; ESPECIALLY TO THE FRIENDLY CO-OPERATIVE SOCIETIES, AND THE MOVEMENT FOR SHORTENING THE HOURS OF LABOUR.
Professor Pearson, Melbourne.
The purport of the present discussion is to consider whether this Church has any concern with a class of social movements which, more or less directly, affect the relations of labour and capital ; which have it for their object to determine whether labour shall be limited, and whether working men shall combine to become producers, or to cheapen the commodities they consume by buying at first hand. The way in which questions of this kind have forced themselves upon public attention during the last few years shows that they need a settlement of some sort ; and the issues practically are, whether the Church has a special point of view, which it is imperative or expedient to enforce; and whether a body which claims a commission to represent the higher interests of mankind can leave the discussion of questions with a moral side to Parliament and the press. No one, I think, can doubt that clergymen have repeatedly interposed with the best possible effect in economical questions. The names of Maurice, Kingsley, and Marriott are written in the early annals of co-operation ; Bishop Fraser was one of the first to denounce the infamous gang system under which children were worked in the eastern counties ; and Mr. Girdlestone's efforts to raise wages in Dorsetshire, and Mr. Herring's to foster a general emigration, have been attended with very salutary results. On the other hand, clergymen have come forward now and again, as at Leeds and Sheffield, to combat Chartism, or the perpetration of trades union outrages. Generally the clergyman thus acting has had to struggle against a load of obloquy that would crush or dishearten any but a strong man ; and the question arises whether it is right to leave the difficult task of interposing between rival interests to private initiative and single heroic men. A Church that has no counsel to give in the more urgent questions of the day; a Church that is cold and irresponsive when some of its ablest members are speaking out, may seem to be a Church that is hesitating between right and wrong. I do not wish to extenuate the difficulties of Church action. Even the very harmless questions my paper deals with are capable of provoking great bitterness. Co-operation in production or distribution is often denounced as a bastard form of Socialism, and may undoubtedly involve very serious interference with vested interests. There is even a greater prejudice against any movement for limiting the hours of labour. The reaction which Adam Smith stimulated against legislation that cripples by trying to direct trade, has formulated itself in the minds of middle class Englishmen as a positive command that industry is always to be left alone. The employer who is told by a tradesman that he cannot contract with his labourers for more than a certain number of hours in the day believes, not only that he is losing money, but that the laws of common justice and common sense have been violated. The Church of England is eminently a Church of the rich, with a book-learned clergy, recruited largely from the employers' class, and apt, I think, to carry the employers' point of view into its pastoral work. Even men who admit that they are bound fearlessly to teach what is right in every case where morals and economics are mixed may yet hold advisedly that trade and labour are best left to themselves, and that if they give the example of unblemished lives, and deliver the great common-places of the Christian law, they may leave the task of application, with its controversies and strife, to secular men.
I would ask those who think in this way, and who wish to separate economical from ethical teaching, to consider in the first place that a statesman who should expect to govern society by abstract principles is much like a mathematician who should construct a theory of projectiles without taking the resistance of the air into account. No one now disputes that the introduction of machinery has been beneficial to the working classes, and has led to the employment of very much more labour than it has dispensed with. My own belief and hope are that, as our command of mechanical forces is increased, we shall gradually be able to abridge the hour's of labour to that rational minimum which will allow time for domesticity and cultivation and amusement, as well as rest. Nevertheless, now and again we hear that the introduction of some new labour-saving appliance is opposed by men who have long acquiesced in using all the older machinery that their trade employs. These men see what the economist is a little apt to forget, that although the displacement of labour which new machinery involves will right itself after a time, the hands who are suspended will be out of employment for weeks or months together. In fact, the common phrase that the labour market will easily find its level after, any disturbance is a misleading one. Labour and its remuneration will find their level, not like sea waters after a storm, but rather like earth after an earthquake, the greater extent sinking back to where it was before, but portions remaining permanently depressed, and portions permanently elevated. Whoever invents a supremely useful machine, a Nasmyth hammer, a spinning-jenny, or a sewing-machine, invites a portion of society to submit to present privation, in order that the rest may benefit at once, and the whole race hereafter. The economist who deals only with the production and distribution of wealth, is entitled not to recognise that there are two sides to the question. For him, whatever increases the nation's capital, or, better still, the wealth of the whole world, is incontestably good. But on what theory of enlightened selfishness or mere materialism is the operative class to sacrifice itself that its neighbours and its successors may be better off? Why, for instance, may not A and B, who will be the first men thrown out of work, and who do not know when they shall get it again, combine with their fellow-workmen to prevent the obnoxious machinery from being used ? We all grant, of course, that they have no right to use force or intimidation, to mob or ratten ; but their right to sell their labour on such conditions as they please to prescribe is as incontestable as the right of a syndicate of merchants to buy up all the quinine in the world and sell relief from sickness at starvation prices. My own conviction is that if self-interest ever did become — as, thank God, it never can become — the sole motive power in the world, we should have a steady relapse into barbarism. As it is, mixed up with much that is crude and unwise, we find constant touches of much that is generous and far-thoughted — I do not say far-sighted — in the rules of an ordinary trades union. No economist can defend the rules which deter the skilled work man from profiting to the full by his skill ; but I have always felt that, within limits, such a principle is more consonant to the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount than the Darwinian law, by which the strong grows up to the full measure of his strength, and the weakest goes to the wall. It has been the keen sense of brotherhood, however limited to a particular craft, which has been the inner strength of trades unions hitherto ; and political economy, if it fail to convince the members of these by arguments of expediency, which, as I have shown, involve a moral groundwork to be conclusive, is apt to find itself helpless and at a loss when it comes in collision with this impulsive morality. Neither, I apprehend, can economical science appeal consistently to moral arguments, for its function is to deal with wealth or well-being as determined by such causes. Science needs a mediator and interpreter between itself and the moral elements in man. To science, a cotton famine is matter to be remedied by stimulating the growth of cotton in new countries, by finding substitutes for it, by assisting the surplus hands to emigrate. Admirable remedies all of them, but which require time for their operation. Would the Lancashire, men have endured distress uncomplainingly as they did in 1863-4 if they had not been sustained by sympathy with the great struggle to enfranchise labour which, was then going on across the Atlantic ? Seldom, indeed, is the moral side of suffering so clearly to be discovered as it then was. More often it needs the prophetic vision to see it ; more often still the distress of a great commercial crisis can only be alleviated by sympathy. Under any circumstances, I know of no men more distinctly entitled to interpose their good offices in such crises than the ministers and working members of the Church.
I have glanced first at the question of wage rate because this seems to me the most direct issue in the incessant struggle between employer and employed. It is also one of the most intricate, because properly to decide it demands a knowledge in every instance of the profits made in the particular trade, and the work of arbitration must always be entrusted to skilled referees. There is, however, a secondary form, so to speak, of this question, with which the moralist has as least as much to do as the economist ; the issue, how far it is right to exact continuous and hard labour from women and children. It is proper, perhaps, to observe that the two cases are not precisely similar. Some economists — Miss Martineau, for instance — have held that any attempt to regulate labour by law is mischievous. The view of J. S. Mill and Fawcett, however, is that children who cannot judge or act for themselves are clearly to be distinguished from women who are quite able to manage their own concerns, except when the law interposes to hinder them. Habitually the English House of Commons has acted upon this latter theory, but it has not done so without exposing itself to severe criticism, and deviating at times into inconsistencies. For instance, when the Bishop of Manchester drew attention to the gang-system, Mr. Read, the representative of the farmers, protested that it was impossible to farm those particular properties in any other way. Lord Sherbrook, when he was Minister of Education — to use our title — declared that the parent ought to be the judge whether his children should be kept at work or sent to school. Evidently there are three views on the subject — the employer's view, that he should be allowed to buy any labour which he can obtain ; the trades union view, that the competition of children with adults ought to be restricted in order to husband employment for adults ; and the " hand to-mouth" politician's view, which I will put in Mr. Lowe's words, that children " are better employed in keeping their father, mother, brothers and sisters from the parish than in learning anything." I ask whether there is not room for a fourth view, that of Christian men or mere moralists, if you please, that the early years of life should be dedicated to some other training than the mere mastery of a craft ; and that no parents are justified in debarring their children from the acquisition of that knowledge which will make them better citizens, better in all household relations, more intelligent even for manual work when they grow up. However, I will not argue this question at length, for I think it is now generally agreed that the law may protect children against neglect and greed as well as against actual cruelty in their homes. Not so in the case of women. " If we once accept the principle," says Mr. Fawcett, " that grown-up persons cannot determine for themselves the number of hours which they shall work, we virtually treat them as if they were helpless children." Nay, Mr. Fawcett's views have found a poet to embody them in very passable verse ; and the poet tells us in his preface how "a paternal legislature, ever anxious in its sentimental way to keep women cribbed and coddled and ranked with children, has decreed that all female pitworkers shall leave their work at two o'clock on Saturday afternoons." Now, I quote this particularly because the interference of the State with the work of women in pits is one of the strongest proofs that the labour maker cannot be left to make laws for itself. In 1842, when Lord Ashley brought forward the bill ultimately adopted, he showed that women worked half naked in the pits, crawling on all fours, and dragging carts by chains passing from the waist between the legs. Parliament was shocked into enacting a stringent measure which declared it to be unfit that women and girls should be employed in any mine or colliery. Now, it is perfectly true that the abuses of factory labour for women have never equalled those of labour in mines. Still it is held by many high authorities that a child-bearing woman cannot bear the strain of factory work without injury to her constitution, and that a mother engaged in factories cannot nurse her child properly. The Social Science Association of Germany has accordingly advocated the entire exclusion of women from factory labour, and the Massachusetts Statistical Bureau has declared in the same spirit that the employment of married women is an evil that is sapping the life of our operative population, and must sooner or later be regulated or, more properly, stopped. Mr. Stanley Jevons, to whose work on the State in Relation to Labour I am indebted for these quotations, suggests as an intermediate and palliative measure between absolute exclusion and let alone laissez faire that mothers should only be allowed to labour in those factories where they could take their children with them, depositing them in nurseries, and suckling them at intervals. My object in this paper is, of course, not to determine what remedial measures are possible. I would only say that in cases like this, where the vaunted " do-nothing" system seems, in fact, to be doing the devil's work, it does seem as if there was room for active Church action ; as if the ministers of religion ought to be the very first men who should call attention to the stinted motherly instincts, the enfeebled children's lives. Neither let any one suppose that evils of this sort are confined to mines and factory towns. Mrs. Butler sent a thrill through English society by telling how the married women in Georgia were constant sufferers from a painful disease (prolapsus uteri), induced by the obligation to work in the fields just after they had been confined. A medical friend who had practised in English villages assured me that the Oxfordshire women were no better off.
We shift ground very much, though we do not shift it altogether, when we pass from the question of regulating labour for women and children to that of fixing a limit beyond which man shall not labour. Nevertheless I am not sure that the duty of the Church is less important in connection with the eight hours movement than with other questions between employer and employed. The object of those who support this movement has not been to diminish labour but to lessen drudgery. The assumption is that a man working faithfully does as much as can fairly be demanded of him in eight hours ; that when he is kept longer it is to his own loss of time, but not to his employer's gain ; and that if he is freed earlier he gains time, which he may, and often will, spend innocently and profitably. I need not ask here whether the uniform standard of eight hours is a wise or even a practicable one. I think all would agree that there must be different standards for the smith or coalheaver, and for the shepherd or watchman. Mean while I think the Church, as an organisation for promoting the spiritual interests of society, has three points of connection with a movement of this kind. The Church is interested in seeing that the hours of labour are neither too long nor too short. It is mere mockery if men are let loose for a seventh day of rest so exhausted as to be fit for little more than sleep and food. Whatever hours a working man can spend with his wife and children, whatever time he can give to intellectual interests of any sort, are seasons by which religion ought ultimately to profit. Neither is it a slight matter if the working class all over a great country feels that legislation has done its utmost to economise the toil necessary for a livelihood. Again, an eight hours law, if it ever be carried, will be in the nature of a contract, and its success will altogether depend on the workman's really putting his strength into the time for which he is paid. In talking with English farmers I have constantly found them object to cottage allotments, on the ground that their labourers rose early to work in them, and came to the farm afterwards tired out. Clearly any such practice in connection with the eight hours system would be a violation of good faith, and the Church, which in early days claimed for itself, the jurisdiction over contracts, can never abnegate the duty of protesting against dishonesty in any shape. Lastly, on the Church will devolve, to some extent, the responsibility of finding employment for the larger leisure the working classes will enjoy. When the representatives of our great religious bodies came forward not long ago to assist in the inauguration of a working men's college, I cannot doubt but one actuating motive was a desire to find a new and healthy occupation for the holiday time of men and women unencumbered with family cares.
It is now nearly eighteen years since the president of the Statistical Society, Mr. Chadwick, declared that a given amount of money spent (1) as the wage classes are accustomed to spend it, by purchases on credit at small retail shops, will produce one and a half days' subsistence ; (2) spent at retail shops for ready money the same amount will produce two days' subsistence ; (3) spent on food purchased wholesale for cash it will produce nearly three days' subsistence. Mr. Chadwick adds that the effect of setting up one co-operative store in Leeds was to dispense with the services and the expense of some forty sets of retail distributors, or to occasion the shutting up of some forty small retail shops. In other words, co-operative stores are a labour-saving machine, obnoxious to all the prejudices that beset machinery, attended with some suffering to a class when they are first introduced, and ultimately productive of unmixed good. Assuming for the moment that Mr. Chadwick's calculations are not overstated, I ask if men who are constantly brought in contact with poverty can refuse actively to support a movement that should add 50 per cent. to the purchasing capacity of the poor man's wages ; that should substitute decent comfort for penury in many thousand cases. Inasmuch, however, as religion, like science, knows no distinction of classes ; inasmuch as the small retail shopkeeper is as precious to both as the artisan or the labourer, it seems clear that to speak effectively on this question of labour-saving appliances in distribution, the Church should have spoken out equally as to labour-saving appliances in production. I would add one consideration, the full discussion of which will perhaps fall under another paper. The disproportionate growth of the distributing class as compared with the producing is due, I believe, to two moral causes — the love of amusement, and the passion for speculation. Men flock out of healthy country lives in farms or mines into our great cities because they like to be near the theatre and the racecourse, or because they hope to grow rich suddenly by some form of gambling. The cure for a taint of this kind is not economical but religious, and can only be found, I am convinced, in a return to the masculine asceticism that has distinguished the best days of history, Puritan or republican.
Co-operation, however, is not only cheapness or utility. It has a secondary yet most important use in familiarising the working classes who join in it with the position and responsibilities of the capitalist. French society has secured itself from any great assault on landed property by making a large proportion of the population landowners. England, as the great industrial capital of the world — and we, of course, are only a part of England — has to work out the problems of industry for the whole of the human race. I am confident that there is no more practical means of effacing the mere class view of the relations between capital and labour than to encourage co-operation in its most various forms. Mr. Chadwick tells us that the co-operative factories have all come round to piecework, and have decided that the mode of payment is in accordance with communistic principle, " each according to his capacity, each according to his work." In other words, the generous impulse to let skilled and unskilled share alike has been found by men administering their own funds to be incompatible with successful management ; that is, with God's natural order in the world, which proportions result to efficiency. Take another noteworthy point. Mr. Holyoake states that hundreds of strikes would have been averted if employers would have submitted to a conference and explanation. This, however, assumes not only that the employers in these cases were in the right, but that they could have shown themselves to be so. Is it not at least conceivable that a few co-operative factories, really owned and managed by workmen, would give a standard for the possible wage-rate such as operatives themselves could not suppose to be unfair. My impression is that in any great industrial community the progress of co-operation will be attended with such an extinction of class bitterness as to remove a great moral difficulty from our path.
There is a third form of co-operation so intensely speculative that I will only glance at it. Mr. Holyoake has suggested that a few strikes against orders to do bad work, against shoddy and veneer, would raise wages and the whole character of industry in a few years. This, however, would only mean that the second great commandment of the law should be rigidly carried out in trade. Shortly stated, my argument is that there is a moral as well as an economical side to all relations between employers and employed ; and that the Church should not allow the control of moral questions to pass out of its own hands. Practically, I think it should interpose whenever women or children are worked beyond the physical strength, or in such a way as to stint their moral growth ; to secure leisure for the labourer and a fair return for wages to the employer ; and to mediate sympathetically in the short, sharp times of trial which occur when labour is momentarily displaced by a labour-saving appliance. My belief is that if the Churches allow themselves to be supplanted in work of this kind by Parliament or the press, they will be unfaithful to the prophetic office they have assumed.
Church of England Messenger and Ecclesiastical Gazette for the Diocese of Melbourne and Ballarat (Vic. : 1876 - 1889), 1882, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article197131701
No comments:
Post a Comment