Since 1954 no question has so well succeeded in exacerbating the once rather staid proceedings of the International Labor Conference of the International Labor Organization as the problem of the status and rights of employer delegates from those countries which may be designated as “the states with fully socialized economies”. While David A. Morse, Director-General of the International Labor Office, was certainly correct in pointing out that “The ILO has always been confronted with political issues of one kind or another and [that] many of them have related to the representation of employers and workers within the Organization”, there is hardly any parallel in the history of the International Labor Organization for the fury of the debate over employer delegates from Communist countries which was unleashed when the Soviet Union rejoined the ILO in 1954.

The aim of this paper is to trace two processes, interconnected in a large measure, in the labour relations of the British shipping industry from 1911 to 1929. One is the gradual transformation of the policy of the Sailors' and Firemen's Union under Havelock Wilson from aggressive militancy to one of accommodation to the shipowners' point of view. The other process to be considered is the rise and fall of four rival organisations: the Cooks' and Stewards' Union, the British Seafarers' Union, the Amalgamated Marine Workers' Union, and finally the seamen's section of the Transport and General Workers' Union.

The prestige of the landlord class, which had stood so high in the long period of prosperity of the mid-Victorian years, fell to its lowest point in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. From the early 1880's landowners were attacked by politicians and land reformers in Parliament, in the Press and in a welter of literature on various aspects of the land question. At the same time there was a revival in the membership and activities of land organisations many of which had been started in the land agitation of the early 1870's only to go down before the onset of the Great Depression. The main cause of the widespread feelings of hostility towards landowners was economic: the instability of trade and employment and the effects of falling profit margins on the outlook and standards of expenditure of businessmen. The conflict of economic interests between landlords, businessmen and workers was expressed in the language of class war. Radicals of the Liberal Party took advantage of the increased support given to them by the business and professional classes to renew their campaign against the landowning aristocracy. They carped at the wealth of landowners and pointed to the burden of rents and royalties which lay on the enterprise of farmers and mineowners. They contrasted the relatively fixed incomes of landowners with the falling rate of return on industrial investments. Turning away from moderate reforms designed to improve the transfer and development of estates, they pronounced that the chief burden on the land was not the law but the landlord himself.

Der Briefwechsel Rodbertus-Lassalle umfasst die ganze Zeit der Arbeiteragitation. Er beginnt mit dem 25. Dezember 1862, nachdem Lassalle schon mit dem Komitee der Leipziger in Verbindung getreten war, und endigt erst kurz vor seinem Tode mit einem Brief vom 14. Juni 1864.

Die beiden nachstehend mitgeteilten Briefe fand ich, kurz nach der Herausgabe der Hess'schen Korrespondenz, in der “Heine-Sammlung” der Landes- und Stadtbibliothek Düsseldorf, derem Leiter, Herrn Dr. Eberhard Galley, ich für die Genehmigung der Veröffentlichung und mehrere nützliche Hinweise zu Dank verpflichtet bin. Der Inhalt des Briefes vom 19. Oktober 1837 zeigt deutlich, dass er der erste ist, den Hess an Heine richtete. Dieser Brief, in dem Hess ein ungeschminktes Bild seiner eigenen Persönlichkeit entwirft, ist psychologisch einer der interessantesten, die er je geschrieben hat.