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The bane and antidote of England is her immense manufacturing power--the
faculty that enables her to inundate, the whole habitable globe with the
products of her industry, is at once the source of her prosperity and
poverty--her millionaire mill-owners and her impoverished thousands.
Never was the skill of machinery pushed to the same wonderful--never the
results of mechanical invention so astoundingly developed. Men, are but
the presiding genii over the wonder-working slaves of their creative
powers, and the child, is the volition that gives impulse to the giant
force of a mighty engine. Subdivision of labour, carried to an extent
almost incredible, has facilitated despatch, and induced a higher degree
of excellence in every branch of mechanism--human ingenuity is racked,
chemical analysis investigated, mathematical research explored--and all,
that Mr. Binns, of Birmingham, may make thirteen minikin pins--while Mr.
Sims, of Stockport, has been making but twelve. Let him but succeed in
this, and straightway his income is quadrupled--his eldest son is
member for a manufacturing borough, his second is a cornet in the Life
Guards--his daughter, with a fortune of one hundred thousand pounds,
is married to the heir of a marquisate--and his wife, soaring above
the murky atmosphere of the factory, breathes the purer air of western
London, and advertises her _soirees_ in the _Morning Post_. The pursuit
of wealth is now the grand characteristic of our age and country; and
the headlong race of money-getting seems the great feature of the day.
To this end the thundering steamer ploughs the white-crested wave of the
broad Atlantic--to this end the clattering locomotive darts through
the air at sixty miles the hour--for this, the thousand hammers of the
foundry, the ten thousand wheels of the factory are at work--and man,
toiling like a galley-slave, scarce takes time to breathe in his mad
career, as with straining eyeballs and outstretched hands, he follows in
the pursuit of lucre.
Now, men are imitative creatures; and strange enough, too, they are
oftentimes disposed from the indulgence of the faculty to copy things,
and adapt them to purposes very foreign to their original destination.
This manufacturing speed, this steeple-chase of printed calico and
Paisley wear, is all very well while it is limited to the districts
where it began.
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That two hundred and seventy thousand white cotton night-caps, with a
blue tassel on every one of them, can be made in twenty-four hours
at Messrs. Twist and Tredlem's factory, is a very gratifying fact,
particularly to all who indulge in ornamental headgear--but we see
no reason for carrying this dispatch into the Court of Chancery, and
insisting that every nod of the woolsack is to decide a suit at law. Yet
have the lawyer and the physician both adopted the impetuous practices
of the manufacturing world, and Haste, red haste! is now the cry.
Lord Brougham's Chancery practice was only to be equalled by one of Lord
Waterford's steeple-chases. He took all before him in a fly--he rode
straight, plenty of neck, baulked nothing--up leap or down leap, sunk
fence or double ditch, post and rail, or quickset, stone wall, or clay
bank, all one to him--go it he would. Others might deny his judgment; he
wanted to get over the ground, and _that_ he did do.
The West-end physician, in the same way, visits his fifty patients
daily, walks his hospital, delivers a lecture to old ladies about
some “curious provision” of nature in the palm of the human hand (for
fee-taking); and devoting something like three minutes and twelve
seconds to each sick man's case, pockets some twenty thousand per annum
by his dispatch.
Speed is now the _El Dorado_. Jelly is advertised to be made in a
minute, butter in five, soup seasoned and salted in three seconds of
time. Even the Quakers--bless their quiet hearts!--could n't escape
the contagion and actually began to walk and talk with some faint
resemblance to ordinary mortals. The church alone maintained the even
tenor of its way, and moved not in the wild career of the whirlwind
world about it. Such was my gratulation, when my eye fell upon the
following passage of the _Times_. Need I say with what a heavy heart I
read it? It is Mr. Rushton who speaks:--
“In the month of December, 1841, he heard that a man had been found dead
in the streets of Liverpool; that all the property he possessed had been
taken from his person, and that an attempt to trace his identity had
been made in vain. He was taken to the usual repository for the dead,
where au inquest had been held upon him, and from the 'dead house,' as
it was called, he was removed to the workhouse burial-ground. The man
who drove the hearse on the occasion was very old, and not very capable
of giving evidence. His attendant was an idiot. It had been represented
to Mr. Hodgson and himself that the dead man had been taken in the
clothes in which he died and put into a coffin which was too small for
him; that a shroud was put over him; that the lid of the coffin would
not go down; and that he was taken from the dead-house and buried in
the parochial ground, no funeral rites having been performed on the
occasion. It had also been communicated to Mr. Hodgson and himself that,
after two days, the clergyman who was instructed to perform those rites
over the paupers, came and performed one service for the dead over all
the paupers who had been buried in the intermediate time.”
Now, without stopping to criticise the workhouse equipage, which appears
to be driven by a man too old to speak, with an idiot for his companion;
nor even to advert to the scant ceremony of burying a man in his daily
dress, and in a coffin that would not close on him--what shall we say of
the “patent parson power” that buries paupers in detachments, and reads
the service over platoons of dead? The reverend chaplain feeling
the uncertainty of human life, and knowing how frail is our the to
existence, waits in the perfect conviction of a large party before he
condescends to appear. Knowing that dead men tell no tales, he surmises
also that they don't run away, and so he says to himself--these people
are not pressed for time, they 'll be here when I come again--it is a
sickly season, and we 'll have a field-day on Saturday. Cheap soup for
the poor, says Mrs. Fry. Cheap justice, says O'Connell. Cheap clothing,
says a tailor who makes new clothes from old, with a machine called a
devil--but cheap burial is the boast of the Liverpool chaplain, and he
is the most original among them.
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