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 and lock-outs; (2) whether free collective negotiation could be replaced with advantage by any other method of settling the conditions of employment of bodies of work-people, which would dispense with the necessity of testing the labour market by a suspension of work.

1. The first of these questions is virtually the question of the advantages and disadvantages to the community of combinations of workmen and employers, which is discussed at length in the article. As regards the question of the direct cost of strikes and lock-outs, it is proper to remember that individual bargaining does not do away with stoppages; in fact, the aggregate amount of time lost in the process of adjusting ten thousand separate labour contracts may be considerable—possibly not less than that consumed on an average in effecting a single agreement involving the whole body, even if the chance of a collective stoppage of work occurring during the process of combined bargaining be taken into account.

While, then, the strikes and lock-outs which accompany the system of combined bargaining are rightly to be described as wasteful, this is not so much because of the excessive amount of working time which they consume, as because of the disturbance and damage done to industry by the violent breach of continuity—a breach which may dislocate trade to an extent quite disproportionate to the actual loss of time involved, and the fear of which undoubtedly affects the minds of possible customers and hampers enterprise on the part of employers. The extent of the injury directly inflicted on the consuming public by a strike varies greatly in different cases, being at its maximum in the case of industries having the total or partial monopoly of supplying some commodity or service of prime necessity, e.g. gas-works, water-works, railway or tramway service; and least in the case of a local stoppage in some widely-spread manufacturing or constructive industry open to active competition from other districts.

In speaking above of the loss occasioned by strikes and lock-outs attention has only been paid to the effects of the actual stoppage as such, and not to the particular methods adopted by the strikers to make the stoppage effective. The evils arising from the practice of intimidation or violence towards other workmen, or from the increase of class-hatred and bitterness engendered by the strike between employer and employed, are patent to all, though they cannot be estimated from an economic point of view.

2. As to the second question, viz. the possibility of maintaining combined negotiation, but of substituting some better method than strikes of resolving a deadlock, it is hardly necessary to say that so far as such substitution can be voluntarily carried out with the assent of both parties, whether by the establishment of wages boards or joint-committees, or by agreements to refer differences to third parties, the result is an economic as well as a moral advantage.

But the increasing adoption of these voluntary expedients for diminishing the chance of industrial friction lends no countenance to the expectation that a satisfactory universal substitute for strikes and lock-outs can be devised except at the price of economic liberty. Compulsory reference of disputes to a state tribunal cannot be reconciled with freedom of voluntary negotiations.

Unless, then, we are prepared for a scheme of compulsory regulation of industry by the state, strikes and lock-outs must be accepted as necessary evils, but their frequency may be greatly diminished with the improvement of means of information as to the true condition of the labour market, and the influences by which it is determined. Many disputes arising purely from mismanagement and misunderstanding are wholly avoidable. While there is no warrant for expecting the total abolition of strikes and lock-outs, it is not unreasonable. to hope that the spread of education and the means of rapidly obtaining information, the improvement of class relations, and the adoption, where practicable, of conciliatory methods, may gradually tend to confine actual stoppages to the comparatively few cases

in which there is a genuine and serious difference of principle between the parties.

Important British Strikes and Lock-outs.