Nov, 17.
THE latest telegrams indicate the. approaching end of the greatest struggle between Labour, and Capital that has ever been fought in England. On the surface, Capital has won the fight, and Labour will go back to i%s task embittered and revengeful. One of our contributors just back from home asserts that the, great mass of the English people have been with the miners in their struggle from the beginning, and, while it is conceded that their leaders have made a hash of things by not agreeing with their adversaries more: quickly, it i generally felt that the miners' cause ix on the whole: a just one and that the inevit-fable settlement is but a truce. Herein lies the explanation of the grimness and silence with which the discomfort of a shortlage of coal has been faced by; the poorer classes of the country. Few have been able to get more than an average of eight pounds! of house coal a day, and this only by permission of the coal supply officials; while anthracite is obtained by favour, plus £4 to 45. ton in payment.—Yet little has been heard from the labouring family man who is working short time himself, and whose wife has to cook the food, do the washing and heat the house on a handful of coal a day.
There is also a strong feeling that both the press and the} Government have been on the tine owners' side; that the press of a decade or two ago would have come through with a f clean sheet, but that its combine and affiliations to-day make it] largely subservient to the interests of the moneyed class. The; Government, it is freely stated, has done nothing but come in at! the wrong moment, usually at} the instance of Mr. Winston Churchill, however good its in-' tentions may have been. It certainly a fact that their principal contribution -to a settlement has been to reiterate the saw that th law of supply and demand must take its The visitor to the country is in a quandary. He hears of the shelving first of the Sankey remission's report by a Government that is obviously bankrupt of] ideas itself—yet sees that Government still in power. He discovers a general feeling against nationalization, yet active sympathy with the underpaid miner. He sees a great country come to a standstill for months and an inert Government sit on its bench and watch the fight the detachment of an Oriental amah.
The weak point in Ministerial organization is that the same men have to deal one day with an extraordinarily intricate industrial question like the coal strike; the next day with al Wanhsien affair; and the day jatter with South African nation-ahets anxious to tear down the Union Jack and put up-a local -|product. The result is dissatisfaction all round. We in China know that only too well. Whoever is "put up" in the House to answer questions about this country obviously knows nothing about it, the Foreign Secretary himself least of all, but has merely been coached up by a secretary. So like Hamlet we continue to "eat the air promise crammed" and.are in a good position to sympathize with the miners. So long as the old principle prevailed that the business of government was to govern, the absence of particular knowledge among Ministers was not noticeable, But now that Governments have to adjudicate on an almost unlimited number of social questions for the proper understanding of which a lifetime of study would not be too much, the anomalies and futilities that ensue are very glaring.
In the case of the coal strike the one passionate hope of everyone was that however long might last, at least some settlement would be contrived that would mean an end of such upheavals, No one can flatter himself that this hope is likely to be gratified. The miners have gone back to work not in 1 ponse to the Government's offer—which in truth is so complicat~ ed that they probably cannot understand it—but because they cannot fight any longer. In these circumstances one would ask, What has become of the Samuel Commission's report? Is it to prove so much waste paper? Tt was the result of an enormous amount of labour, it was as judicial in its conclusions as it had been in its investigations and it put forward some definite solutions other than the two which we are offered as apparently the only alternatives—the law of supply and demand, or nationalization, Tt will be a world of pities if this monument of patient investigation goes for nothing, especially as the miners are quite convinced that the mine-owners do not like it and have forced the Government to wreck it.
For the moment there appears little to hope for but the working of what is known as the "spirit of the og No one nowadays is dismissed as an incorrigible Radical for holding that labour is entitled to demand of life something more than bare subsistence alternating with stark periods of "elemming." Among employers generally there is a livelier sense of the import-;{ance for the prosperity of their business of keeping their men contented and surely it is impossible that this better feeling should stop just short of the coalfields. Undoubtedly a large part of the bitterness of the late conflict was due to bad repre~ sentation on both sides. With this out of the way, the example of the Bolsover Colliery in granting their men a special bonus offers at least some hope that miners and owners may ultimately settle their quarrels as others have done without 1 further fighting, port and later of the Coal Com-|PHE N.-C.D.N. POLICY
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.