The mill-owners, of course, felt outraged when Parliament passed the first Factory Act, and when the Ten Hours Act of 1847 and subsequent legislation, designed to put an end to the scandal of women being sent underground to work, and to rescue children from conditions hardly less horrible than those of negro slavery, was under discussion, Bright and Cobden characterised the proposals as “harassing the manufacturers,” and as “a blow at liberty.”
V
Manchester was a place of especial unrelieved grimness in the early years of the nineteenth century. It had ceased to be a picturesque overgrown village, and was assuming the earlier and more forbidding aspect of an industrial town. It was, of course, compared with the widespreading city of to-day, a small place, and the surrounding country came close up to its centre, and is said to have been not unpleasing. But the toil and the striving were then unrelieved by any urban graces. There was no “Society” at Manchester, but a great deal of discontent existed and short commons were then the rule. Manchester was regarded in those days of depression, after the close of the great Continental wars, as a dangerous place; and here, indeed, Radicalism was born, of injustice and hunger. “Manchester! your Royal Highness,” exclaimed the fastidious Beau Brummell, in horror, to the Prince Regent—“only think of Manchester!” when his regiment was ordered there. He sped swiftly away and sold out of the Army, rather than be banished to a benighted place where the correct set of a cravat was unknown, and not considered especially worth knowing.
Manchester, as an industrial centre, has, in common with other great cities similarly placed, always keenly felt the vicissitudes of national prosperity, and, with the surrounding towns and districts of Lancashire, has ever ridden on the crest of the waves of commercial expansion, or wallowed in the depths of its depression. There is perhaps no other great city, nor any other county than Lancashire, in England which so surely feels the warming glow of good times, or the chilling nip of bad; caused by influences almost wholly beyond control.
POLITICAL AGITATION
The years immediately following Waterloo and the close of the great and long-continued wars with Napoleon were lean years in Lancashire in particular, and in England in general, and discontent was rife. The price of bread was high, employment was scarce and threatened by the continual introduction of labour-saving machinery. The outlook of all the wage-earning classes was very grim, and the position was further inflamed by agitators, who very speedily put a political complexion upon the economic crisis. It was the era before Reform, when all political power was frankly held by the classes and the wealthy. The people were not enfranchised, and were taught by mob orators to believe that there lay the secret of the ills and disabilities they suffered. To possess a vote was held up as an ideal which, when reached, would be the solution of all grievances. It was probably not declared in so many words that enfranchisement would bring more work and better paid, nor that the voting-power would enable the working-men to vote away the employment of the labour-saving machinery they dreaded; but so much was implied. Riots, more or less serious, took place sporadically, throughout the country, where the people were almost starving; for, side by side with scarcity of employment, the price of bread was extravagantly high, in consequence of a succession of bad harvests bringing up the price of corn to an unprecedented figure. The Government at length became seriously alarmed at the troubles. There had been destructive riots in 1816, in Spitalfields, when a mob of 30,000 had broken into shops and houses, and burned and pillaged. Nottingham, Preston, Bury, and many other places were scenes of mob rule. In 1818 the Manchester operatives had broken the factory-windows, and had to be dispersed by Dragoons; and in the same year there were riots at Barnsley. The year 1819 opened with the demagogue, “Orator Hunt,” being thrashed by Hussars in the theatre at Manchester, where, it was said, he had hissed the playing of “God Save the King”; and it was declared that the turbulent Reformers of Glasgow proposed marching upon London. At the same time a Reform meeting held at Birmingham was dispersed, a constable being shot by workmen endeavouring to rescue one of the arrested speakers.
It must be admitted that the classes were not conciliatory. Their representatives in high places scorned the masses as the “swinish multitude,” and did not propose any political changes.
MASS MEETING
Still, the methods of the mob-rulers were extremely provocative and alarming. Whatever else they were, or were not, Hunt and Bamford, leading spirits among the Reformers, were intelligent men, and should have been able to forecast the probable effect the drilling of the multitude would have upon the Government. It was very well to argue that the drilling that went on at night was merely intended to enable great bodies of men to march to and from mass-meetings in order. The leaders were philosophical Radicals, and did not for a moment contemplate force, and their followers were very generally of the same mind; but we may easily see into the mind of Governments, which themselves only employ drilling to one end: that of reducing brute force to a scientific form of defence and attack; and undoubtedly these exercises, even without arms, were alarming, for who was to tell whence weapons might not be procured at any given moment. In short, the Administration imagined the country to be on the brink of revolution: a thing not so wildly improbable when meetings were enlivened by banners bearing the inscriptions, “Annual Parliaments,” “Universal Suffrage,” and “No Corn Laws”; and when that offensive emblem, a Cap of Liberty, carried on a pole, was prominent. The authorities imagined themselves face to face with an organised attempt at a subversion of the Constitution, and, in that belief, it behoved them to be on their guard.
“Orator Hunt” and Samuel Bamford, who had already, in 1817, been arrested on suspicion of high treason in connection with the Reform movement, were active in the agitation of 1819. They had drilled thousands of men in readiness for a peaceful mass-meeting to be held in the small open space then called “St. Peter’s Field,” at the end of Mosley Street, Manchester, on August 16th, and the whole countryside was agog with excitement and the wildest rumours. Rustic folk, going home in the darkness, had heard the words of military command, “face right,” “face left,” “right wheel,” “left wheel,” and so forth, and extravagant notions of what was afoot very naturally spread. In readiness for the day, the magistrates enrolled a force of special constables, and a strong force of Yeomanry and military was kept near at call.