The Secret of the League: The Story of a Social War

A medley of cries met this despotic programme throughout. Even Tirrel's friends felt that he was throwing away his reputation; and he had more enemies than friends.

"You'd simply make the situation twice as involved," exclaimed Mr Vossit as the mouthpiece of the babel. "The liberty of the subject! It would mean civil war. They'd rise."

"Who would rise?" demanded Tirrel.

"The privileged classes."

"But they have risen," he declared vehemently. "This is civil war. What more do you want?"

It was a question on which they all had views, and for the next five minutes the room was full of suggestions, not of what they themselves wanted, but of what would be the probable action of the classes if driven to extremities.

"Very well," assented Tirrel at last; "that is what they will do next as it is, for they consider that they are in extremities."

"Well, comrade," said Mr Bilch broadly, "you don't seem to have put your money on a winner this event. What's your other tip?"

"Failing that, the other reasonable course is conciliation. I would suggest approaching Hampden and Salt to find out whether they are open to consider a compromise. The details would naturally require careful handling, but if both sides were willing to come to an understanding, a basis could be found. As things are, I should consider it a gain to drop the Personal Property Tax, the Minimum Wage Bill, to guarantee the inviolability of capital against further taxation while we are in office, and to make generous concessions for the fuller representation of the monied classes in Parliament, in return for the abandonment of a coal war, the dispersal in some agreed way of the League reserves, the reduction of the subscription to a nominal sum, and a frank undertaking that the League would not adopt a hostile policy while the agreement remained in force."

This proposal was even less to the temper of the meeting than the former one had been, and the latter half of it was scarcely heard among the fusillade of hostile cries. No one laughed when a hot-headed comrade stood upon a chair and howled "Traitor!"

Tirrel looked round on the assembly. Practically every man who had a tacit right to join in the deliberative Council had arrived, and the room was full; but there was not a single member among them willing to face the necessity for strong and immediate action, and they were hostile to the man who just touched the secret depths of their unconfessed and innermost misgivings. Mr Tubes felt that he had done his duty, and need not invite reference to his delicate position by further emphasising unpalatable truths; he had presented the spectacle of a weak man startled into boldness, now he was sufficiently himself again to go with the majority. The more responsible members of the Government distrusted Tirrel in every phase; the smaller fry relied on the wisdom of orthodoxy, and agreed that the man who could blow the hotness of extirpation and the coldness of conciliation with the same breath must prove an unworthy guide; and on every hand there was the tendency of settled authority to deprecate novel and unmatured proceedings.

Tirrel had become the Hampden of an earlier decade among his party.

"You call me 'Traitor,'" he said, turning to the man who had done so. "Write down the word, comrade, and then, if you will bring it to me without a blush six months hence, I will wear it round my neck in penance."

He bowed to the Premier and withdrew, not in anger or with a mean sense of injustice, but because he felt that it would be sheer mockery to share the deliberations of a Council when their respective views, on a matter which he believed to be the very crux of their existence, were antagonistic in their essences.

After his departure the progress was amazing. His ill-considered proposals had cleared the air. Every one knew exactly what he did not want, and that was a material step towards arriving at the opposite goal.

At the end of a few hours a very effective and comprehensive scheme for quietly and systematically doing nothing had been almost unanimously arrived at. Several quires of paper had been covered with suggestions, some of them being accepted as they stood, some recommended for elaboration, some passed for future consideration, some thrown out. The ambassador in Paris was to retire (on the ground of ill-health) if he could not satisfactorily explain the position. A special mission was to be sent to Berlin to get really at the bottom of things, and, if possible, have the tax either not put on or taken off, according to the situation when they arrived there. A legal commission was to rout out every precedent to see if the Unity League was not doing something outside the powers of a trade union (a very forlorn hope); and all over the country enquiries were to be made and assurances given, all very discreetly and without the least suggestion of panic.

The only doubtful point was whether every one else would play the game with the same delicate regard for Ministerial susceptibilities, or whether some might not have the deplorable taste to create scenes, send deputations, demand work with menace, claim the literal fulfilment of specific pledges, incite to riot and violence, stampede the whole community, and otherwise act inconsiderately towards the Government, when they discovered the very awkward circumstances in which their leaders had involved them.

The first indication of a jarring note fell to the lot of the President of the Board of Trade in the shape of a telegram which reached him early on the following morning. This was its form:

"From the Council of the Amalgamated Union of Chimney Sweepers and Federated Carpet Beaters. (Membership, 11,372). – Seventeen million estimated chimneys stop smoking. No soot, precious little dust. Where the Hell do we come in?

"Blankintosh, Secretary."

A few years before, it had been officially discovered that there were four or five curiously adaptable words, without which the working man was quite unable to express himself in the shortest sentence. When on very ceremonious occasions he was debarred their use, he at once fell into a pitiable condition of aphasia. Keenly alive to the class-imposed disadvantages under which these men existed, the Government of that day declared that it was a glaring anomaly that the poor fellows should not be allowed to use a few words that were so essential to their expression of every emotion, while the rich, with more time on their hands, could learn a thousand synonyms. The law imposing a shilling fine for each offence (five shillings in the case of "a gentleman," for even then there was one law for the rich and another for the poor) was therefore repealed, and the working man was free to swear as much as he liked anywhere, which, to do him justice, he had done all along.

It was for this reason that Mr Blankintosh's pointed little message was accepted for transmission; but there was evidently a limit, for, when the President of the Board of Trade, an irascible gentleman who had, in the colloquial phrase, "got out of bed on the wrong side" that morning, dashed off a short reply, it was brought back to him by a dispirited messenger two hours later with the initials of seventeen postmasters and the seventeen times repeated phrase, "Refused. Language inadmissible."

CHAPTER XV

THE GREAT FIASCO

The Government allowed the 22nd day of July to pass without a sign. They were, as their supporters convincingly explained to anxious enquirers, treating the Unity League and all its works with silent contempt. They were "doing nothing" strategically, they wished it to be understood; a very different thing from "doing nothing" through apathy, indecision, or bewilderment, but very often undistinguishable the one from the other in the result.

On the 22nd day of July seventeen million "estimated chimneys" ceased to pollute the air. The League was not concerned with the exact number, and they accepted the chimney sweepers' figures. It was more to the purpose that the order was being loyally and cheerfully obeyed. The idea of fighting the Government with the Government's own chosen people, appealed to the lighter side of a not unhumorous nation.

Ever since the institution of a Socialistic press, and from even remoter times than the saplinghood of the "Reformer's Tree," Fleet Street party hacks and Hyde Park demagogues had been sharpening their wit upon the "black-coated" brigade, the contemptible bourgeoisie of "Linton Villas," "Claremonts," and "Holly Lodges," taunting them with self-complacency, political apathy, and social parasitism. The proportion of moral degradation conferred by a coat intentionally black, in comparison with one that is merely approaching that condition through the personal predilections of its owner, has never yet been defined, and the relative æsthetic values of the architectural pretensions of villadom, compared with the unswerving realism of the "Gas Works Views," "Railway Approach Cottages," and "Cement Terraces," of the back streets, may be left to the matured judgment of an unprejudiced posterity. The great middle class in all its branches had never hitherto made any reply at all. Now that it had begun to retort in its own effective way, the Government agreed that the best counterblast would be – to wait until it all blew over.

There were naturally defections from the first. A friendly spy in Mr Tubes's secret service managed to secure the information without much trouble that within seven days of the publication of the order no less than 4372 notices of resignation had been received at headquarters. He was hastening away with this evidence of the early dissolution of the League when his grinning informant called him back to whisper in his ear that during the same period there had been 17,430 new members enrolled, and that while the resignations seemed to have practically ceased the enrolments were growing in volume. In addition to these there were battalions who joined in the policy of the League through sympathy with its object without formally binding themselves as members.

In some of its aspects the success of the movement erred in excess. There were men, manufacturers, who in their faith and enthusiasm wished to close their works at once, and, regardless of their own loss, throw their workmen and their unburnt coal into the balance. It was not required; it was not even desirable then. The League's object was to disorganise commerce as little as possible beyond the immediate boundaries of the coal trade. They were not engaged in an internecine war, and every one of their own people deprived of employment was a loss. Cases of hardship there would be; they are common to both sides in every phase of stubborn and prolonged civil strife, but from the "class" point of view coal had the pre-eminent advantage that its weight and bulk gave employment to a hundred of the "masses" to every one of themselves. There were also two circumstances that discounted any sense of injustice on this head. Firstly, there was a spirit of sacrifice and heroism in the air, born of the time and the situation; and secondly, it soon became plain that the League was engaged in vast commercial undertakings and was absorbing all the men of its own party who were robbed of their occupation by the development of the war.

A firm starting business with an unencumbered capital of ten million sterling, enjoying a "private income" of five millions a year, and not troubled with the necessity of earning any dividend at all, could afford to be a generous employer.

From the first moment it was obvious that oil must take the place of coal. That was the essence of the strife. The Tocsin set to work in frantic haste to prove that it was impossible; to show that all the authorities of the past and present had agreed that no real substitute for coal existed. It was quite true, and it was quite false. It was not a world struggle. Abroad, foreign coal was being substituted for English coal. At home only half a million tons a week were in issue at the first. Afterwards, as coal stagnation fed coal stagnation, the tonnage rose steadily, but the calorific ratio of coal and oil, the basis of all comparison, simply did not exist, except on paper, for the two fuels in domestic use.

The Tocsin's second article convinced its readers that all the lamp companies in the world could not keep up with the abnormal demand for lamps, stoves, and oil-cookers, that the ridiculous proposal of the League would involve, if it were not providentially ordained that it was foredoomed to grotesque failure by the dead weight of its own fatuous ineptitude.

In practice the two single firms of Ripplestone of Birmingham, and Schuyler of Cleveland, U.S.A., at once put on the market a varied stock that filled every requirement. There was no waiting. As The Tocsin bitterly remarked, it soon became apparent that the demand had been foreseen and "treacherously provided against during the past two years."

The third Tocsin article on the situation dealt statistically with the oil trade of the world. It necessarily fell rather flat, because The Tocsin Special Commissioner entered upon the task with the joyous conviction that the world's output would not be sufficient for the demand, the world's oil ships not numerous enough to transport it. As he dipped into the figures, however, he made the humiliating discovery that the increased demand would do little more than ruffle the surface of the oil market. The Baku oil fields could supply it without inconvenience; the United States could do it by contract at a ten per cent. advance; the newly-discovered wells of Nova Scotia alone would be equal to the demand if they diverted all their produce across the Atlantic.

He threw down his pen in despair, and then picked it up again to substitute invective for statistics. Before his eyes the motor-tanks of the Anglo-Pennsylvanian Oil Company, of London and Philadelphia, and the Anglo-Caucasian Oil Company, of London and Baku, were going on their daily rounds. It was still a matter for wonder how well equipped the sudden call had found those two great controlling oil companies. It was yet to be learned that for their elaborate designations there might be substituted the simple name "Unity League."

It was submitting The Tocsin young man to rather a cruel handicap to send him to the British Museum Reading Room for a few hours with instructions to prove impossible what Salt and Hampden had been straining every nerve for two years to make inevitable.

Three articles exhausted his proof that a successful coal boycott under modern conditions was utterly impossible.

He went out into the city and the suburbs, interviewing coal merchants and coal agents with the object of drawing a harrowing picture of the gloom and depression that had fallen upon these unfortunate creatures at the hands of their own class League.

He found them all bearing up well under the prospect, but much too busy to give him more than a few minutes of their time. Every one of them had been appointed an oil agent to the League firms, and League members were ordering their oil through them, just as heretofore they had ordered coal. It was very easy, profitable work for them; they had nothing to do but to transmit the orders to the League firms and the fast business-like motor-tanks distributed the oil. But half of the coal carters were now under notice to leave, and there were indications that work was very scarce. Each motor-tank displaced twenty men and twenty horses. Already, it was said, thousands of horses had been sent out to grass from London alone.

Externally, as far as the Capital was concerned at all events, things were going on very much the same as before, when the struggle was a fortnight old. Elsewhere signs were not lacking. The Government had received disquieting reports from its agents here and there, but so far it was meeting the situation by refusing to acknowledge that it existed. A march of the Staffordshire miners had been averted by the men's leaders being privately assured that it would embarrass the Government's plans. The march had been deferred under protest; so far the organisation answered to the wheel. But the Midlands were clamorously demanding exceptional relief for the exceptional conditions. Monmouth had seen a little rioting, and in Glamorgan the bands of incendiaries called "Beaconmen," who set fire to the accumulations of coal stacked at the collieries, had already begun their work. Cardiff was feeling the effect of having a third of its export trade in coal suddenly lopped off, and Newport, Swansea, Kirkcaldy, Blyth, Hull, Sunderland, Glasgow, and the Tyne ports were all in the same position. Most of the railways had found it necessary to dispense with their entire supernumerary staff, and most of the railway workshops had been put on short time. In London alone, between four and five thousand out-of-work gas employés were drawing Government pay.

About the third week in August the Premier, Mr Tubes, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer had a long private conference. As a result Mr Strummery called an Emergency Council. It was a thin, acrimonious gathering. Some one brought the tidings that seven more companies in South London were substituting Diesel oil engines for steam. He had all the dreary developments statistically worked out on paper. Nobody wanted to hear them, but he poured them out into the unwilling ears, down to the climax that it represented two hundred and forty-seven fewer men required at the pits.

It served as a text, however, for Mr Chadwing to hang his proposal on. After a month of inaction, the Government was at length prepared to go to the length of admitting that abnormal conditions prevailed. Oil had thrown a quarter of a million of their people out of employment. Let oil keep them. He proposed to retaliate with a 50 per cent. tax on imported oil, to come into operation under Emergency Procedure on the 1st of September.

There were men present to whom the suggestion of taxing a raw article, necessary to a great proportion of the poor, was frankly odious. They were prepared to attack the proposal as a breach of faith. A few words from Mr Strummery, scarcely more than whispered, explained the necessity for the tax and the menace of the situation.

Those who had not been following events closely, paled to learn the truth.

The Treasury was living from hand to mouth, for the City had ceased to take up its Bills. Unless "something happened" before the New Year dawned, it would have to admit its inability to continue the Unemployed Grant. Already a quarter of a million men and their dependents, in addition to the normal average upon which the estimates were based, had been suddenly thrown upon the resources of the Department. If Mr Tubes's forecast proved correct, double that number would be on their hands within another month. The development of half a million starving men who had been taught to look to the Government for everything, looking and finding nothing, could be left to each individual imagination.

The Oil Tax came into operation on the 1st of September. Under the plea of becoming more "business-like," a great many of the Parliamentary safeguards had been swept away, and such procedure was easy. All grades of petroleum had already advanced a few pence the gallon under the increased demand, and the poorer users had expressed their indignation. When they found, one day, that the price had suddenly leapt to half as much again, their wrath was unbounded. It was in vain for Ministers to explain that the measure was directed against their enemies. They knew that it fell on them, and demanded in varying degrees of politeness to be told why some luxury of the pampered, leisured classes had not been chosen instead. The reason was plain to those who studied Blue Books. So highly taxed was every luxury now that the least fraction added to its burden resulted in an actually decreased revenue from that source.

But if the mere tax and increase had impressed the poor unfavourably, a circumstance soon came to light that enraged them.

In spite of the tax the members of the Unity League were still being supplied with oil at the old prices, and they were assured that they would continue to be supplied without advance, even if the tax were doubled!

The poor, ever suspicious of the doings of those of their own class when set high in authority, at once leapt to the conclusion that they were being made the victims of a double game. It was nothing to them that the Anglo-Pennsylvanian and the Anglo-Caucasian companies were now trading at a loss; it was common knowledge that their richer League neighbours had not had the price of their oil increased, and they knew all too well that they themselves had. With the lack of balanced reasoning that had formerly been one of the Government's best weapons, they at once concluded that they alone were paying the tax, and the unparalleled injustice of it sowed a crop of bitterness in their hearts.

If that was the net result at home, the foreign effect of the policy was not a whit more satisfactory. Studland, the Consul-General at Odessa, one of the most capable men in the Service, cabled a despatch full of temperate and solemn warning the moment he heard of the step. It was too late then, if, indeed, his words would have been regarded. Russia replied by promptly trebling her existing tax on imported coal, and at the same time gave Germany rebate terms that practically made it a tax on English coal. It was said that Russia had only been waiting for a favourable opportunity, and was more anxious to develop her own new coal fields in the Donetz basin than to import at all. As far as the Treasury was concerned, the oil tax yielded little more than was absorbed by the thirty thousand extra men thrown out of work by Russia's action. The Government had given a rook for a bishop.

A little time ago the Cabinet had been prepared to greet winter as a friend. Without quite possessing the ingenuousness of their amiable Comrade Bilch, they had thought cynically of the pampered aristocrats shivering in Mayfair drawing-rooms, of the comfort-loving middle classes sitting before their desolate suburban hearths, of blue-faced men setting out breakfastless for freezing offices, and of pallid women weeping as they tried to warm the hands of little children, as they put them in their icy beds.

And now? All their cynical sympathy had apparently been in vain. There were not going to be any cold breakfasts, freezing offices, or shivering women and children. Warming stoves and radiators raised the temperature of a room much quicker than a fire did, and kept it equable without any attention. Oil cookers took the place of the too often erratic kitchen range. Mrs Strummery innocently threw the Premier into a frenzy one morning by dilating on the advantages of a "Britonette" stove which she had been shown by a Tottenham Court Road ironmonger. The despised, helpless "classes" were going on very comfortably. They were going on even gaily; "Oil Scrambles" constituted a new and popular form of entertainment for long evenings; from Wimbledon came the information that "Candle Cinderellas" would have a tremendous rage during the approaching season; and in Cheapside and the Strand the penny hawkers were minting money with the novel and diverting "Coal Sack Puzzle."

But the winter was approaching, though no longer as a friend. If England should say to-morrow what Lancashire was saying that day, there were portents of stirring times in the air. Already Northumberland, Durham, and Yorkshire were muttering in their various uncouth dialects, and Lanark was subscribing to disquieting sentiments in its own barbarous tongue. Derbyshire was becoming uneasy, Staffordshire was scarcely answering to the wheel, and Nottingham was in revolt against what it considered to be the too compliant attitude of the Representation Committee. The rioting in Monmouth was only restrained from becoming serious in its proportions by the repeated assurances from Westminster that the end was in sight; and the "Beaconmen" of Glamorgan were openly boasting that before long they would "light such a candle" that the ashes would fall upon London like a Vesuvian cloud.

Still nearer home was the disturbing spectacle of the railway-men thrown out of work, the coal carters, the stablemen, the gasworkers, the canal boatmen, the general labourers, the tool-makers, the wheel-wrights, the chimney sweepers, the brushmakers. The sequence of dependence could be traced, detail by detail, through every page of the trade directory.