suffering and so much ignorance, has been marked by a comparative
absence of violence, and comparative respect for law. Considering what
large bodies of men have been out on strike, how much they have endured
in the conflict, and what appeals have been made to their passions, it
is wonderful how little of actual crime or disturbance there has been.
There were the Sheffield murders the disclosure of which filled all the
friends of labour with shame and sorrow, all the enemies of labour with
malignant exultation. But we should not have heard so much of the
Sheffield murders if such things had been common. Sheffield is an
exceptional place; some of the work there is deadly, life is short and
character is reckless. Even at Sheffield, a very few, out of the whole
number of trades, were found to have been in any way implicated. The
denunciation of the outrages by the trades through England generally,
was loud and sincere; an attempt was made, of course, to fix the guilt
on all the Unions, but this was a hypocritical libel. It was stated, in
one of our Canadian journals, the other day, that Mr. Roebuck had lost
his seat for Sheffield, by protesting against Unionist outrage. Mr.
Roebuck lost his seat for Sheffield by turning Tory. The Trades'
candidate, by whom Mr. Roebuck was defeated, was Mr. Mundella, a
representative of whom any constituency may be proud, a great employer
of labour, and one who has done more than any other man of his class in
England to substitute arbitration for industrial war, and to restore
kindly relations between the employers and the employed. To Mr. Mundella
the support of Broadhead and the criminal Unionists was offered, and by
him it was decisively rejected.
The public mind has been filled with hideous fantasies, on the subject
of Unionism, by sensation novelists like Mr. Charles Reade and Mr.
Disraeli, the latter of whom has depicted the initiation of a working
man into a Union with horrid rites, in a lofty and spacious room, hung
with black cloth and lighted with tapers, amidst skeletons, men with
battle axes, rows of masked figures in white robes, and holding torches;
the novice swearing an awful oath on the Gospel, to do every act which
the heads of the society enjoin, such as the chastisement of "nobs," the
assassination of tyrannical masters, and the demolition of all mills
deemed incorrigible by the society. People may read such stuff for the
sake of amusement and excitement, if they please; but they will fall
into a grave error if they take it for a true picture of the Amalgamated
Carpenters or the Amalgamated Engineers. Besides, the Sheffield outrages
were several years old at the time of their discovery. They belong,
morally, to the time when the unions of working men being forbidden by
unfair laws framed in the masters' interest were compelled to assume the
character of conspiracies; when, to rob a union being no theft,
unionists could hardly be expected to have the same respect as the
better protected interests for public justice; when, moreover, the
mechanics, excluded from political rights, could scarcely regard
Government as the impartial guardian of their interests, or the
governing classes as their friends. Since the legalization of the
unions, the extension of legal security to their funds and the admission
of the mechanics to the suffrage there has been comparatively little of
unionist crime.
I do not say that there has been none. I do not say that there is none
now. Corporate selfishness of which Trade Unions after all are
embodiments seldom keeps quite clear of criminality. But the moral
dangers of corporate selfishness are the same in all associations and in
all classes. The Pennsylvanian iron master who comes before our
Commissions of Inquiry to testify against Unionist outrage in
Pennsylvania where a very wild and roving class of workmen are managed
by agents who probably take little thought for the moral condition of
the miner--this iron master I say is himself labouring through his paid
organs in the press, through his representatives in Congress, and by
every means in his power to keep up hatred of England and bad relations
between the two countries at the constant risk of war because it suits
the interest of his Protectionist Ring. The upper classes of Europe in
the same spirit applauded what they called the salvation of society by
the _coup d'etat_, the massacre on the Boulevards and the lawless
deportation of the leaders of the working men in France. In the main
however I repeat the present movement has been legal and pacific and so
long as there is no violence, so long as no weapons but those of
argument are employed, so long as law and reason reign, matters are sure
to come right in the end. The result may not be exactly what we wish
because we may wish to take too much for ourselves and to give our
fellow men too little, but it will be just and we cannot deliberately
desire more. If the law is broken by the Unionists, if violence or
intimidation is employed by them instead of reason, let the Government
protect the rights of the community and let the community strengthen the
hands of the Government for that purpose.
Perhaps you will say that I have forgotten the International and the
Commune. There is undoubtedly a close connection between the labour
movement and democracy, between the struggle for industrial and the
struggle for political emancipation, as there is a connection between
both and Secularism, the frank form assumed among the working men by
that which is concealed and conformist Scepticism among the upper class.
In this respect the present industrial crisis resembles those of the
past which as we have seen were closely connected with religious and
political revolutions. In truth the whole frame of humanity generally
moves at once. With the International, however, as an organ of political
incendiarism, labour had very little to do. The International was, in
its origin, a purely industrial association, born of Prince Albert's
International Exhibition, which held a convention at Geneva, where
everybody goes pic-nicing, for objects which, though chimerical, were
distinctly economical, and free from any taint of petroleum. But a band
of political conspirators got hold of the organization and used it, or
at least, so much of it as they could carry with them, for a purpose
entirely foreign to the original intent. Mark, too, that it was not so
much labour or even democracy that charged the mine which blew up Paris,
as the reactionary Empire, which, like reaction in countries more nearly
connected with us than France, played the demagogue for its own ends,
set the labourers against the liberal middle class, and crowded Paris
with operatives, bribed by employment on public works. I detest all
conspiracy, whether it be that of Ignatius Loyola, or that of Karl Marx-
-not by conspiracy, not by dark and malignant intrigue, is society to be
reformed, but by open, honest and kindly appeals to the reason and
conscience of mankind. Yet, let us be just, even to the Commune. The
destruction of the column at the Place Vendome was not a good act; but
if it was in any measure the protest of labour against war, it was a
better act than ever was done by the occupant of that column. On that
column it was that, when Napoleon's long orgy of criminal glory was
drawing to a close, the hand of misery and bereavement wrote "Monster,
if all the blood you have shed could be collected in this square, you
might drink without stooping." Thiers is shooting the Communists;
perhaps justly, though humanity will be relieved when the gore ceases to
trickle, and vengeance ends its long repast. But Thiers has himself been
the literary arch-priest of Napoleon and of war: of all the incendiaries
in France, he has been the worst.
The Trade Unions are new things in industrial history. The guilds of the
Middle Ages, with which the unions are often identified, were
confederations of all engaged in the trade, masters as well as men,
against outsiders. The Unions are confederations of the men against the
masters. They are the offspring of an age of great capitalists,
employing large bodies of hired workmen. The workmen, needy, and obliged
to sell their labour without reserve, that they might eat bread, found
themselves, in their isolation, very much at the mercy of their masters,
and resorted to union as a source of strength. Capital, by collecting in
the centres of manufacture masses of operatives who thus became
conscious of their number and their force, gave birth to a power which
now countervails its own. To talk of a war of labour against capital
generally would, of course, be absurd. Capital is nothing but the means
of undertaking any industrial or commercial enterprise, of setting up an
Allan line of steamships or setting up a costermonger's cart. We might
as well talk of a war of labour against water power.
Capital is the fruit of labour past, the condition of labour present,
without it no man could do a stroke of work, at least of work requiring
tools or food for him who uses them. Let us dismiss from our language
and our minds these impersonations, which though mere creatures of fancy
playing with abstract nouns end by depraving our sentiments and
misdirecting our actions, let us think and speak of capital impersonally
and sensibly as an economical force and as we would think and speak of
the force of gravitation. Relieve the poor word of the big _c_,
which is a greatness thrust upon it, its tyranny, and the burning hatred
of its tyranny will at once cease. Nevertheless, the fact remains that a
working man standing alone, and without a breakfast for himself or his
family, is not in a position to obtain the best terms from a rich
employer, who can hold out as long as he likes or hire other labour on
the spot. Whether Unionism has had much effect in producing a general
rise of wages is very doubtful. Mr. Brassey's book, "Work and Wages,"
goes far to prove that it has not, and that while, on the one hand, the
unionists have been in a fool's paradise, the masters, on the other,
have been crying out before they were hurt. No doubt the general rise of
wages is mainly and fundamentally due to natural causes: the
accumulation of capital, the extension of commercial enterprise, and the
opening up of new countries, which have greatly increased the
competition for labour, and consequently, raised the price, while the
nominal price of labour as well as of all other commodities has been
raised by the influx of gold. What Unionism, as I think, has evidently
effected, is the economical emancipation of the working man. It has
rendered him independent instead of dependent, and, in some cases almost
a serf, as he was before. It has placed him on an equal footing with his
employer, and enabled him to make the best terms for himself in every
respect. There is no employer who does not feel that this is so, or whom
Mr. Brassey's statistics, or any statistics, would convince that it is
not.
Fundamentally, value determines the price the community will give for
any article, or any kind of work, just so much as it is worth. But there
is no economical deity who, in each individual case, exactly adjusts the
price to the value; we may make a good or a bad bargain, as many of us
know to our cost. One source of bad bargains is ignorance. Before
unions, which have diffused the intelligence of the labour market, and
by so doing have equalized prices, the workman hardly knew the rate of
wages in the next town. If this was true of the mechanic, it was still
more true of the farm labourer. Practically speaking, the farm labourers
in each parish of England, ignorant of everything beyond the parish,
isolated and, therefore, dependent, had to take what the employers chose
to give them. And what the employers chose to give them over large
districts was ten shillings a week for themselves and their families,
out of which they paid, perhaps, eighteen-pence for rent. A squire the
other day, at a meeting of labourers, pointed with pride, and no doubt,
with honest pride, to a labourer who had brought up a family of twelve
children on twelve shillings a week I will venture to say the squire
spent as much on any horse in his stables. Meat never touched the
peasant's lips, though game, preserved for his landlord's pleasure, was
running round his cottage. His children could not be educated, because
they were wanted, almost from their infancy, to help in keeping the
family from starving, as stonepickers, or perambulating scarecrows. His
abode was a hovel, in which comfort, decency, morality could not dwell;
and it was mainly owing to this cause that, as I have heard an
experienced clergyman say, even the people in the low quarters of cities
were less immoral than the rural poor. How the English peasants lived on
such wages as they had, was a question which puzzled the best informed.
How they died was clear enough; as penal paupers in a union workhouse.
Yet Hodge's back, like that of Jacques Bonhomme, in France, bore
everything, bore the great war against Republican France; for the
squires and rectors, who made that war for class purposes, got their
taxes back in increased rents and tithes. How did the peasantry exist,
what was their condition in those days when wheat was at a hundred, or
even a hundred and thirty shillings? They were reduced to a second
serfage. They became in the mass parish paupers, and were divided, like
slaves, among the employers of each parish. Men may be made serfs, and
even slaves by other means than open force, in a country where, legally,
all are free, where the impossibility of slavery is the boast of the
law. Of late benevolence has been, abroad in the English parish,
almsgiving and visiting have increased, good landlords have taken up
cottage improvements. There have been harvest-homes, at which the young
squires have danced with cottagers. But now Hodge has taken the matter
into his own hands, and it seems not without effect. In a letter which I
have seen, a squire says, "Here the people are all contented; we (the
employers) have seen the necessity of raising their wages." Conservative
journals begin to talk of measures for the compulsory improvement of
cottages, for limiting ground game, giving tenant right to farmers,
granting the franchise to rural householders. Yes, in consequence,
partly, at least of this movement, the dwellings and the general
conditions of the English peasantry will be improved, the game laws will
be abolished; the farmers pressed upon from below, and in their turn
pressing upon those above, will demand and obtain tenant right; and the
country, as well as the city householders will be admitted to the
franchise, which, under the elective system, is at once the only
guarantee for justice to him and for his loyalty to the State. And when
the country householder has the suffrage there will soon be an end of
those laws of primogeniture and entail, which are deemed so
Conservative, but are in fact most revolutionary, since they divorce the
nation from its own soil. And then there will be a happier and a more
United England in country as well as in town: the poor law, the hateful,
degrading, demoralizing poor law will cease to exist; the huge poor-
house will no longer darken the rural landscape with its shadow, in
hideous contrast with the palace. Suspicion and hatred will no more
cower and mutter over the cottage hearth, or round the beer-house fire:
the lord of the mansion will no longer be like the man in Tennyson
slumbering while a lion is always creeping nearer. Lord Malmesbury is
astonished at this disturbance. He always thought the relation between
the lord and the pauper peasant was the happiest possible; he cannot
conceive what people mean by proposing a change. But then Lord
Malmesbury was placed at rather a delusive point of view. If he knew the
real state of Hodge's heart he would rejoice in the prospect of a
change, not only for Hodge's sake, but, as he is no doubt a good man,
for his own. England will be more religious, too, as well as happier and
more harmonious, let the clergy be well assured of it. Social injustice
especially when backed by the Church, is unfavourable to popular
religion.
The general rise of wages may at first bring economical disturbance and
pressure on certain classes, but, in the end, it brings general
prosperity, diffused civilization, public happiness, security to
society, which can never be secure while the few are feasting and the
many are starving. In the end, also, it brings an increase of
production, and greater plenty. Not that we can assent, without reserve,
to the pleasant aphorism, that increase of wages, in itself, makes a
better workman, which is probably true only where the workman has been
under-fed, as in the case of the farm labourers of England. But the
dearness of labour leads to the adoption of improved methods of
production, and especially to the invention of machinery, which gives
back to the community what it has paid in increased wages a hundred or a
thousand fold. In Illinois, towards the close of the war, a large
proportion of the male population had been drafted or volunteered,
labour had become scarce and wages had risen, but the invention of
machinery had been so much stimulated that the harvest that year was
greater than it had ever been before. Machinery will now be used to a
greater extent on the English farms; more will be produced by fewer
hands, labourers will be set free for the production of other kinds,
perhaps for the cultivation of our North-West, and the British peasant
will rise from the industrial and intellectual level of a mere labourer
to that of the guider of a machine. Machinery worked by relays of men
is, no doubt, one of the principal solutions of our industrial problems,
and of the social problems connected with them. Some seem to fancy that
it is the universal solution; but we cannot run reaping machines in the
winter or in the dark.
High wages, and the independence of the labourers, compel economy of
labour. Economize labour, cries Lord Derby, the cool-headed mentor of
the rich; we must give up our second under-butler. When the labourer is
dependent, and his wages are low, the most precious of commodities, that
commodity the husbanding of which is the chief condition of increased
production, and of the growth of national wealth, is squandered with
reckless prodigality. Thirty years the labourers of Egypt wrought by
gangs of a hundred thousand at a time to build the great Pyramid which
was to hold a despot's dust. Even now, when everybody is complaining of
the dearness of labour, and the insufferable independence of the working
class, a piece of fine lace, we are told, consumes the labour of seven
persons, each employed on a distinct portion of the work; and the
thread, of exquisite fineness, is spun in dark rooms underground, not
without injury, we may suppose, to the eyesight or health of those
employed. So that the labour movement does not seem to have yet trenched
materially even on the elegancies of life. Would it be very detrimental
to real civilization if we were forced, by the dearness of labour, to
give up all the trades in which human life or health is sacrificed to
mere fancy? In London, the bakers have struck. They are kept up from
midnight to noon, sometimes far even into the afternoon, sleepless, or
only snatching broken slumbers, that London may indulge its fancy for
hot bread, which it would be much better without. The result of the
strike probably will be, besides relief to the bakers themselves, which
has already been in part conceded, a more wholesome kind of bread, such
as will keep fresh and palatable through the day, and cleaner baking;
for the wretchedness of the trade has made it vile and filthy, as is the
case in other trades besides that of the bakers. Many an article of mere
luxury, many a senseless toy, if our eyes could be opened, would be seen
to bear the traces of human blood and tears. We are like the Merchant
Brothers in Keats:--
"With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt,
Enriched from ancestral merchandize,
And for them many a weary hand did swelt
In torch-lit mines and noisy factories,
And many once proud-quivered loins did melt
In blood from stinging whip; with hollow eyes
Many all day in dazzling river stood
To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood."
"For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,
And went all naked to the hungry shark;
For them his ears gushed blood; for them in death
The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark
Lay pierced with darts; for them alone did seethe
A thousand men in troubles wide and dark:
Half ignorant, they turned an easy wheel
That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel."
Among other economies of labour, if this movement among the English
peasantry succeeds and spreads to other countries, then will come an
economy of soldiers' blood. Pauperism has been the grand recruiting
serjeant. Hodge listed and went to be shot or scourged within an inch of
his life for sixpence a day, because he was starving; but he will not
leave five shillings for sixpence. Even in former days, the sailor,
being somewhat better off than the peasant, could only be forced into
the service by the press gang, a name the recollection of which ought to
mitigate our strictures on the encroaching tendencies of the working
class. There will be a strike, or a refusal of service equivalent to a
strike in this direction also. It will be requisite to raise the
soldier's pay; the maintenance of standing armies will become a costly
indulgence. I have little faith in international champagne, or even in
Geneva litigation as a universal antidote to war: war will cease or be
limited to necessary occasions, when the burden of large standing armies
becomes too great to be borne.
The strike of the English colliers again, though it causes great
inconvenience, may have its good effect. It may be a strong indication
that mining in England is getting very deep, and that the nation must
exorcise a strict economy in the use of coal, the staple of its wealth
and greatness. The lot of the colliers, grubbling all day underground
and begrimed with dirt, is one of the hardest; the sacrifice of their
lives by accidents is terribly large; and we may well believe that the
community needs a lesson in favour of these underground toilers, which
could be effectually taught only by some practical manifestation of
their discontent.
To the labour movement, mainly, we owe those efforts to establish better
relations between the employer and the employed, which are known by the
general name of co-operation. The Comtists, in the name of their
autocrat, denounce the whole co-operative system as rotten. Their plan,
if you get to the bottom of it, is in fact a permanent division of the
industrial world into capitalists. And workmen; the capitalists
exercising a rule controlled only by the influence of philosophers; the
workmen remaining in a perpetual state of tutelage, not to say of
babyhood. A little acquaintance with this continent would probably
dissipate notions of a permanent division of classes, or a permanent
tutelage of any class. It is true that great commercial enterprises
require the guidance of superior intelligence with undivided counsels as
well as a large capital, and that co-operative mills have failed or
succeeded only in cases where very little policy and very little capital
were required. As to co-operative stores, they are co-operative only in
a very different sense: combinative would be a more accurate term; and
the department in which they seem likely to produce an alteration, is
that of retail trade, an improvement in the conditions of which,
economical and moral, is assuredly much needed. But if we are told that
it is impossible to give the workmen an interest in the enterprise, so
as, to make him work more willingly avoid waste and generally identify
him self with his employer the answer is that the thing has been done
both in England and here. An artisan working for him self and selling
the produce of his individual skill has an interest and a pride in his
work for which it would seem desirable to find if possible some
substitute in the case of factory hands whose toil otherwise is mere
weariness. The increased scale of commercial enterprise however is in
itself advantageous in this respect. In great works where an army of
workmen is employed at Saltaire or in the Platt works at Oldham there
must be many grades of promotion and many subordinate places of trust
and emolument to which the workmen may rise by industry and probity
without capital of his own.