'The worst was, it did not last,' resumed the old man. 'Like too many other folks emboldened with success, we wasn't content to let well alone, but went on a bit too far. The masters took up their own defence at last; and the wonder to me now, looking back, is, that they didn't do it before. They formed themselves into a Union, and passed a resolve to employ no man unless he signed a pledge not to belong to a Trades' Union. Then we all turned out. Six months the strike was on, and the buildings was at a standstill, and us out of work.'
'Were wages bad at that time?' inquired Robert Darby.
'No. The good workmen among us had been earning in the summer thirty-five shillings a-week; and the bricklayers had just had a rise of three shillings. We was just fools: that's my opinion of it now. Awful misery we were reduced to. Every stick we had went to the pawn-shop; our wives was skin and bone, our children was in rags; and some of us just laid our heads down on the stones, clammed to death.'
'What was the trade in other places about, that it didn't help you?' indignantly demanded Sam Shuck.
'They did help us. Money to the tune of eighteen thousand pounds came to us; but we was a large body—many mouths to feed, and the strike was prolonged. We had to come-to at last, for the masters wouldn't; and we voted our combination a nuisance, and went humbly to 'em, like dogs with their tails between their legs, and craved to be took on again upon their own terms. But we couldn't get took back; not all of us: the masters had learnt a lesson. They had got machinery to work, and had collected workmen from other parts, so that we was not wanted. And that's all the good the strike brought to us! I came away on the tramp with my family, and got work in London after a deal of struggle and privation: and I made a vow never to belong willingly to a strike again.'
'Do you see where the fault lay in that case?—the blame?—the whole gist of the evil?'
The question came from a gentleman who had entered the room as old White was speaking. The men would have risen to salute him, but he signed to them to be still and cause no interruption—a tall, noble man, with calm, self-reliant countenance.
'It lay with the masters,' he resumed, nobody replying to him. 'Had those Manchester masters resisted the first demand of their men—a demand made in the insolence of power, not in need—and allowed them fully to understand that they were, and would be, masters, we should, I believe, have heard less of strikes since, than we have done. I never think of those Manchester masters but my blood boils. When a principal suffers himself to be dictated to by his men, he is no longer a master, or worthy of the name.'
'Had you been one of them, and not complied, you might have come to ruin, sir,' cried Robert Darby. 'There's a deal to be said on both sides.'
'Ruin!' was the answer. 'I never would have conceded an inch, though I had known that I must end my days in the workhouse through not doing it.'