Part 5

Mr. Fairbairn’s authority against rectangular hooks is quoted in the pamphlet. He says they will increase the danger--would pull all about the peoples’ ears. But do they? In the last report which the writer represents as having been consulted for the other side of the question, the inspectors jointly state that “in none of our districts has any accident come to our knowledge from the coiling of a strap round a horizontal shaft where strap-hooks have been put up in the manner recommended.” And Mr. Redgrave reports thus from Yorkshire: “With respect to one of the precautions which is considered of great value in Yorkshire and other parts of my district--I mean the strap-hook, for preventing the lapping of the strap upon the revolving shaft; the fact that not an accident has been reported to me during the last six months as having been caused by the lapping of a strap upon a shaft, nor by one of the many thousand strap-hooks which have been fixed up in a very large number of factories, more or less in the different departments of fifteen hundred out of two thousand factories which constitute my district, in a large proportion of which, moreover, they have existed for many years, may be taken as conclusive evidence that the strap-hook does obviate the lapping of the strap, thereby preventing accidents, and does not increase the danger of the shaft and its liability to cause accidents.”

Our evidence does not end here, but we must have regard to space. We pass rapidly over the statements in the pamphlet that the men who die, die by their own indiscretion, or, as Miss Martineau expresses it, “climb up to the death which is carefully removed out of their natural reach.” This climbing up to death will occur to any sane man or woman, perhaps, as being excessively probable, but it is not true; very few deaths are the result of gross and active carelessness: some arise from a momentary inadvertence; but the reports of inquests constantly sent to us show that at least half who die, can in no fair sense be said to deserve any blame. The pamphlet itself quotes inadvertently the statement of an engineer, that “there should be a ready means of putting on the strap when the mill is in motion;” doing this is a common cause of death. Again, one man is seized by a loose end of his neckcloth, another dragged to his death out of a cart, because a cloth in it is accidentally blown by the wind against machinery.

Need we do more than allude to such arguments as, that if law compels the fencing of machinery (which while in motion thus can seize the passive stander-by) it ought to compel windows to be barred, because people can throw themselves out of them, and trees to be fenced, because boys can climb up and tumble down? If we take thought for the operative, working in the midst of dangerous machinery, are we, it is asked, to legislate “for every drunken vagabond who lies down in the track--every deaf old man who chooses the railway for his walk?” Need we answer such preposterous inquiries?

We have maintained that it is strictly within the province of the law to protect life, and to prohibit any arrangements by which it is shown that the lives of people in pursuit of their lawful and useful work, are without necessity endangered. Preventable accidents of every kind we have always declared it to be the duty of the legislature to prevent. We are told that Common Law suffices for all cases. It is hardly worth while to spend time in showing that it does not, and cannot provide for these cases. Common Law is the law as established for a given and considerable length of time, and it arose out of the fusion of much special legislation. It knew nothing of steam-engines, and it is impossible that it should have foreseen such cases as arise out of the new systems of railway and factory. Common Law will not make factories safe working places for the operative; special consideration must be given to the subject. When we learn, as Sir John Kincaid reports from Scotland, that a sufficient fencing of three hundred and fifty feet of horizontal shafting cost one factory only six pounds; that the casing of two hundred and fifty-one feet of shafting above seven feet from the floor--more precaution than was absolutely needed--cost another factory only eight pounds four; that a Paisley factory cased three hundred and twenty-four feet of such shafting most efficiently with block iron casing, for no more than sixteen pounds four, we refuse to listen to the cry of Mills on Fire--Ruinous Expense--Manufactures must cease--Fatal Principles--Property going to be pitched into the Atlantic--and simply wait until the recusant Lancashire Mill-owners have done calling names and litigating, and have learnt that if they will not voluntarily take the necessary steps to prevent the more horrible sort of accidents in their mills, they must take them by compulsion.

Miss Martineau suggests the impropriety of any discussion until doubt has been removed by the settlement of a point raised before the Court of Queen’s Bench. The whole matter is to remain in abeyance--things are to go on as they are, and there are to be no convictions--while the point mainly at issue is awaiting the decision of the higher courts. Let us see what this means. The point at issue, as the pamphlet rightly states, is the interpretation of the words “securely fenced;” and it was agreed some time ago that in the case of a certain prosecution for unfenced machinery, the question should go before the Queen’s Bench to determine whether machinery could be said to be otherwise than securely fenced when no accident could be shown to have been caused by it; whether the fact that such machinery had led to deaths and mutilations in other mills proved it, or did not prove it, to be insecure in a mill where, as yet, no blood had been shed. The question so raised is an obvious quibble, and even the known uncertainty of the law could scarcely throw a doubt over the issue of a reference to its supreme courts. Meanwhile the issue was raised. The great purpose and business of the Association seemed to be to raise it. One, at least, of the inspectors stood aside from the disputed class of prosecutions till the doubt so raised should be definitively settled. We ourselves now fall under reproof for not solemnly and silently awaiting the decision of the question, whether securely fenced means so fenced as that an accident shall not have happened, or so fenced that an accident shall not arise. We now learn upon inquiry, that while we have been waiting, and the Association has been claiming a twice-pending judicial decision, we find--what do our readers suppose?--that no case whatever awaits the opinion of the Judges!

We believe that we have now answered all the accusations laid against ourselves in Miss Martineau’s pamphlet. There is one citation of “actual resolutions of the Association,” side by side with our summary of their purport, presented as a “conviction of the humanity-monger,” of which we need say nothing, because it cannot fail to suggest to any person only moderately prejudiced, that our summary is very close and accurate indeed.

We will pursue the pamphlet no further, having set ourselves right. There is not an argument, or statement, or allusion in it that is not open to rebuke. It fails even in such small details as when a professor of Literature with a becoming sense of its uses, and that Professor the authoress of Forest and Game Law Tales, and of many volumes of Stories on Political Economy, should gracefully and becomingly think it as against Mr. Dickens, “pity, as a matter of taste, that a writer of fiction should choose topics in which political philosophy and morality were involved.” It fails when accusing us of “burlesque” and “irony,” because we put plain things “in the palpable way which a just-minded writer would scrupulously avoid,” and have, God knows, with a heart how full of earnestness, tried to make the suffering perceived that must have been involved in all these accidents. It fails even when against this “philo-operative cant,” its writer must needs quote Sydney Smith. “We miss Sydney Smith, it is said, in times like these--in every time when a contagious folly, and especially a folly of cant and selfish sensibility, is in question. This very case, in a former phase came under his eye”--and then we have two notes of what he said against the Ten Hours’ Bill: sayings with which, it happens, that the writer of these papers perfectly agrees. When a case really parallel to this, affecting, not the laws of labour, but the carrying on of trade in a way leading sometimes to cruel deaths came under his eye, we did not miss Sydney Smith indeed! The author of the paper upon climbing boys was the last person for Miss Martineau to quote. “We come now,” begins one of his paragraphs, “to burning little chimney-sweepers;” and the same paragraph ends by asking, “What is a toasted child, compared to the agonies of the mistress of the house with a deranged dinner?” Palpably put, and with a bitter irony, we fear!

We have done. We hope we have not been induced to exceed the bounds of temperate and moderate remonstrance, or to prostitute our part in Literature to Old Bailey pleading and passionate scolding. We thoroughly forgive Miss Martineau for having strayed into such unworthy paths under the guidance of her anonymous friend, and we blot her pamphlet out of our remembrance.

COMING SOUTH A CENTURY AGO.

Many amusing books (and many dull ones) come into existence through the clubs which have been following the fashion of the Bannatyne in Edinburgh, the Maitland in Glasgow, and the Camden and Grainger in England. The northern clubs have indulged the most in what the French call luxurious editions. They have benefited by the notion that each subscriber will, in addition to his very moderate subscription, sooner or later print a book for them at his own charge. And when a duke presents to one of these societies the Chartulary of Melrose at the cost of a thousand guineas, and an earl having paid as much for the printing of the Chartulary of Paisley goes on to produce four or five quartos of the Analecta of Woodrow, the example of liberality is set upon no trifling scale. As gifts, though not to be refused, are not always well chosen, volumes that are scarcely worth the pains of reading do occasionally appear. This by the way. We have been reading without any sense of pain one of the publications of the Maitland club--a piece of history relating to a family at present extinct in the male line, the Stewarts of Coltness, in Lanarkshire. Authorship ran in their blood. One of their family wrote a domestic narrative in the year sixteen hundred, which was the main source of a genealogical history of the race drawn up by a Sir Archibald one hundred and seventy-three years later. There were cavalier Coltnesses, and there was a Gospel Coltness; but the Coltness to whom we mean to pay attention in this place is a lady--a literary Coltness, married unto Mr. Calderwood of Polton, in Mid-Lothian. This clever dame descended into England, exactly one hundred years ago, and passed over Holland, on a journey to her brother, a political exile at Aix-la-Chapelle. She wrote a journal, and regarding England through a Scotch mist of her own, took notes in a shrewd way; sometimes canny, and sometimes (as regards the relative merits of the north and south), of a not wholly unquestionable kind. This lady had been bred up in the family of a distinguished crown lawyer; was accustomed to the best society in Scotland; was in her own family commander-in-chief over an amiable husband; and, if we may venture to state so much, forty years of age, when she, for the first time in her life, came south.

Mrs. Calderwood and her husband travelled from Edinburgh to London in their own post-chaise, attended by a serving-man on horseback with pistols in his holsters and a broadsword in his belt. There was a case of pistols in the carriage, more fit, perhaps, for the use of the lady than of the good-natured laird; who, being a man of accomplishments, took with him a pocket Horace to beguile the hours of wayfaring. They set out on the third of June; and, being on the road each day for twelve or fourteen hours, arrived in London on the evening of the tenth.

On the road of course, one day, the lady dined at Durham, “and I went,” she adds, “to see the cathedral; it is a prodigious bulky building.” The day happening to be Sunday, Mrs. Calderwood was much shocked at the behaviour of little boys, who played at ball in what she termed the piazzas, and supposed that the woman who was showing her the place considered her a heathen,--“in particular she stared when I asked what the things were they kneeled upon, as they appeared to me to be so many Cheshire cheeses.” Mrs. Calderwood had travelled far into England before she met with any sensible inhabitant; and then the first intelligent native is recorded, and proves to have been a chamber-maid.

“At Barnet we stopped; and while we changed horses, I asked some questions at the maid who stood at the door, which she answered and went in. In a little time out comes a squinting, smart-like, black girl, and spoke to me, as I thought, in Irish; upon which I said, ‘Are you a Highlander?’ ‘No,’ said she, ‘I am Welch. Are not you Welch?’ ‘No,’ said I, ‘but I am Scots, and the Scots and Welch are near relations, and much better born than the English.’ She took me by the hand, and looked so kindly, that I suppose she thought me her relation because I was not English; which makes me think the English are a people one may perhaps esteem or admire, but they do not draw the affections of strangers, neither in their country nor out of it.”

The general appearance of the southern country is thus pleasantly

O’erlaid with black, staid wisdom’s hue:

“The villages to north of Trent are but indifferent, and the churches very thin sown; and, indeed, for a long time one would think the country of no religion at all, there being hardly either Christian church or heathen temple to be seen. The fields on both hands were mostly grass; and the greatest variety and plenty of fine cattle, all of various colours. I admired the cattle much more than the people; for they seem to have the least of what we call smartness of any folks I ever saw, and totally void of all sort of curiosity--which, perhaps, some may think a good quality.... As for the inclosing in England, it is of all the different methods, both good and bad, that can be imagined; and that such insufficient inclosures, as some are, keep in the cattle (which is so hard with us in Scotland) is entirely owing to the levelness of the grounds; so that an English cow does not see another spot than where she feeds, and has as little intelligence as the people.” Surely the cows are to be pitied, born incapable of taking comprehensive views of things in this flat and unprofitable land. If ever there arose a chance of wider views for the fair traveller, England rose not in her esteem on that account. “Sometimes,” she owns, “we had an extensive prospect, but not the least variety, so that we could say there was too much of it. No water, no distinction between a gentleman’s seat and his tenant’s house, but that he was a little more smothered up with trees.” The lady, when she reached London, found the same reason for contempt of Hyde Park as a place of resort; it was naught, because it was quite smothered with trees. She also surprised the crowded Londoners that she thought England on the whole less populous than Scotland, and there is a good deal of right observation in the sketch she gives of England extra-metropolitan a hundred years ago.

“In the first place, look from the road on each hand, and you see very few houses; towns there are, but at the distance of eight or ten miles. Then, who is it that lives in them? There are no manufactories carried on in them; they live by the travellers and the country about; that is, there are tradesmen of all kinds, perhaps two or three of each--smiths, wrights, shoemakers, &c.; and here is a squire of a small estate in the country near by; and here are Mrs. This, or That, old maids, and so many widow ladies with a parsonage house, a flourishing house. All the houses, built of brick, and very slight, and even some of timber, and two stories high, make them have a greater appearance than there is reality for; for I shall suppose you took out the squire and set him in his country house, and the old maids and widow ladies and place them with their relations, if they have any, in the country, or in a greater town, and take a stone house with a thatch roof of one storey instead of a brick one of two, and there are few country villages in Scotland where I will not muster out as many inhabitants as are in any of these post towns. Then I observed there were few folks to be met with on the road, and many times we could post an hour, which is seven miles, and not see as many houses and people put together on the road! Then on Sunday, we travelled from eight o’clock till we came to Newcastle, where the church was just going in; so that I may say we travelled fifteen miles to Newcastle; and the few people we met going to church upon the road surprised me much. The same as we went all day long; it had no appearance of the swarms of people we always see in Scotland going about on Sunday, even far from any considerable town. Then,” adds the Scotch lady, “the high price of labour is an evidence of the scarcity of people. I went into what we call a cottage, and there was a young woman with her child, sitting; it was very clean, and laid with coarse flags on the floor, but built with timber stoops, and what we call cat and clay walls. She took me into what she called her parlour, for the magnificent names they give things makes very fine till we see them; this parlour was just like to the other. I asked her what her husband was. She said, a labouring man, and got his shilling a day; that she did nothing but took care of her children, and now and then wrought a little plain work. So I found that, except it was in the manufacturing counties, the women do nothing; and if there were as many men in the country as one might suppose there would be, a man could be got for less wages than a shilling per day. Then the high wages at London shows the country cannot provide it with servants. It drains the country, and none return again who ever goes as chairmen, porters, hackney coachmen, or footmen; if they come to old age, seldom spend it in the country, but often in an almshouse, and often leave no posterity. Then the export they make of their victual is a presumption they have not inhabitants to consume it in the country, for, by the common calculation, there are seven millions and one half in England, and the ground in the kingdom is twenty-eight millions of acres, which is four acres to each person. Take into this the immense quantity of horses which are kept for no real use all over the kingdom, and it will be found, I think, that England could maintain many more people than are in it. Besides, let every nation pick out its own native subjects who are but in the first generation, the Irish, the Scots, the French, &c., and I am afraid the native English would appear much fewer than they imagine. On the other hand, Scotland must appear to be more populous for its extent and produce; first, by its bearing as many evacuations in proportion, both to the plantations, the fleet, and army, besides the numbers who go to England, and, indeed, breeding inhabitants to every country under the sun; and if, instead of following the wrong policy of supplying their deficiency of grain by importing it, they would cultivate their waste lands, it would do more than maintain all its inhabitants in plenty.” The lady presently becomes severe: “I do not think the soil near London is naturally rich, and neither the corns nor grass are extraordinary. I thought their crops of hay all very light, and but of an indifferent quality; they call it meadow hay, but we could call it tending pretty nearly to bog hay.”

Her admiration of things English seems indeed to have been confined pretty closely to its immense number of fine horses. “As for London, the first sight of it did not strike me with anything grand or magnificent.... Many authors and correspondents take up much time and pains to little purpose on descriptions. I never could understand anybody’s descriptions, and I suppose nobody will understand mine; so will only say London is a very large and extensive city. But I had time to see very little of it, and every street is so like another that, seeing part, you may easily suppose the whole.”

Then for the heads of London, your ill-meaning, politician lords, the lady Samson pulls their temple down over their heads. “You will think it very odd that I was a fortnight in London, and saw none of the royal family; but I got no clothes made till the day before I left, though I gave them to the making the day after I came. I cannot say my curiosity was great. I found, as I approached the court and the grandees, they sunk so miserably, and came so far short of the ideas I had conceived, that I was loth to lose the grand ideas I had of kings, princes, ministers of state, senators, &c., which, I suppose, I had gathered from romance in my youth. We used to laugh at the English for being so soon afraid when there was any danger in state affairs; but now I do excuse them. For we, at a distance, think the wisdom of our governors will prevent all those things; but those who know and see our ministers every day, see there is no wisdom in them, and that they are a parcel of old, ignorant, senseless bodies, who mind nothing but eating and drinking, and rolling about in their carriages in Hyde Park, and know no more of the country, or the situation of it, nor of the numbers, strength, and circumstances of it, than they never had been in it. And how should they, when London and twenty miles round it is the extent ever they saw of it?”

There were here some remarks not very inappropriate, considering that they were written when the Duke of Newcastle was fighting on his stumps, and the ferment concerning Admiral Byng was at its height.