On labour, its wrongful claims and rightful dues, its actual present and possible future

Front matter

FROM THE

BENNO LOEWY LIBRARY

COLLECTED BY

Preface

TO

THE SECOND EDITION.

This edition has been carefully revised throughout, but the greater part of the new matter introduced will be found in the Chapter on Supply and Demand, and in the Book treating of Labour and Capital in Alliance. In the first of these, which has been completely recast and almost completely rewritten, certain peculiar notions of mine are resubmitted, with explanations and amplifications, in a form in which I am quite content that final judgment should be passed upon them. The other, to which one whole chapter has been added, and several minor additions have been made, presents a certainly sincere and, as I hope, a fairly comprehensive view of the facts and principles of industrial cooperation. During the process of revision, I. have received considerable aid from critics both friendly and hostile. Among the former I have the satisfaction of being able to name the ' Fortnightly,' in which Mr. Mill has honoured my book by making it the subject of two separate articles — the 'Westminster,' and

a * vi PREFACE.

' British Quarterly Reviews,' the ' Times,' and the ' Journal des Economistes.' Among the latter I have been a good deal disappointed to meet the ' Spectator,' but not at all surprised to encounter the ' Edinburgh Review.' To one and all, however, with the single exception of the last named, I am indebted for more or less of comment of that salutary kind which at once induces and assists a writer to re-examine his previous opinions.

To the ' Edinburgh Review,' some of whose maunderings I had quizzed, perhaps a little too unmercifully, in my former edition, my obligations are of a different order. The contributor to that journal who has taken me in hand, commences indeed with a shout of lo triumphe! and in his fourth sentence announces himself as a conqueror about to drive me from an indefensible position, but he nevertheless pays me the compliment of thenceforward systematically garbling my statements, thereby plainly evincing his inability to grapple with them. Of which piece of politeness I at one time proposed to make fitting acknowledgment, by printing here and there beneath my own words, my reviewer's versions or interpretations of them. On second thoughts, however, I felt that this would not be worth while. Even those who have no means of knowing anything of me but what the reviewer tells them, must at once perceive the utter incompatibility of the monstrosities which he attempts to father on me, with the ' cultivated intelligence ' for which he is, at the same time, pleased to give me credit ; while no one can read ten

PREFACE. vii

consecutive pages of my work without seeing that its aim and tenor are the direct opposites of what the reviewer asserts them to be. Although, therefore, wherever the reviewer has made any pretence at argument, I have not withheld the few words necessary to show that it is only a pretence, I have uniformly passed over in silence his stolid misconceptions and studied misrepresentations. As for the misrepresentations, remembering as I do what the ' Edinburgh Review ' was in its palmy days, it is simply painful to me to see it in the decrepitude of old age descending to such paltry shifts. Those who have neither the wit to answer, nor the candour to assent, should for their own sakes keep their ill-will to themselves, for by any strictures they may indulge in, they will merely betray their impotence and meanness. Whatever they may say, there can be no doubt of their being at heart convinced of the truth of that which, in order to oppose, they are constrained to falsify.

The reader is requested to bear in mind that through almost the whole of the volume, with the exception of the last few pages, by ' present time ' is meant the end of 1868. The supplementary and now concluding chapter, however, and also some newly-added notes, are to be understood as bearing a date more than a twelvemonth later, viz. that of this supplementary preface.

London : February 1870.

PREFACE

TO

THE FIRST EDITION.

' When I was about five-and-twenty,' said the late Mr. Nassau Senior, ' I determined that I would re-^ form the condition of the poor of England.' When I was myself about the same age, I conceived, not indeed the same ambitious design, but much the same desire as that which it implies. More than five-and-twenty years have passed since then, and it is somewhat sadly now, with sexagenarianism at no great distance, that I contrast the insignificance of performance with the magnificence of youthful projects. But the passion of a life is not to be extinguished by any failures that do not extinguish life itself, and so long as any strength is vouchsafed to me, so long shall it be cheerfully devoted to continued search after a cure for human destitution. Vast as the problem is, 'its magnitude need not overwhelm us. Only it requires to be approached with caution and modesty. Though no one singly can expect to solve it, by combining their efforts all may. In the work of universal progress, what indi-

X PREFACE.

vidually are the ablest of workers ? And yet the work advances : mankind's great business tends irresistibly towards accomplishment, and every one who investigates, labours, even while erring, in the cause of truth.'

Words, in substance the same as these, have already served for motto on the title-page, and might by themselves have sufficed likewise for preface, for they explain fully the motives for my present appearance in print. An additional reason for their being repeated here is, that besides being those of one of my most valued friends, they are taken from a treatise of his containing but few other passages to which I am prepared to accord an equally unqualified assent.

London : December i\, 1868.

Book I. LABOUR'S CAUSES OF DISCONTENT

Book I.

INTRODUCTORY.

LABOUR'S CAUSES OF DISCONTENT.

If self-glorification were ever permissible, the present age might be excused for so incessantly proclaiming itself to be pre-eminently one of progress. In certain directions, greater advances have undoubtedly been made during the last sixty-eight years than during the previous six hundred. It is within the briefer and more recent period that man has made a printing machine of the sun, and a postal messenger of lightning, and has put steam into harness, now yoking it beside the winds to his sea chariot, now urging it to whirlwind speed along novel highways of iron. Since the beginning of a century which has still a third of its course to run, the growth of population has in this country been far greater than it had previously been since the Norman Conquest, and the growth of national wealth has been greater still. For every individual living in Great Britain in 1801, there are now more than two ; for every one who then enjoyed an income of a hundred pounds a year, there are now three. That modest annuity, moreover, notwithstanding the depreciating influence of Californian and Australian gold discoveries, is now worth a great deal more than it was two generations back — will procure for its recipient a much larger quantity of the necessaries and conveniences of life. Provisions of all sorts, except meat, are now much cheaper; so, too, are fuel, artificial light, aids to locomotion, all articles of furniture and clothing, and most literary and artistic products. Wheat, which, during the wars of the first French Revolution, rose repeatedly to a hundred, and once to a hundred and twenty shillings a quarter, now scarcely ever reaches to much above half the latter price.

Of coal, what was then commonly paid in the metropolis for a ton, will now purchase nearly as much again. Hats, boots and shoes, and every intermediate article of attire, may now, with a little management, be had at prices from one half to two thirds of what would then have been charged for habiliments of similar description and quality. At less than the cost of the wax candles used to light a single entertainment of the Prince of Wales' last predecessor, many a London gin palace is now illuminated nightly, throughout the year, with a brilliance never equalled in Carlton House, reflected by mirrors of greater size and beauty than Louis the Magnificent was fain to content himself with for wainscoting the Salle des Glaces in his palace of Versailles. By properly regulating his movements, a man may now make an excursion from London to Brighton, at less expense of time and money, than his grandfather must have incurred in order to ride outside the coach from the Bank to Hampstead. At an average rate of half a crown a volume, he may fit up his library with books which not very long ago would have been thought cheap at half a guinea ; for sixpence a week he may supply himself with a square yard of ' Illustrated News,' adorned with wood engravings that Bewick might have been proud of; while he may, at his choice, have either a wonderful pennyworth of ' Daily News ' entirely to himself, or, at the same price, an hour or two's daily reading of the marvellously Brobdignagian sheet into which, since some of us were children, has gradually expanded the Liliputian ' Times ' of an era ignorant of steam presses.

That intellectual has kept pace with material progress, might be too much to affirm, but in the extent to which it has fallen short of the latter, there is nothing to be ashamed of. The absolute number of readers cannot now be less than twenty times, nor the number relatively to population less than ten times, what they were when living sexagenarians were learning their alphabet. No doubt there are very many who read little but novels and newspapers, but provided these be good of their kind, there is no very great deal of much more instructive reading. He who reads nothing now but his newspaper, would, sixty years ago, have read nothing whatever ; and whoever, even though he seek no other aid, avails himself fully of the light of the ' Morning Star,' or the communicativeness of the ' Daily Telegraph,' will not be ill supplied with materials wherewith to store his mind, and to exercise his judgment and fancy. Hard students besides have been multiplying at the same time with superficial smatterers. There are many more of them, both absolutely and relatively, than there ever were before. If not, such books as Mr. Mill's ' Logic ' and ' Political Economy' would not be annually bought by the thousand, nor would the scientific works of Sir John Herschel, Sir Charles Lyell, and Dr. Tyndall be in such large, nor the metaphysical works of Professor Bain and of Mr. Herbert Spencer, in such increasing demand. In every period the average quality of readers may be judged of from that of the writers, and what period was ever much better off than our own for philosophers, historians, poets, or novelists .? What needs John Stuart Mill but to have been long enough dead in order to have his name bracketed with those of Bacon and Locke 1 Had we not lately amongst us in Macaulay an English Livy more glowingly pictorial than his Roman prototype .? Have we not still in Grote a Thucydides without his occasional harshness, and a Tacitus without his constant aff'ectation .? And in Carlyle one whose characteristic excellences, in spite of equally characteristic faults, assign to him a place apart, without parallel among ancient or modern historians.? Is there not in single couplets, and triplets, and quatrains of Tennyson more of the true poetic essence than, but for Gray's elegy, could be squeezed out of the whole body of eighteenth century versification ? Is it not enough simply to mention Thackeray or George Eliot, to prevent any but a parrot from attempting to revive the antiquated claims to supremacy in fiction of Fielding, or SmoUet, or of Scott ?

On the subject of morals it behoves us, no doubt, to speak less confidently. Earnestness and enthusiasm are now out of date. To display much emotion about anything, is now almost a mark of imperfect breeding. Airs of imperturbable indifference are now the most approved wear of common sense. Nor, alas ! is it in externals only that fashion has altered for the worse. Commercial honesty has ceased to be one of our national characteristics. ' National eccentricity in money matters ' is the mildest phrase now used by foreigners to indicate the sad change that has taken place since an Englishman's word was universally held to be as good as his bond. As for political honour or consistency, most of what little of that remains among our leading statesmen, seems to me to be concentrated in the single person of Lord Salisbury. So is it with the seniors. Of the boy and girl of the period, their seniors are not perhaps the fairest judges. It is scarcely for these to decide how far the examples of frivolity and heartlessness themselves have set, have been outdone by their juniors. At any rate, it suits my temper better to suggest excuses for our misguided young people. They may be perhaps in a transition state. It may be because they have seen so many objects of traditional veneration dragged down from their pedestals, and denounced as shams and humbugs, that they have come to believe nothing really worthy of reverence. It may be reaction from ancestral slowness that has made them so fast.

If so, another reaction is certainly coming on. Any how, the unnaturally accelerated pace is sure to tire at last, and it may, let us hope, be succeeded by another midway between the previous extremes of speed. Whether our children are or arc not as yet our inferiors, it is quite on the cards that they may hereafter grow up into superiors of either their parents or grandparents. Not that the contrast between the latter and ourselves is by any means wholly to our disadvantage. On the contrary, there is not the smallest boast in asserting that a balance fairly struck between our moral backslidings and our moral advances, would show that the latter greatly exceeded. Taking moral gains and moral losses together, we are undoubtedly much ahead of our forefathers. Among our gains is not to be overlooked that increased refinement which has utterly banished drunkenness and ribald language from amongst educated men. Neither should the spirit of enlarged benevolence, now so generally diffused, disgusting as is the cant often talked in its name, for the cant would not be talked if the spirit were not prevalent. What, however, is most noticeable, is perhaps the habitual reference to acknowledged principle — the habitual testing, by a recognised standard, of acts done or to be done — the principles, too, being more enlightened, and the standard more elevated. Doctrines for which ethical teachers were not long since half-despairingly pleading, goals to which they were pointing with faint hope of ever seeing them reached, are now accepted as truisms, and taken as starting points for fresh departures. What use can there be in sanctimoniously shutting one's eyes to facts like these .' Why not rather exult in them as proofs that God's kingdom on earth is not receding but advancing .? Why not gratefully rejoice that much as iniquity may abound, grace doth yet more abound ; that though the ratio of saints to sinners be still lamentably low, it is at any rate in these latter days higher than it had ever previously been 1

Yes, verily, let laudatores temporis acti say what they please, there never before was a time like the present : never was there a more advanced or more rapidly-advancing age than that in which we live ! Happy ye, oh youngsters ! did ye but know your luck, whose career is beginning in it instead of ending ; and all such of us as belong to any of the upper ten thousands of society, or have even contrived to lay hold on their skirts, may fairly congratulate each other on progress in which we all participate. Our position is decidedly preferable to that of corresponding classes at any former period. But is there equal, or is there any, reason for congratulating the inferior millions by whose ceaseless exertions the superior myriads are upheld .'' Has there been like improvement in their condition .? Have their lines likewise fallen in pleasanter places than any ever occupied by their forefathers .'' The question is not to be answered monosyllabically. Some benefit assuredly, and that by no means inconsiderable, is derived by the poorest amongst us from the victories of ' science, and the long results of time;' but there is nevertheless considerable room for apprehension, that while enjoying these new spoils of conquest, they may in many cases have lost, or loosened, their hold on former acquisitions.

No reader of Lord Macaulay's History can have forgotten the descriptive catalogue there drawn up of the blessings which philosophy and civilisation have conferred upon those who hold the plough or tend the oxen, or weave at the loom, or quarry or square the stone. We are there reminded that a rustic can now drive his cart in a single hour over a distance which, in a premacadamite age, no vehicle could have traversed in less than twelve : that an artisan may now, however late he leaves his work, walk homeward through secure, convenient, and brilliantly hghted streets which, a hundred and eighty years ago, would have been so dark after sunset, that he could not have seen his hand, and so ill-paved and watched, that he might think himself lucky if he reached his own door without stumbling and breaking his neck, or being knocked on the head by a footpad : that every bricklayer who falls from a scaffold, every sweeper of a crossing who is run over by a carriage, may now have his wounds dressed and his limbs set with a skill such as formerly all the wealth of a great lord like Ormond, or of a merchant prince like Clayton, could not have purchased : that bull-baiting and cock-fighting, or the sight of wretches in the pillory pelted with rotten eggs and brickbats, or howling at the cart's tail beneath the lash, are no longer permitted to blunt the sensibiHties of the populace : that many things— products of tropical countries being specially mentioned — which at no very remote date were costly rarities, reserved for the exclusive use of the opulent, are now within everybody's reach.*

So far Macaulay proceeds upon tolerably firm ground, but presently his footing becomes less secure. Discovering that the summer rate of agricultural wages was, in 1685, 4^. a week in part of Warwickshire, and i,s. b. week in part of Devonshire, that in 1682 it was 6s. a week in part of Suffolk, and in 1661, 'js. a week in part of Essex, he at once adopts the lowest of these rates as that which prevailed throughout the southern kingdom during the reigns of the last two Stuarts, and assumes that an English peasant's weekly wages did not then ordinarily exceed ^s.; whereas a district in which they should be as low as ys., would now be ' thought to be in a state shocking to humanity.' Next, upon the strength of a ballad which appears to have been sung during the same reigns about the streets of Norwich and other clothing towns, he assumes that workmen, in what was then the great staple manufacture of the country, thought themselves well paid if they gained 6s. a week. Then, referring to the register of prices which, since 1729, has been kept in Greenwich Hospital, he finds that the daily earnings of the bricklayers, masons, and carpenters employed in the repair of that building, have risen from 2s. 6d. to 4$-. lod., Ss. 3</., and 5j. 5(/. respectively, and those of plumbers from^J. 6d. to 5^. 6d. Further, he remarks that in 1685, when the pay of a private foot soldier was only 4J. id. a week, no difficulty was experienced in obtaining many thousands of English recruits at very short notice, whereas the present weekly stipend of a private, although raised to

* Hist, of England, vol. i. pp. 423-5.

ys. yd., is found to be an ' insufficient attraction for English youth, insomuch that it has become necessary to enlist largely among the poorer population of Munster and Connaught.' From these data he considers it to be clear that the money wages of labour were, in the generation preceding the revolution of 1688, not more than half what they now are ; and seeing that none of the necessaries of life have since doubled in price, while many articles of universal use have become decidedly cheaper, he concludes that labouring men were in that age worse off than at present in all material respects — that they were worse lodged, worse clothed, and worse fed. That any one should think differently, he attributes to that impatience of their actual condition which makes mankind, 'while constantly moving forward with eager speed, constantly look backward with tender regret' He cannot otherwise understand how it can be doubted that the career of the working class, like that of all other classes of English society, has in every stage been one uninterrupted ' progress from poverty and barbarism towards the highest degrees of opulence and civilisation.'*

Confidently put forward as they are, these are nevertheless but hastily formed conclusions, as will presently appear when the evidence on which they rest has been supplemented by some additional testimony — testimony of which Macaulay fully recognised the authority, and which, indeed, he exhorted his readers to consult, but which he himself somewhat inconsistently neglected to apply. Throughout the particular period which he contrasts with our own, lived Daniel Defoe, that most minute, careful, and comprehensive of enquirers. One subject which he investigated with peculiar interest was the condition of his poorer countrymen, and the following are some of his notes upon it. It is curious to observe how item by item, as if of malice aforethought, he disproves the whole of Lord Macaulay's proofs.

* Macaulay, ut supra, pp. 415-427.

INTROD.] LABOUR'S CAUSES OF DISCONTENT. ii

' Although in Yorkshire, and generally in the Bishoprick of Durham, a labourer's weekly wages might,' he says, ' be only 4r., in Kent, and in several of the southern and western provinces, they were ys., gs., or los.' Often when he (Defoe) had wanted a man for work, and had offered gj. a week to sturdy varlets at his door, he had been told to his face that they could get more by begging, and ' once,' says he, ' I put a lusty fellow in the stocks for making the experiment.' Again, he represents himself as habitually paying six or seven men together on a Saturday night, the least los., and some 30J., for work, and he mentions one man who fOr several years gained of him from 16^. to 20s. a week by his handiwork at the ' mean, scoundrel employment of tilemaking.' Turning to manufactures, he says nothing was more common than for journeymen weavers to earn from 15^. to 30J. a week; and he appeals to silk throwsters, whether they were not in the habit of giving 8j., gs., and los. ' to blind men and cripples to turn wheels.' Then he speaks of ' the difficulty of raising soldiers, the vast charge the kingdom was at to officers to procure men, the many little and not over honest methods used to entice them into the service ; ' and all this he explains by the ease and plenty in which Englishmen lived. If, he argues, they had ' wanted employment and consequently bread, they would have carried a musket rather than starve, and have worn the queen's cloth or anybody's cloth rather than go naked and live in rags and want ; ' but he that could ' earn 20s. at an easy, steady employment, must be mad or drunk when he lists for a soldier to be knocked on the head for 3^. 6d. a week.' True, the high wages that prevailed were not always turned to the best account. They were higher here than in any other country in the world, but whereas a Dutchman, with 20s. a week, would be sure to grow rich and to leave his children in very good condition, an Englishman 'could often but just live, as it was called,' might perhaps 'hardly have a pair of shoes to his feet, or clothes to cover his nakedness, and might have his wife and children kept by the parish.' But then this was caused entirely by the extravagant humour of our poor people in eating and drinking, for they ' ate and drank, but especially the latter, three times as much in value as any sort of foreigners of the same dimensions in the world.' If it had not been for the alehouse, every one might have lived comfortably, for it was incontestable that there was ' more labour than hands to perform it,' and that the ' meanest labour in the nation afforded the workman sufficient to provide for himself and his family.'*

Not even Macaulay's eloquence and ingenuity can countervail these sturdy affirmations of Defoe, which place beyond dispute, that there has not, since the earlier writer lived, been any such marked or general rise of money wages as the other imagined. Besides, money wages, a century or two ago, were very far from representing so accurately as at present the sum total of their recipient's resources. Among the proceedings, legal or other, which, with whatever motive instituted, have, together with many beneficial results, had the baneful one of utterly divorcing the English labourer from the soil, the most efficacious have been Inclosure Bills, which did not come much into fashion until the middle of George II. 's reign. Previously, whoever wished to build himself a cottage, might, without much objection, squat himself down on one of the many tracts of neglected land which, scattered about on every side, then made up a full fourth of the whole area of the kingdom ; while the ease with which rent-free dwellings were thus obtainable, necessarily lowered the rent of other dwellings of a similar class. Labourers, consequently, in rural districts had to pay little or nothing for lodgings, and no small portion of their board also was procurable on equally easy terms. The peasant's garden, cribbed probably, like the site of his cottage, from the waste, supplied him with roots and herbs ; on the adjoining common he

* ' Giving alms no charity,' passim.

had grazing for a cow and a few sheep, as well as for pigs and poultry : some neighbouring wood or heath furnished him with fuel for the gathering, and he was lucky if he lived too far from a meer or marsh to allow of his catching an occasional eel or mallard, as well as the ague. It may be that where ' he once fed a flock of geese, is now an orchard rich with apple blossoms ; that the fen in which he snared wild fowl has long since been drained and divided into corn-fields and turnip-fields ; that the moor where he cut turf among the furze bushes is now a meadow bright with clover, and renowned for butter and cheese.' But of whatever advantage such transformations may be to the country at large, to the poor countryman they have been of less than no advantage at all. His share of the gain resulting from them is a miserable set-off against his concomitant loss, for what he has gained is simply access to shops and markets stocked more abundantly than before from the augmented produce of the improved land, while, what he has lost, is all that the same land would have yielded if left in a state of nature. It was by supplemental aids derived from lands in that state, that the Yorkshire hind, when earning no more than 5^. a week in money, was nevertheless enabled, as we are expressly told he was, ' to live much better ' than working men ' in any of the manufacturing countries of Germany, France, or Italy.' When this was the case in Yorkshire, ' where labour was cheapest,' it is very certain that in Kent and Sussex, and in the southern counties generally, where agricultural wages were on an average twice as high as in the north, and were supplemented in the same manner, the condition of labourers in husbandry cannot have been one which their successors have any reason to look back to with contempt.

Nor if the condition of manufacturing labour be considered, will the result of the comparison be more unfavourable to the past. In days gone by a large portion of the manufacturing business of the country was done by rural cottagers, while such operatives as, being in populous cities pent, were shut off from rights of common, appear, from what Defoe tells us, to have been in general quite as highly paid in his time as in ours. If in some few places there were weavers earning only 6s. a week or less, so likewise are there now, and the explanation is the same in both cases, and is to be sought in the local decay or in the migration of particular employments. Thus the invention of the knitting frame had caused stocking making to be ' transposed ' from Norwich to Spitalfields, insomuch that ' whereas the hose trade from Norfolk had once returned at least 5,000^. a week,' it had, in the course of twenty years, become ' not worth the naming.' The effects of a similar transposition were visible at Canterbury, where, a few years before, there had been 200 broadcloth looms, but where there were no longer more than 50, the others having gone with their owners to London. From Sudbury, too, and Farnham, many of the principal tradesmen had removed with their stocks to the metropolis, where they gave work to a new set of hands, while their old hands were left behind to bid against each other for what little work remained with them.* The internecine competition and struggle for existence that then set in, might speedily bring down wages to the point indicated in the song on which Macaulay lays so much stress, but it is plain that such exceptional reductions did not sensibly affect the ordinary price of manufacturing labour. Where the woollen trade was declining, the wages of hand-loom weavers might well be as low as are at this moment those of the ribbon makers of Coventry; but wherever business was thriving, the earnings of textile operatives generally seem to have been quite as considerable as they . have ever been, unless very temporarily, since. It cannot be said to be usual now for journeymen weavers to gain more than from 15J. to 30^. a week, and we might look in vain now for silk throwsters who ' pay 8j., 9^., and \os. a week to blind men and cripples for only turning wheels.'