I. MEMORANDUM ON THE CAUSES OF AND REMEDIES FOR LABOUR UNREST, SUBMITTED ΤΟ THE CHAOS AND ORDER IN INDUSTRY A CHAPTER I THE CAUSE OF STRIKES MAN healthy is a man: a man sick is an organism. system in proportion as that system is disturbed or out of order. However little society may resemble an organism in many ways, it is like it in this. Society, that is, the ordinary man in society, becomes actively conscious of the industrial and economic system only when he finds by experience that something has gone wrong, and that the system is not functioning properly in relation to the life of the community as a whole. We are acutely conscious of industry to-day because industry is in a mess, because its normal working is constantly interrupted by disputes between the various parties now concerned in it, and because, as consumers and users of its products and services, we directly experience the results of its disorder. No one can afford at the present time to say that he is not interested in the industrial system, if only because the industrial system, without being greatly interested in him, is constantly deflecting the ordinary course of his life, and, by concentrating upon itself the attention of the best brains in the community, preventing the doing of other things that need to be done, and causing even the best-laid plans which ignore its peculiarities to break down. We must attend to industry, because, until we have got industry reasonably organised, it is not of much use to attend to other things of equal importance and certainly of greater ultimate interest. It is not because industry is in itself interesting, attractive or engrossing to the ordinary man that the ordinary man must sit up and take notice of it. It is even because it is, to him at least, uninteresting and unattractive. He does not want to think about strikes and profits, or methods of industrial organisation. There are other things much nearer to his heart, and in his opinion, which matters most, much better worth thinking about. But he is coming to realise that, unless he sees that the industrial chaos is converted into an order which the workers in industry will accept, the future will hold for him, not merely discomforts and disturbances, but acute privations and perhaps the dissolution of the society on which the realisation of his personal desires depends. Thus far the majority of intelligent persons have got already. They have realised that industry and the industrial system are matters of personal concern to them in their everyday life. But many intelligent persons have got no farther. Having realised that industry matters, they have merely based a strong opinion about industry on their existing prejudices and presuppositions, and have made no real attempt to think out for themselves what is wrong with industry, or what ought to be done to set the industrial house in order. A class prejudice, an assumption inculcated in the home, the school, |