The History of Trade Unionism / (Revised edition, extended to 1920)

by Sidney Webb; Beatrice Webb

CHAPTER II

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE
[1799-1825]

The traditional history of the Trade Union Movement represents the period prior to 1824 as one of unmitigated persecution and continuous repression. Every Union that can nowadays claim an existence of over a century possesses a romantic legend of its early years. The midnight meeting of patriots in the corner of a field, the buried box of records, the secret oath, the terms of imprisonment of the leading officials—all these are in the sagas of the older Unions, and form material out of which, in an age untroubled by historical criticism, a semi-mythical origin might easily have been created. That the legend is not without a basis of fact, we shall see in tracing the actual effect upon the Trade Union Movement of the legal prohibitions of combinations of wage-earners which prevailed throughout the United Kingdom up to 1824. But we shall find that some combinations of journeymen were at all times recognised by the law, that many others were only spasmodically interfered with, and that the utmost rigour of the Combination Laws was not felt until the far-reaching change of policy marked by the severe Acts of 1799-1800, which applied to all industries whatsoever. This will lead us naturally to the story of the repeal of the whole series of Combination Laws in 1824-5, the most impressive event in the early history of the movement.

There is a clear distinction—at any rate, as regards England—between the various statutes which forbade combination prior to the end of the eighteenth century, and the general Combination Acts of 1799-1800. In the numerous earlier Acts recited and repealed in 1824 the prohibition of combination was in all cases incidental to the regulation of the industry. It was assumed to be the business of Parliament and the law courts to regulate the conditions of labour; and combinations could, no more than individuals, be permitted to interfere in disputes for which a legal remedy was provided. The object primarily aimed at by the statutes was not the prohibition of combinations, but the fixing of wages, the prevention of embezzlement or damage, the enforcement of the contract of service or the proper arrangements for apprenticeship. And although combinations to interfere with these statutory aims were obviously illegal, and were usually expressly prohibited, it was an incidental result that combinations formed to promote the objects of the legislation, however objectionable they might be to employers, were apparently not regarded as unlawful. [111]

Thus one of the earliest types of combination among journeymen—the society to enforce the law—seems always to have been tacitly accepted as permissible. Although it is probable that such associations came technically within the definitions of combination and conspiracy, whether under the common law or the early statutes, we know of no case in which they were indicted as illegal. We have already described, for instance, how, in 1726, the woollen weavers of Wiltshire and Somersetshire openly combined to present a petition to the King in Council against their masters, the broad clothiers. The Privy Council, far from deeming the action of the weavers illegal, considered and dealt with their complaint. And when the employers persisted in disobeying the law, we have seen how, in 1756, the Fraternity of Woollen Clothweavers petitioned the House of Commons to make more effectual the power of the justices to fix wages, and obtained a new Act of Parliament in accordance with their desires. The almost perpetual combinations of the framework knitters between 1710 and 1800 were never made the subject of legal proceedings. The combinations of the London silkweavers obtained a virtual sanction by the Spitalfields Acts, under which the delegates of the workmen’s organisations regularly appeared before the justices, who fixed and revised the piecework prices. Even in 1808, after the stringency of the law against combinations had been greatly increased, the Glasgow and Lancashire cotton-weavers were permitted openly to combine for the purpose of seeking a legal fixing of wages, with the results already described. Nor was it only the combination to obtain a legally fixed rate of wages that was left unmolested by the law. Combinations to put in force the sections of the Statute of Apprentices (5 Eliz. c. 4), or other prohibitions of the employment of “illegal workmen,” occurred at intervals down to 1813. In 1749 a club of journeymen painters of the City of London proceeded against a master painter for employing a non-freeman; and the proceedings led, in 1750, to a conference of thirty journeymen and thirty masters with the City Corporation, at which the regulations were altered.[112] No one seems to have questioned the legality of the 1811-13 outburst of combinations to prosecute masters who had not served an apprenticeship, or who were employing unapprenticed workmen. One reason, doubtless, for the immunity of combinations to enforce the law was that they included employers and sympathisers of all ranks. For instance, the combinations in 1811-13 to enforce the apprenticeship laws comprised both masters and journeymen, who were equally aggrieved by the competition of the new capitalist and his “hirelings.”[113] The Yorkshire Clothiers’ Community, or “Brief Institution,” to which reference has already been made, included, in some of its ramifications, the “domestic” master manufacturers, who fought side by side with the journeymen against the new factory system.

On the other hand, combinations of journeymen to regulate for themselves their wages and conditions of employment stood, from the first, on a different footing. The common law doctrine of the illegality of proceedings “in restraint of trade,” as subsequently interpreted by the judges, of itself made illegal all combinations whatsoever of journeymen to regulate the conditions of their work. Moreover, with the regulation by law of wages and the conditions of employment, any combination to resist the order of the justices on these matters was obviously of the nature of rebellion, and was, in fact, put down like any individual disobedience of the law. Nor was express statute law against combinations wanting. The statute of 1305, entitled, “Who be Conspirators and who be Champertors” (33 Edw. I. st. 2), was in 1818 held to apply to a combination to raise wages among cotton-spinners, whose leaders were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment under this Act. The “Bill of Conspiracies of Victuallers and Craftsmen” of 1549 (2 and 3 Edw. VI. c. 15), though aimed primarily at combinations to keep up the prices charged to consumers, clearly includes within its prohibitions any combinations of journeymen craftsmen to keep up wages or reduce hours.

It is some proof of the novelty of the workmen’s combinations in the early part of the eighteenth century, that neither the employers nor the authorities thought at first of resorting to the very sufficient powers of the existing law against them. When, in 1720, the master tailors of London found themselves confronted with an organised body of journeymen claiming to make a collective bargain, seriously “in restraint of trade,” they turned, not to the law courts, but to Parliament for protection, and obtained, as we have seen, the Act “for regulating the Journeymen Tailors within the bills of mortality” (7 Geo. I. st. 1, c. 13, amended by 8 Geo. III. c. 17).[114] Similarly, when the clothiers of the West of England began between 1717 and 1725 to be inconvenienced by the “riotous and tumultuous clubs and societies” of woolcombers and weavers, who made bye-laws and maintained a Standard Rate,[115] they did not put in force the existing law, but successfully petitioned Parliament for the Act “to prevent unlawful combinations of workmen employed in the Woollen Manufactures” (12 Geo. I. c. 34). Indeed, prior to the general Acts of 1799 and 1800 against all combinations of journeymen, Parliament was, from the beginning of the eighteenth century, perpetually enacting statutes forbidding combinations in particular trades.[116]

In the English statutes this prohibition of combination was, as we have seen, only a secondary feature, incidental to the main purpose of the law. The case is different with regard to the early Irish Acts, the terms of which point to a much sharper cleavage between masters and men, due, perhaps, to difference of religion and race. The very first statute against combinations which was passed by the Irish Parliament, the Act of 1729 (3 Geo. II. c. 14), contained no provisions protecting the wage-earner, and prohibited combinations in all trades whatsoever. The Act of 1743 (17 Geo. II. c. 8), called forth by the failure of the previous prohibition, equally confined itself to drastic penal measures, including the punishment of the keepers of the public-houses which were used for meetings. But in later years the English practice seems to have been followed; for the laws of 1758 (31 Geo. II. c. 17), 1763 (3 Geo. III. 34, sec. 23), 1771 (11 and 12 Geo. III. c. 18, sec. 40, and c. 33), and 1779 (19 and 20 Geo. III. c. 19, c. 24, and c. 36) provide for the fixing of wages, and contain other regulations of industry, amongst which the prohibition of combinations comes as a matter of course.

By the end of the century, at any rate, the common law, both in England and in Ireland, had been brought to the aid of the special statutes, and the judges were ruling that any conspiracy to do an act which they considered unlawful in a combination, even if not criminal in an individual, was against the common law. Soon the legislature followed suit. In 1799 the Act 39 Geo. III. c. 81 expressly penalised all combinations whatsoever.

The grounds for this drastic measure appear to have been found in the marked increase of Trade Unionism among workers of various kinds. The operatives’ combinations were regarded as being in the nature of mutiny against their employers and masters; destructive of the “discipline” necessary to the expansion of trade; and interfering with the right of the employer to “do what he liked with his own.” The immediate occasion was a petition from London engineering employers, complaining of an alarming strike of the millwrights. This led to a Bill suppressing combination in the engineering trade, which was passed by the House of Commons, in spite of the protests of Sir Francis Burdett and Benjamin Hobhouse. The measure was, however, dropped in the House of Lords in favour of a more comprehensive Bill, applicable to all trades, which Whitbread had suggested. This was introduced on June 17, 1799, by William Pitt himself, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, who referred to the alarming growth of combination, not merely in the Metropolis but also in the north of England. Subsequent stages of the Bill were moved by George Rose, another member of the Administration; and the measure was hurried through all its stages in both Houses with great rapidity, receiving the Royal Assent only twenty-four days after its introduction into the House of Commons. There was therefore little opportunity for any effective demonstration against its provisions, but the Journeymen Calico-printers’ Society of London petitioned against the measure, and instructed counsel to put forward their objections. They represented that, although the Bill professed merely “to prevent unlawful combinations,” it created “new crimes of so indefinite a nature that no one journeyman or workman will be safe in holding any conversation with another on the subject of his trade or employment.” Only a few other petitions were presented, and, though Benjamin Hobhouse opposed it in the Commons and Lord Holland in the Lords, the Bill passed unaltered into law. [117]

But the struggle was not yet over. The employers were not satisfied with the 1799 Act; and The Times announced in January 1800 that “one of the first Acts of the Imperial Parliament [of the United Kingdom] will be for the prevention of conspiracies among journeymen tradesmen to raise their wages. All benefit clubs and societies are to be immediately suppressed.”[118] On the other hand, the trade clubs in all parts of the country poured in petitions of protest; and the Whig and Tory members for Liverpool, General Tarleton and Colonel Gascoyne, among whose constituents were the strongly combined shipwrights, who were freemen and Parliamentary electors, united to bring in an amending Bill. This was supported in a series of brilliant speeches by Sheridan, whose attempts to reduce to a minimum the mischief of the 1799 Act were strenuously resisted by Pitt and the Law Officers of the Crown. The petitions were considered by a Committee, which recommended certain amendments. Two justices were substituted for one as the tribunal; no justice engaged in the same trade as the defendant could act; the qualifying words “wilfully and maliciously” were introduced in the description of the offences. A clause protecting trade friendly societies was proposed but eventually rejected. A particularly odious feature of the 1799 Act, under which defendants were required to give evidence against themselves under severe penalties for refusal, was left unaltered. A series of interesting clauses providing for the reference of wage disputes to arbitration—copied from the contemporary Act relating to the cotton trade[119]—aroused great opposition, as tending “to fix wages” and as involving the recognition of the Trade Union representative, but they were finally adopted; without, so far as we are aware, ever being put in force. [120]

The general Combination Act of 1800 was not merely the codification of existing laws, or their extension from particular trades to the whole field of industry. It represented a new and momentous departure. Hitherto the central or local authority had acted as a court of appeal on all questions affecting the work and wages of the citizen. If the master and journeyman failed to agree as to what constituted a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work, the higgling of the market was peremptorily superseded by the authoritative determination, presumably on grounds of social expediency, of the standard of remuneration. Probably the actual fixing of wages by justices of the peace fell very rapidly into disuse as regards the majority of industries, although formal orders are found in the minutes of Quarter Sessions during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and deep traces of the practice long survived in the customary rates of hiring. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, at any rate, free bargaining between the capitalist and his workmen became practically the sole method of fixing wages. Then it was that the gross injustice of prohibiting combinations of journeymen became apparent. “A single master,” said Lord Jeffrey, “was at liberty at any time to turn off the whole of his workmen at once—100 or 1000 in number—if they would not accept of the wages he chose to offer. But it was made an offence for the whole of the workmen to leave that master at once if he refused to give the wages they chose to require.”[121] What was even more oppressive in practice was the employers’ use of the threat of prosecution to prevent even the beginnings of resistance among the workmen to any reduction of wages or worsening of conditions.

It is true that the law forbade combinations of employers as well as combinations of journeymen. Even if it had been impartially carried out, there would still have remained the inequality due to the fact that, in the new system of industry, a single employer was himself equivalent to a very numerous combination. But the hand of justice was not impartial. The “tacit, but constant” combination of employers to depress wages, to which Adam Smith refers, could not be reached by the law. Nor was there any disposition on the part of the magistrates or the judges to find the masters guilty, even in cases of flagrant or avowed combination. No one prosecuted the master cutlers who, in 1814, openly formed the Sheffield Mercantile and Manufacturing Union, having for its main rule that no merchant or manufacturer should pay higher prices for any article of Sheffield make than were current in the preceding year, with a penalty of £100 for each contravention of this illegal agreement.[122] During the whole epoch of repression, whilst thousands of journeymen suffered for the crime of combination, there is no case on record in which an employer was punished for the same offence.

To the ordinary politician a combination of employers and a combination of workmen seemed in no way comparable. The former was, at most, an industrial misdemeanour: the latter was in all cases a political crime. Under the shadow of the French Revolution, the English governing classes regarded all associations of the common people with the utmost alarm. In this general terror lest insubordination should develop into rebellion were merged both the capitalist’s objection to high wages and the politician’s dislike of Democratic institutions. The Combination Laws, as Francis Place tells us, “were considered as absolutely necessary to prevent ruinous extortions of workmen, which, if not thus restrained, would destroy the whole of the Trade, Manufactures, Commerce, and Agriculture of the nation.... This led to the conclusion that the workmen were the most unprincipled of mankind. Hence the continued ill-will, suspicion, and in almost every possible way the bad conduct of workmen and their employers towards one another. So thoroughly was this false notion entertained that whenever men were prosecuted to conviction for having combined to regulate their wages or the hours of working, however heavy the sentence passed on them was, and however rigorously it was inflicted, not the slightest feeling of compassion was manifested by anybody for the unfortunate sufferers. Justice was entirely out of the question: they could seldom obtain a hearing before a magistrate, never without impatience or insult; and never could they calculate on even an approximation to a rational conclusion.... Could an accurate account be given of proceedings, of hearings before magistrates, trials at sessions and in the Court of King’s Bench, the gross injustice, the foul invective, and terrible punishments inflicted would not, after a few years have passed away, be credited on any but the best evidence.” [123]

It must not, however, be supposed that every combination was made the subject of prosecution, or that the Trade Union leader of the period passed his whole life in gaol. Owing to the extremely inefficient organisation of the English police, and the absence of any public prosecutor, a combination was usually let alone until some employer was sufficiently inconvenienced by its operations to be willing himself to set the law in motion. In many cases we find employers apparently accepting or conniving at their men’s combinations.[124] The master printers in London not only recognised the very ancient institution of the “chapel,” but evidently found it convenient, at any rate from 1785 onwards, to receive and consider proposals from the journeymen as an organised body. In 1804 we even hear of a joint committee consisting of an equal number of masters and journeymen, authorised by their respective bodies to frame regulations for the future payment of labour, and resulting in the elaborate “scale” of 1805, signed by both masters and men.[125] The London coopers had a recognised organisation in 1813, in which year a list of prices was agreed upon by representatives of the masters and men. This list was revised in 1816 and 1819, without any one thinking of a prosecution.[126] The Trade Union was openly reformed in 1821 as the Philanthropic Society of Coopers. The London brushmakers in 1805 had “A List of Prices agreed upon between the Masters and Journeymen,” which is still extant. The framework knitters, and also the tailors of the various villages in Nottinghamshire, were, from 1794 to 1810, in the habit of freely meeting together, both masters and men, “to consider of matters relative to the trade,” the conferences being convened by public advertisement.[127] The minute books of the local Trade Union of the carpenters of Preston for the years 1807 to 1824 chronicle an apparently unconcealed and unmolested existence, in correspondence with other carpenters’ societies throughout Lancashire. The accounts contain no items for the expense of defending their officers against prosecutions, whereas there are several payments for advertisements and public meetings, and, be it added, a very large expenditure in beer. And there is a lively tradition among the aged block printers of Glasgow that, in their fathers’ time, when their very active Trade Union exacted a fee of seven guineas from each new apprentice, this money was always straightway drunk by the men of the print-field, the employer taking his seat at the head of the table, and no work being done by any one until the fund was exhausted. The calico-printers’ organisation appears, at the early part of the nineteenth century, to have been one of the strongest and most complete of the Unions. In an impressive pamphlet of 1815 the men are thus appealed to by the employers: “We have by turns conceded what we ought all manfully to have resisted, and you, elated with success, have been led on from one extravagant demand to another, till the burden is become too intolerable to be borne. You fix the number of our apprentices, and oftentimes even the number of our journeymen. You dismiss certain proportions of our hands, and will not allow others to come in their stead. You stop all Surface Machines, and go the length even to destroy the rollers before our face. You restrict the Cylinder Machine, and even dictate the kind of pattern it is to print. You refuse, on urgent occasions, to work by candlelight, and even compel our apprentices to do the same. You dismiss our overlookers when they don’t suit you; and force obnoxious servants into our employ. Lastly, you set all subordination and good order at defiance, and instead of showing deference and respect to your employers, treat them with personal insult and contempt.”[128] Notwithstanding all this, no systematic attempt appears to have been made to put down the calico-printers’ combination, and only one or two isolated prosecutions can be traced. In Dublin, too, the cabinetmakers in the early part of the present century were combined in a strong union called the Samaritan Society, exclusively for trade purposes; “but though illegal, the employers do not seem to have looked upon it with any great aversion; and when on one occasion the chief constable had the men attending a meeting arrested, the employers came forward to bail them. Indeed, they professed that their object, though primarily to defend their own interests against the masters, was also to defend the interests of the masters against unprincipled journeymen. Many of the masters on receiving the bill of a journeyman were in the habit of sending it to the trades’ society committee to be taxed, after which the word Committee was stamped upon it. One case was mentioned, when between two and three pounds were knocked off a bill of about eight pounds by the trade committee.” [129] And both in London and Edinburgh the journeymen openly published, without fear of prosecution, elaborate printed lists of piecework prices, compiled sometimes by a committee of the men’s Trade Union, sometimes by a joint committee of employers and employed.[130]“The London Cabinetmakers’ Union Book of Prices,” of which editions were published in 1811 and 1824, was a costly and elaborate work, with many plates, published “by a Committee of Masters and Journeymen ... to prevent those litigations which have too frequently existed in the trade.” Various supplements and “index keys” to this work were published; and other similar lists exist. So lax was the administration of the law that George White, the energetic clerk to Hume’s Committee, asserted that the Act of 1800 had “been in general a dead letter upon those artisans upon whom it was intended to have an effect—namely, the shoemakers, printers, papermakers, shipbuilders, tailors, etc., who have had their regular societies and houses of call, as though no such Act was in existence; and in fact it would be almost impossible for many of those trades to be carried on without such societies, who are in general sick and travelling relief societies; and the roads and parishes would be much pestered with these travelling trades, who travel from want of employment, were it not for their societies who relieve what they call tramps.” [131]

But although clubs of journeymen might be allowed to take, like the London bookbinders, “a social pint of porter together,” and even, in times of industrial peace, to provide for their tramps and perform all the functions of a Trade Union, the employers had always the power of meeting any demands by a prosecution. Even those trades in which we have discovered evidence of the unmolested existence of combinations furnish examples of the rigorous application of the law. In 1819 we read of numerous prosecutions of cabinetmakers, hatters, ironfounders, and other journeymen, nominally for leaving their work unfinished, but really for the crime of combination.[132] In 1798 five journeymen printers were indicted at the Old Bailey for conspiracy. The employers had sent for the men’s leaders to discuss their proposals, when, as it was complained, “the five defendants came, clothed as delegates, representing themselves as the head of a Parliament as we may call it.” The men were in fact members of a trade friendly society of pressmen “held at the Crown, near St. Dunstan’s Church, Fleet Street,” which, as the prosecuting counsel declared, “from its appearance certainly bore no reproachable mark upon it. It was called a friendly society, but by means of some wicked men among them this society degenerated into a most abominable meeting for the purpose of a conspiracy; those of the trade who did not join their society were summoned, and even the apprentices, and were told unless they conformed to the practices of these journeymen, when they came out of their times they should not be employed.” Notwithstanding the fact that the employers had themselves recognised and negotiated with the society, the Recorder sentenced all the defendants to two years’ imprisonment. [133]

Twelve years later it was the brutality of another prosecution of the compositors that impressed Francis Place with the necessity of an alteration in the law. “The cruel persecutions,” he writes, “of the Journeymen Printers employed in The Times newspaper in 1810 were carried to an almost incredible extent. The judge who tried and sentenced some of them was the Common Sergeant of London, Sir John Sylvester, commonly known by the cognomen of ‘Bloody Black Jack.’... No judge took more pains than did this judge on the unfortunate printers, to make it appear that their offence was one of great enormity, to beat down and alarm the really respectable men who had fallen into his clutches, and on whom he inflicted scandalously severe sentences.”[134] Nor did prosecution always depend on the caprice of an employer. In December 1817 the Bolton constables, accidentally getting to know that ten delegates of the calico-printers from the various districts of the kingdom were to meet on New Year’s Day, arranged to arrest the whole body and seize all their papers. The ten delegates suffered three months’ imprisonment, although no dispute with their employers was in progress.[135] But the main use of the law to the employers was to checkmate strikes, and ward off demands for better conditions of labour. Already, in 1786, the law of conspiracy had been strained to convict, and punish with two years’ imprisonment, the five London bookbinders who were leading a strike to reduce hours from twelve to eleven.[136] When, at the Aberdeen Master Tailors’ Gild, in 1797, “it was represented to the trade that their journeymen had entered into an illegal combination for the purpose of raising their wages,” the masters unanimously “agreed not to give any additional wages to their servants,” and backed up this resolution of their own combination by getting twelve journeymen prosecuted and fined for the crime of combining.[137] In 1799 the success of the London shoemakers in picketing obnoxious employers led to the prosecution of two of them, which was made the means of inducing the men to consent to dissolve their society, then seven years old, and return to work at once.[138] Two other shoemakers of York were convicted in the same year for the crime of “combining to raise the price of their labour in making shoes, and refusing to make shoes under a certain price,” and counsel said that “in every great town in the North combinations of this sort existed.”[139] The coach-makers’ strike of 1819 was similarly stopped, and the “Benevolent Society of Coachmakers” broken up by the conviction of the general secretary and twenty other members, who were, upon this condition, released on their own recognisances.[140] In 1819 some calico-engravers in the service of a Manchester firm protested against the undue multiplication of apprentices by their employers, and enforced their protest by declining to work. For this “conspiracy” they were fined and imprisoned.[141] And though the master cutlers were allowed, with impunity, to subscribe to the Sheffield Mercantile and Manufacturing Union, which fixed the rates of wages, and brought pressure to bear on recalcitrant employers, the numerous trade clubs of the operatives were not left unmolested. In 1816 seven scissor-grinders were sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for belonging to what they called the “Misfortune Club,” which paid out-of-work benefit, and sought to maintain the customary rates. [142]

But it was in the new textile industries that the weight of the Combination Laws was chiefly felt. White and Henson describe the Act of 1800 as being in these trades “a tremendous millstone round the neck of the local artisan, which has depressed and debased him to the earth: every act which he has attempted, every measure that he has devised to keep up or raise his wages, he has been told was illegal: the whole force of the civil power and influence of the district has been exerted against him because he was acting illegally: the magistrates, acting, as they believed, in unison with the views of the legislature, to check and keep down wages and combination, regarded, in almost every instance, every attempt on the part of the artisan to ameliorate his situation or support his station in society as a species of sedition and resistance of the Government: every committee or active man among them was regarded as a turbulent, dangerous instigator, whom it was necessary to watch and crush if possible.”[143] To cite one only of the instances, it was given in evidence before Hume’s Committee that in 1818 certain Bolton millowners suggested to the operative weavers that they should concert together to leave the employment of those who paid below the current rate. Acting on this hint a meeting of forty delegates took place, at which it was resolved to ask for the advance agreed to by the good employers. A fortnight later the president and the two secretaries were arrested, convicted of conspiracy, and imprisoned for one and two years respectively, although their employers gave evidence on the prisoners’ behalf to the effect that they had themselves requested the men to attend the meeting, and had approved the resolutions passed.[144] In the following year fifteen cotton-spinners of Manchester, who had met “to receive contributions to bury their dead,” under “Articles” sanctioned by Quarter Sessions in 1795, were seized in the committee-room by the police, and committed to trial for conspiracy, bail being refused. After three or four months’ imprisonment they were brought to trial, the whole local bar—seven in number—being briefed against them. Collections were made in London and elsewhere (including the town of Lynn in Norfolk) for their defence. The enrolment of their club as a friendly society availed little. It was urged in court that “all societies, whether benefit societies or otherwise, were only cloaks for the people of England to conspire against the State,” and most of the defendants were sentenced to varying terms of imprisonment. [145]

But the Scottish Weavers’ Strike of 1812, described in the preceding chapter, is the most striking case of all. In the previous year certain cotton-spinners had been convicted of combination and imprisoned, the judge observing that there was a clear remedy in law, as the magistrates had full power and authority to fix rates of wages or settle disputes. In 1812 many of the employers refused to accept the rates which the justices had declared as fair for weaving; and all the weavers at the forty thousand looms between Aberdeen and Carlisle struck to enforce the justices’ rates. The employers had already made overtures through the sheriff of the county for a satisfactory settlement when the Government arrested the central committee of five, who were directing the proceedings. These men were sentenced to periods of imprisonment varying from four to eighteen months; the strike failed, and the association broke up.[146] The student of the newspapers between 1800 and 1824 will find abundant record of judicial barbarities, of which the cases cited above may be taken as samples. No statistics exist as to the frequency of the prosecutions or the severity of the sentences; but it is easy to understand, from such reports as are available, the sullen resentment which the working class suffered under these laws. Their repeal was a necessary preliminary to the growth among the most oppressed sections of the workers of any real power of protecting themselves, by Trade Union effort, against the degradation of their Standard of Life.

The failure of the Combination Laws to suppress the somewhat dictatorial Trade Unionism of the skilled handicraftsmen, and their efficacy in preventing the growth of permanent Unions among other sections of the workers, is explained by class distinctions, now passed away or greatly modified, which prevailed at the beginning of the present century. To-day, when we speak of “the aristocracy of labour” we include under that heading the organised miners and factory operatives of the North on the same superior footing as the skilled handicraftsman. In 1800 they were at opposite extremes of the social scale in the wage-earning class, the weaver and the miner being then further removed from the handicraftsman than the docker or general labourer is from the Lancashire cotton-spinner or Northumberland hewer of to-day. The skilled artisans formed, at any rate in London, an intermediate class between the shopkeeper and the great mass of unorganised labourers or operatives in the new machine industries. The substantial fees demanded all through the eighteenth century for apprenticeship to the “crafts” had secured to the members and their eldest sons a virtual monopoly.[147] Even after the repeal of the laws requiring a formal apprenticeship some time had to elapse before the supply of this class of handicraftsmen overtook the growing demand. Thus we gather from the surviving records that these trades have never been more completely organised in London than between 1800 and 1820.[148] We find the London hatters, coopers, curriers, compositors, millwrights, and shipwrights maintaining earnings which, upon their own showing, amounted to the comparatively large sum of thirty to fifty shillings per week. At the same period the Lancashire weaver or the Leicester hosier, in full competition with steam-power and its accompaniment of female and child labour, could, even when fully employed, earn barely ten shillings. We see this difference in the Standard of Life reflected in the characters of the combinations formed by the two classes.

In the skilled handicrafts, long accustomed to corporate government, we find, even under repressive laws, no unlawful oaths, seditious emblems, or other common paraphernalia of secret societies. The London Brushmakers, whose Union apparently dates from the early part of the eighteenth century, expressly insisted “that no person shall be admitted a member who is not well affected to his present Majesty and the Protestant Succession, and in good health and of a respectable character.” But this loyalty was not inconsistent with their subscribing to the funds of the 1831 agitation for the Reform Bill.[149] The prevailing tone of the superior workmen down to 1848 was, in fact, strongly Radical; and their leaders took a prominent part in all the working-class politics of the time. From their ranks came such organisers as Place, Lovett, and Gast.[150] But wherever we have been able to gain any idea of their proceedings, their trade clubs were free from anything that could now be conceived as political sedition. It was these clubs of handicraftsmen that formed the backbone of the various “central committees” which dealt with the main topics of Trade Unionism during the next thirty years. They it was who furnished such assistance as was given by working men to the movement for the repeal of the Combination Laws. And their influence gave a certain dignity and stability to the Trade Union Movement, without which, under hostile governments, it could never have emerged from the petulant rebellions of hunger-strikes and machine-breaking.

The principal effect of the Combination Laws on these well-organised handicrafts in London, Liverpool, Dublin, and perhaps other towns, was to make the internal discipline more rigid and the treatment of non-unionists more arbitrary. Place describes how “in these societies there are some few individuals who possess the confidence of their fellows, and when any matter relating to the trade has been talked over, either at the club or in a separate room, or in a workshop or a yard, and the matter has become notorious, these men are expected to direct what shall be done, and they do direct—simply by a hint. On this the men act; and one and all support those who may be thrown out of work or otherwise inconvenienced. If matters were to be discussed as gentlemen seem to suppose they must be, no resolution would ever be come to. The influence of the men alluded to would soon cease if the law were repealed. It is the law and the law alone which causes the confidence of the men to be given to their leaders. Those who direct are not known to the body, and not one man in twenty, perhaps, knows the person of any one who directs. It is a rule among them to ask no questions, and another rule among them who know most, either to give no answer if questioned, or an answer to mislead.” [151]

In the new machine industries, on the other hand, the repeated reductions of wages, the rapid alterations of processes, and the substitution of women and children for adult male workers, had gradually reduced the workers to a condition of miserable poverty. The reports of Parliamentary committees, from 1800 onward, contain a dreary record of the steady degradation of the Standard of Life in the textile industries. “The sufferings of persons employed in the cotton manufacture,” Place writes of this period, “were beyond credibility: they were drawn into combinations, betrayed, prosecuted, convicted, sentenced, and monstrously severe punishments inflicted on them: they were reduced to and kept in the most wretched state of existence.”[152] Their employers, instead of being, as in the older handicrafts, little more than master workmen, recognising the customary Standard of Life of their journeymen, were often capitalist entrepreneurs, devoting their whole energies to the commercial side of the business, and leaving their managers to buy labour in the market at the cheapest possible rate. This labour was recruited from all localities and many different occupations. It was brigaded and controlled by despotic laws, enforced by numerous fines and disciplinary deductions. Cases of gross tyranny and heartless cruelty are not wanting. Without a common standard, a common tradition, or mutual confidence, the workers in the new mills were helpless against their masters. Their ephemeral combinations and frequent strikes were, as a rule, only passionate struggles to maintain a bare subsistence wage. In place of the steady organised resistance to encroachments maintained by the handicraftsmen, we watch, in the machine industries, the alternation of outbursts of machine-breaking and outrages, with intervals of abject submission and reckless competition with each other for employment. In the conduct of such organisation as there was, repressive laws had, with the operatives as with the London artisans, the effect of throwing great power into the hands of a few men. These leaders were implicitly obeyed in times of industrial conflict, but the repeated defeats which they were unable to avert prevented that growth of confidence which is indispensable for permanent organisation.[153] Both leaders and rank and file, too, were largely implicated in political seditions, and were the victims of spies and Ministerial emissaries of all sorts. All these circumstances led to the prevalence among them of fearful oaths, mystic initiation rites, and other manifestations of a sensationalism which was sometimes puerile and sometimes criminal.

The most notorious of these “seditions,” about which little is really known, was the “Luddite” upheaval of 1811-12, when riotous mobs of manual workers, acting under some sort of organisation, went about destroying textile machinery and sometimes wrecking factories. To what extent this had any direct connection with the Trade Union Movement seems to us, pending more penetrating investigation of the unpublished evidence, somewhat uncertain. That the operatives very generally sympathised with the most violent protest against the displacement of hand labour by machinery, and the extreme distress which it was causing, is clear. The Luddite movement apparently began among the Framework-knitters, who had long been organised in local clubs, with some rudimentary federal bond; and the whole direction of the Luddites was often ascribed, as by the Mayor of Leicester in 1812, to “the Committee of Framework-knitters, who have as complete an organisation of the whole body as you could have of a regiment.”[154] But money was collected from men of other trades, notably bricklayers, masons, spinners, weavers, and colliers, as well as from the soldiers in some of the regiments stationed at provincial centres; and such evidence as we have found points rather to a widespread secret oath-bound conspiracy, not of the men of any one trade, but of wage-earners of all kinds. We find an informer stating (June 22, 1812), with what truth we know not, “that the Union extends from London to Nottingham, and from thence to Manchester and Carlisle. Small towns lying between the principal places are not yet organised, such as Garstang and Burton. Only some of the trades have taken the first oath. He says there is a second oath taken by suspicious persons.”[155] On the other hand, it looks as if the various local Trade Clubs were made use of, in some cases informally, as agents or branches of the conspiracy.

General Maitland, writing from Buxton (June 22, 1812) to the Home Secretary, says that, in his opinion, “the whole of this business ... originated in those constant efforts made by these associations for many years past to keep up the price of the manufacturers’ wages; that finding their efforts for this unavailing, both from the circumstances of the trade and the high price of provisions, they in a moment of irritation, for which it is but just to say they had considerable ground from the real state of distress in which they were placed ... began to think of effecting that by force which they had ever been trying to do by other means; and that in this state the oath was introduced.... I believe the whole to be, certainly a most mischievous, but undefined and indistinct attempt to be in a state of preparation to do that by force which they had not succeeded in carrying into effect as they usually did by other means.” The whole episode has been too much ignored, even by social historians; and “Byron’s famous speech and Charlotte Brontë’s more famous novel give to most people their idea of the misery of the time, and of its cause, the displacement of hand labour by machinery.” [156]

The coal-miners were in many respects even worse off than the hosiery workers and the cotton weavers. In Scotland they had been but lately freed from actual serfdom, the final act of emancipation not having been passed until 1799. In Monmouthshire and South Wales the oppression of the “tommy shops” of the small employers was extreme. In the North of England the “yearly bond,” the truck system, and the arbitrary fines kept the underground workers in complete subjection. The result is seen in the turbulence of their frequent “sticks” or strikes, during which troops were often required to quell their violence. The great strike of 1810 was carried on by an oath-bound confederacy recruited by the practice of “brothering,” “so named because the members of the union bound themselves by a most solemn oath to obey the orders of the brotherhood, under the penalty of being stabbed through the heart or of having their bowels ripped up.”[157]

Notwithstanding these differences between various classes of workers, the growing sense of solidarity among the whole body of wage-earners rises into special prominence during this period of tyranny and repression. The trades in which it was usual for men to tramp from place to place in search of employment had long possessed, as we have seen, some kind of loose federal organisation extending throughout the country. In spite of the law of 1797 forbidding the existence of “corresponding societies,” the various federal organisations of Curriers, Hatters, Calico-printers, Woolcombers, Woolstaplers, and other handicraftsmen kept up constant correspondence on trade matters, and raised money for common trade purposes. In some cases there existed an elaborate national organisation, with geographical districts and annual delegate meetings; like that of the Calico-printers who were arrested by the Bolton constables in 1818. The rules of the Papermakers,[158] which certainly date from 1803, provide for the division of England into five districts, with detailed arrangements for representation and collective action. This national organisation was, notwithstanding repressive laws, occasionally very effective. We need cite only one instance, furnished by the Liverpool Ropemakers in 1823. When a certain firm attempted to put labourers to the work, the local society of ropespinners informed it that this was “contrary to the regulations of the trade,” and withdrew all their members. The employers, failing to get men in Liverpool, sent to Hull and Newcastle, but found that the Ropespinners’ Society had already apprised the local trade clubs at those towns. The firm then imported “blacklegs” from Glasgow, who were met on arrival by the local unionists, inveigled to a “trade club-house,” and alternately threatened and cajoled out of their engagements. Finally the head of the firm went to London to purchase yarn; but the London workmen, finding that the yarn was for a “struck shop,” refused to complete the order. The last resource of the employers was an indictment at the Sessions for combination, but a Liverpool jury, in the teeth of the evidence and the judge’s summing up, gave a verdict of acquittal. [159]

This solidarity was not confined to the members of a particular trade. The masters are always complaining that one trade supports another, and old account books of Trade Unions for this period abound with entries of sums contributed in aid of disputes in other trades, either in the same town or elsewhere. Thus the small society of London Goldbeaters, during the three years 1810-12, lent or gave substantial sums, amounting in all to £200, to fourteen other trades.[160] The Home Secretary was informed in 1823 that a combination of cotton-spinners at Bolton, whose books had been seized, had received donations, not only from twenty-eight cotton-spinners’ committees in as many Lancashire towns, but also from fourteen other trades, from coal-miners to butchers.[161] A picturesque illustration of this brotherly help in need occurs in the account of an appeal to the Pontefract Quarter Sessions by certain Sheffield cutlers against their conviction for combination: “The appellants were in court, but hour after hour passed, and no counsel moved the case. The reason was a want of funds for the purpose. At last, whilst in court, a remittance from the clubs in Manchester, to the amount of one hundred pounds, arrived, and then the counsel was fee’d, and the case, which, but for the arrival of the money from this town, must have dropped in that stage, was proceeded with.”[162] And although the day of Trades Councils had not yet come, it was a common thing for the various trade societies of a particular town to unite in sending witnesses to Parliamentary Committees, preparing petitions to the House of Commons and paying counsel to support their case, engaging solicitors to prosecute offending employers, and collecting subscriptions for strikes.[163] This tendency to form joint committees of local trades was, as we shall see, greatly strengthened in the agitation against the Combination Laws from 1823-25. With the final abandonment of all legislative protection of the Standard of Life, and the complete divorce of the worker from the instruments of production, the wage-earners in the various industrial centres became indeed ever more conscious of the widening of the old separate trade disputes into “the class war” which has characterised the past century.

It is difficult to-day to realise the naïve surprise with which the employers of that time regarded the practical development of working-class solidarity. The master witnesses before Parliamentary Committees, and the judges in sentencing workmen for combination, are constantly found reciting instances of mutual help to prove the existence of a widespread “conspiracy” against the dominant classes. That the London Tailors should send money to the Glasgow Weavers, or the Goldbeaters to the Ropespinners, seemed to the middle and upper classes little short of a crime.

The movement for a repeal of the Combination Laws began in a period of industrial dislocation and severe political repression. The economic results of the long war, culminating in the comparatively low prices of the peace for most manufactured products, though not for wheat, led in 1816 to an almost universal reduction of wages throughout the country. In open defiance of the law the masters, in many instances, deliberately combined in agreements to pay lower rates. This agreement was not confined to the employers in a particular trade, who may have been confronted by organised bodies of journeymen, but extended, in some cases, to all employers of labour in a particular locality. The landowners and farmers of Tiverton, for instance, at a “numerous and respectable meeting at the Town Hall” in 1816, resolved “that, in consequence of the low price of provisions,” not more than certain specified wages should be given to smiths, carpenters, masons, thatchers, or masons’ labourers.[164] The Compositors, Coopers, Shoemakers, Carpenters, and many other trades record serious reductions of wages at this period. In these cases the masters justified their action on the ground that, owing to the fall of prices, the Standard of Life of the journeymen would not be depressed. But in the great staple industries there ensued a cutting competition between employers to secure orders in a falling market, their method being to undersell each other by beating down wages below subsistence level—an operation often aided by the practice, then common, of supplementing insufficient earnings out of the Poor Rate. This produced such ruinous results that local protests were soon made. At Leicester the authorities decided to maintain the men’s “Statement Price” by agreeing to wholly support out of a voluntary fund those who could not get work at the full rates. This was bitterly resented by the neighbouring employers, who seriously contemplated indicting the lord-lieutenant, mayor, alder-men, clergy, and other subscribers for criminal conspiracy to keep up wages.[165] And in 1820 a public meeting of the ratepayers of Sheffield protested against the “evil of parish pay to supplement earnings,” and recommended employers to revert to the uniform price list which the men had gained in 1810.[166] Finally we have the employers themselves publicly denouncing the ruinous extent to which the cutting of wages had been carried. A declaration dated June 16, 1819, and signed by fourteen Lancashire manufacturers, regrets that they have been compelled by the action of a few competitors to lower wages to the present rates, and strongly condemns any further reduction; whilst twenty-five of the most eminent calico-printing firms append an emphatic approval of the protest, and state “that the system of paying such extremely low wages for manufacturing labour is injurious to the trade at large.”[167] At Coventry the ribbon manufacturers combined with the Weavers’ Provident Union to maintain a general adherence to the agreed list of prices, and in 1819 subscribed together no less than £16,000 to cover the cost of proceedings with this object. This combination formed the subject of an indictment at Warwick Assizes, which put an end to the association, the remaining funds being handed over to the local “Streets Commissioners” for paving the city. These protests and struggles of the better employers were in vain. Rates were reduced and strikes occurred all over the country, and were met, not by redress or sympathy, but by an outburst of prosecutions and sentences of more than the usual ferocity. The common law and ancient statutes were ruthlessly used to supplement the Combination Acts, often by strained constructions. The Scotch judges in particular, as an eminent Scotch jurist declared to the Parliamentary Committee in 1824, applied the criminal procedure of Scotland to cases of simple combination, from 1813-19, in a way that he, on becoming Lord Advocate, refused to countenance.[168] The workers, on attempting some spasmodic preparations for organised political agitation, were further coerced, in 1819, by the infamous “Six Acts,” which at one blow suppressed practically all public meetings, enabled the magistrate to search for arms, subjected all working-class publications to the crushing stamp duty, and rendered more stringent the law relating to seditious libels. The whole system of repression which had characterised the statesmanship of the Regency culminated at this period in a tyranny not exceeded by any of the monarchs of the “Holy Alliance.” The effect of this tyranny was actually to shield the Combination Laws by turning the more energetic and enlightened working-class leaders away from all specific reforms to a thorough revolution of the whole system of Parliamentary representation. Hence there was no popular movement whatever for the repeal of the Combination Laws. If we were writing the history of the English working class instead of that of the Trade Union Movement, we should find in William Cobbett or “Orator” Hunt, in Samuel Bamford or William Lovett, a truer representative of the current aspirations of the English artisan at this time than in the man who now came unexpectedly on the scene to devise and carry into effect the Trade Union Emancipation of 1824.

Francis Place was a master tailor who had created a successful business in a shop at Charing Cross. Before setting up for himself he had worked as a journeyman breeches-maker, and had organised combinations in his own and other trades. After 1818 he left the conduct of the business to his son, and devoted his keenly practical intellect and extraordinary persistency first to the repeal of the Combination Laws, and next to the Reform Movement. In social theory he was a pupil of Bentham and James Mill, and his ideal may be summed up as political Democracy with industrial liberty, or, as we should now say, thoroughgoing Radical Individualism. No one who has closely studied his life and work will doubt that, within the narrow sphere to which his unswerving practicality confined him, he was the most remarkable politician of his age. His chief merit lay in his thorough understanding of the art of getting things done. In agitation, permeation, wire-pulling, Parliamentary lobbying, the drafting of resolutions, petitions, and bills—in short, of all those artifices by which a popular movement is first created and then made effective on the Parliamentary system—he was an inventor and tactician of the first order. Above all, he possessed in perfection the rare quality of permitting other people to carry off the credit of his work, and thus secured for his proposals willing promoters and supporters, some of the leading Parliamentary figures of the time owing all their knowledge on his questions to the briefs with which he supplied them. The invaluable collection of manuscript records left by him, now in the British Museum, prove that modesty had nothing to do with his contemptuous readiness to leave the trophies of victory to his pawns provided his end was attained. He was thoroughly appreciative of the fact that in every progressive movement his shop at Charing Cross was the real centre of power when the Parliamentary stage of a progressive movement was reached. It remained, from 1807 down to about 1834, the recognised meeting-place of all the agitators of the time. [169]

It was in watching the effect of the Combination Laws in his own trade that Place became converted to their repeal. The special laws of 1720 and 1767, fixing the wages of journeymen tailors, as well as the general law of 1800 against all combinations, had failed to regulate wages, to prevent strikes, or to hinder those masters who wished in times of pressure to engage skilled men, from offering the bribe of high piecework rates, or even time wages in excess of the legal limit. Place gave evidence as a master tailor before the Select Committee of the House of Commons which inquired into the subject in 1810; and it was chiefly his weighty testimony in favour of freedom of contract that averted the fresh legal restrictions which a combination of employers was then openly promoting.[170] This experience of the practical freedom of employers to combine intensified Place’s sense of the injustice of denying a like freedom to the journeymen, whilst the brutal prosecution of the compositors of the Times in the same year brought home to his mind the severity of the law. Four years later (1814), as he himself tells us, he “began to work seriously to procure a repeal of the laws against combinations of workmen, but for a long time made no visible progress.” The employers were firmly convinced that combinations of wage-earners would succeed in securing a great rise of wages, to the serious detriment of profits. Far from contemplating a repeal of the Act of 1800, they were in 1814 and 1816 pestering the Home Secretary for legislation of greater stringency as the only safeguard for their “freedom of enterprise.”[171] The politicians were equally certain that Trade Union action would raise prices, and thus undermine the foreign trade upon which the prosperity and international influence of England depended. The working men themselves afforded in the first instance no assistance. Those who had suffered legal prosecution were hopeless of redress from an unreformed Parliament, and offered no support. One trade, the Spitalfields silk-weavers, supported the Government because they enjoyed what they deemed to be the advantage of legal protection from the lowering of wages by competition.[172] Others were suspicious of the intervention of one who was himself an employer, and who had not yet gained recognition as a friend to labour. But Place was undismayed by hostility and indifference. Knowing that with an English public the strength of his cause would lie, not in any abstract reasoning or appeal to natural rights, but in an enumeration of actual cases of injustice, he made a point of obtaining the particulars of every trade dispute. He intervened, as he says, in every strike, sometimes as a mediator, sometimes as an ally of the journeymen. He opened up a voluminous correspondence with Trade Unions throughout the kingdom, and wrote innumerable letters to the newspapers. In 1818 he secured a useful medium in the Gorgon,[173] a little working-class political newspaper, started by one Wade, a woolcomber, and subsidised by Bentham and Place himself. This gained him his two most important disciples, eventually the chief instruments of his work, J. R. McCulloch and Joseph Hume. McCulloch, afterwards to gain fame as an economist, was at that time the editor of the Scotsman, perhaps the most important of the provincial newspapers. A powerful article based on Place’s facts which he contributed to the Edinburgh Review in 1823 secured many converts; and his constant advocacy gave Place’s idea a weight and notoriety which it had hitherto lacked. Joseph Hume was an even more important ally. His acknowledged position in the House of Commons as one of the leaders of the growing party of Philosophic Radicalism gained for the repeal movement a steadily increasing support with advanced members of Parliament. Among a certain section in the House the desirability of freedom of combination began to be discussed; presently it was considered practicable; and soon many came to regard it as an inevitable outcome of their political creed. In 1822 Place thought the time ripe for action; and Hume accordingly gave notice of his intention to bring in a Bill to repeal all the laws against combinations.

Place’s manuscripts and letters contain a graphic account of the wire-pullings and manipulations of the next two years.[174] In these contemporary pictures of the inner workings of the Parliamentary system we watch Hume cajoling Huskisson and Peel into granting him a Select Committee, staving off the less tactful proposals of a rival M.P.,[175] and finally, in February 1824, packing the Committee of Inquiry at length appointed. Hume, with some art, had included in his motion three distinct subjects—the emigration of artisans, the exportation of machinery and combinations of workmen, all of which were forbidden by law. To Place and Hume the repeal of the Combination Laws was the main object; but Huskisson and his colleagues regarded the Committee as primarily charged with an inquiry into the possibility of encouraging the rising manufacture of machinery, which was seriously hampered by the prohibition of sales to foreign countries. Huskisson tried to induce Hume to omit from the Committee’s reference all mention of the Combination Laws, evidently regarding them as only a minor and unimportant part of the inquiry. But Place and Hume were now masters of the situation; and for the next few months they devoted their whole time to the management of the Committee. At first no one seems to have had any idea that its proceedings were going to be of any moment; and no trouble was taken by the Ministry with regard to its composition. “It was with difficulty,” writes Place, “that Mr. Hume could obtain the names of twenty-one members to compose the Committee; but when it had sat three days, and had become both popular and amusing, members contrived to be put upon it; and at length it consisted of forty-eight members.”[176] Hume, who was appointed chairman, appears to have taken into his own hands the entire management of the proceedings. A circular explaining the objects of the inquiry was sent to the mayor or other public officer of forty provincial towns, and appeared in the principal local newspapers. Public meetings were held at Stockport and other towns to depute witnesses to attend the Committee.[177] Meanwhile Place, who had by this time acquired the confidence of the chief leaders of the working class, secured the attendance of artisan witnesses from all parts of the kingdom. Read in the light of Place’s private records and daily correspondence with Hume, the proceedings of this “Committee on Artisans and Machinery” reveal an almost perfect example of political manipulation. Although no hostile witness was denied a hearing, it was evidently arranged that the employers who were favourable to repeal should be examined first, and that the preponderance of evidence should be on their side. And whilst those interests which would have been antagonistic to the repeal were neither professionally represented nor deliberately organised, the men’s case was marshalled with admirable skill by Place, and fully brought out by Hume’s examination. Thus the one acted as the Trade Unionists’ Parliamentary solicitor, and the other as their unpaid counsel. [178]

Place himself tells us how he proceeded: “The delegates from the working people had reference to me, and I opened my house to them. Thus I had all the town and country delegates under my care. I heard the story which every one of these men had to tell, I examined and cross-examined them, took down the leading particulars of each case, and then arranged the matter as briefs for Mr. Hume, and as a rule, for the guidance of the witnesses, a copy was given to each.... Each brief contained the principal questions and answers.... That for Mr. Hume was generally accompanied by an appendix of documents arranged in order, with a short account of such proceedings as were necessary to put Mr. Hume in possession of the whole case. Thus he was enabled to go on with considerable ease, and to anticipate or rebut objections.” [179]

The Committee sat in private; but Hume’s numerous letters to Place show how carefully the latter was kept posted up in all the proceedings: “As the proceedings of the Committee were printed from day to day for the use of the members, I had a copy sent to me by Mr. Hume, which I indexed on paper ruled in many columns, each column having an appropriate head or number. I also wrote remarks on the margins of the printed evidence; this was copied daily by Mr. Hume’s secretary, and then returned to me. This consumed much time, but enabled Mr. Hume to have the whole mass constantly under his view; and I am very certain that less pains and care would not have been sufficient to have carried the business through.” [180]

From Westminster Hall we are transported, by these private notes for Hume’s use, all now preserved in the British Museum, into the back parlour of the Charing Cross shop, where the London and provincial artisan witnesses came for their instructions. “The workmen,” as Place tells us, “were not easily managed. It required great care and pains not to shock their prejudices so as to prevent them doing their duty before the Committee. They were filled with false notions, all attributing their distresses to wrong causes, which I, in this state of the business, dared not attempt to remove. Taxes, machinery, laws against combinations, the will of the masters, the conduct of magistrates—these were the fundamental causes of all their sorrows and privations.... I had to discuss everything with them most carefully, to arrange and prepare everything, and so completely did these things occupy my time that for more than three months I had hardly any rest.” [181]

The result of the inquiry was as Hume and Place had ordained. A series of resolutions in favour of complete freedom of combination and liberty of emigration was adopted by the Committee, apparently without dissent. A Bill to repeal all the Combination Laws and to legalise trade societies was passed through both Houses, within less than a week, at the close of the session, without either debate or division. Place and Hume contrived privately to talk over and to silence the few members who were alive to the situation; and the measure passed, as Place remarks, “almost without the notice of members within or newspapers without.”[182] So quietly was the Bill smuggled through Parliament that the magistrates at a Lancashire town unwittingly sentenced certain cotton-weavers to imprisonment for combination some weeks after the laws against that crime had been repealed. [183]

Place and Hume had, however, been rather too clever. Whilst the governing classes were quite unconscious that any important alteration of law or policy had taken place, the unlooked-for success of Place’s agitation produced, as Nassau Senior describes, “a great moral effect” in all the industrial centres. “It confirmed in the minds of the operatives the conviction of the justice of their cause, tardily and reluctantly, but at last fully, conceded by the Legislature. That which was morally right in 1824 must have been so, they would reason, for fifty years before.... They conceived that they had extorted from the Legislature an admission that their masters must always be their rivals, and had hitherto been their oppressors, and that combinations to raise wages, and shorten the time or diminish the severity of labour, were not only innocent, but meritorious.”[184] Trade Societies accordingly sprang into existence or emerged into aggressive publicity on all sides. A period of trade inflation, together with a rapid rise in the price of provisions, favoured a general increase of wages. For the next six months the newspapers are full of strikes and rumours of strikes. Serious disturbances occurred at Glasgow, where the employers had been exceptionally oppressive, where the cotton operatives committed several outrages, and where a general lock-out took place. The cotton-spinners were once more striking in the Manchester district. The shipping trade of the North-East Coast was temporarily paralysed by a strong combination of the seamen on the Tyne and Wear, who refused to sail except with Unionist seamen and Unionist officers. The Dublin trades, then the best organised in the kingdom, ruthlessly enforced their bye-laws for the regulation of their respective industries, and formed a joint committee, the so-called “Board of Green Cloth,” whose dictates became the terror of the employers. The Sheffield operatives have to be warned that, if they persist in demanding double the former wages for only three days a week work, the whole industry of the town will be ruined.[185] The London shipwrights insisted on what their employers considered the preposterous demand for a “book of rates” for piecework. The London coopers demanded a revision of their wages, which led to a long-sustained conflict. In fact, as a provincial newspaper remarked a little later, “it is no longer a particular class of journeymen at some single point that have been induced to commence a strike for an advance of wages, but almost the whole body of the mechanics in the kingdom are combined in the general resolution to impose terms on their employers.” [186]

The opening of the session of 1825 found the employers throughout the country thoroughly aroused. Hume and Place had in vain preached moderation, and warned the Unions of the danger of a reaction. The great shipowning and shipbuilding interest, which had throughout the century preserved intact its reputation for unswerving hostility to Trade Unionism, had possession of the ear of Huskisson, then President of the Board of Trade and member for Liverpool. Early in the session he moved for a committee of inquiry into the conduct of the workmen and the effect of the recent Act, which, he complained, had been smuggled through the House without his attention having been called to the fact that it went far beyond the mere repeal of the special statutes against combinations.[187] This time the composition of the committee was not left to chance, or to Hume’s manipulation. The members were, as Place complains, selected almost exclusively from the Ministerial benches, twelve out of the thirty being placemen, and many being representatives of rotten boroughs. Huskisson, [188] Peel, and the Attorney-General themselves took part in its proceedings; Wallace, the Master of the Mint, was made chairman, and Hume alone represented the workmen. Huskisson regarded the Committee as merely a formal preliminary to the introduction of the Bill which the shipping interest had drafted,[189] under which Trade Unions, and even Friendly Societies, would have been impossible. For the inner history of this Committee we have to rely on Place’s voluminous memoranda, and Hume’s brief notes to him. According to these, the original intention was to call only a few employers as witnesses, to exclude all testimony on the other side, and promptly to report in favour of the repressive measure already prepared. Place, himself an expert in such tactics, met them by again supplying Hume daily with detailed information which enabled him to cross-examine the masters and expose their exaggerations. And, if Place’s account of the animus of the Committee and the Ministers against himself be somewhat highly coloured, we have ample evidence of the success with which he guided the alarmed Trade Unions to take effectual action in their own defence. His friend John Gast, secretary to the London Shipwrights, called for two delegates from each trade in the metropolis, and formed a committee which kept up a persistent agitation against any re-enactment of the Combination Laws. Similar committees were formed at Manchester and Glasgow by the cotton operatives, at Sheffield by the cutlers, and at Newcastle by the seamen and shipwrights. Petitions, the draft of which appears in Place’s manuscripts, poured in to the Select Committee and to both Houses. If we are to believe Place, the passages leading to the committee-room were carefully kept thronged by crowds of workmen insisting on being examined to rebut the accusations of the employers, and waylaying individual members to whom they explained their grievances. All this energy on the part of the Unions was, as Place observes, in marked contrast with their apathy the year before. The workmen, though they had done nothing to gain their freedom of association, were determined to maintain it. Doherty, the leader of the Lancashire Cotton-spinners, writing to Place in the heat of the agitation, declared that any attempt at a re-enactment of the Combination Laws would result in a widespread revolutionary movement. [190] The net result of the inquiry was, on the whole, satisfactory. The Select Committee found themselves compelled to hear a certain number of workmen witnesses, who testified to the good results of the Act of the previous year. The ship-owners’ Bill was abandoned, and the House of Commons was recommended to pass a measure which nominally re-established the general common-law prohibition of combinations, but specifically excepted from prosecution associations for the purpose of regulating wages or hours of labour. The master shipbuilders were furious at this virtual defeat. The handbill is still extant which they distributed at the doors of the House of Commons on the day of the second reading of the emasculated Bill.[191] They declared that its provisions were quite insufficient to save their industry from destruction. If Trade Unions were to be allowed to exist at all, they demanded that these bodies should be compelled to render full accounts of their expenditure to the justices in Quarter Sessions, and that any diversion of monies raised for friendly society purposes should be severely punished. They pleaded, moreover, that at any rate all federal or combined action among trade clubs should be prohibited. Place and Hume, on the other hand, were afraid, and subsequent events proved with what good grounds, that the narrow limits of the trade combinations allowed by the Bill, and still more the vague terms “molest” and “obstruct,” which it contained, would be used as weapons against Trade Unionism. The Government, however, held to the draft of the Committee. The shipbuilders secured nothing. Hume induced Ministers to give way on some verbal points, and took three divisions in vain protest against the measure. Place carried on the agitation to the House of Lords, where Lord Rosslyn extracted the concession of a right of appeal to Quarter Sessions, which was afterwards to prove of some practical value.

The Act of 1825 (6 Geo. IV. c. 129)[192]—which became known among the manufacturers as “Peel’s Act”—though it fell short of the measure which Place and Hume had so skilfully piloted through Parliament the year before, effected a real emancipation. The right of collective bargaining, involving the power to withhold labour from the market by concerted action, was for the first time expressly established. And although many struggles remained to be fought before the legal freedom of Trade Unionism was fully secured, no overt attempt has since been made to render illegal this first condition of Trade Union action. [193]

It is a suggestive feature of this, as of other great reforms, that the men whose faith in its principle, and whose indefatigable industry and resolution carried it through, were the only ones who proved altogether mistaken as to its practical consequences. If we read the lesson of the century aright, the manufacturer was not wholly wrong when he protested that liberty of combination must make the workers the ultimate authority in industry, although his narrow fear as to the driving away of capital and commercial skill and the reduction of the nation to a dead level of anarchic pauperism were entirely contradicted by subsequent developments. And the workman, to whom liberty to combine opened up vistas of indefinite advancement of his class at the expense of his oppressors, was, we now see, looking rightly forward, though he, too, greatly miscalculated the distance before him, and overlooked many arduous stages of the journey. But what is to be said of the forecasts of Place and the Philosophic Radicals? “Combinations,” writes Place to Sir Francis Burdett in 1825, “will soon cease to exist. Men have been kept together for long periods only by the oppressions of the laws; these being repealed, combinations will lose the matter which cements them into masses, and they will fall to pieces. All will be as orderly as even a Quaker could desire.... He knows nothing of the working people who can suppose that, when left at liberty to act for themselves without being driven into permanent associations by the oppression of the laws, they will continue to contribute money for distant and doubtful experiments, for uncertain and precarious benefits. If let alone, combinations—excepting now and then, and for particular purposes under peculiar circumstances—will cease to exist.” [194]

It is pleasant to feel that Place was right in regarding the repeal as beneficial and worthy of his best efforts in its support; but in every less general respect he and his allies were as wrong as it was possible for them to be. The first disappointment, however, came to the workmen. Over and over again they had found their demands for higher wages parried only by the employers’ resort to the law, and they now saw the way clear before them for an organised attack upon their masters’ profits. Trades which had not yet enjoyed permanent combinations began to organise in the expectation of raising their wages to the level of those of their more fortunate brethren. The Sheffield shop-assistants combined to petition for early closing.[195] The cotton-weavers of Lancashire met in delegate meeting at Manchester in August 1824 to establish a permanent organisation to prevent reductions in prices and to secure a uniform wage, the notice stating that it was by their secret combinations that the tailors, joiners, and spinners had succeeded in keeping up wages.[196] In the same month the Manchester dyers turned out for an advance, and paraded the streets, which they had placarded with their proposals.[197] The Glasgow calender-men struck for a regular twelve hours’ day, and carried their point. The success of the shipwrights on the north-east coast[198] induced the London shipwrights to convert their “Committee for conducting the Business in the North” into the “Shipwrights’ Provident Union of the Port of London,” which existed continuously until its absorption in the twentieth century by the national society dominating the trade.

“Such is the rage for union societies,” reports the Sheffield Iris of July 12, 1825, “that the sea apprentices in Sunderland have actually had regular meetings every day last week on the moor, and have resolved not to go on board their ships unless the owners will allow them tea and sugar.” Local trade clubs expanded, like the Manchester Steam-Engine Makers’ Society, into national organisations. In other cases corresponding clubs developed into federal bodies. The object in all these cases was the same. The preamble to the first rules of the Friendly Society of Operative House Carpenters and Joiners of Great Britain, which was established by a delegate meeting in London in 1827, states that, “for the amelioration of the evils attendant on our trade, and the advancement of the rights and privileges of labour,” it was considered “absolutely necessary that a firm compact of interests should exist between the whole of the operative carpenters and joiners throughout the United Kingdom of Great Britain.” [199]

Nor was it only in the multiplication of trade societies that the expansion showed itself. A committee of delegates from the London trades meeting during the summer of 1825 set on foot the Trades Newspaper and Mechanics’ Weekly Journal, a sevenpenny stamped paper, with the motto, “They helped every one his neighbour, and every one said to his brother, ‘Be of good cheer.’”[200] A vigorous attempt was made to promote Trade Union organisation in all industries, and to bring to bear a body of instructed working-class opinion upon the political situation of the day. [201]

The high hopes of which all this exultant activity was the symptom were soon rudely dashed. The year 1825 closed with a financial panic and widespread commercial disaster. The four years that followed were years of contraction and distress. Hundreds of thousands of workmen in all trades lost their employment, and wages were reduced all round. In many manufacturing districts the operatives were kept from starvation only by public subscriptions.[202] Strikes under these circumstances ended invariably in disaster. A notable stand made by the Bradford woolcombers and weavers in 1825 resulted in complete defeat and the break-up of the Union. [203]

During the greater part of the following year all Lancashire was convulsed by incessant strikes of coal-miners and textile workers against the repeated reductions of wages to which the employers resorted—strikes which were marred by serious disorder, the destruction of many hundreds of looms, and severe repression by the troops. [204]

At Kidderminster, three years later, practically the whole trade of the town was brought to a standstill by the carpet-weavers’ six months’ resistance to a reduction of 17 per cent in their wages[205]—a resistance in which the operatives received the sympathy and support of many who did not belong to their class. In the same year the silk-weavers of London and other towns maintained an embittered resistance to a further cut at wages.[206] The emancipated combinations were no more able to resist reductions than the secret ones had been, and in some instances the workmen again resorted to violence and machine-breaking.

For a moment the repeal seemed, after all, to have done nothing but prove the futility of mere sectional combination, and the working men turned back again from Trade Union action to the larger aims and wider character of the Radical and Socialistic agitations of the time, with which, from 1829 to 1842, the Trade Union Movement became inextricably entangled. This is the phase which furnishes the theme of the following chapter.