It is really incomprehensible (our friend proceeds), in you who should be so well acquainted with animals, to call these boards—or that other uncomfortable boarded object like a Mangle with the inside taken out—a Bed, for creatures with these limbs and these habits. That, a Bed for a Lion and Lioness, which does not even give them a chance of being bruised in a new place? Learn of your cat again, and see how she goes to bed. Did you ever find her, or any living creature, go to bed, without re-arranging to the whim and sensation of the moment, the materials of the bed itself? Don’t you, the Zoological Society, punch and poke your pillows, and settle into suitable places in your beds? Consider then, what the discomfort of these magnificent brutes must be, to whom you leave no diversity of choice, no power of new arrangement, and as to whose unchanging and unyielding beds you begin with a form and substance that have no parallel in their natural lives. If you doubt the pain they must endure, go to museums and colleges where the bones of lions and other animals of the feline tribe who have lived in captivity under similar circumstances, are preserved; and you will find them thickly encrusted with a granulated substance, the result of long lying upon unnatural and uncomfortable planes.
I will not be so pressing as to the feeding of my Royal Friends (pursues the Master), but even there I think you are wrong. You may rely upon it, that the best regulated families of Lions and Lionesses don’t dine every day punctually at the same hour, in their natural state, and don’t always keep the same kind and quantity of meat in the larder. However, I will readily waive that question of board, if you will only abandon the other.
The time of the sitting being out, our friend takes his palette from his thumb, lays it aside with his brush, ceases to address the Zoological Society, and releases the Bulldog and myself. Having occasion to look closely at the Bulldog’s chest, he turns that model over as if he were made of clay (if I were to touch him with my little finger he would pin me instantly), and examines him without the smallest regard to his personal wishes or convenience. The Bulldog, having humbly submitted, is shown to the door.
“Eleven precisely, to-morrow,” says our friend, “or it will be the worse for you.” The Bulldog respectfully slouches out. Looking out of the window, I presently see him going across the garden, accompanied by a particularly ill-looking proprietor with a black eye—my prototype I presume—again a ferocious and audacious Bulldog, who will evidently kill some other dog before he gets home.
THE MANCHESTER STRIKE.
There can be no doubt that the judgment to be formed upon a strike among the operatives in a great factory district, if it is to be worth anything, must be based upon a more difficult chain of reasoning than usually goes to the consideration of irregularities in the appointed course of trade. Perfectly free competition regulates all prices, it is said; and, in most callings, regulates with certainty the price of labour. A self-adjusting power is introduced by it into the usual machinery of commerce. So far as regards labour, the working of it is that, as a rule, every man goes where he can get most value for such work as he can best perform; and every man who wants labour will, to the extent his capital allows, vie with his neighbours in attempting to secure to his service the best labour he can meet with of the sort he wants. That is the ordinary course of trade. Only the true price stands, and that price being the lowest by which men of average capabilities find that they can live, a poor trade entails secret hardships; middling trade a bare subsistence; and none but a very brisk trade affords chance of wealth. So it is with the price of skilled labour; but, with the price of unskilled labour, it is scarcely so. In each class of men possessing special capabilities, there is a given number only, and the aim of each of their employers is to do what he can towards securing for himself, out of that number, the best. For the absolutely unskilled, there can be no competition when a mass of the population, ignorant and in sore need, is pressing forward to receive a dole of such work as it can perform; or, if there be a competition, it is of an inverse kind—a struggle among thousands for the food of hundreds; each striving by the most desperate offer of cheap labour—sometimes even an hour’s work for a farthing—to secure a portion of the necessary subsistence.
Skilled labour is, with but few exceptions, subject to an inevitable law, with which employer and employed alike must be content to bring their operations into harmony. But, with unskilled labour, the compulsion set on the employer is in no proportion to that set on the employed. Wages in that case are not regulated by a just regard to the fair relations between capital and labour; the question among competitors being not who shall, by paying most, attract the most efficient class of servants, and secure the heartiest assistance; but who shall, by paying least, take most advantage of the necessity of people who are struggling for the chance of only a few crumbs of the bread of independence. It thus becomes notorious enough how it is that cheap articles are produced out of the lifeblood of our fellow-creatures. The evil can only be corrected now, by the direct interference of our consciences. Unwholesomely cheap production is a perversion of the common law of trade which will in course of time be blotted out by the advance of education; and there can never be in this country a glut of intelligence and skill, although we may soon have a glut of ignorance. Parallel with the advance of mind, there will run the advance of mind-work, and the diffusion of a right sense of its value will be increased.
Thus it will be seen, that while we believe with all our hearts in the wholesomeness of the great principle of free competition—regard nothing as so really helpful to the labourer, so sure to beget healthy trade and bring out all the powers of the men engaged in it—we do see that there is in society one class, and that a large one, upon which, when men look, they may believe that competition is an evil. The truth is, that the existence of that class, so helpless and so much neglected, is the evil to remove; but while it remains—as wholesome meat may kill a man with a disease upon him—there is an unsound body hurt by it, requiring, O political economist! spoon-meat and medicine, not the substantial bread and beef which doubtless theory can prove and experience affirm, to be the best of nourishment for human bodies. There are fevers among bodies politic as among bodies corporal, and we are disposed to think that half the difficulties opposed to a distinct and general perception of the truths which our economists have ascertained, depend upon the fact that they have not yet advanced—so to speak—from a just theory of nutrition to the formation of a true system of therapeutics. That which will maintain health is not, necessarily, that which will restore it. Often it happens that a blister or a purge, though it would certainly make sound men sick, will make the sick man whole. May it not also be that what is ruinous to all sound trade shall hereafter come to be known as a social medicine possessed, in certain cases, of a healing power, and applicable therefore to some states of disordered system? We believe that a great many discrepancies of opinion may be reconciled by a view like this. Its justice is hardly to be questioned; although, as to the particular applications of it, there is room for any amount of discussion.
Thus, in the case of the Manchester strike, the workmen—though not of the unskilled class—may state that they are unable to feel the working of the principle of competition; that if they do not get what pay they like at one factory, they are not practically at liberty to get the value of their labour in another. Even the population of one mill, thrown out of work, is too large and too special, as to the nature of the various kinds of skill possessed among its people, to be able to find anything like prompt absorption into other factories; but as masters almost always act in groups for the determination of wages, it is the population, not of one mill, but that of five or six, that becomes discontented; and the best proof of the fact that it is practically unable to better itself even though higher wages may be given elsewhere is, that it does not better itself. There is a curious and decided variation in the rates of wages paid in various factories and manufacturing towns; variations artificially increased by strikes, but the existence of which shows, at any rate, to the satisfaction of the operatives, that rates may be arbitrary, and that the natural law does not work easily in their case which brings the price of any article to its just, uniform level. The Manchester masters point out to their men other masters who pay less than they pay; the operatives point on the other hand, to masters paying more. But it is not in their power to carry their own labour to those masters, as it ought to be, for a free working of the principle of competition. Mechanical and accidental difficulties stand completely in the way, and they are aggravated on both sides by habits of imperfect combination. It is just to state these difficulties, and to show that the instinct of the operative may not be altogether reprehensible when it suggests to him that against the worst uneasiness which he feels in the system to which he belongs, a blister or a bloodletting, in the shape of a strike, is the best remedy. He may be very wrong, as a man is apt to be wrong when doctoring himself. There is an excuse for his quackery in the fact that he has, at present, no physician to call in.
The difficulties of the case, as it is felt by employers and employed in our manufacturing districts, is aggravated, as we have said, by imperfect combinations; for, between the trades’ unions and the masters’ associations there is, in truth, a perfect unity of interest. They who reduce the master’s capital, reduce his power of employing labour; they who wrong the labourer by whom they live, reduce his will and power to do work. At present, men and masters are in many cases combatants, because they never have been properly allies; they have not been content to feel that they are fellow-workers, that the man at the helm and the man at the oars are both in the same boat, and that the better they agree together, the more likely they will be to weather out a storm.