Congress and Legislation 
By SIDNEY WEBB, M.P. 
T is not easy, in 1928, to realise how little 
opportunity there was in 1868 for the British 
wage-earners to bring effectively to the minds of 
Ministers and Government Departments even the 
most serious of their grievances or the most urgent 
of their needs. There was, of course, no 
workman in Parliament, a body then composed exclusively of 
property owners, employers, and lawyers. There was no 
organisation that even claimed fo speak for Labour. By the 
Reform Act of 1867, the Parliamentary Franchise had just been 
brought within reach of some of the befter-paid wage-earners 
having durable residences in those parts of the Kingdom that 
happened to be within the boundaries of any Parliamentary 
Borough ; but even here the complications and imperfections of 
the electoral registration long deprived most of them of a vote. 
No daily newspaper deigned to concern itself with industrial 
grievances. When, in April, 1868, the Manchester and Salford 
Trades Council invited the ‘‘ Trades Councils, Federation of 
Trades, and Trade Societies generally ”’ to send representatives 
to a Congress to discuss ‘‘ the various subjects which at the 
present time affect the Trade Societies,” they were, for the first 
time, equipping the British wage-earning class with a vocational 
organisation of national scope, which could not fail to have its 
effect on the legislative and executive government of the country. 
Those who to-day think the political activities of Trade Unionism 
a pernicious innovation of the present century may be reminded 
that it was the second Trades Union Congress in 1869 that 
appointed a Parliamentary Committee, and expressly directed 
it to promote legislation and to interview Cabinet Ministers. 
But the political effect of the new organisation of labour 
was nof at first manifest ; and there were—as there always are— 
impatient workmen who declared that the Trades Union Congress 
and its Parliamentary Committee were useless and powerless, 
ah