An unfulfilled prophecy 

An epilogue which commences by acknowledging the falsification of the prophetic paean which has preceded it may have its disadvantages from the point of view of dramatic unity, but it cannot be denied that it exhibits in the author the desirable qualities of candour and courage ; and if Prophecy be "the most gratuitous form of human error," surely a gratuitous advertisement by the Prophet of the failure of his Prophecy should be accounted the most commendable form of human penance.

The Masters' and Workmen's Alliance

Having said so much by way of anticipatory palliation, the revelation must be made that the projected Alliance between the Staffordshire Pottery manufacturers and their workmen, which seemed so likely to be realised in 1898, was almost forgotten in 1899, and in the spring of 1900 so far had the two sides apparently drifted from any ideas of alliance, that nearly 20,000 working potters had either left their work on strike or had been locked out by their employers. Nevertheless, it may be said that the Alliance which seemed so likely in 1898 has become in 1900 well-nigh inevitable; and the very events which have apparently indicated the unlikelihood of its establishment have served to prove afresh its necessity.

The projected Alliance received the warmest support from many of the chief employers and the better part of the workpeople, and by its adherents on both sides it was spoken of as heralding the dawn of a new and better day for the whole trade. Many preliminary meetings were held by both masters and men, and the work of organisation proceeded vigorously. 

Finally, in November 1898, a combined meeting of employers and workmen was held at Hanley, which apparently set the seal to the Alliance, and pronounced it an accomplished fact. The meeting was attended by 2000 workmen and the heads or representatives of nearly seventy firms — amongst them some of the largest, oldest, and most influential in the trade.

The meeting was addressed by both employers and workmen, and the burden of the speeches made was that the old methods had failed, and others must be tried ; and the gratifying spectacle was witnessed of masters and men meeting on a common platform, each recognising the rights of the other, and seeking to turn antagonism into co-operation for mutual good. The employers frankly and handsomely admitted what the workmen had always contended, and what the facts of this narrative place beyond doubt — that the process of cheapening labour, adopted as a consistent policy as a remedy for low selling prices, merely encouraged the evil, and in no sense arrested it ; and a deeper meaning was discerned in the platitude that the interests of capital and labour are one. [footnote 1]

The "solemn compact" signed

The resolutions, approving of the principles of the Alliance, and pledging those present to establish it, were passed without any show of dissent, the terms of the Alliance were formally signed, and the chairman of the meeting — a gentleman of local prominence officiating in a neutral capacity — acted as witness to what was called " This solemn compact."

It needs words of more than conventional meaning to adequately express the regret which must be felt by all those who have a genuine concern in industrial questions, that a movement of such a nature, and having such a force behind it, should have become abortive, if only for a time. But it had reached its point of highest promise, and steadily declined. 

Though supported by some of the largest and most influential firms, who had almost perfected their organisation, and acted together as the Earthenware Manufacturers' Alliance, it was bitterly opposed by firms of equal rank, who clung to the Manufacturers' Association ; and though it commended itself entirely to the Union workmen, 4000 of whom commenced paying their subscriptions to the Earthenware Operative Alliance, it could not leaven the lump of apathy amongst the non-Union portion of the workmen.

In February 1899 it was still regarded as a progressive movement, and in May the Committee of the Earthenware Manufacturers' Alliance subscribed to a statement, addressed to the Home Secretary on the question of lead poisoning, as a body separate from the Manufacturers' Association.

The movement collapses 

But all the vitality of the movement had gone, workmen's subscriptions had ceased, and the printed notices remaining on the walls of the various manufactories of which the employers and employed had accepted the Alliance, became only another object-lesson of the disunion and supineness of those engaged in the potting industry.

Meanwhile, the prices of materials were steadily rising. Coal especially, — thanks mainly to the united action of colliery owners and miners, — had risen so much in price as to appreciably affect the cost of production. 

Thereupon, under the stress of this necessity, the pottery manufacturers decided that there was nothing for it but to raise the prices of their ware, and accordingly it was done. 

It was a very simple business matter, and there was no suggestion of an appeal to the generous instincts of the colliery owners and workers in favour of the distressful industry — the market price of coal had gone up, and the market price of pots must follow.

And so the working potters, seeing how readily earthenware selling prices responded to the claims of coal, determined to test the sensibility of those prices to the claims of their labour. In February and March 1900, the Union workmen gave notices for a 10 per cent, advance in wages. 

The reply was that it was impossible to give the advance — it was an unreasonable thing to ask for it seeing that the price of coal was what it was. But the working potters had determined that the selling price of their labour must also advance — coal or no coal — and if coal must be the arbiter of their fate they could cite the claims of their kitchen fires against those of the manufacturers' ovens.

The strike of 1900

At most of the manufactories non-Union men, unaffected by the notice for an advance, were also employed, but there was a sufficient number of Unionists employed at all manufactories to stop the work entirely. 

The employers, therefore, gave a counter-notice terminating all contracts, and Union and non-Union workpeople then became united in the struggle.

As soon as the gates were closed people began to ask when the negotiations would begin. There was no longer a Board of Arbitration ; and no machinery existed by which the two sides could be automatically brought together. The procedure on each side followed the usual course of meetings, resolutions, and letters. 

The manufacturers had passed a resolution three days before the general lock-out, which stated that 

" having considered the suggestion made by one branch for a 5 per cent advance on July 1st, with a promise of a further 5 per cent, advance on the 25th day of March 1901," 

they regretted they could not 

" see any reason for altering the decision already arrived at — namely, that the present time is inopportune for any advance either to the before-mentioned or any branches, and that the suggestion cannot therefore be entertained, but the manufacturers will be quite willing to consider an advance on 25th March 1901, providing the state of trade will admit of it, and to meet the operatives to discuss the question in ample time before the close of the trade year."

The Daily Sentinel, a local paper of great influence, which took very broad views of the dispute and ably expressed them, pertinently asked, " Why should not the Manufacturers' Association meet the operatives now instead of a year hence ? " and pointed out that if the manufacturers had a good reply to the workmen's request they would both strengthen their own position, and enable the operatives to at least feel the compliment had been paid them of having their intelligence appealed to, if that reply was given and explained frankly and personally in a Conference.

The manufacturers, probably feeling that something should be done to show their position in the matter, issued a notice saying that if the workmen would return to work on the old terms their cases should be individually considered. As for a Conference, what was there to confer about when they had already said that any question of an advance "could not be entertained"?

The notice of the employers was simply a naîve invitation to the workpeople to abandon their position, on the promise of a benevolent consideration of a request that had been described as beyond further consideration ; or, to put it in a locution, 

" If you will give up the fight we will allow you to surrender." 

But the workmen were not in the mood for surrender before the struggle had well begun, and nothing came of the notice.

The Duchess of Sutherland intervenes 

There was, however, one gratifying feature in the strike — the total absence of bitterness on either side. It was, in fact, an affair of honour, conducted with the most perfect regard for punctilio — nothing was said of capitalistic rapacity, and nothing was heard of Trades-Union tyranny. 

But, equally, nothing was being done to bring the dispute to an end, or to get at the heart of the matter ; and whilst factories were closed, and the streets were full of out-of-works, the dispute was degenerating into a pretty little exercise in the art of polite letter-writing. There was then an intervention of vigorous and exhilarating common-sense. 

The two sides were drifting still further apart when several spectators of the quarrel — notably the Duchess of Sutherland and the Rev. W. S. Knowles, Rector of Hanley — interposed with the humble suggestion that all this fiddling was out of place in a matter of such gravity ; and that the dispute could never be settled by the " aloofness " of the disputants. They appealed to the employers to depart from their attitude of letting matters take their course rather than condescend to explanations, and pressed them to meet the men in Conference.

Amicable settlement of the dispute 
Five per cent, advance 

It required just such a timely intervention from some one dispassionately looking at the struggle from outside to change the course of events. Thereafter, the two sides met, and talked things over, and the position was at once clarified. One Conference led to another, counter-proposals were made, and ultimately the manufacturers offered an advance of 5 per cent, to commence in October 1900. The representatives of the men received it favourably, and promised to lay it before their constituents, and the Conference broke up with mutual compliments upon each other's behaviour, "though," it was pleasant to read, " masters and men smoked and chatted for some time afterwards."

The chairman of the Manufacturers' Association said that the masters, in making their offer, had gone beyond what they should have done in justice to themselves, 

" but they were very anxious to relieve themselves of the responsibility of continuing the struggle." 

In this admirable spirit the men accepted the offer, which was commended to them by their old adviser, Mr William Owen ; a mass meeting of potters was held to ratify the action of their delegates, and when the gates were re-opened on the 29th of May the general feeling was that the rupture had ended in a rapprochement [footnote 2]

In 1879 Lord Hatherton had decreed a reduction of 8⅓ per cent. Twenty years afterwards the potters had won back 5 per cent, of their lost wages. Moreover, they had, for the first time within the memory of a working generation, seen a strike end in their favour.

" The men," it was written, " have won their case. They have achieved a solid and memorable victory."

Co-operation between Master and Man

It is impossible to doubt that the effect of the strike will make for good. The workmen are content to accept the advance conceded as a temporary satisfaction, but there is no question that now they have been able to make a breach in the traditional attitude of their employers, they will follow up their success at the earliest moment. The employers, on the other hand, will be compelled to raise selling prices to meet the advance in wages in October, and their anxiety will be to maintain and increase them — for they, too, have a long way to travel before they reach satisfaction. 

It will indeed be strange if they do not seize the opportunity of turning the growing organisation of their workmen into one of co-operation rather than of antagonism : and, in any case, the bulk of the manufacturers, like their predecessors of 1836, would welcome a strong and aggressive Union which would compel them to do that which, left to themselves, the past clearly shows they can or will not do, rather than see the trade drift aimlessly on as it has done for the last quarter of a century.

The course of events, therefore, leaves combination on one side only, or on each side, or a combination of both sides together practically an irresistible policy. 

The masters have always been united on one point — the necessity of keeping wages low — and now the utter fallacy of this as a policy of self-interest has come home to them. The men have always been disunited, and the folly of disunion has only been thrown into sharper relief by a success at last obtained by united action. 

The masters, again, have always been disunited on the question of selling prices, and now each individual master wishes that pressure in some form or other might be put upon his fellow-manufacturers to force them to observe rules of restraint as to selling prices by which he, for one, would be gladly bound. 

The question therefore remains what form this pressure should take, and it has become clear that to be most effective the pressure should come from circumstances to some extent beyond their corporate control, but within their acquiescence and support. In other words, the pendulum is swinging back again to the projected Alliance of 1898 — to the workmen's proposals of 1890 — to the far-sighted scheme of the manufacturers' forgotten predecessors of 1836. 

An industrial policy advocated by employers so long ago as 1836, revived by employers sixty years afterwards, when the whole history of the trade during the interval is seen to have proved its soundness, and opposed in 1900 by other employers who hold it to be of a revolutionary and ultra-Socialistic character, forms in itself an interesting study. 

It is therefore worth while to make some examination of the policy, and of the objections made against it, rather with the view of clearing the air of negatives than of attempting a final and positive judgment on its theoretical perfection.

Objections to the scheme 

The objections made in 1898 to the suggested Alliance were mainly divided into two classes — its immorality as a commercial creed (in which was included its economic fallacy), and its impracticability as a working scheme.

There was a still further objection, but one which was too flimsy to sustain any argument either for or against. It was that the scheme was the suggestion of an outsider, Mr E. J. Smith of Birmingham, who was interested in the manufacture of bedsteads, and therefore knew nothing of the manufacture of pottery. 

This objection is answered by the circumstances that the working potters in 1890 proposed a scheme identical with that of Mr Smith ; and that in those branches of the potting trade in which his scheme had been adopted — and particularly in the Rockingham teapot trade 

— the manufacturers admitted that until Mr Smith's advent into their midst they had only the haziest notion of what certain articles sold by them cost to produce, and in many cases were selling their teapots at prices which only just fell short of giving them away. [footnote 3] 

Moreover, it was an objection which stopped at the threshold of the scheme, and did not even look inside it. [footnote 4]

The scheme examined

The first class of serious objectors relied mainly on the use of the term "un-English." It is an epithet only to be sparingly employed, for all things English are not good, nor are they either always good or bad ; and, moreover, it begs the question, and until we know what is English and what is not, the epithet itself is of little assistance. But it is a term which has often served the turn of the most arrogant type of conservatism, and in that sense was doubtless used by the pottery manufacturers who opposed the scheme. 

Trades Unions, compulsory education, the early Factory Acts, and free schools have all been assailed by the same term, and all have survived and have passed into acceptance by the body politic.

It is, at any rate, obvious that the same arguments which support and justify, on the grounds of morality and expediency, a combination of working-men engaged in the same trade, and a combination of employers in the same trade, must support a further combination of working-men and employers. 

The last is, indeed, only the inevitable and logical outcome of the former two states. Combinations of employers have hitherto had to deal with forces on each side of them. On the one hand, they kept an eye on the wages they paid to their workmen, and took care they did not pay more than they could help ; and on the other, they took united action to see that they got paid for their goods as much as their customers could give them.

The pottery manufacturers have been so busily engaged in attacking and resisting attack on the one side that they have allowed the enemy on their other flank to have pretty much his own way, and he has been helped in his depredations by the manufacturers themselves, who have thus been playing at the game of robbing Peter to pay Paul. 

This has proved to be a very unprofitable game, and the manufacturers now see that it is time to give as much attention to what is coming into one pocket as to what is going out from the other. 

They have come to realise that the cleavage of interests lies between the trade as a whole, and the middleman and customer beyond him, [footnote 5] rather than between the two forces in the trade itself. 

Is it an un-English thing to acknowledge the failure of a policy that has failure written across it with unmistakable clearness, and to adopt some other policy which promises to make for commercial soundness?

Its ethics and its economics

But where the un-English character of the policy is supposed to lurk is in the method of " coercion " by which it is supposed to be maintained. [footnote 6] 

- Under the constitution of the Alliance, no manufacturer who did not subscribe to its rules would have workmen who were members of the operative section of the Alliance to work for him. 

" It is not honest or English to say that if a manufacturer does not join this combination his workmen shall be withdrawn," says one objector — the president of the North Staffordshire Chamber of Commerce. 

Leaving out the debatable question of national characteristic, wherein does the dishonesty lie? 

If a manufacturer persuades himself that his interest lies outside an employers' Alliance, and can persuade his workpeople that their interests lie outside their Union, no one shall say him nay, and non-Union employers and non-Union workmen may forgather in harmony, rejoicing in the unity of their disunion. 

Such employers and workmen may indeed formally unite in an association for the maintenance of free capital and free labour, and exercise in turn the " coercion " of a policy of proscription against the unclean thing, and they shall be unmolested ; and if their Union, rooted in disunion, stood, they would have given an interesting Gilbertian touch to the treatment of industrial problems.

It has been no rare thing to see in the advertisements of certain of the daily papers the warning — or should one say " coercive " — note : 

" No Union men need apply." 

If a body of employers adopts a contrary motto in its relation to the labour it employs, it is at least exercising an equal right, leaving out of consideration any question of the comparative honesty or enlightenment of the two methods.

The strange thing is that these objectors to the honesty and English character of the proposed Alliance all admitted that something must be done to raise and maintain selling prices, but none had a better plan to suggest than that the manufacturers in the trade should come to some agreement in the matter, 

"and honourably abide by it." 

This is a proposal which has not even the merit of novelty, and has the demerit of having been tried for twenty years and having failed most completely. But, on the ethical part of the question, it is difficult to see the difference in principle between an organisation of employers — whether called the Manufacturers' Association or by any other name — pledged to a certain course of action, and providing for a monetary penalty in the case of breaches of the rules, and an organisation of employers and workmen bound together for precisely the same object, though enforcing a penalty which cannot be expressed in monetary terms. 

In each case the association is entirely voluntary, and the principle the same ; but in the case of the Manufacturers' Association the result of the successive efforts to maintain selling prices has been that those who have honourably adhered to the agreement have practically been labouring under the disadvantage of a self-denying ordinance by which the less scrupulous members have profited, until it became too obvious, and the movement fell to pieces, to be afterwards renewed and to pass through the same stages to the same end. [footnote 7] 

But all this talk of coercion, honesty, and un-English attributes becomes the merest nonsense when one reflects that the effort of seventy manufacturers to form themselves into an Alliance with their workmen was not so much the outcome of any sudden benevolence towards their employés as the deliberate expression of their revolt against the backsliding and treachery of their own class, and the realisation that their traditional enemies might, after all, prove to be their friends.

As to the objections to the scheme on economic grounds, these mainly consisted of a tiresome reiteration of the relentlessness of the law of " supply and demand" — a phrase which has probably done more harm, as apparently summarising and stereotyping a system of philosophy, than any other phrase consisting of as few and as simple words, readily to be remembered and repeated by the multitude. 

One would have to delve deeper than a phrase in order to get at the economic bottom of the matter, but those who used the phrase forgot, or ignored, the fact that this law, like most others, has been baffled or breached by human ingenuity ; and that the equation between supply and demand is mainly adjusted by competition. In other words, the inexorability of the law may be considerably modified by a modification of the circumstances upon which it is based, and a combination of individuals may accomplish what a number of individuals acting independently would not do. 

If this combination of individuals (dealing with an article which is not of elemental utility, and the production of which is not a monopoly) attempted to force up its price beyond what was fair and reasonable, which under these circumstances practically becomes that which the customer is prepared to pay, then indeed they would invoke the operation of the law of supply and demand, just as much as the individual who attempted to defy the same force.

But the objectors on this ground failed to see that the individual is not necessarily the final unit, but that a collection of individuals may also be the unit, and that by the very fact of their combination they have, to that extent, made a breach in the law of supply and demand in its relation to values. 

To apply the point in less technical language, it is ridiculous to suppose that the final and " natural " price of a dinner service is precisely and inevitably that which the keenest and most reckless competition amongst individuals may fix, and that by no possibility would that dinner service be purchased if offered by a combination of individuals who, taking into consideration the cost of its production and the reasonable profit which they required, offered it at a price which secured a recognition of those essentials.

The Alliance was even spoken of as a " conspiracy to defraud the public," and it was gravely questioned whether it would not be indictable on that ground.

As to the public, it is big enough to take care of itself, and it would effectually check any conspiracy to force upon it a dinner service it did not want at a price it was not prepared to pay by leaving the dinner service in the shop. 

A fair profit and a living wage

The argument that a combination of employers and workmen for the purpose of regulating selling prices and wages must tend to put an "artificial value" on the article produced must also claim that Trade Unions put an artificial value on labour, and that a combination of manufacturers acting alone must also tend to put an artificial value on the goods they offer for sale ; and if, after defining what is an artificial and what a natural value (a definition which might summarily close the controversy), that argument is maintained, it must involve, in order to be effective, the demonstration of the economic fallacy of all combination movements. Moreover, the price of an article may be equally an artificial one when below a "natural" standard as when above it.

The question of foreign competition was also raised, but it is particularly foreign to the question at issue. 

The programme of the projected Alliance involved no such claims of English exclusiveness and superiority as to commit the Staffordshire pottery manufacturers to take no notice of the competition of their foreign rivals where it made itself felt, but to persist in offering to the Africander or the New Zealander — or even to the Englishman — an article marked two shillings which the gleeful German could offer and sell for one. 

The sole ground for any effort to raise and regulate selling prices in the Staffordshire pottery trade — whether by one form of combination or another — is that there is a field and margin on the hither side of foreign competition which might be profitably cultivated were it not for the competition of Staffordshire manufacturers in adjoining towns, or in the same town, or probably in the same street. [footnote 8]

From the workman's point of view, he can have nothing to lose by an alliance with the manufacturer on the lines suggested. His Union would be buttressed by the compact (and the whole history of the potters' Unions has shown their lamentable weakness), just as he would help to uphold the combination of his employer. 

Formerly he was told that his wages were dependent on selling prices ; and when he asked upon what selling prices depended, he was handed a tabloid of compressed truth called "the law of supply and demand," and told that he would find it easy to swallow, and that it would give him instant relief from perplexity. 

For a time it worked all right, but the effect soon wore off, and he came to see that selling prices, if ultimately governed by a stern law, were, before that point was reached, the sport of the reckless competition in which one manufacturer indulged, and to which another succumbed. [footnote 9] 

If the workman can be assured by an arrangement which has for the security of its observance the interest of the employers themselves, and the force which he can exercise, that selling prices shall be maintained by united action up to the point when they must give way to outside forces beyond their control, then he is at least as sure of getting his " natural " share of the value he helps to create as if he, through his Union, acting as an antagonistic body to his employer, and therefore inviting resistance, demanded a price which could not be given — or accepted a rate below that which the conditions of trade would afford. He becomes, in fact if not in name, a partner of his employer, and if he sacrifices his " independence " as an aggressive Trades Unionist it is only because he has secured a recognition of that interdependence of capital and labour which has been the laudable theme of every industrial reformer.

And, as for employers and workmen together, there is the consoling fact that the whole law and government by which the social machine is governed and ordered is based upon the principle that in order to preserve the individual it is necessary to assert the power of the community.

The necessity of the Staffordshire Potter — And his opportunity 

But all these cobwebs of abstract speculation may be brushed away by the broom of commonsense. For the Staffordshire potter, master and man, the question is a very simple one — How can a fair profit and a fair wage be assured? Combination has never passed on either side beyond a half-hearted stage ; strikes have failed, arbitration has left things in the air, and wages and profits have chased each other in an eager descent. 

Any plan that can arrest this descent, and bring about an upward tendency, is to be welcomed with open arms ; and if to do so is to embrace an economic heresy, so much the worse for economic theories that cannot square with the imperative law of self-preservation.

Political philosophers evolve theories of political and social perfection, and Utopias are founded here and there in distant Western states, which flourish for the day of enthusiasm, and on the morrow of disillusionment provide a sale of effects which offers a desirable opportunity for the investment of the unregenerate and outside speculator. Economists propound theories of what should or must be, and the middleman reaps where free labour, working for starvation wage, and free capital, growing lean on unrestricted competition, have sown. It should be no reproach to either the intelligence or the morality of labour and capital in the potting trade if they adopt measures which, even if empirical, point to a better goal than that to which they have been led by following the old and well-worn road of individualistic caprice.

What will he do with it ?

If theories of industrial economy raise themselves as ghosts in the path, may they not rise superior to superstitious fear, and walk through the shadow to the substance beyond? And if it is said that posterity will put its finger on the fallacy, and show them where they were wrong, may they not, thinking of their present need, reply that they are the heirs of a policy which has left them only an encumbered estate for a legacy ; — or, in lighter vein, ask, What has posterity done for them? and add, That sufficient for the evil of the day is the cure thereof.

BURSLEM, May 1900.