certainly the very worst. For his short-lived communities there was at
least this excuse: that within their own area they were to be perfectly
homogeneous little Communist States. There were to be no conflicting
sections; and profit-making and competition were to be effectually
eliminated. But in “the Trades Union,” as he conceived it, the mere
combination of all the workmen in a trade as co-operative producers no
more abolished commercial competition than a combination of all the
employers in it as a Joint Stock Company. In effect his Grand Lodges
would have been simply the head offices of huge Joint Stock Companies
owning the entire means of production in their industry, and subject
to no control by the community as a whole. They would therefore have
been in a position at any moment to close their ranks and admit fresh
generations of workers only as employees at competitive wages instead
of as shareholders, thus creating at one stroke a new capitalist class
and a new proletariat. Further, the improvident shareholders would soon
have begun to sell their shares in order to spend their capital, and
thus to drop with their children into the new proletariat; whilst the
enterprising and capable shareholders would equally have sold their
shares to buy into other and momentarily more profitable trades. Thus
there would have been not only a capitalist class and proletariat, but
a speculative stock market. Finally there would have come a competitive
struggle between the Joint Stock Unions to supplant one another in
the various departments of industry. Thus the shipwrights, making
wooden ships, would have found the boilermakers competing for their
business by making iron ships, and would have had either to succumb
or to transform their wooden ship capital into iron ship capital and
enter into competition with the boilermakers as commercial rivals in
the same trade. This difficulty was staring Owen in the face when he
entered the Trade Union Movement; for the trades, then as now, were
in continual perplexity as to the exact boundaries between them; for
example, the minute-books of the newly formed Joiners’ Society in
Glasgow (whose secretary was a leading Owenite) show that its great
difficulty was the demarcation of its trade against the cabinetmaker
and the engineer-patternmaker, each of whom claimed certain technical
operations as proper to himself alone. In short, the Socialism of Owen
led him to propose a practical scheme which was not even socialistic,
and which, if it could possibly have been carried out, would have
simply arbitrarily redistributed the capital of the country without
altering or superseding the capitalist system in the least.
All this will be so obvious to those who comprehend our capitalist
system that they will have some difficulty in believing that it could
have escaped so clever a man and so experienced and successful a
capitalist as Owen. How far he made it a rule to deliberately shut
his eyes to the difficulties that met him, from a burning conviction
that any change was better than leaving matters entirely alone, cannot
even be guessed; but it is quite certain that he acted in perfect
good faith, simply not knowing thoroughly what he was about. He had
a boundless belief in the power of education to form character; and
if any scheme promised just sufficient respite from poverty and
degradation to enable him and his disciples to educate one generation
of the country’s children, he was ready to leave all economic
consequences to be dealt with by “the New Moral World” which that
generation’s Owenite schooling would have created. Doubtless he thought
that “the Trades Union” promised him this much; and besides, he did not
foresee its economic consequences. He was disabled by that confident
sciolism and prejudice which has led generations of Socialists to
borrow from Adam Smith and the “classic” economists the erroneous
theory that labour is by itself the creator of value, without going
on to master that impregnable and more difficult law of economic rent
which is the very corner-stone of collectivist economy. He took his
economics from his friend William Thompson,[286] who, like Hodgskin and
Hodgskin’s illustrious disciple, Karl Marx, ignored the law of rent in
his calculations, and taught that all exchange values could be measured
in terms of “labour time” alone. Part of the Owenite activity of the
time actually resulted in the opening of labour bazaars, in which
the prices were fixed in minutes. The fact that it is the consumer’s
demand which gives to the product of labour any exchange-value at
all, and that the extent and elasticity of this demand determines
how much has to be produced; and the other governing consideration,
namely, that the expenditure of labour required to bring articles of
the same desirability to market varies enormously according to natural
differences in fertility of soil, distance to be traversed, proximity
to good highways, waterways, or ports, accessibility of water-power or
steam fuel, and a hundred other circumstances, including the organising
ability and executive dexterity of the producer, found themselves left
entirely out of account. Owen assumed that the labour of the miner
and that of the agricultural labourer, whatever the amount and nature
of the product of each of them, would spontaneously and continuously
exchange with each other equitably at par of hours and minutes when the
miners had received a monopoly of the bowels of the country, and the
agricultural labourers of its skin. He did not even foresee that the
Miners’ Union might be inclined to close its ranks against newcomers
from the farm labourers, or that the Agricultural Union might refuse
to cede sites for the Builders’ Union to work upon. In short, the
difficult economic problem of the equitable sharing of the advantages
of superior sites and opportunities never so much as occurred to the
enthusiastic Owenite economists of this period.
One question, and that the most immediately important of all, was
never seriously faced: How was the transfer of the industries from the
capitalists to the Unions to be effected in the teeth of a hostile and
well-armed Government? The answer must have been that the overwhelming
numbers of “the Trades Union” would render conflict impossible. His
enthusiastic disciple, William Benbow, successively a shoemaker,
bookseller, and coffee-house keeper, invented the instrument of the
General Strike--a sacred “holiday month” prepared for and participated
in by the entire wage-earning class, the mere “passive resistance” of
which would, without violence or conflict, bring down all existing
institutions. Whether this was in Owen’s mind in 1834, as it was, in
1839, avowedly in those of the Chartists, is uncertain.[287] At all
events, Owen, like the early Christians, habitually spoke as if the Day
of Judgment of the existing order of society was at hand. The next six
months, in his view, were always going to see the “New Moral World”
really established. The change from the capitalist system to a complete
organisation of industry under voluntary associations of producers was
to “come suddenly upon society like a thief in the night.” “One year,”
comments his disciple, “may disorganise the whole fabric of the old
world, and transfer, by a sudden spring, the whole political government
of the country from the master to the servant.”[288] It is impossible
not to regret that the first introduction of the English Trade Unionist
to Socialism should have been effected by a foredoomed scheme which
violated every economic principle of Collectivism, and left the
indispensable political preliminaries to pure chance.
It was under the influence of these large plans and confident hopes
that the Trade Unions were emboldened to adopt the haughty attitude and
contemptuous language towards the masters which provoked Manchester and
Liverpool employers to meet the challenge of the Builders’ Union by
“the Document.” The “intolerable tyranny” of the Unions, so much harped
on by contemporary writers, represents, to a large extent, nothing more
than the rather bumptious expression of the Trade Unionists’ feeling
that they were the rightful directors of industry, entitled to choose
the processes, and select their fellow-workers, and even their managers
and foremen. And it must be remembered that this occurred at a period
when class prejudice was so strong that any attempt at a parley made
by the workers, however respectfully, was regarded as presumptuous
and unbecoming. Hence the working class had always too much reason to
believe that civility on their part would be thrown away. It is certain
that during the Owenite intoxication the impracticable expectations
of national dominion on the part of the wage-earners were met with an
equally unreasonable determination by the governing classes to keep
the working men in a state not merely of subjection, but of abject
submission. The continued exclusion of the workmen from the franchise
made constitutional action on their side impossible. The employers,
on the other hand, used their political and magisterial power against
the men without scruple, inciting a willing Government to attack the
workmen’s combinations by every possible perversion of the law, and
partiality in its administration. Regarding absolute control over
the conduct of their workpeople as a _sine qua non_ of industrial
organisation, even the genuine philanthropists among them insisted
on despotic authority in the factory or workshop. Against the abuse
of this authority there was practically no guarantee. On the other
side it can be shown that large sections of the wage-earners were not
only moderate in their demands, but submissive in their behaviour. As
a rule, wherever we find exceptional aggression and violence on the
part of the operatives, we discover exceptional tyranny on the side
of the employers. To give an example or two, the continual outrages
which disgrace the annals of Glasgow Trade Unionism for the first
forty years of this century are accounted for by the reports of the
various Parliamentary Inquiries which mark out the Glasgow millowners
as extraordinarily autocratic in their views and tyrannous in their
conduct. Again, the aggressive conduct of certain sections of the
building trades is frequently complained of in the capitalist press
between 1830-40. But the agreements which the large contractors of
that time required “all those to sign who enter into their employ,”
printed copies of which are still extant, show that the demands of
the employers were intolerably arbitrary.[289] Then there is the
case of the miners of Great Britain, who were in very ill repute for
riotous proceedings from 1837-44. The provocation they received may
be judged from a manifesto issued by Lord Londonderry in his dual
capacity as mine-owner and Lord-Lieutenant of Durham County during
the great strike of the miners in 1844 for fairer terms of hiring.
He not only superintends, as Lord-Lieutenant, the wholesale eviction
of the strikers from their homes, and their supersession by Irishmen
specially imported from his Irish estates, but he peremptorily orders
the resident traders in “his town of Seaham,” on pain of forfeiting his
custom and protection, to refuse to supply provisions to the workmen
engaged in what he deems “an unjust and senseless warfare _against
their proprietors and masters_.”[290] The same intolerance marks
the magazines and journals of the dominant classes of the period. It
seems to have been habitually taken for granted that the workman had
not merely to fulfil his contract of service, but to yield implicit
obedience in the details of his working life to the will of his
master. Combinations and strikes on the part of the “lower orders”
were regarded as futile and disorderly attempts to escape from their
natural position of social subservience. In short, the majority of
employers, even in this time of negro emancipation, seem to have been
unconsciously acting upon the dictum subsequently attributed to J. C.
Calhoun, the defender of American slavery, that “the true solution of
the contest of all time between labour and capital is that capital
should own the labourer whether white or black.”
The closing scene of Owen’s first and last attempt at “the Trades
Union” shows how ephemeral had been his participation in the real life
of the Trade Union Movement. In August 1834 he called together one of
his usual miscellaneous congresses, consisting of delegates from all
kinds of Owenite societies, with a few from the Grand National and
other Trade Unions. At this congress the “Grand National Consolidated
Trades Union,” which was to have brought to its feet Government,
landlords, and employers, was formally converted into the “British and
Foreign Consolidated Association of Industry, Humanity, and Knowledge,”
having for its aim the establishment of a “New Moral World” by the
reconciliation of all classes. Beyond one or two small and futile
experiments in co-operative production, it had attempted nothing to
realise Owen’s Utopia. Its whole powers had been spent, seemingly
with his own consent, in a series of aggressive strikes. For all
that, Owen’s meteoric appearance in the Trade Union World left a deep
impression on the movement. The minute-books and other contemporary
records of the Trade Unions of the next decade abound in Owenite
phraseology, such as the classification of Society into the “idle” and
the “industrious” classes, the latter apparently meaning--and being
certainly understood to mean--only the manual workers. More important
is the persistence of the idea that the Trade Unions, as Associations
of Producers, should recover control of the instruments of production.
From this time forth innumerable attempts were made, by one Trade Union
or another, to employ its own members in Productive Co-operation. A
long series of industrial disasters, culminating in the great losses of
1874, has, even now, scarcely eradicated the last remnant of this Joint
Stock Individualism from the idealists of the Trade Union Movement; or
taught them to distinguish accurately between it and the demonstrably
successful Co-operative Production of the Associations of Consumers
which constitute the Co-operative Movement of to-day. Outside the
organised ranks his effect upon general working-class opinion was,
as Place remarks, enormous, as we could abundantly show were we here
concerned with the “Union Shops,” “Equitable Labour Exchanges,” and
industrial communities which may be considered the most direct result
of the Owenite propaganda, or with the fortunes of the innumerable
co-operative associations of producers, whose delegates formed the
backbone of the Owenite congresses of these years.[291]
The Trade Union Movement was not absolutely left for dead when
Owen quitted the field. The skilled mechanics of the printing and
engineering trades had, as we shall presently see, held aloof from
the general movement, and their trade clubs were unaffected either by
the Owenite boom or its subsequent collapse. In some other trades the
inflation of 1830-4 spread itself over a few more years. The Potters’
Union went on increasing in strength, and in 1835 gained a notable
victory over the employers, when a “Green Book of Prices” was agreed
to, which long remained famous in the trade. Renewed demands led to
the formation by the employers of a Chamber of Commerce to resist the
men’s aggression. The “yearly bond” was rigidly insisted upon, and a
great strike ensued, which ended in 1837 in the complete collapse of
the Union.[292] In 1836 the Scottish compositors formed the General
Typographical Association of Scotland, which for a few years exercised
an effective control over the trade. The same year saw a notable
strike by the Preston Cotton-spinners, from which is dated the general
adoption of the self-acting mule.[293] But the most permanent effect
is seen in the building trades. The national Unions of Plumbers and
Carpenters have preserved an unbroken existence down to the present
day,[294] whilst the Friendly Society of Operative Stonemasons
remained for nearly another half century one of the most powerful of
English Unions. The fortnightly circulars of the English Stonemasons
reveal, for a few years, not only a vigorous life and quick growth,
but also many successful short strikes to secure Working Rules and to
maintain Time Wages. The Scottish Stonemasons are referred to as being
even more active and influential in trade regulation, and as having
included practically all the Scottish masons. There is evidence, too,
of informal federal action between the National Unions of Stonemasons,
Carpenters, and Bricklayers. Unfortunately the absence of such modern
machinery of organisation as Trades Councils, Trade Union Congresses,
and standing joint committees prevented the scattered sectional
organisations from forming any general movement. This state of things
was broken into during the year 1837 by the sensational strikes in
Glasgow, the prolonged legal prosecution and severe punishment of their
leaders, and the appointment of a Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry
into the results of the repeal of the Combination Laws.
We do not propose to enter here into the details of the famous
trial of the five Glasgow cotton-spinners for conspiracy, violent
intimidation, and for the murder of fellow-workers. But it is one of
the “leading cases” of Trade Union history, and the manifestations
of feeling which it provoked show to the depths the state of mind of
the working classes.[295] The evidence given in court, and repeated
before the Select Committee of 1838, leaves no reasonable doubt that
the Cotton-Spinners’ Union in its corporate capacity had initiated
a reign of terror extending over twenty years, and that some of the
incriminated members had been personally guilty not of instigation
alone, but of actual violence, if not of murder. In spite of this,
the whole body of working-class opinion was on their side, and the
sentence of seven years’ transportation was received with as much
indignation as that upon the Dorchester labourers four years before.
This was one of the natural effects of the class despotism and scarcely
veiled rebellion which we have already described. The use of violence
by working men, either against obnoxious employers or against traitors
in their own ranks, was regarded in much the same way as the political
offences of a subject race under foreign dominion. Such deeds did
not, in fact, necessarily indicate any moral turpitude on the part of
the perpetrators. No one accused the five Glasgow cotton-spinners of
bad private character or conduct, and at least four out of the five
were men of acknowledged integrity and devotedness.[296] Their unjust
treatment whilst awaiting trial, and still more their sentence to
transportation, enlisted the sympathy of the Parliamentary Radicals,
and Wakley, the member for Finsbury, did not hesitate to bring their
case before the House of Commons as one of legal persecution and
injustice.
At this time the trade societies of Dublin and Cork had caused serious
complaint by attempting to establish, and not without violence, an
effective monopoly in certain skilled industries. Their action had been
reproved by Daniel O’Connell, whom they, in their turn, had repudiated
and denounced. O’Connell defeated Wakley’s friendly motion for an
inquiry into the cotton-spinners’ case by a serious indictment of Trade
Unionism. By a clever analysis of the rules of the Irish societies,
which he made out to be purely obstructive and selfish, he condemned,
in a speech of great power, all attempts on the part of trade
combinations to regulate the conditions of labour. The well-established
methods of modern Trade Unionism, such as the maintenance of a minimum
rate, received from him the same condemnation as the unsocial and
oppressive monopolies for which the Irish trades had long been
notorious. The Government met this speech by granting a Select
Committee under Sir Henry Parnell to inquire into the whole question;
and Trade Unionism accordingly found itself once more on its defence
as a permanent element in social organisation. The case of the Glasgow
cotton-spinners and the appointment of this Parliamentary Committee
for the moment revived the sentiment of solidarity in the Trade Union
world. A joint committee of the Glasgow trades was formed to collect
subscriptions for the defence of the prisoners; and communications for
this purpose were made to all the known Trade Unions. Considerable
funds were subscribed, as the trial was repeatedly postponed at great
expense to the prisoners; and when at last, in January, 1838, they were
convicted and sentenced, a combined agitation for some mitigation of
their punishment was begun. By this time it had become known that some
kind of inquiry into Trade Unionism was in contemplation. The Unions
at once set their house in order. The Stonemasons, who had already
given up the administration of oaths, resolved, for greater security
against illegal practices, “that all forms of regalia, initiation, and
passwords be dispensed with and entirely abolished.”[297] The Dublin
Plasterers formally suspended their exclusive rules, and deferred
the issue of a new edition until after the inquiry.[298] In Glasgow,
the chief seat of the disorder, many societies--among others, the
local Carpenters--deliberately burned their minute-books and archives
for the past year. The London societies appointed a committee, “The
London Trades Combination Committee,” to conduct the Unionist case
in the Parliamentary inquiry. Lovett, then well known as a Radical
politician, became secretary, and issued a stirring address to the
Trade Unions throughout the country, asking for subscriptions and
evidence.[299] But the Parliamentary Committee proved both perfunctory
and inconclusive. The Government, which had conceded it merely to rid
itself of the importunity of Wakley on the one hand and O’Connell on
the other, had evidently no intention of taking any action on the
subject; and the Committee, always thinly attended, made no attempt
at a general inquiry, and confined itself practically to Dublin and
Glasgow. O’Connell got the opportunity he desired of demonstrating,
through selected witnesses, the violent and exclusive spirit which
animated the Irish Unions. With regard to Glasgow, the chief witness
was Sheriff, afterwards Sir Archibald, Alison, whose vigorous action
had quelled the cotton-spinners in that city. It was scarcely necessary
to call witnesses on behalf of the Unions; but John Doherty, then
become a master-printer and bookseller, was allowed to describe the
Manchester spinners’ organisation and the ill-fated associations of
1829-31. The inquiry resulted in nothing but the presentation to the
House of two volumes of evidence, without even so much as a report. It
seems to have been expected that the Committee would be reappointed
to complete its task; but when the next session came the matter was
quietly dropped.[300]
The temporary fillip given by the cotton-spinners’ trial and the
Parliamentary Committee did not stop the steady decline of Trade
Unionism throughout the country. Trade, which had been on the wane
since 1836, grew suddenly worse. The decade closed with three of the
leanest years ever known; and widespread distress prevailed. The
membership of the surviving Trade Unions rapidly decreased. The English
Stonemasons, perhaps the strongest of the contemporary societies,
reduced themselves, in 1841, temporarily, to absolute bankruptcy by
their disastrous strike against an obnoxious foreman on the rebuilding
of the Houses of Parliament. The Scottish Stonemasons’ Society, of
equal or greater strength, collapsed at about the same time, from
causes not known to us. The Glasgow trades had been completely
disorganised by the disasters of 1837. The Lancashire textile
operatives showed no sign of life; whilst such growing societies as
the Ironfounders, the Journeymen Steam-Engine Makers and Millwrights,
and the Boilermakers were crippled by the heavy drafts made upon their
funds by unemployed members. The state of mind of the working classes
was no more propitious than the state of trade. Fierce discontent
and sullen anger are the characteristics of this period. Hatred of
the New Poor Law, of the iniquitous taxes on food, of the general
oppression by the dominant classes, blazes out in the Trade Union
records of the time. The agitation for the “Six Points,” set on foot
by Lovett and others in the Working Men’s Association of 1836, became
the centre of working-class aspiration. The _Northern Star_, started
at the end of 1837, rapidly distanced all other provincial journals in
circulation. The lecturers of the Anti-Corn Law League increased the
popular discontent, even when their own particular panacea failed to
find acceptance. A general despair of constitutional reform led to the
growing supremacy of the “Physical Force” section of the Chartists, and
to the insurrectionism of 1839-42.
The political developments of these years are outside the scope of
this work. The Chartist Movement plays the most important part in
working-class annals from 1837 to 1842, and does not quit the stage
until 1848. Made respectable by sincerity, devotion, and even heroism
in the rank and file, it was disgraced by the fustian of many of its
orators and the political and economic quackery of its pretentious and
incompetent leaders whose jealousies and intrigues, by successively
excluding all the nobler elements, finally brought it to nought.
An adequate history of it would be of extreme value to our young
Democracy.[301] Here it is only necessary to say that whilst the
Chartist Movement commanded the support of the vast majority of the
manual-working wage-earners, outside the ranks of those who were
deeply religious, there is no reason to believe that the Trade Unions
at any time became part and parcel of the Movement, as they had,
during 1833-4, of the Owenite agitation, though some of their members
furnished the most ardent supporters of the Charter. Individual trades,
such as the shoemakers, seem to have been thoroughly permeated with
Chartism, and were always attempting to rally other trade societies to
the cause. The angry strikes of 1842 in Lancashire and the Midlands,
fostered, as some said, by the Anti-Corn Law League, were “captured”
by the Chartists, and almost converted into political rebellions. The
delegate meeting of the Lancashire and Yorkshire trade clubs, which
was conducting the “general strike” then in progress “for the wages
of 1840,” resolved in August 1842 to recommend all wage-earners “to
cease work until the Charter becomes the law of the land.”[302] For a
few weeks, indeed, it looked as if the Trade Union Movement, such as
it was, would become merged in the political current. But the manifest
absurdity of persuading starving men to remain on strike until the
whole political machinery of the country had been altered, must have
quickly become apparent to the shrewder Trade Unionists. When Chartist
meetings at Sheffield were calling for a “general strike” to obtain the
Charter, the secretaries of seven local Unions wrote to the newspapers
explaining that their trades had nothing to do with the meetings
or the resolutions.[303] It must be remembered in this connection
that the number of Trade Unionists was, in these years, relatively
small--probably not so great as a hundred thousand in the whole
kingdom--so that they could not have formed any appreciable proportion
of the two, three or four million adherents that the Chartist leaders
were in the habit of claiming. And it may be doubted whether in
any case a Trade Union itself, as distinguished from particular
members who happened to be delegates, made any formal profession of
adherence to Chartism. In the contemporary Trade Union records that
are still extant, such as those of the Bookbinders, Compositors,
Ironfounders, Cotton-spinners, Steam-engine makers, and Stonemasons,
there are no traces of Chartist resolutions; although denunciations
of the “Notorious New Poor Law oppression” abound in the _Fortnightly
Circular_ of the Stonemasons;[304] whilst the Ironfounders,
Compositors, and Cotton-spinners pass resolutions in favour of Free
Trade. A partial explanation of this reticence on the more exciting
topic of the Charter is doubtless to be found in the frequently adopted
rule excluding politics and religion from Trade Union discussions--a
rule which was, in 1842, protested against by an enthusiastic Chartist
delegate from the Bookbinders at the Manchester Conference.[305] There
must, however, have been something more than mere obedience to the rule
in the unwillingness of the trade societies to be mixed up with the
Chartist agitation. The rule had not prevented the organised trades of
1831-2 from taking a prominent part in the Reform Bill Movement. The
banners of the Edinburgh trade clubs were conspicuous in the public
demonstration on the rejection of the Bill of 1831. When the House
of Lords gave way, the Birmingham Trade Unions themselves organised
a triumphal procession, which was discountenanced by the middle
class.[306] The records of the London Brushmakers show that they
even subscribed from the Union funds to Reform associations. But we
never find the trade societies of 1839-42 contributing to Chartist
funds, or even collecting money for Chartist victims. The cases of
Frost, Williams, and Jones, the Newport rebels of 1839, were least
as deserving of the working-class sympathy as those of the Glasgow
cotton-spinners. But the Trade Unions showed no inclination to
subscribe money or get up petitions in aid of them. “Never,” writes
Fergus O’Connor, in 1846, “was there more criminal apathy than that
manifested by the trades of Great Britain to the sufferings of those
men;” and he adds, “that if one half that was done for the Dorchester
labourers or the Glasgow cotton-spinners had been done for Frost,
Williams, and Jones, they would long since have been restored.”[307]
Insurrectionism, whether Owenite or Chartist, was, in fact, losing its
attraction for the working-class mind. Robert Owen’s economic axioms of
the extinction of profit and the elimination of the profit-maker were,
during these very years, passing into the new Co-operative Movement,
inaugurated in 1844 by the Rochdale Pioneers. The believers in a
“new system of society,” to be brought about by universal agreement,
were henceforth to be found in the ranks of the commercial-minded
Co-operators rather than in those of the militant Trade Unionists.
Chartism, meanwhile, had degenerated from Lovett’s high ideal of a
complete political democracy to an ignoble scramble for the ownership
of small plots of land. The example of the French Revolution of 1848
fanned the dying embers for a few weeks into a new flame; and many of
the London trades swung into the somewhat theatrical fête of April 10,
1848, swelling the procession against which the Duke of Wellington
had marshalled the London middle class. But the danger of revolution
had passed away. A new generation of workmen was growing up, to whom
the worst of the old oppression was unknown, and who had imbibed the
economic and political philosophy of the middle-class reformers.
Bentham, Ricardo, and Grote were read only by a few; but the activity
of such popular educationalists as Lord Brougham and Charles Knight
propagated “useful knowledge” to all the members of the Mechanics’
Institutes and the readers of the _Penny Magazine_. The middle-class
ideas of “free enterprise” and “unrestricted competition” which
were thus diffused received a great impetus from the extraordinary
propaganda of the Anti-Corn Law League, and the general progress of
Free Trade. Fergus O’Connor and Bronterre O’Brien struggled in vain
against the growing dominance of Cobden and Bright as leaders of
working-class opinion. And so we find in the Trade Union records of
1847-8, that vigorous resistance begins to be made to any movement in
support of the old ideals. The Steam-Engine Makers’ Society suspended
some of their branches for depositing the branch funds in Fergus
O’Connor’s Land Bank. When two branches of the Stonemasons’ Society
propose the same investment, the others indignantly protest against
it as an absurd political speculation. And it is significant that
these protests came, not from the cautious elders whose enthusiasm had
outlived many failures, but from those who had never shared the old
faith. When in 1848 the Yorkshire Woolstaplers proposed to take a farm
upon which to set to work their unemployed men, it was the younger
members, as we are expressly told, who strenuously but vainly resisted
this action, which resulted ruinously for the society.
All this makes the close of the “revolutionary” period of the Trade
Union Movement. For the next quarter of a century we shall watch the
development of the new ideas and the gradual building up of the great
“amalgamated” societies of skilled artisans, with their centralised
administration, friendly society benefits, and the substitution,
wherever possible, of Industrial Diplomacy for the ruder methods of the
Class War.
FOOTNOTES:
[207] In a manuscript essay on the different forms of association,
entitled “Trades Unions condemned, Trade Clubs justified,” Place gives
us the distinction between the two. “A trade society,” he says, “that
is, a club consisting of the journeymen in any one trade which does
not form part of a union of several trades, which does not appoint
delegates to meet other delegates, is a very different thing from a
Trades Union, even though it may call itself a union. Trades Unions
are those in which several trades, or portions of several trades, in
the same line of business or in different callings, are confederated
by means of delegates.” Place often refers to this distinction between
the Trade Clubs, which were, according to his view, “very valuable
institutions,” and the “Trades Unions,” or “associations of several or
many trades in one combination,” which he regarded as “very mischievous
associations.” William Lovett, too, watching the same transformation,
makes, in a letter published in the _Poor Man’s Guardian_ of August 30,
1834, exactly the same distinction.
[208] See the reports to the Home Secretary (Home Office Papers,
42--179, 180, 181, 182); _The Town Labourer_ (by J. L. and B. Hammond,
1917), pp. 306-11.
[209] See the “Articles of the Philanthropic Hercules, for the Mutual
Support of the Labouring Mechanics,” dated December 24, 1818, which
Gast contributed to the _Gorgon_. Gast’s preliminary address appears in
the issue for December 5, 1818, and in that of January 29, 1819, the
society is described as established (Place MSS. 27899--143).
[210] _The Herald of the Rights of Industry_ (Manchester, April 5,
1834).
[211] _Labour Rewarded: The Claims of Labour and Capital: How to secure
to Labour the Whole Product of its Exertions_, by One of the Idle
Classes [William Thompson], 1827; see _The Irish Labour Movement_, by
W. P. Ryan, 1919.
[212] _A Report of the Proceedings of the Meeting of Cotton-spinners
at Ramsay_, etc. (Manchester, 1829, 56 pages); _Copy of Resolutions of
the Delegates from the Operative Cotton-spinners who met at the Isle of
Man_ (Manchester, 1830), in Home Office Papers, 40--27.
[213] John Doherty, described by Place as a somewhat hot-headed Roman
Catholic--really one of the acutest thinkers and stoutest leaders
among the workmen of his time--was born in Ireland in 1799, and went
to work in a cotton-mill at Larne, Co. Antrim, at the age of ten. In
1816 he migrated to Manchester, where he quickly became one of the
leading Trade Unionists, and secretary to the local Cotton-spinners’
Society. We find him, for instance, taking a prominent part in the
agitation against the proposed re-enactment of the Combination Laws
in 1825. Whether he was concerned in the Philanthropic Society or
General Union of 1818 or 1826 we do not know. In 1829 he organised the
great strike of the Hyde spinners against a reduction of rates, and
became, as described in the text, successively General Secretary to
the Federation of Spinners’ Societies, and to the National Association
for the Protection of Labour, in which office he is reported, probably
inaccurately, to have received the then enormous salary of £600 a year.
We naturally find him the object of great suspicion by the Government,
but no charge seems ever to have been brought against him (Home Office
Papers, 40--26, 27). The articles in the _Voice of the People_ and
the _Poor Man’s Advocate_, which are evidently from his pen, show him
to have been a man of wide information, great natural shrewdness,
and far-reaching aims. His idea was that all the local and district
Unions were to be federated in a national organisation for the sole
purpose of dealing with trade matters, and that they should also be
federated in a National Association for obtaining political reforms.
In 1832, during the Reform crisis, Place describes him as advising
the working classes to use the occasion for a social revolution. He
subsequently acted as secretary to an association of operatives and
masters established to enforce the Factory Acts, and was one of Lord
Shaftesbury’s most strenuous supporters. In 1838, when he had become
a printer and bookseller in Manchester, he gave evidence before the
Select Committee on Combinations of Workmen, in which he described the
spinners’ organisations and strikes. There is a pamphlet by him in the
Goldsmiths’ Library at the University of London, entitled _A Letter to
the Members of the National Association for the Protection of Labour_
(Manchester, 1831).
[214] Home Office Papers, 40--27.
[215] _Ibid._, December 3, 1830, 40--26.
[216] Foster died in 1831, and McGowan settled at Glasgow. “Almost
every spinning district,” writes the _Poor Man’s Advocate_ of June
23, 1832, “of any consequence, was enrolled in the Union. The power
of the Union, of course, increased with its members, and a number of
the worst-paying employers were compelled to advance the wages of the
spinners to something like the standard rate.... The Union, however,
which Mr. McGowan had mainly contributed to mature, has since, from
distrust or weariness, sunk into comparative insignificance.”
[217] The letter is preserved in the MS. “Contribution Book” of the
Liverpool Sailmakers’ Friendly Association, established 1817.
[218] _Address of the National Association for the Protection of Labour
to the Workmen of the United Kingdom_ (4 pp. 1830), in Home Office
Papers, 40--27.
[219] Given as Appendix to the pamphlet _On Combination of Trades_
(1830). Compare Wade’s _History of the Middle and Working Classes_
(1834), p. 277.
[220] Thirty-one numbers, extending from March 6 to October 2, 1830,
are in the Manchester Public Library (620 B).
[221] The numbers from January to September 1831 are in the British
Museum. See Place’s letter in _Westminster Review_ (1831), p. 243.
[222] Home Office Papers, 40--26, 27.
[223] Home Office Papers, April 8, 1831, 44--25.
[224] _Union Pilot and Co-operative Intelligencer_, March 24, 1832
(Manchester Public Library, 640 E).
[225] Meanwhile the coalminers of Northumberland and Durham, under the
leadership of “Tommy Hepburn,” an organiser of remarkable ability, had
formed their first strong Union in 1830, which for two years kept the
two counties in a state of excitement. Strikes and riotings in 1831
and 1832 caused the troops to be called out: marines were sent from
Portsmouth, and squadrons of cavalry scoured the country. After six
months’ struggle in 1832 the Union collapsed, and the men submitted.
See Home Office Papers for these years, 40--31, 32, &c.; Sykes’ _Local
Records of Northumberland_, &c., vol. ii. pp. 293, 353; Fynes’ _Miners
of Northumberland and Durham_ (Blyth, 1873), chaps, iv. v. vi.; _An
Earnest Address and Urgent Appeal to the People of England in behalf of
the Oppressed and Suffering Pitmen of the Counties of Northumberland
and Durham_ (by W. Scott, Newcastle, 1831); _History and Description of
Fossil Fuel_, etc. (by John Holland, 1835), pp. 298-304.
[226] It is not clear whether this scheme was initiated by carpenters
or masons. The carpenters and joiners are distinguished among the
building trades for the antiquity of their local trade clubs, which
are known to have existed in London as far back as 1799. A national
organisation was established in London in July 1827, called the
Friendly Society of Operative Carpenters and Joiners, which still
survives under the title of the “General Union.” MS. records in
the office of the latter show that this federation had 938 members
in 1832, rising to 3691 in 1833, and to 6774 in 1834, a total not
paralleled until 1865. This rapid increase marks the general upheaval
of these years. But this Society did not throw in its lot with the
Builders’ Union until 1833. On the other hand, the existing Operative
Stonemasons’ Friendly Society, which dates its separate existence from
1834, but which certainly existed in some form from 1832, has among
its archives what appear to be the original MS. rules and initiation
rites of its predecessor, the Builders’ Union; and in these documents
the masons figure as the foremost members. Moreover, these rules and
rites closely resemble those of contemporary unions among the Yorkshire
woollen-workers; and an independent tradition fixes the parent lodge
of the Masons’ Society at the great woollen centre of Huddersfield,
whereas the Friendly Society of Carpenters and Joiners, founded in
London, had its headquarters at Leicester. But however this may be,
the constitution and ceremonies described in these documents owe their
significance to the fact that they are nearly identical with those
adopted by many of the national Unions of the period, and were largely
adopted by the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of 1834.
[227] A similar ritual is printed in _Character, Objects, and
Effects of Trades Unions_ (1834), as used by the Woolcombers’ Union.
Probably the Builders’ Union copied their ritual from some union of
woollen-workers. The Stonemasons’ MS. contains, like the copy printed
in this pamphlet, a solemn reference to “King Edward the Third,” who
was regarded as the great benefactor of the English wool trade, but
whose connection with the building trade is not obvious. In a later
printed edition of _The Initiating Parts of the Friendly Society of
Operative Masons_, dated Birmingham, 1834, his name is omitted, and
that of Solomon substituted, apparently in memory of the Freemasons’
assumed origin at the building of the Temple at Jerusalem.
The actual origin of this initiation ceremony is not certainly known
John Tester, who had been a leader of the Bradford Woolcombers in 1825,
afterwards turned against the Unions, and published, in the _Leeds
Mercury_ of June and July 1834, a series of letters denouncing the
Leeds Clothiers’ Union. In these he states that “the mode of initiation
was the same as practised for years before by the flannel-weavers
of Rochdale, with a party of whom the thing, in the shape it then
wore, had at first originated.... A great part of the ceremony, ...
particularly the death scene, was taken from the ceremonial of one
division of the Oddfellows, ... who were flannel-weavers at Rochdale,
in Lancashire; and all that could be well turned from the rules and
lectures of one society into the regulations of the others was so
turned, with some trifling verbal alterations.” In another letter he
says that the writer of the “lecture book” was one Mark Warde. Tester
is not implicitly to be believed, but it seems probable that the
regalia, doggerel rhymes, and mystic rites of the unions of this time
were copied from those of an Oddfellows’ Lodge, with some recollections
of Freemasonry. In his _Mutual Thrift_ (1891), the Rev. J. Frome
Wilkinson describes (p. 14) the initiation ceremony of the “Patriotic
Oddfellows,” a society which merged in the present “Grand United
Order of Oddfellows” before the close of the century. The ceremony so
described corresponds in many characteristic details with that of the
Trades Unions. All the older friendly society “Orders” imposed an oath,
and were consequently unlawful.
[228] Home Office Papers, December 29, 1832, 40--31.
[229] At Birmingham, when the builders’ strike presently extended to
that town, the following was the manifesto drawn up for adoption by the
Builders’ Union, for presentation to the leading building contractor
who had just undertaken to erect the new grammar-school. (No record of
its adoption and presentation has been found.) “We, the delegates of
the several Lodges of the Building Trades, elected for the purpose of
correcting the abuses which have crept into the modes of undertaking
and transacting business, do hereby give you notice that you will
receive no assistance from the working-men in any of our bodies to
enable you to fulfil an engagement which we understand you have entered
into with the Governors of the Free Grammar School to erect a new
school in New Street, unless you comply with the following conditions:
“Aware that it is our labour alone that can carry into effect what
you have undertaken, we cannot but view ourselves as parties to your
engagement, if that engagement is ever fulfilled; and as you had
no authority from us to make such an engagement, nor had you any
legitimate right to barter our labour at prices fixed by yourself, we
call upon you to exhibit to our several bodies your detailed estimates
of quantities and prices at which you have taken the work; and we call
upon you to arrange with us a fixed percentage of profit for your own
services in conducting the building, and in finding the material on
which our labour is to be applied.
“Should we find upon examination that you have fixed equitable prices
which will not only remunerate you for your superintendence but us for
our toil, we have no objections upon a clear understanding to become
partners to the contract, and will see you through it, after your
having entered yourself a member of our body, and after your having
been duly elected to occupy the office you have assumed” (_Robert Owen:
A Biography_, by Frank Podmore, 1906, vol. ii. p. 442-4).
[230] _An Impartial Statement of the Proceedings of the Members of the
Trades Union Societies, and of the Steps taken in consequence by the
Master Traders of Liverpool_ (Liverpool, 1833); _Remarks on the Nature
and Probable Termination of the Struggle now existing between the
Master and Journeyman Builders_ (Manchester, 1833); _Times_, June 27,
1833.
[231] _Pioneer_, December 7, 1833; _History of Birmingham_, by W.
Hutton (Birmingham, 1835), p. 87.
[232] It was edited by James Morrison, an enthusiastic Owenite, who
died, worn out, in 1835 (_Beer’s History of British Socialism_, 1919,
p. 328).
[233] It was eventually finished by the landlord, and still exists as a
metal warehouse in Shadwell Street.
[234] In May 1834 an informer offered to supply the Home Secretary
With full particulars of its organisation, leading members and their
activities, for two sums of £50 each (Home Office Papers, 40--32).
[235] Letters to Cobbett’s _Weekly Register_, reprinted in the
_Pioneer_, December 21, 1833. See also Home Office Papers, 40--32; and
the _Crisis_ for November and December 1833. _The Voice of the West
Riding_, an unstamped weekly, June and July 1833, was devoted to this
agitation in the Yorkshire textile industry (see Home Office Papers,
40--31).
[236] For an unfavourable account of this Union, see the extremely
biassed statement given in the pamphlet _Character, Objects, and
Effects of Trades Unions_ (1834). The employers seem to have regarded
all the demands of the men as equally unreasonable, even the request
for a list of piecework prices. See _Times_, October 2, 1833. A printed
address _To the Flax and Hemp Trade of Great Britain_, issued by the
flaxworkers of Leeds, November 30, 1832, refers with admiration to
the effectiveness of this Union (Home Office Papers, 40--31; see also
41--11).
[237] _Times_, October 28, 1833.
[238] _Crisis_, October 19, 1833.
[239] _Crisis_, October 12, 1833. The history of the General Trades
Unions from 1832 to 1834 is mainly to be gathered from the files of
the Owenite press, the _Crisis_, the _Pioneer_, and the _Herald of the
Rights of Industry_, with frequent ambiguous references in the Home
Office Papers for these years. The _Poor Man’s Guardian_ and the _Man_
also contain occasional references. The _Official Gazette_, issued by
the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union itself in June 1834, has
unfortunately not been preserved. We have also been unable to discover
any copy of the Glasgow Owenite journals, the _Tradesman_, _Trades
Advocate_, _Liberator_, etc., mostly edited or written by Owen’s
disciple, Alexander Campbell, the secretary of the local joiners’ Trade
Union.
[240] It is interesting to notice how closely this organisation
resembles, in its Trade Union features, the well-known “Knights of
Labour” of the United States, established in 1869, and for some years
one of the most powerful labour organisations in the world (“Historical
Sketch of the Knights of Labour,” by Carroll D. Wright, _Quarterly
Journal of Economics_, January, 1887). Its place was taken by the
American Federation of Labour, with exclusively Trade Union objects.
[241] _Glasgow Argus_, quoted in _People’s Conservative_, December 28,
1833.
[242] May 5, 1834.
[243] _Times_, January 23 and 30, 1834.
[244] _Kerr’s Exposition of Legislative Tyranny and Defence of the
Trades Union_ (Belfast, 1834), vol. 1611 of the Halliday Tracts in the
Royal Irish Academy, Dublin; see _The Irish Labour Movement_, by W. P.
Ryan, 1919.
[245] _Poor Man’s Guardian_, July 26, 1834.
[246] _Times_, April 19, 1834.
[247] The only record of this organisation known to us is a copy of
the Rules in the Goldsmiths’ Library at the University of London,
which we print in the Appendix. A “Memorial from the Grand National
Consolidated Trades Union of Great Britain and Ireland to the Producers
and Non-Producers of Wealth and Knowledge” is printed in the _Crisis_,
May 17, 1834; another, “to the Shopmen, Clerks, Porters and other
industrious non-producers,” in the issue for April 26, 1834.
[248] See the London newspapers for March 1834; a good summary is given
in the _Companion to the Newspaper_ for that month (p. 71).
[249] September 26, 1831: _Lord Melbourne’s Papers_ (1889), ch. v. p.
130. The note he left on leaving the Home Office was as follows: “I
take the liberty of recommending the whole of this correspondence _re_
the Union to the immediate and serious consideration of my successor
at the Home Department” (Home Office Papers, 40--27). See also the
statements in the House of Lords debate, _Times_, April 29, 1834; and
the comments in _Labour Legislation, Labour Movements, and Labour
Leaders_, by George Howell, 1902, p. 23.
[250] “We recommend that the soliciting of any person to join in
combinations, or to subscribe to the like purposes, should be
punishable on summary conviction by imprisonment for a shorter period,
say not exceeding two months.”
[251] The report was never published, and lies in MS. in the Home
Office library. Ten years later, when Nassau Senior was acting as
Commissioner to report on the condition of the handloom weavers,
he revived a good deal of his 1830 Report, but not the astonishing
proposals quoted in the text. The portion thus revived appears in
his _Historical and Philosophical Essays_ (1865), vol. ii. We had
placed in our hands, through the kindness of Mrs. Simpson, daughter
of Nassau Senior, the original answers and letters upon which his
report was based. This correspondence shows that the leading Manchester
manufacturers were not agreed upon the desirability of re-enacting the
Combination Laws, though they, with one accord, advocated stringent
repression of picketing. Nor were they clear that combinations had, on
the whole, hindered the introduction of new machinery, one employer
even maintaining that the Unions indirectly promoted its adoption.
But the most interesting feature of the correspondence is the extent
to which the employers complained of the manner in which their rivals
incited, and even subsidised, strikes against attempted reductions of
rates. The millowner, whose improved processes gave him an advantage
in the market, found any corresponding reduction of piecework rates
resisted, not only by his own operatives, but by all the other
manufacturers in the district, who sometimes went so far as to publish
a joint declaration that any such reduction was ‘highly inexpedient.’
The evidence, in fact, from Nassau Senior’s point of view, justified
his somewhat remarkable proposal to punish employers for conniving at
combinations.
[252] Lord Melbourne to Sir Herbert Taylor, September 26, 1831
(_Papers_, chap. v. p. 131). The workmen’s combinations began at
this time to attract more serious attention from capable students
than they had hitherto received. Two able pamphlets, published
anonymously--there is reason to believe at the instance and at the
cost of the Whig Government--_On Combinations of Trades_ (1830), and
_Character, Objects, and Effects of Trades Unions_ (1834), set forth
the constitution and proceedings of the new unions, and criticise
their pretensions in a manner which has not since been surpassed. The
second of these was by Edward Carlton Tufnell, one of the factory
commissioners, and remains perhaps the best statement of the case
against Trades Unionism. Tufnell also wrote a pamphlet, entitled
_Trades Unionism and Strikes_ (1834; 12mo); and Harriet Martineau one
_On the Tendency of Strikes and Sticks to produce Low Wages_ (Durham,
1834; 12mo), neither of which we have seen. A well-informed but hostile
article, founded on these materials, appeared in the _Edinburgh Review_
for July 1834. Charles Knight published in the same year a sixpenny
pamphlet, _Trades Unions and Strikes_ (1834, 99 pp.), which took the
form of a bitter denunciation of the whole movement.
[253] See his letter of March 30, 1834, in _Lord Melbourne’s Papers_,
chap. v.
[254] _Leeds Mercury_, April 26, 1834. Joseph Hume said he had had the
“greatest difficulty in prevailing upon the Ministers not to bring in a
bill for putting down the Trades Unions” (_Poor Man’s Guardian_, March
29, 1834).
[255] Letter dated September 3, 1833, in _Times_, September 9, 1833.
[256] R. _v._ Bykerdike, 1 Moo. and Rob. 179, Lancaster Assizes, 1832.
A letter was written to certain coal-owners, “by order of the Board of
Directors for the body of coal-miners,” stating that unless certain
men were discharged the miners would strike. Held to be an illegal
combination. See _Leeds Mercury_, May 24, 1834.
[257] _Times_, August 22, 1835.
[258] _Poor Man’s Guardian_, September 29, 1832.
[259] _Times_, February 27, 1834.
[260] R. _v._ Marks and others, 3 East Rep. 157.
[261] Lengthy accounts appeared in the newspapers for March and April
1834. The indictment is given in full in the House of Commons Return,
No. 250, of 1835 (June 1st). The legal report is in 6 C. and P. 596
(R. _v._ Loveless and others). The _Times_ reported the judge’s
charge at some length, March 18, 1834, and the case itself March 20,
1834, giving the rules of the projected union. An able article in the
_Law Magazine_, vol xi. pp. 460-72, discusses the law of the case.
The defendants subsequently published two statements for popular
circulation, viz. _Victims of Whiggery, a statement of the persecution
experienced by the Dorchester Labourers_, by George Loveless (1837),
and _A narrative of the sufferings of James Loveless, etc._ (1838),
which are in the British Museum. See also _Labour Legislation, Labour
Movements, and Labour Leaders_, by G. Howell, 1902, pp. 62-75; Spencer
Walpole’s _History of England_, vol. iii. chap. xiii. pp. 229-31; and
_Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates_, vols. xxii. and xxiii.
[262] The student is referred to the admirable account of these
proceedings in _The Village Labourer_, by J. L. and B. Hammond, 1912.
See, for a contemporary account, _Swing Unmasked, or the Cause of Rural
Incendiarism_, by G. C. Wakefield, M.P., 1831.
[263] _Lord Melbourne’s Papers_, pp. 147-150, letters dated November
3 and 7, 1832. Lord Melbourne seems to have thought, probably quite
incorrectly, that these rural organisations were in connection with
the political organisation called the National Union of the Working
Classes, founded by William Lovett in 1831, to support the Reform Bill.
[264] _Times_, March 20, 1834.
[265] _Lord Melbourne’s Papers_, p. 158.
[266] _Times_, March 18, 20, 31; April 1, 16, 19, 1834; _Leeds
Mercury_, April 26, 1834.
[267] A prominent Owenite agitator of the time, incumbent of St.
Nicholas, Warwick, who is said to have been inhibited from preaching by
his bishop.
[268] _Times_, April 22; _Companion to the Newspaper_, May and June
1834. Trade Union accounts declare that 100,000 to 200,000 persons were
present. A detailed description of the day is given in Somerville’s
_Autobiography of a Working Man_ (1848), not usually a trustworthy work.
[269] _Times_, April 19, 1834.
[270] The agitation for their release was kept up, both in and out
of Parliament, by the “London Dorchester Committee”; and in 1836 the
remainder of the sentence was remitted. Through official blundering it
was two years later (April 1838) before five out of the six prisoners
returned home. The sixth, as we learn from a circular of the Committee,
dated August 20, 1838, had even then not arrived. “Great and lasting
honour,” writes a well-informed contemporary, “is due to this body of
workmen (the London Dorchester Committee), about sixteen in number, by
whose indefatigable exertions, extending over a period of five years,
and the valuable assistance of Thomas Wakley, M.P. for Finsbury, the
same Government who banished the men were compelled to pardon them
and bring them home free of expense. From the subscriptions raised
by the working classes during this period, amounting to about £1300,
the Committee, on the return of the men, were enabled to place five
of them, with their families, in small farms in Essex, the sixth
preferring (with his share of the fund) to return to his native place.”
(Article in the _British Statesman_, April 9, 1842, preserved in Place
MSS. 27820--320.) See also House of Commons Return, No. 191 of 1837
(April 12); and _Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates_, vol. xxxii. p. 253.
[271] The series of “Initiation Parts,” or forms to be observed on
admission of new members, which are preserved in the archives of the
Stonemasons’ Society, reveal the steady tendency to simplification of
ritual. We have first the old MS. doggerel already described, dating
probably from 1832. The first print of 1834, whilst retaining a good
deal of the ceremonial, turns the liturgy into prose and the oath into
an almost identical “declaration,” invoking the “dire displeasure” of
the Society in case of treachery. The second print, which bears no
date, is much shorter; and the declaration becomes a mere affirmation
of adhesion. The Society’s circulars of 1838 record the abolition,
by vote of the members, of all initiation ceremonies, in view of the
Parliamentary Inquiry about to be held into Trade Unionism. But even
the simplified form of 1838 retains, in its reference to the workmen
as “the real producers of _all_ wealth,” an unmistakable trace of the
Owenite spirit of the Builders’ Union of 1832.
[272] _Times_, April 30 to June 10; House of Lords debate, April 28;
_Globe_, May 21, 1834; Home Office Papers, May 10, 1834, 40--32; _The
Tailoring Trade_, by F. W. Galton, 1896.
[273] _Leeds Mercury_, May 3, 1834.
[274] See the address of the “Grand Master” to the “Operative
Cordwainers of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union,” _Crisis_,
June 28, 1834; also _Times_, May 2, 1834; Home Office Papers, 40--32.
[275] _Times_, August 21, 1834.
[276] _Statement of the Master Builders of the Metropolis in
explanation of the differences between them and the workmen respecting
the Trades Unions_, 1834. See also _Times_, July 27 to November 29,
1834.
[277] The _Times_ honoured these events by long descriptive reports
from its “own correspondent,” then an unusual practice; see the issues
from April 17 to 25, 1834. A good account is also to be found in the
_Leeds Mercury_, April 19 and 26, 1834; see also the _History of the
Marcroft Family_ (1889), pp. 1036.
[278] _Trades Journal_, March 1, 1841; probably written by Alexander
Hutchinson, general secretary of the Friendly United Smiths of Great
Britain and Ireland.
[279] _England and America: a Comparison of the Social and Political
State of both Nations_, 1833, 2 vols.
[280] _Poor Man’s Guardian_, March 12, 1831; Place MSS. 27791--246,
272. “There were seven Co-operative Congresses in the years 1830-5 in
which the Trade Union and Labour Exchange elements were prominent”
(Prof. Foxwell’s Introduction to _The Right to the Full Produce of
Labour_, by Anton Menger, 1899).
[281] See the volumes of the _Poor Man’s Guardian_, preserved in the
British Museum.
[282] Place MSS. 27797--290; see a similar account in the _Life of
William Lovett_, by himself, p. 86. James Mill writes to Lord Brougham
on September 3, 1832, as follows: “Nothing can be conceived more
mischievous than the doctrines which have been preached to the common
people.... The nonsense to which your lordship alludes about the right
of the labourer to the whole produce of the country, wages, profits,
and rent all included, is the mad nonsense of our friend Hodgskin,
which he has published as a system, and propagates with the zeal of
perfect fanaticism.... The illicit cheap publications, in which the
doctrine of the right of the labouring people, who they say are the
only producers, to all that is produced, is very generally preached,
... are superseding the Sunday newspapers and every other channel
through which the people might get better information” (Bain’s _James
Mill_, p. 363, 1882). The series of Socialist authors of these years,
usually ignored, have been well described by Prof. Foxwell in his
Introduction to the English translation of Menger’s _Right to the Whole
Produce of Labour_, 1899; and more fully and philosophically in M.
Beer’s _History of British Socialism_, 1919, vol. i.
[283] “Owen’s chief merit was that he filled the working classes with
renewed hope at a time when the pessimism, both of orthodox economists
and of their unorthodox opponents, had condemned labour to be an
appendage of machinery, a mere commodity whose value, like that of
all commodities, was determined by the bare cost of keeping up the
necessary supply. Owen laid stress upon the human side of economics.
The object of industry was to produce happier and more contented men
and women” (_The Chartist Movement_, by Mark Hovell, 1918, p. 45).
[284] The prospectus of this Society is in the British Library of
Political Science at the London School of Economics. A copy is given
in the _Morning Chronicle_, December 7, 1833. Its Manchester meetings
are reported in the _Crisis_ for November and December 1833. It seems
to have had for its organ a penny weekly called _The Herald of the
Rights of Industry_, some numbers of which are in the British Museum.
Professor Foxwell has kindly drawn our attention to a further reference
to it in the _Life of James Deacon Hume_, p. 55. It excited the
curiosity of the Home Secretary. See Home Office Papers, 40--31.
[285] See Owen’s elaborate speech, reported in the _Crisis_, October
12, 1833; _Robert Owen: a Biography_, by Frank Podmore, 1906; and
_Trade Unionism_, by C. M. Lloyd, 1915.
[286] _Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth most
conducive to Human Happiness_, by William Thompson, 1824; also his
_Labour Rewarded, the Claims of Labour and Capital_; _How to secure to
Labour the whole Product of its Exertions_, by One of the Idle Classes,
1827; see Professor Foxwell’s Introduction to _The Right to the
whole Produce of Labour_, by Anton Menger, 1899; _History of British
Socialism_, by M. Beer, 1919, vol. i.; and _The Irish Labour Movement_,
by W. P. Ryan, 1919, ch. iii.
[287] The pamphlet, entitled _The Grand National Holiday and Congress
of the Productive Classes_, by William Benbow, 1831, had an extensive
circulation. Mark Hovell (_The Chartist Movement_, 1918, p. 91) thinks
he was the same William Benbow whom Bamford mentions as a delegate
from Manchester in 1817 (_Life of a Radical_, p. 8), and whom Henry
Hunt describes as of the Manchester Hampden Club, and as having been
reported by a Government spy to be manufacturing pikes in 1816 (_The
Green Bag Plot_, 1918).
[288] Leading article in the _Crisis_, October 12, 1833.
[289] A specimen dated 1837 is preserved by the Stonemasons’ Society,
according to which a Liverpool contractor bound all his employees to
serve him at a fixed wage for a long term of years, any time lost by
sickness or otherwise not to be paid for and to be added to the term;
all “lawful commands” to be obeyed; and no present or future club or
other society to be joined without the employer’s consent.
[290] See his manifestoes reprinted in _Northern Star_, July 6 and
July 27, 1844. “Lord Londonderry again warns all the shopkeepers and
tradesmen in his town of Seaham that if they still give credit to
pitmen who hold off work, and continue in the Union, such men will be
marked by his agents and overmen, and will never be employed in his
collieries again, and the shopkeepers may be assured that they will
never have any custom or dealings with them from Lord Londonderry’s
large concerns that he can in any manner prevent.
“Lord Londonderry further informs the traders and shopkeepers, that
having by his measures increased very largely the last year’s trade
to Seaham, and if credit is so improperly and so fatally given to his
unreasonable pitmen, thereby prolonging the injurious strike, it is his
firm determination to carry back all the outlay of his concerns even to
Newcastle.
“Because it is neither fair, just, or equitable that the resident
traders in his own town should combine and assist the infatuated
workmen and pitmen in prolonging their own miseries by continuing
an insane strike, and an unjust and senseless warfare against their
proprietors and masters.”
[291] Some account of these developments will be found in _The
Co-operative Movement in Great Britain_, by Beatrice Potter (Mrs.
Sidney Webb).
[292] The collapse was duly reported to the Home Secretary (Home Office
Papers, 40--33, 34, 35).
[293] See Ashworth’s paper before British Association, 1837; _Remarks
upon the Importance of an Inquiry into the Amount and Appropriation
of Wages by the Working Classes_, by W. Felkin, 1837; _Appeal to the
Public from the United Trades of Preston_, February 14, 1837 (in Home
Office Papers, 40--35).
[294] The United Society of Operative Plumbers (reorganised 1848)
still dominates its branch of the trade, and retains traces of the
federal constitution of the Builders’ Union. The sister organisation
of carpenters (now styled the General Union of Carpenters and Joiners)
has been overtaken and overshadowed by the newer Amalgamated Society of
Carpenters and Joiners; whilst the Operative Bricklayers’ Society has
absorbed practically all the older societies in its own branch of the
trade.
[295] Glasgow was still the principal centre of the cotton industry,
especially in weaving. In 1838 there were in the Glasgow area about
36,000 handlooms devoted mainly to cotton, with two persons to a
loom, whilst in all Lancashire there were only 25,000 (Parliamentary
Papers, xlii. of 1849 and xxiv. of 1840; _The Chartist Movement_, by
Mark Hovell, 1918, p. 14). Combination among the cotton operatives of
Glasgow was of old standing. After the strike of 1812, already referred
to, trouble broke out again in 1820 and 1822, when outrages were
committed (_Arts and Artisans_, by J. G. Symons, 1839, p. 137).
Besides securing full reports in the newspapers, the Trade Union
committee conducting the case published at a low price an account of
the trial in parts, which has not been preserved. Two other exhaustive
reports were issued, and may still be consulted, viz. _Report of
the trial of Thomas Hunter and other operative cotton-spinners in
Glasgow in 1838_, by Archibald Swinton (Edinburgh, 1838), and _The
trial of Thomas Hunter, etc., the Glasgow Cotton-spinners_, by James
Marshall (Glasgow, 1838). See also the _Autobiography of Sir Archibald
Alison_, 1883; the _Northern Star_ for 1837-8; the _Annual Register_
for 1838, pp. 206-7; and the evidence before the Select Committee
on Combinations, 1838. A summary will be found in Howell’s _Labour
Legislation, Labour Movements and Labour Leaders_, 1902, pp. 83-4.
[296] The five prisoners were pardoned in 1840, in consequence of their
exemplary conduct. There is a joint letter by them in the _Trades
Journal_ for August, 1840, relating to the subscriptions raised for
them by a London committee.
[297] _Stonemasons’ Fortnightly Circular_, January 19, 1838.
[298] Evidence of W. Darcy, the secretary, second report of 1838
Committee, p. 130.
[299] Circular dated March 1, 1838, in Stonemasons’ archives; and
_An Address from the London Trades Committee appointed to watch the
Parliamentary Inquiry into Combinations_, 1838.
[300] George Howell suggests, we are not sure with what authority, that
Nassau Senior, whose report on Trade Unionism to the Home Secretary
in 1830 we have already described, tendered this to Sir Henry Parnell
as the basis of a report by the Committee of 1838, but the proposal
was not accepted (_Labour Legislation, Labour Movements and Labour
Leaders_, 1902, pp. 83-4). See also _The Irish Labour Movement_, by W.
P. Ryan, 1919.
[301] A series of subsequent publications has now gone far to fill this
gap. _The Chartist Movement_, by R. G. Gammage (republished 1894),
may now be supplemented by _The Life of Francis Place_, by Professor
Graham Wallas (revised edition, 1918); _Le Chartisme_, 1830-48, by
E. Dolléans, 2 vols. (Paris, 1912-13); _The Chartist Movement_, by
Mark Hovell, 1918; _The Social and Economic Aspects of the Chartist
Movement_, by F. F. Rosenblatt (New York, 1916); _The Decline of the
Chartist Movement_, by P. W. Slosson (New York, 1916); _Chartism and
the Churches_, by H. V. Faulkner (New York, 1916); _Die Entstehung und
die ökonomischen Grundsätze der Chartistenbewegung_, by John Tildsley
(Jena, 1898); and especially by the two separate volumes on the
_History of British Socialism_, by M. Beer, 1919 and 1920.
[302] _Northern Star_, August 20, 1842.
[303] _Sheffield Iris_, August 1842.
[304] See, for instance, that for October 1839.
[305] _Northern Star_, August 20, 1842. “It is clear that the trade
societies as a whole stood outside the Chartist Movement, though many
Trade Unionists were no doubt Chartists too. The societies could not
be induced to imperil their funds and existence at the orders of the
Chartist Convention” (_The Chartist Movement_, by Mark Hovell, 1918, p.
169).
[306] _History of Birmingham_, by W. Hutton (Birmingham, edition of
1835), p. 149.
[307] _Northern Star_, August 24, 1846.