FOR TOWN AND COUNTRY. JANUARY, 1850. 'LABOUR AND THE POOR.' [Although agreeing entirely with the spirit and object of the following communication, we beg to guard ourselves against being supposed to go along with the writer in the whole of his opinions.-EDITOR.] THERE are few, even among those . whom outward circumstances or an inward sense of duty has led more or less to associate with, or at least to inquire into the condition of the working classes of this country, who can have been otherwise than startled with the revelations of the Morning Chronicle on the subject of Labour and the Poor;' startled especially to find how closely particular details tallied with the results of their own experience, and, therefore, how great must be the average truthfulness of the whole picture; startled above all things to see how purblind and stunted their own experience had been, in leading them so little from the particular to the general, from the effect to the cause; from this or that case of distress,' to the social disease whereof it was but an individual symptom, which might be quelled, and yet leave the evil wholly unabated. From many a lip and heart again the cry will have burst forth, What has the Church been doing with her clergy and districtvisitors; the local authorities, with their boards of guardians, relievingofficers, and other appliances of secular help to the distressed; the State, with its functionaries and commissioners; private societies, with their numberless devices of machine-made charity; statists with their figures; VOL. XLI. NO. CCXLI. economists with their theories; ay, every one of us with our eyes, and ears, and hearts, what have we been doing that such things yet should be,-that a newspaper should be required to tell us of them? Never before, certainly, on so great a scale was this great and vital branch of the Condition-of-England question exhibited to us with such completeness and in such relief. It is not so much that many absolutely new facts have been discovered; that many grains of truth have been sifted out, which did not lie buried ere this in the dust-heaps of parliamentary blue-books and reports of societies; it is that the light-flood of publicity has shewn these facts in their number, in their coherence, and their sequency; it is that the scattered grains of truth, like the iron filings from the mingled rubbish, have been drawn out by the magnet of a steady purpose, and lie there to our hand, ready to be welded into some mighty engine either of death or of life, according as we choose to make use of them, for purposes of mutual insult and hatred, or Godfearing fellowship, labour, and love. And each member of the series bears its own distinctive character, points its own moral, reveals a special class of evils and of wrongs, suggests special remedies. The tale of the B Rural Districts is cheerless above all the rest. It shews to us the whole mass of the agricultural labourers in the south-western counties first, and now in the east-midland counties -living not like men but beasts; stinted in their wages, starved of decent house-room, stunted in all their faculties of affection and of knowledge, uncared for, vicious, degraded; sullen and hateful, as a brute half tamed by hunger and fear. And the one cause for all this evil lies in the neglect of the duties of property. Wherever a landlord chooses to exert himself for the benefit of his tenantry, or seemingly only to allow them to exert themselves; wherever a farmer treats his labourers on a par with his cattle, and finds them in keep when he does not find them in work, a gleam of sunshine lights at once upon the picture; decency returns to the labourer's cottage, thrifty gardens supply the place of the filthy muck-heap, and the clergyman feels he has no longer to contend, as elsewhere, alone in sheer blank hopelessness, against universal dishonesty, vice, and beastliness. Up to this hour the landlords have the game in their own hands; they have but to will it, and the English peasant may, in a generation or two, be the honour of his country instead of its shame. The Manufacturing Districts again present, on the whole, the most pleasing side of the picture. It is impossible to peruse this series, and not to observe that under two separate conditions manufacturing industry is decidedly conducive to the welfare of the people employed in it. On the one hand, while as yet machinery has not outgrown domestic use; when, for instance, the loom, through its various processes, affords employment for all the members of the household, and becomes thus a very centre of family life; thus the condition of the Saddleworth clothweaver is equal, and, in some respects, superior to that of the yeoman or small landowner under its best aspect, inasmuch as he has all his children at work under his own eye, and can frequently afford the wholesome luxury of a garden, or the bracing enjoyment of field-sports. Again, when loom and jenny have learnt to cluster round the steamengine, and the operatives have be come massed in little armies under the factory-roof, their very numbers and the discipline which machinery always brings with it afford many more appliances of good than of evil. Even though the manufacturer, raised into a real labour-lord, should, like the landlord, neglect his duty towards the tenants of his workshop, screw profits out of wages, and cut 'hands' adrift on the slightest sign of commercial depression, still the operative is not lonely and helpless as the agricultural labourer. Collective remonstrances can be urged, the combination of numbers can be opposed to that of capital, may be used for purposes of mutual relief, encouragement, instruction; whilst the large scale on which the operations of manufacture take place renders more public every act of tyranny or of wise benevolence, and affords the check of opinion upon the acts of the masters. And where, indeed, the labour-lord does understand his duty, the bonds of union between master and workman, between man and man, can be drawn far tighter than amongst an agricultural population (as at present constituted); all improvements in the condition of the working classes, whether material, intellectual, or moral, can be introduced on the largest scale, and a whole factory may become one living body, animated with one spirit of mutual good-will and zeal. This is especially the case in some of the rural factories. It is true that we have here but examples of enlightened despotism;' the constitutional guarantees of the operative have yet to be settled, his Bill of Rights lies yet unwritten. For the special evils of the system, such as the drugging of children, arising from the demand for female labour in the factories, special remedies must be devised; such as the establishment of those public nurseries, or crèches, which have taken deep root in France, and which might, by law, be annexed like schools to every factory. The crèche, it may be shortly stated, is an establishment where infants are kept during the day (by Sisters of Charity, for instance), and delivered back at night to the mother, who comes as often as necessary during the day to give the breast. Cradles are provided and a play-room, with food to be given by hand in case of 1850.] need. The objection to the indiscriminate use of this plan, that it tends to the neglect of motherly duty, is surely quite out of place in the manufacturing towns, where it is shewn to be the habitual practice of mothers to leave their children to old women or young girls, who drug them with opiates; especially if the crèche, as suggested, be annexed to the factory itself. I venture to say that such establishments, if properly directed, would put a complete check upon the wholesale poisoning of children which is proved to take place, and would, to a great extent, renovate the health of the population. I shall not dwell here at length upon the letters of the Manufacturing series, the condition of the manufacturing poor having been already treated of at length by other hands in the columns of Fraser's Magazine. Nor shall I insist upon the letters from the Rural Districts, although the subject of them is one less known and more awful. Awfully, indeed, do they confirm those gloomy pictures drawn of the English peasant by the author of Yeast,' pictures of which so many hitherto doubted the literal accuracy. Both series only serve to bring out the truth which the Metropolitan series exhibits in the most glaring colours, with the most startling effect; that everywhere throughout England a force is at work which bears down the wages of the operative with the profits of the capitalist, until the profits swallow up the wages, and vice or crime makes up the maintenance of the de. frauded workman. On this picture let us now dwell. The transition is complete, from the compulsory socialism (to use a much belied term) of the Manufacturing Districts, to the reigning individualism of the Metropolis; from the gregarious factory-hands to the solitary shirt-makers. London seems emphatically the city of unsocialized labour. From the great slop-seller to the poor slop-worker in her garret, there is a chasm of indifference and selfishness wider almost than that which separates the clod from the most careless landlord. Less labourlords than mere money-lords, the employers for the most part have not the slightest connexion with the employed, beyond the giving out work 3 and paying for it, generally with Strange and sad, indeed, are the pictures which these Metropolitan letters exhibit, drawn from God's own storehouse of Fact,--stranger, sadder, terribler than all fiction. Look at the Spitalfields weavers, formerly the only botanists in the metropolis,' possessing, within the memory of living man, an Entomological Society, a Horticultural Society, an Historical Society, and a Mathematical Society, all maintained by the operatives, |