Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 56, No. 345, July, 1844. Various
overtakes northern conquerors, when they settle in the regions of southern opulence.
Another powerful cause which promotes the corruption of men, when thus suddenly congregated together from different quarters in the manufacturing districts, is, that the restraints of character, relationship, and vicinity are, in a great measure, lost in the crowd. Every body knows what powerful influence public opinion, or the opinion of their relations, friends, and acquaintances, exercises on all men in their native seats, or when living for any length of time in one situation. It forms, in fact, next to religion, the most powerful restraint on vice, and excitement to virtue, that exists in the world. But when several hundred thousand of the working classes are suddenly huddled together in densely peopled localities, this invaluable check is wholly lost. Nay, what is worse, it is rolled over to the other side; and forms an additional incentive to licentiousness. The poor in these situations have no neighbours who care for them, or even know their names; but they are surrounded by multitudes who are willing to accompany them in the career of sensuality. They are unknown alike to each other, and to any persons of respectability or property in their vicinity. Philanthropy seeks in vain for virtue amidst thousands and tens of thousands of unknown names; charity itself is repelled by the hopelessness of all attempts to relieve the stupendous mass of destitution which follows in the train of such enormous accumulation of numbers. Every individual or voluntary effort is overlooked amidst the prodigious multitude, as it was in the Moscow campaign of Napoleon. Thus the most powerful restraints on human conduct—character, relations, neighbourhood—are lost upon mankind at the very time when their salutary influence is most required to enable them to withstand the increasing temptations arising from density of numbers and a vast increase of wages. Multitudes remove responsibility without weakening passion. Isolation ensures concealment without adding to resolution. This is the true cause of the more rapid deterioration of the character of the poor than the rich, when placed in such dense localities. The latter have a neighbourhood to watch them, because their station renders them conspicuous—the former have none. Witness the rapid and general corruption of the higher ranks, when they get away from such restraint, amidst the profligacy of New South Wales.
In the foremost rank of the causes which demoralize the urban and mining population, we must place the frequency of those strikes which unhappily have now become so common as to be of more frequent occurrence than a wet season, even in our humid climate. During the last twenty years there have been six great strikes: viz. in 1826, 1828, 1834, 1837, 1842, and 1844. All of these have kept multitudes of the labouring poor idle for months together. Incalculable is the demoralization thus produced upon the great mass of the working classes. We speak not of the actual increase of commitments during the continuance of a great strike, though that increase is so considerable that it in general augments them in a single year from thirty to fifty per cent.6 We allude to the far more general and lasting causes of demoralization which arise from the arraying of one portion of the community in fierce hostility against another, the wretchedness which is spread among multitudes by months of compulsory idleness, and the not less ruinous effect of depriving them of occupation during such protracted periods. When we recollect that such is the vehemence of party feeling produced by these disastrous combinations, that it so far obliterates all sense of right and wrong as generally to make their members countenance contumely and insult, sometimes even robbery, fire-raising, and murder, committed on innocent persons who are only striving to earn an honest livelihood for themselves by hard labour, but in opposition to the strike; and that it induces twenty and thirty thousand persons to yield implicit obedience to the commands of an unknown committee, who have power to force them to do what the Sultan Mahmoud, or the Committee of Public Safety, never ventured to attempt—to abstain from labour, and endure want and starvation for months together, for an object of which they often in secret disapprove—it may be conceived how wide-spread and fatal is the confusion of moral principle, and habits of idleness and insubordination thus produced. Their effects invariably appear for a course of years afterwards, in the increased roll of criminal commitments, and the number of young persons of both sexes, who, loosened by these protracted periods of idleness, never afterwards regain habits of regularity and industry. Nor is the evil lessened by the blind infatuation with which it is uniformly regarded by the other classes of the community, and the obstinate resistance they make to all measures calculated to arrest the violence of these combinations, in consequence of the expense with which they would probably be attended—a supineness which, by leaving the coast constantly clear to the terrors of such associations, and promising impunity to their crimes, operates as a continual bounty on their recurrence.
Infant labour, unhappily now so frequent in all kinds of factories, and the great prevalence of female workers, is another evil of a very serious kind in the manufacturing districts. We do not propose to enter into the question, recently so fiercely agitated in the legislature, as to the practicability of substituting a compulsory ten-hours' bill for the twelve hours' at present in operation. Anxious to avoid all topics on which there is a difference of opinion among able and patriotic men, we merely state this prevalence and precocity of juvenile labour in the manufacturing and mining districts as a fact which all must deplore, and which is attended with the most unhappy effects on the rising generation. The great majority, probably nine-tenths, of all the workers in cotton-mills or printfields, are females. We have heard much of the profligacy and licentiousness which pervade such establishments; but though that may be too true in some cases, it is far from being universal, or even general; and there are numerous instances of female virtue being as jealously guarded and effectually preserved in such establishments, as in the most secluded rural districts. The real evils—and they follow universally from such employment of juvenile females in great numbers in laborious but lucrative employment—are the emancipation of the young from parental control, the temptation held out to idleness in the parents from the possibility of living on their children, and the disqualifying the girls for performing all the domestic duties of wives and mothers in after life.
These evils are real, general, and of ruinous consequence. When children—from the age of nine or ten in some establishments, of thirteen or fourteen in all—are able to earn wages varying from 3s. 6d. to 6s. a-week, they soon become in practice independent of parental control. The strongest of all securities for filial obedience—a sense of dependence—is destroyed. The children assert the right of self-government, because they bear the burden of self-maintenance. Nature, in the ordinary case, has effectually guarded against this premature and fatal emancipation of the young, by the protracted period of weakness during childhood and adolescence, which precludes the possibility of serious labour being undertaken before the age when a certain degree of mental firmness has been acquired. But the steam-engine, amidst its other marvels, has entirely destroyed, within the sphere of its influence, this happy and necessary exemption of infancy from labour. Steam is the moving power; it exerts the strength; the human machine is required only to lift a web periodically, or damp a roller, or twirl a film round the finger, to which the hands of infancy are as adequate as those of mature age. Hence the general employment of children, and especially girls, in such employments. They are equally serviceable as men or women, and they are more docile, cheaper, and less given to strikes. But as these children earn their own subsistence, they soon become rebellious to parental authority, and exercise the freedom of middle life as soon as they feel its passions, and before they have acquired its self-control.
If the effect of such premature emancipation of the young is hurtful to them, it is, if possible, still more pernicious to their parents. Labour is generally irksome to man; it is seldom persevered in after the period of its necessity has passed. When parents find that, by sending three or four children out to the mills or into the mines, they can get eighteen or twenty shillings a-week without doing any thing themselves, they soon come to abridge the duration and cost of education, in order to accelerate the arrival of the happy period when they may live on their offspring, not their offspring on them. Thus the purest and best affections of the heart are obliterated on the very threshold of life. That best school of disinterestedness and virtue, the domestic hearth, where generosity and self-control are called forth in the parents, and gratitude and affection in the children, from the very circumstance of the dependence of the latter on the former, is destroyed. It is worse than destroyed, it is made the parent of wickedness: it exists, but it exists only to nourish the selfish and debasing passions. Children come
Commitments:—
8 Strike.
9 Strike.
PORTER'S