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The Daily record and the Dresden daily : 04.04.1906
- Erscheinungsdatum
- 1906-04-04
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- Englisch
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- SLUB Dresden
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- SLUB Dresden
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- Public Domain Mark 1.0
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- ZeitungThe Daily record and the Dresden daily
- Jahr1906
- Monat1906-04
- Tag1906-04-04
- Monat1906-04
- Jahr1906
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ypPRESDEN Office: Struvestr. 5 1 open 9-6 o’clock. Telephone: 1755 INmil 51° 3' 13" N. Latitude. 13° 44' 15 E. Longitude. Expedition: Struvestr. 5 L eoffnet von 9-6 Uhr. Fernruf: 1755. ■Ns 51. | DRESDEN, Wednesday, April 4, 1906. 10 Pfennig. “The Dresden Daily” will appear every morning except on Mondays and days following public holidays. It will be sent to any address in Dresden on payment of a Quarterly Subscription of 3 J(. The subscription may commence at any time. THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT AND THE TRADE DISPUTES BILL. The “rift within the lute”, twice referred to in this column, widens. On Wednesday last, the Attorney General, on behalf of the Government, introduced into the House of Commons the Minis terial measure for the regulation of Trade Unions and trade disputes. The need for further legisla tion on this suhject had arisen because, under judicial decisions, a construction had been put upon the law of conspiracy so wide that it is now im possible to say beforehand what action a Trade Union may legally take; and because the right of “peaceful persuasion” has been impaired, and pro vident funds have been made liable for claims founded on the acts of unauthorized officials. “A more thorny problem”, said the Attorney General, “for a Government to deal with has never arisen. We have done our best to solve it, and the House is entitled to consider whether our solution is worth acceptance, or whether they prefer the method of which some honourable members are in favour. We think the Bill will be regarded as a satisfactory solution of a very difficult question. At all events it is an honest Bill.” On Friday the House passed by an overwhelming majority the second reading of the Trade Disputes Bill introduced by Mr. W. Hudson, the Labour Member for Newcastle-on-Tyne. The first two sections of this Bill, which deal with conspiracy and picketing, are substantially equivalent to the first two sections of the Government Trade Disputes Bill. The third section provides that “an action shall not be brought against a Trade Union or other association aforesaid for the recovery of damage sustained by any person or persons by reason of the action of a member or members of such Trade Union or other association aforesaid”. The corresponding provision of the Government Bill is a rather complicated amendment of the law of agency, designed to le ve the Trade Union liable for the authorised acts of a central executive committee, while freeing it in some measure from the liability which often attaches to other employers for the wilfully wrongful deeds of subordinate agents. The Government had the choice between three alternatives: opposition to Mr. Hudson’s Bill as differing fundamentally from their own in its third section; acceptance of Mr. Hudson’s Bill as substantially identical with their own by reason of its first two sections and its general good in tentions; and the leaving it open to the House to choose freely between the two Bills on the ground that they differed considerably, yet not so consider ably as to let any vote on them affect the credit of the Government. In a keenly awaited speech the Prime Minister declared for the second of these three pos sible courses. In their first two sections the Bills were identical; the difference introduced by the third section of Mr. Hudson’s Bill was a difference of the merest detail,” a matter which could be settled with no difficulty at all in Committee. It would be unjust to charge the Prime Minister with attempting to deceive the House; there was no possibility of deception—even of self-de ception. The whole of Friday’s discussion had turned upon the difference between the two Bills; upon the vital distinction between the principle of liability retained by the Government and the principle of absolute immunity asserted by the Trade Unionists. Half the speech of the Attorney-Gene ral on Wednesday had been devoted to emphasi sing the same difference and to criticising the pro posals of the Labour Party as involving a serious and dangerous departure from the principles adop ted by the Government. The Prime Minister de clared that he saw no reason under the sun why he should not vote for Mr. Hudson’s Bill; he had ho answer to Mr. Wyndham’s retort that an abso lutely conclusive reason was to be found at his right hand, in the person of the Attorney-General seated on the Treasury Bench. The action of the Government on Friday was a transparent admis sion of the fact that they had wholly miscalculated the nature of the forces behind them and of the pledges by which the rank and file of the Liberal Party feel themselves to be bound. Wherever the proposals of the Government differ from Section 3 of Mr. Hudson’s Bill, the former, and not the latter, will be amended. That, in direct opposition to the Prime Minister’s statement, the difference is to be regarded as im portant in practice and vital in principle will not be denied by any impartial judge. That the adop tion of Mi*. Hudson’s principle of immunity rather than the Government’s principle of guarded liability will be a social blunder of the first, magnitude appears no less indubitable. To say this does not in the least imply hostility to Trade Unionism. Mr. F. E. Smith injured a good case by his un compromising attack on Mr. Hudson’s Bill as a whole and by his championship of non-unionism against unionism. The essence of Trade Unionism is the substitution of combined for individual dea ling between employers and employed. In itself that may be a good thing and not a bad thing. The development of Trade Unionism implies, of course, limitation of individual liberty; if ten thousand coal miners agree upon certain terms as the proper ones for their work they mean to affect and they do affect very seriously the liberty of any individual coal miner to accept other terms of employment. But there is a vital distinction as to the means by which this inter ference with individual liberty may be brought about. Trade Unionism involves two forms of power to affect others. The first is the power inherent in concerted action as such; if any number of persons agree only to work on certain terms, and only with others accepting those terms, they can exercise a power strictly proportionate to their own numbers and the firm ness of their agreement. And they can exercise it by perfectly peaceful methods, simply putting into force in concert their own right to work or not to work except on their own terms. There are, however, other methods by which the many, in their general interest, may endeavour to control the one: the methods of personal violence and intimidation and assault. Such methods are not needed by the strongly organised Trade Unions; they are, of course, reprobated by all responsible officials, for ultimately they do infinite harm to those who adopt them; yet they are neither impossible nor to this day unknown. In regard to these two powers, the power of peaceful but concerted action, which is the essence of Trade Unionism, and the power of personal violence of the many against the one, Trade Unions may surely at this time of. day claim the full and unfettered use of the former, but of the former alone. By the provisions of the Government Bill, Trade Unions would obtain, what they now have not, what they must be allowed, the power to use the mere weight of their numbers peacefully in self- defence. No act done by many would be unlawful unless it were unlawful as the act of one. The re versal of the Taff Vale case, on the other hand, would give Trade Unions what as peaceful associa tions they do not want, what in a civilised State no association should be*allowed to possess: complete immunity from the law—the power to make their accumulated funds into the sinews of violent war upon persons and on property. To represent this as the creation of a class privilege is to misre present it and to understate its real gravity which lies in the weakening of law, and of the control of the State over individuals and associations within its borders. IMPRISONMENT FOR DEBT IN ENGLAND. The following article from the pen of Henriette Jastrow, which appears in the ” Woehc'', is a de scription of how the English laws touching debt arid debtors strike a German living in London. The authoress after commenting on the different appear ance of an English Court of Justice to a German, the full-bottomed wig of the Judge, the barristers’ robes &c, goes on to say. “We will however today turn our attention to those who stand in a category betweeri the realms of criminal and civil justice: the insolvent debtors. They have cheated their fellow men of their rightful property by contract- ing debts beyond their means; but the contraction of the debt itself took place with the knowledge and consent of the other party, who would have been able to prevent it, had he refused credit. According to the modern ideas of equity this circumstance is of such weight that the insolvent debtor, so far as he has committed no fraudulent action, is, in the eye of the law, no longer re garded as a criminal, but merely becomes subject to the civil code. It was a long time before this view forced its way into acceptance. In ancient times there not only existed the so-called “debt bondage”, on the strength of which the creditor could make the insolvent or dilatory debtor his slave, but by the Roman Law of the Twelve Tables he could even kill him. All these laws were re pealed in Rome in 325 A. D., and replaced by an easy imprisonment for the insolvent debtor. ‘ But the Christian States did not at first adopt this lenient view, but inflicted all kinds of more or less severe penalties on the debtor. In England for example, as late as the seventeenth century the existing form of the law was made more severe; the debtor was put in the pillory and one of his ears was cut off. Only in comparatively recent times, in 1816, was this law repealed, and the same stage was reached as the Romans had attained in 325, in that now only the prison remained for the debtor who could not fulfil his obligations. The second half of the last century brought a revolution in this view of justice. In 1867 personal arrest for the compulsion of payment was abolished in France, the North German Confederation and Austria followed suit in 1868, as did by degrees all the other civilised nations. Thus in England a revision of the law of imprisonment for debt was taken in hand in the year 1869. In principle, the example of the other States was followed, but as so often happens with the English people, they could not quite free themselves from the old tra ditions, and provided the law with clauses of such a nature, that it may truthfully be said that im prisonment for debt exists in England even today. Not, however, for the debtor on a large scale, the spendthrift who lives above his income, the Stock Exchange gambler, whose speculations have brought him to ruin; these and other “insolvent rich”, so to speak, bring their cases before the Bankruptcy Court, which frees them from their obligations at one stroke. Apart from exceptional cases in which the judge can order a precautionary arrest, they are in no danger of being robbed of their personal liberty. It is otherwise with the petty debtor. Of course, as a debtor, personal arrest is abolished for him too, and if he is ab solutely incapable of paying, then not only “the King has lost his rights,” but also the credi tor; he is powerless to put the debtor in prison. But if the latter thinks that he will be able to pay off his debt, if he is only given time, and if the creditor can put the debtor under an obligation in court to pay off the amount sued for, either in a lump sum or by instalments before a certain date, he thereby lays a snare for the debtor which may bring him to prison. For a failure to comply with , this judicial order of payment constitutes Con tempt of Court, and as such, on the application of the creditor, must be expiated by imprisonment. Only on payment, or at latest after six weeks, is the debtor released. In the latter case, that is if the debtor is released without having paid the debt, the creditor naturally retains his claims upon him in civil law. He cannot send him to prison more than once for delay in paying the same sum, but the more instalments there are due, the more often does this sword of Damocles hang over the head of the tardy debtor, for each unpaid instalment constitutes this dreaded “ Contempt of Court ”.
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