It was with regret we heard the argument we have just stated against the legislative interference with the rate of wages, introduced in the discussion of the ten-hours' bill, and applied against the principle of that measure. It was plainly misapplied. Why do we not relish any legislative interposition, on whatever plea of humanity, between workmen and capitalist? Because it will fail of its humane intention. We should heartily rejoice—who would not?—if a reasonable minimum of wages could be established and secured. But it cannot. Is the legislature equally incompetent when it steps in to prevent children and very young persons from being overworked; from being so employed that the health and vigour of ensuing generations may be seriously impaired, (which would be a grave mistake even in the economy of labour;) from being so entirely occupied that no time shall remain for education? We think not. The legislature is not in this case equally powerless. It may here prevent an incipient abuse from growing into a custom. The law cannot create an additional amount of capital to be distributed over its population in the shape of an advance of wages, but the law can say to all parents and all masters—you shall not profit by the labour of the child, to the ruin of its health, and the loss of all period for mental and moral discipline. Such an overtasking of the child's strength has not hitherto been an element in your calculation, and it shall not become one.
All these various schemes—socialist or otherwise—of legislative interference, take their rise from the aspect, sufficiently deplorable, of the distress of the manufacturing population; and it is almost excusable if the contemplation of such distress should throw men a little off their balance. But it is not so easily excusable if men, once launched on their favourite projects, endeavour to prove their necessity by heightened descriptions of that distress, and by unauthorized prophecies of its future and continual increase. What a formidable array of figures—figures of speech as well as of arithmetic—are brought down upon us with gloomy perseverance, to convince us that the manufacturing population of this country is on the verge of irreparable ruin! We think it right to put our readers upon their guard against these over-coloured descriptions. Even when Parliamentary reports are quoted, whose authority is not to be gainsaid, they ought to defend themselves against the first impression which these are calculated to make. The facts stated may be true, but there are other facts which are not stated equally true, and which the scope and purpose of such reports did not render it necessary to collect. If, in this country, there is much distress, if in some places there is that utter prostration of mind and body which extreme poverty occasions, there is also much prosperity; there is also, in other places, much vigorous industry, receiving its usual, and more than its usual recompense. If there are plague-spots in our population, there are also large tracts of it still sound and healthy. Set any one down to read list after list of all the maimed and halt and sick in our great metropolis, and the whole town will seem to him, for the time being, one wide hospital: he must throw open the window and look on the busy, animated, buoyant crowd that is rushing through the streets, before he shakes off the impression that he is living in a city of the plague.
Without a doubt, he who approaches the consideration of the distress of the labouring classes, should have a tender and sympathizing spirit; how else can the subject possess for him its true and profound interest? But it is equally necessary that he bring to it a cultivated and well-disciplined compassion; that he should know where, in the name of others, he should raise the voice of complaint, and where, in the name of suffering humanity at large, he should be silent and submit. It should always be borne in mind, that it is very difficult for persons of one condition of life, to judge of the comparative state of well-being of those of another condition. An inhabitant of cities, a man of books and tranquillity, goes down into the country, without previous preparation, to survey and give report of the distress of a mining or agricultural district. In what age since the world has been peopled, could such an individual be transported into the huts of peasants, or amongst the rude labours of the miner, without receiving many a shock to his sensibility? Perhaps he descends, for the first time in his life, the shaft of a coal-mine. How foul and unnatural must the whole business seem to him!—these men working in the dark, begrimed, half-naked, pent up in narrow galleries. He has gone to spy out hardships—he sees nothing else. Or perhaps he pays his first visit to the interior of the low-roofed crazy cottage of the husbandman, and is disgusted at the scant furniture and uninviting meal that it presents; yet the hardy labourer may find his rest and food there, with no greater share of discontent than falls to most of us—than falls, perhaps, to the compassionate inspector himself. We have sometimes endeavoured to picture to ourselves what would be the result if the tables were turned, and a commission of agricultural labourers were sent into the city to make report of the sort of lives led there, not by poor citizens or the lowest order of tradesmen, but by the very class who are occupied in preparing largo folio reports of their own distressful condition. Suppose they were to enter into the chambers of the student of law—of the conveyancer, for example. They make their way through obscure labyrinths into a room not quite so dark, it must be allowed, nor quite so dirty as the interior of a coal-mine, and there they find an unhappy man who, they are given to understand, sits in that gloomy apartment, in a state of solitary confinement, from nine o'clock in the morning till six or seven in the evening. They learn that, for several months in the year, this man never sees the sun; that in the cheerful season when the plough is going through the earth, or the sickle is glittering in the corn, and the winds are blowing the great clouds along the sky, this pale prisoner is condemned to pore over title-deeds which secure the "quiet enjoyment" of the land to others; and if they imitate the oratory of their superiors, they will remark upon the strange injustice, that he should be bound down a slave to musty papers, which give to others those pastures from which he never reaps a single blade of grass, and which he is not even permitted to behold. These commissioners would certainly be tempted to address a report to Parliament full of melancholy representations, and ending with the recommendation to shake out such unhappy tenants into the fields. It would be long before they could be brought to understand that he of the desk and pen would, at the end of half an hour, find nothing in those fields but a mortal ennui. To him there is no occupation in all those acres; and therefore they would soon be to him as barren as the desert.
If there is any apparent levity in the last paragraph we have penned, it is a levity that is far from our heart. There is no subject which gives us so much concern as this—of the undoubted distress which exists amongst the labouring population, and the necessity that exists to alleviate and to combat it. Coming from the immediate perusal of Utopian schemes, promising a community of goods, and from the reconsideration of those arguments which prove such schemes to be delusive and mischievous, the impression that is left on our mind is the profound conviction of the duty of government, to do whatever lies really in its power for the amelioration of the condition of the working classes. The present system of civilized society works, no doubt, for the good of the whole, but assuredly they do not reap an equal benefit with other classes, and on them falls the largest share of its inevitable evils. May we not say that, whatever the social body, acting in its aggregate capacity, can do to redress the balance—whether in education of their children, in sanatory regulations which concern their workshops and their dwellings, or in judicious charity that will not press upon the springs of industry—it is bound to do by the sacred obligation of justice?
FOOTNOTES:
[28] Etudes sur les Réformateurs, ou Socialistes Modernes. Par M. Louis Reybaud.
[29] We shall perhaps take some opportunity to speak separately of M. Leroux's work, Sur l'Humanité. It is a work of very superior pretension to the writings of MM. St Simon, Fourier, and others, who must rather be regarded as makers of projects than makers of books. M. Leroux has the honour of indoctrinating George Sand with that mysticism which she has lately infused into her novels—by no means to the increase of their merit. When M. Leroux was reproached by a friend for the fewness of his disciples, he is said to have replied—"It is true I have but one—mais, que voulez-vous?—Jésus Christ lui-même n'avait que douze."
[30] He had been drawing the usual painful picture of the distress of the manufacturing classes, and citing for his authority some English journal. In doing this he has made a somewhat alarming mistake. The colloquial phrase job-work has perplexed, and very excusably, the worthy Belgian, and he has drawn from a very harmless expression a terrible significance. "Partout le travail est le métier de job (job-work) comme disent les Anglais—un métier à mourir sur le fumier." In another place he has understood the turn out of our factories as the expulsion of the artisans by the master manufacturers.