"Strike at ****** Palace.—All the workmen at present employed on this extensive structure ceased work on the appearance of the contractor yesterday morning. Their demand for higher wages being decidedly refused by him, the men quitted the spot, and the works have since remained deserted. A considerable crowd gathered round, and appeared disposed to take part with the workmen, who, it is said, have for some time past been arranging a combination to secure a rise of wages. The contractor declares his intention to concede no part of the demand."
The crowd taking part with the workmen! Then the crowd knows less than the workmen what it is about. These wages are paid by that very crowd; and it is because they issue from the public purse that the workmen think they may demand higher wages than they would from a nobleman or private gentleman. The contractor is but a medium, as they see, between the tax-payers and themselves; and the terms of the contract must depend much on the rate of wages of those employed. I hope the contractor will indeed concede nothing; for it is the people that must overpay eventually; and it has been too long taken for granted that the public must pay higher for everything than individuals. I should not wonder if these men have got it into their heads, like an acquaintance of mine in the same line, that, as they are taxed for these public buildings, they have a right to get as much of their money back as they can, forgetting that if every taxed person did the same, there would be no palace built;—not but that we could spare two or three extremely well;—or might, at least, postpone some of the interminable alterations and embellishments, with an account of which the nation is treated, year after year, in return for its complaisance in furnishing the cash. Let their Majesties be nobly lodged, by all means; and, moreover, gratified in the exercise of tastes which are a thousand times more dignified than those of our kings in the days of cloth of gold, and more refined than those of monarchs who could make themselves exceedingly merry at the expense of their people. The test, after all, is—What is necessary for the support of the administrating body, and what upholds mere pomp? These are no days for public pomp. In one sense, the time for it is gone by; in another sense, it is not come;—that is, we ought now to be men enough to put away such childish things; and, we cannot yet afford them. Two or three noble royal palaces, let alone when once completed, are, in my mind, a proper support to the dignity of the sovereign. As for half-a-dozen, if they do not make up a display of disgraceful pomp, the barbaric princes of the East are greater philosophers than I take them for. Yes, yes; let the sovereign be nobly lodged; but let it be remembered that noble lodgings are quite as much wanted for other parties.
"Mr. ——’s motion was lost without a division."
Aye: just so. The concentrated essence of the people, as the House of Commons pretends to be, must put up with a sordid lodging, however many royal palaces England may boast. They are not anything so precious as they pretend to be, or they would not so meanly exclude themselves from their right. They might just as faithfully consult the dignity of the empire by making the King and Queen live in a cottage of three rooms, as by squeezing themselves into a house where there is neither proper accommodation for their sittings, nor for the transaction of their business in Committees, nor for witnessing, nor for reporting their proceedings. I thought my wife quite right in saying that she would never again undergo the insult of being referred to the ventilators; and I have determined twenty times myself that I would despise the gallery so utterly that I would never set foot in it again: yet to the gallery I still go; and I should not wonder if my wife puts away, for once or twice, her disgust at inhaling smoke and steam, and her indignation at being permitted to watch the course of legislation only through a pigeon-hole and a grating. The presence of women there, in spite of such insults, is a proof that they are worthy of being treated less like nuns and more like rational beings; and the greater the rush and consequent confusion in the gallery, the more certain is it that there are people who want, and who eventually will have the means of witnessing the proceedings of their legislators. But all this is nothing to the importance of better accommodation to the members. Of all extraordinary occasions of being economical, that is the most strange which impairs the exertions of the grand deliberative assembly of the nation,—the most majestic body, if it understood its own majesty,—within the bounds of the empire. Why,—every nobleman should be content with one house, and every private gentleman be ashamed of his stables and kennels, rather than that the House of Commons should not have a perfect place of assemblage. I verily believe that many a poor man would willingly give his every third potato towards thus aiding the true representation of his interests. It would be good economy in him so to do, if there was nothing of less consequence to be sacrificed first. But King, Lords, and Commons are not the only personages who have a claim on the public to be well housed, for purposes of social support, not pomp.
"Yesterday morning, Andrew Wilson underwent the sentence of the law, &c. &c. Though only twenty years of age, he was old in guilt, having been committed for his first offence,—throwing stones at the police,—-when he was in his thirteenth year. He is supposed to have been for some time connected with a gang of desperate offenders; but nothing could be extracted from him relative to his former associates, though the reverend chaplain of the jail devoted the most unremitting attention to the spiritual concerns of the unhappy man."
So this is the way we tend the sick children of the great social family, because, forsooth, with all our palaces, we cannot afford a proper infirmary! As soon as symptoms of sickness appear, we thrust all our patients together, to make one another as much worse as possible, and when any one is past hope, we take credit for our humanity in stuffing him with remedies which come too late. To look at our prisons, one would think that we must be out in our Christian chronology. That among the many mansions of the social edifice, room cannot be found for those who have the strongest claim of all on our pitying love and watchful care,—what a scandal this is may be most fully comprehended by those who have passed from the loathsome confusion of the greater number of our prisons to the silence and rigid order of the very few in which a better system has been tried. There are persons to press the argument that while many of our honest poor, in London and in the factory districts, are crowded together, six or seven families in the same apartment, it cannot be expected that the guilty should be better accommodated. But these same honest poor,—trebly honest if they can remain so under such a mode of living,—may well be as glad as other people that the prisoner should be doomed to the solitude which their poverty denies to them. These same honest poor are taxed to pay for the transportation of multitudes of the guilty, and for the idleness of all: while the incessant regeneration of crime through our prison methods affords but a melancholy prospect of augmented burdens on their children’s children for similar purposes. In this point of view alone, how dearly has the public paid for the destruction of this Andrew Wilson, and for the offences of the gang he belongs to! Committed in his childhood for the childish fault of throwing stones, kept in a state of expensive idleness for want of an apparatus of labour, thrown into an atmosphere of corruption for want of room to insulate him, issuing forth as a vagabond to spread the infection of idleness and vice, and being brought back to be tried and hanged at the nation’s expense, after he had successfully qualified others for claiming from the public the expense of transportation,—would not the injured wretch have been more profitably maintained through a long life at the public expense? Would it not have answered better to the public purse to give him an establishment, on condition of his remaining harmless? If no Christian considerations are strong enough to rouse us to build new jails, or to transmute the spare palaces of the educated and the honoured into penitentiaries for the ignorant and forlorn, there may be calculable truths,—facts of pounds, shillings, and pence,—which may plead on behalf of the guilty against the system of mingled parsimony and extravagance by which guilt is aggravated at home, and diffused abroad, and the innocent have to pay dear for that present quiet which insures a future further invasion of their security. Every complainant who commits a young offender to certain of our jails knows, or may know, that he thereby burdens the public with a malefactor for life, and with all who will become criminals by his means. What wonder that the growing chances of impunity become a growing inducement to crime? There is no occasion to “provide criminals with port wine and Turkey-carpets;” but there would be more sense and better economy in this extreme,—if insulation were secured,—than in the system which remains a reproach to the head and heart of the community. Ah! here are a few hints as to one of the methods by which we contrive to have so many young offenders upon our hands.
“John Ford, a publican, was fined for having music in his house, &c. &c.”
“Two labourers, brothers, named White, were charged with creating a disturbance in the neighbourhood of the residence of Sir L. M. N. O., who has lately enforced his right of shutting up the foot-path, &c. &c.”
“The number of boats which passed under Putney Bridge from noon to sunset on a Sunday in summer, was computed by the informant of the right reverend bishop to exceed, &c. &c.”
"The witness stated that he saw the two prisoners that morning in the Albany Road, Regent’s Park, selling the unstamped publications which were now produced. He purchased a copy from each of them, and took the vendors into custody. The magistrates committed the prisoners to the House of Correction for one month each, and thrust the forfeited papers into the fire. The prisoners were then removed from the bar, laughing.“