a sense of the immediate danger with which the failure of the religious
sanction threatens social order and morality. As we have said already,
the men of whom we specially speak are far above anything like social
Jesuitism. We have not a doubt but they would regard with abhorrence any
schemes of oligarchic illuminism for guarding the pleasures of the few
by politic deception of the multitude. But they have probably begun to
lay to heart the fact that the existing morality, though not dependent
on any special theology, any special view of the relations between soul
and body, or any special theory of future rewards and punishments, is
largely dependent on a belief in the indefeasible authority of
conscience, and in that without which conscience can have no
indefeasible authority--the presence of a just and all-seeing God. It
may be true that in primaeval society these beliefs are found only in the
most rudimentary form, and, as social sanctions, are very inferior in
force to mere gregarious instincts or the pressure of tribal need. But
man emerges from the primaeval state, and when he does, he demands a
reason for his submission to moral law. That the leaders of the anti-
theological movement in the present day are immoral, nobody but the most
besotted fanatic would insinuate; no candid antagonist would deny that
some of them are in every respect the very best of men. The fearless
love of truth is usually accompanied by other high qualities; and
nothing could be more unlikely than that natures disposed to virtue,
trained under good influences, peculiarly sensitive to opinion and
guarded by intellectual tastes, would lapse into vice as soon as the
traditional sanction was removed. But what is to prevent the withdrawal
of the traditional sanction from producing its natural effect upon the
morality of the mass of mankind? The commercial swindler or the
political sharper, when the divine authority of conscience is gone, will
feel that he has only the opinion of society to reckon with, and he
knows how to reckon with the opinion of society. If Macbeth is ready,
provided he can succeed in this world, to "jump the life to come," much
more ready will villainy be to "jump" the bad consequences of its
actions to humanity when its own conscious existence shall have closed.
Rate the practical effect of religious beliefs as low and that of social
influences as high as you may, there can surely be no doubt that
morality has received some support from the authority of an inward
monitor regarded as the voice of God. The worst of men would have wished
to die the death of the righteous; he would have been glad, if he could,
when death approached, to cancel his crimes; and the conviction, or
misgiving, which this implied, could not fail to have some influence
upon the generality of mankind, though no doubt the influence was
weakened rather than strengthened by the extravagant and incredible form
in which the doctrine of future retribution was presented by the
dominant theology.
The denial of the existence of God and of a Future State, in a word, is
the dethronement of conscience; and society will pass, to say the least,
through a dangerous interval before social science can fill the vacant
throne. Avowed scepticism is likely to be disinterested and therefore to
be moral; it is among the unavowed sceptics and conformists to political
religions that the consequences of the change may be expected to appear.
But more than this, the doctrines of Natural Selection and the Survival
of the Fittest are beginning to generate a morality of their own, with
the inevitable corollary that the proof of superior fitness is to
survive--to survive either by force or cunning, like the other animals
which by dint of force or cunning have come out victorious from the
universal war and asserted for themselves a place in nature. The
"irrepressible struggle for empire" is formally put forward by public
writers of the highest class as the basis and the rule of the conduct of
this country towards other nations; and we may be sure that there is not
an entire absence of connection between the private code of a school and
its international conceptions. The feeling that success covers
everything seems to be gaining ground and to be overcoming, not merely
the old conventional rules of honour, but moral principle itself. Both
in public and private there are symptoms of an approaching failure of
the motive power which has hitherto sustained men both in self-
sacrificing effort and in courageous protest against wrong, though as
yet we are only at the threshold of the great change, and established
sentiment long survives, in the masses, that which originally gave it
birth. Renan says, probably with truth, that had the Second Empire
remained at peace, it might have gone on forever; and in the history of
this country the connection between political effort and religion has
been so close that its dissolution, to say the least, can hardly fail to
produce a critical change in the character of the nation. The time may
come, when, as philosophers triumphantly predict, men, under the
ascendancy of science, will act for the common good, with the same
mechanical certainty as bees; though the common good of the human hive
would perhaps not be easy to define. But in the meantime mankind, or
some portions of it, may be in danger of an anarchy of self-interest,
compressed for the purpose of political order, by a despotism of force.
That science and criticism, acting--thanks to the liberty of opinion won
by political effort--with a freedom never known before, have delivered
us from a mass of dark and degrading superstitions, we own with
heartfelt thankfulness to the deliverers, and in the firm conviction
that the removal of false beliefs, and of the authorities or
institutions founded on them, cannot prove in the end anything but a
blessing to mankind. But at the same time the foundations of general
morality have inevitably been shaken, and a crisis has been brought on
the gravity of which nobody can fail to see, and nobody but a fanatic of
Materialism can see without the most serious misgiving.
There has been nothing in the history of man like the present situation.
The decadence of the ancient mythologies is very far from affording a
parallel. The connection of those mythologies with morality was
comparatively slight. Dull and half-animal minds would hardly be
conscious of the change which was partly veiled from them by the
continuance of ritual and state creeds; while in the minds of Plato and
Marcus Aurelius it made place for the development of a moral religion.
The Reformation was a tremendous earthquake: it shook down the fabric of
mediaeval religion, and as a consequence of the disturbance in the
religious sphere filled the world with revolutions and wars. But it left
the authority of the Bible unshaken, and men might feel that the
destructive process had its limit, and that adamant was still beneath
their feet. But a world which is intellectual and keenly alive to the
significance of these questions, reading all that is written about them
with almost passionate avidity, finds itself brought to a crisis the
character of which any one may realize by distinctly presenting to
himself the idea of existence without a God.
THE LABOUR MOVEMENT
_(This Lecture was delivered before the Mechanics' Institute of
Montreal, and the Literary Society of Sherbrooke, and published in the
CANADIAN MONTHLY, December, 1872. The allusions to facts and events must
be read with reference to the date.)_
We are in the midst of an industrial war which is extending over Europe
and the United States, and has not left Canada untouched. It is not
wonderful that great alarm should prevail, or that, in panic-stricken
minds, it should assume extravagant forms. London deprived of bread by a
bakers' strike, or of fuel by a colliers' strike, is a serious prospect;
so is the sudden stoppage of any one of the wheels in the vast and
complicated machine of modern industry. People may be pardoned for
thinking that they have fallen on evil times, and that they have a dark
future before them. Yet, those who have studied industrial history know
that the present disturbance is mild compared with the annals of even a
not very remote past. The study of history shows us where we are, and
whither things are tending. Though it does not diminish the difficulties
of the present hour, it teaches us to estimate them justly, to deal with
them calmly and not to call for cavalry and grapeshot because one
morning we are left without hot bread.
One of the literary janissaries of the French Empire thought to prove
that the working class had no rights against the Bonapartes, by showing
that the first free labourers were only emancipated slaves. One would
like to know what he supposed the first Bonapartes were. However though
his inference was not worth much, except against those who are pedantic
enough, to vouch parchment archives for the rights and interests of
humanity, he was in the right as to the fact. Labour first appears in
history as a slave, treated like a beast of burden, chained to the door-
post of a Roman master, or lodged in the underground manstables
(ergastula) on his estate, treated like a beast, or worse than a beast,
recklessly worked out and then cast forth to die, scourged, tortured,
flung in a moment of passion to feed the lampreys, crucified for the
slightest offence or none. "Set up a cross for the slave," cries the
Roman matron, in, Juvenal. "Why, what has the slave done?" asks her
husband.
One day labour strikes; finds a leader in Spartacus, a slave devoted as
a gladiator to the vilest of Roman pleasures; wages a long and terrible
servile war. The revolt is put down at last, after shaking the
foundations of the state. Six thousand slaves are crucified along the
road from Rome to Capua. Labour had its revenge, for slavery brought the
doom of Rome.
In the twilight of history, between the fall of Rome and the rise of the
new nationalities, we dimly see the struggle going on. There is a great
insurrection of the oppressed peasantry, under the name of Bagaudae, in
Gaul. When the light dawns, a step has been gained. Slavery has been
generally succeeded by serfdom. But serfdom is hard. The peasantry of
feudal Normandy conspire against their cruel lords, hold secret
meetings, the ominous name _commune_ is heard. But the conspiracy
is discovered and suppressed with the fiendish ferocity with which panic
inspires a dominant class, whether in Normandy or Jamaica. Amidst the
religious fervour of the Crusades again breaks out a wild labour
movement, that of the Pastoureaux, striking for equality in the name of
the Holy Spirit, which, perhaps, they had as good a right to use as some
who deemed their use of it profane. This is in the country, among the
shepherds and ploughmen. In the cities labour has congregated numbers,
mutual intelligence, union on its side; it is constantly reinforced by
fugitives from rural serfdom; it builds city walls, purchases or extorts
charters of liberty. The commercial and manufacturing cities of Italy,
Germany, Flanders, become the cradles of free industry, and, at the same
time, of intellect, art, civilization. But these are points of light
amidst the feudal darkness of the rural districts. In France, for
example, the peasantry are cattle; in time of peace crushed with forced
labour, feudal burdens, and imposts of all kinds; in time of war driven,
in unwilling masses, half-armed and helpless, to the shambles.
Aristocratic luxury, gambling, profligate wars--Jacques Bonhomme pays
for them all. At Crecy and Poictiers, the lords are taken prisoners;
have to provide heavy ransoms, which, being debts of honour, like
gambling debts, are more binding than debts of honesty. But Jacques
Bonhomme's back is broad, it will bear everything. Broad as it is, it
will not bear this last straw. The tidings of Flemish freedom have,
perhaps, in some way reached his dull ear, taught him that bondage is
not, as his priest, no doubt, assures him it is, a changeless ordinance
of God, that the yoke, though strong, may be broken. He strikes, arms
himself with clubs, knives, ploughshares, rude pikes, breaks out into a
Jacquerie, storms the castles of the oppressor, sacks, burns, slays with
the fury of a wild beast unchained. The lords are stupefied. At last
they rally and bring their armour, their discipline, their experience in
war, the moral ascendency of a master-class to bear. The English
gentlemen, in spite of the hostilities, only half suspended, between the
nations, join the French gentlemen against the common enemy. Twenty
thousand peasants are soon cut down, but long afterwards the butchery
continues. Guillaume Callet, the leader of the Jacquerie, a very crafty
peasant, as he is called by the organs of the lords, is crowned with a
circlet of red-hot iron.
In England, during the same period serfdom, we know not exactly how, is
breaking up. There is a large body of labourers working for hire. But in
the midst of the wars of the great conqueror, Edward III., comes a
greater conqueror, the plague called the Black Death, which sweeps away,
some think, a third of the population of Europe. The number of labourers
is greatly diminished. Wages rise. The feudal parliament passes an Act
to compel labourers, under penalties, to work at the old rates. This Act
is followed by a train of similar Acts, limiting wages and fixing in the
employers' interest the hours of work, which, in the pages of
imaginative writers, figure as noble attempts made by legislators of a
golden age to regulate the relations between employer and employed on
some higher principle than that of contract. The same generous spirit,
no doubt, dictated the enactment prohibiting farm labourers from
bringing up their children to trades, lest hands should be withdrawn
from the land-owner's service. Connected with the Statutes of Labourers,
are those bloody vagrant laws, in which whipping, branding, hanging are
ordained as the punishment of vagrancy by lawgivers, many of whom were
themselves among the idlest and most noxious vagabonds in the country,
and the authors of senseless wars which generated a mass of vagrancy, by
filling the country with disbanded soldiers. In the reign of Richard
II., the poll tax being added to other elements of class discord, labour
strikes, takes arms under Wat Tyler, demands fixed rents, tenant right
in an extreme form, and the total abolition of serfage. A wild religious
communism bred of the preachings of the more visionary among the
Wycliffites mingles in the movement with the sense of fiscal and
industrial wrong. "When Adam delved and Eve span, where was then the
gentleman?" is the motto of the villeins, and it is one of more
formidable import than any utterance of peasant orators at Agricultural
Labourers' meetings in the present day. Then come fearful scenes of
confusion, violence and crime. London is in the power of hordes
brutalized by oppression. High offices of state, high ecclesiastics are
murdered. Special vengeance falls on the lawyers, as the artificers who
forged the cunning chains of feudal iniquity. The rulers, the troops,
are paralyzed by the aspect of the sea of furious savagery raging round
them. The boy king, by a miraculous exhibition of courageous self-
possession, saves the State; but he is compelled to grant general
charters of manumission, which, when the danger is over, the feudal
parliament forces him by a unanimous vote to repudiate. Wholesale
hanging of serfs, of course, follows the landlords' victory.
The rising under Jack Cade, in the reign of Henry VI., was rather
political than industrial. The demands of the insurgents, political
reform and freedom of suffrage, show that progress had been made in the
condition and aspirations of the labouring class. But with the age of
the Tudors came the final breakup in England of feudalism, as well as of
Catholicism, attended by disturbances in the world of labour, similar to
those which have attended the abolition of slavery in the Southern
States. This is the special epoch of the sanguinary vagrancy laws, the
most sanguinary of which was framed by the hand of Henry VIII. The new
nobility of courtiers and upstarts, who had shared with the king the
plunder of the monasteries, were hard landlords of course; they robbed
the people of their rights of common, and swept away homesteads and
cottages, to make room for sheep farms, the wool trade being the great
source of wealth in those days. By the spoliation of the monasteries,
the great alms-houses of the Middle Ages, the poor had also been left
for a time without the relief, which was given them again in a more
regular form by the Poor Law of Elizabeth. Hence in the reign of Edward
VI., armed strikes again, in different parts of the kingdom. In the
West, the movement was mainly religious; but in the Eastern countries,
under Kett of Norfolk, it was agrarian. Kett's movement after a brief
period of success, during which the behaviour of the insurgents and
their leader was very creditable, was put down by the disciplined
mercenaries under the command of the new aristocracy, and its
suppression was of course followed by a vigorous use of the gallows. No
doubt the industrial conservatives of those days were as frightened, as
angry, and as eager for strong measures as their successors are now: but
the awkwardness of the newly liberated captive, in the use of his limbs
and eyes, is due not to his recovered liberty, but to the narrowness and
darkness of the dungeon in which he has been immured.
In Germany, at the same epoch, there was not merely a local rising, but
a wide-spread and most terrible peasants' war. The German peasantry had
been ground down beyond even an hereditary bondsman's power of endurance
by their lords generally, and by the Prince Bishop and other spiritual
lords in particular. The Reformation having come with a gospel of truth,
love, spiritual brotherhood, the peasants thought it might also have
brought some hope of social justice. The doctors of divinity had to
inform them that this was a mistake. But they took the matter into their
own hands and rose far and wide, the fury of social and industrial war
blending with the wildest fanaticism, the most delirious ecstacy, the
darkest imposture. Once more there are stormings and burnings of feudal
castles, massacring of their lords. Lords are roasted alive, hunted like
wild beasts in savage revenge for the cruelty of the game laws. Munzer,
a sort of peasant Mahomet, is at the head of the movement. Under him it
becomes Anabaptist, Antinomian, Communist. At first he and his followers
sweep the country with a whirlwind of terror and destruction: but again
the lords rally, bring up regular troops. The peasants are brought to
bay on their last hill side, behind a rampart formed of their waggons.
Their prophet assures them that the cannon-balls will fall harmless into
his cloak. The cannon-balls take their usual course: a butchery, then a
train of torturings and executions follows, the Prince Bishop, among
others, adding considerably to the whiteness of the Church's robe.
Luther is accused of having incited the ferocity of the lords against
those, who, it is alleged, had only carried his own principles to an
extreme. But in the first place Luther never taught Anabaptism or
anything that could logically lead to it; and in the second place,
before he denounced the peasants, he tried to mediate and rebuke the
tyranny of the lords. No man deserves more sympathy than a great
reformer, who is obliged to turn against the excesses of his own party.
He becomes the object of fierce hatred on one side, of exulting derision
on the other; yet he is no traitor, but alone loyal to his conscience
and his cause.
The French Revolution was a political movement among the middle class in
the cities, but among the peasantry in the country it was an agrarian
and labour movement, and the dismantling of chateaux, and chasing away
of their lords which then took place were a renewal of the struggle
which had given birth to the Jacquerie, the insurrection of Wat Tyler,
and the Peasants' War. This time the victory remained with the peasant,
and the lord returned no more.
In England, long after the Tudor period, industrial disturbances took
place, and wild communistic fancies welled up from the depths of a
suffering world of labour, when society was stirred by political and
religious revolution. Under the Commonwealth, communists went up on the
hill side, and began to break ground for a poor man's Utopia; and the
great movement of the Levellers, which had in it an economical as well
as a political element, might have overturned society, if it had not
been quelled by the strong hand of Cromwell. But in more recent times,
within living memory, within the memory of many here there were labour
disturbances in England, compared with which the present industrial war
is mild. [Footnote: For the following details, see Martineau's "History
of the Peace."] In 1816, there were outbreaks among the suffering
peasantry which filled the governing classes with fear. In Suffolk
nightly fires of incendiaries blazed in every district, thrashing
machines were broken or burnt in open day, mills were attacked. At
Brandon large bodies of workmen assembled to prescribe a maximum price
of grain and meat, and to pull down the houses of butchers and bakers.
They bore flags with the motto, "Bread or Blood". Insurgents from the
Fen Country, a special scene of distress, assembled at Littleport,
attacked the house of a magistrate in the night, broke open shops,
emptied the cellars of public-houses, marched on Ely, and filled the
district for two days and nights with drunken rioting and plunder. The
soldiery was called in; there was an affray in which blood flowed on
both sides, then a special commission and hangings to close the scene.
Distressed colliers in Staffordshire and Wales assembled by thousands,
stopped works, and were with difficulty diverted from marching to
London. In 1812, another stain of blood was added to the sanguinary
criminal code of those days by the Act making death the penalty for the
destruction of machinery. This was caused by the Luddite outrages, which
were carried on in the most systematic manner, and on the largest scale
in Nottingham and the adjoining counties. Bodies of desperadoes, armed
and disguised, went forth under a leader, styled General Ludd, who
divided them into bands, and aligned to each band its work of
destruction. Terror reigned around; the inhabitants were commanded to
keep in their houses and put out their lights on pain of death. In the
silence of night houses and factories were broken open, machines
demolished, unfinished work scattered on the highways. The extent and
secrecy of the conspiracy baffled the efforts of justice and the death
penalty failed to put the system down. Even the attempts made to relieve
distress became new sources of discontent and a soup kitchen riot at
Glasgow led to a two days conflict between the soldiery and the mob. In
1818, a threatening mass of Manchester spinners, on strike came into
bloody collision with the military. Then there were rick burnings,
farmers patrolling all night long, gibbets erected on Pennenden heath,
and bodies swinging on them, bodies of boys, eighteen or nineteen years
old. Six labourers of Dorsetshire, the most wretched county in England,
were sentenced to seven years' transportation nominally for
administering an illegal oath, really for Unionism. Thereupon all the
trades made a menacing demonstration, marched to Westminster, thirty
thousand strong, with a petition for the release of the labourers.
London was in an agony of fear, the Duke of Wellington prepared for a
great conflict, pouring in troops and bringing up artillery from
Woolwich. In 1840, again there were formidable movements, and society
felt itself on the crust of a volcano. Threatening letters were sent to
masters, rewards offered for firing mills, workmen were beaten, driven
out of the country, burned with vitriol, and, there was reason to fear,
murdered. Great masses of operatives collected for purposes of
intimidation, shopkeepers were pillaged, collisions again took place
between the people and the soldiery. Irish agrarianism meanwhile
prevailed, in a far more deadly form than at present. And these
industrial disturbances were connected with political disturbances
equally formidable, with Chartism, Socialism, Cato Street conspiracies,
Peterloo massacres, Bristol riots.