The production of raw materials and fuel for a manufacture so colossal as
that of England requires a considerable number of workers. But of all
the materials needed for its industries (except wool, which belongs to
the agricultural districts), England produces only the minerals: the
metals and the coal. While Cornwall possesses rich copper, tin, zinc,
and lead mines, Staffordshire, Wales, and other districts yield great
quantities of iron, and almost the whole North and West of England,
central Scotland, and certain districts of Ireland, produce a
superabundance of coal. {241}
In the Cornish mines about 19,000 men, and 11,000 women and children are
employed, in part above and in part below ground. Within the mines below
ground, men and boys above twelve years old are employed almost
exclusively. The condition of these workers seems, according to the
Children's Employment Commission's Reports, to be comparatively
endurable, materially, and the English often enough boast of their
strong, bold miners, who follow the veins of mineral below the bottom of
the very sea. But in the matter of the health of these workers, this
same Children's Employment Commission's Report judges differently. It
shows in Dr. Barham's intelligent report how the inhalation of an
atmosphere containing little oxygen, and mixed with dust and the smoke of
blasting powder, such as prevails in the mines, seriously affects the
lungs, disturbs the action of the heart, and diminishes the activity of
the digestive organs; that wearing toil, and especially the climbing up
and down of ladders, upon which even vigorous young men have to spend in
some mines more than an hour a day, and which precedes and follows daily
work, contributes greatly to the development of these evils, so that men
who begin this work in early youth are far from reaching the stature of
women who work above ground; that many die young of galloping
consumption, and most miners at middle age of slow consumption, that they
age prematurely and become unfit for work between the thirty-fifth and
forty-fifth years, that many are attacked by acute inflammations of the
respiratory organs when exposed to the sudden change from the warm air of
the shaft (after climbing the ladder in profuse perspiration), to the
cold wind above ground, and that these acute inflammations are very
frequently fatal. Work above ground, breaking and sorting the ore, is
done by girls and children, and is described as very wholesome, being
done in the open air.
In the North of England, on the borders of Northumberland and Durham, are
the extensive lead mines of Alston Moor. The reports from this district
{242} agree almost wholly with those from Cornwall. Here, too, there are
complaints of want of oxygen, excessive dust, powder smoke, carbonic acid
gas, and sulphur, in the atmosphere of the workings. In consequence, the
miners here, as in Cornwall, are small of stature, and nearly all suffer
from the thirtieth year throughout life from chest affections, which end,
especially when this work is persisted in, as is almost always the case,
in consumption, so greatly shortening the average of life of these
people. If the miners of this district are somewhat longer lived than
those of Cornwall, this is the case, because they do not enter the mines
before reaching the nineteenth year, while in Cornwall, as we have seen,
this work is begun in the twelfth year. Nevertheless, the majority die
here, too, between forty and fifty years of age, according to medical
testimony. Of 79 miners, whose death was entered upon the public
register of the district, and who attained an average of 45 years, 37 had
died of consumption and 6 of asthma. In the surrounding districts,
Allendale, Stanhope, and Middleton, the average length of life was 49,
48, and 47 years respectively, and the deaths from chest affections
composed 48, 54, and 56 per cent. of the whole number. Let us compare
these figures with the so-called Swedish tables, detailed tables of
mortality embracing all the inhabitants of Sweden, and recognised in
England as the most correct standard hitherto attainable for the average
length of life of the British working-class. According to them, male
persons who survive the nineteenth year attain an average of 57.5 years;
but, according to this, the North of England miners are robbed by their
work of an average of ten years of life. Yet the Swedish tables are
accepted as the standard of longevity of the _workers_, and present,
therefore, the average chances of life as affected by the unfavourable
conditions in which the proletariat lives, a standard of longevity less
than the normal one. In this district we find again the lodging-houses
and sleeping-places with which we have already become acquainted in the
towns, and in quite as filthy, disgusting, and overcrowded a state as
there. Commissioner Mitchell visited one such sleeping barrack, 18 feet
long, 13 feet wide, and arranged for the reception of 42 men and 14 boys,
or 56 persons altogether, one-half of whom slept above the other in
berths as on shipboard. There was no opening for the escape of the foul
air; and, although no one had slept in this pen for three nights
preceding the visit, the smell and the atmosphere were such that
Commissioner Mitchell could not endure it a moment. What must it be
through a hot summer night, with fifty-six occupants? And this is not
the steerage of an American slave ship, it is the dwelling of free-born
Britons!
Let us turn now to the most important branch of British mining, the iron
and coal mines, which the Children's Employment Commission treats in
common, and with all the detail which the importance of the subject
demands. Nearly the whole of the first part of this report is devoted to
the condition of the workers employed in these mines. After the detailed
description which I have furnished of the state of the industrial
workers, I shall, however, be able to be as brief in dealing with this
subject as the scope of the present work requires.
In the coal and iron mines which are worked in pretty much the same way,
children of four, five, and seven years are employed. They are set to
transporting the ore or coal loosened by the miner from its place to the
horse-path or the main shaft, and to opening and shutting the doors
(which separate the divisions of the mine and regulate its ventilation)
for the passage of workers and material. For watching the doors the
smallest children are usually employed, who thus pass twelve hours daily,
in the dark, alone, sitting usually in damp passages without even having
work enough to save them from the stupefying, brutalising tedium of doing
nothing. The transport of coal and iron-stone, on the other hand, is
very hard labour, the stuff being shoved in large tubs, without wheels,
over the uneven floor of the mine; often over moist clay, or through
water, and frequently up steep inclines and through paths so low-roofed
that the workers are forced to creep on hands and knees. For this more
wearing labour, therefore, older children and half-grown girls are
employed. One man or two boys per tub are employed, according to
circumstances; and, if two boys, one pushes and the other pulls. The
loosening of the ore or coal, which is done by men or strong youths of
sixteen years or more, is also very weary work. The usual working-day is
eleven to twelve hours, often longer; in Scotland it reaches fourteen
hours, and double time is frequent, when all the employees are at work
below ground twenty-four, and even thirty-six hours at a stretch. Set
times for meals are almost unknown, so that these people eat when hunger
and time permit.
The standard of living of the miners is in general described as fairly
good and their wages high in comparison with those of the agricultural
labourers surrounding them (who, however, live at starvation rates),
except in certain parts of Scotland and in the Irish mines, where great
misery prevails. We shall have occasion to return later to this
statement, which, by the way, is merely relative, implying comparison to
the poorest class in all England. Meanwhile, we shall consider the evils
which arise from the present method of mining, and the reader may judge
whether any pay in money can indemnify the miner for such suffering.
The children and young people who are employed in transporting coal and
iron-stone all complain of being over-tired. Even in the most recklessly
conducted industrial establishments there is no such universal and
exaggerated overwork. The whole report proves this, with a number of
examples on every page. It is constantly happening that children throw
themselves down on the stone hearth or the floor as soon as they reach
home, fall asleep at once without being able to take a bite of food, and
have to be washed and put to bed while asleep; it even happens that they
lie down on the way home, and are found by their parents late at night
asleep on the road. It seems to be a universal practice among these
children to spend Sunday in bed to recover in some degree from the over-
exertion of the week. Church and school are visited by but few, and even
of these the teachers complain of their great sleepiness and the want of
all eagerness to learn. The same thing is true of the elder girls and
women. They are overworked in the most brutal manner. This weariness,
which is almost always carried to a most painful pitch, cannot fail to
affect the constitution. The first result of such over-exertion is the
diversion of vitality to the one-sided development of the muscles, so
that those especially of the arms, legs, and back, of the shoulders and
chest, which are chiefly called into activity in pushing and pulling,
attain an uncommonly vigorous development, while all the rest of the body
suffers and is atrophied from want of nourishment. More than all else
the stature suffers, being stunted and retarded; nearly all miners are
short, except those of Leicestershire and Warwickshire, who work under
exceptionally favourable conditions. Further, among boys as well as
girls, puberty is retarded, among the former often until the eighteenth
year; indeed, a nineteen years old boy appeared before Commissioner
Symonds, showing no evidence beyond that of the teeth, that he was more
than eleven or twelve years old. This prolongation of the period of
childhood is at bottom nothing more than a sign of checked development,
which does not fail to bear fruit in later years. Distortions of the
legs, knees bent inwards and feet bent outwards, deformities of the
spinal column and other malformations, appear the more readily in
constitutions thus weakened, in consequence of the almost universally
constrained position during work; and they are so frequent that in
Yorkshire and Lancashire, as in Northumberland and Durham, the assertion
is made by many witnesses, not only by physicians, that a miner may be
recognised by his shape among a hundred other persons. The women seem to
suffer especially from this work, and are seldom, if ever, as straight as
other women. There is testimony here, too, to the fact that deformities
of the pelvis and consequent difficult, even fatal, childbearing arise
from the work of women in the mines. But apart from these local
deformities, the coal miners suffer from a number of special affections
easily explained by the nature of the work. Diseases of the digestive
organs are first in order; want of appetite, pains in the stomach,
nausea, and vomiting, are most frequent, with violent thirst, which can
be quenched only with the dirty, lukewarm water of the mine; the
digestion is checked and all the other affections are thus invited.
Diseases of the heart, especially hypertrophy, inflammation of the heart
and pericardium, contraction of the _auriculo-ventricular_ communications
and the entrance of the _aorta_ are also mentioned repeatedly as diseases
of the miners, and are readily explained by overwork; and the same is
true of the almost universal rupture which is a direct consequence of
protracted over-exertion. In part from the same cause and in part from
the bad, dust-filled atmosphere mixed with carbonic acid and hydrocarbon
gas, which might so readily be avoided, there arise numerous painful and
dangerous affections of the lungs, especially asthma, which in some
districts appears in the fortieth, in others in the thirtieth year in
most of the miners, and makes them unfit for work in a short time. Among
those employed in wet workings the oppression in the chest naturally
appears much earlier; in some districts of Scotland between the twentieth
and thirtieth years, during which time the affected lungs are especially
susceptible to inflammations and diseases of a feverish nature. The
peculiar disease of workers of this sort is "black spittle," which arises
from the saturation of the whole lung with coal particles, and manifests
itself in general debility, headache, oppression of the chest, and thick,
black mucous expectoration. In some districts this disease appears in a
mild form; in others, on the contrary, it is wholly incurable, especially
in Scotland. Here, besides the symptoms just mentioned, which appear in
an intensified form, short, wheezing, breathing, rapid pulse (exceeding
100 per minute), and abrupt coughing, with increasing leanness and
debility, speedily make the patient unfit for work. Every case of this
disease ends fatally. Dr. Mackellar, in Pencaitland, East Lothian,
testified that in all the coal mines which are properly ventilated this
disease is unknown, while it frequently happens that miners who go from
well to ill-ventilated mines are seized by it. The profit-greed of mine
owners which prevents the use of ventilators is therefore responsible for
the fact that this working-men's disease exists at all. Rheumatism, too,
is, with the exception of the Warwick and Leicestershire workers, a
universal disease of the coal miners, and arises especially from the
frequently damp working-places. The consequence of all these diseases is
that, in all districts _without exception_, the coal miners age early and
become unfit for work soon after the fortieth year, though this is
different in different places. A coal miner who can follow his calling
after the 45th or 50th year is a very great rarity indeed. It is
universally recognised that such workers enter upon old age at forty.
This applies to those who loosen the coal from the bed; the loaders, who
have constantly to lift heavy blocks of coal into the tubs, age with the
twenty-eighth or thirtieth year, so that it is proverbial in the coal
mining districts that the loaders are old before they are young. That
this premature old age is followed by the early death of the colliers is
a matter of course, and a man who reaches sixty is a great exception
among them. Even in South Staffordshire, where the mines are
comparatively wholesome, few men reach their fifty-first year. Along
with this early superannuation of the workers we naturally find, just as
in the case of the mills, frequent lack of employment of the elder men,
who are often supported by very young children. If we sum up briefly the
results of the work in coal mines, we find, as Dr. Southwood Smith, one
of the commissioners, does, that through prolonged childhood on the one
hand and premature age on the other, that period of life in which the
human being is in full possession of his powers, the period of manhood,
is greatly shortened, while the length of life in general is below the
average. This, too, on the debit side of the bourgeoisie's reckoning!
All this deals only with the average of the English coal mines. But
there are many in which the state of things is much worse, those, namely,
in which thin seams of coal are worked. The coal would be too expensive
if a part of the adjacent sand and clay were removed; so the mine owners
permit only the seams to be worked; whereby the passages which elsewhere
are four or five feet high and more are here kept so low that to stand
upright in them is not to be thought of. The working-man lies on his
side and loosens the coal with his pick; resting upon his elbow as a
pivot, whence follow inflammations of the joint, and in cases where he is
forced to kneel, of the knee also. The women and children who have to
transport the coal crawl upon their hands and knees, fastened to the tub
by a harness and chain (which frequently passes between the legs), while
a man behind pushes with hands and head. The pushing with the head
engenders local irritations, painful swellings, and ulcers. In many
cases, too, the shafts are wet, so that these workers have to crawl
through dirty or salt water several inches deep, being thus exposed to a
special irritation of the skin. It can be readily imagined how greatly
the diseases already peculiar to the miners are fostered by this
especially frightful, slavish toil.
But these are not all the evils which descend upon the head of the coal
miner. In the whole British Empire there is no occupation in which a man
may meet his end in so many diverse ways as in this one. The coal mine
is the scene of a multitude of the most terrifying calamities, and these
come directly from the selfishness of the bourgeoisie. The hydrocarbon
gas which develops so freely in these mines, forms, when combined with
atmospheric air, an explosive which takes fire upon coming into contact
with a flame, and kills every one within its reach. Such explosions take
place, in one mine or another, nearly every day; on September 28th, 1844,
one killed 96 men in Haswell Colliery, Durham. The carbonic acid gas,
which also develops in great quantities, accumulates in the deeper parts
of the mine, frequently reaching the height of a man, and suffocates
every one who gets into it. The doors which separate the sections of the
mines are meant to prevent the propagation of explosions and the movement
of the gases; but since they are entrusted to small children, who often
fall asleep or neglect them, this means of prevention is illusory. A
proper ventilation of the mines by means of fresh air-shafts could almost
entirely remove the injurious effects of both these gases. But for this
purpose the bourgeoisie has no money to spare, preferring to command the
working-men to use the Davy lamp, which is wholly useless because of its
dull light, and is, therefore, usually replaced by a candle. If an
explosion occurs, the recklessness of the miner is blamed, though the
bourgeois might have made the explosion well-nigh impossible by supplying
good ventilation. Further, every few days the roof of a working falls
in, and buries or mangles the workers employed in it. It is the interest
of the bourgeois to have the seams worked out as completely as possible,
and hence the accidents of this sort. Then, too, the ropes by which the
men descend into the mines are often rotten, and break, so that the
unfortunates fall, and are crushed. All these accidents, and I have no
room for special cases, carry off yearly, according to the _Mining
Journal_, some fourteen hundred human beings. The _Manchester Guardian_
reports at least two or three accidents every week for Lancashire alone.
In nearly all mining districts the people composing the coroner's juries
are, in almost all cases, dependent upon the mine owners, and where this
is not the case, immemorial custom insures that the verdict shall be:
"Accidental Death." Besides, the jury takes very little interest in the
state of the mine, because it does not understand anything about the
matter. But the Children's Employment Commission does not hesitate to
make the mine owners directly responsible for the greater number of these
cases.
As to the education and morals of the mining population, they are,
according to the Children's Employment Commission, pretty good in
Cornwall, and excellent in Alston Moor; in the coal districts, in
general, they are, on the contrary, reported as on an excessively low
plane. The workers live in the country in neglected regions, and if they
do their weary work, no human being outside the police force troubles
himself about them. Hence, and from the tender age at which children are
put to work, it follows that their mental education is wholly neglected.
The day schools are not within their reach, the evening and Sunday
schools mere shams, the teachers worthless. Hence, few can read and
still fewer write. The only point upon which their eyes are as yet open
is the fact that their wages are far too low for their hateful and
dangerous work. To church they go seldom or never; all the clergy
complain of their irreligion as beyond comparison. As a matter of fact,
their ignorance of religious and of secular things, alike, is such that
the ignorance of the factory operatives, shown in numerous examples in
the foregoing pages, is trifling in comparison with it. The categories
of religion are known to them only from the terms of their oaths. Their
morality is destroyed by their work itself. That the overwork of all
miners must engender drunkenness is self-evident. As to their sexual
relations, men, women, and children work in the mines, in many cases,
wholly naked, and in most cases, nearly so, by reason of the prevailing
heat, and the consequences in the dark, lonely mines may be imagined. The
number of illegitimate children is here disproportionately large, and
indicates what goes on among the half-savage population below ground; but
proves too, that the illegitimate intercourse of the sexes has not here,
as in the great cities, sunk to the level of prostitution. The labour of
women entails the same consequences as in the factories, dissolves the
family, and makes the mother totally incapable of household work.
When the Children's Employment Commission's Report was laid before
Parliament, Lord Ashley hastened to bring in a bill wholly forbidding the
work of women in the mines, and greatly limiting that of children. The
bill was adopted, but has remained a dead letter in most districts,
because no mine inspectors were appointed to watch over its being carried
into effect. The evasion of the law is very easy in the country
districts in which the mines are situated; and no one need be surprised
that the Miners' Union laid before the Home Secretary an official notice,
last year, that in the Duke of Hamilton's coal mines in Scotland, more
than sixty women were at work; or that the _Manchester Guardian_ reported
that a girl perished in an explosion in a mine near Wigan, and no one
troubled himself further about the fact that an infringement of the law
was thus revealed. In single cases the employment of women may have been
discontinued, but in general the old state of things remains as before.
These are, however, not all the afflictions known to the coal miners. The
bourgeoisie, not content with ruining the health of these people, keeping
them in danger of sudden loss of life, robbing them of all opportunity
for education, plunders them in other directions in the most shameless
manner. The truck system is here the rule, not the exception, and is
carried on in the most direct and undisguised manner. The cottage
system, likewise, is universal, and here almost a necessity; but it is
used here, too, for the better plundering of the workers. To these means
of oppression must be added all sorts of direct cheating. While coal is
sold by weight, the worker's wages are reckoned chiefly by measure; and
when his tub is not perfectly full he receives no pay whatever, while he
gets not a farthing for over-measure. If there is more than a specified
quantity of dust in the tub, a matter which depends much less upon the
miner than upon the nature of the seam, he not only loses his whole wage
but is fined besides. The fine system in general is so highly perfected
in the coal mines, that a poor devil who has worked the whole week and
comes for his wages, sometimes learns from the overseer, who fine at
discretion and without summoning the workers, that he not only has no
wages but must pay so and so much in fines extra! The overseer has, in
general, absolute power over wages; he notes the work done, and can
please himself as to what he pays the worker, who is forced to take his
word. In some mines, where the pay is according to weight, false decimal
scales are used, whose weights are not subject to the inspection of the
authorities; in one coal mine there was actually a regulation that any
workman who intended to complain of the falseness of the scales _must
give notice to the overseer three weeks in advance_! In many districts,
especially in the North of England, it is customary to engage the workers
by the year; they pledge themselves to work for no other employer during
that time, but the mine owner by no means pledges himself to give them
work, so that they are often without it for months together, and if they
seek elsewhere, they are sent to the treadmill for six weeks for breach
of contract. In other contracts, work to the amount of 26s. every 14
days, is promised the miners, but not furnished, in others still, the
employers advance the miners small sums to be worked out afterwards, thus
binding the debtors to themselves. In the North, the custom is general
of keeping the payment of wages one week behindhand, chaining the miners
in this way to their work. And to complete the slavery of these
enthralled workers, nearly all the Justices of the Peace in the coal
districts are mine owners themselves, or relatives or friends of mine
owners, and possess almost unlimited power in these poor, uncivilised
regions where there are few newspapers, these few in the service of the
ruling class, and but little other agitation. It is almost beyond
conception how these poor coal miners have been plundered and tyrannised
over by Justices of the Peace acting as judges in their own cause.
So it went on for a long time. The workers did not know any better than
that they were there for the purpose of being swindled out of their very
lives. But gradually, even among them, and especially in the factory
districts, where contact with the more intelligent operatives could not
fail of its effect, there arose a spirit of opposition to the shameless
oppression of the "coal kings." The men began to form Unions and strike
from time to time. In civilised districts they joined the Chartists body
and soul. The great coal district of the North of England, shut off from
all industrial intercourse, remained backward until, after many efforts,
partly of the Chartists and partly of the more intelligent miners
themselves, a general spirit of opposition arose in 1843. Such a
movement seized the workers of Northumberland and Durham that they placed
themselves at the forefront of a general Union of coal miners throughout
the kingdom, and appointed W. P. Roberts, a Chartist solicitor, of
Bristol, their "Attorney General," he having distinguished himself in
earlier Chartist trials. The Union soon spread over a great majority of
the districts; agents were appointed in all directions, who held meetings
everywhere and secured new members; at the first conference of delegates,
in Manchester, in 1844, there were 60,000 members represented, and at
Glasgow, six months later, at the second conference, 100,000. Here all
the affairs of the coal miners were discussed and decisions as to the
greater strikes arrived at. Several journals were founded, especially
the _Miners' Advocate_, at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, for defending the rights
of the miners. On March 31st, 1844, the contracts of all the miners of
Northumberland and Durham expired. Roberts was empowered to draw up a
new agreement, in which the men demanded: (1) Payment by weight instead
of measure; (2) Determination of weight by means of ordinary scales
subject to the public inspectors; (3) Half-yearly renewal of contracts;
(4) Abolition of the fines system and payment according to work actually
done; (5) The employers to guarantee to miners in their exclusive service
at least four days' work per week, or wages for the same. This agreement
was submitted to the "coal kings," and a deputation appointed to
negotiate with them; they answered, however, that for them the Union did
not exist, that they had to deal with single workmen only, and should
never recognise the Union. They also submitted an agreement of their own
which ignored all the foregoing points, and was, naturally, refused by
the miners. War was thus declared. On March 31st, 1844, 40,000 miners
laid down their picks, and every mine in the county stood empty. The
funds of the Union were so considerable that for several months a weekly
contribution of 2s. 6d. could be assured to each family. While the
miners were thus putting the patience of their masters to the test,
Roberts organised with incomparable perseverance both strike and
agitation, arranged for the holding of meetings, traversed England from
one end to the other, preached peaceful and legal agitation, and carried
on a crusade against the despotic Justices of the Peace and truck
masters, such as had never been known in England. This he had begun at
the beginning of the year. Wherever a miner had been condemned by a
Justice of the Peace, he obtained a _habeas corpus_ from the Court of
Queen's bench, brought his client to London, and always secured an
acquittal. Thus, January 13th, Judge Williams of Queen's bench acquitted
three miners condemned by the Justices of the Peace of Bilston, South
Staffordshire; the offence of these people was that they refused to work
in a place which threatened to cave in, and had actually caved in before
their return! On an earlier occasion, Judge Patteson had acquitted six
working-men, so that the name Roberts began to be a terror to the mine
owners. In Preston four of his clients were in jail. In the first week
of January he proceeded thither to investigate the case on the spot, but
found, when he arrived, the condemned all released before the expiration
of the sentence. In Manchester there were seven in jail; Roberts
obtained a _habeas corpus_ and acquittal for all from Judge Wightman. In
Prescott nine coal miners were in jail, accused of creating a disturbance
in St. Helen's, South Lancashire, and awaiting trial; when Roberts
arrived upon the spot, they were released at once. All this took place
in the first half of February. In April, Roberts released a miner from
jail in Derby, four in Wakefield, and four in Leicester. So it went on
for a time until these Dogberries came to have some respect for the
miners. The truck system shared the same fate. One after another
Roberts brought the disreputable mine owners before the courts, and
compelled the reluctant Justices of the Peace to condemn them; such dread
of this "lightning" "Attorney General" who seemed to be everywhere at
once spread among them, that at Belper, for instance, upon Roberts'
arrival, a truck firm published the following notice:
"NOTICE!
"PENTRICH COAL MINE.
"The Messrs. Haslam think it necessary, in order to prevent all
mistakes, to announce that all persons employed in their colliery will
receive their wages wholly in cash, and may expend them when and as
they choose to do. If they purchase goods in the shops of Messrs.
Haslam they will receive them as heretofore at wholesale prices, but
they are not expected to make their purchases there, and work and
wages will be continued as usual whether purchases are made in these
shops or elsewhere."
This triumph aroused the greatest jubilation throughout the English
working-class, and brought the Union a mass of new members. Meanwhile
the strike in the North was proceeding. Not a hand stirred, and
Newcastle, the chief coal port, was so stripped of its commodity that
coal had to be brought from the Scotch coast, in spite of the proverb. At
first, while the Union's funds held out, all went well, but towards
summer the struggle became much more painful for the miners. The
greatest want prevailed among them; they had no money, for the
contributions of the workers of all branches of industry in England
availed little among the vast number of strikers, who were forced to
borrow from the small shopkeepers at a heavy loss. The whole press, with
the single exception of the few proletarian journals, was against them;
the bourgeois, even the few among them who might have had enough sense of
justice to support the miners, learnt from the corrupt Liberal and
Conservative sheets only lies about them. A deputation of twelve miners
who went to London received a sum from the proletariat there, but this,
too, availed little among the mass who needed support. Yet, in spite of
all this, the miners remained steadfast, and what is even more
significant, were quiet and peaceable in the face of all the hostilities
and provocation of the mine owners and their faithful servants. No act
of revenge was carried out, not a renegade was maltreated, not one single
theft committed. Thus the strike had continued well on towards four
months, and the mine owners still had no prospect of getting the upper
hand. One way was, however, still open to them. They remembered the
cottage system; it occurred to them that the houses of the rebellious
spirits were THEIR property. In July, notice to quit was served the
workers, and, in a week, the whole forty thousand were put out of doors.
This measure was carried out with revolting cruelty. The sick, the
feeble, old men and little children, even women in childbirth, were
mercilessly turned from their beds and cast into the roadside ditches.
One agent dragged by the hair from her bed, and into the street, a woman
in the pangs of childbirth. Soldiers and police in crowds were present,
ready to fire at the first symptom of resistance, on the slightest hint
of the Justices of the Peace, who had brought about the whole brutal
procedure. This, too, the working-men endured without resistance. The
hope had been that the men would use violence; they were spurred on with
all force to infringements of the laws, to furnish an excuse for making
an end of the strike by the intervention of the military. The homeless
miners, remembering the warnings of their Attorney General, remained
unmoved, set up their household goods upon the moors or the harvested
fields, and held out. Some, who had no other place, encamped on the
roadsides and in ditches, others upon land belonging to other people,
whereupon they were prosecuted, and, having caused "damage of the value
of a halfpenny," were fined a pound, and, being unable to pay it, worked
it out on the treadmill. Thus they lived eight weeks and more of the wet
fag-end of last summer under the open sky with their families, with no
further shelter for themselves and their little ones than the calico
curtains of their beds; with no other help than the scanty allowances of
their Union and the fast shrinking credit with the small dealers.
Hereupon Lord Londonderry, who owns considerable mines in Durham,
threatened the small tradesmen in "his" town of Seaham with his most high
displeasure if they should continue to give credit to "his" rebellious
workers. This "noble" lord made himself the first clown of the turnout
in consequence of the ridiculous, pompous, ungrammatical ukases addressed
to the workers, which he published from time to time, with no other
result than the merriment of the nation. When none of their efforts
produced any effect, the mine owners imported, at great expense, hands
from Ireland and such remote parts of Wales as have as yet no labour
movement. And when the competition of workers against workers was thus
restored, the strength of the strikers collapsed. The mine owners
obliged them to renounce the Union, abandon Roberts, and accept the
conditions laid down by the employers. Thus ended at the close of
September the great five months' battle of the coal miners against the
mine owners, a battle fought on the part of the oppressed with an
endurance, courage, intelligence, and coolness which demands the highest
admiration. What a degree of true human culture, of enthusiasm and
strength of character, such a battle implies on the part of men who, as
we have seen in the Children's Employment Commission's Report, were
described as late as 1840, as being thoroughly brutal and wanting in
moral sense! But how hard, too, must have been the pressure which
brought these forty thousand colliers to rise as one man and to fight out
the battle like an army not only well-disciplined but enthusiastic, an
army possessed of one single determination, with the greatest coolness
and composure, to a point beyond which further resistance would have been
madness. And what a battle! Not against visible, mortal enemies, but
against hunger, want, misery, and homelessness, against their own
passions provoked to madness by the brutality of wealth. If they had
revolted with violence, they, the unarmed and defenceless, would have
been shot down, and a day or two would have decided the victory of the
owners. This law-abiding reserve was no fear of the constable's staff,
it was the result of deliberation, the best proof of the intelligence and
self-control of the working-men.
Thus were the working-men forced once more, in spite of their unexampled
endurance, to succumb to the might of capital. But the fight had not
been in vain. First of all, this nineteen weeks' strike had torn the
miners of the North of England forever from the intellectual death in
which they had hitherto lain; they have left their sleep, are alert to
defend their interests, and have entered the movement of civilisation,
and especially the movement of the workers. The strike, which first
brought to light the whole cruelty of the owners, has established the
opposition of the workers here, forever, and made at least two-thirds of
them Chartists; and the acquisition of thirty thousand such determined,
experienced men is certainly of great value to the Chartists. Then, too,
the endurance and law-abiding which characterised the whole strike,
coupled with the active agitation which accompanied it, has fixed public
attention upon the miners. On the occasion of the debate upon the export
duty on coal, Thomas Duncombe, the only decidedly Chartist member of the
House of Commons, brought up the condition of the coal miners, had their
petition read, and by his speech forced the bourgeois journals to
publish, at least in their reports of Parliamentary proceedings, a
correct statement of the case. Immediately after the strike, occurred
the explosion at Haswell; Roberts went to London, demanded an audience
with Peel, insisted as representative of the miners upon a thorough
investigation of the case, and succeeded in having the first geological
and chemical notabilities of England, Professors Lyell and Faraday,
commissioned to visit the spot. As several other explosions followed in
quick succession, and Roberts again laid the details before the Prime
Minister, the latter promised to propose the necessary measures for the
protection of the workers, if possible, in the next session of
Parliament, _i.e_., the present one of 1845. All this would not have
been accomplished if these workers had not, by means of the strike,
proved themselves freedom-loving men worthy of all respect, and if they
had not engaged Roberts as their counsel.
Scarcely had it become known that the coal miners of the North had been
forced to renounce the Union and discharge Roberts, when the miners of
Lancashire formed a Union of some ten thousand men, and guaranteed their
Attorney General a salary of 1200 pounds a year. In the autumn of last
year they collected more than 700 pounds, rather more than 200 pounds of
which they expended upon salaries and judicial expenses, and the rest
chiefly in support of men out of work, either through want of employment
or through dissensions with their employers. Thus the working-men are
constantly coming to see more clearly that, united, they too are a
respectable power, and can, in the last extremity, defy even the might of
the bourgeoisie. And this insight, the gain of all labour movements, has
been won for all the miners of England by the Union and the strike of
1844. In a very short time the difference of intelligence and energy
which now exists in favour of the factory operatives will have vanished,
and the miners of the kingdom will be able to stand abreast of them in
every respect. Thus one piece of standing ground after another is
undermined beneath the feet of the bourgeoisie; and how long will it be
before their whole social and political edifice collapses with the basis
upon which it rests? {259}
But the bourgeoisie will not take warning. The resistance of the miners
does but embitter it the more. Instead of appreciating this forward step
in the general movement of the workers, the property-holding class saw in
it only a source of rage against a class of people who are fools enough
to declare themselves no longer submissive to the treatment they had
hitherto received. It saw in the just demands of the non-possessing
workers only impertinent discontent, mad rebellion against "Divine and
human order;" and, in the best case, a success (to be resisted by the
bourgeoisie with all its might) won by "ill-intentioned demagogues who
live by agitation and are too lazy to work." It sought, of course,
without success, to represent to the workers that Roberts and the Union's
agents whom the Union very naturally had to pay, were insolent swindlers,
who drew the last farthing from the working-men's pockets. When such
insanity prevails in the property-holding class, when it is so blinded by
its momentary profit that it no longer has eyes for the most conspicuous
signs of the times, surely all hope of a peaceful solution of the social
question for England must be abandoned. The only possible solution is a
violent revolution, which cannot fail to take place.