(c) Trade Union Action.

But we are often told that the English artisans have won a Nine Hours Day, and the Australians an Eight Hours Day, by trade union action. Why cannot all workers go and do likewise, and not "go whining to the State"?

It is true that a series of successful strikes has brought about a nominal nine hours day in most English skilled crafts. But the gain has often been little more than nominal. Habitual overtime in many industries makes the day as long as before.

But only one out of nine of the English wage earners is organised into a trade union at all, and still fewer are members of a union strong enough to enforce any reduction of hours. What responsible person would venture to advise the tramway men, or the laundry women to strike for shorter hours, although they are members of well-organised trade unions?

The trade unions themselves are rapidly coming to the opinion that only by legislation can a real and a general shortening of hours be secured. The Liverpool Trade Union Congress voted for an Eight Hours Bill. The Trades Councils of London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Birmingham, and Hull support the same demand. Both unions of railway workers are now in its favor. The coal miners everywhere outside of Northumberland and Durham are almost unanimous on the subject. Democratic legislation is everywhere preferred to trade anion warfare.

But even if Trade Unions were powerful enough to secure a serious and effective reduction in the hours of labor, it may still be doubted whether it is to the interest of the community as a whole that the work of obtaining an Eight Hours Day should be left to them. The methods of Trade Unions are essentially the methode of war. A strike, with all the misery entailed, is the only effective instrument which Trade Unions possess for enforcing their will.

Few people realise how much misery a strike of necessity entails. The long, anxious waiting, the insufficiency of food, the cessation of every luxury, and the spectacle daily growing sadder of the home bit by bit bereft of all its little ornaments and comforts, while its inmates, like its owner, are visibly suffering from downright starvation : these are the trials imposed upon the workman and upon his family when a Trade Union asserts its independence by striking. Nor are the workmen actually engaged in a strike the only members page 8 of the community who suffer thereby. To many a little tradesman who has just with difficulty been able to keep his head above water a strike in his neighborhood will mean inevitable bankruptcy.

Moreover, a well-supported, widespread strike in some industries could not be tolerated by any Government. If all the railways running into London were really paralysed for a fortnight, with sympathetic strikes among the seamen and carmen, it may safely be predicted that Government intervention would be necessary to prevent food going to famine prices and serious tumult ensuing. Similar reasoning applies to the gas-workers, by whose labor London is lighted; the men in the service of the waterworks, by means of which it lives; or even those servants of the community who bury its dead. In all these cases, and in many others, the proposal that the workers should gain their ends by a strike can be made only because it is assumed that they must fail.