mated Engineers during the disputes of 1897 was their refusal to work overtime systematically, and part of the treaty of 1898 which ended hostilities was the limitation of extra hours to forty in any four weeks.

In dealing with the sanitation of the workshop and the safety of employment, the unions have adopted a method different from their course of procedure in regard to hours and wages. Availing themselves of the public timidity in face of infectious disease, and the humanitarian sentiments felt universally towards the victims of accident, they have invariably gone to Parliament to get legal sanction for their union rules. In such matters there can be no room for individual bargaining, and besides the complaints of the workers require scientific remedies. The occupants of a weaving-shed know their sufferings from an atmosphere saturated with steam, but a scale of permissible temperatures can only be established by the investigations of medical and trade experts.

Here we are brought to one of the limits of trade union action, when the reformer must enter the domain of exact science. The need of a legal sanction for an Eight Hours Day, in order to eliminate the opposition of the non-unionist and the non-associated employer, introduces us to a second. And the failure of the greatest unions to withstand the assault of combined capital is the main obstacle to unionism. as a method of achieving the industrial millennium. In America the trusts hold the workers in the hollow of their hands; in Britain the engineers exhausted their own funds, used up the generous subscriptions of other trades, and yet had to surrender almost at discretion to the federated employers. As trusts develop in this country this weakness must increasingly appear. All these practical reasons are forcing the unionists more and more to supplement their society action by utilising their power as citizens and bringing in the aid of the State. Already the public, alarmed for the safety of passengers, has had to provide intervention by the Board of Trade as a remedy for the overwork

of railway servants, and every day the factory health and safety code is made more stringent. The trade unions reply, as we have seen, by handing over those two categories of their activity to the responsibility of Parliament; and though on the whole wages are as yet considered too technical a question for any one but those immediately concerned, signs are not wanting that legal sanction may be asked and obtained for the formal agreements collectively entered into by masters and men. So far the unions have confined themselves to the parliamentary exaction of honesty from employers, by compelling the correct measurement of piecework and prohibiting payment in kind. Unfortunately the means for exerting direct political influence are of the scantiest possible. The local trades councils "contribute at present little to the solidarity or political efficiency of the trade union movement as a whole"; but in municipal affairs, though hampered by the jealousy of the large unions, they are active in securing the election of labour candidates to local bodies and the adoption of the "fair wages clause. The annual Trade Union Congress has become a mere debating society, introduced by a confession of failure and devoted to the confused discussion of the same series of multifarious resolutions year after year. The Parliamentary Committee does not lead the trade union world, and is not provided with enough money to conduct an efficient agitation in favour of a tithe of the resolutions passed annually. The system of proxy-voting places the Congress in the hands of a few of the large unions, and its deliberations are of less influence. than the annual meetings of such trades as the miners or railway servants. All attempts to create a trade union parliamentary party independent of political parties have hitherto failed, owing mainly to personal jealousies and to the refusal of tried leaders to give up their political connections. Yet, with a sublime faith, the efforts are continually repeated, and will one day succeed.

The History of Trade Unionism, p. 467, S. and B. Webb. Longmans, 1894.

From the standpoint of the organisation of labour, the main work of the trade unions has been to wrest from the employers a great portion of the control over industry, and even of the management of the workshop. In 1852 the engineer employers, in their statement of their case, asserted, "We alone are the competent judges of our own business.

We claim and are resolved to assert the right of every British subject to do what we like with our own." In 1898 the same class of masters "will admit no interference with the management of their business," but "collective bargaining is made the subject of distinct agreement." These words mark a great change. The consumer is the ultimate arbiter of what is to be produced. The employer is responsible for the choice of material, of processes, and of workers, subject only to his not introducing changes seriously affecting the standard of life of his employees. Everything personally affecting the workman-his health or his safety, his wages or his hours of work, or the intensity of labour is a matter which concerns him more than his employer, and he is entitled to be consulted on any changes of process or organisation of the workshop affecting him in these respects. This is fully admitted in all the great industries, where the conditions of labour are determined by joint-committees of masters and men, and set forth in agreements" which, for comprehensiveness and validity, are comparable to treaties or acts of parliament. The details of labour, in fact, are regulated by a number of private legislatures; and, furthermore, the settlement of disputes arising out of these agreements is in the hands of private courts of justice. Any complaint, for instance, of a cotton operative is referred first to the secretaries of the local trade union and employers' association for inquiry, next to these organisations, then to the central executives, and only after the failure of negotiation can a strike ensue, and then a vote of the union must be taken first. In this way the men secure a very direct influence over the selection

of raw material, the speed of machinery, and other questions of workshop management. Similar methods of procedure prevail in every well-organised trade. The piecework lists of the cotton trade, the wages board of the miners, the arbitration boards of the bootmakers, the working rules of the building trades-all these institutions represent the admission of the workers to a share in determining the conditions of labour; they are all means whereby masters and men meet together and elaborate the terms of the contract of service. The boiler-makers work under a similar agreement, elaborated in 1895, and providing for the reference of "new work" to joint-committees; wages in the engineering trade are fixed by the Federated Employers in consultation with the Amalgamated Society; and railwaymen to a large extent have made similar arrangements. In short, about million and a-half of the workers are now taken into partnership by the employers, a tacit admission by the masters that they no longer are, nor are fit to be, dictators in their own houses. When to trade union regulations we add the mass of detailed rules under which the legislature prescribes that manufacture must be conducted, we can see how complete is the national confession that the vaunted doctrine of competition and laissez-faire are not proper guides to the building up of a free and comfortable community.

CHAPTER XI

THE CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT

THE Co-operative movement of the "thirties" disappeared almost as completely as the trade unionism which Owen equally inspired. Out of the great number of stores, bazaars, corn-mills, manufacturing societies, and communities, only a few scattered and minute bodies maintained a trivial existence, while the propagandist side of the movement became a convenient refuge for fanatics on food and marriage, currency and religion. Only George Jacob Holyoake and a few other "socialist missionaries were steadfast in the faith, confident that good must come from the truth which they preached. Time has amply justified. their belief, but nothing could have been more unpromising than the outlook on that evening, the 21st December 1844, when the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers opened their store in Toad Lane. Yet from that "owd weavers' shop" sprang the modern co-operative movement. Mr. Holyoake has told the romantic story of the progress of this society from 1844 to 1892 in The History of the Rochdale Pioneers (Swan Sonnenschein and Co., London, 1893), and it is a record of almost unvaried progress. Rochdale had already played a creditable part in the Owenite movement, and the Equitable Pioneers originated in the efforts of a group of socialists and chartists to improve the condition of the weavers and to mitigate the effects of an