Page:The Case for Capitalism (1920).djvu/168

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theory has been blown into bits by the railway strike of last September. The railways were in the hands of the Government, which was paying a fixed rate for their use to their proprietors, and yet the railwaymen declared a lightning strike which inflicted untold hardship almost entirely upon the poorer classes. They had, in my opinion, a very genuine grievance, but it could not affect them for six months, yet such was the action that they thought fit to take when working for the Government.

It will also be remembered that the Prime Minister when he announced that the Government did not intend to adopt Mr. Justice Sankey's recommendation that the coal-mining industry should be nationalized laid stress on this aspect of the question. Mr. Justice Sankey's recommendation had been based upon the hope that nationalization would tend to smooth the relations between the workers and their employer, but Mr. Duncan Graham, M.P., a mining leader, had declared at a conference of the National Union of the Scottish Mine-Workers, "that if the mines became the property of the nation the miners would need to be more determined than ever in their policy and more vigorous in the Trade Union organization because instead of