Captains of Industry Part 13

Here he set on foot the most liberal and far-reaching plans for the benefit of the working people and their children. He built commodious and beautiful school-rooms, in which the children were taught better, in some respects, than the sons of the n.o.bility were taught at Eton or Harrow. Besides the usual branches, he had the little sons and daughters of the people drilled regularly in singing, dancing, military exercises, and polite demeanor. He made one great mistake, due rather to the ignorance of the age than his own: he over-taught the children--the commonest and fatalest of errors to new-born zeal. But his efforts generally for the improvement of the people were wonderfully successful.

"For twenty-nine years," as he once wrote to Lord Brougham, "we did without the necessity for magistrates or lawyers; without a single legal punishment; without any known poors' rates; without intemperance or religious animosities. We reduced the hours of labor, well educated all the children from infancy, greatly improved the condition of the adults, and cleared upward of three hundred thousand pounds profit."

Having won this great success, he fell into an error to which strong, self-educated men are peculiarly liable,--_he judged other people by himself_. He thought that men in general, if they would only try, could do as well for themselves and others as he had. He thought there could be a New Lanark without a Robert Owen. Accustomed all his life to easy success, he was not aware how exceptional a person he was, and he did not perceive that the happiness of the people who worked for him was due as much to his authority as a master as to his benevolence as a man. The consequence was that he devoted the rest of his life to going about the world telling people how much better they would be off if they would stop competing with one another, and act together for their common good.

Why have one hundred kitchens, one hundred ovens, and one hundred cooks, when the work done in them could be better done in one kitchen, with one oven, by five cooks? This was one question that he asked.

Here is the steam engine, he would say, doing as much work in Great Britain as the labor power of two worlds as populous as ours could do without it. Yet the ma.s.s of the people find life more difficult than it was centuries ago. How is this? Such questions Robert Owen pondered day and night, and the results he reached were three in number:--

1. The steam engine necessitates radical changes in the structure of society.

2. Cooperation should take the place of compet.i.tion.

3. Civilized people should no longer live in cities and separate homes, but in communities of fifteen hundred or two thousand persons each, who should own houses and lands in common, and labor for the benefit of the whole.

In spreading abroad these opinions he spent forty of the best years of his life, and the greater part of a princely income. At first, and for a considerable time, such was the magnetism of his presence, and the contagion of his zeal, that his efforts commanded the sympathy, and even the approval, of the ruling cla.s.ses of England,--the n.o.bility and clergy. But in the full tide of his career as a reformer he deliberately placed himself in opposition to religion. At a public meeting in London he declared in his bland, impressive way, without the least heat or ill-nature, that all the religions of the world, whether ancient or modern, Christian or pagan, were erroneous and hurtful.

Need I say that from that moment the influential cla.s.ses, almost to a man, dropped him? One of the few who did not was the Duke of Kent, the father of Queen Victoria. He remained a steadfast friend to Owen as long as he lived. Mr. Owen founded a community on his own system. Its failure was speedy and complete, as all experiments must be which are undertaken ages too soon. He came to America and repeated the experiment. That also failed in a remarkably short period. a.s.sociated with him in this undertaking was his son, Robert Dale Owen, who has since spent a long and honorable life among us.

Returning to England, Mr. Owen continued to labor in the dissemination of his ideas until the year 1858, when he died at the age of eighty-seven.

Mr. Holyoake, author of "The History of Cooperation in England,"

attributes to the teaching of Robert Owen the general establishment in Great Britain of cooperative stores, which have been successful. As time goes on it is probable that other parts of his system, may become available; and, perhaps, in the course of time, it may become possible for men to live an a.s.sociated life in communities such as he suggested.

But they will never do it until they can get Robert Owens at their head, and learn to submit loyally and proudly to the just discipline essential to success where a large number of persons work together.

JOHN SMEDLEY,

STOCKING-MANUFACTURER.

I wonder men in a factory town should ever have the courage to strike; it brings such woe and desolation upon them all. The first few days, the cessation from labor may be a relief and a pleasure to a large number--a holiday, although a dull and tedious holiday, like a Sunday without any of the alleviations of Sunday--Sunday without Sunday clothes, Sunday bells, Sunday church, Sunday walks and visits. A painful silence reigns in the town. People discover that the factory bell calling them to work, though often unwelcome, was not a hundredth part as disagreeable as the silence that now prevails. The huge mills stand gaunt and dead; there is no noise of machinery, no puff of steam, no faces at the windows.

By the end of the first week the novelty has pa.s.sed, and the money of some of the improvident families is running low. All are upon short allowance, the problem being to prolong life at the minimum of expense.

The man goes without his meat, the mother without her tea, the children without the trifling, inexpensive luxuries with which parental fondness usually treated them. Before the end of the second week a good many are hungry, and the workers begin to pine for employment. Their muscles are as hungry for exercise as their stomachs are for food. The provision dealers are more and more cautious about giving credit. The bank accounts, representing months or years of self-denying economy, begin to lessen rapidly, and careful fathers see that the bulwarks which they have painfully thrown up to defend their children against the wolf are crumbling away a hundred times faster than they were constructed. If the strike lasts a month, one half the population suffers every hour, and suffers more in mind than in body. Anxiety gnaws the soul. Men go about pale, gloomy, and despairing; women sit at home suffering even more acutely; until at last the situation becomes absolutely intolerable; and the strikers are fortunate indeed if they secure a small portion of the advance which they claimed.

Terrible as all this is, I am afraid we must admit that to just such miseries, sometimes rashly encountered, often heroically endured, the workingman owes a great part of the improvement in his condition which has taken place during the last seventy-five years. A strike is like war. It should be the last resort. It should never be undertaken except after long deliberation, and when every possible effort has been made to secure justice by other means. In many instances it is better to submit to a certain degree of injustice than resort to a means of redress which brings most suffering upon the least guilty.

Does the reader know how the industrial cla.s.ses were treated in former times? Mr. George Adcroft, president of an important cooperative organization in England, began life as a coal miner. He has recently given to Mr. Holyoake, author of the "History of Cooperation," some information about the habits and treatment of English miners only forty years ago:--

"They worked absolutely naked, and their daughters worked by their side.

He and others were commonly compelled to work sixteen hours a day; and, from week's end to week's end, they never washed either hands or face.

One Sat.u.r.day night (he was then a lad of fifteen) he and others had worked till midnight, when there were still wagons at the pit's mouth.

They had at last refused to work any later. The foreman told the employer, who waited till they were drawn up to the mouth, and beat them with a stout whip as they came to the surface."

So reports Mr. Holyoake, who could produce, if necessary, from the records of parliamentary investigations, many a ream of similar testimony. In truth, workingmen were scarcely regarded--nay, they were _not_ regarded--as members of the human family. We find proof of this in the ancient laws of every country in Europe. In the reign of Edward VI.

there was a law against idle workmen which shows how they were regarded.

Any laboring man or servant loitering or living idly for the s.p.a.ce of three days could be branded on the breast with the latter V (vagabond) and sentenced to be the slave of the person who arrested him for two years; and that person could "give him bread, water, or small drink, and refuse him meat, and cause him to work by beating, chaining, or otherwise." If he should run away from this treatment, he could be branded on the face with a hot iron with the letter S, and was to be the slave of his master for life.

Nor does there appear to have been any radical improvement in the condition of the workingman until within the memory of men now alive.

When Robert Owen made his celebrated journey in 1815 among the factory towns of Great Britain, for the purpose of collecting evidence about the employment of children in factories, he gathered facts which his son, who traveled with him, speaks of as being too terrible for belief.

"As a rule," says that son (Robert Dale Owen), "we found children of ten years old worked regularly fourteen hours a day, with but half an hour's interval for dinner, which was eaten in the factory.... Some mills were run fifteen, and in exceptional cases sixteen hours a day, with a single set of hands; and they did not scruple to employ children of both s.e.xes from the age of eight.... Most of the overseers carried stout leather thongs, and we frequently saw even the youngest children severely beaten."

This as recently as 1815! Mr. Holyoake himself remarks that, in his youth, he never heard one word which indicated a kindly or respectful feeling between employers and employed; and he speaks of the workshops and factories of those days as "charnel-houses of industry." If there has been great improvement, it is due to these causes: The resistance of the operative cla.s.s; their growth in self-respect, intelligence, and sobriety; and the humanity and wisdom of some employers of labor.

The reader has perhaps seen an article lately printed in several newspapers ent.i.tled: "Strikes and How to Prevent Them," by John Smedley, a stocking manufacturer of Manchester, who employs about eleven hundred persons. He is at the head of an establishment founded about the time of the American Revolution by his grandfather; and during all this long period there has never been any strike, nor even any disagreement between the proprietors and the work-people.

"My ancestors' idea was," says Mr. Smedley, "that those who ride inside the coach should make those as comfortable as possible who are compelled, from the mere accident of birth, to ride outside."

That is the secret of it. Mr. Smedley mentions some of their modes of proceeding, one of which is so excellent that I feel confident it will one day be generally adopted in large factories. A cotton or woolen mill usually begins work in this country at half-past six, and frequently the operatives live half an hour's walk or ride from it. This obliges many of the operatives, especially family men and women, to be up soon after four in the morning, in order to get breakfast, and be at the mill in time. It is the breakfast which makes the difficulty here.

The meal will usually be prepared in haste and eaten in haste; late risers will devour it with one eye on the clock; and of course it cannot be the happy, pleasant thing a breakfast ought to be. But in Mr.

Smedley's mill the people go to work at six without having had their breakfast. At eight the machinery stops, and all hands, after washing in a comfortable wash-room, a.s.semble in what they call the dinner-house, built, furnished, and run by the proprietors. Here they find good coffee and tea for sale at two cents a pint, oatmeal porridge with syrup or milk at about ten cents a week; good bread and b.u.t.ter at cost.

In addition to these articles, the people bring whatever food they wish from home. The meal is enjoyed at clean, well-ordered tables. The employers keep in their service a male cook and female a.s.sistants, who will cook anything the people choose to bring. After breakfast, for fifteen minutes, the people knit, sew, converse, stroll out of doors, or amuse themselves in any way they choose. At half-past eight, the manager takes his stand at a desk in the great dinner-room, gives out a hymn, which the factory choir sings. Then he reads a pa.s.sage from a suitable book,--sometimes from the Bible, sometimes from some other book. Then there is another hymn by the choir; after which all hands go to work, the machinery starting up again at nine.

There is similar accommodation for dinner, and at six work is over for the day. On Sat.u.r.days the mill is closed at half-past twelve, and the people have the whole afternoon for recreation. All the other rules and arrangements are in harmony with this exquisite breakfast scheme.

"We pay full wages," adds Mr. Smedley, "the hands are smart and effective. No man ever loses a day from drunkenness, and rarely can a hand be tempted to leave us. We keep a supply of dry stockings for those women to put on who come from a distance and get their feet wet; and every overlooker has a stock of waterproof petticoats to lend the women going a distance on a wet night."

I would like to cross the sea once more for the purpose of seeing John Smedley, and placing wreaths upon the tombs of his grandfather and father. He need not have told us that whenever he goes through the shops all the people recognize him, and that it is a pleasure to him to be so recognized.

"I wish," he says, "I could make their lot easier, for, with all we can do, factory life is a hard one."

RICHARD COBDEN,

CALICO PRINTER.

An American citizen presented to the English town of Bradford a marble statue of Richard Cobden. It was formally uncovered by Mr. John Bright, in the presence of the mayor and town council, and a large a.s.sembly of spectators. The figure is seven feet in height, and it rests upon a pedestal of Scotch granite polished, which bears the name of COBDEN encircled by an inscription, which summarizes the aims of his public life:--

"FREE TRADE, PEACE AND GOOD WILL AMONG NATIONS."

The giver of this costly and beautiful work was Mr. G. H. Booth, an American partner in a noted Bradford firm. Unhappily Mr. Booth did not live to behold his own gift and share in the happiness of this interesting occasion.

We ought not to be surprised that an American should have paid this homage to the memory of an English statesman. There are plenty of good Americans in this world who were not born in America, and Richard Cobden was one of them. Wherever there is a human being who can intelligently adopt, not as a holiday sentiment merely, but as a sacred principle to be striven for, the inscription borne upon the Cobden statue: "Free trade, peace, and good will among nations," _there_ is an American. And this I say although we have not yet adopted, as we shall soon adopt, the principle of Free Trade.

Cobden was one of the best exemplifications which our times afford of that high quality of a free citizen which we name public spirit. The force of this motive drew him away from a business which yielded a profit of a hundred thousand dollars a year, to spend time, talent, fortune, and life itself, for the promotion of measures which he deemed essential to the welfare of his countrymen.

He did this because he could not help doing it. It was his nature so to do. Circ.u.mstances made him a calico printer, but by the const.i.tution of his mind he was a servant of the State.

His father was an English yeoman; that is, a farmer who owned the farm he tilled. During the last century such farmers have become in England fewer and fewer, until now there are scarcely any left; for there is such a keen ambition among rich people in England to own land that a small proprietor cannot hold out against them. A n.o.bleman has been known to give four or five times its value for a farm bordering upon his estate, because in an old country nothing gives a man so much social importance as the ownership of the soil. Cobden's father, it appears, lost his property, and died leaving nine children with scarcely any provision for their maintenance; so that Richard's first employment was to watch the sheep for a neighboring farmer, and this humble employment he followed on the land and near the residence of the Duke of Richmond, one of the chiefs of that protectionist party which Cobden destroyed.

With regard to his education, he was almost entirely self-taught, or, as Mr. Bright observed, in his most cautious manner:--

"He had no opportunity of attending ancient universities, and availing himself of the advantages, and, I am afraid I must say, in some degree, of suffering from some of the disadvantages, from which some of those universities are not free."