TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE HOPES OF A COAL SETTLEMENT. THE events which led to the sudden and dramatic collapse of what would have been in effect a general strike—a strike which would have served the purposes of revolution—are certainly not a cure for optimism. Any- body who surveys those events carefully is justified in feeling that the same common sense which saved the country then will before very long end the miners' strike. Natural relief at the removal of the greater danger must not, however, blind us to the fact that the miners' strike is still going on, and that the danger to the country is intense. The industries of the nation, deprived of their mainspring of vitality, are simply withering away. We are losing markets which we may never recover. Plant is being injured which it may be impossible to repair. Capital is being lost, to recover which. years of hard work will be necessary. The figures of unemployment are soaring above the high level which they had already reached. The duly remedy for our present distress is the re-creation of the things which were destroyed by the war, and that means hard and regular work aided by perfect freedom of exchange. So long as the coalfields remain idle, or continue to produce coal only at pro- hibitive prices, so long will our industrial rehabilitation be delayed. Moreover, if the recovery be just too long delayed it will not be possible to recover at all. Even now it is certain that, however successful and however speedy the settlement may be, fewer miners will be employed than before the strike. Whether the reduction of men employed in the mines will be more or less than is estimated now, we can none of us escape from the fact that the main result of the strike will be that fewer men will be at work after the strike than were at work before it. And this happens when the restoration of wealth and a good standard of living for everybody hangs upon increasing employment, and upon nothing else. When we write on Thursday the signs are not inauspicious for a settlement. The parties are a little nearer together, and the best sign of all is that the closer similarity of opinion is appearing through the thrashing out of questions in public by the principals themselves and not in any way through the intervention of the Govern- ment, who for the past few days have been following a waiting policy. It would be a splendid thing, full of guidance and encouragement for the future, if the principals could come to an agreement without the Government doing anything more than look on as a third party. That is really the true and proper position for Governments. They should not be direct parties to industrial disputes, but should be, prepared merely in times of extremity to act as a benevolent friend, and of course also to guard the public interest. Naturally, a great deal of goodwill and a great deal of hard and anxious work will be needed of the principals before a settlement can come. But we think it is safely coming. First let us say what is expected of the miners. They must know now, foi they have received final proof of it, that any kind of strike which, though not in itself a revolution, would be revolutionary in effect in that. it would challenge the constitutional authority of the Government is impossible. Persistence in a strike on such lines would have no popular support, and without the sanction of the people no considerable strike has ever succeeded or ever will succeed. In the form in which the miners originally put their policy into effect, they were guilty of an astonishingly futile paradox. They declared that they wanted to save the poorer mines by making them dependent upon the richer mines, and at the same time, by calling out the pump-men, they tried to destroy all mines, whether rich or poor ! This is the kind of tragic paradox which ought to be sequestered in nightmares, and for which there is no place in a common- sense nation. The miners must see to it that they do not deal again in that spirit. They should remember that sabotage is a foreign idea here, even as the word is foreign. Nothing will ever be gained by it but public anger, together with the ruin of the wreckers who have performed the fanatical act of destroying their own means of livelihood. The next point is that, apart from a revolu- tionary challenge to the Government, it is impossible for the miners to obtain either such a national pool of 'profits as would be a mere alias for nationalization, or a per- manent subsidy. Nationalization as a popular idea is dead and done with. The very name of State control sickens most people. As for a regular subsidy, it Is not to be thought of that the mines, instead of being water- sheds out of which the health-giving streams of industrial energy flow, should become a burden upon the taxpayer. That would mean a retracing of all the steps by which Englishmen have built up their prosperity. Although it is true. that agriculture is still our largest industry, more than forty millions of people are finally industrialized and live, as it were, upon a dust-heap. We live upon what we manufacture—what we produce with the help of energy supplied mainly from coal. If the miners really mean to cut off that source of energy, or to make it so expensive that it will have lost its use, there can be only two possible results : either the nation will steadily go downhill, or necessity will once more become the mother of invention, and substitutes for the power supplied by coal will be quickly found and applied. In either case the miners will be out of a job.
- We cannot, unfortunately, flatter ourselves with the expectation of being listened to by the miners, but we do, nevertheless, appeal to them to remember that there is still a wide field for discussion, and that the only fruitful field lies wholly removed from unconstitutional action. The reason why the country revolted instinctively against the miners at the beginning was that they seemed to base their case—the destruction of property was the open proof—not on an appeal to the merits of the case, but on an appeal to power. We think we are not wrong in saying that in the subsequent stages of the dispute the public have begun to recognize that there are points in the miners' demands which are arguable and reasonable. Surely these should never have been obscured. But it was the miners' fault that they were obscured. We sincerely hope that they will reflect upon the extraordinarily illuminating fact that the process of doing justice to their arguments began with the perfectly legitimate and constitutional intervention of a group of members in the House of Com- mons. It would be difficult to praise too highly what was done by that group. To say that Mr. Hodges in mating a most sensible concession to his unofficial inter- viewers was caught unawares and was a victim of a plot is preposterous. One cannot help wondering after this experience whether it would not be possible to have in the House of Commons some permanent Committee to watch industrial disputes, and play just such a part of suggestion and mediation as was played by that group of younger members last week. A Committee regularly studying industrial questions would be armed with all the necessary information whenever a crisis arose. For all the Prime Minister's wonderful skill in his negotiations with the miners, it cannot be pretended that he had all the facts at his disposal. To take an example, the dispute is now turning upon the possibility of establishing a pool. There are several conceivable sorts of pool. A pool which would -involve nationalization is, as we have said, quite impossible ; but others are not impossible, and yet Mr. Lloyd George has hitherto spoken as though there were only-one sort of pool. Candidly, we feel that a pool which would be an arrange- ment within the mining industry itself is by no means one that ought to be refused discussion. On the contrary, we think that discussion of it is definitely required. Mr. Hodges describes the pool he proposes not as a pool of profits, but as a levy on tonnage. A justifiable object of such an arrangement would be not to keep existence which can never pay their way, but to maintain within broad districts something approaching to similar pay for similar work. Mr. Herbert Smith, as reported in the Times of Wednesday, said :— mines in " The owners in South Yorkshire are as good as any in Great Britain, but they, are an utterly impossible lot in West Yorkshire. Whether I was a rebel before or not, I would be a rebel now against an utterly impossible proposal. Just look 4 the figures' A man earning 10s. in South Yorkshire gets a 2s. advance, but a West Yorkshire miner who earned 10s. up to March 3Ist is now asked, as the same time as the other men get that advance, to consent to a reduction of more than 2s. for the same quantity of work. Taking the owners' percentages, the advance on the day's rate in South Yorkshire is 23. 10/5d. If the man who is going to have that advance had to go into the eastern part of most Yorkshire he would get a reduction of Is. 7•1Id. on the same base rate of 103.' and if he were to go into the western area of West Yorkshire ho would have a reduction of 2s. 4-53d. There can be no settlement on such terms. They talk about young men and extremists. Well ! they can put me down an extremist under conditions like that."
Now to turn to the owners. Their proposals at the outset were not ungenerous and we are convinced were generously intended, but they had obvious superficial defects. Real hope, however, is to be found in the new proposals from the owners which were published in the papers of Wednesday. The system of a National Wages Board is accepted, and the national principles would be applied in each district in accordance with district financial results. The offer to give to the workers, in addition to wages which would be appreciably higher than the highest earnings before the war, the whole of the surplus revenue while the present abnormal period lasts, is in itself a guarantee of absolute good faith. Another tempting proposal is the offer of a joint audit of the owners' books. 'We have long felt that no employer has anything to lose by allowing all the financial facts about his business to be known. A very large part of the grievances of the manual worker arise from financial ignorance. He does not understand how much it costs a firm " to put a man to work." He does not understand what capital reserves have to be maintained as a safeguard against losses and as the where- withal for securing new business. He regards capital as something which has been produced solely by his own labour, and which is being wrongfully withheld from him by the employer. Again, he has no idea of what he as a citizen of the country owes to the adventurousness of capitalists. Half the coal-pits of the country would not have been in existence now if capitalists had not taken the risk of losing all their money in sinking shafts. Yet from many of those shafts no paying results were ever obtained. The same story runs through all industries. For the Londoner perhaps the supreme example is the Tube rail- ways. Millions of pounds were put up by business men who hoped, of course, to gain handsome profits on their speculation. But they did not. The only gainers are the public, who have had easy and cheap means of travelling put at their disposal. If the Government had made the Tubes and had had to pay regular interest on capital, and had, moreover, mismanaged the business as Government always do, the price of travelling to the public would have been double or treble what it is now. Really it is well worth while for the working man to pay something for all the direction and inventiveness which come from capitalism. And what he pays for this service is truly very little ! It has been calculated that if the accumulated capital in the country were distributed among the families of manual workers there would be enough to pay only 5s. a week to every family of five persons for three years. The miner had much better recognize that the capitalist of the coal- field is his friend and coadjutor, and will actually prove himself to be so if he is given only a little encouragement.
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