Recent Developments in European Thought Part 10

Here then in Northumberland there is a decent country life, but elsewhere there is an atmosphere of deadness; and it is this deadness of the countryside which explains the horror that new comers to industrial regions frequently expressed at the prospect of a forcible return to the parish of their origin.

'I was told,' says a visitor to Lancashire in 1842, 'that there had been several instances of death by sheer starvation. On asking why application had not been made to the commissioner of the parish for relief, I was informed that they were persons from agricultural districts who, having committed an act of vagrancy, would be sent to their parishes, and that they had rather endure anything in the hope of some manufacturing revival, than return to the condition of farm labourers from which they had emerged. This was a fact perfectly new to me, and at the first blush, truly incredible, but I asked the neighbours in two of the instances quoted ... and they not only confirmed the story, but seemed to consider any appearance of scepticism a mark of prejudice or ignorance.'[32]

3. Though there is little peasant life in England, there is life of a feverish desperate order for many who live in country places. These people are not farm workers nor yet are they craftsmen who supply the industrial needs of the village. They are feeders to the towns, engaged in what is misnamed 'domestic industry'. The life they lead is a sordid replica of an all too sordid original.

Cobbett in a tirade against the Lords of the Loom[33] idealized the old-time union of agriculture and manufacture. The men should work in the fields, while the women and children stayed at home at their spinning wheels, making homespun for the family garments. But the picture was a vanishing one even in his day. Domestic industry does not mean this. The rural distress revealed in the Hand-loom Weavers Commission is the distress of specialized hand-workers, male and female, who are clinging desperately to the worst-paid branch of a dying trade.

The worsted industry of East Anglia is perishing, defeated by the resources of Yorkshire, of which the power-loom is only one. The cloth trade in the Valley of Stroud (Gloucester) is a shadow of its former self. It has lost the power of recovering from a depression. The next period of slackness that comes along may bankrupt the business and rob a village of specialized hand-workers of their main employment.

In Devonshire, the serge trade, which used to give employment to looms in almost every town and village, has become so unremunerative that it has pa.s.sed into the hands of the wives and daughters of mechanics and agricultural labourers. In Oxfordshire in 1834, we are told by the Poor Law Commissions of that year, glove and lace making were vanishing occupations. In the neighbourhood of Banbury 'some make lace and gloves in the villages. Formerly spinning was the work for women in the villages, now there is scarcely any done.'[34]

Since 1834 the process of disintegration had proceeded apace.

We must not, however, convey the impression that domestic industry in 1842 had all but vanished from the countryside. In its ancient strongholds it still endures, but it is in an unhealthy condition, and the towns are sucking its life-blood away.

To ill.u.s.trate this, let us describe the course of a boom in domestic industry and study how the trade boom of 1833-7 reached through to the country silk weavers in Ess.e.x and other places all around London. The terms which we usually apply to the cultivation of land are apposite.

The town workers represent the intensive margin of cultivation, the country workers the extensive margin. First of all the Spitalfield weavers, who have been short of work, have more work given to them. The weavers' wives also get work, and their boys and girls who never were on a loom before are now put to the trade. Fresh hands are introduced. From the Metropolis the demand for labour pushes outwards over the country.

Recourse is had to 'inferior soils'. Old weavers in the villages get work, together with their wives and families. Even farm labourers are impressed. Blemishes for which at other times deductions would be claimed are now over-looked. Carts are sent round to the villages and hamlets with work for the weavers, so that time may not be lost in going to the warehouses to take back or carry home work. Then comes the ebb: 'the immediate effect is that all the less skilful workmen, the dissolute and disorderly, are denied work; the third and fourth looms, those worked by the sons and daughters of the weavers, are all thrown out of use'. The intensiveness of cultivation has been reduced in the towns, the least remunerative no longer pays.

The ebb of the tide, which reduces the quant.i.ty of employment in the towns, leaves the country districts high and dry. 'At such times the country towns and villages to which work is liberally sent, when there is a demand for goods, suffer still more. A staff or skeleton only is kept in pay, and that chiefly with a view to operations when a demand returns.'[35] A skeleton--well said.

Occasional cultivation is bad for land, and worse for human beings. The ribbon-weaving villages north of Coventry are a disorderly eruption from the town. Coventry itself has the better-paid 'engine weaving'; the rural districts have the 'single hand trade'. The country workers, say the Commissioners, 'retain most of their original barbarism with an accession of vice'. The yokels who went out to the French wars innocent boys returned confirmed rogues. b.a.s.t.a.r.dy is greater than ever, despite the new Poor Law. 'It may surprise the denouncers of the factory system to find all the vices and miseries which they attribute to it, flourishing so rankly in the midst of a population not only without the walls of a factory, but also beyond the contamination of a large town.'[36] It may have surprised such people, but it does not surprise us who are surveying the industrial scene and beginning to apprehend the rottenness of that worm-eaten structure which under the misnomer of domestic industry marks the half-way house to full capitalism.

4. Let us now journey to the factory districts of Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire where town lies close upon town, and the tall chimneys envelop in smoke the cottages in which hand-loom weavers work and the children of hand-loom weavers sleep. Let us suppose that we have found our position by Leeds. We should like to follow the track of the new railroads, for we have in our pocket a small green book:

'Bradshaw's Railway Time Tables and a.s.sistant to Railway Travelling'.

'10th Mo. 19th, 1839. Price Sixpence.'

Bradshaw tells us that we can get from Littleborough to Manchester in 11 hours--via Rochdale, Heywood, and Millshill--but it is not clear how we are to get to Littleborough. So we follow an alternative route, the ca.n.a.l. It is a fashionable method of transit for mineral traffic and paupers. Mr. Muggeridge, the emigration agent, tells us how he transported the southern paupers in 1836. 'The journey from London to Manchester was made by boat or waggon, the agents a.s.sisting the emigrants on their journey.'[37] When we got up our geography for the tour out of Thomas Dugdale's 'England and Wales' this is what we read at every turn: 'Keighley: in the deep valley of the Aire, its prosperity had been much increased by the Leeds and Liverpool Ca.n.a.l which pa.s.ses within two miles.' 'Skipton: in a rough mountainous district. The trade has been greatly facilitated by the proximity of the town to the Leeds and Liverpool Ca.n.a.l.' So the Leeds and Liverpool ca.n.a.l shall be our guide.

We leave Bradford, Halifax, and the worsted districts to the left of us, and pa.s.sing by Shipley, approach the cotton district near the Lancashire border. 'The township of Shipley is the western-most locality of the Leeds clothing districts; it runs like a tongue into the worsted district. In like manner the worsted district blends with the cotton district at Steeton, Silsden, and Addingham.' We are pa.s.sing, the Commissioner tells us, from high wages to low. 'The cloth weavers of Shipley work for wages little, if any, higher than those of the worsted weavers; while the worsted weavers north-west of Keighley are reduced down to the cotton standard.'[38]

At Keighley we bend sharply south and soon reach Colne in Lancashire.

Dr. Cook Taylor describes the conditions there in the early part of 1842:

'I visited eighty-eight dwellings, selected at hazard. They were dest.i.tute of furniture save old boxes for tables or stalls, or even large stones for chairs; the beds are composed of straw and shavings. The food was oatmeal and water for breakfast, flour and water, with a little skimmed milk for dinner, oatmeal and water again for a second supply.' He actually saw children in the markets grubbing for the rubbish of roots. And yet, 'all the places and persons I visited were scrupulously clean. Children were in rags, but they were not in filth. In no single instance was I asked for relief.... I never before saw poverty which inspired respect, and misery which demanded involuntary homage.'

From Colne we journey to Accrington. Of its 9,000 inhabitants not more than 100 were fully employed. Numbers kept themselves alive by collecting nettles and boiling them. Some were entirely without food every alternate day, and many had but one meal in the day and that a poor one.[39]

Our last stage is Burnley, where the weavers--to quote again from Dr.

Cook Taylor--'were haggard with famine, their eyes rolling with that fierce and uneasy expression common to maniacs. "We do not want charity," they said, "but employment." I found them all Chartists, but with this difference, that the block-printers and hand-loom weavers united to their Chartism a hatred of machinery which was far from being shared by the factory operatives.'

What a comment on England's industrial supremacy--England with her virtual monopoly of large-scale manufacture in Europe! It must have been a puzzle, too, for the Poor Law Commissioners, who were then building workhouses in these parts for the purpose of depauperizing hand-loom weavers on the less eligibility principle.

But how was it, with such a Poor Law, that the hand-loom weavers did not die of starvation by the thousand? If we enter a cotton mill we shall see why. Within these gaunt walls, which are illumined at night by sputtering gas-light, the factory children work, earning twice as much as their parents, who were too old and too respectable to become factory hands.

By this time, perhaps, it is evening, but this matters nothing to the 'melancholy mad engines', which feed on water or burning coals. The young people will still be there, with eight hours work to their credit and more to do--'kept to work by being spoken to or by a little chastis.e.m.e.nt'.[40]

'I have seen them fall asleep,' said an over-looker in 1833, 'and they have been performing their work with their hands while they were asleep, after the Billy had stopped. Put to bed with supper in their hands, they were clasping it next morning, when their parents dragged them out of bed. Half asleep they stumbled or were carried to the mill, to begin again the ceaseless round.'

'It keeps them out of mischief', said the opponents of shorter hours.

Besides, the conditions were no worse than any other industries! Factory work, however, as the doctors show, was different from work in the mines. The heat and confinement of the mill caused precocious s.e.xual development, whilst in the mines the result of exaggerated muscular development was to delay maturity.

In 1842 conditions are better than they were in 1833--thanks to the factory inspectors. There is little positive cruelty, and the sight of deformity--enlarged ankle bones, bow legs, and knock knees, caused by excessive standing as a child--is rare. The problem now is one of industrial fatigue. The children are 'sick-tired'.

5. The Midlands of Leicestershire, Notts, and Derbyshire are a region of red bricks and pantiles, dotted over valleys of exquisite green. So let us leave the smoke of Lancashire and hover here for a while. Here dwell the stocking workers or frame-work knitters--the people who knit on frames stockings, gloves, and other articles of hosiery. It does not look like a region of industry. There are only a few towns, such as Nottingham, Leicester, and Loughborough; and except for a few lace factories in Nottingham, large buildings are rare. The town knitters either work in their own homes or in shops with standings for perhaps as many as fifty frames. In the villages the knitting is nearly all done in the cottages, opposite long low windows, or in a small out-house which might well be a fowl-house.

But in the streets of Leicester we can see 'life' of a sort. We can watch the procession to the p.a.w.nbrokers. Some of the knitters p.a.w.n their blankets for the day, and most lodge their Sunday clothing during the week. Says a Leicester p.a.w.nbroker:

'We regularly pay away from 40 to 50 (to some 300 persons) every Monday morning or on the Tuesday. They will, perhaps, wash on the Monday and get their linen clean preparatory to the next Sunday, and in the course of the week they bring all the linen things they can spare. Friday is the worst; they will then bring their small trifling articles, such as are scarcely worth a penny, and we lend on them, to enable them to buy a bit of meat or a few trifles for dinner.'[41]

They are too poor to indulge in church-going or alcohol. They have no clothes to go to church in. Their publican is the druggist, where they buy opium for themselves and G.o.dfrey's cordial, a preparation from laudanum, for their children. In the whole of Leicester, with its population of 50,000, there are but nine gin-houses. And only on Sundays do they get a bit of schooling. 'We have only one bit of a cover lid to cover the five of us in winter ... we are all obliged to sleep in one bed.'[42]

A frame smith, making his usual inspection of hosiers' frames at workmen's dwellings in Nottingham, after thus spending a fortnight, found his health had begun to suffer from the squalid wretchedness of their abodes. Thinking to improve it, he went on the same errand into the country, but found the frame-work knitters there in a still more deplorable state. From the bad air and other distressing influences in their condition and that of their dwellings, in another fortnight he returned, too ill to attend to his business for some weeks afterwards.

This occurred in 1843.[43]

Nottingham, however, with its up-to-date lace trade was usually better off than this. The lace factories, like the cotton mills in Lancashire, eased the position of the hand-workers. In Leicestershire the knitters had no such alternative. The more their earnings were reduced, the more helplessly they were bound to their only trade.

6. 1842 is a long while ago! Let us go to sleep for thirty years and wake up in 1871, when the Truck Commissioners are publishing their report.

West of Birmingham lies the black country, an area of some twenty square miles. Here, if we have read the evidence of the Truck Commissioners, we can interpret a dumb-show in Dudley, where the nail-makers dwell.

On Monday mornings the nail-maker emerges from a small hovel containing a smithy and walks into Dudley to call on a gentleman known as a fogger, a petty-fogger if he is a middleman, a market-fogger if he is a master.

The nailer comes out with a bundle of metal which he takes to a second house and changes for a second bundle of metal, and with this he walks away. (The next nailer, not so lucky, hangs about till Wednesday morning, waiting for his metal.) On Sat.u.r.day the nailer comes back with his nails, enters the fogger's shop, and emerges with 12_s._ in his hand. But he does not go home. He slips into a shop close by and parts company with the shillings. In return he gets a parcel, the contents of which are obviously displeasing to him. What has happened?

The nailer is a Government servant. But the Government only employs him indirectly. It puts out contracts for rivets and nails to contractors who sublet their contract, so that the work reaches the nailer at third or fourth hand. The Government, in the interest of public economy (Victorian England is famous for retrenchment), gives its contract to the lowest tenderer; and the policy of the lowest tender is responsible for the dumb-show we have watched.

To begin with, the nailer gets metal which does not suit him, so he has to change it, and this he does at the price of 2_d._ per 10_d._ bundle, at a metal changers, a relative of the fogger. (His friend who has to wait till Wednesday for his bundle is kept idling about in order that he may drink what is left of last week's earnings at a 'wobble shop'

which is owned by yet another branch of the family of fogger.)

When the nailer and his family have worked fourteen hours a day throughout the week, the nailer returns on Sat.u.r.day with the nails, and receives 12_s._ for them. These shillings he takes to the fogger's store and exchanges for tea and other articles. The shillings are 'nimble'; we commend the rapidity of their circulation to Mr. Irving Fisher. A fogger who pays out the shillings from his warehouse receives them back again in a few minutes over the counter of his store. 'He will perhaps reckon with seven or eight at one time, and when he has reckoned with them, and perhaps paid them six, seven, or eight pounds, he will wait until they have gone to the shop and taken the money there as they leave the warehouse. Then he goes into the shop himself for it, as he cannot go on paying without it.'[44]

But surely this is truck! Certainly not. There may be 'fearful cheating'

with tea, but the nailer is not bound to go there. He is perfectly free.

The only trouble is this: it is a case of tea or no work the week following. This is why, despite the Truck Act of 1831 and despite the known existence of the abuse, these practices are rife among the nailers as late as 1871, the year in which the Truck Commissioners issued the Report from which this scene is compiled. The plight of the nailers is not the plight of factory operatives or miners; it is the plight of the frame-work knitters, of men who are bound by the intangible fetters of economic need to the uncontrollable devil of 'semi-capitalism'.

2. MINING OPERATIONS

1. Coal was king of the nineteenth century. The first steam-engine was built to pump water out of coal mines, the first ca.n.a.l was cut to carry the Duke of Bridgwater's coal from Worsley to Manchester. The first railroads were laid around Newcastle to convey the coals from the pit mouth to the river. George Stephenson, the inventor of the locomotive, began life as a trapper on a Tyneside colliery.

Where would English industry have been without its king? In 1780 (in round figures) 5,000,000 tons of coal were raised in the United Kingdom: in 1800, 10,000,000; in 1865, 100,000,000; and in 1897, 200,000,000.

Coal enticed the cotton factories from the dales of the Pennines to the moist lowlands of West Lancashire. At every stage of their work the iron-makers depended on coal; and the great inventions in the iron and steel industry are land-marks in the expansion of the demand for coal--Cort's puddling process 1783, Watt's steam-engine 1785, Neilson's hot blast 1824, Naysmith's steam-hammer 1835, Bessemer's steel-converter 1855, Siemen's open hearth 1870, Thomas' basic process for the treatment of highly phosphoric ores 1878. The steamship, a novelty in 1820, ruled the seas in 1870; and ironclads followed steamships. The smokeless steam-coal of South Wales guarded the heritage of Trafalgar. By the end of the nineteenth century, coaling stations were an important item in international politics.

Meanwhile, the people of England, heedless of Malthusian forebodings, multiplied exceedingly. They lighted their streets and buildings with coal-gas, and burnt coal in their grates. With coal they paid for the food and raw materials from other lands. Imports of food and raw materials were offset by exports of coal and of textiles and hardware produced by coal. The spirit of invention has pushed on to electricity and oil, but coal is still the pivot of English industry and commerce.