1875] LABOUR LEGISLATION 365 maintain solvency. It established the Friendly Societies, and with them the people's savings, on a satisfactory basis. But the most important legislation of the session dealt with the relation of master and man. Hitherto the workman had been severely handicapped in his contentions with his employer about wages and conditions of service by two rules of law coming down from a state of society antecedent to the industrial epoch. In the first place, breach of contract by the workman was regarded, and punished, as a criminal offence, while the employer in a like case was only liable in the civil courts; and, in the second place, the doctrine of 'conspiracy' among workmen was applied in such a way as to cover the normal actions of trade unions, and to bring their promoters within reach of the criminal law. By two Bills which Cross introduced, in pursuance of the report of the Royal Commission of the previous year, both these wrongs were righted. The one made employers and workmen equal before the law as regards labour contracts, constituting breach of contract merely a civil offence on the part of a workman as it had always been on the part of an employer. The other made 'conspiracy as applied to trade disputes no longer a crime, except when it was for the purpose of committing what would be a crime if done by one person. These two Acts, said a Trade Union Manual of Labour Laws of the day, were the charter of the social and industrial freedom of the working classes; and the Labour member, Alexander Macdonald, in the House, and the Labour Congress formally in the autumn, thanked the Government warmly for passing them. The Acts which have been already described were by no means the whole crop garnered by the Government in this fertile session of constructive social legislation. The interests of agricultural tenants were not forgotten, but Disraeli himself piloted a Bill through the House of Commons by which the tenant obtained compensation for unexhausted improvements, a presumption of law being created in his favour, while at the same time freedom of contract between landlord and tenant was preserved. Moreover, the protection of merchant seamen from the dangers of unseaworthy ships was undertaken in circumstances to which we shall recur. Finally, Cross in this same session consolidated and improved the whole sanitary code in the Public Health Act the foundation on which all subsequent amendment in detail has been built. After 1875 there was never again, during the lifetime of the Government, a session untroubled by serious foreign or imperial complications; but, though the pace was necessarily slower, steady progress was made throughout with social reform. The greatest and most important work of all was to put the coping-stone on that edifice of factory legislation which Shaftesbury had gradually reared, with the steady support of Disraeli and of Young England,' in the teeth of the bitter opposition of Bright and the Manchester school. In their very first session, 1874, the Government had remedied the wrong done in 1850, when the ten hours' day which Parliament had decreed in 1847 for women and children was for administrative reasons enlarged, in face of strong opposition by Disraeli and John Manners, to a ten-and-a-half hours' day.1 Fifty-six hours a week, or ten hours on five week-days and six on Saturday, was the total allowed by the Act of 1874; and even this modification was opposed by the individualist Fawcett, and, in the division lobby, by 79 Liberals. Then in 1878 the whole intricate series of factory laws were brought under review, improved, and codified by a Consolidation Act, of which Shaftesbury spoke in the Lords with unbounded satisfaction. He said that he was lost in wonder at the amount of toil, of close investigation, and of perseverance involved in its preparation; two millions of people in this country would bless the day when Cross was appointed Home Secretary. Nor were the Factory Acts the only measures passed by this Government ameliorating the circumstances of labour. Hosiery manufacture was brought under the Truck Acts 1 See Vol. III., p. 254. 1875] THE PEOPLE AND NATURE'S BOUNTY 367 in 1874; provision for inspecting and regulating canal boats was made in 1877; and in 1876 permanent and humane conditions were laid down for merchant shipping. In these ways the Government effected a notable improvement in the conditions of labour; but it was on the old lines of Shaftesbury's movement. In another field they broke new ground. They reversed the old policy of the Enclosure Acts, which encouraged the conversion of common land into private and therefore presumably productive occupation; and, in view of the rapid development of the urban population and the necessity of securing for it the enjoyment of grass and light and air, prevented by an Act of 1876 any further enclosure save where it would be a public as well as a private benefit, and promoted free access to commons and their use as public playgrounds. In a similar spirit, in 1878, Ministers secured, by the Epping Forest Act, the unenclosed portion of that wild tract on the verge of East London to the use of the public for ever. In these acts they were putting into effect a policy in which Mr. Shaw Lefevre, who (as Lord Eversley) is still with us, and Henry Fawcett, so often a foe to Disraeli's legislation, were pioneers; but both these reformers opposed the Enclosure Bill, because it was not, in their opinion, sufficiently drastic. With the like object of preserving the bounty of Nature free and uncontaminated for the people's enjoyment Ministers passed in 1876 the Rivers Pollution Act, absolutely prohibiting the introduction of solid matter into rivers securing them from further pollution by sewage, and imposing upon manufacturers the liability to render harmless the liquid flowing from their works. Here, as so often in their sanitary legislation, the strongest opposition with which Ministers met was from an eminent Radical in this instance Dilke. While passing these measures of material sanitation, the Government in no way neglected the mental and spiritual health of the people. Indeed, their record in the promotion of education was a substantial one. In 1876 they widely extended the benefit of elementary education by a Bill amending Forster's Act of 1870; in 1877 they reformed by the agency of statutory commission the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, making the revenues of the Colleges more available for educational purposes: while in 1878 and 1879 they materially improved Irish education — university, secondary, and elementary — first, by establishing an examining and degree-giving Royal University to meet in some degree the claims of the Roman Catholics; next, by taking a million from the Irish Church fund to encourage secondary education by means of exhibitions to successful students and of grants to managers of efficient schools; and finally by establishing out of the same fund a proper system of pensions for national school teachIn the sphere of spiritual sanitation, besides the respect for the religious needs of the people which a critical body of Dissenters and secularists in Parliament found only too clearly expressed in the terms of the English educational Bills, the Government encouraged the Church of England to extend her usefulness by extending her episcopate as advocated by Disraeli himself in 1864; passing Bills for the creation of new dioceses of St. Albans and Truro in 1875 and 1876, and a more general Bill in 1878, under which no fewer than four additional sees, Liverpool, Newcastle, Wakefield and Southwell, were authorised. It was the greatest ecclesiastical reform since the Reformation, said Tait, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the House of Lords. ers. Such in general scope was the code of social and sanitary legislation which Disraeli's great Ministry established for the people of this country. It took the practical pressing needs of the working population one by one, and found a remedy for them, without inflicting hardship on any other class, or affecting our historical institutions in any way, save to strengthen their hold on popular affections. palace is not safe, when the cottage is not happy,' Disraeli had said at a Wynyard Horticultural Show in 1848; and he did his best in the 1874-1880 Ministry to make the one The 1875] TORY DEMOCRACY IN ACTION 369 safe by making the other happy. Well might Alexander Macdonald tell his constituents in 1879, 'The Conservative party have done more for the working classes in five years than the Liberals have in fifty.' The work then done has had of course to be extended and supplemented in many respects, but in its main outlines it has stood the test of time. The aspirations of Sybil and 'Young England,' the doctrines in which Disraeli had 'educated' his party for thirty years, the principles laid down in the great speeches of 1872, were translated into legislative form; it was Tory democracy in action. Gorst, who, owing to his position as party organiser, was in close touch with Disraeli during these years, has expounded in an impressive passage 1 what he understood the domestic policy of his 'ancient master' to be. The principle of Tory democracy is that all government exists solely for the good of the governed; that Church and King, Lords and Commons, and all other public institutions are to be maintained so far, and so far only, as they promote the happiness and welfare of the common people; that all who are entrusted with any public function are trustees, not for their own class, but for the nation at large; and that the mass of the people may be trusted so to use electoral power, which should be freely conceded to them, as to support those who are promoting their interests. It is democratic because the welfare of the people is its supreme end; it is Tory because the institutions of the country are the means by which the end is to be attained. It is a proof of Disraeli's greatness, and of the soundness of his conception, that the stamp printed by him on Tory policy has persisted, though it has sometimes been obscured by accretions of class and party interest. Gorst, indeed, whose relations with his party became increasingly uncomfortable until he finally quitted it, held that only Randolph Churchill and his immediate comrades carried on the Tory democratic tradition. This tradition was perhaps not the aspect of Disraeli's work that specially appealed to his 1 In a letter in The Times of Feb. 6, 1907. |