Part 5

There is some reason that we will not undertake to give, which causes Lancashire, although by no means the only British factory district, to be the district most afflicted by misunderstandings. Nowhere else are the masters so much obstructed by the dictatorial spirit of the men; nowhere else is the law so much interfered with, by the dictatorial spirit of the masters. In Scotland, Yorkshire, and the west of England, masters and men work generally well together, and the law is more or less obeyed; machinery, for instance, not being, as a rule, obstinately left unfenced.

Many pages of this journal have been devoted already to the discouragement of strikes. We have urged invariably that the one perfect remedy against them is the opening up of more and better opportunities of understanding one another, between man and master. In case we may be supposed to be ignorant of the feelings about which we reason, let it be known that every thought--almost every word--upon this subject given in the paragraphs that follow will be the thought or word, not of a speculative person at a distance, but of a Lancashire millowner. At the time of the disastrous Preston strike, a Preston manufacturer, whose men stood by him honestly and well, published at Manchester, a little pamphlet;[D] which, if its counsel had been taken, would assuredly have made the present strike of Manchester impossible. Mr. Justice Talfourd’s last words, placed lately by the men above their manifesto, was then chosen as a motto by the masters. Coming, this gentleman wrote, into Lancashire from a district where good feeling subsisted between the employer and the employed, it was with the utmost surprise that he found labour and capital to be in a state of antagonism throughout the country. From the time when he first began to employ labour in Lancashire, more than a quarter of a century ago, he has made it his strict business to study the system at work around him, and discover the real causes of the evils that undoubtedly exist; and he has no hesitation in saying, that the main cause is a want of cordial feeling--the absence, in fact, of a good understanding between the parties to the labour-contract. This feeling must be established, he adds, or the case never will be mended. Such understanding does not come by any explanations from third parties; it is produced only by direct and habitual intercourse between the parties too often at issue. The Preston manufacturer says that no doubt the masters in Lancashire help their men to be intelligent by spending money liberally upon schools connected directly or indirectly with their mills. Duty is done amply; and, for duty’s sake, too, to children; but, he adds, what is really wanted is the education of the adult intellect. The minds of children, having been prepared by the rudiments of knowledge to receive ideas (whether good or evil), they are then cast adrift to gather and continue their education by absorbing all the notions, all the prejudices, and all the fallacies with which chance may surround them. A dispute arises; there is no sympathy shown to the operatives by the employers; but much real or pretended sympathy is shown by the delegates, who tell them fine-spun theories about the results of trades’ unions; talk to them in an inflated manner about their rights and wrongs; tell them that a strike is the only way of battling for the right. Such men never interfere without widening the breach, on which they get a footing.

[D] Strikes Prevented. By a Preston Manufacturer. Galt and Co. 1854.

So far, the Preston manufacturer says what we have felt and said on numerous occasions. Now let us see how he not only speaks, but acts, and how the doing looks which illustrates the saying.

In the first place, minor acts of friendship to the men may be mentioned:--He has encouraged them to form a Provident Club in connection with his mill, and given them all help in it that would not compromise their independence; at the same time he has encouraged them also to support the benefit clubs out of doors. He has liked them to be led to accumulate savings, never believing that a store of money in the operative’s power would facilitate a strike, but rather knowing that the provident man who has saved property will be especially unwilling to see it dissipated. He has provided his men with a reading-room and a lending library, and secured a fund for its support, while he has removed a cause of soreness that exists in even well-regulated mills, by devoting to their library the fines levied upon operatives for faults of discipline. Such fines are necessary, and the faults for which they are imposed cost, of course, loss to the millowner for which they are no real compensation; nevertheless, if the master puts such shillings into his own pocket, or, as is sometimes the case, gives them as pocket-money to a son, experience declares that they are grudged, and sometimes counted as extortions. Let the fine go to the common account of the men, and the payer of it, instead of being pitied as the victim of a tyrant, will be laughed at--thanked for his donation to the library, and so forth. Practically, also, the result of this system, as the Preston manufacturer has found, is to reduce the number of the fines. Men would so much rather be victims than butts, that acts of neglect are more determinedly avoided, though we may suggest the general good feeling in the mill as a much better reason for the greater care over the work.

Left to select, by a committee chosen from among themselves, the books to be placed in their library, the men have been found to prefer those which contained useful knowledge--such as manuals of popular science, voyages, and histories.

So much being done to promote among the adults increasing intelligence and good feeling, there remains the most essential thing, the cornerstone of the whole system. It has been the practice of this master to promote weekly discussion--meetings among the operatives in his employment. Topics of the day, opinions of the press, the state of trade, questions concerning competition, discoveries on practical science or mechanics, especially such as affect the cotton-trade; and, lastly, the conduct and discipline of their own mill, provide plenty of matter for the free play of opinion. The master takes every possible opportunity of being present at these meetings; and, from what he has heard in them concerning his own mill, the Preston manufacturer declares that he has derived substantial advantage. It will, very often, he says, happen that the men may fancy themselves to be suffering under a grievance which does not really exist, and which a very little explanation will at once remove. Sometimes, too, a real grievance may be in existence, which the employer needs only to be informed of to remedy. In some mills, this master adds,--such is the fear of the consequence of being thought a grumbler,--that the men will often draw lots to determine who shall be the bearer of a complaint which may have been long seeking expression.

With one extract we will sum up the result of the adoption of this system. “I confess,” says the Preston manufacturer, “that, at the time, having control of a large establishment, I cultivated a habit of meeting and discussing questions with my workmen, both questions affecting the public concernment, and questions relating to our business. I confess that I derived quite as much benefit from these discussions as they did; and how much that was, may be inferred from the fact that, after the institution of that habit, I never had a dispute with my operatives. And I will here say that, at those meetings, I have heard an amount of sound and various information, expressed with a native strength and eloquence such as would have surprised any one not conversant with the Lancashire population. It was from those meetings that I derived the settled conviction which I now entertain, that the operatives do not lack the power, but only the means, of forming sound and independent opinions.”

We believe that we employ ourselves more usefully at this juncture in setting forth general principles like these than in any attempt, by arbitration as third parties in a special case, to introduce that which the Preston manufacturer declares to be only a fresh element of discord.

THE HALL OF WINES.

If you mount the Belvedere of the Jardin des Plantes, at Paris, there is one particular segment of the panorama which forms a very complete and singular picture. The right-hand wing (theatrically speaking) is formed by Jussieu’s famous cedar of Lebanon, planted by his own hands in seventeen hundred and thirty-five; that on the left hand is a clump of yews, firs, and miscellaneous evergreens. The heights of Montmartre crown the horizon; the middle distance is formed by the line of houses that constitute the quays on the right bank of the Seine, broken in the midst by the cupolas of St. Pol, and a little to the left by the barn-like roof of St. Louis dans l’Île. But the whole central space of the landscape is overspread with what might be a lake of brown mud in a half-dried and crumpled state, but which, after a second look, proves a vast expanse of tiled roofs running in parallel rows, and slightly diversified by the tops of trees and by scarcely visible skylights which break up the gray-brown uniformity. That petrified mud-lake consists entirely of the roofs which cover the famous Entrepôt or Halle-aux-Vins, which Napoleon the First propounded (by imperial decree) in eighteen hundred and eight, on the site of the Abbey of St. Victor, where Abelard had listened to the lessons of Guillaume de Champeaux, and where many good bottles of ecclesiastical wine had made their disappearance down monkish throats.

If your curiosity is sufficiently awakened to pay the Entrepôt a nearer visit, you will meet with much to interest. Suppose you walk down Rue Cuvier,--perhaps one of these days we shall have Owen Street, and Faraday Street, in London,--you will reach the Quai Saint Bernard, with the Seine rushing rapidly to the left and in front. You will encounter an eddying stream of pleasure and of business combined, as if the whole population of Paris were dancing a grand Sir Roger de Coverly together; omnibuses flitting backwards and forwards,--Hirondelles, Favorites, Gazelles, Parisiennes; holiday parties laden with eatables, to be washed down, outside the Barrière, by wine untaxed by octroi duty; students and savans bent on taking notes on botany and comparative anatomy; wine merchants and their customers with mouths in tasting trim, bound either for the Halle itself or for Bercy beyond it; troops of children with their nurses and grandmothers, about to spend the afternoon in watching the monkeys; artisans’ cousins from the interior, with hearts palpitating at the hope of beholding living lions, tigers and boa-constrictors, for the first time in their life; not to mention the man who cuts your portrait in black paper, with the Arab who jumps into the air like a goat and lights on his forefeet like a sportive tomcat, on their way to compete with the giantess, the learned pig, and the fortune-telling pony at the foot of the bridge of Austerlitz. From all these mundane follies the Halle-aux-Vins is secluded, in monastic style, by a light railing covered with stout iron network, which allows it to gaze at the Vanity Fair, while it separates it from too familiar contact with the world. It is in the crowd--without being of it--a convenient, friar-like, differenceless distinction. Exclusiveness, however, of whatever kind, is more apparent than real. At the bottom of Rue Cuvier, turn to your right, and you may enter at once, unless you prefer walking along the Quai to the principal entrance, where there is a letter-box, in case you have a billet-doux to post. The principal restriction imposed upon a stranger is, that he is forbidden to smoke amongst the eaux-de-vie.

Well, now that you are inside it, what do you think of it? Is the wine-market of Paris like any thing else? The name of the establishment puts the London Docks into your head; but, beyond their commercial use and distinction, there is no more analogy between the London Docks, and this little bit of fairy-land, than there was between the caverns of Ætna, where Vulcan made pokers and tongs, and the slopes of Parnassus where the Muses danced. The Halle-aux-Vins is not a building, nor a labyrinthine cellar; it is a complete town, as perfect and unique in its way as Pompeii itself. Once a week, indeed, it resembles the city of the dead; it is silent, solitary, and closed. No business is transacted there on Sundays, save only by the restless spirits which will work unseen, and which contrive to make their escape invisibly, however fast they may be imprisoned.

The Halle is the very concentration and impersonation of French vinous hilarity. It would not do for port and sherry, which require a more solid and stately residence; nor is it sufficiently whimsical and mediæval to serve as a rendezvous for Rhenish, Austrian, and Hungarian volunteers in the grand army of Jean Raisin. Rudesheimer, Voeslan, Gumpoldskirchen, or Luttenberg, could not well sojourn comfortably in any place that had not a touch of a ruined castle in its architecture. But the Entrepôt, whose first stone was laid little more than forty years back, no more pretends to an elderly and dignified mien than does the Bal Mabille (by daylight) or the Château des Fleurs. It is as tasteful and as elegant as if intended to serve as a suburban luncheon-place, where you might call for any known wine in the world, to be sipped under the shade of flowering shrubs, to the accompaniment of sandwiches, sausage-rolls, and ices, handed to you by white-aproned waiters or rosy-cheeked and smart-capped damsels.

Great part of this town consists of houses--summer-houses, dolls-houses,--of one story, with one door, one window, and one chimney; with room in each, for exactly one more than one inmate. An extra apartment is sometimes contrived, by means of a bower, which serves instead of a garden--there is none--though a great deal of gardening is done in the Halle, in tubs, flower-pots, and mignonette-boxes, wherein luxuriant specimens of the culture are observable; myrtles, oleanders, lilacs, orange-trees, bay-trees, and pomegranates, all a-growing and a-blowing. Favoured mansions possess a garden--sometimes as much as three or four mètres square--bedecked with roses, dwarf and standard, lilies of the valley, violets double and single, irises displaying some of the colours of the rainbow, hollyhocks, gilliflowers, blue-bells, and oyster-shells all in a row. There is an abundant supply of excellent water; of course to serve no other purpose whatever than the refreshment of the aforesaid favourites of Flora, though people say more wine is drunk in Paris than ever comes or came into it.

The Halle-aux-Vins houses, which put you in mind of Gulliver’s box in Brobdingnag, are raised from the ground on separate blocks of stone, to keep them dry, which suggests the further idea of the possibility of their being flown away with by an eagle or roc, if they had only a convenient ring in the roof. Of course, the houselings,--detached and separate; no quarrelling with next-door neighbours, nor listening to secrets through thin partition walls,--are ranged in streets, the perusal of whose simple names is sufficient to create a vinous thirst. What do you say to walking out of Rue de Bordeaux into Rue de Champagne, thence traversing Rue de Bourgogne, to reach Rue de la Côte-d’Or, and Rue de Languedoc, before arriving at Rue de Touraine! The Barmecide’s guest would have been in ecstacies, in defiance of the koran, at such a feast.

Moreover, to make things still more pleasant, every one of the euphonious alleys and streets is planted with trees of different ornamental species,--the lime, the horse-chesnut, and other arboreal luxuries. It is a pity that the climate does not permit the growth of cork-trees, bearing crops of ready-cut corks, including bungs, long clarets, and champagne-stoppers. The happy mortal to whom each little lodge belongs, is indicated by a legible inscription giving not only the number of his isolated square counting-house, according to its place in the alley which it lines, whether in single or in double row, but also bearing the town-address of its tenant, and specifying the special liquors in which he deals; thus:--“21, Mossenet, Senior, & Cie.; Quai d’Anjou, 25. Fine wines of the Côte-d’Or cellar, Rue de Champagne, 17.” Similar biographical sketches are given of other lords of other summer-houses which wink at you with their Venetian blinds behind their fences of trelliswork covered with creeping plants.

The ground-plan of the Halle-aux-Vins is formed of square blocks, consisting of magazins, divided at right angles by the streets we have traversed. The magazins are appropriately named after the rivers of France along whose banks are the most famous vineyards. The Magazin du Rhone, Magazin de L’Yonne, Magazin de la Marne, Magazin de la Seine, and Magazin de la Loire, will serve as guides to the nomenclature of the rest of the establishment. Five principal masses of building are thus divided by clean-swept streets, whose most conspicuous ornaments, besides the little thrifty fir-trees, arbor-vitæ, and junipers in tubs, are groups of all sorts of casks lying about in picturesque attitudes, as if they had purposely arranged themselves in tableaux for the sake of having their portraits drawn; and drays, which are simply long-inclined planes balancing on the axle of the wheel, on which the casks are held by a rope tightened by a four-handled capstan. The elevation of the Halle-aux-Vins is pyramidal in principle. The ground-floor of the blocks is crossed by galleries from which you enter cobwebby rather than mouldy cellars, whose more apt denomination would be the Bordeaux word chais. Each gallery, a sort of rectangular tunnel some three hundred and fifty metres long, is lighted by the sunshine from a grating above, and is traversed by a wooden railway for tubs to roll on straight and soberly. Great precautions are taken against fire. The galleries are closed at each end by double doors of iron grating. The sapeurs pompiers, in various ways, make their vicinity if not their presence felt.

Other storehouses, built over the ground-floor so as to form a second story, are tastefully surrounded with terraces, on which you are strictly forbidden to smoke. These upper magazins are approached from the streets by inclined planes of road-way for the use of vehicles; pedestrians, by stepping up light iron staircases, may more readily breathe the air of the terrace, while sounds of tapping and wine-coopering mingle with the hum of the adjacent city, with the passing music of some military band, or with the roar and the scream of the captive creatures which are stared at by the crowd in the Jardin des Plantes. Vinous and spirituous smells float in the atmosphere from the full casks which lie about, in spite of the coating of plaster with which their ends are covered; and we draw nigh to the vaulted magazins of eau de vie, where every brandy-seller has his own proper numbered store, lighted from above by little square skylights, and where roam groups of inquisitive tasters, or spirit-rappers, anxious to pry into secrets that are closely veiled from the vulgar herd. The sanctum of the shrine is the Depotoir Public, or public gauging and mixing apparatus of cylindrical receivers, and glass-graduated brandyometers, and cranes for raising the barrels to the top of the cylinders. In this presence-chamber of alcoholic majesty, etiquette is strictly observed. Conformably with the rules and regulations of the Entrepôt, the conservator apprises Messieurs the merchants that they are required to mind their P’s and Q’s. It is no more allowable to meddle with the machinery, or to intrude behind the mystic cylinders, than it is to make playthings of the furniture which adorns the altar of a cathedral.

There are paradoxical facts connected with the Halle-aux-Vins which none but the thoroughly initiated can solve. Perhaps it may afford a clue to know that there are two emporia of wine and spirit at Paris; one, the Halle within the barrière, and, therefore subject to the octroi tax, and more immediately connected with the supply of the city itself--the other, Bercy, close by, but outside the barrière, and consequently filled with the goods yet untouched by the troublesome impost. Large as it is, the Entrepôt is not large enough; were it twice as big, it would all be hired. For, of all trades in Paris, the wine-trade is the most considerable. There are now nearly seven hundred wholesale merchants, and about three thousand five hundred retail dealers, without reckoning the épiciers, or grocers, who usually sell wines, spirits, and liqueurs in bottle; taking no account of the innumerable houses where they give to eat, and also give to drink. Not only is it the mission of Parisian commerce to moisten the throats of the metropolis, but it is the natural intermediary of the alcoholic beverages that are consumed in the vineyardless districts of France. The twentieth part of the produce of the empire travels to Paris. But, as the imposts on their arrival are very heavy and moreover press only on the local consumption, means have been taken to store the merchandise in such a way as not to pay the duty till the moment of its sale to the consumer. Hence, there is established on the bank of the Seine where Bercy stands, an assemblage of a thousand or twelve hundred cellars and warehouses--a sort of inland bonding-place--outside the limits of the octroi tax. These are hired by the merchants of the city as receptacles for their stock in hand.

The buildings of the Halle-aux-Vins, within the fiscal boundary, cost altogether thirty millions of francs, estimating the value of the site at one third of that sum. The speculation, however, has not hitherto responded to the hopes that were entertained at the time when it was founded. Whether the rentals (which vary from two francs and a half to five francs the superficial mètre), are fixed at too low a figure, or whether the wine-merchants, disliking to be watched and hindered in the performance of their trade manipulations, prefer their private magazins at Bercy, the Entrepôt brings in to the city of Paris no more than three hundred thousand francs clear a year, that is, about one per cent for the capital employed. That Jean Raisin is somewhere made the subject of certain mystic rites which are scrupulously screened from public observation may be proved by the simple rules of addition and subtraction.