THE STRIKES IN SOUTHERN EUROPE.
THAT there can be no fire without fuel is at least as 1 sensible an adage as the old one that if there is smoke there must be fire. There must be some reason. for the epidemic of violence among industrials which has recently broken out all over the South of Europe, from Barcelona to Bucharest, and it is of importance, as well as interest, to ascertain what it can be. The ex- planations usually accepted in this country are none of them satisfactory. It is asserted in some quarters that the industrials, being Southerners, have broken out from mere unreasonableness, as it is the wont of Southerners to do ; but the explanation assumes, as Mr. Gladstone once said, that there are one-legged races. Southerners are passionate, and when excited bloodthirsty, but it is foolish to believe that they will without provocation descend into the streets, face soldiers whose superior force they, having been soldiers, themselves thoroughly under- stand, and die in heaps in a hopeless battle without what appears to themselves to be a reason. The industrials of Trieste, of Barcelona, of many another less im- portant Spanish city, and of Bucharest have so died, and the miners of Montceau-les-Mines would have died but that the Government of France, being strong and determined, mobilised a force sufficient to crush a province, and convinced the discontented that they would on the first shot being fired use it in earnest. Others declare that it is all the fault of the Anarchists, that they persuade the industrials of their grievances, that they furnish leaders, and that they direct the war against all property. If that is true, as the officials believe, or feign to believe, what gives the Anarchists such ascendency that they can overcome the ordinary selfish- ness of human nature, persuade scores of thousands to risk starvation, and hurl half-armed men in hundreds upon soldiers whom they know to be stronger- than themselves ? They certainly do not expect, as a French crowd misled by tradition might, that the soldiers will join them. That Anarchists are formidable from their intermittent power of ordering the assassination, of Kings and statesmen we believe, but the inclination to make a bogey of the faction and credit it with sending all the bluebottle flies to the butchers' shops is a mere result of unreflecting panic. An Anarchist can only tell a hundred men to go and be shot, as the preacher tells them to go and be good, their action depending after the sermon, as before it, wholly on their own tempers. The third popular explanation, though it looks more reasonable, is little more conclusive than the others. It is all, it is said, the fault of the Governments. They are timid, they meet every strike with a display of force, and the workers, considering that unjust, resort to arms. It seems to be forgotten that the Governments, maintaining as they do a system of espionage, are thoroughly well informed ; that in Spain and France at least they are not on the capitalists' side ; and that they have every con- ceivable motive, Parliamentary, political, and social, for avoiding any approach to civil war. Why on earth should the French, or the Austrian, or the Spanish, or the Italian Government want to kill their own voters, by whose breath they live, and against whom they can have no possible cause of enmity ? If letting strikers alone would be sufficient, they would let them alone, and be glad of their freedom from responsibility.
We believe that a wave of commercial depression has struck the whole Continent, being most visible to out- siders in Germany, and that in the South, where the margin of comfort is always so thin, the wave produces intense suffering. State taxation is heavy, municipal rates are cruel and are unfairly levied, wages are low as coin, pared with the price of food, debts for rent accumulate, and at last the leaders of the workmen, seeing the despair of their followers, and filled many of them with the idea that it is all the fault of the rich and powerful—an idea nearly as dominant in our own country in 1821-31—order strikes as the best means of manifesting the unbearable- ness of the situation. That means for the industrial masses, if they accept the advice, simple if temporary starvation. They have nothing to fall back upon when wages stop, as the peasantry have when the harvest is bad, they have no property but a little furniture, and as the well-to-do detest disorder, they expect and receive no charity. The situation rapidly becomes desperate. There are those among us still who doubt the wisdom of the Poor-law, but they have never seen the sort of temper which the danger or presence of actual hunger produces in Southerners. They plunder the bakers' shops, they threaten all whose property is visible and the religious bodies—partly from anti-religious spite, but partly also, we imagine, from a traditional belief that they in par- ticular ought to spend their last penny for the poor—and then,—then what can Governments, whose raison d'elie is the maintenance of order, do but interfere ? And how can they interfere except by the use of military force ? Talking is of no use in a bread riot. You must give the people bread or you must shoot them, and on the Conti- nent crowds do not vanish as they do here when once the soldiers are seen. The crowd has been through the military mill, it is half ashamed to fly, and if it had arms would fight resolutely ; the few who have arms use them, and then the order to fire must be given, or the soldiers, in their own judgment insulted as well as threatened, would fire without command. And so the crowd is dis- persed, and goes elsewhere, or reassembles at night, or even goes home to get what little food it can. And the women among them who have been killed are secretly buried—this is specially mentioned in the Barcelona accounts—and their relatives next day renew the riots in hope of vengeance. And so it goes on, sometimes for a week, sometimes for a fortnight, till human nature can bear no more; the employers are ordered—for that is what it means—to make some slight concession, and the mass of workers, disordered by hunger, fear, and disap- pointment, return to their work, and there is a period, not of peace, but of quiescence till demand becomes brisk again. And when the brisk demand is over and the slack times come once more there will be a renewal of the same scenes,—at least in the many years we have watched the process there has been no decided improvement, or if there has been it has been neutralised by the swarming of new hands from the country, by the fiercer competition, and by the up-growth, felt even in Southern Europe, of a new demand for more comfort, which means in its essence more expenditure.
What are the remedies ? It is not certain that there are any practicable. Free-trade, Poor-laws, and shorter hours of work would no doubt make the situation much more bearable, for the first would bring all the prosperity attainable, the second would prevent the actual hunger which drives men to the resolve "to live working or die fighting," and the third would sweeten gradually all tempers, for the Southerners, if not exactly overworked— they know how to evade that—are held to work for longer hours than their nature will bear. These three reforms, however, are exactly the reforms which opinion resists. The true doctrine of commerce, that if you would sell you must buy or go without being paid, can no more be driven into the head of a Continental than into that of an American, and Poor-laws are dreaded as if they would involve total confiscation of property. "Why," asks the peasant, "am I to maintain that little rascal in the city who cannot support himself ? " There is more hope for the shorter day, but little even of that, the Southern employer believing that slackness is ingrained in his workmen's natures, and that if he reduces hours from twelve to eight he will get just one-third less labour for the same wages. One of the facts with which the politician has to deal, and which he is very apt to forget, is that there are whole classes in the world who are perfectly well-meaning, but who are. the victims of what the Roman Catholic Church calls "invincible ignorance." Even, however, if the three great economic reforms were obtained, the prospect would not be altogether bright. The population of Europe constantly increases, the competition of Asia is visibly beginning, the rush from the land to industrialism never ceases, and it may very well be that more is produced than the world will consume at a price leaving any profit. That has happened already as regards wheat, and we see no reason in the nature of things why the industrial should not one day overstock his market as well as the agriculturist. The present mad rage for new markets, even if they are to be acquired by the sword, seems to indi- cate that the experts of trade agree with us in this opinion.
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