Bradlaugh’s Last Article.

Evening Star, Volume 8505, Issue 8505, 2 May 1891, Page 4

Bradlaugh’s Last Article.

A CHARACTERISTIC ARGUMENT IN SCI’POHT OF THE INDIVIDUALIST IDEAL. The Februaiy number of tho ‘New Review ’ contains Mr Bradlaugh’s last contribution to periodical literature. It is a reply to Mr Bernard Shaw’s article in the previous number on the ‘Socialist Ideal’ from the political point of view. “ I will, in my advocacy of individualism,” he says at the outset, “ quite -exclude from the scope of this paper the Socialism which, either in grim earnest or in merry, or is it cynical, jest proposes ' to take every square foot of land and every penny of the capital in the country and to make them public property,’ especially as this taking is to ‘ be effected by coercion ’ and * without any further compensations than those which, ample though they may be, the proprietary classes have not been educated to appreciate.’ The scores of thousands of owners of single houses, and of small plots of land acquired in land and building societies through years of careful thrift; the hundreds of thousands of storers up of small economies in the various savings banks ; tho numerous array of small investors in the co-operative societies, will form some reliant resistant quantity to the threatened confiscation by coercion. I should like to see even the Fabian lecturer who would have calm confidence enough to ask a crowded audience gathered in any one of the numerous cooperative halls of the Midlands, or of the North, to abandon for ever all hope of ‘ divvy,’ and to graciously surrender to a new Socialistic Government the corpus of their hardly-acquired shares.” “I am au individualist,” he continues, “ as far as one wisely can be in such a country as our own. If I were in the great North-west of the Dominion, far away from Ottawa or Montreal, or if I were in Western Australia, 500 miles or more from Perth, I should be still more individualist. I hold that the Legislature ought not to limit the freedom of the adult individual except to prevent or punish crime, or to prevent, or to give remedy for, damages in the cases of matters which, not being regarded as crime, are admittedly injurious to the life, health, comfort, or property of the community in general, or of its individual members. I even deny the right of the State to inflict other punishment for crime than may be reasonably considered as preventive of the happening of similar crime. I admit that it is often exceedingly difficult to draw the line between the sphere of executive and individual action, and in all such cases I am inclined not to allow or authorise the State to interfere, except under very overwhelming evidence of general advantage resulting.” Mr Bradlaugh, after explaining his position with regard to the Truck Act which was directed against fraud, and answering his apparent antiindividualist attitude on other questions, turns to the question of the hours of labor. He holds that all questions of hours and wages “ should be, and can best be, settled in each industry in conciliatory conference between employers and employed. Parliament ought not to have the duty of pronouncing, for it has neither the requisite knowledge nor sufficient leisure to differentiate from year to year in the varying circumstances of each industry; nor is it possible in practice to make one hard and fast rule that shall serve for all.” The municipalisation of industries he regards as “ either superfluous or it is mischievous.” “To ask that local authorities shall compete with ordinary manufacturers is, if the industry is reasonably profitable, unneessary, for private enterprise will greedily seek out such occasions for getting return on capital. In the cases of unprofitable undertakings tho loss will be so much utterly wasted capital, which will have to be reimbursed from the local rates, and which loss will have reduced the profits and lessened the purchasing power of wages earned in any profitable businesses conducted within the jurisdiction of such local authority.” Returning to the hours question, he observes; “ Where excessive hours may, as in the case of railway workers, involve danger to life and limb of others, the duty of the Legislature under whose authorisation such enterprises exist is to interfere, and it may well do so by making the fact of such undue employment involve a prima Jacie case for damages against the railway company where injury results, and by making the high officials criminally responsible where accident to life or limb has followed. Nor do I see anything unfair, when a railway company comes Parliament for privilege and powers without which it cannot conduct its business, that Parliament shall, in granting those privileges, annex such conditions as to hours of working as it thinks fit in respect to such occupations as signalmen, guards, or engine-drivers, where inattention resultant from weariness has caused lossof life and grievous bodily injury to the general public.” Mr Bradlaugh next produces an array of figures to show “ steady growing thrift of the industrial classes, which has slowly but certainly during the last fifty years, and especially during the past thirty years, changed and ameliorated the general condition of the masses,” He did not hope that there would be any “ legislation on the points glanced at” in this “practically moribund Parliament ” ; but electioneering speeches would be made in the House. “There is hesitancy,” he says, “lest offence may be given to voters ”; but certainly not in this case. Towards the end of the article he says Now, with generally increased education there is a natural growing desire for a higher standard of comfort. This is good, and should be encouraged : but men should be stimulated to achieve their own betterment, not be taught to look to the Executive Government for an amelioration which is only permanently possible by individual initiative and exertion. I note the word ‘ blackleg ’ figures in the advocacy of Socialism in politics printed in your last issue, as it often figures in Socialist speeches ; but the so called ‘blackleg’ is mostly only an honest man with a hungry wife and starving children, who is trying to work for food instead of begging or stealing.” Concerning the future he expresses himself thus: “The people will have the suffrage control, but they will seldom exercise it unitedly except under pressure of emotion, sympathy, indignation, or hunger. On settled thought-out policy they will be at least as much divided as the governing classes have hitherto been. On Imperial policy as touching, say, the Maoris, the Zulus, the dwellers in Central Africa, and even the millions of our fellow-sufferers in India, they will be indifferent; these are far away. On Imperial as affecting relations with great foreign Powers there will too often be a strong Jingo tendency, for national antipathies are _ very easily aroused. It is on home policy in hard times that we need to revive the old brave spirit of endurance manifested by our Lancashire cotton weavers nearly thirty years ago.”