THE MEMBER FOR MORPETH.
WE stated at some length on September 24th the grounds of a dispute which had arisen between Mr. Bart, the Member for Morpeth, and the Northumberland Miners' Asso- ciation. That Association virtually returns Mr. Burt to Par- liament, and to enable him to live in London, has for fourteen years paid him—as he states himself in 64 Debrett "—a salary of £500 a year. Recently, however, a considerable portion of the miners have become dissatisfied with Mr. Burt, have declared that he has become a politician, so ceasing to be purely a representative of labour, and have consequently pro- posed to withdraw his allowance,—that is, so far as their in- tention goes, to compel him to resign his seat. Indeed, the Association last year, by a vote of 4,800 to 3,300, resolved to dismiss Mr. Burt, but action upon it was delayed, Mr. Burt's supporters in the Association being still numerous. The dis- pute, however, has recently come to a head, a " general " and, we suppose, final vote is to be taken immediately, and Mr. Burt has issued an address in the reception of which all politicians in the Kingdom ought to be interested. On its success or failure will depend in large measure the general appreciation of the labour vote. The working men are now in a majority in nearly all constituencies ; and if so strong and prominent a body among them as the Miners' Association of Northumberland decide that their only acceptable representa- tives are men indifferent to politics, and careful only for the direct interests of labour, their enfranchisement may prove to have been a direct injury to the community at large. The question could not have been brought forward in a more crucial form. Nobody even alleges that Mr. Burt is an unpopular, or a negligent, or an unsuccessful Member ; that he neglects the interests of labour, or that he has in any way broken the tacit contract between himself and his constituents. It is admitted, we believe, most certainly it is true, that he has strenuously helped forward all Labour Bills, that he has always warmly pleaded for the labourers' dance, and that he has by his character and his tact secured even for some extreme views—such, for example, as those restricting women's
labour—a fair and attentive hearing. The single charge against him is that he is too wide-minded, that being Member for Morpeth, he has given his best attention to all questions affecting the citizens of Morpeth and of the remainder of the United Kingdom. His only offence is that he has not been sufficiently a class representative, or held sufficiently aloof from questions on which working men are only interested as members of the general community. His only assailants are those who believe that "working men's representatives should be neither Whig, Tory, nor Radical, that they should not be politicians, but only labour representatives."
It can hardly be needful to point out how utterly fatal this doctrine must be to representative government, or how it would reduce Parliament, if generally acted on, to a Convention of Delegates from the trades, bound by a sort of oath to attend to nothing but trade questions ; but we may perhaps do some good by showing how utterly adverse such a system would be to the interests of workmen themselves. In adopting it, they shut themselves out from power. Somebody must govern the country, make its general laws, settle the principles and incidence of taxation, control the great army of officials, and conduct all foreign affairs ; and who is it to be I Clearly, on the miners' theory, the workmen are to have nothing to do with it. Their representatives are to speak and vote on wages, but not on taxes ; on trade quarrels, but not on wars ; on the misdeeds of employers, but not on the shortcomings of the Courts, the police, or the functionaries of any kind whatever. As for principles of government, they are never to open their months about them. The difference between one Government and another may involve the whole future of the country, all its trades included ; but the represen- tatives of labour are to have no preferences. Those things are "politics," and they are to stand aloof from politics, to sever themselves from parties—that is, from the combinations intended to make certain ideas victorious—and to devote them- selves in sullen exclusiveness to those subjects alone upon which workmen, as workmen, think their wages, their hours, or pos- sibly their right of combination, may depend. They are, in fact, to let those govern who choose to govern ; and, except upon strictly labour questions, to allow the Sovereign, or the upper classes, or the shopkeepers' representatives, or whoever will and can, to make such laws, and impose such taxes, and carry out such policies as they please. The workmen, the majority, are not even to have a voice ; but though they possess votes and representatives, are silently to acquiesce in the decisions of others whose interests and opinions may be, and in many cases are, in direct opposition to their own. Was any course more utterly absurd ever proposed by reasonable men ? The miners might just as well take oath that they would attend only to mining, and never have an opinion on markets, or attempt in the slightest degree to influence railway rates, or care whether or not their tools were rendered unprocurable by special taxa- tion on steel.
We cannot pursue the answer to this strange proposal. We find a difficulty in believing that it is seriously entertained, and we want to discuss just now a point of an entirely different kind,—namely, the personal character of Mr. Thomas Burt. The miners of Northumberland are scarcely aware of what they did for themselves and for their entire class, in the opinion of all other classes, when they sent up Mr. Burt to the House of Commons. There was and is among the cultivated a most unfortunate impression, justified, we admit, by too many examples,—that of all men workmen choose the least fit representatives ; that they prefer either narrow-minded, hot- headed fanatics, who will neither take an argument nor see a fact, and who place themselves in perpetual opposition to everybody ; or else they elect men full of sounding words, lavish of absurd promises, heroic in false assertions, and, as a rule, utterly dishonest, either because they are seeking notoriety, or because, to secure their seats, they are false to all their own innermost convictions. The answer to all such calumnies for the past fourteen years has been to quote the Member for Morpeth, to show that the miners of Northum- berland, supposed in London to be the roughest of the rough, have sent up as their representative a quiet, sagacious, inde- pendent man, who has never spoken without adding something to the debate, and who, though he pleads warmly for a class to which the majority of Members do not belong, has won not only the ear and the respect, but the personal regard of the whole House of Commons. That, we say, has been the regular and customary answer, and it might have been a stronger one yet. We know nothing whatever of Mr. Burt personally, and cannot recall a subject on which we are
just now in political agreement with him ; but we do not hesitate to say, after reading his present address' that he is more than we originally thought him, that he is an honour both to his constituents and to the House of Commons. We say gravely, we hardly know in politics or literature a man who, under circumstances of extreme provocation, could have produced an address so full at once of ability, of dignity, and of gentlemanly feeling as, this working miner has done. He not only does not berate, his opponents, he does them the fullest justice. How many Members of Parliament are there who, when threatened after fourteen years of good service with summary dismissal. would write of those who had traduced them in such terms as these I- " I have no desire to ignore or to minimise the importance of the recent vote. Perhaps I was as little surprised, and as little disquieted by it as most people. I knew the adverse influences which were at work ; some of them open and beyond your control or mine ; others. certainly not open, but which I shall not stop further to characterise. What really concerns me is how far any faults or errors of mine may have contributed to produce such a result. Frankness and straight- forwardness are your characteristics as they are mine. You have a. thoroughly democratic system of representation, and I cannot donbb that, had there been any personal complaint against me, you would• in fairness have brought it before your committee. You have not done so. Nor have I reason to believe that there are any serious, or indeed any, political differences between us. During the last Perlis- mentary recess, open public meetings were held in every quarter of the borough of Morpeth. These meetings were crowded, and at all of them unanimous votes of confidence were carried. Of coarse, as a public man I am a fit subject for criticism. But any complaints which have come to my knowledge have been of the haziest kind. When such have appeared in the newspapers they have nearly always. been anonymous, and they have, so far as I know, almost without exception proceeded from persons who are neither members of our association nor electors in the constituency which I represent. Since I ceased, on your invitation, to work with my hands, you have, while bravely fighting the battle of life under the hardest conditions, con- tinued to pay me for more than fourteen years what mast appear to you to be a large salary. Whatever the future may have in store, I consider this is not discreditable either to you or to me ; and by ma certainly it will never be forgotten."
Or how many are there of the many Colonels and Admirals' who discuss allowances, who will meet a proposal to accept lower wages with such a rebuke as this V-
" On this question of salary there is now, I am told, some dissatis- faction. It has been publicly stated by some one, who apparently assumes to speak both for you and for me, that you will no longer pay the present salary, and that I will not accept less. I have never myself said anything to justify such 1113 assertion and I need hardly tell you that no one has been authorised to speak for me on such a. subject. Assuming that it is desirable to re-open the salary question,. there are two or three points that I think should be recognised. First,. I think it should be remembered that I am your General Secretary; that I am always at your call as such, and that when wanted in that capacity, everything else is subordinated to serving you to the best of my judgment and ability. Second, the old saying that 'it takes two parties to make a bargain' should not be forgotten when you are dealing with your officials. In other words, it should not be assumed that this is a question for you alone to determine. I assert the principle, whioh I have always maintained much more stoutly for you than for myself, that the employed have quite as much right as the employer to a voice in fixing the wage to be paid and to be received. Whether the employer is one man or ten thousands men, whether the remuneration for service rendered is called a wage or a salary, the principle, I contend, is in both cases the same. I hold, it is your duty, as well as your interest, to support that principle by example as well as by precept."
Or, finally, how many are there of all the Members who are seeking the workmen's vote, who, while addressing those work- men exclusively, can or will state the true argument against exclusive devotion to the Labour Question in terms so clear, so true, and so dignified as these ?-
"Such a view is not less insulting to the workman than it is absurd in itself. It is saying in the most practical way that the- worker is something less than a man and a citizen ; it is asserting. that he is a mere wealth-producing tool, that he should separate him- self from humanity, from great questions of justice between indi- viduals and between one nation and another, and should concentrate- all his energies upon matters that affect him as a manual labourer. As a temporary expedient this may be defensible ; but it is unsound., in principle, and therefore incapable of universal application. Oar aim should be to unite men, not to divide them ; to break down, and not to intensify and accentuate class distinctions::
It seems to us that for the Northumberland miners to dis- miss such a representative as this, upon any such ground as they plead, is to lower the claim of all workmen to the fran, chise, to show that they are ungrateful for exceptional service, and to prove that they are incapable of estimating at them- true value value either ability or character. That is the very worst
impression working electors could produce ; and in dismissing. a representative of whom they ought to be proud, if only because of their own insight in selecting him, they are doing
their best to place arguments in the hands of men who are only too willing to believe that in allowing workmen to vote like others, the franchise was "degraded."
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