CHAPTER I.. Scotland in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.

SCOTLAND IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES.

GENERAL SOCIAL CONDITIONS—EARLY FARMING METHODS—POVERTY OF THE PEOPLE—MINERS AS SERFS—“THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE”—IMPROVING CONDITIONS: THE ACT OF UNION AND ITS EFFECTS—THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION—THE FACTORY SYSTEM: ITS EFFECT ON THE STATUS OF MEN.

The conditions under which the people of Scotland lived during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were rude and uncouth, and, when judged by modern standards, could scarcely be described as other than appalling. In the few towns of any size, stone buildings were the rule; but in the rural districts the majority of the people lived in huts, the walls of which were built of sods and stones, and which were roofed with wattles and thatched with rushes. These huts were windowless save for a hole in the wall which admitted some air but very little light during the summer, and which was stuffed with rags and rushes during winter in order to keep out the snell North wind. The floor was but earth, hardened with the trampling of countless feet; and fireplace or chimney there was none, unless a few stones set in the middle of the floor or against one of the gables can be called a fireplace, and a hole in the roof, through which the smoke found its way after it had explored every nook and cranny of the house, a chimney.

Famine was an almost annual visitor. The majority of the people lived by agriculture, but the land was cold and undrained, and the methods of tilling were ineffective. The motive power was sometimes provided by oxen, but often the people harnessed themselves to the primitive implements. The result was that the grain grown was poor in quality and scanty in quantity, while often it failed to ripen because of the wetness of the soil, and because, also, of lateness in sowing. The cattle were poor and underfed. Roots for feeding purposes were unknown until near the end of the period; there was no grain to spare, and little straw or hay for winter feeding, so that the poor brutes had to forage for themselves as best they could.

In the hall of the laird the position was a little better, but few of the lairds of that day could aspire to the standard of living of a moderately well-to-do farmer of to-day. Of food there was always enough in the hall, but it was coarse and unsavoury. Throughout the winter fresh meat was unknown. The cattle were killed in the autumn; the meat was stored in brine barrels, and this brine-soaked meat, or swine flesh preserved in the same manner, was the only meat which found a place on the table of the laird during the winter months, except on the few occasions of great importance when one or two fowls were killed.

The farming class, if it be not a misnomer to call them farmers, usually lived in groups of such huts as are described above, and tilled their land more or less in common. The system chiefly in vogue was the “run rig” system, under which exchange of ground took place every year. The more important of their crude implements were also held in common, and as these could only be used by one person at a time—as, also, it was often well on in the spring before any thought of tillage occurred to them or the condition of their water-logged soil would permit of it, and as much time was often lost in deciding the rotation in the use of the implements—the return in the good years was only just sufficient for their wants. As the bad years were generally twice as numerous as the good years, the conditions of the rural workers were generally most miserable. Ill-treated Nature, receiving no encouragement from man save the “tickling of her face with a stick,” refused to give of her bounty, and the people who depended on her for life suffered accordingly.

A condition of continual hunger was the lot of the labourers who had no land to till. They were often forced to depend for food on the roots and berries they could gather in the woods; the scraps which went to feed the laird’s pigs were luxuries which only came their way at long intervals. Work was intermittent; it was poorly paid, for money was even scarcer than food. The only landless men who had what might be termed a decent living wage for the period were the miners. They received about a shilling a day; but, in return, they sold themselves into serfdom, for, from the beginning of the seventeenth century until the closing year of the eighteenth, no man, woman, or child who once entered a mine to work in it could leave it again. If the mine was sold the sale carried with it the right to their labour; they were bondslaves until death, the great emancipator, burst their shackles and set them free for ever.

On the large farms, which became more numerous during the eighteenth century, ploughmen received the truly magnificent salary of 35/ a year, with one or two perquisites, of which one was a pair of boots. The ploughman’s daughter, if she went to the farm to assist the farmer’s wife and daughters with the cows, received, as a reward for her labour, 13/4 a year, a piece of coarse cloth for an apron, and a pair of shoes.

In the towns the conditions were little better. In the early years of the eighteenth century a succession of bad years brought distress to all sections of the populace. There was much unrest, which was fanned into flame by the passing of the Act of Union in 1707, when a considerable amount of rioting took place in various parts of the country. In addition, the foreign trade of the country had been ruined by the English Navigation Act of 1660, which provided that all trade with the English Colonies should be carried in English ships alone.

In the closing years of the seventeenth century Paterson, the founder of the Bank of England, launched his Darien scheme, famous in history as “The South Sea Bubble,” for the purpose of inaugurating a great world exchange and mart at the Isthmus of Panama. Scotsmen became responsible for £400,000 of the capital, and actually paid in £220,000. The jealousy of the English merchants, however, together with the fact that it had been proposed to establish a depot on land which was claimed by Spain, without having gone through the formality of consulting that country beforehand, handicapped the scheme from the outset. Nevertheless, although opposed by the English, and cold-shouldered by the Dutch, whose help they had hoped to enlist, the Scotsmen persevered with their project. A company, numbering 1,200, set out for their destination, landed, and erected a fort. Difficulties came fast, however. The King had not given his consent to the scheme, and the American colonists refused to have anything to do with them. Supplies gave out before the new crops were ready, and none were forthcoming from home, so that at the end of eight months the colony was broken up. Out of a total of 2,500 persons who had left Scotland, not more than thirty ever reached home again. The failure of the scheme caused untold misery and ruin in Scotland, and did much to engender the bitter feelings toward the English which showed themselves when the union of the two Parliaments was being discussed; but, worst of all, it bled the country white; so much so that when, a few years later, the British Government called in the Scottish coinage in order to replace it with coinage of the United Kingdom, only coinage to the value of £400,000 was returned to Scotland.

IMPROVING CONDITIONS.

The Act of Union was exceedingly unpopular, but, as it turned out, it was not an unmixed evil, for it placed Scottish traders on the same footing as the English in respect to trading with the Colonies, from which they had been debarred for fifty years. It also gave Scottish ships free entry to English ports and Scottish goods free entry to English markets, and so marked the beginning of the increasing prosperity which has come to Scotland since then.

In particular the opening up of trade with the Southern Colonies had much to do with laying the foundation of the proud commercial position which Glasgow holds to-day. Merchants from the little town on the banks of the Clyde began to trade with these Colonies, bringing back in exchange for their wares tobacco and other products, including cotton. During the same period there was introduced from Holland the art of fine spinning, and on these two articles of Colonial produce—tobacco and cotton—were built up many fortunes. Later in the century the invention of the spinning jenny, the carding frame, and the power-loom, and the discovery by Watt of how to harness the power of steam to production all gave an impetus to the commercial growth of Scotland. With the application of the power of steam the foundation of Scotland’s pre-eminent position in the manufacture of iron and steel and in the building of ships was laid, for by the application of steam-power to pumping machinery and to haulage it was found possible to keep her coal pits free from water and to dig vertical shafts to the coal seams.

Thus the eighteenth century, which had begun with the Scottish people in the direst poverty, ended with many of them in comparative comfort and with the standard of living for all definitely raised. Never since then, not even in the period of deep poverty which followed the close of the Napoleonic war nor in the “hungry ’forties,” have the whole people fallen back into the depths of misery in which they were sunk at the beginning and all through the seventeenth century and well into the “’twenties” of the eighteenth. At times since then progress seemed to be at a standstill; at times it seemed even to be on the down grade; but the impetus has always been recovered; the standard of living has been rising gradually, and although we are still far removed from the rude profusion which has caused the century in English history which followed the “Black Death” to be spoken of as “the golden age of labour,” the trend of our march is in the direction of a condition which, measured by the different standards of to-day, will approximate to that long past happy period.

THE FACTORY SYSTEM.

While it is admitted that the inventions and discoveries of Sir Joseph Arkwright (partner of David Dale at Lanark), Hargreaves, Crompton, and Cartwright revolutionised industry, and in the long run brought a higher standard of living to the people, yet the first results of their application were not wholly good. For centuries spinning and weaving had been carried on in the homes of the people, but with the invention of the spinning jenny, the carding frame, and the power-loom the weaving industry was removed to larger buildings. At first these were merely makeshifts. A disused stable or cowshed, any building, in fact, which would house a number of looms was good enough for the new industry. The hand-loom weavers soon found that they were unable to compete with the new methods. To make matters worse, where they did not themselves give up and take service under the new regime, their wives and their children did, and became competitors in driving the husbands and fathers out of the industry.

Soon the millowners discovered that in the new methods with the new cheap labour there was a mine of wealth and, their greed growing by what it fed on, they sought for even cheaper labour than that of the poorly paid wage-slave women and children. This cheaper labour they found in the thousands of pauper children under the care of the supervisors of the poor. The story of the cruel treatment of these poor little mites, who were often chained to the frames of the looms and whipped to keep them awake, is one of the blackest pages in the whole history of the growth of the capitalist system in Great Britain.

In the weaving trades the entry of women and children changed the whole economy of the weavers’ homes. Formerly the work had been done by the male members of the families, assisted to some extent by the women, but under the new system the factory owner found that he could get as much work done by the mother at a considerable reduction on the wages paid to her husband, and so the husband found himself workless. Then it was found that the children soon became as expert as their elders, and so a further reduction in wages took place.

The net result was that it became a case of equal pay for equal work, but the standard of pay was that of the women and not of the men, and soon the whole family had to work to provide the necessaries of life for the home which should have been provided by the wages of the husband alone. Even to-day, while the women of the cotton mills who are members of their unions are probably the best paid female workers in the country, the standard for men is much below that for male workers in other trades; so that, in the case of the factory workers, “equal pay for equal work” has meant a general lowering of the standard of pay.