Recent Developments in European Thought Part 12

He was right as to the factory districts, but not quite right as to Lancashire. In Prescot, a small Lancashire town on the fringe of the factory district, the watchmakers in 1871 were being paid in watches.

The masters alleged that they only gave watches to the workers when the latter had orders for them, but the evidence showed that these orders only came to hand when the men were asking for fresh work. The p.a.w.nbrokers explained what happened. 'Watches', said a p.a.w.nbroker's clerk, 'pa.s.s from hand to hand as a circulating medium until they get very low in the market and are p.a.w.ned.'[62] The p.a.w.nshop in question had 700 watches on pledge, most of them belonging to workmen in the town.

In railway contracting truck was prevalent in the forties. In roving employment of this type it is difficult to see how some form of contractor's shop could have been avoided. The navvy needed canteens or Y.M.C.A. huts, but such things had not been thought of then. However, when the big period of railway construction came to an end, the question lost its importance.

South Staffordshire and the Black Country were the ancient strongholds of truck. The campaigns against truck originated here. The nailers, the cash-paying masters, and the respectable ratepayers joined together to promote the Truck Act of 1820. Lord Hatherton, a Staffordshire n.o.bleman, after three years hammering at the House of Commons, obtained the Truck Act of 1831. But in 1843, the year of the Midland Mining Commission, truck was still rife in the coalfields. The well-known Tommy-shop scene in Disraeli's novel _Sybil_, which was published in 1845, is taken direct from the Commissioners' Report. Diggs, the b.u.t.ty of the novel, is Banks, the coal proprietor of the Report. In the novel the people say of Master Joseph Diggs, the son: 'He do swear at the women, when they rush in for the first turn, most fearful; they do say he's a shocking little dog.' In the Report, page 93, the miner's wife says: 'He swears at the women when the women are trying to crush in. He is a shocking little dog.' One touch is Disraeli's own. He makes the miners keen to purchase 'the young Queen's picture'. 'If the Queen would do something for us poor men, it would be a blessed job.' In the Report there is nothing about this, but there is a section dealing with Chartism.

However, the truck-shop was gradually disappearing. Every year it became easier to expose evasions, and in good times the workers used their prosperity to slip away from the Company store. In 1850 a final campaign was initiated by five local Anti-Truck a.s.sociations, backed by the National Miners' a.s.sociation under Alexander MacDonald.

Truck-masters were prosecuted and truck was steadily dislodged from the coalfields and adjacent ironworks. Only in the nail trade did it survive, for the reason that the complete subjection of the nailers made it possible to practise the essentials of truck without a formal violation of the law.

In the remaining colliery districts in 1871 truck was prevalent only in West Scotland and South Wales.

In West Scotland it was yielding ground before the pressure of the unions. The companies only maintained it by active coercion. If a miner held out for money, they had to yield; and if they were malicious, they marked him as a sloper and dismissed him the first when a depression came. 'Black lists', said the Truck Commissioners, 'are often kept of slopers; threats of dismissal were repeatedly proved; and cases of actual dismissal for not dealing at the store are not rare.'[63]

However, the masters themselves were getting tired of it, since it led so frequently to strikes.

Truck in South Staffordshire was bound up with the b.u.t.ty system; in railway construction with the system of contracting and sub-contracting, and similarly in South Wales, as also in the west of Scotland, it was bound up with and dependent on the system of long pays. In order to carry on from one pay day to the next, the men got advances on the company's store. In this way many lived permanently ahead of their wages. The thriftless and drunkards were always 'advance men, but the provident miners hated it and only dealt there on compulsion'.

The Commissioners drew a vivid picture of Turn Book morning in South Wales at the close of the pay month.

At 1 or 2 a.m. the women and children begin to arrive with their Advance Books. Perhaps one hundred would be there, wet or fine, sleeping on the doorsteps or singing ballads until morning.

At 5.30 a.m. the doors opened, and the waiters made a rush for the counter. Advance Books were produced, and goods handed over up to the amount of wages which would shortly fall due. Women took their pick of the articles, groceries, tobacco, occasionally a few shillings.

'It is quite usual', say the Commissioners, 'for shoemakers and other small tradesmen in the neighbourhood of Abersychan to be paid by the workmen in goods.... Tobacco in several districts of South Wales has become nothing less than a circulating medium. It is bought by the men and resold by them for drink, and finds its way back again to some of the Company's shops. Packets of tobacco pa.s.s unopened from hand to hand. An Ebbw Vale grocer who took the Company's tobacco at a discount declared: "For years, when they were selling it for 1_s._ 4_d._ a lb. I used to give 1_s._; but I was so much over-flooded with it that I was obliged to reduce the price to 11_d._ That would not do still, and I had to reduce it to 10_d._ I told the men to take it to some other shop if they could get 11_d._ or 1_s._ for it. I was obliged to do that many a time, in order to get rid of the large stocks I held in hand.

Tobacco will not keep for many months without getting worse."'

Weekly pays, therefore, were the constant demand of the miners' unions.

In Northumberland and Durham, whence truck had disappeared long ago, pays were fortnightly, and the only objection advanced by the owners against weekly pays was the practical inconvenience of the pressure on the pay staff. In the North of England Iron Trade, weekly pays, the Commissioners found, had just been introduced. In West Scotland some of the coal-owners were trying to recoup themselves for the loss of their truck-shop by charging poundage on the men's wages. But this dodge, like the bigger grievance of truck, was stoutly resisted by the local union.

Indeed, in one coalfield after another the disappearance of truck and kindred evils coincides with the appearance of strong County Unions.

6. We are given to understand that the miners of South Wales insist on economics written by sound labour men. We therefore offer them a few suggestions for a history of the currency in the nineteenth century from the worker's point of view.

i. In 1800 London relied for small coin on private enterprise.

Every week the Jews' boys collected from the shopkeepers their bad shillings, buying them at a heavy discount, with serviceable copper coin forged in Birmingham (_vide_ Patrick Colquhoun, _A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis_, 1800, Chapter VII).

The resumption of cash payments in 1819 was injurious; for owing to the shortage of small coin, the wage-earners were paid in bulk with large notes, which they had to split at the nearest public-house. The Truck Act of 1831 prohibited wage-payments in notes on Banks more than 15 miles distant, but said nothing about cheques--an oversight which the capitalists repeated in their Bank Act of 1844.

ii. The general dissatisfaction with the state of the currency led to attempts to dispense with coin. About 1830 Labour Exchanges were opened in London for the exchange of goods against time notes, representing one or more hours of labour. The originator was Robert Owen, and the failure of the Exchanges was probably due to the fact that Owen was at heart a capitalist.

The National Equitable Labour Exchange at one time was doing a business of over 20,000 hours per week, but very shortly after this, the President (Owen) had to report a serious deficiency of hours, many thousands having been mislaid or stolen. The Exchange in consequence had to close its doors.

iii. In the 'forties the centre of interest is the Midlands, and the period may be termed the Staffordshire or beer period. The currency was very popular and highly liquid, but it was issued to excess and difficult to store. More solid surrogates were therefore tried. A Bilston p.a.w.nbroker[64] said that he had in p.a.w.n numerous batches of flour, which the men's wives had brought from the Truck Shops and turned into money, in order to pay their house-rents. Flour, however, was not so hard as a Prescot watch.

iv. We come next to the Welsh or Tobacco period, when the currency was easily transferable, but liable to deterioration.

v. Finally, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the world of labour attained to a cash basis, and there was no Cobbett to denounce the resumption.

We shall not be guilty of serious exaggeration if we preface our history with the motto:

'_In the nineteenth century the Trade Unions and the Trade Unions alone made the nominal earnings of the working man a cash reality_.'

3. THE SPIRIT OF a.s.sOCIATION

1. The student of Dicey's Law and Opinion in England is invited to distinguish three periods:

i. The period of old Toryism or legislative quiescence (1800-38).

ii. The period of Benthamism or individualism (1825-70).

iii. The period of collectivism (1865-1900).

Bentham lived during the first period and his name is rightly given to the second period.

The student, therefore, comes to wonder if there is anything which is not Benthamism. Benthamism, he says to himself, stands for individualism. How then can the period of Benthamism include the humanitarian legislation which begins with the first Factory Act of 1802 and broadens out during the middle of the century into the elaborate code regulating from then onwards the conditions of employment in workshops, factories, and mines? How can a monster beget an angel?

We may perhaps throw light on this difficulty by suggesting that the _social_ trend from 1825-70 cannot be compressed into a single word.

Individualism may suffice to define the dominant _legal_ trend, but it conceals the influence exerted on the legislature from without and from below by the action of voluntary a.s.sociations. The period of voluntary a.s.sociation coincides with and overlaps the period of individualism.

2. What Bentham was to individualism, Robert Owen was to voluntary a.s.sociation. Bentham himself was an admirer of Owen and supported his philanthropy, but, as expressions of a social att.i.tude, Benthamism and Owenism were poles asunder. The contrast between the two is admirably displayed in the evidence given before the Factory Committee of 1816 by two representatives of the employing cla.s.s, Josiah Wedgwood of pottery fame and Robert Owen himself.

'In the state of society,' said Wedgwood, 'in which there is evidently a progressive movement, it is much better to leave things as they are than to attempt to amend the general state of things in detail. The only safe way of securing the comfort of any people is to leave them at liberty to make the best use of their time, and to allow them to appropriate their earnings in such way as they think fit.'[65]

Robert Owen thought otherwise. In a couple of answers he exposed the fallacy of enlightened self-interest. They seem obvious enough to-day, but in 1816 they were the voice of one crying in the wilderness. He was asked whether he believed that 'there is that want of affection and feeling on the part of parents, that would induce them to exact from their children more labour than they could perform without injury to their health;' and he replied:

'I do not imagine that there is the smallest difference between the general affection of the lower order of the people, except with regard to that which may be produced by the different circ.u.mstances in which they are placed.'[66]

Another question was: 'Do you conceive that it is not injurious to the manufacturer to hazard, by overwork, the health of the people so employed?' He replied:

'If those persons were purchased by the manufacturers I should say decisively, yes; but as they are not purchased by the manufacturer and the country must bear all the loss of their strength and their energy{;} it does not appear, at first sight, to be the interest of the manufacturer to do so.'[67]

Owen had grasped the meaning of social responsibility, and he devoted his life to social service. But he was too wayward to observe the conventions of society, and pa.s.sed beyond the social pale. The factory reformer became the Socialist. Whether his disciples comprehended his philosophy we may doubt, but he understood better than any one else their instinct for a.s.sociation, and he gratified it.

It is not contended that Owen was responsible for all the a.s.sociative effort of his generation; for with political and religious a.s.sociations he had no sympathy. But the spirit which infected him infected others after him, rousing them to a.s.sociate now for this, and now for that social or religious or political purpose.

3. We may divide a.s.sociations for social purposes into two cla.s.ses.

To the first cla.s.s belong a.s.sociations formed to secure the abolition of some abuse. These naturally disappear when their object is attained.

For example, there was the Anti-slavery Campaign in which Joseph Sturge and other Quakers played so prominent a part. By an organized crusade of political education the Abolitionists induced an originally hostile Parliament to emanc.i.p.ate the West Indian negroes in 1833, and to shorten the period of semi-servile apprenticeship in 1838. Yorkshire was the home of the Short Time Committees, which organized the campaign against White Slavery at home. The Ten Hours Movement caused the Ten Hours Bill to become the law of the land. From Lancashire came the Anti-Corn Law League, whose story is told in another chapter.

The second cla.s.s of a.s.sociation was the a.s.sociation for economic betterment--the Friendly Society, the Co-operative Society, the Trade Union. Conceived in enthusiasm and self-inspired, these a.s.sociations asked only of the State a legal framework in which to develop, but they did not win it without struggle and delay.

The Government was anxious to encourage thrift, but the development of the Friendly Societies was impeded for a time by legislation aimed at political conspiracy. The Corresponding Societies Act of 1799 prevented the Friendly Societies from forming a central organization with branches, and the Dorchester Labourers of 1834 discovered the peril into which the ritual of oaths might lead innocent men.

These deterrents were removed by enabling legislation. In 1829 a central authority, the Registrar of Friendly Societies, was appointed to supervise Friendly Societies, and between 1829 and 1875 further privileges and safeguards were conferred. But the Friendly Society Movement throughout the nineteenth century was wholly voluntary. In 1911 the situation was suddenly reversed by the pa.s.sing of the National Insurance Act.

The Co-operative Societies were more suspect. They crept into legal recognition as the children of the Friendly Society, under the 'frugal investments' clause of the Act of 1846, being compelled by the legal prejudice against a.s.sociation in restraint of trade to adopt this unnatural mother. Their real nature was recognized in 1852, when they were brought under the Industrial and Provident Societies Act, and in 1862, when they were granted the boon of limited liability. But the accident of their legal origin still survives; for they are regulated to-day by the Industrial and Provident Societies Act of 1893. The Co-operative Movement is now drawing closer to politics, following the lead of most of the continental countries, notably Belgium and Germany.

Though we cannot say that there is any indication of the State taking over the movement, we may note that the growth of munic.i.p.al trading in the 'nineties was, in principle, an application of the consumers'