Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine | Page 6

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 the legislature, as to the practicability of substituting a compulsory ten-hours' bill for the twelve hours' at present in operation. Anxious to avoid all topics on which there is a difference of opinion among able and patriotic men, we merely state this prevalence and precocity of juvenile labour in the manufacturing and mining districts as a fact which all must deplore, and which is attended with the most unhappy effects on the rising generation. The great majority, probably nine-tenths, of all the workers in cotton-mills or printfields, are females. We have heard much of the