Representative Institutions 53
Live exegutlye Js a real advance on the old expedients, it is IHielj^tq grove Jnferior to government by a representative, assembly, appointing its own cabinet and officers. But a great national Trade Union extending from one end of the kingdom to the other cannot easily adopt the superior form, even if the members desire it. ) The Cotton Operatives enjoy the special advantage of having practically all their member- ship within a radius of thirty miles from Manchester. The frequent gatherings of a hundred delegates held usually on a Saturday afternoon entail, therefore, no loss of working time and little expense to the organisation. The same con- sideration applies to the great bulk of the membership of the Miners' Federation, three-fourths of which is concentrated in Lancashire, West Yorkshire, and the industrial Midlands. Even the outlying coalfields elsewhere enjoy the advantage of close local concentration, so that a single delegate may effectively represent the hundreds of lodges in his own county. And it is no small consideration that the total membership of the Miners' Federation is so large that the cost of frequent meetings of fifty to seventy delegates bears only a trifling proportion to the resources of the union. Very different is the position of the great unions in the engineering and building trades. The 46,000 members of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters in the United Kingdom, for instance, are divided into 623 branches, scattered over 400 separate towns or villages. Each town has its own Working Rules, its own Standard Rate and Normal Day, and lacks intimate connection with the towns right and left of it. The representative chosen by the Newcastle , branch might easily be too much absorbed by the burning local question of demarcation against the Shipwrights to pay much attention to the simple grievances of the Hexham branch as to the Saturday half-holiday, or to the multiplication of apprentices in the joinery shops at Darlington. Similar considerations apply to the 497 branches of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, whose 80,000 members in the United Kingdom are working in 300 different towns. In view of the increasing
54 Trade Union Structure
uniformity of working conditions throughout the country, the concentration of industry in large towns, the growing facili- ties' of travel and the steady multiplication of salaried local officials,' we do not ourselves regard the geographical difficulty as insuperable. But it is easy to understand why, with so large a number of isolated branches, it has not yet seemed practicable to constitutional reformers in the building or the engineering trades, to have frequent meetings of repre- sentative assemblies.
The tardiness and incompleteness with which Trade" Unions have adopted representative institutions is mainly due to a more general cause. The workman has been slow to recognise the special function of the representative "vtC^ democracy. In the early constitutional ideals of Trade Unionism the representative finds, as we have seen, absolutely no place. The committee-man elected by rotation of offic e o r the de leg ate deputed to take part in a revision of ru les wa s habitua lly re garded only as a vehicle by which "t he voices " could be mecha nically conv eyed. His task required, therefore, no special qualification beyond intelligence to comprehend his instructions and a spirit of obedience in carrying them out. Very different is the duty cast upon the representative in such modern Trade Union constitutions_ as those of the Cotton Operatives and Coalminers. His 'main function is still to express the mind of the average man. But unlike the delegate, he is not a mechanica l yehicle of votes on particular subjects. The ordinary Trg.^e ' Unionist has but little facility in expressing his desires ; unversed in the technicalities of administration, he is unable to judge by what particular expedient his grievances can best be remedied. In default of an expert representative he has to depend on the professional administrator. But for this particular task the professional administrator is no more competent than the ordinary man, though for a different reason. The very apartness of hi s life fro m that of th e avera ge workman depr ives him of close acquaintan ce with th e actua l gr ievances of the mass of the people. Immersed
Representative Institutions 55
in office routine, he is apt to fail to understand from their inconsistent complaints and impracticable suggestions what it is they really desire. [To act as an interpreter between the people and their servants is, therefore, the first function of the representative.
But this is only half of his duty. To him is entrusted also the difficult and delicate task of CQiitrQlling-.±he_ pro-, fe ssional expert s.) Here, as we have seen, the ordinary man completely breaks down. The task, to begin with, requires a certain familiarity with the machinery of government, and a sacrifice of time and a concentration of thought out of the reach of the average man absorbed in gaining his daily bread. So much is this the case that when the administra- tion is complicated, a further specialisation is found necessary, I and the representative assembly itself chooses a cabinet, or executive committee of men specially qualified for this duty. A large measure of intuitive capacity to make a wise choic'ei of men is, therefore, necessary even in the ordinary repre- sentative. Finally, there comes the important duty qt- deciding upon questions of policy or tactics. The ordinkry citizen thinks of nothing but clear issues on broad lines. The representative, on the other hand, finds himself con-*' stantly called upon to choose between the nicely balanced expediencies of compromise necessitated by the complicated facts of practical life. On his shrewd judgment of actual circumstances will depend his success in obtaining, not all that his constituents desire—for that he will quickly recognise as Utopian—but the largest instalment of those desires that may be then and there possible.
To construct a perfect representative assembly can, therefore, never be an easy task ; and in a community ex- clusively composed of manual workers dependent on weekly wages, the task is one of exceptional difficulty. A community of bankers and business entrepreneurs finds it easy to secure a representative committee to direct and control the paid officials whom it engages to protect its interests. Constituents, representatives and officials are
56 Trade Union Structure
living much the same life, are surrounded by the same intellectual atmosphere, have received approximately the same kind of education and mental training, and are con- stantly engaged in one variety or another of what is essentially the same work of direction and control, More-
'over, there is no lack of persons able to give the necessary time and thought to expressing the desires of their class and to seeing that they are satisfied. It is, therefore, not surprising that representative institutions should be seen at their best in middle- class communities.^ In all these
^respects the manual workers stand at a grave disadvantage. Whatever may be the natural endowment of the workman selected by his comrades to serve as a representative, he starts unequipped with that special training and that general familiarity with administration which will alone enable him to be a competent critic and director of the expert pro-
/fessional. Before he can place himself on a level with tS? trained official whom he has to control he must devote his whole time and thought to his new duties, and must there- fore give up his old trade. This unfortunately tends to alter his manner of life, his habit of mind, and usually also" his intellectual atmosphere to such an extent that he gradually loses that 'vivid appreciation of the feelings of the man at the bench or the forge, which it is his function to express. There is a certain cruel irony in the problem which accounts, we think, for some of the unconscious exasperation of the wage-ear ners all over the world against representative institutions. pDirectly