The incapacity to apportion their means for temperate consumption (which is not however confined to the working classes) is extensively shown in the mismanagement of the means for procuring food. It is a subject of complaint which frequently appears in the reports, that the ignorance of domestic economy leads to ill health, by the purchase of unsuitable, and at the same time, expensive food. We have been frequently besought to obtain and promulgate, for popular information, instructions in frugal cookery, and the management of supplies. It is observed by Mr. Brebner, the governor of the Glasgow bridewell, where the cost of maintaining the prisoners in health and increased strength is on average only 2¾d. per diem, that
“The regularity of diet in the prisons here is of vast importance, both as to the quantity and the time of serving it up. If the same persons were to get the same amount of food for a whole week, or for a less time, at their own discretion, they would suffer from surfeit at one time, and from long fasting at another. Irregularity of diet is one of the most fruitful sources of disease that occur in civilized life.”
In further illustration of the beneficial influence which employers may often exercise to assail such vices by regulations in detail, I cite the following instances from a communication I have received from Mr. Edwin Hill, the inspector of stamping machinery for the Government:—
“During a period of nine years (from 1818 to 1827) I was engaged in the superintendence of one of the largest works in the town of Birmingham, consisting of two distinct mills, one employed in rolling copper for the use of braziers and shipwrights, and the other in rolling silver, brass, and other metals. In each mill there was a set of skilled workmen, who undertook the work at fixed prices, and who themselves employed numerous assistants at weekly wages.
“Owing to difficulties in the way of making up the accounts at short intervals, it was the custom for the master to advance weekly to each workman in the silver mill a fixed sum of money (besides advancing a sum to pay the assistants with). The accounts were made up annually, and the balances due to the several workmen then paid. The payments, both weekly and annually, were almost always made not to the men but to their wives. The earnings of the men were considerable, varying from 80l. to 180l. a-year. The men were, almost without exception, highly respectable in their stations, their families were well provided for, their homes cleanly and not without pretensions to some degree of elegance, and their children sent to school at the sole expense of the parents. Some of them had made considerable accumulations of money, and even become proprietors of houses and land. The workmen employed in the copper mill, on the contrary, had been accustomed to receive the full amount of their earnings at the end of each week, and, after paying their assistants, to divide the surplus. These men were much addicted to drinking and feasting at the alehouse; and, although their earnings were nearly as great as those of the other men, their families were in wretchedness, and their wives obliged to eke out a slender pittance by washing and other laborious occupations. There were also several men employed as millwrights and engineers, at regular and good weekly wages. These men were, almost without exception, steady and respectable, and their families well provided for. About the year 1822 the inconvenience and annoyance, and loss, which arose from the unsteady habits of the second set of men, led me to inquire into the causes of their inferiority to the others, and I was soon led to attribute much of the evil to the great irregularity in the amount of their weekly incomes, which varied from about 10s. to 4l. 4s. per man.
“The effects were as follows:—The men were reckless, trusting to their luck to get ‘good work,’ i. e., that which bears a high price in proportion to the required labour. They were enabled to deceive their wives as to the amount of money obtained. They learned the minimum with which their wives could contrive to keep house, and, having learned it, they endeavoured to retain all above this minimum for their own gratifications. Their wives, under the pressure of necessity, picked their pockets, opened their drawers, &c., in search of money believed to be hidden. Their wives actually desired that their husbands might get drunk on Saturday night, because they could the more easily abstract the money from their persons.
“Upon the termination of my inquiries I induced the men, with little difficulty, to receive their money in the way the other men did, viz., by regular weekly advances, rather under their average earnings, with a quarterly or annual settlement; and I took care that the wives should know exactly what their husbands would receive; and from the day the plan commenced, a most decided and permanent improvement took place in the habits of the men, and in the appearance and general comforts of their families. One of the men commenced saving money immediately. This man’s savings, as I have lately been informed, now in January, 1841, considerably exceed 1000l.; whereas, during the five or six years which he passed in the same occupation before the change of plan, he made no saving whatever.”
Another valuable example of the easy means possessed by employers of preventing the formation of habits destructive to the health and prosperity of workmen, is set forth in the evidence of Mr. Peter Fairbairn, the extensive mechanist of Leeds.
Mr. Fairbairn examined.
“You are a mechanist at Leeds?—I am.