Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 355, May 1845. Various

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and then see with what appetite he can take to moral or intellectual improvement when he comes in at night.

      It is the deplorable effect of such a state of things, that it tends not merely to perpetuate, but increase, the very evils from which it has arisen, and reduce the working classes to that state, wherein extrication from them is next to impossible. Under the pressure of the ceaseless desire to cheapen production and diminish the cost of manufacture, young persons of both sexes are huddled together into mills and factories, at so early a period of life that they are scarcely fit to leave the nursery. It has recently been found necessary to introduce a special statute to prohibit children being employed in print-fields in England under eight years of age. They are so because they can at once earn sixpence or eightpence a-day by standing beside a wheel, or watching a film of cotton which is discharged out of a machine; and this cheap and infantine labour is equally attractive to the parents, who thus discover in their offspring a source of income instead of a burden – and the manufacturer, who finds his work done by little docile labourers, too weak to engage in a strike, and yet strong enough to do the work. No exertion of strength is required, at least none at any one moment, in many of these occupations – though the work, when long continued, is to the last degree exhausting; the steam-engine lifts all the weights and furnishes all the power. Thus there is, from the necessities and interests of all concerned, a constant demand for juvenile labour; and this demand speedily produces its own supply, by promoting early marriages, or fostering a swarm of bastards among persons thus thrown together, at the period of life when the passions are the strongest, with a total separation at all times, save bed-time, from that only school of virtue, the parental home.

      Moral and intellectual cultivation is, God be praised, not rendered impossible in the more superior and industrious of the manufacturing operatives; but it may be doubted whether the species of literature which is in general presented to them, and unhappily proves most attractive, either strengthens their minds, or improves their happiness. Exciting novels, such as those of Victor Hugo, Janin, Sue, and others of the class; highly wrought pictures of the manners and vices of high life; horrible stories of seduction, murder, and suicide, such as compose so large a part of the modern romance school of France; – are most sure of circulation among the working classes of great towns, because they at once interest and excite the imagination. They are read to the extent, and for the reason, that novels are so generally devoured by the young, the imaginative, and the indolent of both sexes in the higher ranks. The poor operatives, however, have an excuse for the exclusive reading of such exciting inanities, which does not belong to their higher fellow-citizens; they are so worn out by long-continued toil, that they are unable to bear the fatigue of any kind of reading which requires application or reflection. Some, no doubt, are improved by works of a more elevated class, which they contrive to purchase out of their savings, and to devour during the brief period allowed them between labour and repose. But their number is very small in comparison of the whole, as is decisively proved by the limited number of booksellers' shops in the manufacturing towns, compared to those which supply the means of sensual enjoyment. It is seldom in such cities you will find one bookseller's shop for an hundred where beer or spirits are retailed. Many even of those who read are rather injured than improved, both in their habits and their happiness, by the mental cultivation they receive. They contract exaggerated ideas of the enjoyment of riches, and the avenues to distinction, which may be opened by intellectual effort; they become dissatisfied with the station in the world which Providence has assigned them; they strive to exchange bodily for intellectual toil; and in the vain attempt to exchange their lot for a better one, numbers are precipitated into difficulties, crimes, and ruin.

      The social organization of trades in all the European cities during the middle ages, was eminently favourable to the working classes; and it was perhaps the greatest calamity that ever befell them, that, in the madness of democratic ambition, they united with the master employers to pull down these institutions. When each craft was organized in a little republic of its own, with its office-bearers, stated meetings, funds for the indigent, and exclusive privileges, a gradation of ranks was created amidst the poor – a little aristocracy of industry, which often proved itself capable of contending with the proudest aristocracy of land or riches. The poor were not left alone; the wrongs of individuals were taken up by their craft; joint measures for the common behoof were pursued; the dreadful feeling of isolation in the midst of a crowd was unknown; all were enrolled under some banner, or entered with some craft. Thus every one felt himself in a fixed and definite place in society; he had privileges and advantages of a tangible kind to forfeit by losing it. But when exclusive privileges, crafts, and incorporations, were abolished, amidst cries of joy and shouts of triumph from the whole popular party all over the world, these inestimable blessings were lost. The poor became a mixed indiscriminate multitude, having no more coherence or power of resistance than a rope of sand. They degenerated into a huge assembly of private soldiers without officers, incapable either of organizing any thing for their own durable benefit, or of resisting the progressive encroachments of capital, machinery, and competition, on the sole domain left them – the wages of their labour. Universally it has been found, that, upon the abolition of incorporations and crafts, the condition of the working classes has rapidly and fearfully changed for the worse. The principle of free competition – of breaking down all barriers – allowing every one to elbow his neighbour out of employment, and bringing every thing down to the lowest and cheapest level – has tended only to lower the wages of labour, and aggravate the insecurity of the poor. No one has a fixed or permanent station; every thing is done for days' or weeks' wages; and the penalty of dismissal is destitution, famine, and a lingering death. Hence the constant complaint now on the part of the poor, that they cannot get work; and the prodigious multitude of the lowest class who are constantly moving about, seeking in one situation that employment they have lost in another. This, however, is of all things the most fatal to their habits, character, and prospects; they get among people to whom they are total strangers, who regard them with aversion as intruders, and are neither inclined to relieve their distresses, nor to facilitate their advance in the world. The most powerful check, next to religion, on human conduct —the opinion of friends– is lost on the very class who stand most in need of its control. Obscurity screens immorality from detection; numbers shelter crime from punishment. The temptations to vice multiply, while the barriers against it are cut away. The really good poor are invariably stationary; moving about is as fatal to their habits as it is to those of children. The free circulation of labour, of which we hear so much from master employers and the Chrematists, is often an advantage with a view to the creation of wealth, or the sudden completion of great undertakings: considered with reference to national morals, happiness, and ultimate safety, it is one of the greatest curses which can befall a people.

      It is a sense of the evils arising from this feeling of isolation amidst multitudes, and the experienced inability of the poor, all struggling against each other for subsistence, to resist the progressive decline of their wages till they reach the lowest point consistent with the support of existence, which has made the working classes in France and England of late years so generally embrace, and make such incredible efforts to support, trades'-unions. They have endeavoured, in so doing, to regain that organization of crafts in separate classes and bodies, which was overturned amidst the shouts of triumph consequent on the French Revolution. But this attempt, so far from palliating the existing evils, has had the greatest possible tendency to aggravate them; for it has too often vested irresponsible power in hands wholly unfit to wield it. Perhaps the greatest, the most wide-spread, the most acute suffering endured by the labouring poor in Great Britain during the last thirty years, has arisen from strikes. Nothing has tended so strongly to shake society to its centre; to array the working classes against their employers; to spread habits of recklessness, violence, and improvidence among them, and alienate their natural supporters from them by the frightful crimes to which they have given rise. Foresight, industry, regularity of conduct, frugality, saving habits – those prime guardians of humble virtue – are out of the question when men are subjected to the tyranny of these dreadful, popularly elected despots. The last and only possession left to the poor – their own labour – is liable to be reft from them by the imperious commands of an unknown and irresponsible committee; which, elevated to importance by the public distress, uses every means to prolong it, by preventing a return to habits of regular industry. СКАЧАТЬ