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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 86

How about Personal Independence?

How about Personal Independence?

Some people are afraid that an Eight Hours Bill would destroy the personal independence of the English working man. Yet they know that the Factory Acts, which nominally apply only to women and children, really limit the hours of every man who works in a cotton-mill. Have the Lancashire operatives less personal independence than they had when their masters fixed the hours of labor at fifteen per day? Are the East-end tailors really freer than the men who work under the Factory Acts in the Yorkshire cloth mills? Mr. Mundella is no bad witness on such a point, and his testimony is emphatic. "Writing in 1873, he says :—

An argument which is freely advanced against the interference of the state with the relations of capital and labor, is that it tends to undermine the indepdence and self-reliance of the class which it seeks to protect, and teaches them to look to the State rather than to their own exertions to remedy evils requiring redress. My answer to this is, that the factory operatives of Lancashire and Yorkshire have made greater advances in self-reliance and independence during the past fifty years than any other class of English operatives. Building and benefit societies, co-operative associations, both for distribution and production have taken their rise and flourish amongst them on a scale of magnitude unknown in any other part of the United Kingdom.

page 13

"Why, indeed, should it injure the personal independence or the valiant self-reliance of working-men voters for them to fix by law their own hours of labor? Why should all the moral qualities of manliness be supposed to depend, in some mysterious way, upon the worker being exposed to long hours or any other form of industrial tyranny? No! Personal independence is produced, not by overwork and fear and suspicion, but by bodily and mental health, by regularity of life, and by that feeling of security which comes when humane conditions of employment are guaranteed to the workers by the only power which they know to be stronger than their masters : and that is the Power of the Law.