Although no slaves were owned in England, slavery still existed in her colonies. In the West Indies the whip was freely used, and prior to the year 1820 no voice had been raised against the flogging of women on the plantations. In Scotland, down to the last year of the eighteenth century, colliers and salters were slaves and bound to their service for life, being bought and sold with the works at which they laboured. Although America had put down the slave-trade, she still owned slaves, and continued to traffic in them until the year 1863.
The history of legislation during the historic period shows that it has ever been in the interest of the rich against the poor, the strong against the weak. In France, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, liberty was extinct. “The rich man could purchase for money the power to destroy those whom he hated.”[264]
The lawmakers of the age which we are considering were gentlemen landowners, and as such were able to exercise their cupidity in a degree which precluded all idea of justice to the poorer classes. The abuses of government, the corn-laws, the enormous tax on salt and on the various necessities of life, show somewhat of the extent to which the poor were systematically robbed by the rich.
The law passed in 1350, at Bannockburn, regulating the movements of the British workingmen, and which prohibited combinations among them, was in force until 1824. The evident object of this law was to repress the labourer and deprive him of his just earnings. Although this enactment was known to be oppressive, the working-classes were not possessed of sufficient influence to cause its repeal.
In England, women with their children worked in coal pits, and in the darkness, on hands and feet, dragged about wagons fastened to their waists by chains. Of this Mr. Mackenzie says:
Children of six were habitually employed. Their hours of labour were fourteen to sixteen daily. The horrors among which they lived induced disease and early death. Law did not seem to reach to the depths of a coal-pit, and the hapless children were often mutilated and occasionally killed with perfect impunity by the brutalized miners among whom they laboured. There was no machinery to drag the coals to the surface, and women climbed long wooden stairs with baskets of coal upon their backs.
In the factories, also, as late as 1832 children of six years of age worked from thirteen to fifteen hours daily. If they fell asleep they were flogged. Sometimes through exhaustion they fell upon the machinery and were injured—possibly crushed,—an occurrence which caused little concern to any except the mothers, who had learned to bear their pangs in silence. These children, who were stunted in size and disposed to various acute diseases, were also scrofulous and consumptive. In 1832 the recruiting surgeon could find no men to suit his purpose in the manufacturing districts.
Throughout Europe, the prevailing idea concerning the management of criminals seems to have been vengeance. One would scarcely believe, except on trustworthy authority, that at the beginning of the nineteenth century the English criminal law recognized 223 capital offences. Indeed, so strong was the feeling in favour of severity that Edmund Burke said he could obtain the assent of the House of Commons to any law imposing the penalty of death. If one shot a rabbit he was hanged; if he injured Westminster Bridge he was hanged; if he appeared disguised on a public road he was hanged, and so on. The hanging of small groups was a common occurrence—children of ten years being sometimes among the condemned.[265]
A visit to the Five-Sided Tower in Nuremberg, in which are still preserved various instruments of human torture, will give an idea of the extreme cruelty practised upon political offenders and heretics a century ago.
The “Holy Alliance” of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, which was formed ostensibly to insure peace and establish justice, but which in reality was entered into to suppress free speech, check the growing liberties of the people, and strengthen the belief in the “divine right of kings,” shows the obstacles which had to be overcome before any principle of justice and humanity could take root.