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230 music-books is gone, and the violin and the flute; the collections of plants and insects, and geological specimens, have been sold for what they would fetch. Not only is there nothing left; there is nothing to look to. Week after week, and month after month, must wear on, and there, or in a worse place, they must sit, still waiting for work and pay, and kept from starving only by charity,—outside the workhouse now, but perhaps within it by-and-by. The good steady girls pine and waste: the bright boys—the pride of father and mother—are stopped in their progress. All alike are without work and without prospect. It is this spectacle, with its long-drawn misery to come, which sends the qualm of dread through us; as well it may.

We get no comfort by looking beyond the class. That class are the natural patrons of the tradesmen. The tradesmen can get in no bills: they are selling nothing, unless on credit; and they are paying high rates. They cannot stand long, they say. The small gentry who live by their house property are in much the same situation. They can get in no rents; and yet they have to pay water-rates, poor-rates,—all their tenants’ dues: so that they have less than nothing to live on. I will go no further in this direction. I do not write this to make others and myself miserable, but to discuss what we ought to do. In regard to the extent of the evil, then, I will add only that the population immediately concerned is from four to five millions, without reckoning the shopkeepers and small gentry who are involved with them.

Now, if I am to say what I think, as it is my custom to do, I must declare that, in my opinion, everyoneevery one [sic] of us who enjoys food, shelter and clothing, is bound to help these sufferers. In my opinion, all ordinary alms-giving, all commonplace subscription of crowns or sovereigns, is a mere sign of ignorance, or worse. There are persons who give away a great deal in the course of the year, varying their donations from five shillings to five pounds, who never once conceived of such a thing as a call to part with any considerable part of their substance. Such persons gave 1l. to the Patriotic Fund, just as they do every year to the nearest Dispensary: such persons would subscribe their sovereign to a national loan if all the navies of the world were in our seas, and half-a-dozen hostile armies were pouring out upon our shores: and such persons will no doubt offer their sovereign or five-pound note now to the Lancashire fund,—never dreaming that they appear to others like men walking in their sleep. Some means must be found to make them understand that the task before us all is nothing less than this;—to support, with health and mind unbroken, for half a year, a year, or perhaps two years, four millions or more of respectable people, who must in no sense be trifled with, or degraded, or unfitted for resuming their industry, whenever the opportunity arises. A vast sum of money will be required for this purpose: and, till we see how much, it seems to me that those of us who cannot at once contribute a tenth or such other proportion of our income as we think right, should deny ourselves mere pleasures, and give up or defer any expenditure which can be put off, till we see what the winter will be like to the people of Lancashire and Cheshire. If the old and constant objection is urged,—that thus trade will suffer by our retrenchment of expenditure, the plain answer is “Very true: and this is the tradesman’s share of the national calamity. It will not be a ruinous occasion to tradesmen outside of the manufacturing districts; and they must bear their share. The failure of cotton has caused an actual loss of several millions already; and all just principle and feeling requires that the loss should be spread as widely as possible over society. Let our mercers and music-sellers, then, our confectioners and cabinet-makers go without our fancy custom this year; and you and I will go without new dress, new music, our dessert, our autumn journey, or any indulgence which interferes with our giving a substantial part of our income to the Lancashire people.”

But there are other people in Lancashire than those who are poor, the world is saying. This is abundantly true; and once more, if I am to speak out what I think, I must say that the thought of that particular class is scarcely less painful than the contemplation of their poor workpeople.

When some of them, or their friends, cry “Let bygones be bygones,” the answer is, that that is not possible. The past (as including the last hundred years) of Lancashire is too remarkable, and, on the whole, too illustrious and honourable, to be ever forgotten or dropped out of history. To go no further back than the distress of 1842, it can never be forgotten how nobly and how wisely many of the mill-owners sustained their workpeople through months and years of adversity; nor can it ever be forgotten that that was the occasion which disclosed the prodigious advance made by the operatives in knowledge, reason, and self-command. For the same causes which render these facts ineffaceable in our history, the subsequent characteristics and conduct of the employers will be also remembered. We need not dwell on them: but we cannot pass them over in an hour of meditation on what we ought each and all to do.

Our cotton manufacturers have been openly regarded, for many years, in America as the main supporters of negro slavery. This is no concern of ours, now and here, except that it tends to explain the apathy first, and the pedantry of political economy afterwards, by which they have rendered themselves, in the world’s eyes, answerable for all the really afflictive part of the present distress. They knew that their countrymen understood slave-labour to be a most precarious element in the work of production; they were warned, through a period of thirty years, that a day must come when slave-labour in the Cotton States would be suddenly annihilated; they were shown incessantly for ten years past that the time for that catastrophe was approaching; they were conjured to appropriate some of their new wealth to ensuring a due cultivation of cotton in other and various countries, and especially to sustain the experiments carefully instituted by Government in India. Some three or four of their own number devoted time, trouble, money, and