The Outlook in Britain.

Press, Volume LXII, Issue 18671, 21 April 1926, Page 8

The Outlook in Britain.

It is to be hoped that the "Daily "Express" will not be robbed to-day of "its great step towards peace" in the British coal industry. Five weeks after the publication of the Coal Commission's report Britain is still without a workable plan for keeping the industry going; and five weeks after publication means less than two weeks before the withdrawal of the subsidy. Nor is the trouble the indefiniteness of the report. It was in. definite on some issues, but on others it was almost contemptuously outspoken, arid publication was followed by such a generous measure of acceptance by the Government that the impasse must be otherwise explained. The explanation simply is that peace calls for a greater measure of selfdenial on both sides than either side is prepared to make. The men demanded nationalisation, and that has been condemned except with regard to mineral rights. The owners want Jower wages or a longer day or both, and the Commissioners have advised against any further demands from the men on the border-line of subsistence. But the Report also pointed out that many miners, with the subsidy, have been earning 76 shillings a week against 56 or 57 shillings earned by workers who have no subsidy, and simultaneously established the fact that some mineowners are making more out of the industry to-day, more by a good deal, than they were making before the war. The Report became indefinite only when it plunges into such generalities as that there must be a more earnest attempt at co-operation, a more intelligent application of the lessons of science, more patience, more patriotism, more courage and self-sacrifice and imagination.. Pronouncements of that kind do no good even if they do no harm, but the popular idea is that the crisis has come because neither the miners nor the owners could possibly make sacrifices and still live, and that is true of only a portion of them. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the whole situation is the fact that the outlook can be so black and the temper of the nation so calm. Everybody knows that if an agreement is not reached by the end of the month the miners may go on strike; and if the miners go out several of the other big unions may go out with their, or after them, precipitating such a struggle as the Empire has not seen for many years. It may in fact not be an Empire matter merely, but in the end an international one, and not merely international industrially, but international politically. We do not attach much importance in our Empire to the word "revolution," and nothing would be more foolish at the present stage than to suggest that we shall be compelled soon to attach more importance to it than wo have done in the past. But it certainly is the case that if a big strike comes a section of the strikers will do everything that .hey can do themselves, and call on sympathisers in Russia and elsewhere to do everything that they can do, to convert the upheaval into the British equivalent of the Russian upheaval of 1917. And yet within ten days of that possibility there is no sign anywhere of popular excitement, and no national indication, if we except the picturesque march of 20,000 women this week to the Albert Hall, that disorder is either threatened or feared. Sir William Joynson-Hicks seems to be the only man in the whole Empire who is no longer able to sleep.