Powers that Count in the Problem: New Men Lead While Old Hands Look On Mr. Robert Smillie is sitting in his little cottage home in Lanarkshire, unwell and silent, an inactive spectator of the only big coal fight in which he has not been participator for many years, wondering if he is witnessing the shipwreck of the great organization which he, more than any other man, built up, writes the "Daily Express" Labour correspondent.
Mr. William Brace no longer brings the wise and moderating influences of his sage counsel to bear in the cogitations of the Miners' Federation executive. Instead of helping to prevent a crisis, as he used to do, he is busy in a Government office trying to find a cure.
Mr. George Barker has left Russell-square for St. Stephen's. It is moot point whether his temperamental extremism is calculated to do more harm inside or outside the directing Miners'
body of the Federation, who knows more about the financial, economic, and technical intricacies of the coal industry than many of the other miners' leaders put together, is no longer one of the creators of the mineworkers' policies.
The new Miners' Federation executive is very different from the old. Who are the dominating figures? There are four, and it would be difficult to discover four men with personalities and characteristics so widely divergent.
Mr, Frank Hodges.—By no means a Bolshevik or a Red revolutionary, but a young man of extreme brilliance, with a tendency for exceeding the speech limit which older and more practical men have found it more safe and expedient to observe. He knows precisely where he wants to go, but sometimes it seems that he does not quite realize that the longest way round is often the quickest way of getting there. He has a keen, swift impatient brain—too keen, too swift, and too impatient to take cognizance of many of the matter-of-fact little things that go to make up difficulty. Two or three years ago it was said of him that during what was then thought to be the inevitable industrial struggle he was destined tu play ai increasingly important role, and that the height to which he would climb would depend largely on the issue of two fights—the internal battle between the young, forceful Socialist and the older and more orderly Labour leader, and the external struggle between the two warring sections. Both of those fights are now being waged. The result will be as important to the future of Frank Hodges as it will be to the future of the Miners' Federation.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.