FROM THE COAL DISTRICTS
My Lady: "I'm afraid I must give up the pine-apple, Mr. Green! Eight shillings is really too much!"
Successful Collier: "Just put 'un up for me, then, Master. 'Ere's 'arf a sovereign; and look 'ere—yer may keep the change if yer'll only tell us 'ow to cook 'un!"
Colliers and Cormorants
References to the champagne-habit among the miners abound throughout this year. A picture shows a miner buying a pine-apple which a lady could not afford. Their practice of travelling first-class is also reprobated. But the bitterest explosion of Punch's wrath against the pampered aristocrats of industry was provoked by a speech in which John Bright complacently dwelt on "the growth of material prosperity and comfort in every class." To this Punch vehemently demurred:—
Clerks of all kinds, Civil servants, fund-holders and annuitants with fixed incomes, landowners, doctors, lawyers, and professional men in general, is that so? Do you find it so?
When Mr. Bright said "every class," did he not mean to say, or, at least, should he not have said "certain classes"? It is quite true that the shoddy class, and the class of great speculators, have prospered exceedingly, to as great an increase of their material comfort as increasing wealth could procure them. A proportionate growth of material comfort and prosperity has obviously been experienced by the operatives and mechanics, otherwise called the Working Classes—although there are classes who may be said to do some little work, other than manual labour, to be sure. Do not coal-miners for a fair day's work obtain at least a full two days' wages; do they not drink champagne; and have not they and the rest of our flesh-and-blood amongst them, drunk us out of the Alabama difficulty? They have grown in content too—the Striking Classes. They and the other classes that grasp with one hand and squander with the other, and go on grasping and squandering, and thereby raising prices higher and higher every day, they, all of them, indeed are without doubt increasingly prosperous and comfortable, but they are not everybody. There are a very great many other people besides, who constitute everybody else, and these, so far from being more prosperous and comfortable than they once were, can now no longer afford the luxuries, or even the necessaries, they then could, but have to go without.
The ugly phrase about the Alabama claims was not Punch's own coinage, but he was not in a mood to mince his words where the miners were concerned. The charges against overpaid workmen and profiteers have a strangely familiar ring. And so has the reference, though not under the now familiar name, to the practice of "Ca' Canny," which, however, had been in occasional use for many years before Punch suggested, in 1874, that it might be met by reprisals:—
COLLIERS AND CORMORANTS
The Sheffield Daily Telegraph informs consumers, already subjected by producers to excessive extortion, that at Motherwell:—
"At a mass meeting of Scotch miners on Thursday, 3,000 colliers resolved to work only four days per week, and only eight hours per day, in order to reduce the output, and to keep up prices."
But suppose the butchers and poulterers combined against them, as they combine against the public, what then? And could not the vintners agree to raise "these rapacious colliers' Champagne to some four or five pounds a bottle? Perhaps they will try.