Need we do more than allude to such arguments as, that if law compels the fencing of machinery (which while in motion thus can seize the passive stander-by) it ought to compel windows to be barred, because people can throw themselves out of them, and trees to be fenced, because boys can climb up and tumble down? If we take thought for the operative, working in the midst of dangerous machinery, are we, it is asked, to legislate “for every drunken vagabond who lies down in the track—every deaf old man who chooses the railway for his walk?” Need we answer such preposterous inquiries?
We have maintained that it is strictly within the province of the law to protect life, and to prohibit any arrangements by which it is shown that the lives of people in pursuit of their lawful and useful work, are without necessity endangered. Preventable accidents of every kind we have always declared it to be the duty of the legislature to prevent. We are told that Common Law suffices for all cases. It is hardly worth while to spend time in showing that it does not, and cannot provide for these cases. Common Law is the law as established for a given and considerable length of time, and it arose out of the fusion of much special legislation. It knew nothing of steam-engines, and it is impossible that it should have foreseen such cases as arise out of the new systems of railway and factory. Common Law will not make factories safe working places for the operative; special consideration must be given to the subject. When we learn, as Sir John Kincaid reports from Scotland, that a sufficient fencing of three hundred and fifty feet of horizontal shafting cost one factory only six pounds; that the casing of two hundred and fifty-one feet of shafting above seven feet from the floor—more precaution than was absolutely needed—cost another factory only eight pounds four; that a Paisley factory cased three hundred and twenty-four feet of such shafting most efficiently with block iron casing, for no more than sixteen pounds four, we refuse to listen to the cry of Mills on Fire—Ruinous Expense—Manufactures must cease—Fatal Principles—Property going to be pitched into the Atlantic—and simply wait until the recusant Lancashire Mill-owners have done calling names and litigating, and have learnt that if they will not voluntarily take the necessary steps to prevent the more horrible sort of accidents in their mills, they must take them by compulsion.
Miss Martineau suggests the impropriety of any discussion until doubt has been removed by the settlement of a point raised before the Court of Queen’s Bench. The whole matter is to remain in abeyance—things are to go on as they are, and there are to be no convictions—while the point mainly at issue is awaiting the decision of the higher courts. Let us see what this means. The point at issue, as the pamphlet rightly states, is the interpretation of the words “securely fenced;” and it was agreed some time ago that in the case of a certain prosecution for unfenced machinery, the question should go before the Queen’s Bench to determine whether machinery could be said to be otherwise than securely fenced when no accident could be shown to have been caused by it; whether the fact that such machinery had led to deaths and mutilations in other mills proved it, or did not prove it, to be insecure in a mill where, as yet, no blood had been shed. The question so raised is an obvious quibble, and even the known uncertainty of the law could scarcely throw a doubt over the issue of a reference to its supreme courts. Meanwhile the issue was raised. The great purpose and business of the Association seemed to be to raise it. One, at least, of the inspectors stood aside from the disputed class of prosecutions till the doubt so raised should be definitively settled. We ourselves now fall under reproof for not solemnly and silently awaiting the decision of the question, whether securely fenced means so fenced as that an accident shall not have happened, or so fenced that an accident shall not arise. We now learn upon inquiry, that while we have been waiting, and the Association has been claiming a twice-pending judicial decision, we find—what do our readers suppose?—that no case whatever awaits the opinion of the Judges!
We believe that we have now answered all the accusations laid against ourselves in Miss Martineau’s pamphlet. There is one citation of “actual resolutions of the Association,” side by side with our summary of their purport, presented as a “conviction of the humanity-monger,” of which we need say nothing, because it cannot fail to suggest to any person only moderately prejudiced, that our summary is very close and accurate indeed.
We will pursue the pamphlet no further, having set ourselves right. There is not an argument, or statement, or allusion in it that is not open to rebuke. It fails even in such small details as when a professor of Literature with a becoming sense of its uses, and that Professor the authoress of Forest and Game Law Tales, and of many volumes of Stories on Political Economy, should gracefully and becomingly think it as against Mr. Dickens, “pity, as a matter of taste, that a writer of fiction should choose topics in which political philosophy and morality were involved.” It fails when accusing us of “burlesque” and “irony,” because we put plain things “in the palpable way which a just-minded writer would scrupulously avoid,” and have, God knows, with a heart how full of earnestness, tried to make the suffering perceived that must have been involved in all these accidents. It fails even when against this “philo-operative cant,” its writer must needs quote Sydney Smith. “We miss Sydney Smith, it is said, in times like these—in every time when a contagious folly, and especially a folly of cant and selfish sensibility, is in question. This very case, in a former phase came under his eye”—and then we have two notes of what he said against the Ten Hours’ Bill: sayings with which, it happens, that the writer of these papers perfectly agrees. When a case really parallel to this, affecting, not the laws of labour, but the carrying on of trade in a way leading sometimes to cruel deaths came under his eye, we did not miss Sydney Smith indeed! The author of the paper upon climbing boys was the last person for Miss Martineau to quote. “We come now,” begins one of his paragraphs, “to burning little chimney-sweepers;” and the same paragraph ends by asking, “What is a toasted child, compared to the agonies of the mistress of the house with a deranged dinner?” Palpably put, and with a bitter irony, we fear!
We have done. We hope we have not been induced to exceed the bounds of temperate and moderate remonstrance, or to prostitute our part in Literature to Old Bailey pleading and passionate scolding. We thoroughly forgive Miss Martineau for having strayed into such unworthy paths under the guidance of her anonymous friend, and we blot her pamphlet out of our remembrance.
COMING SOUTH A CENTURY AGO.
Many amusing books (and many dull ones) come into existence through the clubs which have been following the fashion of the Bannatyne in Edinburgh, the Maitland in Glasgow, and the Camden and Grainger in England. The northern clubs have indulged the most in what the French call luxurious editions. They have benefited by the notion that each subscriber will, in addition to his very moderate subscription, sooner or later print a book for them at his own charge. And when a duke presents to one of these societies the Chartulary of Melrose at the cost of a thousand guineas, and an earl having paid as much for the printing of the Chartulary of Paisley goes on to produce four or five quartos of the Analecta of Woodrow, the example of liberality is set upon no trifling scale. As gifts, though not to be refused, are not always well chosen, volumes that are scarcely worth the pains of reading do occasionally appear. This by the way. We have been reading without any sense of pain one of the publications of the Maitland club—a piece of history relating to a family at present extinct in the male line, the Stewarts of Coltness, in Lanarkshire. Authorship ran in their blood. One of their family wrote a domestic narrative in the year sixteen hundred, which was the main source of a genealogical history of the race drawn up by a Sir Archibald one hundred and seventy-three years later. There were cavalier Coltnesses, and there was a Gospel Coltness; but the Coltness to whom we mean to pay attention in this place is a lady—a literary Coltness, married unto Mr. Calderwood of Polton, in Mid-Lothian. This clever dame descended into England, exactly one hundred years ago, and passed over Holland, on a journey to her brother, a political exile at Aix-la-Chapelle. She wrote a journal, and regarding England through a Scotch mist of her own, took notes in a shrewd way; sometimes canny, and sometimes (as regards the relative merits of the north and south), of a not wholly unquestionable kind. This lady had been bred up in the family of a distinguished crown lawyer; was accustomed to the best society in Scotland; was in her own family commander-in-chief over an amiable husband; and, if we may venture to state so much, forty years of age, when she, for the first time in her life, came south.
Mrs. Calderwood and her husband travelled from Edinburgh to London in their own post-chaise, attended by a serving-man on horseback with pistols in his holsters and a broadsword in his belt. There was a case of pistols in the carriage, more fit, perhaps, for the use of the lady than of the good-natured laird; who, being a man of accomplishments, took with him a pocket Horace to beguile the hours of wayfaring. They set out on the third of June; and, being on the road each day for twelve or fourteen hours, arrived in London on the evening of the tenth.
On the road of course, one day, the lady dined at Durham, “and I went,” she adds, “to see the cathedral; it is a prodigious bulky building.” The day happening to be Sunday, Mrs. Calderwood was much shocked at the behaviour of little boys, who played at ball in what she termed the piazzas, and supposed that the woman who was showing her the place considered her a heathen,—“in particular she stared when I asked what the things were they kneeled upon, as they appeared to me to be so many Cheshire cheeses.” Mrs. Calderwood had travelled far into England before she met with any sensible inhabitant; and then the first intelligent native is recorded, and proves to have been a chamber-maid.