The Resolution speaks of the unsatisfactory state of the law and calls attention to the fact that the War Addition Acts expire at the end of the year. I am going to try to show some reasons why we say that the present state of the law is unsatisfactory. The law gives to a workman or workwoman who is injured £l a week as a maximum— I am not dealing with the War Addition Acts, because they expire at the end of the year, we are discussing the permanent law or the law as it stands at present. It gives as a maximum in case of fatal accidents the sum of £300. These compensations are supposed to be based on a theory which allots half of the loss to the employer and the other half to the workman or workwoman. Surely that is one of the greatest fallacies ever uttered. When a workman is injured, he bears all the physical suffering and he is invariably called upon to spend part of his compensation in extra bandages or medicine, while his compensation is bound down to £1 a week. To say that he is bearing half of the loss and the employer the other half is to speak of a theory which is absolutely wrong and has no foundation in fact. I should like to refer, in passing, to one or two of the gentle criticisms of the hon. Member for Springburn (Mr. Macquisten), whose speech we on this side have heard with the greatest possible pleasure, as we have heard all the speeches delivered up to the present by hon. Members. So far as hon. Members in this House at the moment are concerned, evidently workmen's compensation is worthy of consideration. But there is a vast class of hon. Members outside the Chamber, and of employers also outside the Chamber, and perhaps we had better get the details in order that the law may be known, because the hon. Members now in the House will not decide the issue.

I look upon workmen's compensation as it ought to be in quite a different light from that in which it has been regarded up to the present. A man who is definitely injured in the course of his employment ought to be like the soldier; he should be got better as quickly as possible; he should be got back to his work as quickly as possible, and he should certainly suffer no loss financially on the top of the pain he has to endure. For that reason, I believe that the real compensation to the workman who is injured ought to be full wages and the necessary medical and surgical appliances required. Then the workman would boar the pain as his share. I know the argument that has been and will be used against that theory. I heard it used in a Committee of which I had the honour of being a member. It was said that there would be malingering—I beg pardon, that was too strong a word; it should be replaced by the word "inertia," which means exactly the same thing, and which was a polite way of gilding the insult and sugaring the pill. It would be folly on the part of the employers of this country if, on this subject, they did not take a generous view. The hon. Member who first addressed the House upon this question from the opposite benches called attention to a fact that is too seldom recognised in industrial life, namely, that workers are not mere hands, but sentient beings with brains and feelings. Treat them as men and women, let them feel that they are actual living realities and are looked upon as such; do not try and screw every possible farthing you can out of the compensation. The employers of the country will do more good by adopting a generous attitude than by a hundred attempts to screw down the compensation as low as possible. Generosity will pay both the employer and the employed, and I appeal to the Home Secretary to bear this in mind.

With regard to the maximum in case of death, surely it is the most cynical thing in the world to appraise the life of a workman or workwoman at a £300 maximum. If ever there were a cynical assumption in this world it is that a workman or workwoman cannot be worth more than £300. Assume, for instance, that the recommendations of the Holman Gregory Report were accepted, what would they really mean as a burden on industry? I am not accepting the theory that this is a burden on the employer; it is a burden on the industry in which the workman pays his part, as well as the employer. It is a fairly safe assumption to make that the whole of the compensation required in perhaps the most dangerous industry in the country, that of coal mining, to pay full wages and to pay the full Holman Gregory scale—I am sure I shall be pardoned by the hon. and learned Member for South Derbyshire (Mr. Holman Gregory) if I speak of that scale in that way. The words are used in the circle in which I move with the greatest respect—if we accept that it is extremely questionable whether the whole of the costs included would mean one-halfpenny on I cwt. of coal. I think that is the fact of the matter. [HON. MEMBERS: "No. Nothing like it!"] I am stating my figure, that it would not cost one-halfpenny on 1 cwt. of coal. That makes the attempt to refuse an absurd attempt from the point of view of the coalowners as well as the State. The present law is faulty because of the method of calculation of the damages. Take the great Lancashire cotton industry, which has been depressed for well over 12 months. If a workman in that industry met with an accident to-morrow the probability is, if he were permanently injured, that his compensation would be not more than 10s. per week. If we had a year of good trade, another workman injured a year hence might, if the law were amended, get 35s., £2 or £2 10s. per week for exactly the same injury, incurred in exactly the same way. The law, when amended, should contain a definite minimum, and the method of calculation should be based on the average weekly earnings for a full week's work, in order that a workman or workwoman should not go through his or her life permanently injured and be paid a miserably insufficient sum because, on the top of the injury, he or she had the misfortune to be compulsorily idle during a large part of the 12 months previous to the accident occurring.

May I turn now to the question of the system of insurance? I do not share the fears of some hon. Gentlemen opposite that State Insurance would lead to bureaucracy, incompetency, and heavy cost. Let us see what the position was before the sitting of the Departmental Committee. There were a number of insurance offices which combined to arrange a certain tariff of charges, so far as they were concerned, a monopoly in effect, and a very small proportion indeed of the premiums paid to those companies got into the hands of the injured workmen. I believe that a State system of insurance could be worked cheaply, could be worked effectively, and would be the best possible means of putting a finger on the pulse of the accident system, with a view to obtaining the object of the hon. Member opposite, who spoke of the prevention of accidents rather than the paying for them after they have occurred. I think we ought to have, but I have no hope at all that in this House we shall get, a State system, but, failing that State system, surely there is one protection which the worker ought to have. He ought to have an absolute certainty that if an accident happens his compensation will be safe. That guarantee he has not got now. There ought to be a system of compulsory insurance. There can be no statistics laid down on this point. Every man who has worked in a trade union knows what takes place when, what we know as a small employer—a man employing three, four, five or a dozen men—has a serious accident on his premises. This man very often is not able to pay the compensation to which the workman is fairly entitled. Nobody knows what takes place. The workman receives something, nobody knows what, and the thing is settled.

That can be surmounted by a system of compulsory insurance, but I suggest you cannot make an employer insure, or it would not be right to make him insure, unless you give him a guarantee that the very compulsion you are exercising will not be used to his detriment by the insurance company with which he must insure, and I suggest to the Home Secretary that if he cannot give us State insurance, at any rate he will give us compulsory insurance, and, at the same time, give the employer who must insure the certainty that his premiums shall bear some resemblance to the amount of benefit that is paid to the workers out of those premiums. Then I suggest that an alteration is necessary in the law with regard to that peculiar combination of words, "arising out of or in the course of his employment," and I want to suggest that definitely simple words should be used saying that if a workman be injured at his work, compensation should be paid. It is perfectly true that workmen are sometimes too bold and break regulations. I think that miners have been known, in their eagerness to work and to increase production, to break regulations. I notice that the right hon. Member for the City of London (Sir F. Banbury) applauded the sentiment that workmen were too bold and broke regulations.