THE SPEAKER ON AGRICULTURAL LABOUR.
THE Speaker of the House of Commons has rendered a real service not only to English Society, but to the English Constitution, by the important example which he has set at a critical moment of the true mode of dealing with the agricultural labourer. When a Duke and a Bishop have done all the mischief that it was in the power of a Duke and a Bishop to do,—and fortunately perhaps for the balance of English society, there is a liberal disposition amongst us to make excuses for mere Dukes and Bishops, just as we make excuses for spoiled children and invalids,—the ex-Whip of the Liberal party, selected to be Speaker of the House of Commons not because, but in spite of his former office, on the ground that his mind had been so wholly unwarped by it that he still re- mained a typical specimen of the impartial constitutionalist, steps forward, and in a few unpretending words of practical suggestion sets an example which, though we do not of course mean to say that every employer of agricultural labour can afford to follow it, would be enough, if followed honestly only in spirit, to avert the danger ahead' of which we were compelled to speak a week or two ago. Nor is it any small thing that the Speaker of the House of Commons should be the first to move in this matter, and tacitly, though not avowedly, to teach the Bishop truer churchmanship, and the Duke nobler tactics. To the political imagination of the English people there is no truer representative of the whole Constitution as it is,—Throne, Church, Lords, and Commons,—than the Speaker of the House of Commons. Though representing only one of these powers in the State, yet he stands for both the parties it contains, and is the link which connects it at once with the Throne and the House of Lords. The Bishop who " good-humouredly " suggested that the agricultural labourers' advisers might be ducked without gross injustice, and the Duke who wanted to deliver over the labourers bound hand and foot to the farmers, may be mere accidents,—caprices of political fortune ; but a constitutional officer, chosen with all the care appropriate to be Speaker of the principal legislative body, may be assumed to represent the spirit of the system in which he is so important a link. When, then, Mr. Brand tells the farm labourers on his estate that he looks for no satisfactory result till "the labourer receives, in some shape or other, a share, though it may be a small one, of the profit of the business in which he is engaged," he acknowledges their right to be identified in interest with the property they con- tribute to create, and so virtually gives in his adheeion to the main principle of the lecturers whom the Bishop half wanted to duck, and declares his opposition to the Duke's thesis that the farm labourers should be the mere tools of the farmer. When he offers to insure them a minimum interest of 2- per cent. (the interest of the Post-Office Savings' Banks) on every pound they will consent to save and invest in his farm, and to give as much over that rate of interest as the profit the farm yields, he gives the labourer who is inclined to save and lend his savings to the farm the strongest possible personal interest in efficient and economical work. Nay, more, he offers him a. share in any advantages which may arise from his being in the service of a skilful and ingenious master; for the profit will be due not merely to the efficiency of the labour employed, but to the skilful use of labour-saving engines in the use of which the labourers will have no voice ; so that they will have every reason to prize the capacity of their superiors, as well as to exert their own best efforts for the property under their charge. The experiment is, of course, no new one. But its formal adoption by a proprietor in the Speaker's position, and at a moment so critical, when the agricultural labourers are feeling most keenly the injustice of the lords, and prelates, and county magnates by whom their demands had been dis- cussed and denounced, comes like a great constitutional recognition of the abstract justice of their complaints, and the baselessness of the accusations made against them. We do not
for a moment pretend that every farmer could, even if he would, follow the example. It is not to the small farmer, with a capital hardly equal to the demands upon his pocket, that, even if he invited it, the labourers would be willing to entrust their small savings. Bat though the particular method is only applicable to cases in which the fortune of the farmer stands high above all question or doubt, the principle that the labourers may fairly expect, and may claim as a right, to share the advantages of a growing profit, is one which is applicable to all cases, and which, once frankly admitted, will leave everything else matter of detail. The agricultural labourers may now fairly say that they have the Speaker of the House of Commons on their side,—a constitutional authority far higher than that of any Duke and Bishop. Nor is it a little credit to the House of Commons that its main officer should feel far more keenly and truly the claims of the spiritual principle of sympathy as between the lowest and the highest grades in the county hierarchy, than a Lord Spiritual himself.
Nay, in this case the Speaker has not only distanced the Duke and the Bishop,—which is no great matter,—but he seems to have the advantage over some of the ablest literary exponents of the labour question. In the Magazines of the present month there are two remarkable articles which should be read together,—that by "W. R. G." in Fraser on " Strikes, Short Hours, Poor Law, and Laissez-Faire," and that by Mr. Frederic Harrison in the Fortnightly, on Mr. Brassey's book on "Work and Wages." Both essays are full of keenness and force, but both are rather singularly wanting in that appreciation of the true cement of the social system,—the need and the possibility of identifying what seem like antagonistic interests,—which. Mr. Brand's proposal implies. "W. R. G." indeed justifies the agricul- tural labourer in trying to better his condition, his capitalist sympathies being, like those of the Liberal party in general, rather with the great manufacturers and other producers of the cities in the difficulties which a strike causes, than with the tenant-farmers whom, hard and despotic as we admit them to be towards their labourers, Liberals too often treat as the political scum of the earth. Yet the whole drift of "W. R. G.'s" paper is to show that higher wages and shorter hours mean dearer commodities and less production, and he has little but ridicule for those who venture to think—and to assert as a matter of fact, while the present rate of discovery lasts— that both higher wages and shorter hours may very frequently indeed be compatible with a diminished cost of production, and a very much increased amount of production. His boding and melancholy auguries contain not a hint of the advantages which may be expected to accrue not only to the increase of harmony between capital and labour, but to the productive power of labour itself even under-greatly diminished hours of work, from all steps tending not merely to give courage and strength to the labourer, but to make him feel that the courage and strength will benefit himself and his own class in the same proportion in which it benefits the capitalist. "W. R. G." treats the labour problem too much as if the moral considera- tions affecting it must all tend to the side of strife, as if labourers must be assumed, theoretically at least, not to see, what almost all labourers do see,—what, for instance, the journeymen bakers evidently see very clearly—that coups d'e'tat which disorganize society, like sudden strikes of engine-drivers, police, or other labourers on whose daily work the very existence of society depends, though of course, like earthquakes or volcanos, they are on the cards, are less and less likely, instead of more and more likely, to occur, as the working-class comes to understand something of the meaning of the organic unity of social life, and of the universal suffering inflicted (suffering which those who inflict the blow are quite certain not to escape), by these sharp shocks to the confidence reposed by the people in the greater agencies of civilisation. Mr. Harrison's essay is, as might be expected, in a very different tone to "W. R. G.'s," and while it shows a somewhat needless contempt for the theoretic principles of political economy on which "W. R. G." so completely relies,—principles of economy which it is as absurd to despise because they don't correspond to the facts as we kistow them, as it is to despise the first law of motion because it only says what kind of motion would go on if there were none of the friction which eventually disposes of all springs of force not perpetually renewed,—it does very good service by bringing forward the invaluable evidence of Mr. Brassey to show, that in a vast variety of actual employments the shortening of the hours of labour, even down to eight hours, does not diminish,
but increase the productive efficiency of the individual labourer, and that in spite of rising wages and diminished hours, the general tendency of the rate of profit has been to increase far more rapidly than wages themselves. Of course this has been due first to the improvement of the condition and calibre of the labourer, and secondly, to the enormous economy of labour and skill which modern discovery has suc- ceeded in effecting. But it is as well to know that at present at least there seems no limit to this process, and that it would be far wiser in the capitalists to trust to the same development of their machinery and organising power in future as the makeweights against a rising labour market, than to give the fatal impression to the labourer that while their profits are multiplying rapidly, they grudge him every advance of his remuneration. Mr. Harrison, we say, marshals from Mr. Brassey facts on which "W. R. G." would do well to meditate much more carefully than he seems atoll inclined to do. But Mr. Harrison, who is afflicted with Positivism, actually goes out of his Way to sneer at Co-operation as a clumsy and barbarous remedy for the divisions between capital and labour. "Far from being subdivided and controlled by a species of popular suffrage," says Mr. Harrison, apparently in order to spoil by wholly irrelevant and pragmatic dogmatism a very able and useful paper, "the true future of capital is to be concentrated in larger and larger masses than it is, and freed even more
from legal and material restraint But for this it must thoroughly realise to itself the social necessities on which it is based, and the public duties which it is called on to perform. When it has done this, it will not need to meet fierce and perpetual attacks on its very right to exist. In those days, co-operation and every bastard form of socialism will be forgotten, as the clumsy efforts of a generation which had failed to understand even the problem that was set for it to solve." Possibly, if ever all capitalists should become priests of Comte, and wield their capital as a philanthropic priesthood should, the labourers might be content with this new form of paternal government. But as we see exceedingly little symptom of any such disposition in the labourers to anquiesce in the dictatorship of capitalist wisdom, we take leave to believe that the Speaker of the House of Commons rs wiser, not only in his generation, but in the wisdom of the future, than this rhapsodical exponent of what is probably the least considerable sect of a sect-ridden world. Co-operation will do more than rectify the intellectual conditions of the labour problem. It will rectify the moral conditions also. So far as it is possible, and wherever it is possible, it is the highest guarantee of reconciled class-energies and of social peace.
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