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CONCESSIONS OF THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY.

solution showed that a very great confusion of opinion existed in the ranks both of the ministerialists and of their opponents; for while Sir William Heathcote, Lord Cranborne, and Mr. Beresford Hope, all stanch Conservatives, strongly assailed the government, the measure was supported by Mr. Roebuck and several advanced Radicals, who hoped, and as the result showed, not without reason, that they would be able to transform it into such a measure as they desired. The tea-room party were, in fact, able to take advantage of the discussions, and the evidently yielding tendency of the government, to obtain concessions practically identical with household suffrage in boroughs.

On the 17th of May Mr. Hodgkinson, member for Newark, proposed to add to the third clause of the bill the following words, which would have the effect of abolishing the system of compounding for rates in parliamentary boroughs:-"That no person other than the occupier shall be rated to parochial rates in respect of premises occupied by him within the limits of a parliamentary borough, all acts to the contrary notwithstanding." The system which this motion was designed to destroy had all along been regarded and represented as one of the great Conservative safeguards of the bill. The government, as was well known, had secured a majority. Mr. Gladstone, aware of this, came into the house expecting, as a matter of course, that the motion would be rejected; Mr. Disraeli's own colleagues entertained the same expectation; when, to the astonishment probably of every one present, Mr. Disraeli, acting entirely on his own responsibility, accepted the amendment -which had the effect of nearly quadrupling the number of electors on whom the franchise would be conferred—and afterwards persuaded his colleagues that the adoption of this proposition was an improvement of the measure. When the committee again met, Mr. Ayrton moved a resolution reducing the period of residence required for the franchise from two years to one. The motion was resisted by the government, but on a division was carried by 270 to 197. Mr. Disraeli at once announced that he could not proceed with the

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bill without consultation with his colleagues; and another ministerial crisis seemed to be impending; but on the following night he announced that the government had decided to bow to the decision of the house and persevere with their measure.

Meanwhile the bill went steadily forward, the Liberal leaders now hoping to make it all that they had desired, and the government, conceding a ten-pound lodger franchise, abandoning the fancy franchises, reducing the county qualification from £15 to £10, raising the standard of semi-disfranchisement from 7000 to 10,000, and consequently the number of boroughs condemned to lose one of their representatives to forty-six. They proposed to distribute the seats thus placed at their disposal in the following manner: two to Hackney, two to Chelsea with Kensington; one each to twelve boroughs which up to this time had not been represented. Additional members were to sit for each of the following counties or county divisions -West Kent, North Lancashire, and East Surrey; to divide South Lancashire into two, and Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Devonshire, Somersetshire, the West Riding of Yorkshire, Cheshire, Norfolk, Staffordshire, and Essex, into three electoral districts, each of them to be represented by two members. It was also proposed that the Universities of London and Durham should be combined for the purpose of returning a joint representative, instead of the member being given to London University alone, as had originally been intended.

Mr. Disraeli, however, did not succeed in the attempt to amalgamate the High Church University of Durham with the somewhat Liberal and freethinking University of London. After two divisions, in one of which the word "university" was substituted for "universities," and in the other the motion to add the word "Durham" was rejected, the proposal made for extending to the counties the system of voting by papers, which had already been adopted for the universities, was also rejected.

It was evident that the new ministry, in spite of the previous declarations, was prepared, or had been persuaded, to recede from

"I am not accustomed to stand up in defence of those who are possessors of crowns," said Mr. Bright, "but I could not sit and hear that observation without a sense of wonder and pain. I think there has been by many persons a great injustice done to the queen, in reference to her desolate and widowed position. And I venture to say this, that a woman, be she the queen of a great realm or be she the wife of one of your labouring men, who can keep alive in her heart a great sorrow for the lost object of her life and affection, is not at all wanting in a great and generous sympathy with you." These were good words, and the loud and ringing cheers which greeted them were as good a demonstration as could have been gained, that the men of the London trades who had met in the name of parliamentary reform, did not lack genuine loyalty.

The general prosperity of the country to which reference has been made was, as we have said, not inconsistent with serious commercial disturbance and ruinous monetary convulsion; nor could it neutralize the temporary effects of that financial panic. Still less could it avert the consequences of strikes and sudden interruptions in the labour market. The effects of the operation of trades-unions was seen in the widely-spread distress of the followers of unskilled labour. In the east end of London,-Bethnal Green, Limehouse, and Poplar, there was great suffering among the poor during the severe winter of 1866-67. At Deptford there were attempts to commence a bread-riot, and large numbers of the dockyard labourers were out of employment. The operations of the poor-law in these districts were insufficient to relieve the daily and increasing wants of the people during the bitter weather, and various organizations were formed for the purpose of providing food, clothing, and shelter for famished and houseless families. Public indignation was excited by the heartless conduct of some of the workhouse officials and poor-law ("relieving") officers at that time; and the vast number of applicants for the shelter and food which the law ordered should be provided at the casual night-wards of the London workhouses, afforded appalling evidence of the reality of the want and destitu

tion among the poorer class. The anomaly-an anomaly not yet rectified—was, that the shopkeepers in these neighbourhoods, though the universal distress had deprived them of their customers, and they were themselves sinking into destitution, were called upon to pay enormous rates for the relief of the poor, while in the parishes of London inhabited by wealthy householders the rate was comparatively inconsiderable. Some expedients were afterwards adopted to approximate to an equalization of the rates, but they were never carried to complete and effectual legislation. Still charitable efforts were not wanting: subscriptions poured in: the local clergy and active permanent committees of relief made arrangements for distributing food, clothing, money, and all kinds of comforts to the starving and the unemployed. This went on for some time till a strange and serious result was observed. The poor from other districts began to seek temporary, if not permanent, dwellings at the east end of London. House-rent and the charge for lodgings rose considerably. Even single rooms were at a premium. The idle and the careless began to take advantage of the reports that Poplar and Limehouse had become a land of plenty. Trades-unionists, whose unions had not supplied them with funds for keeping their families from semi-starvation, saw how to obtain a little further relief. The dock companies found that there was no absolute need to raise the wretched wages of their labourers, since in times of moderate prosperity the parish would give outdoor relief, and so supplement the insufficient wages out of the rates, and in times of scarcity benevolent people would subscribe to make up the want of wages by gifts of meat, coals, soup, and clothing. So the dock shareholders, as well as other employers of underpaid labour, kept up their dividends, so far as they were kept up, by retaining a low rate of payment. It will of course be said that this is inevitable, and that the commodity of labour will necessarily find its price and be quoted according to the laws of supply and demand. Quite so. But the effects of certain side issues as well as of main issues in this scientific way of treating the question were, at that period, very deeply impressed on people's

THE SHEFFIELD OUTRAGES-MR. THOMAS HUGHES.

minds by what was taking place daily before the relief committees; and the questions were once more asked, with some emphasis, How are paupers made? and, How are the suffering poor to be effectually relieved by having a share in the world's work found for them? All this time the question was rendered far more difficult by the action of some of those tradesunions, which, being associated with benefitclubs, punished any of their members who consented to work overtime or agreed to take reduced wages, by refusing to give them the advantages to which as subscribers to the clubs they were justly entitled. There were employers of unskilled labour who did not (perhaps could not) afford to pay more than would suffice to support the individual, who was therefore obliged to seek charitable aid for his family; and there were employers of skilled labour who were ready to pay wages that could have enabled the workers to maintain themselves and wives and children, but whose gates were closed because the unions forbade any of its members to accept a lower rate of wages or to work for a greater number of hours than had been decided on at their meetings. At the same time hostile measures were taken against❘ all those workmen who refused to join the unions. They were followed, insulted, and in many instances assaulted. At the gates of builders' yards, of factories, and of large workshops pickets of union men were stationed for the express purpose of dissuading the hands to continue their engagements, or of preventing them from doing so by physical violence.

At Sheffield the outrages committed by avowed members of the unions had long been notorious for their diabolical malice. When the Social Science Congress was held in Sheffield in 1865 a great meeting of working men was summoned to meet Lord Brougham and other members, and about 3000 assembled at the Alexandra Music Hall. The veteran addressed them in an introductory speech chiefly concerning the importance of making the homes of working men comfortable to themselves and their families, as a measure lying at the root of all social improvement. Several other speakers followed, mostly in a tone of conciliation and with remarks VOL. IV.

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adapted to the appreciation of the audience. Mr. Thomas Hughes, however, took the opportunity of speaking some plain and wholesome truths, and with no little daring ventured to say in reference to advocacy of the claims of the working men, that the difficulty which had stood in his way was that this had been constantly thrown in his teeth: "Oh, have you heard of the last trade outrage in Sheffield? Have you heard that a house has been blown up with gunpowder, and that another man's wife and child have been attacked because he did not Did not what? Be

cause he did not obey the laws of a union of which he was not even a member? If tradesunions are to fight the battle of the working men they must set their faces against practices such as this." Addressing an audience of Yorkshiremen, he asked them to hear him patiently, and hear what were the reports of the doings in this town; and then, if they could contradict those statements, let them do so. Let them say, "These outrages are things of the past; in the future you shall hear no more of them. We will fight our battles henceforth in an honourable, straightforward, and Christian manner." Well, now, he had heard a few things of Sheffield. The men of this town lived in the very heart, in the midst of the intelligence of England, and, as working men, they received the highest rate of wages; and yet he was told they were opposed to the introduction of machinery, whereby they were driving away from the town a large branch of industry for which they had been celebrated for hundreds of years. Well, he was brought up in an agricultural district, and was just old enough to remember the machine-breaking which took place in that part of the country. Those acts of folly produced a sad amount of destitution and misery; but by-and-by the men found out their mistake, and now there were reaping-machines and thrashing-machines working all through the district; and what was the result? That wages had risen 50 per cent since the introduction of machinery. He would warn the men of Sheffield, if they were opposed to machinery, that there could be only one result-that they would drive the industry of the town into towns where the

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men were not so short-sighted. Then he heard that there were rests used, the use of which was enforced by the trade, but the effect of which was to double up the man's arm and make it useless after a few years, while they had a rest which produced no such results, and which, if used, would enable a man to work ten, fifteen, or twenty years longer. If that were not true, let them contradict it. To his mind it was necessary that he should, in this great centre of trades-unions, where they had it nearly all their own way, tell them the plain truth; and in so doing he repeated, with regard to machinery, that if what he had heard was true, they had adopted a course by which they would gradually lose the confidence of the best part of their fellow-countrymen, and by which they would not hold their own in the great industrial race of the country.

It required some courage to speak like this, and though a few of the men present were pushed forward by their companions to contradict some of these statements, no effectual answer was given to them. Nor were the practices which Mr. Hughes denounced, discontinued. They became intensified, and while the trades-unions denied that they were encouraged by their body, and asserted that the outrages were committed by violent and lawless men whose actions they were unable to control, they seemed never to have put forth the strong influence which they possessed for the purpose of denouncing and preventing such infamous offences. At length, after a number of crimes had aroused public indignation, the miscreants concerned in them proceeded to what appeared to be deliberate murder, and the officers of the unions becoming alarmed, utterly repudiated any connection with the offences said to have been committed at their instigation, and demanded that the charges made against them should be investigated by the trades-unions commission which had been appointed by Lord Derby's government, and was then sitting to inquire into the operations and effects of these associations.

The investigations of this commission proved that not in Sheffield only, but in Manchester and other manufacturing towns, a number of atrocious offences had been committed, and in

many instances had been planned or suggested by officers of trades-unions. Some employers who had hired non-union men to do their work were threatened and assaulted. Others actually gave up business in the dread of being maimed or murdered. One brickmaker had his shed burned down with naphtha and some valuable machinery destroyed. Brick-makers who were non-unionists found the clay which they went to handle, filled with needles. Watchmen employed to protect property were shot at, wounded, and even killed; in one case a valuable horse was slowly roasted to death in revenge against its owner. These dark places of the earth were full of cruelty.

The number of the atrocities at Sheffield was appalling, and the worst of them were traced to the instigation of one man named Broadhead, the secretary of the saw-grinders' union. In many other instances the methods pursued by the unions were infamous and tyrannical; but even the worst of them were scarcely suspected of the crimes which were discovered during an inquiry instituted by Mr. Overend, Q.C., who had been appointed to investigate the working of the Sheffield societies. As he had authority given him to grant a free pardon to any persons who would fully disclose what they knew of the iniquitous transactions, a searching examination elicited details which were so horrible that the account of them affected even the witnesses themselves, and sent a thrill of indignation through the country. The actual perpetrators of these crimes came forward to confess them in evidence, as they thereby escaped the penalty that they had long feared; and the miscreant Broadhead himself took this way of escaping, and during his presence in the court adjured one of his companions to "tell the truth" and "tell all."

A witness named Hallam disclosed several outrages, and at length confessed to having been concerned with another man in shooting a workman named Linley, who had incurrel the displeasure of the members of the union by refusing to join them and to desist from working.

Hallam became much agitated in giving his

THE SAW-GRINDERS' UNION-BROADHEAD.

evidence, and twice fainted in the court. He said, "Crookes joined with me in shooting Linley. I compelled Crookes to shoot him. He shot him with an air-gun." On being asked if any other person had set him on to do this, his reply showed with what fiendish cunning Broadhead had made these men his tools.

"I asked Broadhead one day what he was doing with Linley, and he said he would have a conversation with me the next day. I saw him the next day, and he asked me if I recollected the previous day's conversation. I said I did. He asked me what I would do with him. I told him I would make him as he would work no more. He asked me what I should want for doing it; and I asked him if £20 would be too much. He said, No, he should think not. I said I would do it."

Being asked if he had told Broadhead how it was to be done, he answered that he had not. "I saw Crookes on the following day, and told him I had got the job to do Linley. He asked me whom I had seen, and I told him I had seen Broadhead, and that we were to have £20. He said he thought we should not get £20. I saw him again the week following. We went to Broadhead's to see what we were to have. Crookes saw him alone. When he returned to me he said we were to have £15; that was all he would give. I then went upstairs to Broadhead, and he told me he would not give more than £15 for the job. I agreed to do it. I got £3 from him, and bought a revolver. Crookes got an air-gun." It was with that gun that the unfortunate victim was shot. The two wretches followed him about from place to place nearly every night for five or six weeks before they could get the opportunity they sought. They did not intend to kill him; but Crookes, who❘ was "a pretty good shot," and had been seen by his accomplice to shoot rabbits in Eccleshall Wood, was to aim at the man's shoulder, and so to disable him from working. At last, one night at dusk, having followed him to the Crown public-house, where he was sitting in a room with other persons, they remained in the yard. Linley was sitting near the window. At first Crookes refused to shoot him, but

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Hallam declared that he would do it himself, and he had also found a way by which they might escape out of the yard. Crookes then raised the air-gun and shot the man just as he was leaning forward in earnest conversation. It was intended that the ball should strike him under the shoulder, but it glanced upward and wounded the back of the head, inflicting an injury of which he afterwards died. The assassins fled, and the money which had been promised was paid.

Crookes, the man who committed the crime, came up to add his evidence to that of Hallam, and it was to him, as he passed into the court before the commission, that Broadhead called out, "Tell the truth, Sam, tell all." Broadhead himself had already come forward to save himself by confessing to a list of outrages for which it would almost appear he had no very deep remorse, or at all events no overwhelming shame, though he expressed abhorrence of his crimes and wept during his confession. The reason alleged for shooting Linley was that he had hired a number of boys to work, and was injuring the trade. Another man was "blown up" for having been brought into the trade contrary to rule. They expected if he was admitted a member they would "have him on the box," by which they meant receiving money from the support fund, and it was to drive him from the trade that he was blown up. Crookes had been hired to lame Helliwell by shooting him, but did not get an opportunity. Another man was hired to find somebody to shoot a person named Parker, the price for which was £20 to £30, a sum, to pay which, Broadhead embezzled from the funds. Somebody was to have £5 for blowing up the boilers of a manufacturing firm at Sheffield, to whom Broadhead wrote a letter, saying, “If I but move my finger you are sent into eternity as sure as fate." A man named Baxter, who had "held aloof from the trade" when Broadhead thought he ought to contribute, was punished by having a canister of gunpowder thrown down his chimney. Another man's house was to be blown up; the blowing up of the houses of those who employed non-society men; the flinging of canisters of powder down chimneys, hamstringing

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