THE BRITISH LABOUR CRISIS.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1395, 22 March 1912, Page 4

THE BRITISH LABOUR CRISIS.

The debate upon the first reading of Mii. Asql'ith's Coal Mines Bill, of which we published a cabled summary yesterday, will probably become a landmark in English industrial history. We arc not given tho details of the Bill, but only a rough general outline drawn in Mr. Asquith's speech. It appears that the Government has proposed, with respect to the mining industry, that district boards, consisting of owners' and workers' representatives and an independent chairman, shall be set up with power to prescribe a minimum wage for three years. There are no penal clauses, and no interference with the existing liberty to strike or to lock-out. The brief summary of Mr. Asquith's speech makes it clear that he has no great faith either in the principle of State interference or in his own Bill. "The ever-grow-ing suffering and the impossibility of a mutual settlement had made legislation inevitable," ho said. "He believed that with good sense and fairness there would be no difficulty in settling the minimum. That was all the Government could do." The Bill is described by Opposition newspapers as "inadequate and a sham," and the owners consider it "a makeshift." Mr. Asqtjith would probably agree with these criticisms. As a firm believer in free exchange, he has no love for legislative attempts to harness and drive in unnatural directions the great natural forces of industry: he merely feels himself bound, as the head of the Government, to do whatever is possible inside his economic creed to prevent the evil of a prolonged coal strike. Ho plainly regards his Bill as something like a formality—a formality that he is ready to stamp as a statute, but still a formality in all vital respects.

The chief interest of the debate is in the criticisms of Mr. Bonar Law, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, and Mr. Lloyd-George. The Chancellor, while admitting that the Bill was "a temporary .expedient, necessary to avert disaster"—a concession to fact that he owed as a duty to his chiefyet expressed some opinions to which his chief would certainly not subscribe. He "did not regard syndicalism as the real danger," on the ground, apparently, that "tho minimum wage was not a syndicalist demand." Of course syndicalism is not limited by a demand for a minimum wage. But syndicalism has to obtain a foothold before it can obtain a throat-grip, and the statutory establishment of a minimum wage, as every intelligent person in Australasia knows, can be the first step in the syndicalist programme, and a first step, as our own history shows, that leads naturally to trade union tyranny. The Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Bonar Law, named three courses that the Government might have followed. The first was, in essence, the adoption of the Canadian law (the "Lemif.ux Act"); the second was the policy of laisscz faire; and the third was something we cannot understand, namely, a declaration that "the strike must end," and the use. of "all possible pressure to force the owners to open the mines and to compel the men to resume." The actual Bill is certainly preferable, in the circumstances, to any one of these alternatives; although Mr. Boxar Law was quite right in fearing, as he obviously did fe.'ir, and as the airy attitude subsequently adopted by Mr.. Lloyd-George justified him in fearing, that the Bill, as a virtual surrender to syndicalism, would be the beginning of an evil legislative drift. It is interesting to note that Mn. .Ramsay Macdox.ald, who has made a first-hand investigation of the working of industrial compulsion in Australasia, insisted that compulsory arbitration has not rtiven security in Canada, Xew Zealand, or Australia. Mil. .M.ACDos'Ai.n, in his farewell snweh in gili, condemned ih" prr'nii!.; of permanent compulsion. That was

five years ago, before the outburst of strikes began, with their full jus(Mention of his views. To New Zcsiliimlers the vital fact is tin; certainty that the House of Commons has no intention of plunging into tho morass of stringent industrial compulsion that this country has for so many years been deluded into tolciating.