[283]“Owen’s chief merit was that he filled the working classes with renewed hope at a time when the pessimism, both of orthodox economists and of their unorthodox opponents, had condemned labour to be an appendage of machinery, a mere commodity whose value, like that of all commodities, was determined by the bare cost of keeping up the necessary supply. Owen laid stress upon the human side of economics. The object of industry was to produce happier and more contented men and women” (The Chartist Movement, by Mark Hovell, 1918, p. 45).
[284]The prospectus of this Society is in the British Library of Political Science at the London School of Economics. A copy is given in the Morning Chronicle, December 7, 1833. Its Manchester meetings are reported in the Crisis for November and December 1833. It seems to have had for its organ a penny weekly called The Herald of the Rights of Industry, some numbers of which are in the British Museum. Professor Foxwell has kindly drawn our attention to a further reference to it in the Life of James Deacon Hume, p. 55. It excited the curiosity of the Home Secretary. See Home Office Papers, 40—31.
[285]See Owen’s elaborate speech, reported in the Crisis, October 12, 1833; Robert Owen: a Biography, by Frank Podmore, 1906; and Trade Unionism, by C. M. Lloyd, 1915.
[286]Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth most conducive to Human Happiness, by William Thompson, 1824; also his Labour Rewarded, the Claims of Labour and Capital; How to secure to Labour the whole Product of its Exertions, by One of the Idle Classes, 1827; see Professor Foxwell’s Introduction to The Right to the whole Produce of Labour, by Anton Menger, 1899; History of British Socialism, by M. Beer, 1919, vol. i.; and The Irish Labour Movement, by W. P. Ryan, 1919, ch. iii.
[287]The pamphlet, entitled The Grand National Holiday and Congress of the Productive Classes, by William Benbow, 1831, had an extensive circulation. Mark Hovell (The Chartist Movement, 1918, p. 91) thinks he was the same William Benbow whom Bamford mentions as a delegate from Manchester in 1817 (Life of a Radical, p. 8), and whom Henry Hunt describes as of the Manchester Hampden Club, and as having been reported by a Government spy to be manufacturing pikes in 1816 (The Green Bag Plot, 1918).
[288]Leading article in the Crisis, October 12, 1833.
[289]A specimen dated 1837 is preserved by the Stonemasons’ Society, according to which a Liverpool contractor bound all his employees to serve him at a fixed wage for a long term of years, any time lost by sickness or otherwise not to be paid for and to be added to the term; all “lawful commands” to be obeyed; and no present or future club or other society to be joined without the employer’s consent.
[290]See his manifestoes reprinted in Northern Star, July 6 and July 27, 1844. “Lord Londonderry again warns all the shopkeepers and tradesmen in his town of Seaham that if they still give credit to pitmen who hold off work, and continue in the Union, such men will be marked by his agents and overmen, and will never be employed in his collieries again, and the shopkeepers may be assured that they will never have any custom or dealings with them from Lord Londonderry’s large concerns that he can in any manner prevent.
“Lord Londonderry further informs the traders and shopkeepers, that having by his measures increased very largely the last year’s trade to Seaham, and if credit is so improperly and so fatally given to his unreasonable pitmen, thereby prolonging the injurious strike, it is his firm determination to carry back all the outlay of his concerns even to Newcastle.
“Because it is neither fair, just, or equitable that the resident traders in his own town should combine and assist the infatuated workmen and pitmen in prolonging their own miseries by continuing an insane strike, and an unjust and senseless warfare against their proprietors and masters.”