Lectures and Essays

by Goldwin Smith

One day labour strikes; finds a leader in Spartacus, a slave devoted as a gladiator to the vilest of Roman pleasures; wages a long and terrible servile war. The revolt is put down at last, after shaking the foundations of the state. Six thousand slaves are crucified along the road from Rome to Capua. Labour had its revenge, for slavery brought the doom of Rome.

In the twilight of history, between the fall of Rome and the rise of the new nationalities, we dimly see the struggle going on. There is a great insurrection of the oppressed peasantry, under the name of Bagaudae, in Gaul. When the light dawns, a step has been gained. Slavery has been generally succeeded by serfdom. But serfdom is hard. The peasantry of feudal Normandy conspire against their cruel lords, hold secret meetings, the ominous name commune is heard. But the conspiracy is discovered and suppressed with the fiendish ferocity with which panic inspires a dominant class, whether in Normandy or Jamaica. Amidst the religious fervour of the Crusades again breaks out a wild labour movement, that of the Pastoureaux, striking for equality in the name of the Holy Spirit, which, perhaps, they had as good a right to use as some who deemed their use of it profane. This is in the country, among the shepherds and ploughmen. In the cities labour has congregated numbers, mutual intelligence, union on its side; it is constantly reinforced by fugitives from rural serfdom; it builds city walls, purchases or extorts charters of liberty. The commercial and manufacturing cities of Italy, Germany, Flanders, become the cradles of free industry, and, at the same time, of intellect, art, civilization. But these are points of light amidst the feudal darkness of the rural districts. In France, for example, the peasantry are cattle; in time of peace crushed with forced labour, feudal burdens, and imposts of all kinds; in time of war driven, in unwilling masses, half-armed and helpless, to the shambles. Aristocratic luxury, gambling, profligate wars—Jacques Bonhomme pays for them all. At Crecy and Poictiers, the lords are taken prisoners; have to provide heavy ransoms, which, being debts of honour, like gambling debts, are more binding than debts of honesty. But Jacques Bonhomme's back is broad, it will bear everything. Broad as it is, it will not bear this last straw. The tidings of Flemish freedom have, perhaps, in some way reached his dull ear, taught him that bondage is not, as his priest, no doubt, assures him it is, a changeless ordinance of God, that the yoke, though strong, may be broken. He strikes, arms himself with clubs, knives, ploughshares, rude pikes, breaks out into a Jacquerie, storms the castles of the oppressor, sacks, burns, slays with the fury of a wild beast unchained. The lords are stupefied. At last they rally and bring their armour, their discipline, their experience in war, the moral ascendency of a master-class to bear. The English gentlemen, in spite of the hostilities, only half suspended, between the nations, join the French gentlemen against the common enemy. Twenty thousand peasants are soon cut down, but long afterwards the butchery continues. Guillaume Callet, the leader of the Jacquerie, a very crafty peasant, as he is called by the organs of the lords, is crowned with a circlet of red-hot iron.

In England, during the same period serfdom, we know not exactly how, is breaking up. There is a large body of labourers working for hire. But in the midst of the wars of the great conqueror, Edward III., comes a greater conqueror, the plague called the Black Death, which sweeps away, some think, a third of the population of Europe. The number of labourers is greatly diminished. Wages rise. The feudal parliament passes an Act to compel labourers, under penalties, to work at the old rates. This Act is followed by a train of similar Acts, limiting wages and fixing in the employers' interest the hours of work, which, in the pages of imaginative writers, figure as noble attempts made by legislators of a golden age to regulate the relations between employer and employed on some higher principle than that of contract. The same generous spirit, no doubt, dictated the enactment prohibiting farm labourers from bringing up their children to trades, lest hands should be withdrawn from the land-owner's service. Connected with the Statutes of Labourers, are those bloody vagrant laws, in which whipping, branding, hanging are ordained as the punishment of vagrancy by lawgivers, many of whom were themselves among the idlest and most noxious vagabonds in the country, and the authors of senseless wars which generated a mass of vagrancy, by filling the country with disbanded soldiers. In the reign of Richard II., the poll tax being added to other elements of class discord, labour strikes, takes arms under Wat Tyler, demands fixed rents, tenant right in an extreme form, and the total abolition of serfage. A wild religious communism bred of the preachings of the more visionary among the Wycliffites mingles in the movement with the sense of fiscal and industrial wrong. "When Adam delved and Eve span, where was then the gentleman?" is the motto of the villeins, and it is one of more formidable import than any utterance of peasant orators at Agricultural Labourers' meetings in the present day. Then come fearful scenes of confusion, violence and crime. London is in the power of hordes brutalized by oppression. High offices of state, high ecclesiastics are murdered. Special vengeance falls on the lawyers, as the artificers who forged the cunning chains of feudal iniquity. The rulers, the troops, are paralyzed by the aspect of the sea of furious savagery raging round them. The boy king, by a miraculous exhibition of courageous self- possession, saves the State; but he is compelled to grant general charters of manumission, which, when the danger is over, the feudal parliament forces him by a unanimous vote to repudiate. Wholesale hanging of serfs, of course, follows the landlords' victory.

The rising under Jack Cade, in the reign of Henry VI., was rather political than industrial. The demands of the insurgents, political reform and freedom of suffrage, show that progress had been made in the condition and aspirations of the labouring class. But with the age of the Tudors came the final breakup in England of feudalism, as well as of Catholicism, attended by disturbances in the world of labour, similar to those which have attended the abolition of slavery in the Southern States. This is the special epoch of the sanguinary vagrancy laws, the most sanguinary of which was framed by the hand of Henry VIII. The new nobility of courtiers and upstarts, who had shared with the king the plunder of the monasteries, were hard landlords of course; they robbed the people of their rights of common, and swept away homesteads and cottages, to make room for sheep farms, the wool trade being the great source of wealth in those days. By the spoliation of the monasteries, the great alms-houses of the Middle Ages, the poor had also been left for a time without the relief, which was given them again in a more regular form by the Poor Law of Elizabeth. Hence in the reign of Edward VI., armed strikes again, in different parts of the kingdom. In the West, the movement was mainly religious; but in the Eastern countries, under Kett of Norfolk, it was agrarian. Kett's movement after a brief period of success, during which the behaviour of the insurgents and their leader was very creditable, was put down by the disciplined mercenaries under the command of the new aristocracy, and its suppression was of course followed by a vigorous use of the gallows. No doubt the industrial conservatives of those days were as frightened, as angry, and as eager for strong measures as their successors are now: but the awkwardness of the newly liberated captive, in the use of his limbs and eyes, is due not to his recovered liberty, but to the narrowness and darkness of the dungeon in which he has been immured.

In Germany, at the same epoch, there was not merely a local rising, but a wide-spread and most terrible peasants' war. The German peasantry had been ground down beyond even an hereditary bondsman's power of endurance by their lords generally, and by the Prince Bishop and other spiritual lords in particular. The Reformation having come with a gospel of truth, love, spiritual brotherhood, the peasants thought it might also have brought some hope of social justice. The doctors of divinity had to inform them that this was a mistake. But they took the matter into their own hands and rose far and wide, the fury of social and industrial war blending with the wildest fanaticism, the most delirious ecstacy, the darkest imposture. Once more there are stormings and burnings of feudal castles, massacring of their lords. Lords are roasted alive, hunted like wild beasts in savage revenge for the cruelty of the game laws. Munzer, a sort of peasant Mahomet, is at the head of the movement. Under him it becomes Anabaptist, Antinomian, Communist. At first he and his followers sweep the country with a whirlwind of terror and destruction: but again the lords rally, bring up regular troops. The peasants are brought to bay on their last hill side, behind a rampart formed of their waggons. Their prophet assures them that the cannon-balls will fall harmless into his cloak. The cannon-balls take their usual course: a butchery, then a train of torturings and executions follows, the Prince Bishop, among others, adding considerably to the whiteness of the Church's robe. Luther is accused of having incited the ferocity of the lords against those, who, it is alleged, had only carried his own principles to an extreme. But in the first place Luther never taught Anabaptism or anything that could logically lead to it; and in the second place, before he denounced the peasants, he tried to mediate and rebuke the tyranny of the lords. No man deserves more sympathy than a great reformer, who is obliged to turn against the excesses of his own party. He becomes the object of fierce hatred on one side, of exulting derision on the other; yet he is no traitor, but alone loyal to his conscience and his cause.

The French Revolution was a political movement among the middle class in the cities, but among the peasantry in the country it was an agrarian and labour movement, and the dismantling of chateaux, and chasing away of their lords which then took place were a renewal of the struggle which had given birth to the Jacquerie, the insurrection of Wat Tyler, and the Peasants' War. This time the victory remained with the peasant, and the lord returned no more.

In England, long after the Tudor period, industrial disturbances took place, and wild communistic fancies welled up from the depths of a suffering world of labour, when society was stirred by political and religious revolution. Under the Commonwealth, communists went up on the hill side, and began to break ground for a poor man's Utopia; and the great movement of the Levellers, which had in it an economical as well as a political element, might have overturned society, if it had not been quelled by the strong hand of Cromwell. But in more recent times, within living memory, within the memory of many here there were labour disturbances in England, compared with which the present industrial war is mild. [Footnote: For the following details, see Martineau's "History of the Peace.">[ In 1816, there were outbreaks among the suffering peasantry which filled the governing classes with fear. In Suffolk nightly fires of incendiaries blazed in every district, thrashing machines were broken or burnt in open day, mills were attacked. At Brandon large bodies of workmen assembled to prescribe a maximum price of grain and meat, and to pull down the houses of butchers and bakers. They bore flags with the motto, "Bread or Blood". Insurgents from the Fen Country, a special scene of distress, assembled at Littleport, attacked the house of a magistrate in the night, broke open shops, emptied the cellars of public-houses, marched on Ely, and filled the district for two days and nights with drunken rioting and plunder. The soldiery was called in; there was an affray in which blood flowed on both sides, then a special commission and hangings to close the scene. Distressed colliers in Staffordshire and Wales assembled by thousands, stopped works, and were with difficulty diverted from marching to London. In 1812, another stain of blood was added to the sanguinary criminal code of those days by the Act making death the penalty for the destruction of machinery. This was caused by the Luddite outrages, which were carried on in the most systematic manner, and on the largest scale in Nottingham and the adjoining counties. Bodies of desperadoes, armed and disguised, went forth under a leader, styled General Ludd, who divided them into bands, and aligned to each band its work of destruction. Terror reigned around; the inhabitants were commanded to keep in their houses and put out their lights on pain of death. In the silence of night houses and factories were broken open, machines demolished, unfinished work scattered on the highways. The extent and secrecy of the conspiracy baffled the efforts of justice and the death penalty failed to put the system down. Even the attempts made to relieve distress became new sources of discontent and a soup kitchen riot at Glasgow led to a two days conflict between the soldiery and the mob. In 1818, a threatening mass of Manchester spinners, on strike came into bloody collision with the military. Then there were rick burnings, farmers patrolling all night long, gibbets erected on Pennenden heath, and bodies swinging on them, bodies of boys, eighteen or nineteen years old. Six labourers of Dorsetshire, the most wretched county in England, were sentenced to seven years' transportation nominally for administering an illegal oath, really for Unionism. Thereupon all the trades made a menacing demonstration, marched to Westminster, thirty thousand strong, with a petition for the release of the labourers. London was in an agony of fear, the Duke of Wellington prepared for a great conflict, pouring in troops and bringing up artillery from Woolwich. In 1840, again there were formidable movements, and society felt itself on the crust of a volcano. Threatening letters were sent to masters, rewards offered for firing mills, workmen were beaten, driven out of the country, burned with vitriol, and, there was reason to fear, murdered. Great masses of operatives collected for purposes of intimidation, shopkeepers were pillaged, collisions again took place between the people and the soldiery. Irish agrarianism meanwhile prevailed, in a far more deadly form than at present. And these industrial disturbances were connected with political disturbances equally formidable, with Chartism, Socialism, Cato Street conspiracies, Peterloo massacres, Bristol riots.

Now the present movement even in England, where there is so much suffering and so much ignorance, has been marked by a comparative absence of violence, and comparative respect for law. Considering what large bodies of men have been out on strike, how much they have endured in the conflict, and what appeals have been made to their passions, it is wonderful how little of actual crime or disturbance there has been. There were the Sheffield murders the disclosure of which filled all the friends of labour with shame and sorrow, all the enemies of labour with malignant exultation. But we should not have heard so much of the Sheffield murders if such things had been common. Sheffield is an exceptional place; some of the work there is deadly, life is short and character is reckless. Even at Sheffield, a very few, out of the whole number of trades, were found to have been in any way implicated. The denunciation of the outrages by the trades through England generally, was loud and sincere; an attempt was made, of course, to fix the guilt on all the Unions, but this was a hypocritical libel. It was stated, in one of our Canadian journals, the other day, that Mr. Roebuck had lost his seat for Sheffield, by protesting against Unionist outrage. Mr. Roebuck lost his seat for Sheffield by turning Tory. The Trades' candidate, by whom Mr. Roebuck was defeated, was Mr. Mundella, a representative of whom any constituency may be proud, a great employer of labour, and one who has done more than any other man of his class in England to substitute arbitration for industrial war, and to restore kindly relations between the employers and the employed. To Mr. Mundella the support of Broadhead and the criminal Unionists was offered, and by him it was decisively rejected.

The public mind has been filled with hideous fantasies, on the subject of Unionism, by sensation novelists like Mr. Charles Reade and Mr. Disraeli, the latter of whom has depicted the initiation of a working man into a Union with horrid rites, in a lofty and spacious room, hung with black cloth and lighted with tapers, amidst skeletons, men with battle axes, rows of masked figures in white robes, and holding torches; the novice swearing an awful oath on the Gospel, to do every act which the heads of the society enjoin, such as the chastisement of "nobs," the assassination of tyrannical masters, and the demolition of all mills deemed incorrigible by the society. People may read such stuff for the sake of amusement and excitement, if they please; but they will fall into a grave error if they take it for a true picture of the Amalgamated Carpenters or the Amalgamated Engineers. Besides, the Sheffield outrages were several years old at the time of their discovery. They belong, morally, to the time when the unions of working men being forbidden by unfair laws framed in the masters' interest were compelled to assume the character of conspiracies; when, to rob a union being no theft, unionists could hardly be expected to have the same respect as the better protected interests for public justice; when, moreover, the mechanics, excluded from political rights, could scarcely regard Government as the impartial guardian of their interests, or the governing classes as their friends. Since the legalization of the unions, the extension of legal security to their funds and the admission of the mechanics to the suffrage there has been comparatively little of unionist crime.

I do not say that there has been none. I do not say that there is none now. Corporate selfishness of which Trade Unions after all are embodiments seldom keeps quite clear of criminality. But the moral dangers of corporate selfishness are the same in all associations and in all classes. The Pennsylvanian iron master who comes before our Commissions of Inquiry to testify against Unionist outrage in Pennsylvania where a very wild and roving class of workmen are managed by agents who probably take little thought for the moral condition of the miner—this iron master I say is himself labouring through his paid organs in the press, through his representatives in Congress, and by every means in his power to keep up hatred of England and bad relations between the two countries at the constant risk of war because it suits the interest of his Protectionist Ring. The upper classes of Europe in the same spirit applauded what they called the salvation of society by the coup d'etat, the massacre on the Boulevards and the lawless deportation of the leaders of the working men in France. In the main however I repeat the present movement has been legal and pacific and so long as there is no violence, so long as no weapons but those of argument are employed, so long as law and reason reign, matters are sure to come right in the end. The result may not be exactly what we wish because we may wish to take too much for ourselves and to give our fellow men too little, but it will be just and we cannot deliberately desire more. If the law is broken by the Unionists, if violence or intimidation is employed by them instead of reason, let the Government protect the rights of the community and let the community strengthen the hands of the Government for that purpose.