Desperate Responses
Richard Hyman, 5 April 1984
The incredible frequency of these strikes proves best of all the extent to which the social war has broken out all over England. No week passes, scarcely a day, indeed, in which there is not a strike in some direction, now against a reduction, then against a refusal to raise the rate of wages … sometimes against new machinery, or for a hundred other reasons. These strikes, at first skirmishes, sometimes result in weighty struggles … They are the military school of the working-men in which they prepare themselves for the great struggle … And as schools of war, the Unions are unexcelled. In them is developed the peculiar courage of the English.