Appendix Ii

By Miss Mary Macarthur

The Taff Vale decision struck a vital blow at trade-union organization, and while the case was still finally undecided the leaders of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants called on Sir Charles for advice. Afterwards, when the judgment was upheld, his services were unreservedly at the command of the Parliamentary Committee of the Trade-Union Congress.

He assisted the committee in 1901 at a conference in which Mr. Asquith, Sir Robert Reid, and Mr. Haldane, committed the Liberal party to the initiation of legislation to reverse the Taff Vale decision, and shortly afterwards played a similar part in an interview with Lord James of Hereford and the late Lord Ritchie, who spoke as representing the then Government. The second conference was also satisfactory, since it drew from Lord James the emphatic opinion that workmen on strike were entitled in their own interest to use moral suasion to prevent their places being taken by others.

The Tory party did not, however, take Lord James's view, and a resolution proposing the restoration of the status quo before the Taff Vale judgment was defeated in the House of Commons by a majority of 29. In May, 1903, a Bill introduced by Mr. D. J. Shackleton to legalize picketing shared the same fate; while an even more ominous event was the appointment by the Government of a Royal Commission on which Labour was unrepresented, and before which the leaders of the trade-union movement refused to appear.

Arguments in favour of compromise were put forward at the Trade-Union Congress of 1903, which followed closely on the rejection of Mr. Shackleton's Bill, and during the next three years the position of the unions became continuously more precarious. It looked as though trade- unions were beginning, in the phrase of Mr. Bell, to "exist very much on sufferance."

In this crisis Sir Charles was an inexhaustible source of strength. On everyone he could reach and influence he pressed the policy of standing firm, and the continuing reverses of the Tory party at by-elections played into his hands.

The Tories accepted the decision of their constituents to the extent that Mr. Shackleton's Bill, rejected in 1903, obtained second reading by 39 votes in 1904, and by 122 in 1905. But dislike of the measure had not abated; so many vexatious amendments were embodied in the Bill in Committee as to render it worse than useless; and at last all but the Tory members retired from the Grand Committee in disgust, and the Bill was discharged from the House. But in 1906 came the General Election, by which the Labour party found itself abruptly in the enjoyment of prominence and power.

Faced with responsibility for legislation, the Liberal Government abated something of their pre-election zeal, and introduced a measure which would have given only conditional immunity to the trade-unions; but an indignant Labour party, having secured a majority of 300 for a thoroughgoing measure of their own, were prepared to oppose the Bill of the Government, and this Bill was remodelled on Labour party lines.

The result was seen by everyone, but very few people understood how at every stage the member for the Forest of Dean had intervened, using to the utmost his powerful influence in the one camp to fix the trade- unionists in their demand for complete reversal of the Taff Vale judgment and the prevention of its recurrence, and in the other to bring about an unequivocal acceptance of the demand.