Now domination, or any attempt at, or suspicion of it, is quite incompatible with co-operation; in fact, the least semblance of it in industry will speedily kill any latent spirit of co-operation. Nor does it matter in the slightest on what ground the domination is based or asserted. It may be on intellectual superiority, technical experience, organizing capacity, social standing, I care not what; it is the poison of all industrial harmony. As soon as it appears there is straightway an end of all co-operation in any democratic organization, and sectarianism and strife mark the reaction that immediately ensues. Mutual agreement is the essential basis of co-operation, both from the objective and subjective points of view. To secure agreement there must be the spirit to agree, and the existence of that spirit depends almost entirely on the knowledge and belief that matters of industrial controversy will be considered and adjusted on principles of justice and equity. My experience of industry has left me convinced beyond all doubt on one point—there is, deep down in the heart of the British workman, a sense of justice and fair-play. Often it takes time and trouble to vitalize it, to assist it in freeing itself from the tentacles of ignorance, Marxian sophistry and revolutionary formulae which entangle it, as weeds do a swimmer struggling to gain the surface, but in the end, if it gets a chance, it will assuredly triumph. The Need of Strict Justice The unenlightened employer has not yet given it a chance. He does not believe in its existence, nor in its efficacy as a moderating influence. There are no conceivable circumstances, he will tell you, which Labour will not unjustly use for its own aggrandisement, if an opportunity coincides with power. That in the past has, unfortunately, been the tradition on the part of reactionary employers no less than on the part of Labour. In regard to either justification or excuse, no distinction whatsoever can be drawn between the two. Propositions and proposals founded on equity and reason can, with confidence, be submitted to the workman’s sense of justice. In many instances during the war, I have appealed to this sense of justice with signal success in shop matters of peculiarly acute trade controversy. Even in regard to victimization disputes, always formidable questions, productive often of almost intractable controversy, that is to say, cases of dismissal, fine or reducing, on grounds alleged by the men of the prominence of the “victim” in furthering the interests of his Trade Union, or because of alleged breaches of unwritten shop law, invented, it would be said, by some vindictive foreman. When masters and men have failed to adjust the difference—the former taking their stand on “their right to maintain discipline,” the latter on their duty “to protect their Trade Union interests”—I have invariably found it possible to settle the dispute by getting down to principles of fair-play.