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LABOUR MOVEMENTS IN EUROPE
AJSD AMERICA.
THB FBBHCH WOBXXHn'8 COJTOEESS.
A somewhat novel step has been taken by
Messrs. Oassell, Fetter, * Galpin, a large pub
lishing firm in London, which b none the lets
generous because it is likely to turn oat to be
iruaens. xney nave set apart tor me year
1878 a sum of £600 oat of their profits, and
propose to add a similar sum every year, in
order to form a fund for the benefit of their
workpeople. Every employe who has been -
seven yean in their service will be entitled to
£25 if he becomes unfit for Work by accident,
disease, or old age (reckoned at 65) ; or if he die*
in] harness this sum will be paid to his
representatives. Every workman or workwoman
who has continued 14 years in the, firm's employ
will receive £37 10s. ; if 21 years,' £50— on the '
same conditions. In the case of first-class
clerks these sums will be increased by one-half,
in the case of overseers and managing clerks '
they will be doubled. These payments are free
gifts, intended as rewards for faithful service,
and as the firm reserve the right to dismiss any
man who does not do his work properly, and as
thejpayment does not depend on the profits of
the business, they are not hampered by any
thing like partnership. It is not improbable
that thb promised gratuity will secure for this
firm the best woikmen, and will be an infallible
preventive of strikes. Indeed, looking at the
labour question all over the world one cannot
but see in this a means of lessening the antago
nism between labour and capital so injurious to
both.
The strike amongst the manufacturing popu
lation Lancashire has ended ; the strike
amongst the South Wales colliers and iron
workers b still doisg incalculable mischief. The
new National party in America, which is so
strong in Pennsylvania, New York, Maine, Con
necticut, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin,
California, and Oregon that it looks forward to
carrying the elections there and to influencing
greatly all other States, brings forward a pro
gramme dangerously Communistic; and the
strike among the railway employes in America
was attended with more violence and more
destruction of property than even those of older
countries, where education is less universal
and where the conditions of life are harder.
communism aoes not succeea in America any
more than in Australia in tbe form in which it
appeared in the Paris of 1871 or in Germany
and Russia to-day. But it appears in the guise
of the working man's friend, and thb is the pro
gramme which it unfolds : — An inflated cur
rency and an extreme type of protection ; the
undertaking of large public works in order to
give employment ; the chocking of the aggres
sions of accumulated wealth ; the redaction of
the hours of labour; the abolition of convict
labour; the lowering of the rate of interest to 3
or 4 per cent.; and tho curtailment of the
powers of Corporations.' These changes are
loudly demanded by this so-called National
party, which, taking advantage of a period of
depression, has enlisted the sympathy and
the hopes of the poorer working men all over
the States. Unchecked issues of greenbacks and
the heavy protective duties, which have really
brought about the bad times, are looked on as
the means of curing them. If convict labour is
abolished the convioU must be maintained
entirely by the labour of honest men. The
lowering of the rate of interest would prevent a
poor man from deriving the full benefit of his
savings, and would act as a bar to his ever
obtaining any needed advance for improving his
property or condition. In Australia it is perhaps
less the high rate of wages than the high rate of
profit and interest that b to the working man's
advantage. The higher wages indeed give a larger
margin for self-restraint and prudence to save
from, but the higher interest and the numerous
profitable and safe investments make these savings
doubly valuable for old age or as a help to a man in
rising to an easier and pleasanter life. Th«
undertaking of great public works may and does
give an impetus to the labour market for a time,
but b invariably followed by increased taxation,
which must fall eventually on the body of the
people.
It b very extraordinary that at a time when
England and her colonies and the United States
of America, which have been hitherto remark,
able for decentralization and independence of
State interference and regulation, are looking
more and more to Government works and
Government expenditure and Government regu
lation for the benefit of the working man,
France, nurtured in protection, accustomed to
the idea that the State should be the nursing
mother of industry, b throwing aside patent
plans for curing social evils and for putting an
end to poverty and vice by legislative enact
ment and supervision. Few things more note
worthy are to be met with in the nnnaia of
labour in modern times than the proceedings at
the French Workmen's Congress, held at Lyons
early this year. If inferior to their Englbh
analogue, the Trades Union Congress, in know
ledge of practical details and in their powers of
debate and discussion on matters of immediate
interest, the French workmen and workwomen
exhibited a wider and deeper grasp of their
subject, and the addresses were of a degree of
intellectual and literary excellence worthy of a
place in the best periodicals of either nation.
It must be recollected in considering this «nbj«ct
thattrades unionism in illegal in France, and both
the preliminary associations and the delegates
appointed by them for tho Lyons Congress
might have been at any moment dispersed by
the police. After so long a term of manhood
Suffrage and BO many re»u/uwuua iu which me
claims of the owner or working man— as dis
tinguished from the louryt'jis shopkeeper or the
small propertied peasant — constantly came to the
front, Franre is 40 years behind England in
protective factory legislation, which has been
recently consolidated so ably by Mr. Croiw, and
in the freedom to form Trades Unions which
that Minister has legalized. Their only factory
law— that of 1574— is a dead letter and over
ridden both by the demands of employers
and the competition of the employed. Another
thing that Btrikea one i* that ther« b no
sympathy and no co-operation for the ameliora
tion of the condition of th« workman and of
female and juvenil* kbour'from politician!,
great employers, or influential public write™,
and that tbeFrench working people feel th»t they

most themselves work oat their own redemp
tion. Tteir jealousy and abhorrence of State
interference would satisfy Mr. Herbert Spencer
bimielf, and the only demands they make at
the bands of the Legislature are in matters of
detail, nearly every one of which is at work in
England. That the hoars of female labour
should be no longer than those of men;
that youDg apprentices in factories and
workshops should have a limit as to age
and instead of being worked from 12
to IS hours a day should be protected
by an effective Factory Act ; that night-work
for women and girls should be prohibited ; and
above all that workmen and workwomen should
have power to unite and to discus* industrial
matters were the main objects they kept in
immediate view, and if we take their wider
Tiews as the expression of general opixion one
can see that Socialism so far as it is communistic
and aggressive is dead in France. Boyet, a
working jeweller, spoke of the danger of
Trades Unions falling into the error of the old
Guilds, and stifling individuality, which is
genius ; he repudiated the aid of the State, he
denounced the Black International. He warn -d
his fellows of those foreigners without country
who preach universal brotherhood. He believes
in patriotism and education being strong
enough to solve the stiff economic pro
blem, without protection, without calling on
the intervention of the State, from which be
only demands one thing— liberty. This sieaker
? it down amidst loud applause. Two women —
Mine Ficet, a silk-winder of 20; and Maria
Vincest, of the 'Women's Union of Lyons —
made eloquent speeches on the low pay, the
long hours, and the unhealthy and immoral con
ditions under which women and children
worked, and denounced the competition of
prison and convent labour, but demanded that
prison work should be paid for at current wages
— not like the American National party that it
should be abolished altogether. Josephine
Andre, washerwoman ef Paris, brought up a
report, which was adopted, for the re
gulation of the labour of women and
children. A delegate from the Agricul
turists of the Upper Saone complained
of the ignorance and the superstition
which impede progress in rural districts, bit
the most eloquent and the most original of all
the addresses were those of a young house
piinter named Finan:e, who had already dis
tinguished himself in the Congress of 1873. In
speaking cf industrial crises, he first touched on
thawidt spread misery caused by the introduc
tion of new machinery in the name of progress,
and suggested that as private property receives
compensation when injured for the public
a Wantage, these capitalists who are responsible
for such changes as affect injuriously their
workmen are responsible also for such measures
as will neutralize or mitigate their effects. He
likewise inveighed against the losses and misery
Closed by the caprice of the consumers, by which
one idle fashion in dress, furniture, and decora
tion it changed for another, and an industry is
paralyzed, as everything must be changed
with feverish vehemence, and the workman is
idle and starving half the month, to be driven
by overwork the other half. He blamed for this
bjth the employer and the consumer; the latter
for the criminal indifference of his caprice, the
former for his servility to his customers. And
83 far as the working men and women whom he
addressed fwere employers and consumers he
urged them to practise what they preached.
He trusted to an improved tone of public opinion
alone to effect a change, and that tone his
fellow-workmen must themselves produce.
He aimed at ameliorating the work of
women in the meantime, bat looked at its
giadual diminution, so that they might qui*
factory work altogether, and take their proper
duty of directing education and managing the
home. For those great industrial crises which
must happen, even with the best organizations
of labour, the working people must provide by
insurance funds, and public authorities and
municipalities in particular could do mn-'h to
mitigate them by a wise distributi m of public
works.
Our yonn.; house-painter would no doubt look
with approval on the scheme of Messrs. OasselJ,
Petter, & Galpin referred to above. And to
those, who in America and in Australia fly
to Go /eminent with petitions for em
p'oyment on great and new under
takings we recommend the consideration of
Finance'.* limited recourse to such assistance.
The delegate of the engineers of Grenoble con
fessed that he came to the Congress with a
mandate to demand the help of the State for
superannuated workmen, but since he hadhjard
the powerful speeches from the tribune, and the
spirit of this Congress of 140 representative
men and women (all with one or two exceptions
working people), he bad become convinced that
the State could give no true help, and might in
a moment become an enemy. As to the relations
between town and country, and especially
between the conservative and tuj«rstitious
peasant proprietary of the agricultural districts
and the intelligent and emancipated Parisian
population, Finance again spoke with eloquence
and yot with rare moderation. He warned the
Assembly against bringing forward crude ideas
of socialism and community to the peasant, who
loved the acres he had watered with the sweat of
bis brow, and who would seize bis gun to defend
his bien — his property — even though twenty
years of a despotic empire, wide spread corrup
tion, atd heavy taxation should be the end of it.
Finance looks on community or collectivism in
laad as a step back, and not a step forward, and
holds to personal property as the best, if it is
regulattd, not by a new legislation, but by a
new morality. In the same way he looks on
the Family which has gone through the same
variations as Property as sacred, and considers
the unlimited liberty of divorce, which is oneof the
demands if the Communistic party in Germany
and Russia, as a retrograde step towards the col
lective views of ancestors sunk in barbarism.
Nothing in this speech is finer than the protest
against the despotism of the majority, anl
against the ignorant and impatient desire to ex
tinguish abuses by abolishing what has been
abased. If these utterances are really repre
sentative of the opinions of French, working men
anl women it must be acknowledged that France
has made enormous strides in moral and econo
mic science; and in any case the tone and
temper of this Congress of Lyons might be
imitated with advantage by Anglo-Saxons in
£ gland, in America, and in Australia.

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