West of Birmingham lies the black country, an area of some twenty square miles. Here, if we have read the evidence of the Truck Commissioners, we can interpret a dumb-show in Dudley, where the nail-makers dwell.
On Monday mornings the nail-maker emerges from a small hovel containing a smithy and walks into Dudley to call on a gentleman known as a fogger, a petty-fogger if he is a middleman, a market-fogger if he is a master. The nailer comes out with a bundle of metal which he takes to a second house and changes for a second bundle of metal, and with this he walks away. (The next nailer, not so lucky, hangs about till Wednesday morning, waiting for his metal.) On Saturday the nailer comes back with his nails, enters the fogger's shop, and emerges with 12s. in his hand. But he does not go home. He slips into a shop close by and parts company with the shillings. In return he gets a parcel, the contents of which are obviously displeasing to him. What has happened?
The nailer is a Government servant. But the Government only employs him indirectly. It puts out contracts for rivets and nails to contractors who sublet their contract, so that the work reaches the nailer at third or fourth hand. The Government, in the interest of public economy (Victorian England is famous for retrenchment), gives its contract to the lowest tenderer; and the policy of the lowest tender is responsible for the dumb-show we have watched.
To begin with, the nailer gets metal which does not suit him, so he has to change it, and this he does at the price of 2d. per 10d. bundle, at a metal changers, a relative of the fogger. (His friend who has to wait till Wednesday for his bundle is kept idling about in order that he may drink what is left of last week's earnings at a 'wobble shop' which is owned by yet another branch of the family of fogger.)
When the nailer and his family have worked fourteen hours a day throughout the week, the nailer returns on Saturday with the nails, and receives 12s. for them. These shillings he takes to the fogger's store and exchanges for tea and other articles. The shillings are 'nimble'; we commend the rapidity of their circulation to Mr. Irving Fisher. A fogger who pays out the shillings from his warehouse receives them back again in a few minutes over the counter of his store. 'He will perhaps reckon with seven or eight at one time, and when he has reckoned with them, and perhaps paid them six, seven, or eight pounds, he will wait until they have gone to the shop and taken the money there as they leave the warehouse. Then he goes into the shop himself for it, as he cannot go on paying without it.'[44]
But surely this is truck! Certainly not. There may be 'fearful cheating' with tea, but the nailer is not bound to go there. He is perfectly free. The only trouble is this: it is a case of tea or no work the week following. This is why, despite the Truck Act of 1831 and despite the known existence of the abuse, these practices are rife among the nailers as late as 1871, the year in which the Truck Commissioners issued the Report from which this scene is compiled. The plight of the nailers is not the plight of factory operatives or miners; it is the plight of the frame-work knitters, of men who are bound by the intangible fetters of economic need to the uncontrollable devil of 'semi-capitalism'.
1. Coal was king of the nineteenth century. The first steam-engine was built to pump water out of coal mines, the first canal was cut to carry the Duke of Bridgwater's coal from Worsley to Manchester. The first railroads were laid around Newcastle to convey the coals from the pit mouth to the river. George Stephenson, the inventor of the locomotive, began life as a trapper on a Tyneside colliery.
Where would English industry have been without its king? In 1780 (in round figures) 5,000,000 tons of coal were raised in the United Kingdom: in 1800, 10,000,000; in 1865, 100,000,000; and in 1897, 200,000,000. Coal enticed the cotton factories from the dales of the Pennines to the moist lowlands of West Lancashire. At every stage of their work the iron-makers depended on coal; and the great inventions in the iron and steel industry are land-marks in the expansion of the demand for coal—Cort's puddling process 1783, Watt's steam-engine 1785, Neilson's hot blast 1824, Naysmith's steam-hammer 1835, Bessemer's steel-converter 1855, Siemen's open hearth 1870, Thomas' basic process for the treatment of highly phosphoric ores 1878. The steamship, a novelty in 1820, ruled the seas in 1870; and ironclads followed steamships. The smokeless steam-coal of South Wales guarded the heritage of Trafalgar. By the end of the nineteenth century, coaling stations were an important item in international politics.
Meanwhile, the people of England, heedless of Malthusian forebodings, multiplied exceedingly. They lighted their streets and buildings with coal-gas, and burnt coal in their grates. With coal they paid for the food and raw materials from other lands. Imports of food and raw materials were offset by exports of coal and of textiles and hardware produced by coal. The spirit of invention has pushed on to electricity and oil, but coal is still the pivot of English industry and commerce. And therefore, seeing that coal has meant all this to England, let us look at the men who raised the coal. How did they live, what did they think about, what did they count for then, what do they count for now?