EDUCATION AND STRIKES.

Press, Volume VII, Issue 682, 5 January 1865, Page 3

EDUCATION AND STRIKES.

The following interesting letter on the! education of mechanics, the great superiority to which as a class they have attained by the high standard of education as compared with what existed in past years, and the influence which a still wider and more progressive method of instruction may be expected to have in leading them to adjust trade disputes in other ways than by strikes, was communicated to the Tiiries by the able and philanthropic writer who signs his letters with the well-known initials S. G. O. It was stated at one of the Social Science meetings that the large employers of labor in the manufacturing districts were withdrawing their subscriptions in aid of education, on the ground that the increased disposition of the operatives to combine and act on the labor-market by means of " strikes " was in some degree the result of the education they had received. This opinion of the masters may, perhaps, appear to them as being well founded, but if so, is it an argument to be used to arrest the education of the workmen ? I think it certainly is not. There is a very wide difference between the action of education of a high standard upon the operative of a manufactory and its action in the case of an agricultural laborer. In the latter, the work upon which he enters when he leaves school is of the simplest character, requiring little from him beyond ordinary intelligence, health, and proper attention to the orders given to him by his master. Xot so is it with the mechanics in any large brunch of manufacture; these men have to deal with a great variety of tools, to perfect their share of a great variety of work executed on material at one time of the finest and most delicate texture, at another of coarse and intractable quality, only to be dealt with by great force of hand, aa well as skill of hand and brain. The machinery in co-operation with which they have to work is of the most complicated character, requiring considerable intelligence to direct its power to properly deal with the material submitted to it. In every factory, in every mining operation, it is of the first importance that the majority of the employed should have at least that share of intelligence which will secure habits of caution in regard to the risks the property of the employer and the lives of the employed must be exposed to, where so much depends on the accidental disarrangement of the machinery and those many elements of danger which are inevitable where the work sought to be done can only be safely attempted with great watchfulness, lest any disturbance of the vast power used, any avertible mischief from the nature of the material or the scene of work, should for want of this caution have been left unguarded against. It requires a well-exercised brain in boyhood to prepare the man for the incessant demand on his judgment and nicety of calculation that the great proportion of skilled labour now requires. Those who have to be trusted as " the hands" to perfect by their labour the wonderful productions of the manufactories of the present day, need not simply the intelligence and skilled manipulation which to-day's inventions may demand, but power to follow in the steps of each day's fresh inventions. If, on the one hand, we are told that the brain of the engineer can know no rest, but must ever be on the watch to push further the wonderful achievements of machinery, will they who tell us so dispute that there is with each novel application of machinery a new demand for increased skill and intelligence in the workman ? It is just with this class that the education I think overdone in the case of the children of the farm labourer can scarcely with their children be so. Born of parents of a higher intellectual type, bred in homes where from their earliest days they are brought into contact with so much that concerns mechanical power, the skill of mechanics, they are brain-fitted and home-fostered in a more intellectual atmosphere, and are thus, when very young, led to value the school's teaching, as leading up to much on which the home's comfort so greatly depends. At the very commencement of the battle of life, when first they enlist in the array of our skilled operative force, they find all they have to do easier done by the use of knowledge gained at school; growing up among men of intelligence, their faculties, so far from being depressed by the nature of their labor, are quickened by it; they continue to improve in knowledge by the use of the power to improve they first obtained at school; their worldly interest, the field of their labor, is no village-bounded field ; they work, and they know it, as it were, for the world at large, and soon ta.ke more or less interest in all those world changes which directly aifect their own particular branch of trade. War and peace, national prosperity or adversity, the interruption from any cause of the progress of trade, are things which come home to them with peculiar force. No wonder they do read newspapers, have their readiug-rooms, clubs, &c, have ears to hearken to and eyes to study matters which affect the condition of their own class —the operative hands by whom the great commercial community work out their wealth: those to whom large " demand " is the harbinger of good, for it is from their labor the " supply " must proceed, to whom a dull market is prophetical of short time and diminished earnings. It is true some portion of what they learnt at school is forgotten, but it is not the case with them as with form laborers, that what they have preserved is found to decrease. No, the reading, writing, arithmetic, that training in how to learn they had received, all very soon proves its own value to them, it is for ever more or less available in their work ; a« they advance in skill and are pro-

moted to a higher class of work they still find more profit in mental cultivation. As their business in life calls for the exercise of all their knowledge and encourages them to seek more, so, with this value for it in life's toil, they find also it has its value in life's recreation. They are inevitably led into tastes for extraneous matters ; tne appetite for news seeks its food in newspapers; those they will naturally like the best relating the news of the day, and comment on it in the interest of their class. Cheap literature gives them a great variety of reading, some purely instructive, some combining a little instruction with much amusement, with about the same amount of good and evil miscellaneous compositions as falls to the lot of other classes of readers. Should we ever have had the co-operative movement and all those various institutions which prove the growing providence of the operative class had they been less educated ? Are not these good evidence of the intellectual progress developing in a sound and wholesome direction ? Should we have had that noble scene of patient submission to ruin and suffering shown in the time of the distress in the cottou districts—that noble exhibition of patient loyalty —had not the operatives of our day become far wiser than our forefathers. We owe our commerce to our national industry, the skilled use of capital, and' the labor of those to whom it gives employment. Neither would avail to increase our home wealth and foster our foreign trade, were we not a people at peace among ourselves. It is not because we have coal aud iron at our feet that we have outrun so many in the race, in which the power of these has made us so strong and swift, but because, having them, using them with such industry, property, the result of that industry, is respected and protected to a degree unknown in other nations. There is ever the great inducement to seek its possession in the fact that it can be peaceable and in all safety be enjoyed. I can well remember the days when any great distress among the operatives ever led to the cropping up of political and social sedition, and this to such an amount as to threaten the safety of our whole social fabric, begetting a degree of illwill between the employers and the employed, most disastrous to the interest of both ; for ever bringing large masses of ignorant, misguided men into direct conflict with the strong arm of the civil power. The coolest heads among the statesmen of those days viewed with the deepest apprehension a condition of things which, if left undealt with, would lead to the wildest anarchy, only at last to be put down by bringing the English soldier, on English ground, into direct collision with his fellowcountrymen. Is it so now ? If it is not, is it that the operatives are men of another race, or that education has made them wiser men, men who know the value of good government, who know it as a protector to themselves, who may yet be sometimes led to seek their ends unwisely, but who are yet too wise to seek them by direct open violence ? It is in vain to protest against trade unions; these are days of " interest." Do we not see it in the House of Commons ? Who can dispute but that " interests" do there combine, and bring pressure upon every Government to legislate in the direction they believe to be the best for their own particular selves ? We may regret that the interests of the master and the servant, the employer and the employed, are not made so identical in practice as we make them to be in theory. It is, however, folly to expect that each will not in this world seek his own first. The labor of the operative is as much his own to deal with as is the capital of his employer; both are put out to usury ; no legal pressure, no force of human reasoning will convince either party that they may not choose their own market. Or, if they so please, let capital and labor, the one or the other, be for a time at rest, if they think it likely to promote their interests. A " strike," in nine cases out of ten, is a most disastrous, unwise stroke of policy on the part of the operatives. It is a deliberate casting on the savings of past days and the present earnings of others the support of masses who were just now producers as well as consumers, but who thus become, in their own case, consumers of a store for which they have now ceased to produce anything, and also a burden for their support upon those who are still producers of that which they should, after supporting themselves, store or put out to profit for their own benefit. Of all the curses which afflict humanity civil war is one of the worst, and yet out of such a war good has been known to arise; nations have thrown off the yoke of the tyranny which oppressed their consciences or ground down their liberty; thus have they regained the freedom of thought and action which was denied them. A " strike" is of the nature of a civil war. To produce wealth, capital must combine with labor; J to secure its daily support and any improvement in its condition, labor must league with capital; in alliance they have wrought out the great commercial triumphs of the day; acting as opponents they have again and again arrested the progress of the national welfare, brought the wealthy to ruin, and reduced to penury and despair thousands of the dwellers in humble homes, who had yet so dwelt in comparative comfort. Still, I hold it cannot be denied that just as civil war is and must ever be in itself a curse, but yet even as such may by some great force of circumstances become the only remedy for a state of things which has becomes morally and physically insupportable, and thus is a last, most grave, but stiji justifiable resort, so there may be exceptionable circumstances under which —however deplorable in its action, howeter opposed to all ordinary rule of right—a strike may- be justified. So that no law is no illegal or unjust compulsion is used on others

to compel them * *6ave \'JaauA be • denied tliat ihoke who choT.** to do bo infringe no law, as far as I know, human or Divine, ia withholding their labour from the market. To arrest men in the path of folly, surely you would not rear them when young without wisdom, to make the operatives as a class see that the weapon they now so rashly use has become the bane of all good feeling between themselves and their employers, is one the very last to which they should ever resort, to eausethem to perceive its manifest cruelty and injustice when forced into the hands of those who only under threats and compulsion would take it. It will scarcely be argued that we should limit early in life the exercise of their intellectual powers, be content to have them artificers of a lower standard for our own purposes, lest they shouldever turn ahigher standard of intellect to bad purpose in their own interest. In my opinion, the true policy lies quite in another direction. We should seek to draw wiser fruit by the promotion of a wiser and more advanced method of instruction. Already we have reaped the fruit of a sound loyalty to the [Sovereign and a general submission to all constituted authority. We know it to be the fact, all strange as it is, that no increase of crime came of that late period of distress to winch the operatives in the North were subject; education had given them the power to reason on its causes; they saw clearly they were such as no power of Government, no commercial foresight, no prudence on their own part, could have averted. I say this was a great educational triumph. Had those hundreds of thousands of starving, ruined men and women been such as I can recollect in their scene of labor, I fear it would have been a very different state of things. Why, then, should we despair that this class, still thoroughly well taught in youth, may yet in advanced life be led to see with truer judgment the interest they have in any possible rational adjustment of trade disputes as preferable to the " strike?" It may be yet some well-judging sound man, with a heart to feel interest in the welfare of the operative class, may write the history ox past "strikes," stating impartially their real origin, the exact nature of the matter in dispute, and the eventual result to the employer and employed; the fault has not always been on one side, and it would be a blessing to both to have the whole truth put calmly on record. In my opinion, the great majority of workmen in all trades are, even now, sufficiently well educated to be open to the teaching such a narrative would offer; if it is not so I accept the fact as a call for more, not less, education. Let the law, the strong arm of the civil power, boldly and firmly administered, put down all exercise of force, direct or indirect, by combinations of workmen to compel others to join them in a " strike." The law can do this j but no legal power can make men deeply reason upon those many causes which, for ever disturbing commerce, act alike on the welfare of the master and the servant. The experience gathered from the past has to be brought to bear on the exigency of the present hour. This is the work of cultivated intellect; the capitalist must do it, or he will have no safe guide for his investments ; the operative must do it, or he will have no safe rule by which, at any given moment, to value the worth of his labor. Is the former to have all the education his parents can obtain for him to fit him to bring matured reasoning power to his business, and yet are we to give the operative a scant allowance of education ? With all the bitter lessons which may be read in the records of mercantile ruin, do not capitalists for ever rush into transactions which prove that although they had high moral and intellectual teaching, they yet act the part of fblly, tainted with all the spirit of the worst of mere gamblers; and yet who says it is because they have had too much education. The demagogue who reaps Ms harvest wheresoever there is discontent, coupled with ignorance, to see whether it has just grounds, would wish only for education among the operatives which would give them a taste for reading and/for oratory without the discriminating power to .discovery the fallacies which exist in print, or ning falsehoods which may be clothed in eloquence. Turn over the files of the provincial papers in the daya of riots in the northern districts in by-gone days; examine the flysheets, placards, ballads of those days; study the speeches of the orators who then led, or rather, I should say, stirred the men—would such trash go down, now ? No! it would not take in the boy who oils the machineryof any workshop in the'kingdom. There are ever on the outskirts of every community a large mass of individuals whose idle habits and profligate lives have kept them in its lowest condition ; but too often the pressure of their numerical strength may be too much for the calm reason of the more industrious, and better class; it is these who but too often prolong a strike beyond the time when thoee who began it would dasire to see its end. They may have gained as mnch as they now see to be reasonable, or they may have seen they had. no real grounds of complaint. Alas ! they find that the vis inertia they have set in motion, the mass of idleness they have made industrious for mischief, now holds them to a source they deplore ; this may be, an argument to sprep4 -»„ education over a larger surface—it canhardly be one to lower its quality, We must. Sir, rest content to see year by year education produce more independence of opinion, yes, and of manner. The working classes will think more and more for themselves, they will hold themselves as higher v men. So be it; so it must be. £et us be prepared for the consequence, and try and teed growing intelligence with sound food, . meet and greet increasing self-respect with the respect to which it is entitled; Let us J not seek to dam back the intelligence of thia I ; great and important claae by blocking it at 1 its early source, but give the m stream all due space, seeking only to keep it J| within the banks of |ust isawon, X^jSf