FOOTNOTES:
[207]In a manuscript essay on the different forms of association, entitled “Trades Unions condemned, Trade Clubs justified,” Place gives us the distinction between the two. “A trade society,” he says, “that is, a club consisting of the journeymen in any one trade which does not form part of a union of several trades, which does not appoint delegates to meet other delegates, is a very different thing from a Trades Union, even though it may call itself a union. Trades Unions are those in which several trades, or portions of several trades, in the same line of business or in different callings, are confederated by means of delegates.” Place often refers to this distinction between the Trade Clubs, which were, according to his view, “very valuable institutions,” and the “Trades Unions,” or “associations of several or many trades in one combination,” which he regarded as “very mischievous associations.” William Lovett, too, watching the same transformation, makes, in a letter published in the Poor Man’s Guardian of August 30, 1834, exactly the same distinction.
[208]See the reports to the Home Secretary (Home Office Papers, 42—179, 180, 181, 182); The Town Labourer(by J. L. and B. Hammond, 1917), pp. 306-11.
[209]See the “Articles of the Philanthropic Hercules, for the Mutual Support of the Labouring Mechanics,” dated December 24, 1818, which Gast contributed to the Gorgon. Gast’s preliminary address appears in the issue for December 5, 1818, and in that of January 29, 1819, the society is described as established (Place MSS. 27899—143).
[210]The Herald of the Rights of Industry(Manchester, April 5, 1834).
[211]Labour Rewarded: The Claims of Labour and Capital: How to secure to Labour the Whole Product of its Exertions, by One of the Idle Classes [William Thompson], 1827; see The Irish Labour Movement, by W. P. Ryan, 1919.
[212]A Report of the Proceedings of the Meeting of Cotton-spinners at Ramsay, etc. (Manchester, 1829, 56 pages); Copy of Resolutions of the Delegates from the Operative Cotton-spinners who met at the Isle of Man(Manchester, 1830), in Home Office Papers, 40—27.
[213]John Doherty, described by Place as a somewhat hot-headed Roman Catholic—really one of the acutest thinkers and stoutest leaders among the workmen of his time—was born in Ireland in 1799, and went to work in a cotton-mill at Larne, Co. Antrim, at the age of ten. In 1816 he migrated to Manchester, where he quickly became one of the leading Trade Unionists, and secretary to the local Cotton-spinners’ Society. We find him, for instance, taking a prominent part in the agitation against the proposed re-enactment of the Combination Laws in 1825. Whether he was concerned in the Philanthropic Society or General Union of 1818 or 1826 we do not know. In 1829 he organised the great strike of the Hyde spinners against a reduction of rates, and became, as described in the text, successively General Secretary to the Federation of Spinners’ Societies, and to the National Association for the Protection of Labour, in which office he is reported, probably inaccurately, to have received the then enormous salary of £600 a year. We naturally find him the object of great suspicion by the Government, but no charge seems ever to have been brought against him (Home Office Papers, 40—26, 27). The articles in the Voice of the People and the Poor Man’s Advocate, which are evidently from his pen, show him to have been a man of wide information, great natural shrewdness, and far-reaching aims. His idea was that all the local and district Unions were to be federated in a national organisation for the sole purpose of dealing with trade matters, and that they should also be federated in a National Association for obtaining political reforms. In 1832, during the Reform crisis, Place describes him as advising the working classes to use the occasion for a social revolution. He subsequently acted as secretary to an association of operatives and masters established to enforce the Factory Acts, and was one of Lord Shaftesbury’s most strenuous supporters. In 1838, when he had become a printer and bookseller in Manchester, he gave evidence before the Select Committee on Combinations of Workmen, in which he described the spinners’ organisations and strikes. There is a pamphlet by him in the Goldsmiths’ Library at the University of London, entitled A Letter to the Members of the National Association for the Protection of Labour(Manchester, 1831).
[214]Home Office Papers, 40—27.
[215]Ibid., December 3, 1830, 40—26.
[216]Foster died in 1831, and McGowan settled at Glasgow. “Almost every spinning district,” writes the Poor Man’s Advocate of June 23, 1832, “of any consequence, was enrolled in the Union. The power of the Union, of course, increased with its members, and a number of the worst-paying employers were compelled to advance the wages of the spinners to something like the standard rate.... The Union, however, which Mr. McGowan had mainly contributed to mature, has since, from distrust or weariness, sunk into comparative insignificance.”
[217]The letter is preserved in the MS. “Contribution Book” of the Liverpool Sailmakers’ Friendly Association, established 1817.
[218]Address of the National Association for the Protection of Labour to the Workmen of the United Kingdom(4 pp. 1830), in Home Office Papers, 40—27.
[219]Given as Appendix to the pamphlet On Combination of Trades (1830). Compare Wade’s History of the Middle and Working Classes (1834), p. 277.
[220]Thirty-one numbers, extending from March 6 to October 2, 1830, are in the Manchester Public Library (620 B).
[221]The numbers from January to September 1831 are in the British Museum. See Place’s letter in Westminster Review(1831), p. 243.
[222]Home Office Papers, 40—26, 27.
[223]Home Office Papers, April 8, 1831, 44—25.
[224]Union Pilot and Co-operative Intelligencer, March 24, 1832 (Manchester Public Library, 640 E).
[225]Meanwhile the coalminers of Northumberland and Durham, under the leadership of “Tommy Hepburn,” an organiser of remarkable ability, had formed their first strong Union in 1830, which for two years kept the two counties in a state of excitement. Strikes and riotings in 1831 and 1832 caused the troops to be called out: marines were sent from Portsmouth, and squadrons of cavalry scoured the country. After six months’ struggle in 1832 the Union collapsed, and the men submitted. See Home Office Papers for these years, 40—31, 32, &c.; Sykes’ Local Records of Northumberland, &c., vol. ii. pp. 293, 353; Fynes’ Miners of Northumberland and Durham(Blyth, 1873), chaps, iv. v. vi.; An Earnest Address and Urgent Appeal to the People of England in behalf of the Oppressed and Suffering Pitmen of the Counties of Northumberland and Durham(by W. Scott, Newcastle, 1831); History and Description of Fossil Fuel, etc. (by John Holland, 1835), pp. 298-304.
[226]It is not clear whether this scheme was initiated by carpenters or masons. The carpenters and joiners are distinguished among the building trades for the antiquity of their local trade clubs, which are known to have existed in London as far back as 1799. A national organisation was established in London in July 1827, called the Friendly Society of Operative Carpenters and Joiners, which still survives under the title of the “General Union.” MS. records in the office of the latter show that this federation had 938 members in 1832, rising to 3691 in 1833, and to 6774 in 1834, a total not paralleled until 1865. This rapid increase marks the general upheaval of these years. But this Society did not throw in its lot with the Builders’ Union until 1833. On the other hand, the existing Operative Stonemasons’ Friendly Society, which dates its separate existence from 1834, but which certainly existed in some form from 1832, has among its archives what appear to be the original MS. rules and initiation rites of its predecessor, the Builders’ Union; and in these documents the masons figure as the foremost members. Moreover, these rules and rites closely resemble those of contemporary unions among the Yorkshire woollen-workers; and an independent tradition fixes the parent lodge of the Masons’ Society at the great woollen centre of Huddersfield, whereas the Friendly Society of Carpenters and Joiners, founded in London, had its headquarters at Leicester. But however this may be, the constitution and ceremonies described in these documents owe their significance to the fact that they are nearly identical with those adopted by many of the national Unions of the period, and were largely adopted by the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of 1834.
[227]A similar ritual is printed in Character, Objects, and Effects of Trades Unions(1834), as used by the Woolcombers’ Union. Probably the Builders’ Union copied their ritual from some union of woollen-workers. The Stonemasons’ MS. contains, like the copy printed in this pamphlet, a solemn reference to “King Edward the Third,” who was regarded as the great benefactor of the English wool trade, but whose connection with the building trade is not obvious. In a later printed edition of The Initiating Parts of the Friendly Society of Operative Masons, dated Birmingham, 1834, his name is omitted, and that of Solomon substituted, apparently in memory of the Freemasons’ assumed origin at the building of the Temple at Jerusalem.
The actual origin of this initiation ceremony is not certainly known John Tester, who had been a leader of the Bradford Woolcombers in 1825, afterwards turned against the Unions, and published, in the Leeds Mercury of June and July 1834, a series of letters denouncing the Leeds Clothiers’ Union. In these he states that “the mode of initiation was the same as practised for years before by the flannel-weavers of Rochdale, with a party of whom the thing, in the shape it then wore, had at first originated.... A great part of the ceremony, ... particularly the death scene, was taken from the ceremonial of one division of the Oddfellows, ... who were flannel-weavers at Rochdale, in Lancashire; and all that could be well turned from the rules and lectures of one society into the regulations of the others was so turned, with some trifling verbal alterations.” In another letter he says that the writer of the “lecture book” was one Mark Warde. Tester is not implicitly to be believed, but it seems probable that the regalia, doggerel rhymes, and mystic rites of the unions of this time were copied from those of an Oddfellows’ Lodge, with some recollections of Freemasonry. In his Mutual Thrift(1891), the Rev. J. Frome Wilkinson describes (p. 14) the initiation ceremony of the “Patriotic Oddfellows,” a society which merged in the present “Grand United Order of Oddfellows” before the close of the century. The ceremony so described corresponds in many characteristic details with that of the Trades Unions. All the older friendly society “Orders” imposed an oath, and were consequently unlawful.
[228]Home Office Papers, December 29, 1832, 40—31.
[229]At Birmingham, when the builders’ strike presently extended to that town, the following was the manifesto drawn up for adoption by the Builders’ Union, for presentation to the leading building contractor who had just undertaken to erect the new grammar-school. (No record of its adoption and presentation has been found.) “We, the delegates of the several Lodges of the Building Trades, elected for the purpose of correcting the abuses which have crept into the modes of undertaking and transacting business, do hereby give you notice that you will receive no assistance from the working-men in any of our bodies to enable you to fulfil an engagement which we understand you have entered into with the Governors of the Free Grammar School to erect a new school in New Street, unless you comply with the following conditions:
“Aware that it is our labour alone that can carry into effect what you have undertaken, we cannot but view ourselves as parties to your engagement, if that engagement is ever fulfilled; and as you had no authority from us to make such an engagement, nor had you any legitimate right to barter our labour at prices fixed by yourself, we call upon you to exhibit to our several bodies your detailed estimates of quantities and prices at which you have taken the work; and we call upon you to arrange with us a fixed percentage of profit for your own services in conducting the building, and in finding the material on which our labour is to be applied.
“Should we find upon examination that you have fixed equitable prices which will not only remunerate you for your superintendence but us for our toil, we have no objections upon a clear understanding to become partners to the contract, and will see you through it, after your having entered yourself a member of our body, and after your having been duly elected to occupy the office you have assumed” (Robert Owen: A Biography, by Frank Podmore, 1906, vol. ii. p. 442-4).
[230]An Impartial Statement of the Proceedings of the Members of the Trades Union Societies, and of the Steps taken in consequence by the Master Traders of Liverpool(Liverpool, 1833); Remarks on the Nature and Probable Termination of the Struggle now existing between the Master and Journeyman Builders(Manchester, 1833); Times, June 27, 1833.
[231]Pioneer, December 7, 1833; History of Birmingham, by W. Hutton (Birmingham, 1835), p. 87.
[232]It was edited by James Morrison, an enthusiastic Owenite, who died, worn out, in 1835 (Beer’s History of British Socialism, 1919, p. 328).
[233]It was eventually finished by the landlord, and still exists as a metal warehouse in Shadwell Street.
[234]In May 1834 an informer offered to supply the Home Secretary With full particulars of its organisation, leading members and their activities, for two sums of £50 each (Home Office Papers, 40—32).
[235]Letters to Cobbett’s Weekly Register, reprinted in the Pioneer, December 21, 1833. See also Home Office Papers, 40—32; and the Crisis for November and December 1833. The Voice of the West Riding, an unstamped weekly, June and July 1833, was devoted to this agitation in the Yorkshire textile industry (see Home Office Papers, 40—31).
[236]For an unfavourable account of this Union, see the extremely biassed statement given in the pamphlet Character, Objects, and Effects of Trades Unions(1834). The employers seem to have regarded all the demands of the men as equally unreasonable, even the request for a list of piecework prices. See Times, October 2, 1833. A printed address To the Flax and Hemp Trade of Great Britain, issued by the flaxworkers of Leeds, November 30, 1832, refers with admiration to the effectiveness of this Union (Home Office Papers, 40—31; see also 41—11).
[237]Times, October 28, 1833.
[238]Crisis, October 19, 1833.
[239]Crisis, October 12, 1833. The history of the General Trades Unions from 1832 to 1834 is mainly to be gathered from the files of the Owenite press, the Crisis, the Pioneer, and the Herald of the Rights of Industry, with frequent ambiguous references in the Home Office Papers for these years. The Poor Man’s Guardian and the Man also contain occasional references. The Official Gazette, issued by the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union itself in June 1834, has unfortunately not been preserved. We have also been unable to discover any copy of the Glasgow Owenite journals, the Tradesman, Trades Advocate, Liberator, etc., mostly edited or written by Owen’s disciple, Alexander Campbell, the secretary of the local joiners’ Trade Union.
[240]It is interesting to notice how closely this organisation resembles, in its Trade Union features, the well-known “Knights of Labour” of the United States, established in 1869, and for some years one of the most powerful labour organisations in the world (“Historical Sketch of the Knights of Labour,” by Carroll D. Wright, Quarterly Journal of Economics, January, 1887). Its place was taken by the American Federation of Labour, with exclusively Trade Union objects.
[241]Glasgow Argus, quoted in People’s Conservative, December 28, 1833.
[242]May 5, 1834.
[243]Times, January 23 and 30, 1834.
[244]Kerr’s Exposition of Legislative Tyranny and Defence of the Trades Union(Belfast, 1834), vol. 1611 of the Halliday Tracts in the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin; see The Irish Labour Movement, by W. P. Ryan, 1919.
[245]Poor Man’s Guardian, July 26, 1834.
[246]Times, April 19, 1834.
[247]The only record of this organisation known to us is a copy of the Rules in the Goldsmiths’ Library at the University of London, which we print in the Appendix. A “Memorial from the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of Great Britain and Ireland to the Producers and Non-Producers of Wealth and Knowledge” is printed in the Crisis, May 17, 1834; another, “to the Shopmen, Clerks, Porters and other industrious non-producers,” in the issue for April 26, 1834.
[248]See the London newspapers for March 1834; a good summary is given in the Companion to the Newspaper for that month (p. 71).
[249]September 26, 1831: Lord Melbourne’s Papers(1889), ch. v. p. 130. The note he left on leaving the Home Office was as follows: “I take the liberty of recommending the whole of this correspondence re the Union to the immediate and serious consideration of my successor at the Home Department” (Home Office Papers, 40—27). See also the statements in the House of Lords debate, Times, April 29, 1834; and the comments in Labour Legislation, Labour Movements, and Labour Leaders, by George Howell, 1902, p. 23.
[250]“We recommend that the soliciting of any person to join in combinations, or to subscribe to the like purposes, should be punishable on summary conviction by imprisonment for a shorter period, say not exceeding two months.”
[251]The report was never published, and lies in MS. in the Home Office library. Ten years later, when Nassau Senior was acting as Commissioner to report on the condition of the handloom weavers, he revived a good deal of his 1830 Report, but not the astonishing proposals quoted in the text. The portion thus revived appears in his Historical and Philosophical Essays(1865), vol. ii. We had placed in our hands, through the kindness of Mrs. Simpson, daughter of Nassau Senior, the original answers and letters upon which his report was based. This correspondence shows that the leading Manchester manufacturers were not agreed upon the desirability of re-enacting the Combination Laws, though they, with one accord, advocated stringent repression of picketing. Nor were they clear that combinations had, on the whole, hindered the introduction of new machinery, one employer even maintaining that the Unions indirectly promoted its adoption. But the most interesting feature of the correspondence is the extent to which the employers complained of the manner in which their rivals incited, and even subsidised, strikes against attempted reductions of rates. The millowner, whose improved processes gave him an advantage in the market, found any corresponding reduction of piecework rates resisted, not only by his own operatives, but by all the other manufacturers in the district, who sometimes went so far as to publish a joint declaration that any such reduction was ‘highly inexpedient.’ The evidence, in fact, from Nassau Senior’s point of view, justified his somewhat remarkable proposal to punish employers for conniving at combinations.
[252]Lord Melbourne to Sir Herbert Taylor, September 26, 1831 (Papers, chap. v. p. 131). The workmen’s combinations began at this time to attract more serious attention from capable students than they had hitherto received. Two able pamphlets, published anonymously—there is reason to believe at the instance and at the cost of the Whig Government—On Combinations of Trades(1830), and Character, Objects, and Effects of Trades Unions(1834), set forth the constitution and proceedings of the new unions, and criticise their pretensions in a manner which has not since been surpassed. The second of these was by Edward Carlton Tufnell, one of the factory commissioners, and remains perhaps the best statement of the case against Trades Unionism. Tufnell also wrote a pamphlet, entitled Trades Unionism and Strikes(1834; 12mo); and Harriet Martineau one On the Tendency of Strikes and Sticks to produce Low Wages(Durham, 1834; 12mo), neither of which we have seen. A well-informed but hostile article, founded on these materials, appeared in the Edinburgh Review for July 1834. Charles Knight published in the same year a sixpenny pamphlet, Trades Unions and Strikes(1834, 99 pp.), which took the form of a bitter denunciation of the whole movement.
[253]See his letter of March 30, 1834, in Lord Melbourne’s Papers, chap. v.
[254]Leeds Mercury, April 26, 1834. Joseph Hume said he had had the “greatest difficulty in prevailing upon the Ministers not to bring in a bill for putting down the Trades Unions” (Poor Man’s Guardian, March 29, 1834).
[255]Letter dated September 3, 1833, in Times, September 9, 1833.
[256]R. v. Bykerdike, 1 Moo. and Rob. 179, Lancaster Assizes, 1832. A letter was written to certain coal-owners, “by order of the Board of Directors for the body of coal-miners,” stating that unless certain men were discharged the miners would strike. Held to be an illegal combination. See Leeds Mercury, May 24, 1834.
[257]Times, August 22, 1835.
[258]Poor Man’s Guardian, September 29, 1832.
[259]Times, February 27, 1834.
[260]R. v. Marks and others, 3 East Rep. 157.
[261]Lengthy accounts appeared in the newspapers for March and April 1834. The indictment is given in full in the House of Commons Return, No. 250, of 1835 (June 1st). The legal report is in 6 C. and P. 596 (R. v. Loveless and others). The Times reported the judge’s charge at some length, March 18, 1834, and the case itself March 20, 1834, giving the rules of the projected union. An able article in the Law Magazine, vol xi. pp. 460-72, discusses the law of the case. The defendants subsequently published two statements for popular circulation, viz. Victims of Whiggery, a statement of the persecution experienced by the Dorchester Labourers, by George Loveless (1837), and A narrative of the sufferings of James Loveless, etc.(1838), which are in the British Museum. See also Labour Legislation, Labour Movements, and Labour Leaders, by G. Howell, 1902, pp. 62-75; Spencer Walpole’s History of England, vol. iii. chap. xiii. pp. 229-31; and Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, vols. xxii. and xxiii.
[262]The student is referred to the admirable account of these proceedings in The Village Labourer, by J. L. and B. Hammond, 1912. See, for a contemporary account, Swing Unmasked, or the Cause of Rural Incendiarism, by G. C. Wakefield, M.P., 1831.
[263]Lord Melbourne’s Papers, pp. 147-150, letters dated November 3 and 7, 1832. Lord Melbourne seems to have thought, probably quite incorrectly, that these rural organisations were in connection with the political organisation called the National Union of the Working Classes, founded by William Lovett in 1831, to support the Reform Bill.
[264]Times, March 20, 1834.
[265]Lord Melbourne’s Papers, p. 158.
[266]Times, March 18, 20, 31; April 1, 16, 19, 1834; Leeds Mercury, April 26, 1834.
[267]A prominent Owenite agitator of the time, incumbent of St. Nicholas, Warwick, who is said to have been inhibited from preaching by his bishop.
[268]Times, April 22; Companion to the Newspaper, May and June 1834. Trade Union accounts declare that 100,000 to 200,000 persons were present. A detailed description of the day is given in Somerville’s Autobiography of a Working Man(1848), not usually a trustworthy work.
[269]Times, April 19, 1834.
[270]The agitation for their release was kept up, both in and out of Parliament, by the “London Dorchester Committee”; and in 1836 the remainder of the sentence was remitted. Through official blundering it was two years later (April 1838) before five out of the six prisoners returned home. The sixth, as we learn from a circular of the Committee, dated August 20, 1838, had even then not arrived. “Great and lasting honour,” writes a well-informed contemporary, “is due to this body of workmen (the London Dorchester Committee), about sixteen in number, by whose indefatigable exertions, extending over a period of five years, and the valuable assistance of Thomas Wakley, M.P. for Finsbury, the same Government who banished the men were compelled to pardon them and bring them home free of expense. From the subscriptions raised by the working classes during this period, amounting to about £1300, the Committee, on the return of the men, were enabled to place five of them, with their families, in small farms in Essex, the sixth preferring (with his share of the fund) to return to his native place.” (Article in the British Statesman, April 9, 1842, preserved in Place MSS. 27820—320.) See also House of Commons Return, No. 191 of 1837 (April 12); and Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, vol. xxxii. p. 253.
[271]The series of “Initiation Parts,” or forms to be observed on admission of new members, which are preserved in the archives of the Stonemasons’ Society, reveal the steady tendency to simplification of ritual. We have first the old MS. doggerel already described, dating probably from 1832. The first print of 1834, whilst retaining a good deal of the ceremonial, turns the liturgy into prose and the oath into an almost identical “declaration,” invoking the “dire displeasure” of the Society in case of treachery. The second print, which bears no date, is much shorter; and the declaration becomes a mere affirmation of adhesion. The Society’s circulars of 1838 record the abolition, by vote of the members, of all initiation ceremonies, in view of the Parliamentary Inquiry about to be held into Trade Unionism. But even the simplified form of 1838 retains, in its reference to the workmen as “the real producers of all wealth,” an unmistakable trace of the Owenite spirit of the Builders’ Union of 1832.
[272]Times, April 30 to June 10; House of Lords debate, April 28; Globe, May 21, 1834; Home Office Papers, May 10, 1834, 40—32; The Tailoring Trade, by F. W. Galton, 1896.
[273]Leeds Mercury, May 3, 1834.
[274]See the address of the “Grand Master” to the “Operative Cordwainers of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union,” Crisis, June 28, 1834; also Times, May 2, 1834; Home Office Papers, 40—32.
[275]Times, August 21, 1834.
[276]Statement of the Master Builders of the Metropolis in explanation of the differences between them and the workmen respecting the Trades Unions, 1834. See also Times, July 27 to November 29, 1834.
[277]The Times honoured these events by long descriptive reports from its “own correspondent,” then an unusual practice; see the issues from April 17 to 25, 1834. A good account is also to be found in the Leeds Mercury, April 19 and 26, 1834; see also the History of the Marcroft Family(1889), pp. 1036.
[278]Trades Journal, March 1, 1841; probably written by Alexander Hutchinson, general secretary of the Friendly United Smiths of Great Britain and Ireland.
[279]England and America: a Comparison of the Social and Political State of both Nations, 1833, 2 vols.
[280]Poor Man’s Guardian, March 12, 1831; Place MSS. 27791—246, 272. “There were seven Co-operative Congresses in the years 1830-5 in which the Trade Union and Labour Exchange elements were prominent” (Prof. Foxwell’s Introduction to The Right to the Full Produce of Labour, by Anton Menger, 1899).
[281]See the volumes of the Poor Man’s Guardian, preserved in the British Museum.
[282]Place MSS. 27797—290; see a similar account in the Life of William Lovett, by himself, p. 86. James Mill writes to Lord Brougham on September 3, 1832, as follows: “Nothing can be conceived more mischievous than the doctrines which have been preached to the common people.... The nonsense to which your lordship alludes about the right of the labourer to the whole produce of the country, wages, profits, and rent all included, is the mad nonsense of our friend Hodgskin, which he has published as a system, and propagates with the zeal of perfect fanaticism.... The illicit cheap publications, in which the doctrine of the right of the labouring people, who they say are the only producers, to all that is produced, is very generally preached, ... are superseding the Sunday newspapers and every other channel through which the people might get better information” (Bain’s James Mill, p. 363, 1882). The series of Socialist authors of these years, usually ignored, have been well described by Prof. Foxwell in his Introduction to the English translation of Menger’s Right to the Whole Produce of Labour, 1899; and more fully and philosophically in M. Beer’s History of British Socialism, 1919, vol. i.
[283]“Owen’s chief merit was that he filled the working classes with renewed hope at a time when the pessimism, both of orthodox economists and of their unorthodox opponents, had condemned labour to be an appendage of machinery, a mere commodity whose value, like that of all commodities, was determined by the bare cost of keeping up the necessary supply. Owen laid stress upon the human side of economics. The object of industry was to produce happier and more contented men and women” (The Chartist Movement, by Mark Hovell, 1918, p. 45).
[284]The prospectus of this Society is in the British Library of Political Science at the London School of Economics. A copy is given in the Morning Chronicle, December 7, 1833. Its Manchester meetings are reported in the Crisis for November and December 1833. It seems to have had for its organ a penny weekly called The Herald of the Rights of Industry, some numbers of which are in the British Museum. Professor Foxwell has kindly drawn our attention to a further reference to it in the Life of James Deacon Hume, p. 55. It excited the curiosity of the Home Secretary. See Home Office Papers, 40—31.
[285]See Owen’s elaborate speech, reported in the Crisis, October 12, 1833; Robert Owen: a Biography, by Frank Podmore, 1906; and Trade Unionism, by C. M. Lloyd, 1915.
[286]Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth most conducive to Human Happiness, by William Thompson, 1824; also his Labour Rewarded, the Claims of Labour and Capital; How to secure to Labour the whole Product of its Exertions, by One of the Idle Classes, 1827; see Professor Foxwell’s Introduction to The Right to the whole Produce of Labour, by Anton Menger, 1899; History of British Socialism, by M. Beer, 1919, vol. i.; and The Irish Labour Movement, by W. P. Ryan, 1919, ch. iii.
[287]The pamphlet, entitled The Grand National Holiday and Congress of the Productive Classes, by William Benbow, 1831, had an extensive circulation. Mark Hovell (The Chartist Movement, 1918, p. 91) thinks he was the same William Benbow whom Bamford mentions as a delegate from Manchester in 1817 (Life of a Radical, p. 8), and whom Henry Hunt describes as of the Manchester Hampden Club, and as having been reported by a Government spy to be manufacturing pikes in 1816 (The Green Bag Plot, 1918).
[288]Leading article in the Crisis, October 12, 1833.
[289]A specimen dated 1837 is preserved by the Stonemasons’ Society, according to which a Liverpool contractor bound all his employees to serve him at a fixed wage for a long term of years, any time lost by sickness or otherwise not to be paid for and to be added to the term; all “lawful commands” to be obeyed; and no present or future club or other society to be joined without the employer’s consent.
[290]See his manifestoes reprinted in Northern Star, July 6 and July 27, 1844. “Lord Londonderry again warns all the shopkeepers and tradesmen in his town of Seaham that if they still give credit to pitmen who hold off work, and continue in the Union, such men will be marked by his agents and overmen, and will never be employed in his collieries again, and the shopkeepers may be assured that they will never have any custom or dealings with them from Lord Londonderry’s large concerns that he can in any manner prevent.
“Lord Londonderry further informs the traders and shopkeepers, that having by his measures increased very largely the last year’s trade to Seaham, and if credit is so improperly and so fatally given to his unreasonable pitmen, thereby prolonging the injurious strike, it is his firm determination to carry back all the outlay of his concerns even to Newcastle.
“Because it is neither fair, just, or equitable that the resident traders in his own town should combine and assist the infatuated workmen and pitmen in prolonging their own miseries by continuing an insane strike, and an unjust and senseless warfare against their proprietors and masters.”
[291]Some account of these developments will be found in The Co-operative Movement in Great Britain, by Beatrice Potter (Mrs. Sidney Webb).
[292]The collapse was duly reported to the Home Secretary (Home Office Papers, 40—33, 34, 35).
[293]See Ashworth’s paper before British Association, 1837; Remarks upon the Importance of an Inquiry into the Amount and Appropriation of Wages by the Working Classes, by W. Felkin, 1837; Appeal to the Public from the United Trades of Preston, February 14, 1837 (in Home Office Papers, 40—35).
[294]The United Society of Operative Plumbers (reorganised 1848) still dominates its branch of the trade, and retains traces of the federal constitution of the Builders’ Union. The sister organisation of carpenters (now styled the General Union of Carpenters and Joiners) has been overtaken and overshadowed by the newer Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners; whilst the Operative Bricklayers’ Society has absorbed practically all the older societies in its own branch of the trade.
[295]Glasgow was still the principal centre of the cotton industry, especially in weaving. In 1838 there were in the Glasgow area about 36,000 handlooms devoted mainly to cotton, with two persons to a loom, whilst in all Lancashire there were only 25,000 (Parliamentary Papers, xlii. of 1849 and xxiv. of 1840; The Chartist Movement, by Mark Hovell, 1918, p. 14). Combination among the cotton operatives of Glasgow was of old standing. After the strike of 1812, already referred to, trouble broke out again in 1820 and 1822, when outrages were committed (Arts and Artisans, by J. G. Symons, 1839, p. 137).
Besides securing full reports in the newspapers, the Trade Union committee conducting the case published at a low price an account of the trial in parts, which has not been preserved. Two other exhaustive reports were issued, and may still be consulted, viz. Report of the trial of Thomas Hunter and other operative cotton-spinners in Glasgow in 1838, by Archibald Swinton (Edinburgh, 1838), and The trial of Thomas Hunter, etc., the Glasgow Cotton-spinners, by James Marshall (Glasgow, 1838). See also the Autobiography of Sir Archibald Alison, 1883; the Northern Star for 1837-8; the Annual Register for 1838, pp. 206-7; and the evidence before the Select Committee on Combinations, 1838. A summary will be found in Howell’s Labour Legislation, Labour Movements and Labour Leaders, 1902, pp. 83-4.
[296]The five prisoners were pardoned in 1840, in consequence of their exemplary conduct. There is a joint letter by them in the Trades Journal for August, 1840, relating to the subscriptions raised for them by a London committee.
[297]Stonemasons’ Fortnightly Circular, January 19, 1838.
[298]Evidence of W. Darcy, the secretary, second report of 1838 Committee, p. 130.
[299]Circular dated March 1, 1838, in Stonemasons’ archives; and An Address from the London Trades Committee appointed to watch the Parliamentary Inquiry into Combinations, 1838.
[300]George Howell suggests, we are not sure with what authority, that Nassau Senior, whose report on Trade Unionism to the Home Secretary in 1830 we have already described, tendered this to Sir Henry Parnell as the basis of a report by the Committee of 1838, but the proposal was not accepted (Labour Legislation, Labour Movements and Labour Leaders, 1902, pp. 83-4). See also The Irish Labour Movement, by W. P. Ryan, 1919.
[301]A series of subsequent publications has now gone far to fill this gap. The Chartist Movement, by R. G. Gammage (republished 1894), may now be supplemented by The Life of Francis Place, by Professor Graham Wallas (revised edition, 1918); Le Chartisme, 1830-48, by E. Dolléans, 2 vols. (Paris, 1912-13); The Chartist Movement, by Mark Hovell, 1918; The Social and Economic Aspects of the Chartist Movement, by F. F. Rosenblatt (New York, 1916); The Decline of the Chartist Movement, by P. W. Slosson (New York, 1916); Chartism and the Churches, by H. V. Faulkner (New York, 1916); Die Entstehung und die ökonomischen Grundsätze der Chartistenbewegung, by John Tildsley (Jena, 1898); and especially by the two separate volumes on the History of British Socialism, by M. Beer, 1919 and 1920.
[302]Northern Star, August 20, 1842.
[303]Sheffield Iris, August 1842.
[304]See, for instance, that for October 1839.
[305]Northern Star, August 20, 1842. “It is clear that the trade societies as a whole stood outside the Chartist Movement, though many Trade Unionists were no doubt Chartists too. The societies could not be induced to imperil their funds and existence at the orders of the Chartist Convention” (The Chartist Movement, by Mark Hovell, 1918, p. 169).
[306]History of Birmingham, by W. Hutton (Birmingham, edition of 1835), p. 149.
[307]Northern Star, August 24, 1846.