Part 4

Your birds (says our friend, resuming his work, and addressing himself again to the Zoological Society), are as happy as the day is--he was about to add, long, but glances at the light and substitutes--short. Their natural habits are perfectly understood, their structure is well-considered, and they have nothing to desire. Pass from your birds to those members of your collection whom Mr. Rogers used to call, “our poor relations.” Of course I mean the monkeys. They have an artificial climate carefully prepared for them. They have the blessing of congenial society carefully secured to them. They are among their own tribes and connexions. They have shelves to skip upon, and pigeon-holes to creep into. Graceful ropes dangle from the upper beams of their sitting-rooms, by which they swing, for their own enjoyment, the fascination of the fair sex, and the instruction of the enquiring minds of the rising generation. Pass from our poor relations to that beast, the Hippopotamus--What do you mean?

The last enquiry is addressed, not to the Zoological Society, but to the Bulldog, who has deserted his position, and is sneaking away. Passing his brush into the left thumb on which he holds his palette, our friend leisurely walks up to the Bulldog, and slaps his face! Even we, whose faith is great, expect to see him next moment with the Bulldog hanging on to his nose; but, the Bulldog is abjectly polite, and would even wag his tail if it had not been bitten off in his infancy.

Pass, I was saying (coolly pursues our friend at his easel again), from our poor relations to that impersonation of sensuality, the Hippopotamus. How do you provide for him? Could he find, on the banks of the Nile, such a villa as you have built for him on the banks of the Regent’s canal? Could he find, in his native Egypt, an appropriately furnished drawing-room, study, bath, wash-house, and spacious pleasure-ground, all en suite, and always ready? I think not. Now, I beseech your managing committee and your natural philosophers, to come with me and look at the Lions.

Here, our friend seizes a piece of charcoal and instantly produces, on a new canvas standing on another easel near, a noble Lion and Lioness. The Bulldog (who deferentially resumed his position after having his face slapped), looks on in manifest uneasiness, lest this new proceeding should have something to do with him.

There! says our friend, throwing the charcoal away, There they are! The majestic King and Queen of quadrupeds. The British Lion is no longer a fictitious creature in the British coat of arms. You produce your British Lion every year from this royal couple. And how, with all the vast amount of resources, knowledge, and experience at your command, how do you treat these your great attractions? From day to day, I find the noble creatures patiently wearing out their weary lives in narrow spaces where they have hardly room to turn, and condemned to face in the roughest weather a bitter Nor’-Westerly aspect. Look at those wonderfully-constructed feet, with their exquisite machinery for alighting from springs and leaps. What do you conceive to be the kind of ground to which those feet are, in the great foresight of Nature, least adapted? Bare, smooth, hard boards, perhaps, like the deck of a ship? Yes. A strange reason why you should choose that and no other flooring for their dens!

Why, Heaven preserve us! (cries our friend, frightening the Bulldog very much) do any of you keep a cat? Will any of you do me the favour to watch a cat in a field or garden, on a bright sunshiny day--how she crouches in the mould, rolls in the sand, basks in the grass, delights to vary the surface upon which she rests, and change the form of the substance upon which she takes her ease. Compare such surfaces and substances with the one uniform, unyielding, unnatural, unelastic, inappropriate piece of human carpentery upon which these beautiful animals, with their vexed faces, pace and repace, and pass each other two hundred and fifty times an hour.

It is really incomprehensible (our friend proceeds), in you who should be so well acquainted with animals, to call these boards--or that other uncomfortable boarded object like a Mangle with the inside taken out--a Bed, for creatures with these limbs and these habits. That, a Bed for a Lion and Lioness, which does not even give them a chance of being bruised in a new place? Learn of your cat again, and see how _she_ goes to bed. Did you ever find her, or any living creature, go to bed, without re-arranging to the whim and sensation of the moment, the materials of the bed itself? Don’t you, the Zoological Society, punch and poke your pillows, and settle into suitable places in your beds? Consider then, what the discomfort of these magnificent brutes must be, to whom you leave no diversity of choice, no power of new arrangement, and as to whose unchanging and unyielding beds you begin with a form and substance that have no parallel in their natural lives. If you doubt the pain they must endure, go to museums and colleges where the bones of lions and other animals of the feline tribe who have lived in captivity under similar circumstances, are preserved; and you will find them thickly encrusted with a granulated substance, the result of long lying upon unnatural and uncomfortable planes.

I will not be so pressing as to the feeding of my Royal Friends (pursues the Master), but even there I think you are wrong. You may rely upon it, that the best regulated families of Lions and Lionesses don’t dine every day punctually at the same hour, in their natural state, and don’t always keep the same kind and quantity of meat in the larder. However, I will readily waive that question of board, if you will only abandon the other.

The time of the sitting being out, our friend takes his palette from his thumb, lays it aside with his brush, ceases to address the Zoological Society, and releases the Bulldog and myself. Having occasion to look closely at the Bulldog’s chest, he turns that model over as if he were made of clay (if I were to touch him with my little finger he would pin me instantly), and examines him without the smallest regard to his personal wishes or convenience. The Bulldog, having humbly submitted, is shown to the door.

“Eleven precisely, to-morrow,” says our friend, “or it will be the worse for you.” The Bulldog respectfully slouches out. Looking out of the window, I presently see him going across the garden, accompanied by a particularly ill-looking proprietor with a black eye--my prototype I presume--again a ferocious and audacious Bulldog, who will evidently kill some other dog before he gets home.

THE MANCHESTER STRIKE.

There can be no doubt that the judgment to be formed upon a strike among the operatives in a great factory district, if it is to be worth anything, must be based upon a more difficult chain of reasoning than usually goes to the consideration of irregularities in the appointed course of trade. Perfectly free competition regulates all prices, it is said; and, in most callings, regulates with certainty the price of labour. A self-adjusting power is introduced by it into the usual machinery of commerce. So far as regards labour, the working of it is that, as a rule, every man goes where he can get most value for such work as he can best perform; and every man who wants labour will, to the extent his capital allows, vie with his neighbours in attempting to secure to his service the best labour he can meet with of the sort he wants. That is the ordinary course of trade. Only the true price stands, and that price being the lowest by which men of average capabilities find that they can live, a poor trade entails secret hardships; middling trade a bare subsistence; and none but a very brisk trade affords chance of wealth. So it is with the price of skilled labour; but, with the price of unskilled labour, it is scarcely so. In each class of men possessing special capabilities, there is a given number only, and the aim of each of their employers is to do what he can towards securing for himself, out of that number, the best. For the absolutely unskilled, there can be no competition when a mass of the population, ignorant and in sore need, is pressing forward to receive a dole of such work as it can perform; or, if there be a competition, it is of an inverse kind--a struggle among thousands for the food of hundreds; each striving by the most desperate offer of cheap labour--sometimes even an hour’s work for a farthing--to secure a portion of the necessary subsistence.

Skilled labour is, with but few exceptions, subject to an inevitable law, with which employer and employed alike must be content to bring their operations into harmony. But, with unskilled labour, the compulsion set on the employer is in no proportion to that set on the employed. Wages in that case are not regulated by a just regard to the fair relations between capital and labour; the question among competitors being not who shall, by paying most, attract the most efficient class of servants, and secure the heartiest assistance; but who shall, by paying least, take most advantage of the necessity of people who are struggling for the chance of only a few crumbs of the bread of independence. It thus becomes notorious enough how it is that cheap articles are produced out of the lifeblood of our fellow-creatures. The evil can only be corrected now, by the direct interference of our consciences. Unwholesomely cheap production is a perversion of the common law of trade which will in course of time be blotted out by the advance of education; and there can never be in this country a glut of intelligence and skill, although we may soon have a glut of ignorance. Parallel with the advance of mind, there will run the advance of mind-work, and the diffusion of a right sense of its value will be increased.

Thus it will be seen, that while we believe with all our hearts in the wholesomeness of the great principle of free competition--regard nothing as so really helpful to the labourer, so sure to beget healthy trade and bring out all the powers of the men engaged in it--we do see that there is in society one class, and that a large one, upon which, when men look, they may believe that competition is an evil. The truth is, that the existence of that class, so helpless and so much neglected, is the evil to remove; but while it remains--as wholesome meat may kill a man with a disease upon him--there is an unsound body hurt by it, requiring, O political economist! spoon-meat and medicine, not the substantial bread and beef which doubtless theory can prove and experience affirm, to be the best of nourishment for human bodies. There are fevers among bodies politic as among bodies corporal, and we are disposed to think that half the difficulties opposed to a distinct and general perception of the truths which our economists have ascertained, depend upon the fact that they have not yet advanced--so to speak--from a just theory of nutrition to the formation of a true system of therapeutics. That which will maintain health is not, necessarily, that which will restore it. Often it happens that a blister or a purge, though it would certainly make sound men sick, will make the sick man whole. May it not also be that what is ruinous to all sound trade shall hereafter come to be known as a social medicine possessed, in certain cases, of a healing power, and applicable therefore to some states of disordered system? We believe that a great many discrepancies of opinion may be reconciled by a view like this. Its justice is hardly to be questioned; although, as to the particular applications of it, there is room for any amount of discussion.

Thus, in the case of the Manchester strike, the workmen--though not of the unskilled class--may state that they are unable to feel the working of the principle of competition; that if they do not get what pay they like at one factory, they are not practically at liberty to get the value of their labour in another. Even the population of one mill, thrown out of work, is too large and too special, as to the nature of the various kinds of skill possessed among its people, to be able to find anything like prompt absorption into other factories; but as masters almost always act in groups for the determination of wages, it is the population, not of one mill, but that of five or six, that becomes discontented; and the best proof of the fact that it is practically unable to better itself even though higher wages may be given elsewhere is, that it does not better itself. There is a curious and decided variation in the rates of wages paid in various factories and manufacturing towns; variations artificially increased by strikes, but the existence of which shows, at any rate, to the satisfaction of the operatives, that rates may be arbitrary, and that the natural law does not work easily in their case which brings the price of any article to its just, uniform level. The Manchester masters point out to their men other masters who pay less than they pay; the operatives point on the other hand, to masters paying more. But it is not in their power to carry their own labour to those masters, as it ought to be, for a free working of the principle of competition. Mechanical and accidental difficulties stand completely in the way, and they are aggravated on both sides by habits of imperfect combination. It is just to state these difficulties, and to show that the instinct of the operative may not be altogether reprehensible when it suggests to him that against the worst uneasiness which he feels in the system to which he belongs, a blister or a bloodletting, in the shape of a strike, is the best remedy. He may be very wrong, as a man is apt to be wrong when doctoring himself. There is an excuse for his quackery in the fact that he has, at present, no physician to call in.

The difficulties of the case, as it is felt by employers and employed in our manufacturing districts, is aggravated, as we have said, by imperfect combinations; for, between the trades’ unions and the masters’ associations there is, in truth, a perfect unity of interest. They who reduce the master’s capital, reduce his power of employing labour; they who wrong the labourer by whom they live, reduce his will and power to do work. At present, men and masters are in many cases combatants, because they never have been properly allies; they have not been content to feel that they are fellow-workers, that the man at the helm and the man at the oars are both in the same boat, and that the better they agree together, the more likely they will be to weather out a storm.

In the case of the existing strike at Manchester, we have read carefully the manifestoes, replies, and counter-replies that have been passing between the opposed bodies for the purpose of being laid before the public; and the fact made in them of all others most manifest is--that the points raised in them are points that ought to have been raised very many months ago; discussed and understood between the masters and the men before the strike, and for the prevention of the strike.

Upon the precise points in dispute we cannot undertake to give a definite opinion. From each party to the quarrel we get half a case, and the halves are not such as the public easily will know how to unite into a distinct whole. Rates of wages, as we have already said, do not appear to be uniform, and while the masters in Manchester desire, as we think, most fairly and properly, to bring a certain class of wages, raised unduly by strikes, to its just and natural rate, pointing to some other place in which the rate is low, the men point to a place where the rates are higher than at Manchester, and say, Come let us strike an average between the two. The offer is refused. It may be necessarily and wisely refused. There are evidently many accessory considerations that affect the nominal day’s wages in this place and that. To the public out of Lancashire it cannot be explained fully by manifestoes. Between masters and men, if they were in any habit of maintaining a right mutual understanding it ought not to be possible that any controversy about them could be pushed to the extremity of open breach. The spinners on strike head one of their documents with the last words of Justice Talfourd: “If I were asked what is the greatest want in English society to mingle class with class, I would say in one word, the want of sympathy.” Most true; but need we say that there is sympathy due from workmen towards employer, as well as from employer towards workmen? It is essential to a correction of the evil thus stated that the operative should either generously be the first to give up hostile prejudices, or that at the least he should be altogether prompt to second, heart and soul, every attempt of the master to establish a relation of good-will and confidence with him. Men rarely quarrel except through what is wisely called--misunderstanding.

There is some reason that we will not undertake to give, which causes Lancashire, although by no means the only British factory district, to be the district most afflicted by misunderstandings. Nowhere else are the masters so much obstructed by the dictatorial spirit of the men; nowhere else is the law so much interfered with, by the dictatorial spirit of the masters. In Scotland, Yorkshire, and the west of England, masters and men work generally well together, and the law is more or less obeyed; machinery, for instance, not being, as a rule, obstinately left unfenced.

Many pages of this journal have been devoted already to the discouragement of strikes. We have urged invariably that the one perfect remedy against them is the opening up of more and better opportunities of understanding one another, between man and master. In case we may be supposed to be ignorant of the feelings about which we reason, let it be known that every thought--almost every word--upon this subject given in the paragraphs that follow will be the thought or word, not of a speculative person at a distance, but of a Lancashire millowner. At the time of the disastrous Preston strike, a Preston manufacturer, whose men stood by him honestly and well, published at Manchester, a little pamphlet;[D] which, if its counsel had been taken, would assuredly have made the present strike of Manchester impossible. Mr. Justice Talfourd’s last words, placed lately by the men above their manifesto, was then chosen as a motto by the masters. Coming, this gentleman wrote, into Lancashire from a district where good feeling subsisted between the employer and the employed, it was with the utmost surprise that he found labour and capital to be in a state of antagonism throughout the country. From the time when he first began to employ labour in Lancashire, more than a quarter of a century ago, he has made it his strict business to study the system at work around him, and discover the real causes of the evils that undoubtedly exist; and he has no hesitation in saying, that the main cause is a want of cordial feeling--the absence, in fact, of a good understanding between the parties to the labour-contract. This feeling must be established, he adds, or the case never will be mended. Such understanding does not come by any explanations from third parties; it is produced only by direct and habitual intercourse between the parties too often at issue. The Preston manufacturer says that no doubt the masters in Lancashire help their men to be intelligent by spending money liberally upon schools connected directly or indirectly with their mills. Duty is done amply; and, for duty’s sake, too, to children; but, he adds, what is really wanted is the education of the adult intellect. The minds of children, having been prepared by the rudiments of knowledge to receive ideas (whether good or evil), they are then cast adrift to gather and continue their education by absorbing all the notions, all the prejudices, and all the fallacies with which chance may surround them. A dispute arises; there is no sympathy shown to the operatives by the employers; but much real or pretended sympathy is shown by the delegates, who tell them fine-spun theories about the results of trades’ unions; talk to them in an inflated manner about their rights and wrongs; tell them that a strike is the only way of battling for the right. Such men never interfere without widening the breach, on which they get a footing.

[D] Strikes Prevented. By a Preston Manufacturer. Galt and Co. 1854.

So far, the Preston manufacturer says what we have felt and said on numerous occasions. Now let us see how he not only speaks, but acts, and how the doing looks which illustrates the saying.

In the first place, minor acts of friendship to the men may be mentioned:--He has encouraged them to form a Provident Club in connection with his mill, and given them all help in it that would not compromise their independence; at the same time he has encouraged them also to support the benefit clubs out of doors. He has liked them to be led to accumulate savings, never believing that a store of money in the operative’s power would facilitate a strike, but rather knowing that the provident man who has saved property will be especially unwilling to see it dissipated. He has provided his men with a reading-room and a lending library, and secured a fund for its support, while he has removed a cause of soreness that exists in even well-regulated mills, by devoting to their library the fines levied upon operatives for faults of discipline. Such fines are necessary, and the faults for which they are imposed cost, of course, loss to the millowner for which they are no real compensation; nevertheless, if the master puts such shillings into his own pocket, or, as is sometimes the case, gives them as pocket-money to a son, experience declares that they are grudged, and sometimes counted as extortions. Let the fine go to the common account of the men, and the payer of it, instead of being pitied as the victim of a tyrant, will be laughed at--thanked for his donation to the library, and so forth. Practically, also, the result of this system, as the Preston manufacturer has found, is to reduce the number of the fines. Men would so much rather be victims than butts, that acts of neglect are more determinedly avoided, though we may suggest the general good feeling in the mill as a much better reason for the greater care over the work.

Left to select, by a committee chosen from among themselves, the books to be placed in their library, the men have been found to prefer those which contained useful knowledge--such as manuals of popular science, voyages, and histories.