A Look Round
According to “Bradstreet’s” there were 964 business failures in America in October, with assets 124 million dollars and liabilities 139 million dollars. In October, 1893, the failures were 1,753 with assets 36 million dollars and liabilities 55 million dollars. Thus in 1893 the average liabilities per failure were 31,375 dollars and in 1907 they were 144,200 dollars. But of the latter twenty failures account for 114 million dollars, leaving only 25 million dollars for the remaining 944.
The S.D.F., I.L.P., and the Labour Party were well represented in the signatures to the Memorial, relating to the employment of barmaids, submitted to the Chancellor of the Exchequer last month. They included Miss Margaret Bondfield, Rev. R. J. Campbell, A. H. Gill, M.P., A. Henderson, M.P., J. Ramsay MacDonald, M.I’., and D. J. Shackleton, M.P. The memorialists claim that from the advertisements in the trade papers it is evident that the great majority of barmaids are engaged on account of their attractiveness to men customers, whilst the record of the magistrates and other courts gives convincing statistical proof that the career of the disproportionate number of barmaids ends in drunkenness, immorality, misery and frequently suicide.
Now, if public houses are such demoralising and terrible places as these people would have us believe, why do not they take up a logical position and advocate their immediate suppression ? And why do they suggest that the wives and daughters of publicans should be permitted to continue to work in “surroundings which carry with them special dangers and temptations” ? Do they consider the publican has a right of private property in his wife and daughters so inviolable that he is to be permitted to employ them in a career that “ends in drunkenness, immorality, misery, and frequently suicide” ?
But the memorialists would even permit barmaids now employed to continue in what they consider such vile surroundings provided they have a licence from the Government. They would “protect the young girls of the nation” but those who have already entered upon this horrible career are to be permitted to go down to their end “in drunkenness, immorality, misery, and frequently suicide” if they have taken out a licence !
The Government is to place it on record that public houses are places where no decent woman should work. The publican’s wife and daughters are not to count. I suppose the worst surroundings are too good for them, according to the ideas of the memorialists. Licences are therefore to be granted to other men’s wives and daughters, and no doubt the fortunate holder of such a badge of slavery will be regarded as one who has either proved herself able to withstand the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, or is so low and depraved that it does not matter what happens to her.
No one denies that the barmaid’s lot could be improved, particularly in regard to her hours of labour, but in many respects it is vastly superior to that of other women workers. As a rule, she gets plenty of food and good food, which is more than can be said of the girls employed in such highly respectable occupations as millinery and dressmaking, often working for nothing and usually for only a few shillings a week. If they live at home the financial effort required for clothing prevents them from being otherwise than semi-starved all the time, and many of them exist in a condition of chronic anaemia which in due course has its effect upon their offspring. If they “live in”—well, Miss Bondfield, who wishes to abolish the barmaids, being an official of the Shop Assistants Union, has time after time denounced the system. And it is said that there are large establishments in the shopping centres of London where the girls who live in are allowed to stay out all night, provided they pay a fine of ten shillings in the morning. Such a system cannot be charged against the publicans. And as to the alleged immorality, it must be admitted that there is nothing drives women on the streets so much as inability to obtain food and clothing for themselves and their dependents. The barmaid, at any rate, is secured against this.
Again, the atmosphere of thousands of coffee shops is much more immoral than the bar of a public house is ever likely to be, and the girls employed have no protection. Customers may use vile language concerning the food (as it is called) supplied in these places, and this language the waitress has to listen to. A remonstrance on her part to her employer would probably result in her getting “the sack,” as the competition is too keen, and the profits too small, particularly in the poorer districts, for the “guvner” to be able to afford to quarrel with his customers. But if a customer in a wicked public house uses vile language to a barmaid and the manager or proprietor overhears or it is reported to him, the culprit is either warned, or put out and sometimes forbidden the house altogether. And the conditions of the girls in these coffee shops, as to hours, wages, and food, are certainly much inferior to those of the majority of barmaids.
Of course the S.D.F. and the I.L.P., through their members who signed the memorial, are being made the tools of the most bigoted section of that nonconformist conscience which they have so often denounced. These pharasaical humbugs really wish to prohibit the sale of alcoholic liquors, but lack the courage to openly declare themselves.
According to the Daily Chronicle’s Rome correspondent between 50,000 and 60,000 Neapolitans have formed a passive resistance movement, and for six months have refused to pay rent or quit their tenements. The Government are taking the usual course. Controlling, as they do, the armed forces of the nation, which armed forces they will continue to control so long as they are politically dominant, they are using those forces against the workers. In the early part of December ten thousand troops from various cities had been despatched to reinforce the Naples Garrison preparatory to evicting the working-class families concerned.
Once more “the impracticability of the Socialist schemes” has been demonstrated, this time by a Mr. Moreton Frewen. He says that the total accumulated capital in the country is estimated at £9,000,000,000, which invested at 3½ per cent. would bring in about 5d. a day per person. The total income from all sources Mr. Frewen estimates at £1,500,000,000 annually, equal to about 14s. per head per week. “Thus,” says our oracle, “the Socialist ideal of happiness would result in every individual in the country being possessed of a revenue of 16s. 11d. per week.” And Mr. Frewen adds that thin would not be “a very prosperous state of affairs.”
16s. 11d. per head per week, says Mr. Frewen, will be the income under Socialism. It is computed that the average family consists of five persons, so that each family would receive £4 4s. 7d. per week. But it is known that the working class have larger families than the well-to-do section of the population, and the amount would therefore be increased for working-class families. And this “would not be a very prosperous state of affairs” !
Well, if Socialism really meant dividing up what is known as the National Income, it would mean the trebling, at least, of the income of the mass of the working class. Chas. Booth has shown that 1,250,000 of the population of London are in receipt of a wage of one guinea or less per week per family, and in commenting on the Railway dispute the Daily Telegraph pointed out that, in the event of a strike, an enormous number of men would be willing to blackleg at £1 per week. “Twenty shillings a week is no luxurious wage we admit,” said the Daily Telegraph, “but it is better, alas, than many thousands of workmen in both, town and country can secure.” So that the “prosperity” of the working class under capitalism is represented by one-sixth or less of what, according to Mr, Frewen, they would receive under Socialism, And this proves “the impracticability of the Socialist schemes ” !
It is not surprising that opponents get the idea that Socialism merely means the equalisation of income or wages when those professing: to be Socialists endeavour to popularise the same idea. Recently I heard a Mr. Dean, on the I.L.P. platform in East Ham, inform a questioner that “of course, it would be quite possible for anyone to save up his money under Socialism, if he preferred not to spend the wages paid to him each week by the State. But he would not be able to employ anyone else with the money so saved. He would be a capitalist, but unable to use his capital.” And after delivering himself of this he read the titles of pamphlets which he advised the audience to buy and study, some of which explained that the wages system would be abolished with the abolition of the capitalist system and the establishment of Socialism.
This misconception of Socialism arises largely out of the advocacy of palliatives by both the I.L.P. and the S.D.F. So obscured is the issue, even to members of these bodies, by their talk of the “right to work,” “better wages for the working class,” “free maintenance for children” etc., that they appear unable to conceive of any system where the hooter shall not sound the time for commencing and leaving work, and where the people shall not be the wage-receiving slaves of the machine industry that they are to-day. They would merely “humanise” the conditions of employment.
J. KAY