“The condition of the labouring population would be less precarious, and their lives less exposed to accidents of every kind, if more foresight presided over their operations. Employers are often guilty of unpardonable carelessness with respect to the employed. To see their conduct, one would suppose that the men in their service were inert machines, or else that they possessed the power of the Creator to reconstruct broken limbs, to restore exhausted constitutions, or to give life to the dead. Here a deleterious atmosphere, which ought to be carefully purified, is imprudently allowed to be inhaled; there a poison, which ought to be handled with precaution, is allowed to penetrate every pore. Further on, as if man had wings, he is embarked on the most fragile scaffolds. Again, he is inconsiderately left to prosecute dangerous researches which demand the utmost care. It is not thus that we should act when the health and life of human beings are in question. To such neglects how many families owe their poverty and misery!
“There have long existed mills to grind plaster, which have not, nevertheless, prevented the unhappy workmen from being employed, in many places, and even in Paris, to pound it with a wooden club, their bodies bent towards the ground, and thus inhaling it in such quantities that the greatest number of them die young, of pulmonary phthisis.
“The use of the moveable inodorous tanks has been long understood in Paris. It consists in substituting for the tanks of masonry vessels of oak, painted, and strongly hooped with iron, so as to allow neither matter nor smell to escape. They are placed beneath the pipe which conveys the contents of the water-closet, and, when full, are carried away, and replaced by others at every hour of the day, without difficulty, without danger to the workmen, without inconvenience to the inhabitants. Well; not only are the ancient tanks not suppressed in favour of this system, so convenient in all respects, but every day new ones are constructed, though not a year passes in which we do not hear of unhappy men perishing in the process of emptying, suffocated by the gas which escapes in their disgusting operation. Now, if we add to the danger of emptying the receptacles, the nuisance to all the inhabitants of the house, which is infected in its remotest corners, as well as the neighbouring houses of the same street, or even quarter; when we take into account the damage to furniture (especially to things that are gilt) by the escape of sulphureous gas, we shall have the measure of the negligence, I will not say of the proprietors only who maintain such an abuse without any justifiable motive, but even of the authority that suffers it. It is no rare thing, after the emptying has taken place, to see asphyxia produced in the masons who are employed in repairing the walls, or in remedying the infiltrations from the privies.
“There is another method, more recent, and, in all probability, more advantageous, of preventing the inconveniences of the ancient receptacles; it is the system of disinfecting fecal matter, discovered by a learned chemist, M. Payen. Independently of its hygienic advantages, and the procuring a powerful manure, this method comprises a question of human dignity of great value. It is necessary, as far as possible, to take from our fellow men the mischievous necessity to perform labours which invest them with ideas of disgust.
“Since the use of gas for lighting, several accidents have happened. Are they not due, for the most part, to the want of precaution in the directors of these manufactories, who have not sufficiently prescribed to their men the necessary measures of prevention? Should they not all know that one must not run with a candle into a place where there is a stream of gas, as one would go in search of a stream of water? It is this imprudence which commonly occasions the explosions that happen, and which are ordinarily followed by the gravest accidents. Do we not find the same carelessness in our mines, followed by the same catastrophes? It is in vain, therefore, that Sir Humphry Davy applied his genius to the discovery of the safety-lamp! Do not the most ordinary rules of health condemn the ignorance with which the preparations of mercury, of sulphur, of lead, of oxide of copper, &c., are made? In the places, lastly, in which wool, hides, and other animal substances are prepared, why not purify the atmosphere in which the workmen exist with such difficulty? This omission is the more strange, that some centimes of solution of chlorine every day would be sufficient to purify the largest shops.
“I insist strongly on the contents of this chapter, because it reveals one of the deepest plague-spots of the labouring population of towns, and because the remedies that it indicates are neither difficult to discover, nor expensive in their application. With more solicitude and surveillance on the part of the government, with more philanthropy on the part of masters, with more precaution as well as self-love on the part of the workmen, would our hospitals receive so many unhappy beings, and death reap so many victims?”
Employers’ Means of influencing the Condition of the Working Population by regard to respectability in Dress.
Besides those means which affect immediately the health and moral condition of the workpeople, others are within the control of their employers which affect the personal appearance, and, through the self-respect, the morality of the population. Mr. William Fairbairn, in the course of an examination, adverted to the means of promoting respectability in personal appearance:—
“It is always,” said he, “an indication of looseness of character, and a low standard of moral conduct, to see a mechanic in dirt or in his working-clothes on Sunday. Thirty years’ experience leads me to draw a very unfavourable conclusion as to the future usefulness to me, and of success to himself, of any workman whom I see in dirt on a Sunday.
“As a general rule, does the advance of his house keep pace with the advance in condition of the person?—As a general rule, it does. Better personal condition leads to better associates, and commonly to better marriage, on which the improved condition of the house is entirely dependent. It is due to the labouring classes of females in Lancashire and the surrounding districts to state that, in the important household virtue of cleanliness, they are superior to the females of the same class in Scotland.