Download National Conference on the Prevention of Destitution, Held at the Caxton Hall, Westminster, on June 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th, 1912 Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle
Excerpt from National Conference on the Prevention of Destitution, Held at the Caxton Hall, Westminster, on June 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th, 1912: Report of the Proceedings of the Unemployment and Industrial Regulation Section The country to which I return strikes me, in many ways, as intellectually a new England. The common ideas about the organisation and control of industry have changed. There has evidently been, in the twelve months, a tremendous education of public Opinion. What the workmen are demanding is something much more than a mere rise in wages. The readers of the Daily M ail welcome the most revolutionary proposals for collective control. The readers of the Spectator, aghast at a vision of a cold grate and empty coal cellar, can only dumbly acquiesce. Even the House of Commons, which is about the last place for facts or ideas to penetrate, seems at one moment to have realised, as in a flash, the depths of its own ignorance, and the impotence to which it had actually come. And though the lobbies quickly recovered them selves, as soon as it was seen that the miners would be persuaded to go back to work, and the Ministerial Tapers and Tadpoles tried to put a brave face on it, the House appears to me still a little conscious of the sorry figure that it has cut in the various labour troubles of the year, still uneasy at not having in its agenda anything bearing on the problem - perhaps a little ashamed of the sudden revelation of the Governing Classes as being no longer Governing Classes at all - so that it now chants its commonplaces about Labour in a minor key. In short, though we in England have by no means become wise, we are perhaps all of us, through our humiliation, in a healthier state of mind. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.