[243]Times, January 23 and 30, 1834.
[244]Kerr’s Exposition of Legislative Tyranny and Defence of the Trades Union(Belfast, 1834), vol. 1611 of the Halliday Tracts in the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin; see The Irish Labour Movement, by W. P. Ryan, 1919.
[245]Poor Man’s Guardian, July 26, 1834.
[246]Times, April 19, 1834.
[247]The only record of this organisation known to us is a copy of the Rules in the Goldsmiths’ Library at the University of London, which we print in the Appendix. A “Memorial from the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of Great Britain and Ireland to the Producers and Non-Producers of Wealth and Knowledge” is printed in the Crisis, May 17, 1834; another, “to the Shopmen, Clerks, Porters and other industrious non-producers,” in the issue for April 26, 1834.
[248]See the London newspapers for March 1834; a good summary is given in the Companion to the Newspaper for that month (p. 71).
[249]September 26, 1831: Lord Melbourne’s Papers(1889), ch. v. p. 130. The note he left on leaving the Home Office was as follows: “I take the liberty of recommending the whole of this correspondence re the Union to the immediate and serious consideration of my successor at the Home Department” (Home Office Papers, 40—27). See also the statements in the House of Lords debate, Times, April 29, 1834; and the comments in Labour Legislation, Labour Movements, and Labour Leaders, by George Howell, 1902, p. 23.
[250]“We recommend that the soliciting of any person to join in combinations, or to subscribe to the like purposes, should be punishable on summary conviction by imprisonment for a shorter period, say not exceeding two months.”
[251]The report was never published, and lies in MS. in the Home Office library. Ten years later, when Nassau Senior was acting as Commissioner to report on the condition of the handloom weavers, he revived a good deal of his 1830 Report, but not the astonishing proposals quoted in the text. The portion thus revived appears in his Historical and Philosophical Essays(1865), vol. ii. We had placed in our hands, through the kindness of Mrs. Simpson, daughter of Nassau Senior, the original answers and letters upon which his report was based. This correspondence shows that the leading Manchester manufacturers were not agreed upon the desirability of re-enacting the Combination Laws, though they, with one accord, advocated stringent repression of picketing. Nor were they clear that combinations had, on the whole, hindered the introduction of new machinery, one employer even maintaining that the Unions indirectly promoted its adoption. But the most interesting feature of the correspondence is the extent to which the employers complained of the manner in which their rivals incited, and even subsidised, strikes against attempted reductions of rates. The millowner, whose improved processes gave him an advantage in the market, found any corresponding reduction of piecework rates resisted, not only by his own operatives, but by all the other manufacturers in the district, who sometimes went so far as to publish a joint declaration that any such reduction was ‘highly inexpedient.’ The evidence, in fact, from Nassau Senior’s point of view, justified his somewhat remarkable proposal to punish employers for conniving at combinations.
[252]Lord Melbourne to Sir Herbert Taylor, September 26, 1831 (Papers, chap. v. p. 131). The workmen’s combinations began at this time to attract more serious attention from capable students than they had hitherto received. Two able pamphlets, published anonymously—there is reason to believe at the instance and at the cost of the Whig Government—On Combinations of Trades(1830), and Character, Objects, and Effects of Trades Unions(1834), set forth the constitution and proceedings of the new unions, and criticise their pretensions in a manner which has not since been surpassed. The second of these was by Edward Carlton Tufnell, one of the factory commissioners, and remains perhaps the best statement of the case against Trades Unionism. Tufnell also wrote a pamphlet, entitled Trades Unionism and Strikes(1834; 12mo); and Harriet Martineau one On the Tendency of Strikes and Sticks to produce Low Wages(Durham, 1834; 12mo), neither of which we have seen. A well-informed but hostile article, founded on these materials, appeared in the Edinburgh Review for July 1834. Charles Knight published in the same year a sixpenny pamphlet, Trades Unions and Strikes(1834, 99 pp.), which took the form of a bitter denunciation of the whole movement.