Oldalképek
PDF
ePub

when, for example, coal sold to Italy at eighteen shillings a ton advanced to nearly six pounds and, of course, produced ruin in Lombardy and the regions where the factories were worked by coal power. France has restored her ruined mines by the best possible equipment and is turning out more coal than in 1913, besides advancing great schemes for the electrification of her railways by gigantic water-power stations. Germany, through the use of lignite or brown coal, which was practically unworked before the war, is producing some sixteen million tons from this source alone, apart from her old coal fields, and has also, perhaps partly through Reparation payments, undercut the British market in Italy and in Central Europe. Oil is coming more and more to replace coal, first in the Royal Navy, and then in the Mercantile Marine.

The result is, as the Report sets out in devastating figures, that, apart from the subsidy, over seventy per cent of the coal raised in the great majority of British mines costs more to place at the pit-head than the selling price. Nor does there appear to be any reason why this condition should not continue. All the nations of Europe are increasing their own coal output. Mines are being opened in countries, such as Spain, where the coal industry works behind a tariff that closes the markets against British coal at the price available. More and more, undoubtedly, those countries who are not content to be dependent on British coal will learn to depend on their own coal fields, and, in conformity with the new nationalism that has been created by the war, will make themselves selfsupporting in the matter of power for their factories and domestic use. The second great point emphasized in the Report is that we are continually increasing the cost of our coal as sold

at the pit-mouth. This is in particular due to the fact that there are many more workers underground than before the war, whose united efforts produce less coal than was produced formerly by a smaller number. A variety of charges and insinuations advanced by various parties are dealt with very fully in the Commission's Report and account for this deplorable fact. It is stated that the men will not do the same amount of work they did, and are deliberately reducing output, in the belief that if less coal is produced, and prices rise, wages will be maintained, and that if they ruin the employers they may obtain the nationalization they desire.

The Commission definitely reports that it has no evidence of any such conduct. It would appear that, as the hewers, for example, who 'set the pace' of the pit, are paid at piece rates, and therefore have to work harder in order to obtain the same income they used to earn before the system of divided profits came into force, the tendency would be to encourage more energetic labor rather than slackness. It is also stated that the large number of men sucked into mining during the warsome of whom may have deliberately entered to escape military service did not possess the same natural efficiency as the coal-miners who formerly worked the mines and whose graves are scattered over our military cemeteries, and therefore tend to set a lower standard of working. The leaders of the men reply with charges of inefficiency against the management, and dwell on the possibilities of enormously increasing the output if such measures were adopted as amalgamations, rearrangements of railways, united drainage systems, and other general methods of bringing the pits up to date. And the Commission recognizes that there is much to be done in

this direction, although it holds out no such hopes as are entertained by the sanguine, that either the State, or any Commission acting under the State's direction, could so change the conditions at present obtaining in most coal fields as to make coal-getting substantially easier, and therefore coal prices cheaper.

So much for diagnosis. 'Give us life or death,' as Thoreau cried, 'we crave only reality. With some intimate With some intimate knowledge of the conditions of the coal problem from the time when I was responsible for the Coal Mines Department of the Home Office to the time when I was holding a similar investigation in 'Coal and Power,' I heartily commend the candid findings of the Commission to the study of the nation. Where the Commission fails, I think, is in its recommendations for reform. The parrot-cry has gone up that these recommendations must be taken as a whole, and that taken as a whole they provide an opportunity of escape from disaster. But even if they are taken as a whole, they offer no escape from disaster. For they leave an unbridgeable gap, which will be confronted next May when the subsidy will stop like the stopping of a clock. All the recommendations they suggest, such as those for the reduction of the miners' wages, even if accepted en bloc, do not fill that gap, and they do not give the slightest indication otherwise of how that gap can be filled. First let me summarize both the pessimistic and the optimistic conclusions:

1. They reiterate the fact, which all specialists in the study of this problem knew, that, although many coal mines. and coal fields must be regarded as permanently unprofitable on account of the rich seams being worked out, geological discovery has revealed within the last thirty years a wealth

of coal where no man even conceived that coal deposits of any sort existed. I am not referring to the Kent coal fields, whose richness has not been entirely proved. But in South Yorkshire, Nottingham, and Lincolnshire, at very considerable depth, partly in mines now paying despite the slump, and partly in borings, investigators have discovered rich coal concentrated in such thick seams as to exceed all the wealth of the Johannesburg conglomerate. And they have as yet found no limit to this natural gift to British resources, which may extend eastward even under the North Sea. Private companies are racing to develop these regions. Sherwood Forest, for example, the home of Robin Hood, is being penetrated by shafts and dotted with model villages. Great mines employing three thousand or more workers are raising coal at so cheap a price that they not only 'dump' this coal to the destruction of the older mines in Lancashire and elsewhere, but they also make a profit entirely independent of the subsidy, and could live without the subsidy to-morrow. It is evident that, if you could exploit this field immediately, creating a coal mine and a colliery village as rapidly as cotton factories were built during the cotton boom in Lancashire, and then by the hand of a dictator ensure a vast migration, irrespective of local ties and loyalties, into these districts from such tormented regions as those of South Wales, your coal problem could be solved.

2. On the other hand, the Commission rightly sweeps away much of the jargon and ignorant nonsense, which is talked by journalists and others who have no knowledge of science, as to the possibility of immediate relief and immediate wealth to be obtained by change in the treatment of coal as power. Men talk glibly of low carbonization, of electricity, of utilization of

by-products and waste coal, as if some alchemist had discovered a process by which sand could be turned into gold. The Commission disproves all this clotted nonsense. It is true that, under circumstances of desperate need, historic examples can be adduced of how science has been compelled to make the necessary discoveries. The scientists of France, during the Napoleonic Wars, had to make the raw materials of gunpowder by new processes, just because France was deprived of the nitrates by the British blockade. In the Great War, the fixing of the nitrogen of the air to the carbohydrates in order to produce the fertilizers without which Germany would have starved was accomplished by laboratory investigation, after defying all the scientists of the world for more than a century. 'That buffalo had to climb that tree.' But although scientists have been working for years and decades on improved methods for obtaining greater power from coal, and although the discovery at any time would make those who took part in it multimillionaires, no such practical process exists to-day as would solve the problem. There is no paying practical proof of the success of low carbonization, or of nonpayable coal being made payable by conversion into electric power, or of the extraction of oil from coal of such a quality and at such a price as will enable that oil to compete with the product of the natural mineral oil fields of the world. Science is on the verge, indeed, of great discoveries, and at any moment some change may be demonstrated such as the methods of Watt, Arkwright, and Stephenson, who created the Industrial Revolution and changed the face of Britain. But the Commission has done well in warning the Government and the people that they cannot fall back in inertia, trusting to the strong arm of science to

save them. It has done well in urging the giving of far greater grants for scientific research. It has not perhaps, however, sufficiently warned the workers that the immediate effect of any such discoveries would be an enormous reduction in the number of men required as miners; just as the laborsaving machinery of a hundred years ago, although ultimately enormously increasing the wealth of England, drove tens of thousands who had hitherto been earning a decent living into pauperism, and hundreds of thousands, in bitterness and despair, to emigration beyond the sea.

3. The Commission recommends a series of changes which will take at least ten or fifteen years to accomplish, each perhaps good in itself. The transfer of royalties from private owners to the State is probably desirable, but it will make no difference at all in the selling price of coal. So also may amalgamations, united schemes of drainage and improved apparatus, and recommendations that coal be sold by the municipalities, be interesting. But it is obvious that if municipal coal bureaus can compete in supplying small quantities at lower prices than the coal merchants can sell at, this will merely be a benefit to the poor, who will get coal cheaper. It will not touch the problem of the miners, who want, if anything, coal dearer. The repudiation of so-called nationalization as a means of reviving the demand for coal in England or abroad ought to convince all sane men of the futility of such a suggestion. Pit committees are good, and better relations between men and masters are good, and the spirit of Mr. Baldwin exhorting little children to love one another is good, although perhaps exasperating to those who are confronted with adamantine facts and are impatient of trying to conceal them in a froth of sentiment. In five,

or ten, or fifteen years it is possible that, through these and other remedies, the coal fields may be made self-supporting, and the life of the miner more civilized and contented and humane, just as in fifteen, fifty, or a hundred years the League of Nations may have become a reality.

But what we want to know is not what will happen in the days of our children, but what is to happen on the first of May, 1926, and here the Commission has made no sane or consistent recommendation. For, set out in plain terms, here are the brutal facts if its recommendations are adopted.

The subsidy is to be suddenly snapped off. Over seventy per cent of the coal raised can only be raised, even without profit to the shareholders, by aid of a subsidy, and therefore, with its disappearance, the majority of mines must inevitably close. These losses might be diminished or even eliminated if the cost of production were reduced by the miners working an eight-hour instead of a seven-hour day, or by such a temporary but enormous reduction in wages as would be equivalent to the amount now given by the taxpayer to the coal industry. But the Commission rejects, and with unanswerable argument, the return to the eight-hour day, which would merely mean lowering the standard of life among all our coal-trade competitors, without giving us any advantages, and would provide cheaper coal to make, say, German steel better able to compete with our steel in the markets of the world. It advocates a reduction in the wages of the more highly paid miners, while maintaining the mini

mum of a 'living wage' as established by the Minimum Wage Act of 1911. But even if this reduction in wages were sadly or gladly accepted, as it is not in the least likely to be, by the Miners Federation, the total money saved by the cuts proposed would not be equal to any subsidy equivalent to that at present given on the theory that it is just sufficient to keep the mines alive, with no profit to their owners. And for the filling of this gap no positive suggestion emerges at all. Outward events, more especially the return to the gold standard, welcome to the bankers but ruination to the industrialist, have knocked the bottom out of the coal market. It seems to be quite evident that the subsidy will have to be continued for a time, in the form of either a grant or a loan. All thought of cutting down the wages in real value even below those of 1913 will have to be abandoned. With the miners reading the reports of the enormous luxury expenditure, the vast accumulated fortunes bequeathed at death, the gigantic dividends paid by British companies outside the dismal regions in which they dwell, such an attempt will come near to exciting a revolution. Finally, accompanying this grant and this refusal to cut down wages, and indeed as a condition of them, bills should be immediately introduced to implement and accelerate the recommendations of permanent changes which may, in the course of time and through man's triumphant refusal to accept defeat, ‘give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,' and 'guide our feet into the way of peace."

AFTER LIBYA, WHAT?1

BY EDMOND ROSSIER

Is justice more than an empty word? A few weeks ago an American diplomat blamed France for keeping Europe in a turmoil with her ambitions and her militarism, although the worst accusation that can be brought against the excited politicians who make laws at the Palais Bourbon is that they neglect the legitimate interests of their country. On the other hand, ever since Fascism has dazzled Italy, Mussolini has been delivering grandiloquent speeches proclaiming that his nation's will shall be imposed upon the rest of the world, that two million men stand ready to follow him to battle, that 'the Napoleonic year' has dawned. Yet no one seems to regard this talk as more than picturesque oratory. At last, however, il Duce's trip to Africa has caught public attention; and the press has been startled into certain expressions of concern.

Mussolini has crossed the historical sea he persists in calling an Italian lake. Did he do so for a change of air -to see new sights? That is hardly likely. The northern coast of Tripoli languished for centuries under the rule of the Sultan, who permitted conditions to survive there, under the very nose of Europe, that were ages behind the times. Only a few years ago a public slave-market was still held in the suburbs of Tripoli. Italy's conquest terminated such abuses, and to that extent was a benefit to humanity. But her preoccupation with the World War

1 From La Semaine Littéraire (Geneva Liberalist weekly), April 24

[blocks in formation]

prevented her from completing the work, and her colonization has scarcely passed as yet the phase of military occupation. The province itself has little to offer. Some of the oases, to be sure, are fertile, but there are too few of them. In most places the desert comes down to the ocean and the coastal hills are but burning sand-dunes.

Il Duce, however, concerned himself little with the character of the country or the customs of the people. His tour was purely political. He was making an occasion to advertise Italy's power, her desire of expansion, her imperative need of colonies. The tribune of Monte Citorio and the balcony of the Chigi Palace did not afford him a big enough sounding board. He therefore sallied forth to find it in a former Roman province now reoccupied by Italy, which might become the steppingstone to imperial acquisitions.

This tour assumed the character of a triumph before it commenced. Thanks to a madwoman's harmless attack upon his life, the Dictator suddenly became the object of general solicitude. His good town of Rome cheered him frantically. Messages of sympathy and admiration poured in from all parts of Italy. These demonstrations immediately assumed an antiforeign character for Fascism, after muzzling the press at home, is impatient of criticism abroad, and accuses the foreign press of fomenting domestic discontent and disorder by its slanders. The Duce seems to share this opinion wholeheartedly. Speaking at Rome imme

493

« ElőzőTovább »