THE STRIKE FEVER IN FRANCE

THE labor situation in France has been marked since June 1 by a number of strikes which have been the most considerable, experienced since the beginning of the war.

The movement began with a strike of the coal miners in the north. It was soon extended, involving the metal workers of the Parisian district and of some regions in the centre. At the same time a complete stoppage occurred on the underground railway of Paris, soon to be followed by a strike of the omnibuses and tramcars. Some minor strikes were started simultaneously among various industries, and more especially in the big Parisian stores, such as the Printemps, while other movements seemed to be impending.

Although the outlook is distinctly better as the strike has already come to an end in the coal mines, and as some other conflicts do not seem to be very far from a solution - it would be premature to consider that the crisis is over. There is still a possibility that the strike may spread to the railways and other industries. It is, therefore, necessary to understand

the real nature of these series of events.

The natural question which many are asking is whether this is a mere economic movement or if it is connected with political designs. The extreme Nationalist press has been quick to accuse the strikers of playing into the hands of the Germans, and even of having received German money. This accusation has not been proved so far. It is fair to say that

some sections of the strikers have issued manifestoes of a political nature.

For instance, the Strike Committee of Saint Denis, a place near Paris, which has always been conspicuous for its extreme tendencies, adopted recently a resolution by which they urged the General Federation of Labor to take up a policy with a view to compelling the Government to confide to the workers the destinies of the country. A kind of Soviet was even set up in Saint Denis for a few hours.

This effort at creating a revolutionary state of things was, however, not only short-lived but isolated. It met with a deliberate resistance on the part of the leaders of the strikes. Thus the Strike Committee of the Metal Workers issued an appeal to the strikers in which they urge them strictly to remain on the professional ground. The leading men of the General Federation of Labor, such as MM. Jouhaux and Mereheim, are working in the same direction. The political agitation, if there is any, is confided to an insignificant minority, largely composed of men without any real following.

The real cause of the present unrest must be found elsewhere in the unsettled economic conditions under which France is laboring at present. It is noteworthy that the strikes are taking place mainly in the Paris district, where the cost of living has risen in a way which has never been experienced before. The rise in prices may be due to the presence of an enormous number of foreigners and refugees. At any rate, it is still continuing, in spite of all the measures taken by the government to stop it.

At the same time the Eight-Hour Law voted at the end of April by the French Parliament has suddenly come into operation in all industries with all the usual consequences of such a sudden change. It is not surprising that these two causes combined should have brought about a kind of crisis making all efforts on both sides to find a way out extraordinarily difficult.

Thus a general agreement was concluded between the metal workers and the Union of Employers even before the Eight-Hour Law was passed, by which it was understood that the working week should be reduced to forty-eight hours without a corresponding reduction either in output or in wages. Still the carrying out of that agreement was so difficult that the present strike could not be averted.

In some other cases the general uncertainty as to conditions of life has produced most awkward effects. For

The great inconvenience experienced by the unfortunate consumer has something to do with this phenomenon, as well as the feeling that this untimely movement is indirectly helping the enemy. But abnormal conditions will not disappear within one day, not even after the Treaty has at last been signed and after the country knows where it stands. Industrial disturbances may be frequent in the near future, and it is better that we should be ready for them. What seems entirely precluded is that they should assume the shape of a revolutionary movement. In spite of the official formulas it uses, the French Federation of Labor is distinctly conservative in its aims. So is the average Frenchman, be he a workingman or a farmer. The fundamental balance of the country cannot be upset.

The Observer

When all these facts are taken into consideration the conclusion one comes to is obviously that the abnormal economic conditions of the present may be mainly responsible for the movement, and that the so-called Bolshevism has really nothing to do with it.

It is more difficult to foresee what will be the outcome. A reassuring factor is found in the general desire of the employers concerned to meet the demands of the workers whenever such a thing is probable. It is also noticeable that the strikers, whenever they seem to be obdurate, are quietly losing the support of public opinion, which at first was rather on their side.

DURING the summer of the past year the writer undertook a journey through thirteen agricultural counties with a view to finding out something about the present achievements and future prospects of English farming. Traveling by train as far as Cornwall, and cycling from the Atlantic Coast to the edge of the North Sea in Norfolk, it was possible to go from end to end of eleven intervening counties and to cover some eight hundred miles. Landowners, farmers, bailiffs, farm laborers, officials of the county agricultural executive committees, police superintendents, market gardeners, estate agents, all the people who might be presumed to have something to say were questioned carefully as occasion. permitted in the course of a journey that occupied rather more than two months. Some of the results of close inquiry and personal investigation will

be set down here, and in the first place it is proposed to consider a question in which every man, woman, and child must have an interest: Can this country feed itself? We have been told that as a result of the labors of the Ministry of Food, the Board of Agriculture, and the Food Production Committee we can now maintain ourselves for forty weeks in the year. This is probably an exaggeration, but if we could approach the figure in face of long-sustained friction now, be it admitted, nearly at an end—and in face of the early mistakes and ceaseless errors of the Food Production Department, there are good grounds for hope. At the same time, it is well to remember that many of the blunders of the august bodies one mentions have been buried under mountains of public money and public enthusiasm, and in the near future this money and enthusiasm will not be forthcoming. Happily for the elect, blunders are soon forgotten. Blunderers are sent to the House of Lords or consigned to less ornate oblivion, inquiry is staved off by familiar Parliamentary methods, and we get along with the war, the peace, or the reconstruction.

Let it be admitted that the county committees have done great work in the face of immense difficulties. In Cornwall, Dorsetshire, Oxfordshire, Herts, and Norfolk, to select a few counties at random, there are skilled men and women at the head of affairs who have created the right spirit in the agricultural districts, under whose wise direction farmers have received good advice and prompt assistance, so that they have been glad to do their very best. In a few counties-Wiltshire appeared to the writer to be the worst example there is little real progress apparent, and the management of affairs appears to be in hands that are, to say the least, unskilled.

Certainly good gifts' were not in evidence in Wiltshire, and for the rest paulum sepultæ distat inertiæ celata virtus.

The methods employed over long stretches of ever-varying country were in part, as has been said, inquiry; in part they were actual investigation. On countless fields that are now down to grass the writer examined the soil with care, digging down into it sufficiently to find whether it suggested a generous response to the plough. Sometimes as many as a dozen fields were disturbed in the course of one day's ride. In certain counties it was frankly admitted by the authorities that the limits of arable had not been reached; there were others in which acknowledgment of this kind was unnecessary. How often in Devonshire, Somerset, and Wilts did the digger's attack reveal rich and not too hilly land, that would produce corn and roots and pulses in their season. On the other hand, there are counties in which the nature of the soil and condition of the rivers must hinder progress. Oxfordshire is a case in point. Here it was impossible to create the arable extension demanded. Let us remember that in the bad years of farming, when wheat was fetching a pound a quarter or less, much corn land was allowed to fall down to grass. It is not difficult to point to areas where corn production was so gravely reduced forty years ago that not only did the land go out of cultivation, but villages themselves tended to disappear. Men drifted to the towns, the lath-and-plaster cottages with leaky roofs and shallow foundations fell in or fell down, and to-day you may find a church, a parsonage, half a dozen farms, and the few cottages required for a minimum of labor where, in the times of agricultural prosperity, a thriving village pulsed with vigorous life. Across England at

its greatest width there was very general agreement that more arable farming is quite feasible. If what is true of the considerable agricultural area traversed may be taken for the truth in counties unvisited, there need be no hesitation in saying that England can feed herself, granting certain conditions. They are security for farmers in the matter of prices, proper accommodation for the agricultural worker, and a sufficiency of well-paid labor. Let us examine the first and last of these conditions.

The complete returns for the year 1918 are unlikely to justify extravagant prophecies founded upon the acreage under crops. In the first place, the weather was not favorable; in the closing days of October there were farmers hard at work carting the last of their barley, raking the fields, ploughing out potatoes. Secondly, the wheat did not fulfill its promise. Four quarters to the acre was quite a common return, and it is a poor one. The labor question was entirely upset in full summer by the call for 30,000 key men from the farms. Their presence in the fighting line may have been a matter of stark necessity, but you cannot farm with the aid of good intentions. Soldiers, German prisoners, women one and all have helped; but farm labor is highly skilled work, demanding a long apprenticeship. In many cases the official instructions to break up grass have been ill-advised. On the long ride through rural England, farms were seen whereon the old arable was foul with twitch, couch grass, dandelions, and thistles, and the land broken up by order was about to yield, on generous computation, half a crop. The cause did not often vary; it was, generally, lack of labor. Sometimes the land reclaimed was not good enough for its new task. The farmer had not sufficient hands to tend his

normal proportion of arable; he had been required, under heavy penalties, to add to it. English land to-day, speaking in general terms, is foul, and much labor will be required to mend it. In these circumstances, can we expect the farmer to add voluntarily to his burdens?

There is another aspect of the labor question. On the official price of corn, labor was originally valued at twentyfive shillings a week. It has now risen to about forty and there is the possibility of a strike for more, while the corn, guaranteed only for a few seasons, stands where it did and there is not even a free market. Much has been kept in stacks and rats have wasted it. The writer, himself a farmer on a very small scale, has never sympathized thized with the farmer's attitude toward labor, coöperation, and many other questions of daily life, and his criticisms have been admitted to these pages. Now, when everything the farmer buys is controlled by the profiteer, and everything he sells is controlled by Government, the tide is beginning to run heavily against him. Up to a point he must do well in order to feed us. If he could control the seasons, if he has enough money for high farming, he might carry on; a few bad years will break a large proportion of our agriculturists on the secondgrade lands that constitute the bulk of England's soil; they are gambling furiously with Jupiter Pluvius, who holds all the trumps.

There are other aspects of labor to which insufficient attention has been called. The boy under fourteen, who does light, odd jobs about the farm, now starts at ten shillings a week, where his grandfather started at a penny a day: so far so good. The same boy at eighteen or nineteen comes of age in agriculture; at the awkward time when he is entirely undeveloped

he takes a man's full money, and has nothing further to look for. If he spends fifty years on the land he can only get the maximum wage. Will he be content? Which one of us in our salad days would have been satisfied with an occupation that yielded its highest prize before we were out of our teens? Naturally, inevitably, the boy will drift to the towns and take his chance there; nor will the farmer make spirited efforts to keep those who may demand a man's pay but cannot do a man's work. It is the towns that clamor for the best human raw material - and destroy it in a generation. The old men who love the land of which they are the pride must die out, and where shall we look for their successors? A vast system of small farms and small holdings, independent as far as possible of hired labor, with coöperation on the largest scale, embracing the provision of machinery, transport, markets, training schools, and the amenities of life—the rehabilitation, in short, under absolutely modern conditions of the yeoman class may save the situation, and this will be the arduous work of years. Farming takes long to learn.

In the meantime, the farmer is faced with another grave trouble the loss of his stock. If we are to have prosperity, the first demand of agricultural England is for unlimited cake and meal to be sold at a fair price. At present the stockyards are endangered, and without stock we cannot grow corn. To the farmer this is a commonplace, to the permanent officials in London's innumerable circumlocution offices, it appears to be a revelation. Artificial manures are a poor substitute for the genuine article. Our stockyard, our sheepfold, and our pigsty grow the food of the country. If we cannot get the proper manure, how will the farmer raise the corn to pay his wages and

keep a roof over his head? Perhaps it is proposed by our rulers that America shall supply us with food in perpetuity?

The tenant farmer does not feel the pinch.as badly as the farmer who, in an excess of enthusiasm and pride, has become his own landlord. Tithe in Essex and in East Anglia is rising toward ten shillings an acre, repairs cost three times what they did before the war, while the allowance on income tax remains at 122 per cent; property tax, rates, taxes, including income tax, have mounted up, and the wages bill is more than doubled. Farmers who are their own landlords must find perhaps five pounds per acre for labor before they begin to pay for their horses, for the purchase and upkeep of modern machinery, and for cake, meal, manure, and seeds. Tenant farmers can often get a helping hand from the landlord, but the old type of landowner is being expropriated, and the man who has made money out of the war and sets up as a landed proprietor wants, first and last, a good return on his capital, and has no tradition to trouble about. Government profiteering is on a colossal scale. It bought maize last year in the Argentine at a pound a quarter and sold it at four or five over here, but only to the people who would purchase a certain proportion of beans that they did not want. Conditional sales are forbidden everywhere, save in government departments.

These reflections upon the farmers' present plight are made deliberately to clear a path by which we may get back to the question that heads this article. There are at present in the counties that the writer has visited tens of thousands of acres ready for the tractor. The much-abused Fordson will do the work, as long as it is divorced, on all heavy land, from the Oliver plough, beloved of the Food