The Thames police deals with mutinies and murders committed on the high seas, and all disputes under the Mercantile Marine Act come as a matter of course to this court, together with the major portion of the criminals, the scene of whose offences is in the docks and on the river. Drunkenness, the vice of the sailors, and the insubordination arising out of it, form a very large portion of the charges of the district. Worship-street is famous, or rather infamous, for wife-beaters. The reason is curious, and supplies a hint to philanthropists to reform the dwellings of the poor, rather than pass harsh acts of parliament against the husbands, which in many cases only serve to aggravate the evils arising from their brutality. The majority of the wife-beaters come from Bethnal-green, where there are a great number of large old mansions let out to the working-classes in floors or flats. Sometimes as many as twenty families live in the same house. The children play about in the passages as a neutral ground, disputes arise, and the mothers take the parts of their respective offspring with discordant fierceness. This drives the men to the public-houses, where they drink their porter iced and listen to more pleasant sounds in the shape of gratuitous concerts. The wives in turn are driven to the tavern doors to seek their mates, with words not too conciliatory, and are brutally assaulted by the drunken husbands, who are taken up the next day and get six months’ imprisonment, the family being in most instances irretrievably broken up and ruined thereby. Some of the magistrates, seeing the baleful working of the system, have attempted a solution of the difficulty by making the husband promise to allow the wife to receive his weekly wages from his master, whose consent to the arrangement has been given. In many instances this plan has worked well, since the husband knows that on the slightest infringement of the agreement his spouse may give him six months’ imprisonment, judgment in the case having been only suspended. But this power, again, is often abused by the woman, and it is a common thing for them on the least threat of their mates to say, “Mind what you are about, or I will give you ‘a sixer.’”
Cases of begging are principally heard at the Marlborough-street police-court, as the rich streets in its neighbourhood are the main scenes of the nuisance. Blind beggars especially affect Regent-street, Oxford-street, and Piccadilly, the most thronged thoroughfares in the West End. We warn our readers against their charitable tendencies for these people. If the truth was known, the cry, “Pity the poor blind!” far from exciting their pity, would arouse their disgust. Blind beggars, as a class, are the most profligate scoundrels in the metropolis, thinking of nothing but their grosser appetites, and plundering the charitable for their satisfaction. One of these men lately taken into custody was discovered seated at the breakfast-table with ham and fourteen poached eggs before him! At the Westminster police-court the foot-guards are continually visitors against their will; but it is remarked as extraordinary that not one of the horse-guards has been charged here for years.
A custom has grown up of making the police magistrates the almoners of the public in cases which have attracted the attention of the charitable through the medium of the press. Many a poor forsaken creature has suddenly found himself not only famous, but comparatively rich, by the simple process of telling his tale in one of these courts. The news of it flies through the country in the pages of the Times, and in the course of two or three mornings the magistrate is oppressed with post-office orders for the benefit of the sufferer, the donors simply requesting that their gifts should be acknowledged in the public journals. The annual receipts at the different courts for special cases must amount to a large sum; and there is in addition a constant flow of small sums towards the poor-box, the contents of which are distributed at the discretion of the magistrate. The annual income from this latter source is about 300l. per annum at Marlborough-street, and at Bow-street respectively, the greater portion of which is given to deserving objects whose cases have come before the court, and the remainder is dispensed at Christmas to the poor of the neighbourhood in the shape of coals and candles. We are particularly anxious to make this fact known, in order that the charitable may be aware that their gifts are well bestowed. The magistrates do not, we believe, encourage these donations, as they consider that the distribution of alms is incompatible with their office; but, on the other hand, it cannot be denied that a vast amount of temporary aid is thus given to persons whose needs cannot be satisfied by the union workhouse. Deserving people are often furnished with the means of obtaining a livelihood, workmen whose tools have been burned in a conflagration supplied with new ones, and in some cases women left behind by their husbands, under circumstances of peculiar hardship, have been provided with a passage to Australia. The thousands in England who only want to know where genuine misfortune exists to hasten to its relief, have a greater guarantee that they will not be imposed upon by these cases at the police-courts than by private solicitations, as the magistrates have the means of sifting the statements of applicants. Nevertheless, even these astute public servants are now and then deceived, and comparatively large sums have been received by them for persons who have afterwards been ascertained to be unworthy of relief; and in instances where the discovery took place in time, the money, by the direction of the donors, has been transferred to truer objects of charity.
The fees, penalties, and forfeitures received at the eleven metropolitan police-courts and by the justices of the exterior police districts are very considerable; in 1855 they amounted to 11,315l. 16s. 6d. This sum goes towards defraying the expenses of the courts, which, together with the salaries of the officers, and other items, amounted in the same year to 63,021l. 0s. 5d. The expenditure may be considered reasonable, when it is remembered that 60,000 cases are annually disposed of, many of which require a minute knowledge of statute and of common law. The chief improvement required is the improvement of the buildings. The Thames police-court is the only one at all suitable for its purpose. An enclosed yard is attached to it, in which the police-van can draw up and discharge its prisoners without exposing them to the public gaze, an important point in times of public excitement. Clerkenwell and Westminster are the next best-arranged courts, but both want space and air; Lambeth, though lately built, is a complete failure; many of the other courts are held in small private houses; and in those of Marlborough Street and Hammersmith, the business is transacted up stairs. In the latter court it is a common thing to hear it said of persons who have been taken before the magistrates—“he has been up the forty steps.” With the common people, with whom these institutions have mainly to deal, justice should be dispensed with regard to appearances; there should be the formality of the superior courts, and somewhat of their show. A magistrate sitting in a plain black dress like an ordinary gentleman, and a lawyer dispensing justice in his wig and gown, are two very different things to the lower classes, whatever they may be to educated persons; and the want of all official costume, and the huddled style of doing business, inseparable from the present confined space, is not calculated to inspire the people with much respect. The police should at least be put upon a level with the county-courts. The latter have to deal with less momentous interests. Questions of paltry debt cannot be put in comparison with questions involving the liberty of the subject; the power of committing to prison for six months with hard labour is far more important than that of adjudicating in money disputes under five pounds. It is not enough that justice is administered; it is the opinion which the people have of it that produces the effect, and until the judgment-seat is rendered dignified, and those who sit on it are clothed with the habiliments which distinguish the magistrate from the man, the law, by losing most of its impressiveness, will lose its moral power over delinquents. The vulgar terror of punishment may remain, but the lesson which is conveyed to the feelings by the solemn stateliness of the tribunal is entirely gone.
MORTALITY IN TRADES AND PROFESSIONS.
It is but natural to suppose, that in such a busy hive of industry as England, where so large a proportion of the population—at least one-half—is engaged in the prosecution of arts and manufactures, that the effects of unceasing toil, and the debilitating influences of many employments, will have a certain effect upon the health and longevity of the artisan. We cannot pit the tender muscles of the child against the senseless energy of steam, without producing a strain upon the vital principle of the workers which must be highly injurious to it. We cannot consign a population as large as that of many German States to live perpetually in the bowels of the earth, without being prepared for an increased death-rate. The hundreds of diverse manufactures and handicrafts, which make the land hum with labour, must all be prosecuted under circumstances more or less inimical to perfect health. If we take the agricultural labourer of the better class, whose daily toil is performed under the roof of heaven, it must be clear that all trades which pursue their monotonous vocations in the crowded workshops of crowded cities, in constrained attitudes, and subject to debilitating emanations, must, to a certain extent, fall short of his standard of health. Nevertheless, we do not think the public are prepared for the state of things which a close examination of the sanitary condition of certain portions of the working population divulges. Accustomed to be furnished with all the appliances of easy life and luxury, the great middle and upper classes have never perhaps given a thought as to the manner in which these wants and appliances are supplied. Accustomed to sip the honey, it never strikes us that perhaps its product involves in some cases the life of the working-bee. Yet the lady, who, from the silken ease of her fauteuil, surveys her drawing-room, may learn a lesson of compassion for the poor workman in nearly every article that lies before her. Those glazed visiting cards, if they could speak, possibly could tell of the paralyzed hand that made them; that splendid mirror, which lights up the stately room, has, without doubt, reflected the trembling form of the emaciated Italian artificer poisoned with mercurial fumes; those hangings, so soft and delicate, may have produced permanent disease to the weaver, whose stomach has been injured by its constant pressure against the beam; the porcelain vase on the bracket has dragged the “dipper’s” hand into a poison that, sooner or later, will destroy its power, and, may-be, produce in him mania and death; nay, the very paper on the walls, tinted with all the vernal brightness of spring, has, for all we know, ulcerated with its poisonous dust the fingers of the hanger. The history of the manufacture of almost every article of elegance or virtù would disclose to us pictures of workmen transiently or permanently disabled in the production of them. All this suffering—much of it totally preventible—goes on without complaint, the workman falls out of the ranks, and another instantly takes his place, to be succeeded perhaps by a third. We are convinced that such a waste of health and life could not be endured, if the public were fully alive to the magnitude of the evil; for this reason we shall endeavour, in the following essay, to give a true picture of what may, perhaps, without pedantry, be termed the pathology of industrial occupations and professions in this country.
Foremost among those artisans who suffer from the inhalation of dust and other gritty particles given off in the pursuit of their employment are the grinders of Sheffield. Dr. J. C. Hall, in a series of papers published lately in the British Medical Journal, draws a picture of the condition of these unfortunate men, which is indeed appalling, and without doubt gives them the bad pre-eminence of pursuing the most deadly trade in existence. Grinding is divided into dry, wet, and mixed; that is, the various articles of steel turned out of the cutler’s shop of Sheffield are subjected to the stone entirely dry, revolving in water, or to processes involving both methods. Of the three, the former is by far the most deadly: forks, needles, brace-bits, &c., are ground entirely on the dry stone, and the amount of finely-divided metal dust and siliceous grit given out in the process may be imagined, when we state that a dozen of razors, weighing 2lb. 4oz. as they come from the forge in the rough, lose in the process of “shaping” on the dry stone, upwards of five ounces, and the stone itself, seven inches in diameter, would be reduced one inch. To receive the mixture of stone and steel thus rapidly given off, the position of the grinder is but too convenient; straddled across his “horsing,” as the frame in which the grindstone revolves is called, with his knees bent in an acute angle, his body inclined forwards, and his head hanging over the work, his mouth is brought into fatal contact with the poisonous dust, and his eyes with the rush of the sparks. Fork-grinding is performed entirely on the dry stone, and consequently it is the most deadly occupation pursued in Sheffield. About 500 men and boys are at present devoting themselves to destruction during the period of early manhood, for the benefit of the users of steel forks. “The silver fork school” imagines perhaps that these vile appliances have long been banished to the same limbo as snuffers, and will be surprised to learn that more steel forks than ever are thus fashioned in Sheffield, and the poor grinder, as he receives into his lungs the products of the fashioning, in his own person exemplifies the awful passage in the burial-service—“dust to dust”—as the disease thus induced cuts him off at the average age of twenty-nine years! “I shall be thirty-six years old next month,” remarked a grinder, pathetically, to Dr. Hall, “and you know, measter, that’s getting a very old man in our trade.” Another operation, almost as deadly as fork-grinding, is that of “racing the stone.” These grindstones are but roughly reduced to the circular form by the quarry men, and the grinder undertakes the business of reducing and removing all their asperities, which he does by revolving them against a piece of steel—a tremendous dust being given off in the process. In wet grinding, which is employed in the manufacture of saws, files, sickles, table-knives, and edge-tools, comparatively little dust is made, and in these employments the grinders enjoy comparatively longer life; their average age ranging from thirty-five to forty years. In addition to the destructive effects of these particles of metal and stone upon the delicate membrane of the lungs, the dry-grinder is subjected to serious injury of the eyes from the red-hot particles of steel thrown off in the shape of sparks. The more careful of the workmen protect themselves from the danger, however, by wearing large spectacles of ordinary window glass. These spectacles, when they have been in use a little time, give practical evidence of their utility, for on examining them they are found to be speckled all over with the particles of steel, which, when red-hot, become embedded in the glass.
In the rough nomenclature of the trade, the disease which thus early destroys the fashioner of forks and needles is termed the grinder’s rot. The lung, when examined after death, looks as though it had been dipped in ink, and the texture, instead of exhibiting the usual spongy character of that organ when in health, cuts like a piece of india-rubber! The colour and the solidification of the dry-grinder’s lung is owing to the chronic inflammation to which it has been subjected by the presence from an early age of irritating particles of steel and stone within its finest air passages. But why dry-grind at all, the reader will involuntarily exclaim, if the wages of the occupation are death? The grinder replies, that there are certain operations which cannot be done on the wet stone; giving the rounded back to razors, technically called “humping,” and the rounded side to scissors, are quoted as examples. The pressure during the process of shaping is so great, that the rolling friction would speedily make the stone wear, and the workman would be unable to hold the blade upon it. Then, again, we may ask, where is the necessity for this rounded form—would the shaver on a cold morning care a jot whether his razor had a round or a square back? Would the lady, as she manipulated her lace-work with her scissors, hesitate to accept a three-sided scissor-leg in place of a half-round one, if she knew that the difference involved the life of a fellow-creature? Yet such trifling differences as these between round and flat, stand in the way of the health or misery of an entire class of workers! We give a list of the average duration of life of artisans in steel in Sheffield:—Dry-grinders of forks, 29 years; razors, 31 years; scissors, 32 years; edge-tool and wool-shears, 32 years; spring-knives, 34 years; table-knives, 35 years; files, 35 years; saws, 38 years; sickles, 38 years—the ascending longevity being in proportion to the amount of water used on the stone, and to the greater amount of adult labour employed; such articles as saws, sickles, and tools are happily too heavy to be manipulated by the children employed, and thus early diseased in the manufacture of the lighter articles.