may say so, more ignorant than they are now, they were naturally
more submissive and content with conditions the cause of which they so
little understood. You cannot send the children of the poor to school,
and improve your State agencies for education, and increase the millions
annually which the country is ready to spend in teaching the masses of
the people more than they knew before, and expect those masses to remain
content with the economic and social conditions which even disturbed
their more ignorant fathers. In short, the more you educate and train
the working classes, the more naturally you bring them to the point of
revolt against conditions which are inhuman or unfair, or which cannot
be brought to square with the higher standard of education which they
may receive. I am sure when the community come to understand that it is
a natural and even a proper sense of revolt on the part of the masses of
the people they will not regret their education. Out of all this feeling
of discontent in the minds of the industrial population there has in the
last thirty odd years grown very strong organisation. The Trade Union
movement, which I mention first as a very great factor in all these
matters, is a most powerful and important factor, and the country will
have to pay greater regard to the steps which Trade Unionism may take
than the country has been disposed previously to do. The Trade Union
movement was stimulated and developed by the conditions which it was
brought into being to remedy. The Trade Union was not the growth of mere
agitation. The average Briton must be convinced that there is something
really wrong before he will try to remedy it at all, and you cannot by
lectures, and by telling the people that they have been and are being
oppressed, stir the people of this country to any resistance.
Particularly you cannot get them to pay a contribution for it. It was
because of the experience of the mass of the workers, their low wages
and long hours and the bad conditions of employment, that they organised
and used the might that comes from numbers, and paid contributions which
in the sum total now amount to many millions of pounds in the way of
reserve funds. No apology was needed for the working classes and no
defence is required for this step taken by the workers to unite
themselves in Trade Unions, and thereby secure by the unity of numbers
the power which, acting singly, it was impossible for them to exercise.
Thi