Part 15

Cole, Self Government in Industry.

Delisle Burns, The Morality of Nations.

VII

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

C.R. FAY

I. THE INDUSTRIAL SCENE, 1842

1. Let us hover in fancy over the industrial scene in 1842, and photograph a stage of the economic conflict which the people of England were waging then with the forces which held them in thrall.

Our photograph shows us great white lines, continuous or destined to become continuous; they are numerous in Durham and Lancashire, and the newest lead up to and away from London. These white lines are the new railroads of England, and the myriad ant-heaps along them are the navvies. In the year 1848 their numbers had risen to 188,000.

What is a navvy and how does he live? The navvy is an inland navigator who used to dig dykes and canals and now constructs railroads. In the forties the navvies are getting 5s. a day, and for tunnelling and blasting even more, but they are a rowdy crowd, and many of them are Irish. Said the Sheriff substitute of Renfrewshire in 1827: 'If an extensive drain, or canal, or road were to make that could be done by piecework, I should not feel in the least surprised to find that of 100 men employed at it, 90 were Irish.' In 1842 they are building railroads, and when they and the Highlanders are on the same job, it is necessary to segregate them in order to avoid a breach of the peace. The Irish sleep in huts and get higher pay than the natives who are lodged in the neighbouring cottages. The English navvy too keeps out the Irishman if he can. On a track in Northamptonshire, 'There is only one Irishman on the work, for they would not allow any other Irishman.'

In the South of England wages are lower and the navvies are less expert. In South Devon 'very few North countrymen; they are men who have worked down the line of the Great Western; that have followed it from one portion to another'. The riff-raff from the villages cannot work stroke for stroke with the navvy. 'In tilting the waggons they could, but in the barrow runs it requires practice and experience.'

The high wages of the navvy are offset by the disadvantages of his employment. He is lucky if he gets the whole of his earnings in cash. In the Trent Valley they are paid once a month, 'but every fortnight they receive what is called "sub" that is subsistence money, and between the times of subsistence money and times of the monthly payment, they may have tickets by applying to the time-keeper, or whoever is the person to give them out, for goods; and those tickets are directed to a certain person; they cannot go to any other shop.'

The huts in which they live are little better than pigsties, and especially bad for regular navvies, who take their families about with them. In South Devon, 'man, woman, and child all sleep exposed to one another.' On a section of the London and Birmingham Railway fever and small-pox broke out. 'I have seen', says an eye-witness, 'the men walking about with the small-pox upon them as thick as possible and no hospitals to go to.' The country people, the witness continues, make money by letting rooms double. When one lot came out, another lot went in.

Such is the navvy's life at work and at rest.

2. If we can suppose that our camera is capable of distinguishing centres of industrial activity, then our picture will give us 'vital' patches, which stand out against a background of deadness. This deadness is rural England.

What is the condition of the rural counties of Wessex? 'Everywhere the cottages are old, and frequently in a state of decay.' 'Ignorance of the commonest things, needle-work, cooking, and other matters of domestic economy, is ... nearly universally prevalent.' To make both ends meet the wife has abandoned her now useless spinning-wheel and hired herself out to hoe turnips or pick stones.

On the little farms inside the factory districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, on which the country hand-loom weavers eke out a miserable livelihood by cultivating patches of grass land, there is distress more acute than ever was known in a Dorset village. But in Northumberland, by exception, there is a decent country life. 'What I saw of the northern peasantry impressed me very strongly in their favour; they are very intelligent, sober, and courteous in their manners.... The education in Northumberland is very good; the people are intelligent and cute, alive to the advantages of knowledge, and eager to acquire it; it is a rare thing to find a grown-up labourer who cannot read and write and who is not capable of keeping his own accounts.' The same sort of thing was said of Northumberland in 1869: 'If all England had been like Northumberland, this commission ought never to have been issued.' The Commissioner found that though the labourers worked harder and longer than in the South they were not working against starvation. They were enjoying a rough plenty, which included fresh milk. The rest of the family earned sufficient to leave the married woman in her home and no children under twelve were employed in field labour.

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.'

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 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 passed 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.'

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 illustrate 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 Essex 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 quantity 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.' 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. Bastardy 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.' 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 Assistant to Railway Travelling'.