2. Quelques Pages d'Histoire Contemporaine. 4 vols. 3. Etudes sur les Moralistes Français. 1865. THE NORTH BRITISH REVIEW. MARCH 1867. ART. I.-1. Trades'-Societies and Strikes. Report of the Committee on Trades-Societies, appointed by the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science. 1860. 2. Trades-Unions and Strikes: their Philosophy and Intention. By T. J. DUNNING, Secretary to the London Consolidated Society of Bookbinders. 1860. 3. Strikes and Arbitrations: with the Procedure and Forms successfully adopted by the Building Trade at Wolverhampton. Written at the Request of the Working Men's Club. By RUPERT KETTLE. 1866. 4. The Beehive Newspaper. 1866. 5. The Builders' Trade Circular. 1866. 6. Report of the Conference of Trades' Delegates of the United Kingdom, held at Sheffield, July 17-21, 1866. THE history of attempts to adjust the relation between workmen and their employers in England, extends over a period of more than five hundred years. The first Statute regulating wages was passed in 1350, after a great plague had thinned the labouring class, and when the survivors, taking advantage of the small supply of workmen, were claiming an advance of wages. The animus of the Legislature of the day is shown in the preamble, where this very natural desire is ascribed to idleness and malice, and declared to be the cause of 'great damage of the great men, and impoverishing of all the commonalty.' Farm-labourers were bound down to a certain rate of wages, under penalty of three days in the stocks for disobedience to the law; while workmen in the building trades were exposed to fine and imprisonment at the discretion of the Justices. At an early period combinations began to be formed among VOL. XLVI.--NO. XCI. A workmen to free themselves from the effects of this and similar enactments; but the iron fingers of the Legislature were ready to nip such attempts in the bud. So far back as the reign of Henry VI., persons causing general chapters of masons to be held were declared felons, and persons attending such chapters were to be punished by imprisonment and fine. In 1549 an Act was passed to suppress the confederacies of workmen who had conspired together to determine, among other things, how much work was to be done daily, and at what hours and times; and it was declared that any one convicted of such a crime should for the first offence pay £10; for the second, £20; for the third, £40; with the alternative of twenty days' imprisonment, in the first case; the pillory, in the second; and the pillory and loss of one ear in the third. But it was soon found that this law was too stringent, and when, next year, the city of London petitioned against it, on the ground that it would drive away their craftsmen and artificers, and impoverish their city, it was made void for ever.' A kindlier spirit towards the labouring classes, however, appeared in some of the legislation of this period; and efforts were not wanting to check the oppression to which they were often exposed. In the fifth year of Elizabeth, an important and well-known enactment was passed, requiring that every workman should have served as an apprentice seven years, and restricting the number of apprentices which masters might employ. Another important provision of this Statute was, that the wages of labour were to be fixed every year by the Justices of the Peace at the Easter QuarterSessions. This practice, though the Act was not formally repealed till 1813, had gone into disuse long before. Meanwhile the industry of Great Britain was beginning to assume a different form. The bodies of workmen working together were often becoming much larger, and the opportunities of combination to defeat the law and advance their interests increased in a corresponding ratio. The Legislature, ever ready to apply its specific, passed Act upon Act, prohibiting all agreements or associations of workmen for the purpose of advancing wages, or controlling their masters in the management and regulation of their business; and empowered the magistrate to convict summarily, and punish with imprisonment for two or three months, any workman who should take part in them.' It cannot be denied that in the whole course of this legislation against combinations' the sympathies of the Legislature were for the most part with employers; and the fact must be borne in mind, when attention is turned to the excesses and follies that have accompanied the assertion of their rights by workmen in these recent years of new-found freedom. As Adam Smith shrewdly remarks: Whenever the Legislature attempted to regulate the differences between masters and workmen, its counsellors were always the masters.' Combinations on the part of masters, the same writer remarks, were authorized, or at least not prohibited by law; it was the combinations of workmen only that fell under its lash. Against workmen convictions of breaking the law were taking place constantly; but there is no record of any conviction against an employer. We know how difficult it is to get rid of traditional feelings, even when the occasion for them has disappeared. For nearly five hundred years, with but little interruption, a traditional sense of hard usage, in respect of their relation to their employers, had been working into the soul of the labouring class. To eradicate that feeling it would be reasonable, we apprehend, to allot a period not less than the three generations said to be required for purifying the blood. No law can have much effect which is not backed by the general conscience of the community; and for want of such backing the Combination Laws' were often disregarded. And it must be confessed the temptation to do so was sometimes very great. In the year 1786, for example, the bookbinders of London, whose day of work was from six in the morning to eight at night, applied to four of the masters for a diminution of one hour; the application was followed by the discharge of the men and the apprehension of their leaders, and by a criminal prosecution. Most of the masters combined against the men, and the booksellers backed the masters; but other masters were more favourable, including King George III, who had a bookbinder's shop in the then Buckingham Palace, for keeping in repair the royal library at St. James's, and who was the first to grant the hour. About the same time, the Sheffield cutlers had a strike against the 'extortionate practice' of making thir- . teen knives to the dozen. An employer who had made himself obnoxious by enforcing this vexatious violation of Cocker, was lampooned in doggrel, characterized by the usual combination of bad rhyme, rough humour, and bitter feeling, especially as regarded the use to be made of the thirteenth knife: 'Then may the odd knife his great carcass dissect, A heart full as black as the infernal gulf, In that greedy, blood-sucking, bone-scraping wolf.' At the commencement of the century strikes were common in almost every trade, and the Legislature made a vehement effort in 1800 to extinguish them completely by one other stringent enactment. The attempt was not only a complete failure, but its results showed that such enactments only stimulated the evil they were meant to cure. At last, a committee of the House of Commons, of which Mr. Hume was chairman, having reported, in 1824, against the Combination Laws, measures were passed repealing them in that and the subsequent year. The immediate effect of the repeal was to give a great impulse to strikes, and the policy of re-enacting the exploded law was seriously considered in 1825. But milder counsels prevailed. In 1838, when an inquiry into the effects of the repeal was made by a committee of the House of Commons, it was reported that its bearing on the conduct of strikes had been on the whole beneficial. There was not so much violence as formerly, and the union men were pronounced by the majority of masters to be the most highly skilled of the operatives, and the most respectable in the trade. Since that time there is a very general concurrence of testimony, to the effect that strikes have been conducted with less of barbarous violence, with an increasing measure of outward self-restraint. No doubt cases of violence do still occur, and the brutal endeavour to blow up the house of the knife-grinder Fearnyhough, at Sheffield, a few months ago, looks as if matters were becoming worse than ever. But unfortunately not a few instances are on record of attempts to blow up houses, and of many other outrages at Sheffield. In the policy of annoyance and vexatious interference with masters, it is unhappily true, as will appear subsequently, that trades-unions have lately become far more offensive than ever they were formerly. But the days when vitriol used to be dashed in the faces of obnoxious workmen, when men at the point of death were brought into court on stretchers to identify the villains that had shot them, when clothes burnt almost to a cinder were produced to show what vitriol had done, when even young women were blinded for life for going against the rules of the union, and when actual occurrences such as these gave a dread significance to threatening letters from the 'captain of the vitriol forces,' dated from nine miles below hell,' and to the rough representations of pierced hearts, coffins, pistols, death's-heads and cross-bones that embellished them-such days, we trust, have passed away for ever. Even if no higher principle were in force, the members of trades-unions have common sense enough to see that such atrocities inflict incalculable damage on their cause, and on the very smallest allowance of charity, they must be credited with a sincere desire to prevent their recurrence, although their policy and methods may not be so readily exonerated. 1 See Parliamentary Report on Combination Laws, 1824; and Speech of Sir Archibald Alison at Glasgow at Social Science Conference, Sept. 1860. |