motor, is thus full of discomforts and of weariness. Yet, such as it is,
the men would be thankful for any certainty of retaining it. They are
liable to discharge upon any complaint from an inspector (or possibly
from an outside person) and no opportunity is allowed of exculpating
themselves. Furthermore they are firmly convinced that a number of
spies—“spots” is their own slang term—travel to and fro in the character
of ordinary passengers and constantly present complaints, ill or well
founded as the case may be, to the companies. “There’s plenty of
people,” said one man, “who never pay their omnibus fares. They send in
their tickets to the company and get back their money.” “Of course,”
said another, “they must make plenty of complaints or the companies
wouldn’t think it worth while to keep them on.” Whether this belief is
right or wrong, its existence is, at least, highly significant of the
light in which the men regard their employers, and is, I venture to say,
a symptom of very unsatisfactory relations.
The men are also persuaded that there exists among the Federation of
masters a tacit compact in accordance with which a man who has quitted
the service of any one of them will not, for a certain length of time,
be admitted into that of any other. In their own language “the bar is
up” against such a man. How far this opinion is well founded it is
difficult to judge; but it is unquestionably the fact that instance
after instance can be adduced of drivers, holding unendorsed licences,
who, on leaving the employment of one company, have been refused week
after week, by the others, and have been obliged at last to find some
other calling. One finds himself happier and wealthier as a street
sweeper. In at least one such case the responsible post eventually
secured is a guarantee of good character and steadiness.
It is always instructive to compare the conditions offered by the best
and the worst employers, respectively, in the same trade. In the matter
of traffic, the best employer in London is the London County Council. To
begin with, the men who work upon its trams pay nothing for their
uniforms. Their working day is of ten hours. Time lost by such
hindrances as fog, fire and processions is paid extra (at the rate known
to the trade as “time and a half”). Work on a seventh day in the week
when it occurs is paid at time-and-a-quarter rates. Moreover any horse
driver in the Council’s service who desires to qualify as an electric
driver can be trained, free of charge, in the municipal technical
school; whereas the charge for training made by one of the private
companies is £5. Not only does the London County Council issue to its
inspectors special instructions to avoid arbitrary and domineering
treatment of subordinates; it also affords to every man accused by an
inspector the opportunity of meeting his accuser face to face, and of
telling his own story. In short, the London County Council treats those
deserving citizens who do its work, with justice and with respect; and
they, in their turn, treat the public with a degree of kindly courtesy
most refreshing after the asperities of the motor omnibus man. Nor can
it be maintained by any truthful person that the comparatively
comfortable conditions of the municipal tram men have cost the ratepayer
too dear; since the profits of the Southern tramway lines alone in the
year 1905 were assessed by the Exchequer for income tax purposes at
£203,831; while, in addition to the large profits thus indicated, the
reduction of fares on these lines must, by this time, have saved
hundreds of pounds to the travelling public.
With the exception, then, of that fortunate minority employed by the
municipality, the workers on the public conveyances of London present no
very cheering spectacle. In the beginning of this 20th century, and in
the capital of a country that prides itself upon the freedom of its
citizens and upon the representative character of its government, we
find adult skilled male workers, performing valuable public services and
occupying positions of great responsibility, apparently as powerless as
any sweated home worker in her garret to secure for themselves either a
reasonably short working day, or equitable treatment, or payment for the
whole of the hours spent in the employer’s service. Yet one group of
them is guaranteed by the licence of a public department as efficient;
the services which they render are eagerly demanded by the public; their
industry is one in which foreign competition is impossible; and the
companies employing them are in many instances paying high dividends.
These, surely, are facts very much worth the consideration of all those
fellow citizens for whom, in the last resort, the railway man and the
omnibus man are working.
CHAPTER V
WAGE-EARNING CHILDREN
Children and home work—Boot making—Box making—All night at match box
making—“Can do nearly everything”—A boy tooth brush maker—A boy
belt maker—Polishing “spindle legs”—Children and laundry
work—Errands—Street sellers—Boys in bakehouses—In brick
fields—Girls and heavy trays of jam—Half timers’ heavy
loads—Things as they were—Terrors of the early cotton mills—A five
year old maker of “blonde net”—Miss Edgeworth’s “Ellen”—Mrs Hogg
and wage-earning children—Children in American cotton mills—The
glass bottle works—Effects of juvenile work on health—On
education—On morals—On industrial efficiency.
The very worst feature of underpaid labour is that it tends to make wage
earners of children and, in so doing, deteriorates the coming generation
of adult wage earners. Where work is carried on in the home, the
temptation to press children into the service is very great. The tedious
process of fetching and carrying work from and to the factory or
workshop generally falls to their lot; indeed, workers who have no
children of their own not infrequently hire a child, for a few pence, to
perform that duty. The time of a child is considered to be of little
value—of less value than the three halfpence or twopence earned by the
home worker in the hour or more that is often spent in waiting. Not a
few children are habitually late for school, in consequence of being
thus employed. Here is an instance.
“Jane B. Standard 6. Age 13. Father a potman at 25s. a week. Mother
machines uppers of boots; common goods, 10d. a dozen; better, 1s. 3d. a
dozen. Jane sews on buttons, cuts apart work, inks round button holes. A
little brother, aged nine, does buttons” (_i.e._, I suppose, sews them
on). “Mother, who does sometimes three dozen in a day, sometimes only
three pairs, begins work at 7 A.M. Jane begins at 7.45. She goes to the
shop for work, in the morning, and carries it in—a heavy load of three
dozen pairs sometimes—when she comes home from school. She gets late for
school, and is only in time in the afternoons.”
At the same school, a girl of eleven, Alice J., pastes in the soles of
babies’ shoes and sews together the pairs. A sister “sews and beats.”
These are white buck shoes, and are paid at the rate of 1s. 1d. to 1s.
3d. a dozen. Two dozen can be done in a day. The father is a cabinet
maker in regular work; the mother a cleaner (apparently at an office or
warehouse). The sister, of 18 or 19, makes 10s. a week. The little Alice
works from 12 to 1, and again from 5.30 to 6.30, doing in that time a
dozen or fifteen pairs; she reckons that it takes her five minutes to
finish a pair, or perhaps twenty minutes for six pairs.
Esther S., aged ten, and a sister aged six, help their mother at the
midday break, and also in the evening, in lining and covering boxes. 5d.
a gross is paid for the smaller sort; 1s. 9d. for the larger sort. The
work of the children is said to be absolutely necessary. “Dreadful home;
nice woman,” is the observation of the visitor whose notes I have been
permitted to use.
A schoolfellow of Esther’s, Sarah W., is thirteen years old and in
Standard 4. Her father was in prison. Her mother drinks. These parents
hid their children for eight months, and the educational authorities had
great difficulty in finding them. This child, “a very bright girl,” used
to stay up all night making match boxes, so as to get them taken in by
11 the next morning. She now works, between school times, at capping
sticks.
Another little girl sews and opens Japanese fish and poultry baskets,
and sews the handles upon string bags; she also sometimes makes the
bags. She does not like the work, because it makes her hands sore and is
hard work. “I can do nearly everything,” this person of thirteen is
reported as saying.
Employment out of school hours is not of course confined to girls.
Stanley G., aged eleven, works from 5 to 7, wiring tooth brushes, and
can do seven in an hour; 3½d. a dozen is paid for them. The visitor
notes that he had a sore face.
Alfred D., age 13, Standard 7, helps in making white kid belts, receives
1d. in the dozen, and can do fifteen or sixteen dozen in the week.
George W., who is thirteen years old, and only in Standard 3, does wood
chopping and dislikes it, because it hurts his hands. His mother “does
frame work,” and his father, looking glasses.
Thomas P., who is thirteen, and in Standard 5, polishes spindle legs for
a cabinet maker, from 5 to 8 every evening, and from 9 to 2 on
Saturdays. He receives 2s. 6d. a week; and announces that he is going to
be a tobacconist—a calling for which the polishing of furniture legs
hardly seems a valuable preparation.
Cases like these might be multiplied almost indefinitely.
“At a recent enquiry during the spring of this year, it was found that
in a Hackney school one-fourth of the girls were engaged in match box
making, steel covering, baby shoe making and fish basket sewing. This
latter work is of a specially disagreeable character, and little girls
often complain that the manipulation of the reeds is a most painful
process. Children working with their parents at home are frequently kept
at their sewing or pasting until ten or eleven o’clock at night. They
are sent to “shop” before coming to school in the morning, and many of
them are never marked for regular attendance. Particularly severe is the
lot of the children of small laundresses, who are often employed, both
in housework and in ironing in a steam laden atmosphere, two or three
nights weekly till ten o’clock, and all day Saturday.”[32]
Other children are employed by shopkeepers; milk and newspapers are
delivered before and after school, boys are employed by grocers,
greengrocers, &c., to carry out goods, and—sometimes for incredibly long
hours—by barbers. Girls run errands and match stuffs and trimmings. In
the Parliamentary Return obtained from school teachers by Sir John Gorst
in 1899, out of 144,026 children, about 12% were described as engaged in
street trading, exposed inevitably to every inclemency of weather and to
all the hazards of promiscuous companionship, while acquiring habits
that unfit them for regular work later in life. Moreover, the street
seller, juvenile no less than adult, is apt to seek for customers in the
public house. Very few, comparatively, of employed children are engaged
in work that is likely to be of use to them industrially in their
maturer life; and even of those few, some are working under bad
conditions. The Factory Inspectors’ Reports are seldom free from
instances of the overwork of children. In last year’s, for example,
mention is made of boys under thirteen years of age, and even under
twelve, being found, on several occasions, at work in bakehouses. One
boy of twelve, who was found by the inspector clearing ashes from the
oven, before 6 in the morning, had for two or three years been employed,
before school, in delivering rolls, and at the midday break, as well as
after school, in running errands.[33]
Several children under 13 years of age were found working full time in
brick fields.[34]
A bad case is noted on p. 99: “A lad of 15, employed in a large tin
works in West Wales, had started work at 6.30 A.M. on a certain Monday
morning and continued working till 6 A.M. on the following Tuesday.
During this period he only left the works for one hour, viz., 5 till 6
P.M. on Monday, when he went home and took a short rest. He had
therefore worked during the whole twenty-four hours with only about one
hour’s rest.”
The chief lady Inspector says, on pp. 302–3, “Carrying of jam and of
jam-pots, empty or full, is still done largely by women and girls, and I
have cautioned several occupiers about the weights I have found little
girls lifting. A 40-pound tray is a heavy load for a girl of fourteen,
and the repeated carrying of such trays all day long must have a bad
effect.”
Nor are jam makers the only employers who offend in this way. Cases have
occurred in “textile factories, the places where one most expects to
find labour-saving methods, but undoubtedly whenever there is a fairly
abundant supply of young, cheap labour, there is less anxiety to
introduce these, and carrying, pushing or pulling heavy weights is one
of the duties of the apprentice in almost every trade. In a cotton
weaving factory in Lancashire I found children and young persons[35]
carrying cloth from the shed to the warehouse in an upper floor. One
bundle was proved to weigh 44 lbs. and another 40 lbs. In a similar
factory, also in Lancashire, I was not able to have weighed any of the
tins of weft which children were found carrying to the looms, but from
the evident effort it was to raise the tin to the shoulder, it was clear
that the weight was too great. In both cases the entire weight was on
one shoulder, and it was pitiful to see the twisted little figures of
the children doing their best to accomplish more than they were
physically fit for.”[36]
On the same page Miss Martindale speaks of a boy whom she saw in 1903
carrying a piece of clay “weighing 69 lbs., his own weight being 77 lbs.
During the two years which has elapsed he has hardly grown, and he
informed me that he weighs at the present time 81 lbs., showing an
increase of only four lbs.”
While it is reported that in Scotland “the half time system has almost
ceased to exist,” there has recently been in some districts of England,
a marked increase in the number of half timers, owing to the unexampled
prosperity of the cotton trade, and the difficulty of satisfying the
demand for labour in that industry. In a good many districts, a half
timer may be as young as twelve years old.
What the conditions of children’s employment would be, if there were no
Factory Acts, may be guessed by the nature of the first Act of
Parliament passed in their interests. In 1784 certain Manchester
physicians investigated an outbreak of fever. They failed to discover
its primary cause, but reported that “we are decided in our opinion that
the disorder has been supported, diffused and aggravated by the ready
communication of contagion ... and by the injury done to young persons
through confinement and too long continued labour, to which several
evils the cotton mills have given occasion.” They went on to say that
they regarded a longer recess at noon and a shorter working day as
“essential to the present health and future capacity for labour of those
who are under the age of fourteen; for the active recreations of
childhood and youth are necessary to the right growth and conformation
of the human body.” The Manchester magistrates, who had asked for this
report, resolved not to allow in future “indentures of Parish
Apprentices whereby they shall be bound to owners of cotton mills and
other works in which children are obliged to work in the night or more
than ten hours in the day.”
The condition of these unfortunate pauper children was wretched in the
extreme. They were “sent down from the workhouses of London and other
great towns to any manufacturer who would take them, a small premium
being usually paid as an inducement. There was no system of control or
inspection from outside; the factories were frequently set up in some
remote glen or lonely valley where a waterfall or stream provided cheap
power for the machinery and where the restraint of public opinion and
observation was almost entirely absent. There can be no reasonable doubt
that these unhappy children were often worked almost or entirely to
death by their masters or by their overseers whose interest it was to
work the apprentices to the utmost, their pay being in proportion to the
labour they could extract. Sir Samuel Romilly says in his diary that he
had known cases where the apprentices had been actually murdered by
their masters in order to get fresh premiums with new apprentices.”[37]
The Act of 1802, the first on this subject, dealt only with apprentices
and only with the textile trades. It limited the hours of work to twelve
a day, forbade night work, and required a modicum of elementary
instruction; moreover it provided for inspection.
By and by, it became apparent that the evils at which this measure had
been aimed were not confined to any one group of child workers. As late
as 1844, Sir Robert Peel told the House of Commons that in the
potteries, “children worked in a temperature of from 100 to 130,
carrying pieces weighing 3 lbs, and each child carrying two pieces at a
time. The calculation is that the child will carry per day some
thousands of pounds weight. In manufactures other than cotton, work
might sometimes be continued thirteen, fifteen, even seventeen or
eighteen hours consecutively.”[38]
Nor was there any limit as to the earliness of the age at which a child
might be set to work. About five or six seems to have been a common age
for beginning. I have, myself, been acquainted with a woman of about
eighty years old who told me that as a child of five, when she was too
little to reach the work table and had to stand upon a stool, she was
employed all day long in “running blonde net.” Evidence was brought
forward—exactly as similar evidence is brought forward to-day in
America—to show that it was not really injurious to children of nine
years old and under to be kept working for 14 or 15 hours daily; and, no
doubt, there were persons not in the least inhumane who really thought
so. The best of us are liable to social blindness, and able to see but a
small part of contemporary evils that become plainly visible and
unendurable to succeeding generations. An instance of such blindness, in
the case of the disinterested and open minded Maria Edgeworth, may be
found in the pages of her _Rosamond_—that delightful children’s book too
little known to the modern child. In reading the passage it should be
remembered that the whole Edgeworth family were persons of unusual
enlightenment and benevolence, and that the view presented probably
typifies the bettermost stratum of contemporary sentiment.
Rosamond, with her parents, goes to visit a cotton mill conducted by “a
very sensible, humane man, who did not think only of how he could get so
much work done for himself, but also how he could preserve the health of
those who worked for him; and how he could make them as comfortable and
happy as possible.” This good employer was in all probability drawn from
some member of the Strutt family. By and by, while the visitors are
resting and eating “cherries, ripe cherries, strawberries and cream,”
provided by “this hospitable gentleman,” Godfrey calls to his parents to
“‘look out of this window.... All the people are going from work. Look
what numbers of children are passing through this great yard!’
“The children passed close by the window at which Godfrey and Rosamond
had stationed themselves. Among the little children came some tall girls
and among these there was one, a girl about twelve years old, whose
countenance particularly pleased them. Several of the younger ones were
crowding round her.
“‘Laura, Laura, look at this girl! What a good countenance she has,’
said Rosamond, ‘and how fond the little children seem of her!’
“‘That is Ellen. She is an excellent girl,’ said the master of the
manufactory, ‘and those little children have good reason to be fond of
her.’”
He then relates how a good clergyman, who had taught the children and
won their grateful affection, had been appointed to a post elsewhere.
“‘All the children in the manufactory were sorry that he was going away,
and they wished to do something that should prove to him their respect
and gratitude.
“‘They considered and consulted among themselves. They had no money,
nothing of their own to give, but their labour; and they agreed that
they would work a certain number of hours beyond their usual time, to
earn money to buy a silver cup, which they might present to him the day
before that appointed for his departure. They were obliged to sit up a
great part of the night to work to earn their shares. Several of the
little children were not able to bear the fatigue and the want of sleep.
For this they were very sorry, and when Ellen saw how sorry they were,
she pitied them, and she did more than pity them. After she had earned
her own share of the money to be subscribed for buying the silver cup,
she sat up every night a certain time to work, to earn the shares of all
these little children.
“‘Ellen never said anything of her intentions, but went on working
steadily, till she had accomplished her purpose. I used to see her night
after night, and used to fear she would hurt her health, and often
begged her not to labour so hard, but she said, “It does me good,
sir.”’”
The modern reader will sigh to think of what the admirable Ellen’s
health and strength would probably be at thirty, and will find it
difficult to forgive the complacency of the employer in whose mill she
was permitted so to squander her physical resources.
In our own country the general development of factory legislation has
gone far towards stopping the overwork of children in mills and
factories; though it is only of late years, and thanks to the exertions
of Mrs Hogg, that the law has begun to attempt the regulation of
children’s labour out of school hours either in their own homes or for
outside employers.[39]
In the United States, however, where each State is free to make its own
regulations, there is, at this present day, one State (Georgia) in which
the work of children is absolutely unrestricted, and several in which
the practical limitation is extremely small. Children of any age may be,
and actually are, kept at work in the cotton mills of the Southern
States, precisely as they used to be in the mills of Lancashire and
Yorkshire. “Only last year, in North Carolina, the testimony of two
doctors was introduced to show that there was no need from a hygienic
point of view, for a law forbidding girls under fourteen to stand at
their work for twelve hours a day, or for boys or girls under fourteen
to work a twelve-hour night.”[40]
Boys of twelve may still legally work in the coal mines of Kansas and in
all mines in Iowa, Missouri and North Carolina; and do so work. “No
colliery has been visited in which children have not been found employed
at ages prohibited by the law of the State.”[41]
In some American glass bottle works, quite small boys are kept running
to and fro with loads of hot glass all through the day or the night as
the case may be. Mrs Kelley, reporting personal visits of inspection,
says that she found it impossible to get from any boy “a consecutive
statement as to his name, address or parentage. A boy would say, ‘My
name is Jimmie’; and then trot to the cooling oven with his load of
bottles; and returning would say, in answer to a fresh question, ‘I live
in a shanty boat,’ then trot to the moulder for another load of bottles;
and returning say, ‘I’m going to be eight next summer,’ and so on. Among
twenty-four lads questioned during one night inspection, not one
ventured to pause long enough to put together two of the foregoing
statements.”[42]
“There was no restriction upon night work and pitifully little children
were found at work at two o’clock in the morning.”[43]
Some of these children are directly imported—as the little serfs in
English cotton mills often were—from other districts; and in these
States of America, as in England once, not only ruthless employers but
worthless adults of their own class, parents and others, make profits
out of the toil of half grown children.
“A worn out and dissolute glass blower, who had a pension of $8 a month
and five children under the age of fourteen years had recently married a
widow with six children under fifteen years. Father, mother and the
eleven children were living in a tent between the river and the works
where several of the children were employed, some by night and some by
day, so that the beds in the tent were used by different children, one
set rising to go to work when the others returned to sleep.”[44]
Upon the future of these poor children the effect of this early toil is
most injurious. Physically, mentally and morally, the children—the
citizens of the next generation—are damaged.
Significant is the remark of a mother quoted in one of the articles in
_Child Labor_: “‘When Charley works on the night shift, he hasn’t any
appetite.’” (p. 303.)
Doubtless the half timers in a good English mill are examples of
children working under the best of existing conditions; and
manufacturers are fond of assuring us how good these conditions are. Yet
I shall never forget the painful impression made upon myself by the
peculiar mixture of pallor and eagerness on the faces of the little half
timers, the first time that I went over a weaving mill. The working
place was light and airy, and the situation, just outside a healthy
Northern town, was admirable; the work was not physically hard, and the
management, as I was assured by a trustworthy witness, who was himself
at work there, considerate. He, for his part, seemed unaware that the
children looked ill. Incidentally, however, he mentioned that a large
proportion of his fellow workers drank; and I felt that it would be
interesting to know how many of them had been half timers, and whether
early exhaustion might not lie at the root of their intemperance. As to
the children, I am quite sure that any London doctor, or any woman
accustomed to the care of children, would have thought their appearance
unhealthy and their expression of face abnormal.
Evidence more valuable than any untrained observer’s impression is on
record in regard to London school children. Dr Thomas, assistant Medical
Officer of Health to the London County Council, in investigating the
physical condition of 2000 school children, in 14 different schools,
gave special attention to 384 wage earners among the boys. “Of this
number 233 showed signs of fatigue, 140 were proved to be anæmic, 131
had severe nerve signs, 64 were suffering from deformities resulting
from the carrying of heavy weights, and 51 had severe heart signs.
Barbers’ boys were found to suffer most in physique, 72 per cent being
anæmic, 63 per cent showing severe nerve strain, and 27 per cent severe
heart affection.”[45]
Before the Inter-Departmental Committee on the employment of school
children, appointed in 1901, evidence was given by Alderman Watts, of
Manchester, of the abnormal death-rate among children in industrial
schools, many of whom had drifted thither from the streets; and in 1904
Sir Lambert Ormsby, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, of
Dublin, gave to the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical
Deterioration, particulars of the miserable physique of the little
street sellers and of the many cases of pneumonia among them which had
been brought to his notice in the children’s hospitals.[46]
In July 1905, when an inquiry was held by the Home Office into the
Bye-laws for the Employment of Children proposed by the London County
Council, Mr Marshall Jackman, of the Michael Faraday School, Walworth,
gave evidence that, out of 227 boys in that school, 27 were at work of
whom 13 were employed more than eight hours a day, and 13 after nine
o’clock at night. All except six were in poor health. One had broken
down altogether; one had a weak circulation; one had fainted in school
during the previous week; yet another had a defective circulation. In
one single week, nine boys who worked out of school hours were taken ill
in school, were obliged to leave the class and suspend lessons for the
rest of the afternoon.[47]
Very similar evidence may be found in the pages of Mrs Kelley’s volume,
in those of _Child Labor_, and in the Report of the American Consumers’
League. On p. 297 of _Child Labor_ appears the following paragraph which
should make every British reader thankful for the comparative stringency
of our own Factory Acts: “A recent study of the reports of factory
inspectors in several of our industrial States shows a remarkable
uniformity in the percentage of accidents. We find in the textile mills,
foundries and iron mills, glass houses and machine shops employing
children that, in proportion to the number of children employed,
accidents to children under sixteen years of age are from 250 to 300%
more frequent than to adults.”
Educationally, the results of early industrial labour are naturally
disastrous. “In none of the great Southern States,” writes Mrs Kelley,
“in which young children are employed in manufacture are 80% of the
children between 10 and 14 years of age able to read and write.”[48]
At the Home Office enquiry, Mr Marshall Jackman stated that although the
boys who worked out of school hours were of more than average mental
capacity, they were more than twelve months behind the average of the
whole school in educational standing, and moreover were low down even in
their lower classes. Of the 27 boys in his school who were employed,
eleven were one standard below the average, two, two standards below;
four, three standards below; and one, four standards below the general
average.
A report prepared in 1901 for the Scottish Council for Women’s Trades
gives the opinions of 14 head masters, who are practically unanimous as
to the detrimental effect upon the children’s progress of long hours of
work out of school. No. 3 says: “I consider this exploiting of children
is one of the greatest crimes against the children themselves, and the
greatest possible hindrance to their education.” No. 6 thinks “there can
be no doubt that children who have such long spells of employment are
heavily handicapped”; and No. 7 says: “There is no doubt whatever that
these long hours stand very much in the way of educational progress.”
“Message running,” says No. 14, “certainly tends to sharpen intelligence
of a superficial kind but weakens the power of sustained attention and
vigorous mental work in school.”[49]
When we remember that the Inter-Departmental Committee on the employment
of school children—a cautious official body—estimated the _minimum_
number of school children employed in the United Kingdom at 200,000, and
that there is no reason to suppose that number materially lessened, we
perceive that the deterioration of national education from this cause
alone must be by no means trifling.
Of moral injury, especially from street selling, there is abundant
evidence, both in our own country and in the United States. The
committee of 1901 received a statement from the Town Clerk of Newcastle
on Tyne that children had been found in the streets afraid to go home,
lest they should be punished for not bringing in enough money. The
children often, in consequence, slept out, gambled or stole, the girls
sinking lower yet in order to procure sufficient money to take home. The
number of such children he reported to have increased greatly of late
years, and many of them were, he feared, on the threshold of a life of
vice and crime. The Chief Constable of Manchester presented a list of 16
women known as degraded characters, who had formerly been street
sellers. The Chief Constable of Birmingham produced tables showing that
of 713 children engaged in street trading during July 1901, 458 had been
prosecuted for various offences during the previous six months. 163 of
the number were girls.[50]
Boys in American glass works are almost proverbially ill conducted. One
manufacturer, in Ohio, said, in answer to an appeal for the education of
the boys: “You can’t do anything for them. The little devils are vicious
from their birth.” Statements of the same kind used to be made about the
poor little victims in the English mills but it is not observed that the
modern half timer, whose hours and health are protected by law, is any
more vicious than other children. The principal of a Pennsylvanian
school sets the corruption of the boys at a much later date than
infancy. He says: “‘My observation is that when a boy leaves school and
goes into the factory at twelve or thirteen, by the time he is fifteen
or sixteen he is too foul-mouthed to associate with decent people.’”[51]
Street occupations on the farther as on the hither side of the Atlantic
are shown to form an easy avenue to worse things. “Although the street
trades in Washington engage only one-fourth of the total number of
children engaged in all occupations, yet of the number of children under
15 who have gone to the reform school, or who have been turned over by
the courts to the care of the probation officers, over two-thirds have
come from the ranks of the children engaged in the street trades.”[52]
“A judge told the writer that one-third of all the delinquent boys
brought before him had at one time or another served the public as
messenger boys.”[53]
Nor are those children of school age who go to work often found to be
acquiring any sort of technical training or industrial skill. On the
contrary, indeed; their employment is almost always of a kind that
rather unfits them than prepares them to become industrially efficient.
Sadly true are the words written by Mrs Kelley out of prolonged and wide
experience. “The State which accepts the plea of poverty and permits the
children of the poorest citizens to labour prematurely, accepts the
heritage of new poverty flowing from two sources; namely, on the one
hand, the relaxed efforts of fathers of families to provide for them,
and on the other hand the corruption of weak children by inappropriate
occupations which involve temptations beyond the child’s power of
resistance and the exhaustion of strong children by overwork. It is
exactly the most conscientious and promising children who are worked
into the grave or into nervous prostration, or into that saddest state
of all, the moral fatigue which enables a man to sit idly about for
years while his wife or his sister or his children support him.”[54]
Thus the employment of the young which is generally regarded as a result
of poverty is really one of the causes of poverty, and that for several
reasons. It tends to lower the wages of the adult worker and tends to
make the family, instead of the father, the industrial unit; it
diminishes the adult working power of the child itself,[55] and it also
retards the progress of every trade in which it occurs, for as Mr
Schoenhof says: “The cheapness of human labour where it prevails is the
greatest incentive for the perpetuation of obsolete methods.”[56]
Thus, in every respect, the industrial employment of children is an
injury to the community; and it is more than possible (I am not
recommending the course as a practicable one) that, in the long run, the
nation would save money by undertaking the whole support and education
up to the age of sixteen of every child who now works for wages. Short
of this extreme measure, however, there is little doubt that, except for
the fear lest hardships might be intensified, public opinion is ready
for far more stringent limitation of child labour. If it were known that
the wages of parents were, even approximately, adequate (as they would
be under a Minimum Wage Law) most of the objections now made to the
restriction of child labour would die away. That fact alone is no
inconsiderable argument in favour of a Minimum Wage Law.
CHAPTER VI
SUMMARY
Home work—Factory work—The working girl—Her manners, virtues and
code of honour—The woman into whom she developes—Shop
assistants—Traffic workers—Children—“Sweated” workers often
producing high priced goods—Not drunken—Not idle—Not
unskilful—Men as helpless, economically, as women—Sweating an
invariable accompaniment of unregulated labour.
The preceding chapters do not profess to give anything like a general
survey of the whole field of British labour. It has seemed wise for many
reasons to confine myself to aspects with which I am, in a greater or
less degree, personally familiar; and therefore the work of women, and
of London women especially, looms rather large. But I hope that I have
shown, by a sufficient range of instances, certain general truths. In
trade after trade, men, women and children are exhibited working in the
conditions which are indicated, comprehensively but vaguely, by the term
“sweating.” We have seen the dwelling of the home worker robbed of every
feature that makes a home, its narrow space littered with match boxes,
or with shirts or trousers or paper-bags—in any case transformed into
one of the most comfortless of workshops. In some homes the rattle of
the sewing machine forms a ceaseless accompaniment to the whole course
of family life; in others, meals, such as they are, are eaten in the
immediate neighbourhood of the glue pot or the paste pot; the smell of
new cloth, the dust and fluff of flannelette pervade the room of the
“finisher”; damp paper-bags or damp cardboard boxes lie piled on beds;
home, parents and children are all subservient to unintermittent and
most unremunerative labour.
One step, but only one step, higher comes the factory “hand.” We have
seen girls filling pots with boiling jam, carrying to and fro heavy
trays and stacking these trays in piles, two together raising, sometimes
to above the height of their own heads, trays some of which weigh well
over half a hundredweight. We have seen them, even when their work was
not in itself heavy, worn out by the rapidity with which they repeat
endlessly, day after day, and week after week, operations of mechanical
monotony. Some glimpse has been given of those horrible intervals in
which the semistarvation of “full work” gives place to the acute
privation of “slack time.” The dangers, discomforts, hardships and
exactions that must be borne if an employer chooses to inflict them,
have been indicated, though but very inadequately; and the example of
laundries and jam factories has served to suggest how far worse yet
would be the conditions of factory operatives if the law did not
intervene for their protection.
One thing I have not succeeded in picturing—and it is the thing which
seems to me perhaps the most terrible of all: the change of the working
girl into the working woman. I have not drawn the factory girl as I have
known her and delighted in her, gay to “cheekiness,” staunchly loyal,
wonderfully uncomplaining, wonderfully ready to make allowances for “the
governor” as long as he speaks her fair and shows consideration in
trifles, but equally resolute to “pay him out,” when once she is
convinced of his meanness or spitefulness. Her language is devoid, to a
degree remarkable even in our undemonstrative race, of any tenderness or
emotion. She accepts an invitation with the ungracious formula: “I don’t
mind if I do.” Upon the “mate” of her own sex, to whom she is so much
more warmly devoted than to her “chap,” she never bestows a word of
endearment. “Hi, ‘Liza, d’y’ think I’m going to wait all night for you?”
is the tone of her address to the friend with whom she will share her
last penny or for whom she will pawn her last item of pawnable property.
She speaks roughly to her relatives and aggressively to the world at
large; she is no respecter of persons, and her eye for affectation or
insincerity is unerring. Condescend to her and she will “chaff” you off
the field. But meet her on equal terms, help her without attempting to
“boss” her, and within a month or two you will have won her unalterable
allegiance; her face will light up at your coming; she will bear the
plainest speech from you, and on occasion of emergency will obey
implicitly your every command. Nor is she lacking in the fundamental
parts of politeness. Here is an instance. Years ago, in the days when
some of us still believed in the possibility of organising unskilled
women, a member of the Dockers’ Union sent me word that I should find it
possible to walk at dinner time straight into the dining-room of a
certain factory and talk to the workers undisturbed, since at that hour
both the foreman and the porter went home to their own meals. I went,
accordingly, though I confess that I felt myself very much of a
trespasser. As I mounted the extremely grimy stair to the dining-room, I
heard the loud voices of the girls. Their language was singularly vile.
It did not, no doubt, mean very much to them; they used horrible words
as the young of another class use slang. I went in and said my little
say. After the first few words, most of them listened; several asked
questions; a certain amount of conversation continued to go on. But
while I was in the room—and, remember, I was a complete stranger to all
of them—not one word was spoken which I could justly have felt to be
offensive. I distributed my handbills, told them I hoped they would come
to the meeting, and departed. As I went downstairs, I heard them
relapsing into their hideous vernacular. But I could not help reflecting
that they had shown the essence of good manners; and also that, if the
literature of the eighteenth century is to be trusted, the same form of
good manners was far from being universal among those swearing country
gentlemen who were the great grandfathers of our smooth spoken
generation.[57]
The factory girl’s code of honour is curiously like that of the school
boy. In no circumstances will she denounce a companion. To the governor
or to the forewoman she will lie freely if occasion demands. To those
whom she recognises as allies, she is truth itself. I do not recall one
single instance, in disputes between workers and employers, in which the
tale told by working girls has not been proved true in every detail.
With employers, I am sorry to say, this has often been by no means the
case. Two qualities, in particular, mark the factory girl of from
sixteen to twenty: her exuberant spirits and energy, and the invariable
improvement in manner and language that follows upon any sort of
amelioration in her position. To watch the rapid development of
refinement and gentleness consequent upon joining a good club is to feel
how sound is the national character and how lamentable the yearly waste
of admirable human material.
A few years pass, a very few, and these bright girls become apathetic,
listless women of whom at 35 it is impossible to guess whether their age
is 40 or 50. They are tired out; they toil on, but they have ceased to
look forward or to entertain any hopes. The contrast between the factory
girl and her mother is perhaps the very saddest spectacle that the
labour world presents. To be the wife of a casual labourer, the mother
of many children, living always in too small a space and always in a
noise, is an existence that makes of too many women, in what ought to be
the prime of their lives, mere machines of toil, going on from day to
day, with as little hope and as little happiness as the sewing machine
that furnishes one item in their permanent weariness.
We ascend another step and come to the shop assistants, the clerks and
the waitresses in restaurants. We find that these dapper young men and
trim young women whose hands and faces are so much cleaner and whose
speech and manners are so much smoother than those of the factory
worker, are scarcely better off in the matter of pay, and often
absolutely worse off in the matter of working conditions. The factory
worker is at least free after the factory closes, and, except in
laundries, the law generally succeeds in bringing down the hours of work
to something near a reasonable limit.
But the shop assistant is subject to rule during practically the whole
of his or her working life; food, companions, dress, sleeping
arrangements, hours of going to bed and of getting up, nay, the very
medical man to be consulted in case of illness are thrust upon him
without any choice of his own. The privilege, so dear to the natural
man, of wearing an old coat and old slippers in the hours of relaxation,
is not for the shop assistant; nor the modern diversion of experimenting
with new and strange foods, nor the right of voting at elections, either
municipal or parliamentary. The position combines, in short, the
disagreeables of boarding school with those of domestic service, while
failing to offer the pleasant features of either. It is indeed a moot
point in my own mind whether it is not worse to be a shop assistant than
a home worker, supposing the home worker to be a single woman.
Personally, I would rather make cardboard boxes in silence and solitude,
and buy for myself my own inferior bread and cheap tea.
Chapter IV. brings us to the case of workers who are all men, who are
engaged in a most necessary public service and employed for the most
part by rich companies paying high dividends. Here the inexperienced
would expect to find high wages and good conditions prevailing. In fact,
however, we find, in the case of railway servants, that the hours of
work imposed were so excessive as to constitute a public danger and to
demand the intervention of the law. The drivers and conductors of trams
and omnibuses have been shown to be in a large measure enslaved by the
companies for which they work, their hours often cruelly long, their pay
often reduced from a decent nominal to a quite inadequate actual wage,
their conditions of work, in many cases, singularly oppressive and their
liberty of passing into fresh employment, although not so completely
barred as the railway servant’s, yet very seriously hampered and
restricted. In short we behold a body of grown men, skilled and of good
character, almost as unable as the isolated home worker to defend
themselves against a strong and tyrannical employer.
Last of all, we come to the children. In these days we are continually
talking in tones of alarm about a declining birth rate and are at last
seriously considering how to check the appalling infant mortality that
makes an annual massacre of the innocents; but most of us are still very
little awake to the sacrifice of childhood that is daily being made in
our midst. We pass a pale child in the street, carrying a long bundle in
a black wrapper, and the sight makes no impression. But, to those of us
who have seen the under side of London, that little figure is a type of
unremunerative toil, of stunted growth, of weakened vitality and of
wasted school teaching: an example of that most cruel form of
improvidence described by the French proverb as “eating our wheat as
grass.” Labour in childhood inevitably means, in nine cases out of ten,
decadence in early manhood or womanhood; and the prevalence of it among
ourselves is perhaps the most serious of national dangers. There is
probably no branch of home work in which child labour is not involved,
and but very few branches of retail trade. Our milk, our newspapers, our
greengrocery are brought to us by small boys; young boys are out at all
hours and in all weathers with parcel-delivering vans; and many and many
a perambulator is pushed by a small girl whose chin is on a level with
the handle. If, in 1901, there were, as the Interdepartmental Committee
declared, _at least_ 200,000 school children working for wages, and if,
as seems practically certain, the number is larger now, can we wonder
that so many grown up workers have remained inefficient, incompetent and
listless? We cannot have grain, if we choose to eat the wheat in the
blade.
We see, then, that large bodies of British workpeople are, in these
early years of the twentieth century, extremely overworked and
underpaid. These evils are not, as is so often declared, a result of
cheap selling. One of the worst examples of underpayment in the Sweated
Industries Exhibition was a lady’s combination garment, of nainsook, the
selling price of which was 22s.; and much of the work produced by the
underpaid is sold at a good price to the well-to-do. On the other hand,
under a well organised factory system, goods that are sold at a very low
price are sometimes produced by workers receiving comparatively high
wages. Nor is it true that any large proportion of these ill paid
workers are either drunken or idle, or yet incompetent. Incompetent,
indeed, they eventually become, if they are starved, physically and
mentally, for a long enough period; but many of them remain competent
for a surprising number of years. Very many of them are pathetically
industrious, and by no means all are unskilled. Neither my reader nor I,
for instance, could cover a racquet ball so that it would pass muster
when inspected by the paymaster; it is improbable that either of us
could cover an umbrella, and pretty certain that neither could make a
passable artificial rose of even the poorest description. The driver of
a motor omnibus is—in theory at least, and often in practice—a highly
skilled mechanic; but his skill does not enable him (his trade union
being still comparatively young and weak) to retain his freedom of
action nor to resist the most exhausting and harassing conditions of
labour.
The evil is thus not confined to women, nor to home workers, nor to any
class or trade. Nor is it confined to any one country. Nearly every
instance quoted could be matched from Germany and from America.
“Sweating,” in short, invariably tends to appear wherever and whenever
industry is not either highly organised or else stringently regulated by
law.
CHAPTER VII
HOW UNDERPAYMENT COMES
A shirtmaker’s story—The “higgling of the market” as seen at the
factory gate—Mr Booth’s percentage of poverty—Mr Rowntree’s—The
living wage in America—How wages are determined—By relative
needs—Not by efficiency—Mr Bosanquet’s fundamental
fallacy—Ambiguity of word “earn”—Effect upon the poor of the
pressure of the poorer—Efficiency only of pecuniary value while
rare—Not inefficiency but poverty the real disease.
More than seventeen years ago I sat in the neat but poverty stricken
room of a most respectable family and listened to the pathetic,
uncomplaining words of an admirable woman who, together with her sister,
had, for years, helped to support an early widowed sister-in-law and her
three children. All three women worked at home at shirtmaking, and this
one of the aunts had certainly gone short of food. It was not she who
told me of her good deeds. She was showing me, at my request, the shirts
that they were at that time making for a payment of 1s. 2d. a dozen. I
continue in the words of my own report, written immediately afterwards.
“These shirts are of fair average quality and are striped in gay
colours. They have to be fetched ready cut out but not folded; all the
sewing has to be done to them, including a square of lining at the back
of the neck but not the button holes.... ‘Has the price gone down much?’
I asked. ‘Oh, yes’ said Miss Y.; ‘my sister and I used to get sixpence
apiece. But that was for rather better shirts than these. We worked for
B.’s then. One day my sister was there, waiting for the work, and a
gentleman came in and said to Mr B., “I’ll take the whole lot at 4s. 6d.
a dozen”; and Mr B. said to my sister: “Miss Y., will you take the work
at that, or must I give it all to this gentleman?” And my sister
thought, if we stood out for the price, they would come round to us, and
she said, “No,” she would not take it, and so he gave it to the
gentleman and we were thrown out; and instead of coming round to
sixpence again, that work has gone down to 2s. 6d. a dozen, and even
lower than that. I know of people who do the very cheapest cotton shirts
at 9d. or even 7d. a dozen.’”
Miss Y.’s little story is the story of work in hundreds—nay in
thousands—of work places. Sometimes it is at the factory gate that the
cheapening process goes on. Towards the end of those bitter weeks, “the
slack time,” there will be scores of factory girls, pale and pinched
under their shabby feathered hats, going from firm to firm and asking
whether hands are wanted. At last word will go round that X.’s are
“taking on” on Monday morning. Before the opening hour on Monday
morning, the entrance to Mr X.’s factory will look like the pit door of
a popular theatre. Often have I heard girls describe the dialogue that
follows.
“The foreman says to a young girl in front of me: ‘What wages do you
want?’ And she says: ‘Eight shillings.’ And he told her: ‘No, she could
go.’ So when he come to me, I knew it was no good to say, ‘Eight’; so I
said: ‘Seven and six.’”
At seven and sixpence, perhaps, she gets taken on; and when, presently,
the slack time comes again, the girls weeded out, to be first
discharged, are those who have been receiving eight shillings weekly
ever since their engagement in the previous season. Seven shillings and
sixpence a week (translated or not, according to the custom of the
factory, into terms of piece work) now becomes the usual wage; and next
season this descends by another sixpence or another shilling.
Below six shillings or five shillings, an employer or foreman seldom
tries to drive the time wage, even of girls, unless, indeed, he can
salve his conscience by regarding them as learners. Yet I have known a
wealthy employer admit without any signs of compunction, both that
certain girls in his employ were paid four shillings a week, and that
they could not live on that sum.
The home worker, when he thus suffers diminution of an already
insufficient wage, tries to increase output by setting his children to
work.
“The same pressure that leads to the employment of the children
presently leads, in a slack time, to the acceptance of yet lower pay for
the sake of securing work. The poorer the worker the less possible is
any resistance to any reduction in pay. Thus, by and by, mother and
children, working together, come to receive no more than did the mother
working alone. The employer—and eventually in all probability the
public—has in fact obtained the labour of the children without extra
payment. To such an extent has this process been carried that in the
worst paid branches of home work, subsistence becomes almost impossible
unless the work of children is called in.”[58]
It is thus true that, economically, a man’s enemies are those of his own
household; and that, wherever workers are not protected by organisation
or by special laws, the wage, first of the individual and then of the
family, tends to be brought down to the lowest possible level of
subsistence, and even, possibly if a poor-law subsidy can be obtained,
below it. It is not by chance, nor because their work is of little
value, nor because they are contented to take little pay, that all these
many households of workers are living lives so cruelly straitened by
poverty. Nor is it a mere effect of chance that in other countries as
well as in our own, national wealth is beheld increasing side by side
with extreme poverty on the part of those citizens who toil most
incessantly.
In our own country, the investigations of Mr Charles Booth and of Mr
Seebohm Rowntree, carried out independently and on slightly differing
methods, the one in London, the other in York, have resulted in figures
strikingly similar. Mr Booth puts the proportion living in poverty, of
the whole population of London, at 30·7%; Mr Rowntree, that of the whole
population of York, at 27·84%.[59]
In America the same problem has received the attention of various
careful enquirers, the most recent of whom, perhaps, is Father Ryan,
Professor of ethics and economics in the St Paul Seminary,
Minnesota.[60]
In this volume may be found a careful estimate of the figure that may be
taken as affording a “living wage” in different parts of the United
States. Professor Albion Small, head of the Department of Sociology at
the University of Chicago, is quoted as having said “a few years ago”
that “No man can live, bring up a family, and enjoy the ordinary human
happiness on a wage of less than one thousand dollars a year”
(£200).[61]
Mr John Mitchell, President of the United Mine Workers, says, in a
passage quoted by Professor Ryan: “In cities of from five thousand to
one hundred thousand inhabitants, the American standard of living should
mean, to the ordinary unskilled workman with an average family, a
comfortable house of at least six rooms. It should mean a bathroom, good
sanitary plumbing, a parlour, dining-room, kitchen and sufficient
sleeping room that decency may be preserved and a reasonable degree of
comfort maintained. The American standard of living should mean, to the
unskilled workman, carpets, pictures, books and furniture with which to
make his home bright, comfortable and attractive for himself and his
family, an ample supply of clothing suitable for winter and summer and
above all a sufficient quantity of good, wholesome, nourishing food at
all times of the year. The American standard, moreover, should mean to
the unskilled workman that his children should be kept at school until
they have attained the age of sixteen at least, and that he is enabled
to lay by sufficient to maintain himself and his family in times of
illness or at the close of his industrial life, when age and weakness
render further work impossible, and to make provision for his family
against premature death from accident or otherwise.”[62]
The minimum wage upon which a family could be supported, in towns of the
size named, was estimated by Mr Mitchell in 1903 at $600 a year (£120).
In larger cities the cost would, he considered, be higher. Professor
Ryan is, no doubt, right in saying that “the irreducible minimum of
necessaries and comforts” could not “now” (he was writing in October
1905) be obtained in any city of the United States for less than $600,
and that though that sum might be “_possibly_ a Living Wage in the
moderately sized cities of the West, North and East ... in some of the
largest cities of the last-named regions, it is certainly _not_ a Living
Wage.”[63]
Having established this figure for annual income Professor Ryan goes out
to enquire into its actual prevalence and from various official reports
and statistics draws the conclusion that, “the number of male adults
receiving less than $12.50 (£2, 10s.) per week, in 34 manufacturing
industries was, in 1890, 66%, and, in 1900, 64%.[64]
And it must be remembered that in America as in England there are few
manufacturing industries in which wage earners are in full work
throughout the year.
Thus it appears that, in the two great English speaking empires, a
considerable proportion, even of the upper working classes, do not
receive remuneration that allows to them and to their families that
minimum of space, food, clothing and recreation which at the present day
are esteemed essential to civilised life.
The reason of this state of things is a fairly simple one. Wages, in a
state of free competition, are determined not by the intrinsic cost of
the work performed but by the relative needs of the worker to sell and
of the paymaster to buy. Where there are many workers able to offer the
same service and comparatively few buyers, the work will be paid for at
a low rate, however excellent; where would-be buyers’ workers are few
and would-be buyers many, the work will be highly paid, however ill
done. Among ourselves the numbers competing for manual work are very
large, and the need of each particular workman for employment far
greater and more pressing than the need of any employer for any
particular man. Consequently, the wages of the manual worker are low in
proportion to the cost of livelihood; and the individual worker is
absolutely powerless by himself to increase them.
These facts are so familiar, and, when definitely stated, so universally
admitted, that it almost seems necessary to apologise for reiterating
them. Yet they are continually ignored by ordinary middle class people
in conversing upon labour questions, and not infrequently even by
writers of some standing. Categorically, they are not—and doubtless
would not be—denied; but whole volumes are founded upon the basis of
their falsity. The entire constructive argument, for instance, of Mrs
Bosanquet’s “The Strength of the People,” a book which, having gone into
a second edition, may be supposed to have influenced a good many
readers, rests upon a tacit assumption that payment is determined by
quality of work: an assumption masked by the ambiguous character of the
word “earn,” which at one moment is used in the sense of “deserve” and
at another in the sense of “receive.” Mrs Bosanquet—except indeed when
dealing with the old Poor Law—cheerfully ignores the painful law that
wages are determined by the conflict of needs, and writes, throughout,
as though the manual worker who does good work were sure of being well
paid. From this assumption she goes on, very logically, to suppose that
the cure for a man’s poverty is to make him do good work. Many persons
who are not themselves exposed to the pinch of competition may be found
expressing the same view, which obtains apparent support from the fact
that the very ill paid are observed not to be producing good work. For,
although it is unfortunately not true that good work always “earns” good
wages, it is true that bad pay, sooner or later, but quite inevitably
leads to bad work. Without a certain modicum of food, comfort, good
clothing, leisure and ease of mind, no human being long remains capable
of producing good work. The father of a family who receives 18s. a week
and pays 7s. for lodging cannot, if he also feeds his wife and children,
either remain or become a very good workman. Before he can do better
work he must be better paid.
Mrs Bosanquet thinks otherwise. Efficiency and consequently prosperity
might, she appears to believe, be enforced upon the poor by the
withdrawal of such help as is now accorded them. The prospect of that
beloved refuge, the workhouse, prevents them from providing for their
old age; but the prospect of literal starvation would probably be more
effective. The hunger and hardship of their daily lives do not furnish
an adequate spur; but perhaps despair might do so. We seem to hear Mrs
Chick exhorting the dying Mrs Dombey to “make an effort.”
Again, that terrible pressure of the poorer upon the poor which Mr Booth
regards as so serious an evil appears to Mrs Bosanquet an element of
hope and strength. Morally, the charity of the poor to one another is
undoubtedly a beautiful thing; economically, it is assuredly one of the
causes that increase and aggravate poverty; and such diminution of
pauperism as is produced by the maintenance out of the workhouse of an
aged or sick relative may, in the long run, lead to the destitution of a
whole family. The last result of such maintenance may, if wide-spread,
be far more nationally expensive than if all the sick and aged were
supported out of the public purse.
Let us see, in an example of the commonest kind, how this mutual help
works out. Smith and Brown, manual labourers, are working side by side
at a wage of £1 a week or thereabouts. Both are married men with
children. Both are contributing to a provident society which, if they
survive the age of sixty, will furnish a small pittance to their
declining years. Slack times come; Smith is discharged; Brown is
retained. Within a fortnight, Smith, with his wife and children, begins
to suffer hardship; the household property goes, piecemeal, to the
pawnshop; the “club money” is no longer forthcoming, and Smith’s
provision for his old age lapses. Brown, whose pound a week affords, as
may be supposed, no great superfluity for him and his, finds himself
unable to see his “mate” and his mate’s children in want of bread;
Brown’s club money and a good deal more which can ill be spared goes to
their assistance, and Brown’s provision for old age lapses.
The Smith family, it is true, has been kept from the workhouse—at the
cost, not improbably, of some weakly little Smith’s life—but has not
this result been bought too dear? Do not justice and good sense alike
suggest the unfitness of leaving the burden of maintaining the Smith
family to rest upon precisely that class of the community which is least
able to support it? The maintenance of those who cannot maintain
themselves by those who can barely maintain themselves keeps both groups
upon a dead level of destitution. If our aim is really the strengthening
of the people we must not begin by increasing the burdens of the
weakest—burdens borne often at so cruel a sacrifice of health and life,
and with so amazing an absence of complaint. The Smith family and the
Brown family alike are suffering because their income is barely adequate
to their elementary current needs; and their troubles will only be cured
by the possession of a larger real income. This, indeed, Mrs Bosanquet
sees plainly enough. “How can we bring it about,” she asks, “that they”
(_i.e._ “those whom we may call the very poor”) “shall have a
permanently greater command over the necessaries and luxuries of life?”
Gifts she perceives to be no true remedy, though she fails to assign the
economic reason, which is that the possession of outside resources
enables the recipient to “go one lower” than his unendowed competitor in
the battle for employment. The same objection does not apply to the
workhouse, which withdraws the pauper from the battle altogether, but it
does apply to outdoor relief, and is the one valid economic argument
against it. The best charity—as Dr Johnson long ago pointed out—indeed,
the only effectual charity, is to set a man to work at good wages. This
is not, however, Mrs Bosanquet’s plan. “The less obvious, but more
effective remedy is to approach the problem by striking at its roots in
the minds of the people themselves; to stimulate their energies, to
insist upon their responsibilities, to train their faculties. In short,
to make them efficient.”[65]
Unfortunately the ill-nourished, ill clothed and ill taught cannot be
made efficient. Moreover if we could make every one of them efficient,
they would be no better off, financially in their efficient state than
they are now, in their incompetence.[66] While rare, efficiency, like a
tenor voice, commands a monopoly price; if universal, its money worth
would be no higher than that of the ability to read, which in the Middle
Ages was a commercial asset of value. Furthermore, since extreme poverty
destroys efficiency, these ill paid efficient persons would presently
become, like our poorer manual labourers of to-day, weak of brain and of
body, dull, languid, inert and therefore bad workers.
Thus efficiency, however desirable upon other grounds, is no economic
remedy for underpayment. Not inefficiency but poverty is the real
disease, and since poverty is an inevitable result of unlimited
competition in labour, the disease can only be cured by some
interference with the free course of competition. How to apply such
interference effectually is the real problem which organised society has
to solve. Towards its solution Mrs Bosanquet, able though she is, offers
no assistance, because she never acknowledges the character of the
problem. For her there are only inefficient people to be taught better,
not underpaid people to be paid better. In this respect she represents a
considerable school of thought and therefore it has seemed worth while
to examine her thesis at some length; especially since any writer is
pretty sure of welcome who preaches a doctrine so soothing to the
general conscience. Much sympathetic distress would be spared to all of
us, and much racking of anxious brains to a few, if it were but possible
to believe with Mrs Bosanquet that the poor are themselves the
architects of their own poverty and that they must themselves be its
physicians. Unfortunately this is not the case. The process of
cheapening described above is, in a state of unlimited competition,
absolutely inevitable; and neither talent nor industry can exempt from
it any isolated worker whose qualifications do not create for him some
sort of monopoly.
CHAPTER VIII
LABOUR AS A COMMODITY
What is a “fair wage”—Two meanings of “worth”—What work costs to the
worker—Work done below cost price—How the worker may lose upon his
work—The effect upon commodities in general of free
competition—The effect upon labour—The robber employer—Eventual
powerlessness of the single employer—Cost to the nation of the
underpaid worker—Difference in essence between labour and other
commodities—Ambiguity of word “law”—Recognition of the true cost
of labour the basis of reform.
There are few phrases more current than those which include the
expression “a fair wage.” All workers conceive that they have a right to
it; and I never met an employer who did not maintain that he paid
it—although I have met more than one who admitted that his “fair wage”
was one upon which the worker who received it could not live. To any
enquirer venturing to point out this peculiarity, the reply is given:
“But the work is not worth more,” and the reply generally silences the
enquirer for the moment—whereby the employer comes to believe it
unanswerable.
In the enquirer’s mind two questions eventually arise: “Can a wage be
fair upon which the worker cannot live?” and: “Has labour a worth
measurable otherwise than by the market price?”
We begin presently to perceive that there are two faces to that word
“worth”; that it represents sometimes the price to the buyer and
sometimes the cost to the worker. The price to the buyer—the “worth” of
the work in the answer quoted above—is neither more nor less than its
market price, or, in other words, the price brought about by the balance
of competition between those who want to buy labour and those who want
to sell it. This price is regulated solely by the numbers competing on
either hand and by their greater or less degree of combined action. But
the cost of work to the worker is the expenditure of energy which he has
made upon it. Every hour’s work of a man or woman takes out of that man
or that woman a certain fixed amount of strength, of energy,—in short, a
certain amount of life. When we work, we spend, literally, something of
our substance. To make up that expenditure, we must have both a certain
amount of nourishment and a certain amount of rest. If our work is not
paid at such a rate as to give us that, we lose something in every hour
we work. We spend a little more life than is restored to us. Even if we
are paid at a rate that enables us just to make up what we have spent,
we have earned nothing—we have only had our outlay repaid to us. The
purchaser who pays a worker just enough to make him as fit for work
afterwards as before, has only paid the worker’s expenses; he has not
yet begun to pay him for his work. The worker in such a case is
precisely in the position of a capitalist who has lent money, and got it
back, but has made no profit on its use.
The wage of much labour in this and in other countries is on that scale.
So accustomed, indeed, are we to this state of things that many of us
think a worker quite well paid if he receives enough to keep him in good
bodily condition. Yet the same people who hold this opinion in regard to
that labour which is the sole capital of the worker, consider themselves
to have made a very bad bargain if they so invest their pecuniary
capital as to receive no interest upon it. It would be well if we should
bear in mind that the worker who receives no more than enough to make up
the strength expended, is in exactly that financial position.
But there is a financial stage lower than this: the stage of the worker
who not only gets no interest upon his capital, but does not get even
back the whole of his capital. That labour is so often yielded for less
than its cost is one reason why a working man’s expectation of life is
considerably less than that of a professional man; or, to put it in
other words, why the dock labourer and the omnibus conductor die younger
than the lawyer and the clergyman.
There are two ways in either (or both) of which any worker may lose upon
his work, and the names of them are Long Hours and Low Wages. For
instance, a railway company or an omnibus company that keeps a man at
work for sixteen hours out of the twenty-four uses up more of that man’s
vitality than the other eight hours can restore. Though he were to be
paid, like Miss Edna May, at a salary of £200 a week he would still lose
on the bargain. At no price can his employers repay him. They have
consumed some of his capital, and capital of that sort when once spent
is spent for ever.
Or the worker may receive for each hour’s work, even though the stretch
of hours be not unduly long, too little money to pay for those
necessaries by which alone his outlay can be made up. On each
transaction he pays out a little more than is returned to him. He
becomes, at each step, a little poorer in bodily resources; he is never
quite sufficiently fed, never quite sufficiently clothed nor healthily
housed, and he never has that reasonable certainty of to-morrow’s
provision which goes so far towards giving peace of mind and health of
body. Finally, like other persons who spend more than they receive, he
becomes bankrupt; that is to say, he either dies several years earlier
than the average of men who are better paid, or he sinks into the
invalid condition of the pauper. “Labour,” says Mr Schoenhof, “is an
expenditure of vital force. Unless this is replaced by wholesome
nutrition (air, light, sanitation and even cheerful surroundings are
part of wholesome nutrition) the frame will work itself out and the
labour will become economically of smaller and smaller value.”[67]
The cost, then, of labour as a commodity is the cost of the worker’s
existence, a cost paid by the worker not in money, but in exhaustion, in
hunger, in actual flesh and blood. This is the point in which labour
differs from every other commodity, and the reason for which it should
not be treated in the same way as other commodities.
In regard to all commodities, the tendency of free competition is, as we
all know, to bring down the selling price to a figure very little above
the cost of production; and in regard to all commodities other than
labour, it is easy enough to see that this result is advantageous to the
buyer. It is less easy to see, but is probably no less true that, in the
long run, it is advantageous also to the seller, and that every
hindrance to free competition in goods tends to diminish the volume of
production and consequently that of human enjoyment.
But when we come to consider that exceptional commodity, labour, we find
a different result ensuing from free competition; we find the inevitable
consequences to be impoverishment of the seller, deterioration of the
product and increase of human misery. The underpaid worker is not only
inevitably wretched and inevitably unhealthy; he is also a danger and a
burden to the country in which he lives. Since he—or more often
she—receives less than a living wage for his work, and since he
continues to live, it is obvious that some one else is in part
supporting him.
I can never forget the impression made upon me in the first factory
which I ever visited by a little scene of which I was a silent witness.
The head of the firm had shown us over various departments, and
incidentally had talked of how some of his children had just gone to the
other side of the world in a yacht. He was himself a man beginning to be
elderly, well grown, well groomed, fresh coloured, speaking with an
educated accent and presenting that air of prosperous content which is
common with elderly business men who are making money. He presently took
us into a department where very young and very poor-looking little girls
were employed; and one of our party shyly asked what were their wages.
“Four shillings a week,” was the answer. The first speaker, himself an
employer who pays high wages by choice, said deprecatingly:
“But—surely—they can’t live on that!” “Oh, no!” returned their employer,
cheerfully. “They live at home with their parents.” And I, new, then, to
the facts of commercial life, stood staring, silent, at this well fed
gentleman, with sons and daughters of his own, who frankly confessed
that poor men’s daughters had to be supported by their parents in order
that he might have their work for less than it cost. He seemed to me to
be owning himself a thief. And that, indeed, was exactly what he
was—although, strangely enough, he failed to perceive the fact. He was
committing a daily robbery upon persons too weak to withstand his
demands. His being, however, a variety of robbery not recognised by the
laws, he pursued his course not only unremorseful and unpunished, but
with great profit, and died, leaving behind him a large fortune which
only a small minority of his fellow countrymen consider to have been
disgracefully acquired. Yet his course was attended with much more
suffering to other people than that of any highwayman. It was akin
rather to that of the mediæval baron who by force of arms extracted a
reluctant toll from all his poorer neighbours. The girls submitted to
the extortion because it is even worse to starve than to be robbed, and
because they lacked the combination that might have enabled them to
resist both robbery and starvation.
The individual worker whose skill is but the dexterity born of constant
practice—the worker, that is to say, who has no sort of monopoly—is no
more able to regulate the payment of his services than an apple or a
sack is able to regulate its market price. Nor, at a certain stage of
the downward course, is any individual employer able to regulate it. It
is, for instance, probable enough that at the present moment not the
Brothers Cheeryble themselves could sell safety pins at a profit if they
paid a living wage to the women who “cap” them.[68]
For, in the long run, the process of competition generally succeeds in
filching from the employer that unfair profit which he had originally
filched from the worker. It is now the public at large which, by paying
for safety pins a fraction less than they really cost, pockets the
balance of the worker’s living wage. For the manufacturer who desires to
pay his workers better there are now two courses open; he must either,
if he can, find out some improved method, which, by diminishing his
other expenses, will allow him to pay higher for labour, or must combine
with his fellow manufacturers to raise the selling price. In practice,
he generally does neither of these things, but continues to take
advantage of his workers and to say—not without some show of
justification—that he cannot help it, and that they would be worse off
if he gave up business. The public at large, meanwhile, though it
automatically pockets the unfair profits, does not, in the long run,
gain by the transaction. For the underpaid worker who fails to be wholly
supported by the proceeds of his own labour is inevitably supported in
part out of the pocket of some other person or persons. Moreover, both
the health and the work of the underpaid worker presently deteriorates.
He contributes less than he might and ought to the general wealth, and,
by and by, when his health fails sufficiently, he becomes a charge upon
the public. Finally, he dies before his natural time, so that his
country fails to receive the full natural return for those costly and
unproductive years of childhood during which he was supported.
Furthermore, his working life is one of continued hardship, fatigue and
suffering. His existence is not an addition to, but a deduction from,
the total general happiness, the rather that underpayment is a burden
not only to its victim but also to the onlooker. No person of ordinary
sensibilities can fail to be depressed by the knowledge that large
numbers of his fellow citizens are struggling, to their physical, moral
and mental detriment, in hopeless poverty. Yet this state of things
arises inevitably if labour is left, like any other commodity, at the
mercy of unrestricted competition.
This difference in kind, between labour and other commodities, is the
justification of trade unionism, and the explanation of how it is that a
man can logically be at the same time a free trader and a trade
unionist. Except the trade unionists and the professed socialists,
however, no great body of persons seems to have perceived this
peculiarity of labour; and while underpayment is very generally
deplored, the various efforts of the benevolent are mostly directed
either towards supplementing inadequate wages or towards transferring
the underpaid to other branches of work, rather than towards securing
better payment for the work at present done. In the eyes of the average
Briton, the settling of wages by free competition appears, for some
unexplained reason, as a sacred and permanent principle. Perhaps, if
this attitude could be exhaustively analysed, we should find at its root
a vague respect for “the laws of political economy,” which respect is,
in the last resort, but the result of a confusion of mind about two
aspects of the word “law.” Laws in the moral world are, of course,
different from laws in the scientific world. The moral (or social) law
is a command; the scientific law merely a statement of effects. This we
see, plainly enough, when the effects are material and immediate. We do
not dream of regarding the law that fire burns as a command to put our
fingers in the flame. But when we come to consider the results of
wide-spread human action, we seem to ourselves to be in the region
rather of morals than of science, and without clearly realising our
attitude, we begin, many of us, to regard the laws that govern these
matters rather as precepts to be obeyed than as sequences to be avoided.
The law that free competition in labour leads to starvation wages is a
law of the same kind as the law that a dose of prussic acid leads to
death; and the conclusion to be drawn in each case is that if we wish to
avoid the result we must avoid the cause. Persons who are not desirous
of committing suicide must abstain from prussic acid; persons who desire
to see underpayment vanish must resist free competition in labour.
If the nature of labour were as generally apprehended as is the nature
of prussic acid, the laws of our country (which are laws of the other
kind—laws of command) would gradually be so altered as to prevent and
punish that kind of robbery which was practised, for years, by that
prosperous gentleman who, year after year, paid girls for their work at
a trifle under a penny an hour, and died thereafter wealthy and highly
respected. It is more than conceivable that persons now living may
survive to a day in which wealth so accumulated will be held as
discreditable as wealth accumulated by slave trading, and when the
stealing of labour will be held no less criminal than the stealing of
cash. The foundation upon which any such reform must rest will be the
recognition that labour is a commodity differing in its nature from
every other commodity; and that while there is, intrinsically, no such
thing as a fair price, there is, intrinsically, and in every case, such
a thing as a fair wage.
PART II
THE MINIMUM WAGE
CHAPTER I
EXISTING CHECKS
How it is that some workers are not “sweated”—Non-competitive
systems—Co-operation—Public services—Trade unions—Who is to blame
for strikes?—How trade unions promote trade—Limits of their
success—Factory Acts—How restriction raises wages—An example—How
restriction drives the employer into better ways—Limit of legal
restrictions in Great Britain.
If it be true that unlimited competition tends to reduce the wage earner
to the lowest possible rate of subsistence, how does it happen, some
reader may enquire, that under our present competitive system all wage
earners are not, in fact, at that low level, but that, on the contrary,
there are occupations in which wages tend steadily to rise.
The answer is that the course of competition among ourselves is not
unchecked, and that, wherever concerted human action has interposed a
check, the downward course of wages has been stayed. Nor, indeed, is the
competitive system, though the most widely prevalent, the only system in
existence among us.
A very considerable proportion of the trade of these islands is carried
on not upon a competitive but upon a co-operative basis. The actual
sales of goods made by industrial co-operative societies in the year
1904 amounted to £90,681,406,[69] and this total was “exclusive of the
sums (amounting to £11,874,643 in 1904) representing the value of the
goods produced by the productive departments of the wholesale and retail
societies and transferred to their distributive departments.” The
membership of the various societies included in 1904 no less than
2,103,113 persons, an appreciable fraction of the population.
The great movement known as Industrial Co-operation has two forms: (_a_)
Associations of Consumers; (_b_) Labour Copartnerships.
The theory of Associations of Consumers is simple in the extreme. It
consists in the elimination and reduction of intermediate profits, and
the purchase by the retail customer of goods as nearly as possible at
prime cost. The method employed is to sell at the usual market price and
to return the surplus in the form of a percentage upon the total of
purchases—which percentage is usually called a dividend. The fund from
which such payments are paid is “the fund commonly known as profit,” and
commonly retained under that name by the individual employer. Some
writers have pointed out that this fund is in truth not profit but only
savings. “‘Wealth is not created, it is only economised by
distribution’; but in co-operative distribution it is economised to such
effect that, for the workers at any rate, it has appeared to create
wealth where none existed nor could exist for them under the old system
of competitive trading.”[70] The “fund commonly called profit” is in
fact “the margin between the prime cost of an article and the price paid
for it over the counter by the individual customer.” The appropriation
of this margin, or of a considerable part of it, to the customer is a
feature not only of stores belonging to working class members but also
of such undertakings as the Civil Service or the Army and Navy Stores.
In these instances, however, the method adopted is to diminish the
selling price; and this slight difference of procedure has led to a wide
difference of results. The ordinary customer of the middle class stores
feels himself, for the most part, but a purchaser at an exceptionally
good and cheap shop; the customer at a store that follows the plan of
the original Rochdale Pioneers feels himself the member of a community
and the inheritor of a tradition. The fund, being collected in the hands
of the society at large, is recognised more clearly as the property of
all members alike; its destination is regulated by the governing body
whom those members elect; and it forms a continual object lesson in
political economy.
In these cases, it is clear to all persons who understand the processes,
that competition has been checked. The margin no longer goes into an
employer’s pocket but returns to the customer; and since the working
classes are the largest customers, most of it returns to them. In nearly
all instances, however, a part of the fund is retained for public uses;
few, indeed, are the societies that contribute nothing towards
educational or federal purposes.
The other group of co-operators views its members not as consumers but
as producers, and by this very fact narrows its range, since every human
being is a consumer, but not all of us are, or can be, in the strict
sense, producers. There must be clerks, distributors of all kinds,
policemen, organisers. The work of such persons is necessary and useful,
but it does not produce, like that of the weaver or the engineer, an
immediate and apparent increase in the wealth of the world. In theory,
the early associations of producers were workers who combined themselves
into self governed workshops and divided the profits of their labours.
But this ideal is applicable only to industries demanding but a small
outlay of capital, and such industries are always growing fewer. “The
ideal ... was modified; individual sympathisers outside the workshop
were admitted as members ... so too were societies of consumers. Thus,
in place of the old self governing workshop, the modern copartnership
workshop developed.” Associations of this type have been rapidly growing
in the last ten or twelve years, and during the last two or three have
spread amazingly in Ireland. All sorts of industries are represented:
baking, weaving (of cotton, wool and silk), spinning, building,
printing, quarrying, dairying, sick nursing, typewriting, cab-driving
and bookbinding among them; there are societies that make wearing
apparel of various sorts, pianos, harness, nails, mineral waters,
photographs, brushes, watches, cutlery, padlocks and bricks.
“Desborough, with its two important productive societies and its
flourishing store which owns much of the land and has built most of the
houses, is almost a co-operative community.”
Of the great English and Scotch Wholesale Societies made up of
federations of societies, of the annual conferences, the annual
festivals, the Women’s Co-operative Guild—that greatest and most
interesting of working women’s associations—it is not my business here
to speak in detail. Readers who desire to become acquainted with
co-operation as it exists to-day should procure _Industrial
Co-operation_.[71]
It must be enough to say that in the ocean of commercial competition,
co-operation lies like a fertile island inhabited by workers who are
putting into their own pockets the profits of their buying and selling,
and very often also of their labour.
Nor is industrial co-operation the only part of the nation’s business
carried on, in part at least, upon non-competitive principles. The whole
civil service of any country, the army, navy, hospitals, museums,
prisons, endowed schools and municipal undertakings of all kinds are
examples of enterprises established on a non-competitive basis, although
often influenced as regards internal management by competitive methods.
In many of these cases, the payment of workers is fixed otherwise than
by competition. Military and naval officers are not asked what is the
lowest figure at which they will consent to serve their country; nor do
we find in advertisements for town clerks or borough surveyors that
preference will be given to candidates willing to accept a reduction of
salary.
Even in the wider labour market, competition has not entirely a free
course. It is checked by trade organisations, by Factory Acts and by
Sanitary Acts. It is even checked in some slight degree by an uneasy
feeling that it is not decent to let people work for us in return for
obviously inadequate payment.
The avowed aim of trade unions is to check freedom of competition, with
the object of obtaining or maintaining for the workers a high level of
pay and of comfort. Their attempted method has been, almost invariably,
the establishment not of a fixed wage but of a minimum wage. A
misconception upon this point is so deeply engrained in the mind of the
ordinary middle class Briton that I entirely despair of being believed
when I make this statement. If I should live to celebrate a hundredth
birthday, I should expect still to hear in the last year of my life the
words: “What I really can’t bear about trade unions is that they insist
upon all men being paid alike.” Let it be repeated, once again, however
vainly, that trade unions do not so insist. I have never known, nor
heard of, any trade union that objected to any of its members getting
paid as much above the minimum rate as they possibly could. What the
union does forbid is the taking of wages below the minimum; and the
reason of this prohibition will be clear to any person who has read the
chapter: “How Underpayment Comes.”
The means employed by trade unions for securing a minimum wage is the
combined refusal of all members to work at any lower rate. In trades of
skill, as distinguished from trades of mere practice—trades that is to
say which possess in some degree a natural monopoly—unions have often
attained considerable success; and wherever they have done so, poverty
has been in a measure checked. Not only have the members of the union
themselves been comparatively well paid, but the fact of their being so
has helped to raise the level around them. Thus, since national poverty
is the greatest enemy of trade, the unions have almost invariably, and
indeed inevitably, been promoters of trade and prosperity.
At this point the question “How about strikes?” becomes almost
physically audible. Certainly, a strike, during its continuance, hinders
trade and prosperity in exactly the same way as warfare does. It is in
fact warfare on a lesser scale and—in our country—with restrictions upon
the weapons that may be employed; and war is always an evil, though
sometimes the lesser of two evils. In a strike, as in greater wars,
responsibility rests upon both parties, but seldom in equal degrees. The
apportionment of blame must largely depend upon the cause in which each
is fighting. The employer, in nine cases out of ten, is fighting for
cheap labour; the union primarily for access to amenities of life which
the employer enjoys already. In nine cases out of ten, therefore, the
union is really fighting the battle of the whole nation, while the
employer is fighting against it. Mr Schoenhof, a grave State official,
sent by his own government to examine economic questions in Europe,
declares of the acts of British trade unions that: “economically these
acts speak of a high degree of wisdom. On the other hand the attempts of
the employing classes to depress the rate of wages show frequently an
entire misapprehension of the principles under which production is
conducted. Most of the strife would disappear if it were more fully
recognised that a high rate of wages has all the time been the powerful
lever to reaching the low cost of production which practically rules
to-day in the industries of the United States.”[72]
If therefore that combatant is to be held most responsible who is
fighting in the worse cause, it is not the trade unionist but the
employer, who, on the whole, is chiefly to be blamed for the occurrence
of strikes.
There may, indeed, have been cases—I believe there has, in our own day
and country, been at least one—in which a union has followed a mistaken
course, has restricted output, and so lessened the volume of trade, and
to that degree injured the country. In so far as unions have
occasionally done this, they have been blind to the larger issues; but
not so blind, even thus, as those employers who thought to cheapen
production by lowering wages. Poverty, always and everywhere, hinders
production; the wise employer desires to see more money in the pockets
of working class purchasers, and the wise statesman more money in the
pockets of working class taxpayers. Some day, when the history of Great
Britain comes to be seen in the truer perspective of retrospect, it will
be the leaders of trade unionism and the promoters of Factory Acts who
will stand out among the real makers of this nation’s wealth.
But trade unions have seldom been really successful among unskilled
workers—precisely those who, having no natural monopoly, are most liable
to the pressure of economic competition and most likely to be underpaid.
Women workers, too, have always been difficult to organise; not
primarily, as is sometimes supposed, because they are women; but partly
because women, in our present social state, expect to leave the labour
market upon marriage, and therefore are comparatively indifferent about
earning high wages; and partly because women have, as a rule, less of
companionship with one another and of common social life out of working
hours than men, and therefore less opportunity of that “talking over” of
affairs out of which concerted action grows. Home workers are, of
course, especially isolated; and the successful organisation of a union
among unskilled female home workers would be an industrial miracle not
looked for by the most sanguine toiler in the industrial field.
Co-operation and trade unionism have both been, in the main, working
class movements, and both are examples of that curious inarticulate
instinct for right collective action which seems to be inherent in the
English democracy. From an assembly of average English artisans—I say,
English, not British—you will not get logically reasoned statements; you
will very seldom get a clear exposition of principles; but you will,
very generally, get that main line of conduct which true principles and
sound logic would dictate.
Not all the checks, however, in the course of free competition have come
from the workers. The direct interposition of the law was invoked and
secured by men whose personal concern in the question was only that of
fellow citizens. These men were actuated by a horror of the sufferings
undergone by the poorest workers; they felt that moral order was
outraged and the nation disgraced by the existing industrial conditions.
Restriction of hours was the first check imposed by British law, which
has shrunk hitherto from directly fixing a rate of wages.[73]
But since prolonged hours of labour are in fact but a form of diminished
wages, the law has, as it were despite itself, led to a real, and often
also to a nominal, rise of wages. The way in which this comes about was
exemplified with singular completeness in a case that occurred some
years ago in London. The managers of a girl’s club, enquiring into the
non-attendance of a certain member of the club, learned that her
employer was giving every day to her and to her fellow workers a
considerable number of articles to be made at home after the closing of
the work room and to be brought in next morning. In order to complete
this task, she was often, she declared, obliged to work till two in the
morning. The articles were accessories of dress, and were paid for, by
the dozen, at such a rate that the girls (there were seven of them)
earned each about seven shillings a week, or about 1s. 2d. a day for a
working day of from 14 to 16 hours. The ladies of the club reported the
case to the Women’s Industrial Council, the members of which knew—as the
girls did not—that the Factory Act forbade such employment at home after
a working day on the employer’s premises. Now this, it will be seen, was
just the kind of case in which, to people who have but little industrial
experience, the interference of the law seems harsh, and its strict
enforcement disastrous. If, working 14 to 16 hours a day, these poor
girls earned but 1s. 2d., how cruel to let them work but 10 hours, and
so earn but ninepence or tenpence! The Women’s Industrial Council,
however, ruthlessly reported the facts to the Factory inspectors; and
one evening, shortly afterwards, a lady inspector appeared at the
workshop door just as the girls were leaving. Each girl carried a
parcel. The inspector enquired the contents, and on learning them,
turned the girls back and made each leave behind her the work which
should have occupied her until after midnight. She herself interviewed
the employer and no doubt expounded to him the provisions of the Act.
Next morning—or possibly a day or two later—this ingenious gentleman
presented to his employees a statement for their signature which
declared that they carried home work to be done, not by themselves but
by their relatives. They all signed; girls who work part of the night as
well as all day and who receive but seven shillings a week are not
persons likely to have spirit for much resistance. But they told the
club leaders, and the club leaders told the Women’s Industrial Council,
and the Industrial Council hastened to tell the Factory inspectors.
Again the lady inspector appeared and met the girls coming out with
parcels. Again she bade them return the work, and again she went in and
saw their employer. What she said to him can only be surmised; for
neither Factory inspectors nor employers report these things to the
outer world. Whatever it may have been, it was effectual. No more work
was given out to be carried home and the girls were thenceforward able
to spend their evenings, if they chose, at the club and their nights in
sleep. But, at the week’s end, every girl had done much less work, and
being paid at the usual piece work rate, received considerably less than
her weekly average. Thereupon, they represented to their employer their
hard case. The inspector had forbidden them to work at night, and they
could not live upon the proceeds of their work by day. Would he
therefore be pleased to raise their pay; otherwise, they would be
obliged to seek work elsewhere. The employer did raise their wages,
paying them at a rate per dozen which, while still but a very few pence,
was yet somewhere between 40 and 45 per cent. higher than he had paid
before. Nor was this all. Finding that seven girls were now unable to
accomplish all his work, he enlarged his workshop and took on six more.
There were now therefore thirteen girls at work instead of seven, and
all thirteen were receiving wages a shade higher for ten hours’ work
than the seven had received for about fifteen hours. Nor did the retail
selling price of the goods advance by so much as the fraction of a
penny. In such ways as this do legal checks tend to impede the course of
free competition and to prevent the extremity of underpayment.
It is not, however, only by preventing undue hours of labour but also by
insisting upon reasonable sanitary conditions that the law promotes
better wages and improved trade. An employer who can no longer either
overwork or overcrowd his “hands” is driven to seek other channels of
saving. He demands some method of getting more work done in an hour, and
finds it worth his while to pay for the best possible machinery. All
sorts of improved processes are introduced, some of which may demand
increased skill and attention from the workers. The workers as soon as
they have leisure enough to think, and health enough to develop
initiative, begin to insist upon better payment, and because they are
better paid are able to respond to demands for better work. The improved
methods of production, where introduced, lead to an increase of
production which renders possible a lowering of selling price, while the
rise in wages at the same time increases the buying power of the
workers. Trade expands and finds a ready outlet.[74]
The profits of the manufacturer, in these circumstances, are greatly
increased, no longer at the cost of increased hardship to the workers
but with advantage to the whole community. Thus the law has already, in
various ways, interfered with the free course of competition, and its
interference has been beneficial all round. The grounds of its
intervention have always been moral; legislators and constituents alike
have felt that certain evils must be suppressed at whatever loss of
profits or of trade. But the results have been, not only morally but
also economically, of immense national benefit. Slowly the great truth
is emerging into recognition that the enforcement of good conditions and
good payment for the workers of a nation is not only the humane but also
the profitable policy. Slowly, step by step, in that piecemeal, groping
and wasteful manner which seems to be a part of the English nature, and
which, while so maddening to some of us who happen to possess an
infusion of more logical but hotter blood, yet, on the whole, works out
so well in practice, the British law goes forward, setting check after
check in the path of unlimited competition. Almost every step has been
taken amid outcries of opposition and prophecies of ruin. At every
advance, the “practical man” has assured the government of the day,
beforehand, that his particular trade would be destroyed, and,
afterwards, that he had lost nothing.
In spite of all these steps and all these consequences, the vast
majority of English people still believe themselves to be living under a
_régime_ of pure competition and are ready to declare such a _régime_
not only beneficial but inevitable. In fact, however, modern life, even
in our own small islands, comprises not one _régime_ only but many.
Every stage, from a modified feudalism up to an almost undiluted
socialism, is represented by existing conditions in Great Britain. Some
stages are dwindling; some are growing; and it is well within the power
of concerted human action to determine which shall grow and which shall
dwindle.
As far as we have gone, our law has directly stopped many gross forms of
overwork and oppression. The home worker it has helped, if at all, only
in so far as it has enforced certain provisions as to housing and
sanitation. Indirectly, the Factory Acts have served to raise wages by
forming a basis of minimum comfort upon which trade union organisation
could be built. In Great Britain, the law has never yet intervened,
directly and of set purpose, to raise wages. In parts indeed of Greater
Britain the law has directly so intervened; but the history of that
intervention belongs to another chapter.
CHAPTER II
SUPPOSED REMEDIES
Emigration—Valuable to the individual—Useless for the
community—Assumed improvidence of early marriage—Drunkenness cause
of individual poverty, not of general poverty—The amazing thrift
of working people—Dangers of thrift—Observations of a sagacious
Scotchman—Consumers’ Leagues—Why impracticable as remedy for
underpayment—Fields in which a Consumers’ League may be of use.
The evils described in the first part of this volume are no new ones;
they have been familiar for many years to many persons; a variety of
remedies have been suggested and in many cases attempted. Of these
remedies, only those are in any degree effectual which act as checks
upon competition. One group of proposed remedies is founded upon the
assumption that the country is overpopulated. This assumption, is,
however, disproved by the fact (which is unquestioned) that
notwithstanding the presence among us of a large class of rich
non-producers, the national income has increased at a greater rate than
the population of the country. Still, there are persons who believe that
England has too many people and who, therefore, very logically, desire
to reduce the number.
Some reformers of this way of thinking desire to see fewer births;
others desire the removal, to parts of the world where population is
still sparse, of those persons who, in this country, are seen to be
vainly struggling for remunerative employment. Emigration has, no doubt,
in many individual cases, meant a change from indigence to prosperity;
but, as a remedy for general indigence, it has the fatal flaw that every
worker removed is also a consumer removed, and that every consumer
removed means the loss of a customer and, therefore, to that extent, a
diminution of trade. The supply of labour is, indeed, lessened, but the
demand for labour’s product, and thus for labour itself, is lessened
too. It would be better for British trade if the emigrant could be made
prosperous at home instead of being sent to seek prosperity in exile. It
is, however, true that most emigrants go to British colonies, and that
these colonies need them. For these reasons, emigration is, no doubt,
useful, but as a remedy for general poverty at home it must always
remain delusive. Moreover, so long as the immigration of foreigners is
permitted, the emigration of British subjects is in effect little more
than a game of “General Post.”
Another school of reformers holds the poor themselves responsible for
their own poverty. “Why do they marry so young?” “Why do they drink?”
“Why don’t they save?” These questions are heard at every turn; and
persons who do not know the life of the poor regard them as
unanswerable.
To take first the question of early marriages, a point upon which the
better off are apt to judge with singular unfairness of their poorer
brethren. The market value of the middle class man is probably highest
after 40, certainly after 30. The market value of the average workman,
on the other hand, decreases after 40, if not earlier, and, in a vast
number of cases, is as high at 22 as it will ever be. Therefore, while
the middle class man is in a financial sense, prudent in deferring
marriage till 30 or thereabouts, the workman would be foolish indeed to
delay the birth of his eldest children until within ten years or so of
his own decline in market value. The workman who desires, like the
middle class man, that the infancy and schooltime of his children shall
coincide with his own period of greatest prosperity should marry—as in
fact he does—between the ages of 20 and 24. Then, by the time that the
father begins to experience increasing difficulty in getting well paid
employment—or perhaps employment at all—the elder children will at least
be of an age to earn for themselves. It should be remembered, too, that
workpeople as a class die younger than people who are better off, so
that a bricklayer, married at 20, and a barrister, married at 30, have
about even chances of seeing the manhood of their elder sons—another
reason why the former is wise to marry early, if at all. Early
marriages, then, whether improvident or no in the case of middle class
brides and bridegrooms, are not improvident in the case of working
people—unless indeed it be contended that it is improvident for working
people to marry at all—a contention fraught with rather alarming
possibilities to the future of the race.
To the question: “Why do they drink?” the answer is not quite so simple.
One may begin by remarking that there are a great many total abstainers
among wage earners; one may also remark that, if drinking were as
universal among wage earners as, let us say, the wearing of boots, even
the lowest rate of wages would stand at a figure allowing for the
purchase of drink. Economically, it is because the majority of wage
earners do not drink to excess that the excessive drinker finds himself
at a disadvantage. Of course, he is at a disadvantage also in various
other respects, but these do not enter into the economic argument. That
intemperate drinking may conduce to poverty is undeniable; but that
poverty also often conduces to intemperance is no less true. Of the two
kinds of drunkenness that exist among wage earners one is largely in the
nature of an escape from fatigue and from despair. Of the other—the
outbreak at intervals of the able, energetic and often comparatively
prosperous man, I do not pretend to have fathomed the mystery; but it
seems likely that the monotony of modern working life and the lack of
abundant personal interests may be among the contributory causes. It may
also be noted that to carouse at intervals was a deeply rooted habit
among our Northern ancestors, who admired a man potent in drinking as
they admired a man powerful in fight. It is at least conceivable that
the energetic, capable man who “breaks out” every month or two is a
survival of the old type; and it certainly seems to be the case that his
type does not occur among purely Latin races. Be this as it may,
experience shows convincingly that, on the whole, in this country, any
and every class of workers grows by degrees more sober as its hours of
work are shortened and its wages raised. Individuals of the class may
still drink heavily, but the average of sobriety steadily rises with
improved conditions. Moreover, in spite of the temptations presented by
poverty, a steady rise in the sobriety of this country is shown by the
excise returns. If poverty spreads and deepens—as I fear it does—the
cause cannot be found in an increase of drunkenness; for the consumption
of drink per head grows yearly less and less. Temperance is doubtless
advantageous in many ways to those who practise it; but, like
efficiency, it possesses a money value only while it fails to be
universal. If every man were temperate, no employer would make a point
of retaining his temperate “hands” when reducing his establishment.
To the question: “Why do not working people save?” truth requires the
paradoxical reply that they do save, and that they cannot afford to do
so. As a class, working people save a larger proportion of their income
than any other class of the community. The shares in Industrial
Co-operative Societies amounted in 1904 to £27,739,123; the Reserve and
Insurance funds of the same societies to £2,677,420. The great Friendly
and Provident Societies are supported almost wholly by working class
contributors; and, in addition to these, the majority of Trade Unions
are also provident Societies.[75]
Of the thirty families whose household expenditure has been tabulated in
Vol. I. of Mr Booth’s _Life and Labour_ (East London), only five spent
nothing upon insurance or club money; and in one household this item ran
up to 11½ per cent. of the whole expenditure. Considering that the
weekly income, as estimated, ranged from about 10s. 3½d. to about 33s.
7d. and that the households consisted seldom of less than four, and in
one case of eight persons, these contributions are by no means trifling.
Yet it is probable that not two families out of the thirty were able to
make anything like an adequate provision for old age. It hardly, indeed,
requires demonstration that a person earning just enough to support life
can only make an adequate provision for his old age by laying by 100 per
cent. of his income. Upon 10s. a week, or less, the saving of money
becomes something very near to a slow form of suicide. Moreover, at the
risk of horrifying every middle class reader, I must frankly declare
that, in my opinion, a worker does more wisely to abstain from all forms
of thrift beyond participation in his trade union and his co-operative
society. His union will help to keep up his wages; his co-operative
society will increase their purchasing power; the return upon both these
investments is immediate and certain: but anything more is apt to cost
too dear. It is now a good many years since an old Scotchman of great
intelligence and judgment, the secretary of his trade union, a member of
the municipal council, and justly respected by his fellow townsmen of
various ranks, gave me his opinion on this subject. He related to me
how, as a young man, he had accompanied a benevolent gentleman to a
lecture upon thrift, and how, as they afterwards walked away, the
gentleman waxed eloquent upon the duty of every man to lay by. But my
old friend, canny even at five-and-twenty or so, replied that he was a
married man with two children, that his earnings were two pounds a week,
that, if he spent less, either his children must go short of what was
necessary to make them strong, healthy and well trained, or he himself
must go short of what was necessary to maintain his efficiency; and
that, in his belief, the best form of thrift for a man in his position
was to maintain the highest standard of living which his small total
income would secure. In his case the plan had fully succeeded. He was, I
suppose, well over sixty, as hale, as active and as much interested in
the progress of the world as any man of thirty, and a most valuable
citizen. His children had both grown up healthy, capable and
industrious; both were skilled workers, regularly employed and in
receipt of good wages. But supposing—and his trade was one reputed
unhealthy—that the father had died, leaving a widow and young children
unprovided for? We may note that his risk of doing so was lessened by
his being better fed and better clothed than his more sparing neighbour.
Still, death is liable to seize even the best nourished and the most
fitly clothed; he might have died long before his children had completed
their excellent education or become capable of self support. Even in
that case, however, would these orphans, in whom a foundation had been
laid of good health and good teaching, have been really worse off than
if, with a poorer endowment of personal advantages, they had inherited
the money pittance—so sadly inadequate at best—that their father might
have scraped together in his few years of life? For how miserably small
is the provision that _can_, even with the utmost exercise of parsimony,
be made out of a family income of two pounds a week! In their inevitably
inadequate efforts to make such provision, workers too often deny
themselves the absolute essentials of healthy living. To abstain from
buying new shoes in order to save the price for one’s old age, and then
to die of pneumonia, induced by want of sound shoes, is but a doubtful
form of thrift, both for oneself and one’s nation. The interests of the
nation, especially, are certainly better served by the maintenance among
working class families of the highest attainable standard of life than
by the accumulation of very small individual provision for possible
orphans or possible old age. Even two pounds a week will not suffice
(except in remote country districts—where no man earns so much) to
provide really very good food, clothing and housing for four persons;
and the working class family does not often consist of no more than
four. The present cost of thrift, as thrift is generally understood, is
too heavy and the future return too light; and the wise man is not he
who saves his money, but he who spends it to the best advantage.
The supposed remedies hitherto touched upon have been measures demanding
the agency of the wage earner himself; but there is another scheme,
particularly attractive to the inexperienced reformer, in which the
consumer is to be the active person. When men and women who are not
themselves underpaid come face to face with the evil of underpayment, it
is natural enough for them to resolve that henceforth the articles
purchased by themselves shall be articles the makers of which have been
adequately paid. From this individual resolve it is but one step to an
association of persons all thus resolved, and banded together for the
purposes of investigation and exclusive dealing. Such an association is
a “Consumers’ League,” the aim of which is “to check unlimited
competition not at the point of manufacture but at the point of sale.”
Such associations, the first of which was formed, I believe, in
consequence of a suggestion made by myself, many years ago, in
_Longman’s Magazine_, are likely to reappear at a time like the present
when many consciences are disturbed by recognition of the fact that a
considerable proportion of British workers are scandalously underpaid.
It seems desirable, therefore, to point out how and why a Consumers’
League must inevitably fail in its aims.
The complexities of modern commerce are such that it is absolutely
impossible for any group of purchasers, however large and however
earnest, to attain that accurate knowledge of myriads of facts which
would be necessary; or, even, supposing such knowledge to have been once
obtained, to keep abreast of the unceasing changes. Let us take the
comparatively elementary problem of the large retail drapery shops. It
appears to be the general practice in such establishments for each
separate department to be under separate management, and for the head of
each department to have a free hand, subject to the one condition of
producing a certain percentage of profit. The ability to manage
successfully and develop a large branch of trade is not, as may well be
believed, very common, and one part of the payment that it demands is
freedom to do its work in its own way. Thus it is not uncommon for one
department of a large business to be conducted in a spirit of justice
and consideration, while another is marked by the total lack of such a
spirit. For instance, there was at one time, in a certain firm, a
manager of the mourning department who was among the best employers in
the London trade; but at the same time, the man in charge of the
workshop in which certain garments were made up or altered, was a
cutter-down of wages, rude and bullying in his behaviour to the workers
and entirely inconsiderate of their comfort. What reply, in a case like
this, can be given to a lady who asks: “Can I safely go to X’s shop?”
How, if she is furnished with the information just given, can she
discriminate, or how, even if she did, can she or her informant be sure
of the continuance of these conditions? Six months later, the one
manager may have taken a better post, and the other have been dismissed.
The new man at the workshop may be an enlightened organiser, who
introduces improved machinery and methods, knows the value of contented
and well fed workers, and raises wages; while the new man at the
mourning department may have been trained in the ways of “a driving
trade,” and may believe good management to consist in harrying his
employees, in nibbling at their wages and in “cribbing” their leisure.
If we multiply these facts by the number of shops or departments touched
by the weekly purchases of any well-to-do customer, we shall begin to
have some conception of the scale upon which a Consumers’ League would
have to conduct its investigations.
Moreover, all this is only on the uppermost plane. Few of these
retailers manufacture the goods sold. In regard to every single article
it becomes necessary to trace every step of production and transmission.
A pair of shoes cannot be satisfactorily guaranteed until we have
discovered the wages and conditions of employment not only of every
person who has worked upon the actual shoe, but also of the tanner, the
thread weaver and winder, the maker of eyelets, the spinner and weaver
of the shoe-lace and the various operatives engaged upon the little
metal tag at the shoe-lace’s end. Nor is the matter finished even then.
At every stage of its evolution, a shoe requires the services of clerks,
bookkeepers, office-boys, warehousemen, packers, boxmakers, carmen,
railway servants &c., and each new service introduces other material and
other service—paper, ink, ledgers, harness, stable fittings, cardboard,
string, glue, iron, coal—the series is endless. Yet compared with a
woman’s completed gown, or a man’s suit of clothes, how simple a product
is a pair of shoes. The fact is that even the most apparently simple of
commercial acts is but one link in a network that spreads over the whole
field of life and labour; and the fabric of that network is not woven
once and for ever, but is in continual process of change.
At the present stage, then, of our commercial development it appears
absolutely impossible for a Consumers’ League to fulfil its aims. If
labour were thoroughly organised in every branch, so that a strong trade
union existed in every trade, capable of giving information upon every
point, then indeed a Consumers’ League might become truly efficient, but
it would become proportionately superfluous.[76]
The cure of underpayment needs to be applied at the point of payment;
and the establishment of a legal minimum wage is the most direct method
of application.
But although a Consumers’ League can never hope to counteract the
results of unlimited competition, it may, as the National Consumers’
League of America shows, exert a valuable influence upon public opinion,
and may succeed in remedying certain industrial scandals. The Report of
that body for the year 1905–6 (up to March 6, 1906) is a most
interesting pamphlet, full of details that show how useful may be the
work, as industrial detectives and agitators, of a group of citizens,
banded together for the purpose of exposing and abolishing oppressive
and insanitary conditions of labour. In a country where public feeling
is not yet nearly ready for the enactment of a minimum wage, the
formation of a Consumers’ League may possibly be the best step forward.
An effectual remedy it cannot be; but it undoubtedly affords means of
education, both for its members and for the community at large. In our
own country, however, where the evils are already more or less generally
recognised, and where an increasing number of persons are already
beginning to hope for a minimum wage, the Consumers’ League marks a
stage that has been left behind.
We see, then, that emigration, though it may help the individual, can
but affect the trade of the country injuriously; that temperance, while
eminently desirable on other grounds, is only of any economic value
because it is still not universal; that effectual thrift is absolutely
impossible for the underpaid, and that the exercise of even an illusory
thrift can only be achieved by a sacrifice of things essential to good
health. We see, furthermore, that a Consumers’ League may be a valuable
social agency, but can never hope to be an economic remedy for
underpayment. Having looked up all these turnings and found all of them
blind alleys, we now proceed to examine a road along which younger
sisters of ours have travelled already, and at the end of which a ray of
hope seems to be shining. But before entering upon this examination we
will pause to consider the lesson of facts as presented in the history
of our own cotton trade.
CHAPTER III
THE LESSONS OF THE COTTON TRADE
The pessimist view—False assumption on which it rests—Cotton trade not
natural to Britain—Climate—Temperature—Fallacy of inherited
skill—Cotton workers as they were—Advancing legal
restrictions—Rise of wages—Amazing development and prosperity of
the British trade—Change in the mills—Change in the workers—Change
in the employers—The case of Bristol—The verdict of Mr Schoenhof.
Many people who would gladly see working people better paid, honestly
believe that a general rise in wages is not commercially possible. Any
attempt at giving a fair wage all round would, they declare, so diminish
trade as to throw out of work an additional number of persons whose
added competition would inevitably reduce the average wage to below its
original level: or who, if their competition were effectually barred by
the existence of a legal minimum wage, would be left without employment,
in a state more wretched than before. It may be remarked that this view
involves an admission that we live under commercial conditions which
render dishonesty not only the best, but actually the only possible,
policy. Such a belief would appear to furnish an unanswerable argument
in favour of the destruction of such commercial conditions, and it is
difficult to understand how any human being can hold it and not become a
convinced revolutionist. Yet, strange to say, it is from the mouth of
upholders of things as existing, that this doctrine is most frequently
heard. In some quarters, indeed, there would seem to be actual hostility
to the idea of bettering the workman’s lot, an inclination to grudge him
any greater share than he now possesses of the comforts and conveniences
of modern life. This attitude—to some extent, it must be supposed, a
feudal survival—indicates a very ugly spirit of class selfishness which
may possibly be dangerous, and is certainly ignorant. Dull, indeed, must
be the man or woman upon whom modern conditions of life do not impress
the closeness of human interdependence. Never, since the beginnings of
history, has the daily life of every man been so wonderfully interwoven
with that of all his fellows: never was there a time when the deeds of
each were so much a part of his neighbour’s pains or pleasures. Consider
for a single moment how changed would be one’s own life, if there were
no longer in Great Britain any person very poor, very dirty or very ill
mannered, if, in short, no one fell below the standard of that skilled
artisan class which is not only the most solidly virtuous, but also, in
essentials, the most truly courteous section of our society. Is there
one of us, however selfish, however callous, from whose daily existence
a burden would not be lifted?
Yes, the pessimist will say, the change would be delightful, but it is
not possible. That very interdependence of which you speak makes the
whole world but one market, and renders it impossible for any one
country to raise wages while other countries keep theirs low. This
alleged impossibility rests, it will be observed, upon the assumption
that higher wages conduce to higher selling prices, an assumption which
experience shows to be fallacious. And since it is always more
convincing, especially, perhaps, to the British mind, to narrate what
has happened than to declare what must happen, the purposes of my
argument will be best served by a brief account of the English cotton
trade.
Before entering upon this, let me point out how very remarkable a
phenomenon it is that there should exist an English cotton trade at all.
We cannot grow the required material: every ounce of raw cotton has to
be imported at a price, imported too from a great distance, and owing to
its bulky nature, at comparatively a high heavy cost. Originally the
possession of coal, iron and a seaboard gave advantages to England: the
factory system developed early with us, and we manufactured cotton, as
we manufactured other goods, because our energies were turned towards
manufacture in general. But the same influences which caused mechanical
production to begin here have caused it to arise elsewhere, and the
natural development of industry must, one would suppose, eventually
carry the manufacture of cotton to regions where cotton can be grown,
especially if they happen also to possess the means of motive power. The
Southern States of America, where cotton grows, where coal and water
power are plentiful, and where population is no longer sparse, would
seem to be marked out by nature as the home of the cotton industry. And
in fact mills are rapidly rising in that region. Not only so, but the
workers in them are employed for much longer hours and paid at a far
lower rate per hour than English cotton workers. Readers of the chapter
upon child labour, in Part I. of this volume, will be aware that
children are working, both by day and by night, in these mills, whereas
no child may work full time in any English mill, nor any child or woman
at night. Yet these Southern mills, with every advantage of position,
with cheap labour, and comparatively cheap land, have not succeeded, and
are not succeeding, in winning from the English their immense
preponderance in the markets of the world. This undeniable fact is
explained in some quarters as being due to our much abused English
climate, which is said to provide exactly the degree of temperature and
humidity most favourable to the manipulation of cotton yarn. That a very
dry atmosphere will not suit some processes of the trade seems to be
generally acknowledged, and if England were the only damp country in the
world, or even the dampest, we might perhaps regard ourselves as
possessing a sort of monopoly advantage. If, however, there be any one
state of the atmosphere more favourable than any other for the
manufacture of cotton, then it is quite impossible that our notoriously
variable climate can always present it. Moreover, it seems to be the
case that for some processes at least, a combination of dampness with
great heat is desirable: and this combination, natural to some
countries, is actually forbidden by the English law. Countries
possessing a climate at once hot and damp must, it would seem, have a
natural advantage over us, and here again, the Southern States are
favoured by nature.
Another explanation sometimes put forward is that the English workers,
among whom the manufacture was first established, possess a hereditary
skill of manipulation. The physiological possibility of such inheritance
seems to be questionable: and, considering the great changes undergone
by the machinery employed, the existence of it would be, at least, very
surprising. Moreover, this supposed hereditary dexterity would require
to have grown up in strangely few generations, since, in 1830 or so, the
cotton workers of England are described as being deplorably poor
workers, degenerate, physically and morally. Their condition, at that
time and for a good many years afterwards, was appalling. A more
horrible picture than that presented in Mr P. Gaskell’s “Manufacturing
Population of England,” published in 1833, can hardly be conceived.
These cotton operatives were, in short, as unpromising in physique, in
character and in industrial efficiency as any group of casual,
irregularly employed labourers that could be selected to-day from the
ranks of unorganised industry: as ill paid, as wretched and as much
oppressed as any sweated home worker in a slum garret.
By slow degrees, from that first Act which, in 1802, made some faint
attempt at shortening the hours of the unhappy parish apprentices, the
law has gone on, steadily diminishing hours of work. From 1854 onward,
the working week for women in textile trades became one of 60 hours.
Within a few years later, these hours were reduced to 56½; and now, the
legal week in the textile trades is one of 55½ hours. At all these
stages, the regulations, though nominally affecting only women, have, in
practice, decided the hours of men also. Thus, the British textile
worker is employed for fewer hours than any foreign competitor. Wages,
though not high for the individual, are, owing to the fact that nearly
all its members work in the trade, high for the family. Rates of pay
have steadily risen; the average nominal wage of 24s. 9d. for men in
1881—itself an immense advance upon the starvation rates of the
thirties—had risen, in 1902, to 27s. 3d. For later years I cannot cite
figures, but the amazing prosperity of the trade during the last year or
two can hardly have failed to affect wages favourably.[77]
Moreover, these rises have coincided with a fall in the price of food so
marked that the increase in average real wages, between 1881 and 1902,
is reckoned to be more than 36%.