THE RESTRICTION OF OUTPUT.
[To TRIM EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOR."] San,—The best summary I have ever seen of that feature of Trade Unionism which Mr. Lloyd George on July 28th spoke of in the House as "deplorable " in its consequences at the present time—i.e., limitation of output—is in a book of Mrs. F. A. Steel's, A Sovereign Remedy. There a disgusted employer addresses his workmen as follows :- "Labour, they say, is dissociating itself from Capital, Capital from Labour. That may be . . . but what I do see . . . . is that Labour is dissociating itself from work. It is labouring all day, and bringing forth—as little as it can ! It claims the right to do this little . . but why should it deny to any man the right to work at the rate of which he was born physically capable P Why should it make a swift worker take eight hours to do what he can do in four P If I were to put any one of 'you on oath, you would admit that it is far harder to dawdle through eight hours than to work through eight hours. I've seen many bricklayers, painters, plasterers . . . hard put to it how to eke out the time, and yet preserve an air of occupation. . . . Think what this means. It is labour, hard labour ! this, the enslavement of free work. Neither body nor mind gain full exercise, muscles and brain decay, the type goes down. But this is the system of the day. . . . What beats me is this. Why, instead of slaving and dawdling, shouldn't the good workmen, classed together, of course, be allowed to work, say, four hours, and then go their way P It would give us some chance of breeding a typo of Englishman that is now fast dying out, that soon must pass away altogether," And the speaker might have added that the supplanting type, which " the system of the day" has bred as deliberately as a farmer breeds stock, is itself bound to pass away, by the law of Nature that eliminates the unfit. If that law operates through the medinni of a " mailed fist," it is none the less a law of Nature.—I am, Sir, &c., C. X. HUDSON.
Previous page
