4 Joseph Chamberlain Quotes on Work

Joseph Chamberlain quotes on work

5. Sugar is gone; silk has gone; iron is threatened; wool is threatened; cotton will go! How long are you going to stand it? At the present moment these industries...are like sheep in a field.

6. [Social legislation] raised the cost of production; and what can be more illogical than to raise the cost of production in the country and then to allow the products of other countries which are not surrounded by any similar legislation, which are free from any similar cost and expenditure-freely to enter our country in competition with our own goods...If these foreign goods come in cheaper, one of two things must follow...either you will take lower wages or you will lose your work.

9. You are suffering from the unrestricted imports of cheaper goods. You are suffering also from the unrestricted immigration of the people who make these goods...The evils of this immigration have increased during recent years. And behind those people who have already reached these shores, remember there are millions of the same kind who, under easily conceivable circumstances, might follow in their track, and might invade this country in a way and to an extent of which few people have at present any conception...But the party of free importers is against any reform. How could they be otherwise? They are perfectly consistent. If sweated goods are to be allowed in this country without restriction, why not the people who make them? Where is the difference? There is no difference either in the principle or in the results. It all comes to the same thing - less labour for the British working man.

10. There are men in the House of Commons who profess in a special sense to be the representatives of labour, who would not allow me, who represented a great working class constituency...the claim to represent you. In order to do that, according to their theories, I should have to be a man who did some work thirty years ago, and never did any after...it is these men who are at this time blackening the character of those who are upholding the British dominions and the British flag throughout the world...They have no word of sympathy for the men who suffer for the Imperial cause...But one thing I will say, and I say it in your name: these men do not represent the working classes of England, and never yet in our history of the British race, has the great democracy been unpatriotic.