Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine | Page 6

Nay,
what is worse, it is rolled over to the other side; and forms an additional
incentive to licentiousness. The poor in these situations have no
neighbours who care for them, or even know their names; but they are
surrounded by multitudes who are willing to accompany them in the

career of sensuality. They are unknown alike to each other, and to any
persons of respectability or property in their vicinity. Philanthropy
seeks in vain for virtue amidst thousands and tens of thousands of
unknown names; charity itself is repelled by the hopelessness of all
attempts to relieve the stupendous mass of destitution which follows in
the train of such enormous accumulation of numbers. Every individual
or voluntary effort is overlooked amidst the prodigious multitude, as it
was in the Moscow campaign of Napoleon. Thus the most powerful
restraints on human conduct--character, relations, neighbourhood--are
lost upon mankind at the very time when their salutary influence is
most required to enable them to withstand the increasing temptations
arising from density of numbers and a vast increase of wages.
Multitudes remove responsibility without weakening passion. Isolation
ensures concealment without adding to resolution. This is the true
cause of the more rapid deterioration of the character of the poor than
the rich, when placed in such dense localities. The latter have a
neighbourhood to watch them, because their station renders them
conspicuous--the former have none. Witness the rapid and general
corruption of the higher ranks, when they get away from such restraint,
amidst the profligacy of New South Wales.
In the foremost rank of the causes which demoralize the urban and
mining population, we must place the frequency of those strikes which
unhappily have now become so common as to be of more frequent
occurrence than a wet season, even in our humid climate. During the
last twenty years there have been six great strikes: viz. in 1826, 1828,
1834, 1837, 1842, and 1844. All of these have kept multitudes of the
labouring poor idle for months together. Incalculable is the
demoralization thus produced upon the great mass of the working
classes. We speak not of the actual increase of commitments during the
continuance of a great strike, though that increase is so considerable
that it in general augments them in a single year from thirty to fifty per
cent.[7] We allude to the far more general and lasting causes of
demoralization which arise from the arraying of one portion of the
community in fierce hostility against another, the wretchedness which
is spread among multitudes by months of compulsory idleness, and the
not less ruinous effect of depriving them of occupation during such
protracted periods. When we recollect that such is the vehemence of

party feeling produced by these disastrous combinations, that it so far
obliterates all sense of right and wrong as generally to make their
members countenance contumely and insult, sometimes even robbery,
fire-raising, and murder, committed on innocent persons who are only
striving to earn an honest livelihood for themselves by hard labour, but
in opposition to the strike; and that it induces twenty and thirty
thousand persons to yield implicit obedience to the commands of an
unknown committee, who have power to force them to do what the
Sultan Mahmoud, or the Committee of Public Safety, never ventured to
attempt--to abstain from labour, and endure want and starvation for
months together, for an object of which they often in secret
disapprove--it may be conceived how wide-spread and fatal is the
confusion of moral principle, and habits of idleness and insubordination
thus produced. Their effects invariably appear for a course of years
afterwards, in the increased roll of criminal commitments, and the
number of young persons of both sexes, who, loosened by these
protracted periods of idleness, never afterwards regain habits of
regularity and industry. Nor is the evil lessened by the blind infatuation
with which it is uniformly regarded by the other classes of the
community, and the obstinate resistance they make to all measures
calculated to arrest the violence of these combinations, in consequence
of the expense with which they would probably be attended--a
supineness which, by leaving the coast constantly clear to the terrors of
such associations, and promising impunity to their crimes, operates as a
continual bounty on their recurrence.
[Footnote 7:
Commitments:-- Lanarkshire. Lancashire. Staffordshire. Yorkshire.
1836 451 2,265 686 1,252 1837[8] 565 2,809 909 1,376 1841 513
3,987 1,059 1,895 1842[9] 696 4,497 1,485 2,598
PORTER'S _Parl. Tables_, xi. 162.--_Parl. Paper of Crime_, 1843, p.
53.]
[Footnote 8: Strike.]
[Footnote 9: Strike.]
Infant labour, unhappily now so frequent in all kinds of factories, and
the great prevalence of female workers, is another evil of a very serious
kind in the manufacturing districts. We do not propose to enter into the
question, recently so fiercely agitated in