Publisher's Synopsis
An excerpt from the beginning of the first chapter:
I. The Causes of Discontent
There is ample evidence that the nation has been deeply moved by the spectacle of thousands of men, in many parts of the country, and in many different industries, laying down their tools or suffering lockouts for the sake of upholding some claim for better conditions of labour. This spectacle, constant in its main features, though varying in minor details, has compelled even the thoughtless to ask himself its meaning. The idea of the great economic conflict underlying it has laid hold upon the public imagination as it never did before, and from every type of onlooker, clear-sighted or the reverse, criticisms and suggestions have poured in. And the clamorous alarm of one who only sees in the present phenomena the impending ruin of our civilisation, the patient reiterative advocacy by another of some trivial measure of reform which he regards as a sure panacea, and the triumphant doxology of a third, who believes that a new era of peace and prosperity will dawn with the emancipation of the workers - all find willing listeners, There is one thing that many people have found it difficult to understand - namely, how the vast machinery of production, creating the wealth which maintains the greatest empire the world has seen, should rest on so insecure a foundation that an almost inappreciable difference of opinion as to the rights or wrongs of a workman's dismissal, or of the engagement of workers within or without the gates of a dockyard, should be sufficient to lay idle whole mines, whole harbours, whole railway systems, whole groups of industries. The triviality of the apparent "casus belli " has astounded the casual observer. It is to help him to review the actual facts and to analyse their underlying causes, psychological and broadly human as well as economic and theoretical, that the writer will try to outline the results of his own observation, and to suggest some reforms which, in his opinion, will be of value in paving the way to industrial peace.
Not that "peace at any price" is necessarily always, even for the consumer, the best solution of existing difficulties. In many cases the interests of the public generally are better served by a prolonged conflict, whose outcome is the increased productivity of an especial industry, or the reduction of the national burden of pauperism and ill-health, than by a misleading truce. No compromise dictated merely by the expediency of the moment is likely in the long run to benefit the nation as a whole.
