Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 392, June, 1848. Various
facts of unquestionable accuracy demonstrate that this complaint is too well-founded, and in no situations more so than in the chief marts of our manufacturing industry. The weekly returns, made with so much accuracy by the police in Manchester, have exhibited an average, for the last six months, of about 9000 operatives out of employment, and 11,000 working at short time;1 which, supposing there are only two persons on an average dependent on each, will imply above 27,000 persons out of employment, and 30,000 working short time. At Glasgow, matters are still worse. From inquiries made by the magistrates of that city, at the principal manufacturing establishments, with a view to furnish with information the deputation which was sent up to endeavour to procure some aid from government to restore credit and relieve the unemployed, it was ascertained that there are in that city above 11,000 persons out of employment, and 7000 working on short time, and 14,000 railway labourers on the railways connected with that city, who have been dismissed. Taking the ascertained and known unemployed at 25,000, and their dependents at 2 each, which is below the average of 2½, it is certain there are 75,000 unemployed persons in Glasgow and its vicinity. And if the unascertained poor, casual labourers, and Irish are taken into account, it is much within the mark to say, that there are A HUNDRED THOUSAND PERSONS IN GLASGOW AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD OUT OF EMPLOYMENT, besides at least twenty thousand working short time! So great and lamentable a prostration of industry is probably unparalleled in Great Britain.
What is in a peculiar manner worthy of observation in this deplorable prospect, is the universality of the depression. It is not confined to one branch of industry, or one employment; it spreads alike over all the urban population in the empire. Doubtless it is more severely felt in the manufacturing districts than elsewhere, from the entire dependence of industry in commercial localities on credit, and the fearful sensitiveness with which any shock to the monetary system is felt throughout the remotest ramifications of the mercantile world. But distress, more or less, in towns at least, is now universal. In Edinburgh the unemployed are increasing to such a degree, as to excite serious alarm in the better class of citizens. In Dublin, between general distress and repeal agitation, business is entirely at a stand; rents cannot be recovered, sales have ended; and the universal prostration resembles nothing known in recent times but the still more general and poignant distress which in Paris has followed the triumph of the revolutionists. London has suffered, as yet, much less than any other part of the empire from the general depression, because it is the seat of all the realised wealth and durable fortune of the empire: it is the place where money is spent, fully more than where it is made. But even in London, distress, wide-spread and serious, is beginning to be felt: the diminished expenditure of the West End is loudly complained of, and the incessant introduction of foreign manufactures is a standing subject of irritation to the operative classes. The revenue is collected slowly and with difficulty; and its diminished amount, showing a falling off of above two millions a-year, demonstrates that the permanent sources of our strength have at length come to be affected.
It is extremely remarkable, too – and to this point we in an especial manner request the attention of our readers – that the distress is felt much more strongly in the commercial than the agricultural classes. Indeed, were it not for the increased weight of poor-rates, owing to the manufacturing distress, the multitude of railway labourers thrown idle by the stoppage of their lines, and the number of land-holders who have had their finances crippled by the universal fall of railway and other shares, it may be doubted whether there would now be any agricultural distress in the empire at all. Where it exists, it is entirely the reflexion or re-echo, as it were, of commercial ruin. This is the more remarkable, that the only serious and real disaster which has affected the country since the depression began, has been the failure of the potato crop in 1846, which of course blasted, in the first instance at least, the labours of the cultivators only; and that the distress now felt as so poignant has been continued only, not created, by the French and German revolutions. Down to February last, no class had suffered by real external calamity but the farmers: and yet the distress which has become so extreme, has arisen not among them, but among the merchants and manufacturers. This, too, has occurred at a time when a great change has been made for the interest, and at the desire, of the commercial classes, in our foreign mercantile policy, – when free trade has been introduced, to cheapen bread, lessen the cost of production, and facilitate exchanges; and when the ruin which was anticipated from the measure was not to the commercial but the landed interest. This is one of the most remarkable circumstances in our present condition, and one on which it most behoves both our legislators, and all interested in their country's welfare, to ponder.
While this deplorable prostration of the interests of industry in all its manufacturing branches has taken place, no corresponding general decline in prices has occurred. The producer has in too many cases been ruined, but the consumers have not as yet at least been benefited. In some branches of manufacture, indeed, a most frightful depreciation of value has taken place. Silks, muslins, and ladies' dresses are now selling for half of what they were a year and a half ago. But that is the effect of the French revolution, which has thrown such an immense quantity of articles of this description into the British market, and of the unparalleled number of failures amongst ourselves, which have forced such prodigious masses of stock, belonging to sequestered estates, to sale. These bankruptcies, and the ruinous contraction of the currency which has occasioned them, afford too satisfactory an explanation of the depressed prices in most of the staple articles of British manufacture. But in those articles which are not so dependent on the maintenance of commercial credit, and in which the good effects of free-trade might have been expected to appear, unmitigated by its attendant disasters, no diminution of price is perceptible.
The last harvest was so fine, that a public thanksgiving was offered for the blessing; and it came on the back of the importation of £31,000,000 worth of foreign grain, or above 12,000,000 quarters in the preceding fifteen months: but the price of wheat is still 51s. a quarter, and that of oats and barley yet higher in proportion. Oxen and sheep, as well as all kinds of provisions, have been imported to an enormous extent during last year;2 so great, indeed, as to make the able writers in the Times apprehend that they had drained away the whole currency of the country in exchange; but butcher meat is still 7d. a pound. The West Indies are irrecoverably and finally ruined, but we are paying 5d. and 6d. a pound for our slave-grown Cuba and Brazil sugar. The Banker's Circular of May 2, 1848, asks whether there was ever heard of before a monetary crisis which "had lasted a year?" but no man, during that year of fine harvest, general peace, and universal suffering, has found that his household expenses have experienced the least diminution from what they were during the previous years of protected industry, wide-spread contentment, and unbroken prosperity. Free-trade is evidently driving some of the staple branches of British industry out of the field; one is expiring in the West Indies, another languishing in Manchester, a third tottering in Glasgow; and the diminution of home production keeping pace with the increase of foreign supply, prices remain what they were – domestic is superseded by foreign industry; and we shall have the satisfaction of finding that we have ruined many staple branches of our own manufacture without benefiting any class of our people.
It must be evident to every rational observer that this extraordinary and universal depression must have been owing to some cause within the control of the government of this country, and that neither external calamities, nor the inclemencies of nature have had any material share in producing it. Within the short period of three years not only was there no deficiency of employment in any part of the empire, but labour bore a high, in general an extravagantly high price in every part of the empire. Sir R. Peel in an especial manner dwelt on this general flood of prosperity which had set in upon the country in spring 1845, and ascribed it, and the diminution of crime with which it was accompanied, to the measures for liberating commerce from fiscal restraint, which he had introduced on his first coming into power. Since that time no external disaster or warfare has arisen, till the French Revolution broke out in February last, to account for the stoppage of employment, or the general misery into which the lower classes have fallen. We were at peace with all the world: our exports in the year 1845 had reached the unprecedented amount, including the colonial productions, of £150,000,000;3 and railways, penetrating the country in all directions, gave an extraordinary degree of employment to the
In the week ending April 29, 1848, the workers in Manchester stood thus, —
Imported from January 5 to October 10 —
Porter's