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Page 14
He found in his path, which was also the nation's path, three great
foes--drunkenness, the old envenomed quarrel between employer and
employed, and that deep-rooted industrial conservatism of England, which
shows itself on the one hand in the trade-union customs and restrictions
of the working class, built up, as they hold, through long years, for the
protection of their own standards of life, and, on the other, in the
slowness of many of the smaller English employers (I am astonished,
however, at the notable exceptions everywhere!) to realise new needs and
processes, and to adapt themselves to them. Could any one have made such
an omelet without breaking a great many eggs? Is it wonderful that the
employers have sometimes felt themselves unbearably hustled, sometimes
misunderstood, and at other times annoyed, or worried by what seems to
them the red tape of the new Ministry, and its apparent multiplicity of
forms and inquiries?
Men accustomed to conduct their own businesses with the usual independence
of regulation have been obliged to submit to regulation. Workmen
accustomed to defend certain methods of work and certain customs of their
trade as matters of life and death have had to see them jeopardised or
swept away. The restoration of these methods and customs is solemnly
promised them after the war; but meanwhile they become the servants of a
public department almost as much under orders as the soldier himself. They
are asked to admit unskilled men to the skilled processes over which they
have long kept so jealous a guard; above all, they are asked to assent
wholesale to the employment of women in trades where women have never been
employed before, where it is obvious that their introduction taps an
immense reservoir of new labour, and equally obvious that, once let in,
they are not going to be easily or wholly dislodged.
Of course, there has been friction and difficulty; nor is it all yet at
an end. In the few danger-spots of the country, where heads are hottest,
where thousands of the men of most natural weight and influence are away
fighting, and where among a small minority hatred of the capitalist
deadens national feeling and obscures the national danger, there have been
anxious moments during the winter; there may possibly be some anxious
moments again.
But, after all, how little it amounts to in comparison with the enormous
achievement! It took us nine months to realise what France--which,
remember, is a Continental nation under conscription--had realised after
the Battle of the Marne, when she set every hand in the country to work at
munitions that could be set to work. With us, whose villages were
unravaged, whose normal life was untouched, realisation was inevitably
slower. Again we were unprepared, and again, as in the case of the Army
itself, we may plead that we have "improvised the impossible." "No
nation," says Mr. Buchan, "can be adequately prepared, unless, like
Germany, it intends war; and Britain, like France paid the penalty of her
honest desire for peace!"
Moreover, we had our Navy to work for, without which the cause of the
Allies would have gone under, must have gone under, at the first shock of
Germany. What the workmen of England did in the first year of the war in
her docks and shipyards, history will tell some day.
"What's wrong with the men!" cried a Glasgow employer indignantly to me,
one evening as, quite unknown the one to the other, we were nearing one of
the towns on the Clyde. "What was done on the Clyde, in the first months
of the war, should never be forgotten by this country. Working from six to
nine every day till they dropped with fatigue--and Sundays, too--drinking
just to keep themselves going--too tired to eat or sleep--that's what it
was--I saw it!"
I, too, have seen that utter fatigue stamped on a certain percentage of
faces through the Midlands, or the districts of the Tyne and the
Clyde--fatigue which is yet indomitable, which never gives way. How fresh,
beside that look, are the faces of the women, for whom workshop life is
new! In its presence one forgets all hostile criticism, all talk of
strikes and drink, of trade-union difficulties, and the endless worries of
the employers.
The English workman is not tractable material--far from it--and he is not
imaginative; except in the persons of some of his chosen leaders, he has
never seen a ruined French or Flemish village, and he was slow to realise
the bitterness of that silence of the guns on the front, when ammunition
runs short, and lives must pay. But he has sent his hundreds of thousands
to the fighting line; there are a million and a half of him now working at
munitions, and it is he, in a comradeship with the brain workers, the
scientific intelligence of the nation, closer than any he has yet known,
and lately, with the new and astonishing help of women--it is he, after
all, who is "delivering the goods," he who is now piling the great
arsenals and private works with guns and shells, with bombs, rifles, and
machine-guns, he who is working night and day in the shipyards, he who is
teaching the rising army of women their work, and making new and firm
friends, through the national emergency, whether in the trenches or the
workshops, with other classes and types in the nation, hitherto little
known to him, to whom he, too, is perhaps a revelation.
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