The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1875-02-27 00:00:00

THE REPORT OF THE LABOUR LAWS

COMMISSION.
(From Tuesday's TinlCB.)

There have been such loud and frequently repeated
complaints from the working classes and their repre-
sentatives against the supposed harshness and inequality
of the laws by which the relations of Master and Work-
man are at present determined and enforced, and at
the same time it has been so abundantly clear that the
working classes of this country are in possession of a
real freedom, both of individual and of combined action,
which is everywhere else denied to them, that the
general public has naturally been a good deal puzzled,
and has not found it easy to reconcile the language of
Trades'Unionmeetingswiththe obvious and apparently
complete liberty which the members of all Trades' Unions
have always both asserted and enjoyed. There has been
some tendency here and there to suppose that it would
have been impossible so much should have been said if the
case of the complainants had been absolutely without
foundation; but the verdict on the whole has been that
the fault lay less with the law itself than with the un-
reasonable wishes and temper of those who were most
strenuous in their objections to it. The Report of the
Labour Laws Commission, which has recently been
made public under circumstances into which we need
not now enter, will scarcely fail to be quoted by both
sides as favourable to their own view. It points out one
or two grievances in the law, and still more in the
manner in which the law has been administered,
which have been suffered to remain unremedied too
long, and have been very pardonably resented. But
the general conclusion to which it leads is that the law
must be maintained substantially in its present form,
and that the demands which the working classes have
made that it should be altered in their own favour are,
on the whole, inadmissible. This is the opinion of the
very high legal and political authorities of whom the
Commission was composed; it is endorsed by the
Lord Chief Justice of England, by Mr. Justice Smith,
by Mr. Roebuck, by Mr. Russell Gurney, by Mr.
Bouverie, by Mr. Goldney, and by Mr. Thomas
Hughes, whose united judgment Will be accepted by
most classes of Englishmen as quite conclusive of the
matter on which it has been pronounced; and though
one of their body—Mr. Macdonald—has dissented
from it, and has pressed for changes in the law which
the rest of his colleagues have deemed to be unneces-
sary or impolitic, we can scarcely think that the
absence of this one name from the Report, however
natural it may be thought, and however readily it
may be excused, will materially weaken the effect,
either with the Legislature or the public, which a
document signed as we have stated will not fail to
carry with it.

It has long been a great object of the working classes
to secure for themselves the greatest possible freedom
in the exercise of their undoubted right of refusing, and
of inducing others to join with them in refusing, to
work upon terms which they do not themselves approve.
This right, however, is subject at present to restric-
tions which considerably reduce its value. There is
the Master and Servant Act, which interferes with
complete liberty of individual action by imposing penal-
ties for all breaches of contract between an employer
and his workmen; there is the Criminal Law Amend-
ment Act, which forbids rattening and other favourite
acts of inducement, and so limits somewhat nar-
rowly the methods by which the common action of
workmen may be made entirely harmonious; and
lastly, there is the general Law of Conspiracy, which
visits very severely all unlawful combinations, and
turns an act into a crimina offence, if done by many,
which, if done by one only, would entail nothing
worse than a civil liability for dama_ es. Now, all
these are stumbling-blocks, which stand terribly in the
way between the workman and his object. If a strike
were allowed to operate in the same manner as a
declaration of downright war; if all existing treaties
and contracts became at once so much waste paper,
valuable only as long as peace lasted, but
abrogated ipso facto as soon as hostilities were
commenced; and if the parties to the struggle could
treat the minority of their own body just as a
nation can treat the minority of its subjects, and
could compel them all to make common cause against
the enemy without the least regard to their individual
sentiments or wishes, the power which the Delegates
and their followers could wield would be at once
enormously increased, while the Masters would find
their means of resistance so seriously crippled that they
would probably be willing to submit without an effort
in many cases in which at present they can hold their
own successfully. Now, such changes in the law as
would be necessary to insure these advantages to the
Men are not, indeed, formally and expressly demanded.
The law as it ought to be is rather an ideal standard,
to which it is hoped that the law as it is may more or
less nearly be approximated, and it is scarcely attempted
to conceal the purpose of the men in the changes they have
demanded. The Report of the Commissioners is, there-
fore, on the whole, unfavourable to the men. The law on
all points, is to be maintained essentially; but here and
there a particular provision is to be altered which has
had an unfair effect, and is, therefore, opposed to the i
equal justice which is desirable. It s suggested, for
example, either that breaches of contract "of an
aggravated character "—a phrase in the Master and
Servant Act for which no proper definition has been
given—shall be clearly defined, or that the special
penalties laid down for them shall be repealed; that
in all instances in which strictly penal consequences are
involved the case of the defendant shall be tried, if he
wishes it, at the Quarter Sessions, and not by the local
magistrates; and that the general law of conspiracy shall
be declared not to admit of an interpretation recently
put upon it on the authority of Baron Pollock. It
might almost be thought, at first sight, that on this
last point the Commissioners were refreshing them-
selves with a joke, and that the real purpose of their
recommendation was merely to express with a some-
what forcible irony, their own conviction, obviously
correct, that the law had been improperly declared.
But it must be remembered that until Baron Pollock's
ruling has been reversed, or until the law on which it
was founded has been altered, it holds perfectly good.
We must see, therefore, in the suggestion of the Com-
raissioners rather a legal reverence for precedents,
however erroneous, than a wish to pour gentle ridicule
on a very unfortunate mistake, and one, too which has
done more than almost anything else to lend some ap-
pearance of justice to the very exaggerated language of
Trades' Union Delegates.

The question of the jurisdiction by which cases be-
tween employers and workmen are to be determined
is a special and separate one and on this point, too,
the Commissioners recommend some changes, but not
all that the workmen themselves have not unnaturally
desired. They freely acknowledge that there have
been a good many instances in which the law has
been improperly administered by the Magistrates, and
that there has even been some room for the suspicion
which the Men have entertained that the judgments
delivered against thorn have been dictated bx class
Poi 4dicee! The remedy which tho
_

propose is, partly, to allow in certain specified cases an
option to the Men of electing to be tried at Quarter
sessions; partly, to change the law in some points in
which its uncertain language has readily lent itself to
misinterpretation. But they do not recommend that
every case which arises under the Labour Laws shall
be tried before a Stipendiary Magistrate or a County
Court Judge, to the exclusion of the lower and, we
must admit, less trustworthy tribunals. The work
which the paid administrators of the law would be
thus compelled to undertake would, they think, be ex-
cessive, and it would be necessary very largely to aug-
ment their numbers if they were to do efficiently all
that would soon be required of them. The demand
of the workmen, therefore, must be looked upon simply
as a protest against the existence of an unpaid magis-
tracy, and, so regarded, it opens obviously too wide a
question for any body of Commissioners who were not
appointed for the express purpose of inquiring into it.