every twelve months five thousand miners are disabled by the same agencies."

The occurrence of frightful accidents resulting in loss of life and mutilation of the body, will always be more or less connected with physical and especially with machine-attending labour, and will even take place in an improved state of tociety, although not in such terrible proportions; for precautions will then be greater, regulation stricter, and the diminusion of all physical labour will, at the same time, reduce the number of accidents and peril to limb and life.

That these unavoidable accidents should befall the working classes alone, and that they alone should have to face these terrible perils, is, in the opinion of the author, a revolting injustice, resulting from the inequality in the stations of life, which exposes one class of society to imminent danger of bodily injury and loss of life, whilst others are exempt from it; and he asserts, that no money in the shape of wages, were they ever so high, and no participation in the profits of the employer's capital, however liberally conceded to the working classes, could ever be a just compensation for peril to limb and life, injury to health, and other great hardships.

If there is unavoidable danger, it will have to be shared by all, otherwise justice is grossly outraged.

This argument is sure to be met with the observation that, if men meet with accidents in certain occupations, it is in consequence of their fatal lot to be placed in those trades and situations of life; for it is Providence, and neither they themselves nor society, that has assigned to them those dangerous and irksome occupations; and as there will always be hewers of wood and drawers of water, those so engaged will also have to put up with all the hardships connected with their labour.

This religious argument of the case of unavoidable accidents connected with trades and handicrafts, loses, however, all its power, when opposed by the prospect of a new social organization, in which all will feel it their duty and be enabled to share in these dangers, according to the injunction of Christ, "Do unto others as thou wouldst be done by them." The new social state having rendered possible the discharge of this great and humane duty by the equal distribution of all physical labour, it will also consider any withdrawal from it as con

stituting a grave offence against justice, and an unpardonable infringement of the sacred principle of equality, that would most surely bring down upon the offender the just punishment of the law, and the fierce indignation of the whole. community.

The long array of hardships and wrongs which constitute so many sufferings of the working classes, receives yet another illustration in the next chapter.

CHAPTER XXII. CESSATION OF WORK AND LOSS OF

EMPLOYMENT.

THIS evil, which in its immediate and remote

conse

quences very often leads to great sufferings of body and mind, not unfrequently causing the self-destruction of the sufferer, arises from a variety of sources. The burning down

of a factory, the bankruptcy of an employer, a commercial crisis, a failure or scarcity in the supply of raw materials, may temporarily throw out of employment great numbers of people. Large multitudes become often and suddenly reduced to poverty through the unexpected introduction of labour-saving engines,* and find the greatest difficulty in either becoming the attendants of the new machines that have supplanted their labour, or in procuring employment in other trades. A very sad example of this latter kind was the fate of the woolcombers of Bradford, who, being supplanted on a sudden by the introduction of the wool-combing machine, filled the workhouses in great numbers and for many years.

A similar cruel fate has also befallen the once numerous, honourable, and contented class of skilled artizans called. weavers, who, before the introduction of the power-loom, worked on their hand-looms, and wove cotton and linen yarn and silk thread into pieces of cloth. So rapid has been their extermination by the influence of the mighty competitor

* Mr. Nasmyth stated before the Trades Union Commission that by the introduction into his workshops of self-acting tools he was able to dispense with the labour of all that class of men who depended upon mere dexterity; and as a matter of fact he reduced the number of men in his employ by fully one-half.

(machinery) that from hundreds of thousands (in 1838 they numbered still 800,000) there remain now but pitiable remnants of tens of thousands, who gradually succumb to the same exterminating influences, and are, in the parlance of American slang, "improved off the land," in order that industrial progress may run its wild career without the least regard to those it tramples down with its iron heels.

In 1875 there were in Scotland still existing 16,000 hand-loom weavers, living on the very verge of starvation. When, in the same year, some hundreds of them applied for relief to the city authorities of Glasgow, they were ignominiously put to scavenging the streets of the town where they were well known, and where they used to play and roam about in happy boyhood. To what condition the hand-loom weaver of the north of England was reduced, even thirty years ago, may be guessed from the following correspondence, addressed, in 1846, from Huddersfield, to the Morning Post by their Special Reporter,* who says:"While walking in the outskirts of this town in company with a gentleman once engaged in manufacturing industry, I met a poor man trudging into Huddersfield, and bearing on his shoulders something which, though not of great bulk, seemed to overtask his physical powers. When I first noticed him he appeared to be a mendicant. If his meagre outline and faltering step had not made me pity the apparently simulated 'sorrows of a poor old man,' I should have exclaimed, 'This is a pose plastique of the Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet!' His habiliments were in perfect keeping with the character. Had he been enacting the part he could not have dressed more appropriately. A jury of antiquarian tailors could hardly decide in what fashionable, or rather unfashionable, era his clothes were made. As a dramatis pauper, I thought he was exceedingly well made up, and would have done ample credit to any London boards. As he approached, I anticipated some solicitation for pecuniary assistance. I was disappointed. He exhibited in his poverty-which was but too real-much self-respect and the bearing of an independent spirit. My friend accosted him, and finding him communicative, entered into conversation with him, and by a series of appropriate questions drew out the history of the man's misfortunes. It is soon told;

* Mr. John Hanly.

but I regret that I have not preserved it in his own Yorkshire dialect. He was a hand-loom weaver. Formerly by his individual efforts he had been able to provide himself with a superabundance of the necessaries, and many of the enjoyments and refinements of life. Now, with the assistance of his wife and three of his children, he only earns, on an average, ten or twelve shillings a week, working from twelve to fourteen hours a day. I inquired when his waistcoat was made. He said he could not tell. Can you guess within twenty years of the time?' The truth is,' said he, 'it was thrown off a few years ago by a young man in my neighbourhood, and I am wearing it ever since.' The neatness and care with which his trousers and coat were patched strongly impressed me with a conviction of the poor man's taste and inherent love of decency, and induced me to inquire whether he had any better clothes, and what place of worship he attended. He replied that these were the only clothes he had to go a bunting in' (ie., to wear on Sundays and other special occasions); and as they were not good enough to appear in at church, he generally went to chapel. What he was carrying when I met him was a piece of cloth, the weaving of which he had just completed. He was taking it to the master manufacturer, of whom he spoke in very high terms. He had to come into Huddersfield from a distance of six miles to get the materials for work, and of course the same distance to travel when it was finished, in order to get paid. He had, therefore, to travel, to and fro, twenty-four miles for every piece of work he finished; and taking into account the delays and disappointments which he experienced, he calculated that he lost at least two days every fortnight. He seldom partook of animal food, and the luxury of a blanket he had not enjoyed for years. He is acquainted with hundreds whose circumstances are equally wretched. He attributed all his misfortunes to the unrestricted action of machinery."

We may safely assume that out of several millions of once well-to-do hand-loom weavers (with whom we also count the poor weavers in India and Saxony, who perished by thousands in consequence of being displaced by the English cotton manufacture), everyone underwent a similar process of gradual impoverishment, degradation, and suffer

ing by slow starvation. When we consider that in this instance, every individual case of impoverishment presents already years and years of suffering, and when we, moreover, multiply this accumulation of years by the several millions of persons so afflicted, we arrive at so appalling an amount of misery that even the sufferings endured by the victims of inquisition and slavery lie light in the balance against it.

O Civilization! falsely so called, it is thou that art answerable for these inhuman inflictions of pain and degradation on thy own children; and if there should ever come a day of reckoning, the abettors and instigators of these cruel misdeeds and derelictions of the duty to humanity will surely be called to account; amongst whom there will certainly figure in the first rank of the deepest dye of guilt the authors, professors, disciples and propagators of the science of political economy -the dismal science-the science of inhumanity-alias "M'Crowdy's dreary science"!

Mr. F. B. Barton, a well-known positivist, says on this subject:-"To the trying vicissitudes to which the physical worker is subject we must not forget to add the wholesale displacement of his labour by machinery, which leaves him often suddenly and completely destitute, like a wrecked and shattered vessel stranded on the beach far above the rising tide. Surely it is neither just nor humane that they who have been working the best part of their lives in producing their country's wealth should be suddenly and unceremoniously cast aside to shift as best they can, because machinery has been introduced to supersede their labour; and to say that they will reap the benefit hereafter is mere mockery, for while the grass grows the steed starves." "

The migration of trades, although not acting so suddenly as the introduction of labour-saving machines, is even more injurious to the working population of the district where trade begins to decay, or to migrate, because its effects are not so discernible even to the working-men themselves; they obtain gradually less and less employment, but still cling to the hope that their trade will return, and that matters will improve. The silk weavers of Spitalfields have long and patiently put up with the gradual decline of their trade caused by the migration of the silk manufacture to Macclesfield and