Зображення сторінки
PDF
ePub

Cabinet Minister and the heads of the department concerned. It was admitted that an account might be sent for a halfpenny, and that a notice of meeting might be sent for a halfpenny, and therefore the secretaries of Friendly Societies naturally supposed that on the notice of a meeting they might state the amount owing by the member. But no, this could not be allowed. If on the notice the amount due is stated the paper must be charged a penny, but at the conference this sapient conclusion was arrived at:-It was solemnly agreed that although the notice and account, if stated on one piece of paper, must be charged a penny, yet if the account is given on one piece of paper the notice on another and both of these enclosed in a wrapper, the three pieces may go for a halfpenny. This sage arrangement is now acted on, and the secretaries of Friendly Societies, who are usually poor men working for small payment, are put to this double or treble work and trouble in order to satisfy the unreasonable whims of impractical and often over-paid superintendents.

To take a more serious case. The Post Office enjoys a monopoly of telegraphic communication. If one of Her Majesty's subjects wants a wire to connect two separate buildings, the cost of which, with the necessary apparatus, would be under ten pounds, the Post Office will not make this outlay for a less payment than twenty pounds per annum, with a three years' agreement. Thus, six times the cost must be paid for the accommodation, and, as a consequence, few persons can enjoy an advantage at so high a charge. In this way industry is hampered, tradesmen and manufacturers lose business, and working men are left without wages, which would be obtained if the natural activity of life was not paralyzed by such obstructive charges.

But what is still more surprising is the fact that with a monopoly, and making these heavy charges, the business is unprofitable, and the telegraphic department involves the country in a loss. Mr. Henry Fowler, who under the last administration had to answer for the Post Office, constantly excused the illiberal action of the department by the statement that, as

things are, the work is done at a loss, and therefore no reduction could be made. It is a remarkable fact that in almost every departof the Post Office the profit is in proportion to the degree of liberality manifested in its management. Where the charges made in the British Post Office compare favourably with other countries, there a profit arises; where our charges are higher than those of other nations there we make a loss.

The charge for telegraphy in England is twice as high as in Switzerland, ours being one half penny per word as compared with a farthing in that country. We make a loss; they make a profit. The British charge for telephones and special wires is four times as much as in Switzerland, and yet while we make a loss the Swiss get sufficient profit to provide capital for extensions out of revenue, and the whole of the original cost of their telegraphic system has been paid off out of revenue.

This vast difference arises from the different

methods of administration in aristocratic and

democratic countries.

Here the chief object of every department is to provide a large number of offices at high salaries, such as will be acceptable to the upper classes who conduct our Government. The question is not how to develop business, but how to increase promotion. This is the inevitable result of class administration. The class who govern naturally seek their own advancement, and thus we have a system of promotion and retirement in our military and civil services which is the laughing stock of the world, which entails incalculable cost on the British taxpayer, and is inimical to the efficient conduct of public business.

A comparison of the salaries paid to the postal staffin France or Switzerland with our own will show where the profit goes which we ought to realise. In Switzerland, where the telegraphs have been worked with so much profit to the State, and with so small a charge to the community, the chief of the telegraphic department receives twice as much salary as is paid to a first-class telegraphic operator. In London several officers in the telegraphic department

receive from five to ten times as much salary as payments made to railway companies and their

is paid to a first-class telegraphist.

Neither is it the case, as some may suppose, that these excessive differences are the result of old arrangements, and that we conduct matters more fairly now. On the contrary, some of the more recent arrangements are the most glaringly unjust. When the Government purchased the telegraph companies, it was provided by Act of Parliament that all the employés and officers of the old companies should be compensated, if not re-engaged, provided they received salaries exceeding £70 per annum. There was, of course, no justice in this. It was simply a recognition of might against right. The poor and powerless clerks might be turned adrift without a thought of compensation, whereas compensation was freely given to those higher paid officials who did not continue their engagements, but sought and obtained employment elsewhere. These men have since been receiving compensation from the Government, while many of them get actually larger salaries from other engagements than they previously received. At the present time, we are still paying £8,000 a year for these unnecessary "compensations."

But the climax of injustice was reached in the arrangements still more recently made in reference to the Parcels Post. Here everything was yielded to might, nothing to right. The railway companies, who formerly commanded about 130 votes in the House of Commons, were agreed with on terms which have made a Parcels Post at moderate charges impossible in this country during the continuance of the existing agreement.

Although the railway companies do nothing but transfer the parcels from station to station, leaving all the costly work of collection, porterage, delivery, and account keeping to the Post Office, yet they are paid 55 per cent. of the receipts; and, as the charges for parcels in this small country are twice as high as in France or Germany, it follows that the railway companies receive for work which costs a mere trifle more than the charge made for the whole service in other and larger countries.

In or ler to meet, if possible, the excessive

powerful representatives, the additional duties connected with the Parcels Post have been imposed upon the working staff; in some cases without any additional payment, and in general the payment made for the extra work is entirely inadequate.

The whole result is excessive payment to the railway companies, double charges and heavy loss to the public, and unremunerated labour exacted from the working staff. These things would have been impossible if the working classes had been fairly represented in Parliament and in the administration of government.

In the Post Office we pay excessive salaries for management, and cut down working men's wages to the lowest point. It is true that wages are low from the force of competition, but the same cause would bring down the upper class salaries if they were not artificially protected. We never think of subjecting them to competition. The same rule should be applied throughout the service, either competition all round or consideration all round. Excessive salaries cause extravagant management. A man who gets more than £500 a year usually has an assistant, and these assistants are sometimes two or three deep, until we come to a man who does not get so much pay as to make him too dignified to work. The working staff of the Postal and Telegraphic services are constantly increasing in efficiency, but they get no corresponding advance in pay.

The principle of the Post Office seems to be extravagance in mail contracts and the higher class salaries, which benefit the rich, and the most crushing economy in the wages of the poor.

There is no necessity for such enormous payments to shipowners, as the best speed must now be made for their own advantage and the development of general business. And as to high salaries, experience shows that they are not only unnecessary but wholly undesirable as leading to wasteful management. The Chief Superintendent of Telegraphs in Switzerland, who makes a profit on a farthing per word, gets less than £500 a year, while in our own telegraph service, where we make a loss on one

halfpenny per word, we have an enormous number of officers who are paid greatly in excess of this reasonable amount.

With economical administration we might have a halfpenny postage for our letters, half the present rate for telegrams and telephones and special wire arrangements at quarter of the existing cost. This is possible because England is the cheapest country in the world for labour and for mechanical products. These reductions in cost would enormously increase business and develop the demand for labour. There would be little " dulness" of trade if industry were freed from the incubus of aristocratic government, and the people were allowed fairly to work for themselves.

-:0:

INVESTIGATOR.

EVOLUTION OR REVOLUTION. TO THE EDITOR OF THE DEMOCRAT. SIR," Real history," wrote Buckle, "is a history of tendencies, not of events." It is so. Recognise the real tendencies of an age, and its events may almost be discounted. It is only the wire-pullers, place-hunters, and busybodies of the Liberal Party that are in any way discouraged by the late reverse of electoral fortune. Just as all roads led to Rome, so must all parties, Tory, Whig, and Radical (wolens volens) make for the haven of human emancipation. If not by evolution, then by revolution.

He that roars for liberty

Faster binds the tyrant's power,
And the tyrant's cruel glee
Forces on the freer hour.

Salisbury or Gladstone is equally powerless to make headway against the stream of tendency. Providence, happily, was wiser than to make the progress of the race depend either on the will or the caprice of individual men. The great man is he who most completely embodies the spirit of his time.

The primitive savage was economically an individualist of the strictest sect of Lord Bramwell and Mr. Auberon Herbert. The fruits, roots, and shell-fish on which he subsisted he shared with no one, and when these failed him he perished.

Of all the stages in human progress the savage state must have been the most protracted. In all ages ignorance has been a synonym for Conservatism, and the denser the ignorance the intenser the Conservatism.

To Savagery succeeded Slavery, and Slavery, paradoxical as it may appear, was an immense advance on Savagery. It contained the elements of what we are now proud to call civilisation. It laid the foundations of civil society. The institution of Slavery implied a great deal more than the absolute dominion of one man over another. It involved combined effort, the division of labour and the accumulation of property.

Latterly in the ancient world-in Greece and Rome-the condition of the slave was one of comparative comfort. He was frequently to be found in important positions of trust. He might be doctor, schoolmaster, private tutor, librarian, and sometimes even author. reach. The Slavery of Uncle Tom's Cabin Emancipation was generally well within his with which we are most familiar was merely a the institution. recrudescence of the most barbarous phase of

In all ages the most terrible incident of Slavery has been the fact that it has denied to the slave family rights. To rear children for another's profit was ever the bitterest drop in the cup of chattel man.

After Slavery came Serfdom or Feudalism. Under it the persons of the workers were free, and their children were their own not their lord's. They were attached to the soil on which they were born, but some varying portion of their earnings they might retain for private use.

Then came the present or industrial epoch of Wagedom, in which the producer's toil is treated. as a chattel, to be purchased in the cheapest market. This is in some respects a more heartless era than its predecessor. Plutocracy is meaner every way than Aristocracy, whose evil habits it studiously seeks to combine with those peculiar to itself. In its individualism, in its renunciation of personal relations and responsibilities, it savours more of Savagery than either Slavery or Serfdom. "The

workers have

hardly occasion to rejoice at the change. They are free to own land, but have not the means to buy it. They have personal liberty? Yes. They are no longer bound to the soil. Their liberty is one that benefits their masters rather than themselves. The power of discharge and the advantage of having everywhere an army of proletarians to hire is vital to the growth of capital. The workers have lost the power they as serfs possessed to labour to advantage for themselves, for in all the branches of industry wholesale production has supplanted domestic industry." The fifth epoch of development when cooperative industry shall succeed mere cutthroat competition has hardly yet dawned. It is in the womb of the future, and its heralds, like their precursors at every antecedent stage in the progress of the race, must look for nothing but misrepresentation, obloquy, and persecution.

The first step to be taken in the inauguration of the coming co-operative commonwealth is abundantly clear. The worker must be put on such a footing as to enable him to negociate with the capitalist on something like equal terms. Hitherto the employer being in possession of all the instruments of production has been in a position to say to his "hands" :Accept my terms or starve! How shall it be made possible for the workman to tell the capitalist with assurance:-I can work more profitably for myself than by accepting the starvation wages you offer me? By restoring to him without compensation his birthright-Nature's exhaustless source and means of universal production-the land. Do this, and we shall soon hear the last of commercial depressions, trade crises, low wages, and no wages.

[blocks in formation]

We Land Resumptionists may be told, and we are told, that we expect too much from the inevitable triumph of our cause. Be it so. Humanity is on a long and toilsome journey of which no man can forsee the end. There is no finality. Every age has its own work to do. All we maintain is that Land Resumption by the State is the peculiar task set to the men of our day and generation to accomplish.

And who shall say that it is an insignificant or unworthy object we seek to compass? Restore the Land to the People, and the whole crushing load of rates and taxes will at once be lifted from their shoulders. The country will be repeopled and twice its present produce will be raised. Every article of consumption will be greatly cheapened, and in old age every man and every woman may well be provided by the State with a comfortable pension out of the "unearned increment." Life will cease to be a struggle and become a pleasure. Class and caste will be abolished, and all men will start fair on the journey of life.

And the political changes involved will be immense. What is the House of Lords but a House of Landlords? With the resumption

"Conquest" every body will have "come over" including even Sieur de Brassey.

of the soil by the State, every man will become The accumulation of enormous tracts of soil, as big a landlord as his neighbour and no bigger, in the possession of the few could not and the pretensions of the Peers will be renthen occur. Why? Because every one will-dered for ever ridiculous. At this most righteous ing to work could rent land from the State, and enjoy the legitimate fruits of his toil, without drudging for another. Each worker would require only so much land as he could by himself, or with the help of his family, successfully cultivate. The fatal human drain constantly determining from the country to the

And the pretended royal descendants of "the Conqueror" himself, they will of course go with the rest. The Monarchical fountain of dishonour will cease to cast up its polluted and polluting waters. Merit will take the place of

birth, and the Sovereignty of the People will about 2 1-5th. During the same time the cease to be a fiction and become a reality. population has increased from about 24,000,000 The Church likewise has its baleful roots into 36,000,000, or only one-half. That is to say,

the land, and they also will infallibly be dug up. In a word, resume the land and the whole monstrous fabric of "Society," which crushes the life-blood out of the toilers and spinners, will come down with a crash. It is but a pyramid standing on its apex-thirty millions of landlackers against thirty thousand landlords! Friends, let us topple it over.

[ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]

There is a great deal in words. I do not think that the rose would smell as sweetly if you called it a sheep's head. A certain clergyman could melt and move those who heard him by calling out with sonorous and pathetic accent the word Mesopotamia. So on hearing a man pronounce with unctuous and deliberate emphasis, "The commercial interests of this great country," you are at first apt to think that he knows what he is talking about. You would be wrong. He employs those vague and sounding words to denote a state of things in which he will make money, no matter who loses. "The commercial interests of this great country" do not mean to him a state of matters in which all who labour shall reap the reward of their labours, but a state of matters in which he shall reap that reward for them. Commercial prosperity does not imply to him plenty for the people, it means fortunes for the few. And so when we speak of Good Trade let us be sure that we have a true and definite idea of what Good Trade is.

In some respects this present time at which we so heartily growl and grumble is a time of Good Trade. In 1854 our imports amounted to £164,000,000; in 1884-to take a very bad year-the amount is £390,000,000, an increase of a little more than 2. In the same representative years our exports were £139,000,000, as compared with £295,000,000, an increase of

that while the trade of our country has increased two-and-a-half times, the people living by that trade have only increased one-half. We should, it would seem, have better trade instead of worse trade. We find a vast increase of trade, and we do not find that the increase of men is so great as to absorb the profits of that trade. That is to say, while mouths have rapidly increased the means of filling mouths has increased with a rapidity vastly greater. But, since this enormous mass of substance is ever rolling steadily into the kingdom, and since so many are unfed, unclad, unhoused, what must we conclude? We must conclude that there is something radically wrong with the laws of distribution-with the laws that should give to every man his share of work and his share of payment for that work.

If we look back at the matter in another light this becomes more obvious. Any merchant will tell you that a large trade is being done with small profits, and any workman will add that a large trade is being done with few hands. Small profits mean that capitalists are working in constant fear that other men with capital at present unemployed will step in and cut away their business. Few hands mean low wages, and low wages with low profits mean that both capital and labour are drugs in the market. Now, what does this really prove? We have three great facts, distinct facts, indisputable facts. Of these facts number one is that we have a trade which, for practical purposes, we may say is as great as ever it was. We have. for fact two, a vast amount of floating capital and fixed capital, for which this trade has no need or use, and for fact three we have an enormous crowd of working men to whom this trade gives no employment. That is to say we can do all the work that is being done with less capital and less labour. The feast is still as bounteously spread as ever, but fewer men are asked to partake of it. Still the dinner is laid for six, but only four persons are invited to eat it.

Now that seems to me just what, under our economic system, we should naturally expect. What is the use of machinery? Those who are the least fervid in its praise tell us that it enables one man to do at least three men's work. Quite so. But what becomes of the other two men? The greater demand for the cheaper article made by the machinery enables one of them to find employment. But still here is a third man, the odd man out, for whom machinery has left neither place nor portion in this great world. This does not at

« НазадПродовжити »