6 OUR INDUSTRIAL JUNGLE 
still retain a warm and solicitous affection for him 
whenever they want something from him. 
The main principle of British Politics was simply 
that when one side was in office the other side tried 
most strenuously to get them out—not in the least 
because they wanted to get in themselves—but 
solely to secure to the British Workman the bles- 
sings of sound government and social and industrial 
progress—wisely directed, of course. They both 
had a patent process, and were both equally and 
benevolently anxious to experiment upon him. 
So the political equilibrium was pleasantly main- 
tained and nobody was a penny the worse or much 
more than a penny the better. 
The old men of to-day were the boys of fifty 
years ago; the old men of that day had within them 
the recollections of the Chartists and the late 
Georgian agitators. Behind those were the tradi- 
tions of machine breaking and bread rioting of the 
first two decades of the nineteenth century. Well- 
nigh a century of strikes and lockouts, of rattening, 
rioting, sabotage, and brutal suppression, found 
the workman industrially a slave and politically a 
pawn. 
I have been in the scramble for another half 
century, so I know something about it. Fifty 
years ago I was a ’prentice boy, fathered in the 
workshop by men who had known Robert Owen 
and fought and suffered for ‘The People’s 
Charter ’. Political Labour was an embryo, Trade 
Unionism was little more than an untried adoles- 
cent, as irresponsible as it was feeble. 
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