But in Huddersfield and in all the wildly beautiful district around, nor for master nor man, was there any hope that night of that ideal, beatific peace. The strike, the great Weavers’ Strike, as it came to be known, was well under weigh, and both masters and men had settled down with the grim resolve of the northern character to see which side could starve the other into submission. For, after all, with all the talk and all the writing about good trade and bad trade, about high profits and losses, about scales and rates of wages, after all the conferences and deputations and talk of arbitration and Boards of Conciliation, to a trial of brute strength, of sheer endurance, of staying power, not to a determination of which side was right and which was wrong, must the contest surely come.
It was a very pretty quarrel, as quarrels go, a quarrel to make the cynic hug himself in glee, a quarrel to make angels weep. The masters had agreed upon a new scale of wages to be adopted and enforced in every mill in the district, a scale that would determine not only the plus and minus of the employers’ balance-sheets, but that perhaps negligible affair, the plus or minus of thousands of humble homes for miles around. The masters declared, ore rotundo, with swelling voices and in good round phrase that the new scale of wages was not a reduction, but a readjustment; the weavers swore by all their gods that any readjustment the scale would effect would be a transference of so many weekly shillings from the earnings of each craftsman to the pockets of his master.
A question, surely, this, to be settled in three minutes by a penny ready reckoner, where and when Reason has sway. But in Huddersfield and in the villages converging therein Reason had unfurled her glittering wings and had fled affrighted from the scene of strife, to return only when Passion, and Hatred, and Ignorance, and all evil imaginings and utterings had wrought their fill of ill.
A pretty quarrel, in very sooth, a quarrel that should have shown the veriest idiot of a workingman of how little worth are political professions, nay, indeed, of how little worth are religious protestations when that sorest of sore points, the pocket, is touched. The weavers of Huddersfield and of the valleys hard by had, for years that stretched back almost beyond count, flocked in their thousands to shout at the hustings in the Square, or, in later days, to shout in their noble Town Hall for banker or manufacturer or merchant who came to them with glib, smooth speech, asseverating with tear-laden eyes that all they asked, to make them happy, was to spend and be spent in the workers’ cause. And now the lists are ranged for a grim conflict between Labour and Capital, and where are ye now oh, friends of the people? Where now is the Liberal merchant, where now the Radical manufacturer, where now your reforming councillors and aldermen who have risen to their paltry place and gimcrack power on the popular vote, where now the editors of facile pen who have been so fluent in their vows of fidelity to the people’s cause? All, all alike—Whig and Tory, Conservative, Liberal, and Radical stand in solid phalanx, confronting an abandoned, impassioned mob, conscious only of its wrongs and its betrayal. The men know the masters’ scale means robbery, but how shall they, unlettered, unskilled, with hands that can ply a shuttle but unused to pen, with brains to think and know and feel, with tongues little used to ordered speech, how shall they plead their cause?
Two men are seated this stormy March night in a retired room of the Albion public-house on the Buxton Road. The room is small, ill-ventilated, stuffy, its air laden with tobacco reek and the fumes of stale ale. They are Albert Clough, the Weavers’ Secretary, and Allen Rae, two men as different in character and temperament as the poles are wide asunder, but united in a common belief in the worker’s right to a fairer and a sweeter heritage.
Both were weavers, and both, therefore, were well aware of the effect likely to be produced by the masters’ proposed scale upon the earnings of themselves and their fellow-workmen. But there was little other resemblance between the two men. Rae was a man of no small natural ability, his forehead denoted intellectuality, his firm, close-set lips determination and self-control. Anyone accustomed to judge character by external indications would have no difficulty in pronouncing Rae to be of an essentially practical turn of mind; of no great ideals or enthusiasms; a safe guide rather than an impassioned leader. Clough, on the other hand, was as readily assessed, or, as his acquaintances would have phrased it, “sized up,” as a man of impulses, apt to allow his judgment to be warped by his passions and his prejudices. And of passions and prejudices he had his full share. He had read much, and the literature to which he was partial consisted, for the most part, of those books that exposed the iniquities of those in high places, men born and nurtured in the lap of luxury. He, at all events, never questioned the divine dictum as to the possibility of a rich man entering the kingdom of heaven. His whole attitude to the capitalist class, as embodied for him in the Masters’ Union, was determined by a consuming sense of the rank injustice of things, the gross iniquity that he and his fellows should be cursed rather than born into the world, foredoomed to moil and toil for a pittance to lead a hard life of endless work, with long hours and paltry pay, to live a dun, colourless existence, a life of carking care and ceaseless struggle, with the prospect at its close, of the Workhouse, unless he should be so happy as to drop at his loom; while other men, many of whom, he was very sure, were neither so clever, nor so well instructed as himself, were by the accident of birth or from positions their own hands and brains had not won, sheltered from the storms of life, had never known and would never know the pangs of hunger nor the hideous monotony of a life of mechanical toil in another’s service. There was not much talk of Socialism in those days; Socialism was vaguely supposed to be a milder form of Nihilism, having something to do with dynamite and secret societies. Had there been any Socialists in Huddersfield, Clough would have been in their midst; but his Socialism would have been based not so much upon a divine compassion for others as upon a fierce pity for himself.
“Have you read that leading article o’ Joe Woodhead in to-neet’s Rag?” it was thus impolitely he referred to the “Huddersfield Daily Examiner.”
Rae nodded.
“An’ this is th’ paper th’ working-men ha’ been fooils enough to call th’ friend o’ freedom. By gow, Allen, it ma’es me think what fooils we ’n bin.”
“I don’t quite see what else we could expect,” said Rae, quietly. “Yo’ musn’t forget that behind the editorial ‘we’ there is always a very human personality. Th’ editor o’ th’ ‘Examiner’s’ only human, and it’s only natural he’ll look at the present crisis in th’ trade of Huddersfield from a very different standpoint to you an’ me. Yo’ see, he started in life as a manufacturer hissen, an’ only drifted into journalism. He’s one of the middle-class hissen. He were born into it, he wedded into it, an’ aw should think all his friends are of it. Look how thick he is wi’ ‘Midget’ o’ Marsden, ’at they say’s done so much to make th’ ‘Examiner’ go in the Colne Valley. Yo’ can’t say but what both Mr. Woodhead an’ Mr. Robinson—that’s ‘Midget,’ you know—are good Liberals. They’re sound on questions of Church an’ State. But this strike isn’t a question of Church an’ State; it’s a question o’£ s. d.”