and the Unemployed. James Clark & Co., 13 Fleet-street, E.C.; 1904. 3d. HIGGS, MARY.-The Tramp Ward. Reprinted from the Contemporary Review. John Heywood; 1904. 2d. HARDIE, J. KEIR, M.P.-The Unemployed Problem, with some suggestions for solving it. I.L.P., 10 Red Lion-court, E.C. Id. Leeds and the Unemployed. Leeds Fabian Society, 18 Park-lane; 1904. (c) Experiments. ANON.-An Account of several Workhouses for Employing and Maintaining the Poor. Second edition (enlarged). 1732; o.p. EDEN, Sir F. M.-State of the Poor. 2nd vol.; 1797; o.p. RAWLINSON, Sir R.-Public Works in Lancashire for the Relief of the Unemployed during the Cotton Famine. King; 1898. IS. WARNER, A. G.-Some Experiments on Behalf of the Unemployed. Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oct. 1890. (d) General History. ASHLEY, W. J.-English Economic History and Theory. Vol. I., part ii., chapter 5, Relief of the Poor. Longmans; 1893. (e) Parliamentary Papers. Report on Agencies and Methods of Dealing with the Unemployed, by Llewellyn Smith (preface by Mr. Giffen). Labor Department of the Board of Trade; Nov. 1893; o.p. A most valuable report. Report of Board of Trade on Agencies and Methods of Dealing with the Unemployed Report on Relief of Unemployed (in Scotland) during Winter of 1893-4. 71d. Reports. Is. Relief of Distress due to Want of Employment. Report of Special Committee of the Charity Organization Society. C.O. S., 19 Buckingham-st., Strand. 1905; Mansion House Committee on the Unemployed, 1903-4. Report of Executive Committee. Abstract of ditto, 4 pp. leaflet. Both supplied by the Secretary, Mansion House, London. (No price stated.) Metropolitan Borough of Woolwich. Report of Conference. Of the Clerk, Town Hall, Woolwich. (No price stated.) London County Council. Lack of Employment in London. Minutes of Conference, - Feb. 1903. No. 662. King; 6d. |
