many of them gave their notices to the Executive on this distinct understanding. Many of those, however, who refrained from giving their notices, and who afterwards voted for an immediate strike, thought that by leaving their work without notice they became liable only to the usual penalities for absence without leave; and they imagined that, at longest, the strike would last a week, at the end of which they hoped to return to their work with, at least, some improvement in their position. They thus regarded the tendering of notice ast tantamount to retiral from their employment, and simple nonreturn to work as a strike, in protest against the conditions under which they laboured. That they had broken their engagements, and that they might thus be held legally liable for breach of contract does not seem to have been present in their minds, although it was certainly impressed upon them by their own Executive.1

This explanation has, of course, no bearing upon the legal question of notice,2 but must be given a certain weight in forming an ethical judgment upon the action of the men.

3

Day by day, during the strike, the men in the Glasgow district met at noon in the Albion Halls, College Street. The audience, until the Executive appeared at two o'clock each day, beguiled the time with songs and occasionally a dance and instrumental music. "Mr John Smith, engine-driver, Polmadie, for a song," read the chairman, and Mr John Smith, a well-dressed, powerfully built man, sang "Afton Water" with unexpected sweetness, a welcome incongruity at a strike meeting. Sometimes a brakesman, with ingenuous face and ungainly air, gave a rollicking topical song, in which incidents of the strike found a setting in very rude verse indeed. There was the most perfect order and goodhumour. The audience was easily tolerant of lapses in memory,

(1) See page 11.

(2) See page 47.

(3) The Albion Halls was for the railway what "Wade's Arms" was for the dockers strike.

and of music as a rule vigorous rather than artistic. Day by day, reports were read from the districts, describing the situation from the point of view of the men. "Motherwell.--All out here, stand firm; sure to win." This was the prevailing. strain during the six weary weeks.

But the real work of the strikers was done at night and in the early morning. "Picketing," which formed so important. a feature in the Dockers' Strike of 1889,1 was from the beginning, and especially at the beginning, a serious factor in the railway struggle. On the evening of Sunday, 21st December, when an immediate strike was suddenly proclaimed, the secretary, Mr Tait, proved himself equal to the emergency, and produced at once a "plan of campaign" which he had apparently prepared in anticipation of a strike under ordinary conditions, as designed by the Executive.

By this plan of campaign' pickets were despatched direct from the meeting to St Rollox, Polmadie, and other places in the Glasgow districts, and similar parties drove to Motherwell and elsewhere to convey information and to "bring the men out." The picketing of the first Sunday was the great success of the strike. The enthusiasm of the men who had been actually engaged in the movement had “caught on,” and men at all the centres joined them in shoals. After the heat of the first moments of action was over, and during the six weeks of the struggle, picketing became a dreary business. Pickets from the body of the strikers were paid out of the strike funds; but there were besides many volunteers who joined the paid pickets and spent with them the dismal hours between eleven o'clock at night and five or six in the morning, on the hillsides of the Lothians, tramping from cabin to cabin across the moors, or on the road at Polmadie, the most dreary and unredeemed part of Glasgow, watching all night the gate of the Caledonian Railway Depot, amid snow and keen east wind. The pickets were organised in

(1) "See The Story of the Dockers' Strike." H. LI. Smith and Vaughan Nash, p. IoI..

relieving parties, and their captains were posted in the law of the subject, vague as it is. They carried copies of the Conspiracy Act in their pockets, and gave peripatetic lectures in law to its own officers, who were sometimes too recent accessions to the force to have fully mastered all the clauses of all the statutes they were expected to administer.

It would appear that the men were urgently warned against "'intimidation by the captains of their pickets, and although there were unquestionably cases in which the pickets were guilty of "watching and besetting," these were after all not numerous, when one considers the very large number of men who were engaged, and the number of places where picketing was carried on. A serious encounter took place between steel-workers who had volunteered to picket, and the police at Polmadie, in which several persons were injured.

The personal element was not nearly so manifest in the railway as it was in the dockers' strike. In London, Burns' white straw hat was a kind of banner which everyone recognised, and his rather turgid eloquence was immensely effective among the London crowds. Scotsmen are, however, more difficult to move by mere harangues, and, besides, the wide area over which the strike was scattered rendered personal force harder to exercise. The magnetism of a crowd counts for something in a strike. When men are broken into small groups it is supremely difficult to sustain concerted action. The hard work of the Executive was largely consultative and clerical. They had an immense correspondence with the districts, and they were almost daily interviewed by volunteer negotiators. In addition to work of this kind the members of the Executive visited the pickets, and spoke twice or thrice a day at the meetings. Burns reported at one moment that he had had no sleep for eighty hours.

For

(1) The helpers who came from England were Mr Harford, Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, and "John Burns -Socialist, Engineer, Agitator, and County Councillor.'

days together they had worked continuously. By the close of the struggle, they were all thoroughly exhausted. For those who are engaged in it, a modern strike, with its rapidly passing phases and its intense concentration of life and energy upon a single point, really crushes half a lifetime into a few weeks. Few men who have experienced a serious campaign desire to experience another.

The chief personal figure in the struggle was not, however, to be found among the strikers, but was to be found on the other side. The man who was felt to hold the key of the position was Mr. John Walker, general manager of the North British Railway Company, well known in Scotland as one of the most astute and enterprising railway administrators in the country, the man in whose reign the Tay and Forth Bridges have been built, and who was found, when peop'e awoke after the fact, practically to have secured possession of the keys of internal transport in Scotland. Mr. Walker had, along with an able coadjutor on the North British Company, raised the railway in point of mileage and influence from the position of a bad second to the position of being easily the first among the Scottish lines. Whatever one may think as to the likelihood of a great error in judgment having been made by Mr. Walker, in allowing the discontent of his men to reach such proportions, one cannot but admire his firm adherence to what he believed to be his duty, and his really magnificent loyalty to his corporation. At the same time, it depends very largely upon the energy with which he now "sets his house in order,"

whether or not the public demand for serious limitation of the power of railway managers and directors may not become quite irresistible.

Unnecessary complications in calculating hours and wages were among the causes of the London Dock strike, and were among the subsidiary causes of the railway strike in Scotland. In London the hours paid for were less than those actually worked.1 This also was the case in Scotland. By means of the

(1) "The Story of the Dockers' Strike," p. 49.

system of booking on and booking off, and by the "trip' system, the companies are accused of having succeeded in getting from one to two hours' duty per day per man without paying for it.1

The chief causes of the strike, already incidentally noticed, may be summarised here :

1. The neglect, and consequent accumulation of grievances, many of them, perhaps, individually petty, brought about a temper in the minds of the men that was little short of desperate; and it was the existence of this temper, especially among the men at Glasgow, Hamilton, and Motherwell, which led to their breaking from the control of their Executive, and ultimately to the strike.

2

3

2. Behind this specific cause lay another, more remotely responsible for it and for the whole crisis. This was the severe competition between the two railways-the Caledonian and the North British. During the few past years not only have enormous sums been spent by each of them in opposing the other's Bills in Parliament, but their working expenses have been largely increased, owing to the assumed need of making certain lines in order to secure the means of communication in districts in course of development, and to the running of certain trains for purely competitive reasons. The evidence before the Railway Rates Commission showed how the districts in which competition was not effective were compelled to pay in increased rates in order to help to make up for the loss upon districts where competition was severely effective. One section of the public was thus taxed for the benefit of another section; while it would appear from the preceding pages as if some part, at least, of the reduction in rates in districts where competition was severe was recovered

(1) Cf. Mr. Stretton in The Engineer, January 30, 1891. The booking system was, after the strike, abolished by the G. & S. W. Railway Company, 20th January, 1891. See Evening Citizen, 21st January.

(2) Sharply criticised by a shareholder at a special meeting of the North British Railway, 3rd February, 1891.

(3) On Edinburgh access and on G. S. W. Railway amalgamation, for instance.