To the ordinary politician a combination of employers and a combination of workmen seemed in no way comparable. The former was, at most, an industrial misdemeanour: the latter was in all cases a political crime. Under the shadow of the French Revolution, the English governing classes regarded all associations of the common people with the utmost alarm. In this general terror lest insubordination should develop into rebellion were merged both the capitalist’s objection to high wages and the politician’s dislike of Democratic institutions. The Combination Laws, as Francis Place tells us, “were considered as absolutely necessary to prevent ruinous extortions of workmen, which, if not thus restrained, would destroy the whole of the Trade, Manufactures, Commerce, and Agriculture of the nation.... This led to the conclusion that the workmen were the most unprincipled of mankind. Hence the continued ill-will, suspicion, and in almost every possible way the bad conduct of workmen and their employers towards one another. So thoroughly was this false notion entertained that whenever men were prosecuted to conviction for having combined to regulate their wages or the hours of working, however heavy the sentence passed on them was, and however rigorously it was inflicted, not the slightest feeling of compassion was manifested by anybody for the unfortunate sufferers. Justice was entirely out of the question: they could seldom obtain a hearing before a magistrate, never without impatience or insult; and never could they calculate on even an approximation to a rational conclusion.... Could an accurate account be given of proceedings, of hearings before magistrates, trials at sessions and in the Court of King’s Bench, the gross injustice, the foul invective, and terrible punishments inflicted would not, after a few years have passed away, be credited on any but the best evidence.” [123]

It must not, however, be supposed that every combination was made the subject of prosecution, or that the Trade Union leader of the period passed his whole life in gaol. Owing to the extremely inefficient organisation of the English police, and the absence of any public prosecutor, a combination was usually let alone until some employer was sufficiently inconvenienced by its operations to be willing himself to set the law in motion. In many cases we find employers apparently accepting or conniving at their men’s combinations.[124] The master printers in London not only recognised the very ancient institution of the “chapel,” but evidently found it convenient, at any rate from 1785 onwards, to receive and consider proposals from the journeymen as an organised body. In 1804 we even hear of a joint committee consisting of an equal number of masters and journeymen, authorised by their respective bodies to frame regulations for the future payment of labour, and resulting in the elaborate “scale” of 1805, signed by both masters and men.[125] The London coopers had a recognised organisation in 1813, in which year a list of prices was agreed upon by representatives of the masters and men. This list was revised in 1816 and 1819, without any one thinking of a prosecution.[126] The Trade Union was openly reformed in 1821 as the Philanthropic Society of Coopers. The London brushmakers in 1805 had “A List of Prices agreed upon between the Masters and Journeymen,” which is still extant. The framework knitters, and also the tailors of the various villages in Nottinghamshire, were, from 1794 to 1810, in the habit of freely meeting together, both masters and men, “to consider of matters relative to the trade,” the conferences being convened by public advertisement.[127] The minute books of the local Trade Union of the carpenters of Preston for the years 1807 to 1824 chronicle an apparently unconcealed and unmolested existence, in correspondence with other carpenters’ societies throughout Lancashire. The accounts contain no items for the expense of defending their officers against prosecutions, whereas there are several payments for advertisements and public meetings, and, be it added, a very large expenditure in beer. And there is a lively tradition among the aged block printers of Glasgow that, in their fathers’ time, when their very active Trade Union exacted a fee of seven guineas from each new apprentice, this money was always straightway drunk by the men of the print-field, the employer taking his seat at the head of the table, and no work being done by any one until the fund was exhausted. The calico-printers’ organisation appears, at the early part of the nineteenth century, to have been one of the strongest and most complete of the Unions. In an impressive pamphlet of 1815 the men are thus appealed to by the employers: “We have by turns conceded what we ought all manfully to have resisted, and you, elated with success, have been led on from one extravagant demand to another, till the burden is become too intolerable to be borne. You fix the number of our apprentices, and oftentimes even the number of our journeymen. You dismiss certain proportions of our hands, and will not allow others to come in their stead. You stop all Surface Machines, and go the length even to destroy the rollers before our face. You restrict the Cylinder Machine, and even dictate the kind of pattern it is to print. You refuse, on urgent occasions, to work by candlelight, and even compel our apprentices to do the same. You dismiss our overlookers when they don’t suit you; and force obnoxious servants into our employ. Lastly, you set all subordination and good order at defiance, and instead of showing deference and respect to your employers, treat them with personal insult and contempt.”[128] Notwithstanding all this, no systematic attempt appears to have been made to put down the calico-printers’ combination, and only one or two isolated prosecutions can be traced. In Dublin, too, the cabinetmakers in the early part of the present century were combined in a strong union called the Samaritan Society, exclusively for trade purposes; “but though illegal, the employers do not seem to have looked upon it with any great aversion; and when on one occasion the chief constable had the men attending a meeting arrested, the employers came forward to bail them. Indeed, they professed that their object, though primarily to defend their own interests against the masters, was also to defend the interests of the masters against unprincipled journeymen. Many of the masters on receiving the bill of a journeyman were in the habit of sending it to the trades’ society committee to be taxed, after which the word Committee was stamped upon it. One case was mentioned, when between two and three pounds were knocked off a bill of about eight pounds by the trade committee.” [129] And both in London and Edinburgh the journeymen openly published, without fear of prosecution, elaborate printed lists of piecework prices, compiled sometimes by a committee of the men’s Trade Union, sometimes by a joint committee of employers and employed.[130]“The London Cabinetmakers’ Union Book of Prices,” of which editions were published in 1811 and 1824, was a costly and elaborate work, with many plates, published “by a Committee of Masters and Journeymen ... to prevent those litigations which have too frequently existed in the trade.” Various supplements and “index keys” to this work were published; and other similar lists exist. So lax was the administration of the law that George White, the energetic clerk to Hume’s Committee, asserted that the Act of 1800 had “been in general a dead letter upon those artisans upon whom it was intended to have an effect—namely, the shoemakers, printers, papermakers, shipbuilders, tailors, etc., who have had their regular societies and houses of call, as though no such Act was in existence; and in fact it would be almost impossible for many of those trades to be carried on without such societies, who are in general sick and travelling relief societies; and the roads and parishes would be much pestered with these travelling trades, who travel from want of employment, were it not for their societies who relieve what they call tramps.” [131]

But although clubs of journeymen might be allowed to take, like the London bookbinders, “a social pint of porter together,” and even, in times of industrial peace, to provide for their tramps and perform all the functions of a Trade Union, the employers had always the power of meeting any demands by a prosecution. Even those trades in which we have discovered evidence of the unmolested existence of combinations furnish examples of the rigorous application of the law. In 1819 we read of numerous prosecutions of cabinetmakers, hatters, ironfounders, and other journeymen, nominally for leaving their work unfinished, but really for the crime of combination.[132] In 1798 five journeymen printers were indicted at the Old Bailey for conspiracy. The employers had sent for the men’s leaders to discuss their proposals, when, as it was complained, “the five defendants came, clothed as delegates, representing themselves as the head of a Parliament as we may call it.” The men were in fact members of a trade friendly society of pressmen “held at the Crown, near St. Dunstan’s Church, Fleet Street,” which, as the prosecuting counsel declared, “from its appearance certainly bore no reproachable mark upon it. It was called a friendly society, but by means of some wicked men among them this society degenerated into a most abominable meeting for the purpose of a conspiracy; those of the trade who did not join their society were summoned, and even the apprentices, and were told unless they conformed to the practices of these journeymen, when they came out of their times they should not be employed.” Notwithstanding the fact that the employers had themselves recognised and negotiated with the society, the Recorder sentenced all the defendants to two years’ imprisonment. [133]

Twelve years later it was the brutality of another prosecution of the compositors that impressed Francis Place with the necessity of an alteration in the law. “The cruel persecutions,” he writes, “of the Journeymen Printers employed in The Times newspaper in 1810 were carried to an almost incredible extent. The judge who tried and sentenced some of them was the Common Sergeant of London, Sir John Sylvester, commonly known by the cognomen of ‘Bloody Black Jack.’... No judge took more pains than did this judge on the unfortunate printers, to make it appear that their offence was one of great enormity, to beat down and alarm the really respectable men who had fallen into his clutches, and on whom he inflicted scandalously severe sentences.”[134] Nor did prosecution always depend on the caprice of an employer. In December 1817 the Bolton constables, accidentally getting to know that ten delegates of the calico-printers from the various districts of the kingdom were to meet on New Year’s Day, arranged to arrest the whole body and seize all their papers. The ten delegates suffered three months’ imprisonment, although no dispute with their employers was in progress.[135] But the main use of the law to the employers was to checkmate strikes, and ward off demands for better conditions of labour. Already, in 1786, the law of conspiracy had been strained to convict, and punish with two years’ imprisonment, the five London bookbinders who were leading a strike to reduce hours from twelve to eleven.[136] When, at the Aberdeen Master Tailors’ Gild, in 1797, “it was represented to the trade that their journeymen had entered into an illegal combination for the purpose of raising their wages,” the masters unanimously “agreed not to give any additional wages to their servants,” and backed up this resolution of their own combination by getting twelve journeymen prosecuted and fined for the crime of combining.[137] In 1799 the success of the London shoemakers in picketing obnoxious employers led to the prosecution of two of them, which was made the means of inducing the men to consent to dissolve their society, then seven years old, and return to work at once.[138] Two other shoemakers of York were convicted in the same year for the crime of “combining to raise the price of their labour in making shoes, and refusing to make shoes under a certain price,” and counsel said that “in every great town in the North combinations of this sort existed.”[139] The coach-makers’ strike of 1819 was similarly stopped, and the “Benevolent Society of Coachmakers” broken up by the conviction of the general secretary and twenty other members, who were, upon this condition, released on their own recognisances.[140] In 1819 some calico-engravers in the service of a Manchester firm protested against the undue multiplication of apprentices by their employers, and enforced their protest by declining to work. For this “conspiracy” they were fined and imprisoned.[141] And though the master cutlers were allowed, with impunity, to subscribe to the Sheffield Mercantile and Manufacturing Union, which fixed the rates of wages, and brought pressure to bear on recalcitrant employers, the numerous trade clubs of the operatives were not left unmolested. In 1816 seven scissor-grinders were sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for belonging to what they called the “Misfortune Club,” which paid out-of-work benefit, and sought to maintain the customary rates. [142]

But it was in the new textile industries that the weight of the Combination Laws was chiefly felt. White and Henson describe the Act of 1800 as being in these trades “a tremendous millstone round the neck of the local artisan, which has depressed and debased him to the earth: every act which he has attempted, every measure that he has devised to keep up or raise his wages, he has been told was illegal: the whole force of the civil power and influence of the district has been exerted against him because he was acting illegally: the magistrates, acting, as they believed, in unison with the views of the legislature, to check and keep down wages and combination, regarded, in almost every instance, every attempt on the part of the artisan to ameliorate his situation or support his station in society as a species of sedition and resistance of the Government: every committee or active man among them was regarded as a turbulent, dangerous instigator, whom it was necessary to watch and crush if possible.”[143] To cite one only of the instances, it was given in evidence before Hume’s Committee that in 1818 certain Bolton millowners suggested to the operative weavers that they should concert together to leave the employment of those who paid below the current rate. Acting on this hint a meeting of forty delegates took place, at which it was resolved to ask for the advance agreed to by the good employers. A fortnight later the president and the two secretaries were arrested, convicted of conspiracy, and imprisoned for one and two years respectively, although their employers gave evidence on the prisoners’ behalf to the effect that they had themselves requested the men to attend the meeting, and had approved the resolutions passed.[144] In the following year fifteen cotton-spinners of Manchester, who had met “to receive contributions to bury their dead,” under “Articles” sanctioned by Quarter Sessions in 1795, were seized in the committee-room by the police, and committed to trial for conspiracy, bail being refused. After three or four months’ imprisonment they were brought to trial, the whole local bar—seven in number—being briefed against them. Collections were made in London and elsewhere (including the town of Lynn in Norfolk) for their defence. The enrolment of their club as a friendly society availed little. It was urged in court that “all societies, whether benefit societies or otherwise, were only cloaks for the people of England to conspire against the State,” and most of the defendants were sentenced to varying terms of imprisonment. [145]

But the Scottish Weavers’ Strike of 1812, described in the preceding chapter, is the most striking case of all. In the previous year certain cotton-spinners had been convicted of combination and imprisoned, the judge observing that there was a clear remedy in law, as the magistrates had full power and authority to fix rates of wages or settle disputes. In 1812 many of the employers refused to accept the rates which the justices had declared as fair for weaving; and all the weavers at the forty thousand looms between Aberdeen and Carlisle struck to enforce the justices’ rates. The employers had already made overtures through the sheriff of the county for a satisfactory settlement when the Government arrested the central committee of five, who were directing the proceedings. These men were sentenced to periods of imprisonment varying from four to eighteen months; the strike failed, and the association broke up.[146] The student of the newspapers between 1800 and 1824 will find abundant record of judicial barbarities, of which the cases cited above may be taken as samples. No statistics exist as to the frequency of the prosecutions or the severity of the sentences; but it is easy to understand, from such reports as are available, the sullen resentment which the working class suffered under these laws. Their repeal was a necessary preliminary to the growth among the most oppressed sections of the workers of any real power of protecting themselves, by Trade Union effort, against the degradation of their Standard of Life.

The failure of the Combination Laws to suppress the somewhat dictatorial Trade Unionism of the skilled handicraftsmen, and their efficacy in preventing the growth of permanent Unions among other sections of the workers, is explained by class distinctions, now passed away or greatly modified, which prevailed at the beginning of the present century. To-day, when we speak of “the aristocracy of labour” we include under that heading the organised miners and factory operatives of the North on the same superior footing as the skilled handicraftsman. In 1800 they were at opposite extremes of the social scale in the wage-earning class, the weaver and the miner being then further removed from the handicraftsman than the docker or general labourer is from the Lancashire cotton-spinner or Northumberland hewer of to-day. The skilled artisans formed, at any rate in London, an intermediate class between the shopkeeper and the great mass of unorganised labourers or operatives in the new machine industries. The substantial fees demanded all through the eighteenth century for apprenticeship to the “crafts” had secured to the members and their eldest sons a virtual monopoly.[147] Even after the repeal of the laws requiring a formal apprenticeship some time had to elapse before the supply of this class of handicraftsmen overtook the growing demand. Thus we gather from the surviving records that these trades have never been more completely organised in London than between 1800 and 1820.[148] We find the London hatters, coopers, curriers, compositors, millwrights, and shipwrights maintaining earnings which, upon their own showing, amounted to the comparatively large sum of thirty to fifty shillings per week. At the same period the Lancashire weaver or the Leicester hosier, in full competition with steam-power and its accompaniment of female and child labour, could, even when fully employed, earn barely ten shillings. We see this difference in the Standard of Life reflected in the characters of the combinations formed by the two classes.

In the skilled handicrafts, long accustomed to corporate government, we find, even under repressive laws, no unlawful oaths, seditious emblems, or other common paraphernalia of secret societies. The London Brushmakers, whose Union apparently dates from the early part of the eighteenth century, expressly insisted “that no person shall be admitted a member who is not well affected to his present Majesty and the Protestant Succession, and in good health and of a respectable character.” But this loyalty was not inconsistent with their subscribing to the funds of the 1831 agitation for the Reform Bill.[149] The prevailing tone of the superior workmen down to 1848 was, in fact, strongly Radical; and their leaders took a prominent part in all the working-class politics of the time. From their ranks came such organisers as Place, Lovett, and Gast.[150] But wherever we have been able to gain any idea of their proceedings, their trade clubs were free from anything that could now be conceived as political sedition. It was these clubs of handicraftsmen that formed the backbone of the various “central committees” which dealt with the main topics of Trade Unionism during the next thirty years. They it was who furnished such assistance as was given by working men to the movement for the repeal of the Combination Laws. And their influence gave a certain dignity and stability to the Trade Union Movement, without which, under hostile governments, it could never have emerged from the petulant rebellions of hunger-strikes and machine-breaking.

The principal effect of the Combination Laws on these well-organised handicrafts in London, Liverpool, Dublin, and perhaps other towns, was to make the internal discipline more rigid and the treatment of non-unionists more arbitrary. Place describes how “in these societies there are some few individuals who possess the confidence of their fellows, and when any matter relating to the trade has been talked over, either at the club or in a separate room, or in a workshop or a yard, and the matter has become notorious, these men are expected to direct what shall be done, and they do direct—simply by a hint. On this the men act; and one and all support those who may be thrown out of work or otherwise inconvenienced. If matters were to be discussed as gentlemen seem to suppose they must be, no resolution would ever be come to. The influence of the men alluded to would soon cease if the law were repealed. It is the law and the law alone which causes the confidence of the men to be given to their leaders. Those who direct are not known to the body, and not one man in twenty, perhaps, knows the person of any one who directs. It is a rule among them to ask no questions, and another rule among them who know most, either to give no answer if questioned, or an answer to mislead.” [151]

In the new machine industries, on the other hand, the repeated reductions of wages, the rapid alterations of processes, and the substitution of women and children for adult male workers, had gradually reduced the workers to a condition of miserable poverty. The reports of Parliamentary committees, from 1800 onward, contain a dreary record of the steady degradation of the Standard of Life in the textile industries. “The sufferings of persons employed in the cotton manufacture,” Place writes of this period, “were beyond credibility: they were drawn into combinations, betrayed, prosecuted, convicted, sentenced, and monstrously severe punishments inflicted on them: they were reduced to and kept in the most wretched state of existence.”[152] Their employers, instead of being, as in the older handicrafts, little more than master workmen, recognising the customary Standard of Life of their journeymen, were often capitalist entrepreneurs, devoting their whole energies to the commercial side of the business, and leaving their managers to buy labour in the market at the cheapest possible rate. This labour was recruited from all localities and many different occupations. It was brigaded and controlled by despotic laws, enforced by numerous fines and disciplinary deductions. Cases of gross tyranny and heartless cruelty are not wanting. Without a common standard, a common tradition, or mutual confidence, the workers in the new mills were helpless against their masters. Their ephemeral combinations and frequent strikes were, as a rule, only passionate struggles to maintain a bare subsistence wage. In place of the steady organised resistance to encroachments maintained by the handicraftsmen, we watch, in the machine industries, the alternation of outbursts of machine-breaking and outrages, with intervals of abject submission and reckless competition with each other for employment. In the conduct of such organisation as there was, repressive laws had, with the operatives as with the London artisans, the effect of throwing great power into the hands of a few men. These leaders were implicitly obeyed in times of industrial conflict, but the repeated defeats which they were unable to avert prevented that growth of confidence which is indispensable for permanent organisation.[153] Both leaders and rank and file, too, were largely implicated in political seditions, and were the victims of spies and Ministerial emissaries of all sorts. All these circumstances led to the prevalence among them of fearful oaths, mystic initiation rites, and other manifestations of a sensationalism which was sometimes puerile and sometimes criminal.