Page:The Annual Register 1899.djvu/246

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238] ENGLISH HISTOBY. [dec.

creasing adaptability to the needs of the, happily, very exigeant home market. Employment was remarkably good throughout the country, and, speaking generally, the workmen shared substantially in the benefits of excellent trade. This parti- cipation, happily, was brought about in the great majority of cases by friendly negotiation, or by the working of auto- matic systems for the adjustment of wages in accordance with prices, and the number of serious trade disputes recorded during the year was exceptionally small. At the Trade Union Congress, which was held at Plymouth early in September, a series of gloomy observations in the address of the President, Mr. W. J. Vernon, on the unjust subjection of labour to capital, and the generally miserable results of our existing industrial system, had a curiously unreal sound. Nor did the circumstances of the time seem particularly appropriate to a resolution which the congress adopted unanimously, setting forth that "no scheme dealing with old-age pensions would be satisfactory to the whole of the workers of this country which made a condition of thrift, or disregarded the inability of a large proportion of the industrious and deserving poor to make provision for the future.' ' On the other hand the revival of prosperity, already referred to, in the Lancashire cotton trade, might be held to reduce the force of the opposition still vainly maintained by the representatives of that industry at the congress to the renewal of a violently worded resolution in favour of the prohibition of all child labour under fourteen. It was reported at the congress that the General Federation of Trade Unions, inaugurated as the result of a special congress held at Manchester in January, already included a large number of important societies of both skilled and un- skilled labour, such for example as the Amalgamated Engineers and the Lancashire Cotton-Spinning Operatives and the Gas- workers and General Labourers' Union, and had a total enrol- ment of 360,000 members. High hopes were expressed by Mr. Frank Mitchell of Glasgow, the secretary of the federation, as to the concessions which it would be possible to obtain by peaceful pressure from employers, of which there would have been no chance in the disorganised condition of labour before the formation of the federation. It must be added, however, that among acute and well-informed observers much doubt prevailed as to the capacity of the federation to stand any severe financial strain, and as to the likelihood that some of the great unions which had joined it would submit in practice to the kind of control which it imported into their own relations, with their employers.