About four miles from Liege, in one of the glens of this beautiful river, is Chaudefontaine, a spring which has long been the holiday resort of the Liegois, and has now grown into a miniature watering place, with its hotels and other agrémens. And half way to Verviers, a road striking in between the hills on the right leads to Spa, one of the superannuated favourites of fashion, which has long since yielded the throne to younger and gayer rivals. The crowd now rolls past the turn in the road which leads to it, eager to reach Carlsbad or Wisbaden, and no longer contented, as in the Sir Charles Grandison age, to pace the “Promenades de quatre heures,” walk minuets in the “Vauxhall,” or make stately excursions to the cottages of Marmontel’s Annette and Lubin. Still the country and scenery around it, and the magnificent mountains and woods of the Ardennes yield, in nothing, to the attractions of the later protegées of ton, but along with the rest of the ungrateful crowd, we too declined the open door of the antiquated and neglected beauty, and kept on the road to Verviers.
Verviers is a long straggling, but by no means ordinary town, stretching along the banks of the Vesdre, whenever the command of the stream presented a desirable site for a factory. In this, nearly 20,000 inhabitants and their machinery are located along the stream, and the uplands forming, certainly, one of the most cheerful and healthy manufacturing communities in Europe. The grand staples, are wool in all its varieties of worsted and cloth, in the production of which the valley has long enjoyed a high reputation in Holland and France, and its goods are still exported to Italy and the Levant. Like the people of Liege, the workmen of Verviers caught the infection of the revolutionary mania in 1830, but their madness exhibited itself in a still more savage form. On the first intelligence of the revolt, they sprung, eager for the fray, and at once manifested their wishes, by hoisting the tri-colour of France, with whom they demanded an instant incorporation. The town has neither fortress nor garrison, and for two days it was the scene of the most disgusting and uncontrolled excesses. The people assembled in tumultuous masses, and with shouts of “liberty,” tore down the royal insignia of the Netherlands, and razed to the ground the houses of the government officers; factories were destroyed, machinery demolished, and the whole property of the flourishing valley seemed destined to destruction from the freaks of this drunken revolution. At length the soberer citizens, forming an urban guard and a council of safety, succeeded in restoring order, and securing their property from the fingers of the children of “Freedom.”
The woollen trade of the Andennes, is one of the oldest national occupations of the Netherlands, and for the share of it which we enjoy in England, we are indebted to the fanatical fury of Philip II., whose persecutions drove the weavers of Brabant and Flanders to seek an asylum with Elizabeth in England. Unlike its other great staple of linen, however, Belgium, in her woollen manufacture, is dependant upon others for the raw material which she employs; the entire of her possessions do not feed beyond a single million of sheep, and her annual imports of wool from Germany, Holland, England and Spain, exceed 15,000,000 francs. The two grand seats of the trade, though distributed over a considerable district of the south, are at Verviers and Dison, which each produce annually from 30 to 35,000 pieces of thirty ells of Brabant in length. The manufacture is chiefly carried on in the houses of the workmen, and in some places, especially at Dison, the employers are so deficient in capital, that the truck system is universal, and the weaver paid by a portion of his own produce, which he must afterwards sell under the pressure for bread, at such a price as he can get for it; an act of injustice to the operative, which must always tend to the manifest injury of prices, and undermining of the trade.
Down to 1814, the trade was in every way prosperous, but the successive curtailments of consumption, first by the exclusion from France, and, finally, by separation from Holland, have shaken its stability, and brought it into a state of considerable peril at the present moment. Still the number of factories have not diminished, although the rate of profits has been cut down to the lowest possible figure, especially at Verviers. It gives employment, at present, to between 15,000 and 20,000 individuals of all ages, whose wages vary from half a franc per day for children, to two francs, and two francs and a half for their fathers. The countries to which Belgium still exports are Switzerland, Germany, Italy, the Levant, and Holland; but a commercial treaty between the latter country and France, is said to have been framed with a view to transfer to French cloth, the preference now given to that of Verviers in the Dutch market. Her exportations, however, exhibit an incredible decline since the revolution. In 1831, its value amounted to twenty-seven millions of francs; in 1832 to twenty-three; in 1833, it fell to one half, and in 1836, declined to six millions and a half, a diminution which is ascribable to numerous causes, but chiefly to its exclusion from Germany, by the operation of the Prussian commercial league; the states of which were once, previously, its most valuable consumers. Germany, in 1831 and 1832, took no less than 1,000,000 kilogrammes of Belgian cloth, which fell, in 1833, to 344,000, and on an average of the four succeeding years, has scarcely exceeded 250,000.
It is not difficult to imagine the vicissitudes of the woollen trade of Belgium, thus driven, within five-and-twenty years, from the markets of France and her colonies, Holland, Java, and Germany, and, shut up within the narrow circle of her new independence, to maintain a competition with her two powerful rivals—the English and the French. Its present condition and prospects are thus noticed in the intelligent volume of M. Briavionne. “After having participated, for so many years, in the splendour of the Empire, the woollen manufactures of Belgium underwent a decline in the early stage of her connexion with Holland, which she ultimately recovered, and with such a firm success, that the events of 1830 inflicted on it but a momentary injury. The close of 1831, and the years 1832, 1833 and 1834, were, on the whole, a period of satisfactory trade. But now commenced a struggle of every description, and the clothing for the army being speedily accomplished, it became essential to look for new outlets abroad. But just at this crisis came the consolidation of the Zoll-Verein in Germany—the plague, which ravaged the Levant—the cholera, which terrified Italy—and, above all, the commercial calamities of the United States in 1836 and 1837, each and all of which interfered directly with her demand; and, to crown all, a period of depression in the home market in 1838, and last year arrived, simultaneously with a change in public taste, as to the fashion of dress, which altered the whole character of their productions, and imposed the expense of new machinery, and differently constructed apparatus of all kinds. The general result is, at present, a weighty depression, especially in the poorer districts of Dison; and one may sum up the recent history of the trade by saying, that the two first years after the separation from Holland were good—1834, disastrous—1835 and 1836, passable—1837 and 1838, bad—and 1839, equally so.”[15]
Verviers is an open, gay looking country town, not like the manufacturing places of England, which are dense, red-bricked rows of smoky houses, thickly huddled together—but with broad, sunny streets, and handsome white houses; the dwellings of the proprietors and their factories, being equally ornamented on the front next the street. The country around it, though beautiful, is barren, and provisions of all kinds are as expensive in Verviers as in Brussels.
M. Gaudry, an intelligent proprietor of several manufactories, to whom we brought letters, gave a deplorable account of the recent joint stock speculations in Belgium, which seem to have been carried on to an extent of capital, and with a recklessness in management that is quite inconceivable. Verviers was a favourite field for their operations, owing to the variety of its resources, which presented something to suit every appetite of enterprise; and as works in actual operation were much more seductive baits for shareholders, concerns were bought up wholesale from their proprietors at the most extravagant rates, to be sold out again in retail shares to the joint stock amateurs. One coal mine, in the vicinity of the town, which had nearly ruined its proprietor, was greedily purchased by the projectors of one of these schemes, making its owner’s fortune just in time to conceal his actual ruin, and after being worked for a short time, ended in the bankruptcy of the new company—but, of course, not till it had amply rewarded the secretaries, solicitors, and directory. A worsted manufacturer, in like manner, who was on the verge of insolvency, offered his mills to a joint stock proprietary, who eagerly accepted them on his terms—paid a sum for the concern, which he forthwith invested in land, and gave him a salary, for managing his own works, more than equal to all the profits they ever realized.
It will scarcely be believed, though it is a fact, that between 1833 and 1838, one hundred and fifty or sixty companies of this kind, actually invested three hundred and fifty millions of francs, or about £15,000,000, in speculations of this kind—for insurances, mines, machine making, public works, export associations, glass manufactories, sugar refineries, cotton and flax mills, printing, brewing, in short, every imaginable undertaking that could be described in scrip.
The mania originated with some similar undertakings projected by the King of Holland, but which being prudently conducted were moderately successful. But never was theory more vividly exemplified, in practice, than were the warnings of Adam Smith realized in the case of the Belgium companies; without either of his two essentials to success—“monopoly or defined and limited action;” they burst at once into all the pathless wilds of speculation and extravagance. To success in any industrial undertaking, two things are essential, mind and money; but the shareholders of a company contribute only the latter, leaving the supply of the former to a directory: the partners are only called upon to pay and not to think, so that the mass of their capital is unrepresented by an equivalent proportion of intellect and forethought. The general result of this, is the failure that invariably accompanies neglect, and even the works which are undertaken are never pushed with vigour, or expanded by new discoveries and inventions. These are the offspring of that anxious exertion of all the faculties of the brain which accompanies the watchful prudence of a man, who has his whole fortune at stake, and is dependent upon his individual genius. But the holder of a joint-stock share, who throws his contribution into the general fund, and sends twice a year for his dividend, (perhaps, without receiving it,) has neither the information nor the interest that are indispensable to stimulate improvements.
Mistakes and errors are thus constantly occurring, and losses supervene; these, on their first appearance, would alarm and deter a private individual from incurring further risk, and he would prepare, at once, to retrieve his capital; but to the officers of a company these occurrences are matters of comparative indifference, so long as the last shilling of the paid up funds remains to meet their salaries as they fall due. And even the proprietary themselves, though conscious of the diminution of their profits, do not feel it so acutely, coming as it does off so large a fund, and are, besides, spurred on by the spirit of rivalry to incur the temporary loss, in order to drive some competing company from the field, which is only to be done by the largeness of their transactions; on the principle of the match-seller, who lost a trifle upon every bundle, and would be ruined were it not for the vast extent of the business which he did.