State Of Feeling In A Manufacturing Town

[RichardB]

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Start page 46.

Tried to get the text down; defeated me.

(Apologies to Vox)

[vox]

EBENEZER ELLIOTT

Autobiography "Of my birth no public registry exists. My father, being a Dissenter, baptized me himself, or employed his friend, and brother Berean, Tommy Wright, the Barnesly tinker, to baptize me. But I was born at the New Foundry, Masbro', in the parish of Rotherham, on the 17th day of March, in the year of our—Lord 1781;"

Autobiography - Link

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"A bronze statue, by Burnard of London, subscribed for by the working men of Sheffield, was erected at a cost of £600 in Sheffield market-place in 1854, to the memory of Elliott. Landor wrote a fine ode on the occasion. The statue was afterwards removed to Weston Park."

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[RichardB]

Took hours, but I defeated it in th e end, broken up from basically one twp-page paragraph to make it easier to read - still tough going ...

Gentlemen - There is war in the city of soot.

The hand of the workmen is lifted against his master, and, not in vain, if his intention be to close the butcher's shop.

Yet, alas ! if the master defeat the workman, the same result is probable; for, while they are injuring each other, a third party, resisted by neither of them, is devouring the substance of both.

“As I am undersold by foreigners”

says the employer to the employed,

“instead raising your wages, you should lower them or you will give my trade to the Germans”.

“I can but starve then ?”

replies the workman;

“the question is not whether you will lose your trade, for that catastrophe is certain, if we are to pay sevenpence per pound for beef, while our rivals pay only twopence-halfpenny.

If I would work for nothing, and give you all my wages, you would tamely suffer the money to be taken from you by the basest of mankind and be poor still.

The real question at issue between us two seems to be, whether I shall starve after you lose your trade or before ? Yet, why should I starve even then ?

If your trade go to Germany, I will follow it thither; and, in the meantime, no matter by what means, I will get as high wages as I can, that I may be able to pay for my passage over the herring-pool”.

“The Germans”

continues the master

“can undersell me forty per cent and yet obtain twice my profits”.

“Then they can give twice your wages”

answers the workman “and the sooner you remove your capital to Germany, and I my skill and labour, the better for us both. It is plain from your own showing, that if the German workmen are not better paid than I am, the fault rests with themselves; for their masters can at least afford to give higher wages; but if there is any truth in your assertions you will soon be unable to pay any wages at all.”

“If you will not work for reasonable wages”

resumes the master

“my work shall be done by apprentices.”

“But”

replies the workman

“I will not suffer you to take another apprentice; no, not one.”

“Then you are a tyrant,”

exclaims the master.

“The world is full of them”

retorts the servant. “

it is not the fault of our masters if we have not been brought down to potatoes. How long is it since you sent me to York Castle, merely because I did my best to obtain the fair price for my labour ? And do you now blame me for following your example ? Curses always come home to roost.”

“Yes”

says the master “you will find it so.”

Now there is no misrepresentation in the statements of the master manufacturer.

Every word is true

The silver platers of the Continent undersell us twenty per cent in price, and fifty in pattern.

Still the blind will not see.

In another year, perhaps, the merchants of Sheffield will import cutlery from Germany, the German scissors being already fifty per cent cheaper than ours; for the cutlers of Modlin pay only fifteen pence per stone for bread, while we pay three shillings.

Still the blind will not see.

The cutlers of Belgium make and sell for twenty pence a complete set of steel knives and forks, consisting of twenty-four pieces and the saw makers of Belgium make and sell, for one shilling and sixpence each, saws equal to ours at nearly twice the price. But then, the Belgian artisans and capitalists are not impoverished by act of parliament.

Still the blind will not see.

The Russians, in the market of New York, undersell John Barber's razors thirty per cent, Joseph Rodgers and Sons cutlery forty per cent, and cast cutlery in general, fifty per cent; for the Russian workmen, when they buy two pecks of corn, do not lose, or throw away the price of one peck; in other words, they are not compelled by law to give a shilling for eightpence.

Still the blind will not see.

“Oh, but we shall soon have our bread as cheap as our neighbours !”

Yes, when our manufactures have left the kingdom, when we have neither edgetools, nor saws, nor knives, nor scissors, nor money, to give in exchange for bread we shall have it as cheap as our neighbours have it; for capital will not stay here, for potato-profits, if it can get roast-beef profits elsewhere.

But the blind will then see.

Instead of obtaining, permanently, as they might have done, the fair average price of Europe for their wheat, say forty shillings per quarter, at their doors they must then be satisfied with two-thirds of that price, say about twenty-four shillings per quarter, at Hamburgh or Amsterdam.

Hey, then - but not for a miracle ! - let the blind see when it is too late; if they are to be a fate unto themselves; and it is written that they shall break stones on the high roads for subsistence !

But how horrifying to our souls, to our bones in the grave, will be the music of their gruntle, when after receiving eightpence for twelve hours’ hard labour, they visit the paradise of the market, and there, with their miserable earnings, buy bread - not at thirty- six pence per stone, as their victims do, but at fifteen !

“Good bye, fine fellow !”

“Who is that vagabond ?”

“Lord, Sir, he was once a great gentleman, who kept a parson of his own”.

Well, if the enemy thank God for crime and carnage, may not we thank him, if he make themselves his instruments in ridding us of a nuisauce - these suicides their own prosperity, who toil not, neither do they spin ? Have they not wickedly and foolishly destroyed more capital, in the memory of one generation, than all the lands of England would sell for at the bread tax price; and in less than twenty years produced more crime and misery than all other causes in a hundred ?

This is a subject on which the press has basely, and almost universally, shrunk from the performance of its duty, to the infinite injury of the people, and the now probably inevitable and hopeless rain of their oppressors, who seem doomed to open their eyes on the edge of a precipice, over which they must plunge precipice they must plunge headlong.

But of all the treason against all, in this matter, that of the Philosophers of Useful Knowledge has the most brass in it. They calmly ask, what the workmen would say if a conspiracy existed to raise the price of beef, butter, bread and ale ? As if that conspiracy were not the cause of all our heart-burnings, our agonies and our despair !

It is frightfully amusing, dismally instructive, to observe the deep hatred, the blasting scorn, with which the working classes of this town and their betters, as they are called, regard each other. They are all deplorably ignorant on the subjects which most nearly concern them all; but the workmen, I think, are less ignorant than their employers, in spite of the pains which have been and are taken, by the ultra-pious and intellectual, to keep them in ignorance. Will your readers believe, that the “Westminster Review” - thve book most likely to teach our workmen what they most need to know - has been, and is excluded, by an express law, from our Mechanics Library ? Such, however, is the fact; the wisest and the best have had their own way, and we are now reaping the consequences. But if our first merchants themselves have yet to learn the alphabet of political economy, can we wonder that rich and poor alike are quarrelling about effects when they ought to be removing causes ?

Nor is it less horribly amusing and instructive to observe, how completely the aristocratic leaven has leavened the whole mass of society here. Even our beggary has its castes. All try to seem rich, that they may not be thought poor, and all but the tax-fed are in danger of poverty. Perhaps the most frightful symptom of our social disease is exhibited by the masters who have been workmen, and who exceed in arrogance and insolence, by many degrees, the cab driving sons of the sons of the dunghill sprung.

Next to them in their virtuperation of the poor, are the insolvent - and their name is Legion. There must be some reason why Calamity, like an old woman, lives for ever. Hanging by a hair over the grave dug for Hope, do they vilify the all-plundered poor to conciliate the rich ? If so, the flattered and the flatterer lire worthy of each other.

“Well Mister What's-your-name. I hear you still think we must have a free trade, or a revolution”.

“Yes, I do”

“But, if we have a free trade, what will become of the landlords ?”

“They never ask what will become of you, if we are not to have a free trade Why care for people who care for nobody but themselves ?

Your wheel barrow is not a coach-and-four; it is the grapery that is in danger, not your grand epergne, plated with sham silver”.

“Well, but Mr What's-your-name, how is your trade now ?”.

“Very bad”

“ ‘Pshaw, we never prospered more than at present. Look at that new street ! what an income is rising there !”.

“That income is not rising. but sinking. More than one half of the capital expended there, is already lost for ever, in taxes on wood, bricks and bread.

“Bread ! come, that is a droll joke ! what has bread to do with building ? The money, however, must have come from somewhere”.

“True; but do you know that the poor rates of England and Wales last year increased eight per cent on the average ? There is not one county upon which to hang a quibble, not one was stationary, in not one was there a decrease; and the increase was greatest in those counties, on which depends the prosperity of all the rest. In Warwickshire, the increase was sixteen per cent - in Lancashire, twenty two. Does this look like prosperity ? A little more such prosperity will close the manufactories from one end of the kingdom to the other; and then your favourite Wetherell, will see the difference between a mob that chooses to do evil, and one that cannot avoid doing it”.

“Well, but Mister What's-your-name, you should not be ungrateful, You see, God has sent his scourge, the cholera among us”.

A few months since, a very big man in a certain great house, blamed his Majesty's Ministers for the precautions they took against that disease. Shortly afterwards it arrived at his own door, but it passed on ,and entered not; how, then, can it be of God ? Are famine and bad government your gods ?”

“Well you are a ***** fellow Mr What's- your- name. But what do you think of your Radicals now ? The men are masters”.

“Yes, Sir; but, instead of trying to establish low wages which signify low profits, had you not better try to raise profits by joining with your men, heart and hand to effect the removal of the great cause of contention ?”

“What, submit to the beggars ? I would starve first.”

“Now Mr Sneak-for-nought, if you were weighed, are you worth three-halfpence ?”

First let it be possible for you to become rich in England, and then, perhaps, you may despise the poor without being ridiculous.

“But our magnificoes are magnificoes indeed. We have, at least, half a dozen ancients of yesterday, who, rather than suffer the Reform Bill to pass, and see the rabble, as the saying is, rise in intellect and respectability, would welcome the Russian despot and his Cossacks. They openly declare they would .

“Well, Mr What's-your-name, what do you want with me ?”

“I have been writing another book and wish you to subscribe”.

“Why don’t you write a book which a gentleman could read ?”

“I am not a gentleman, Sir”.

“If you are you, are a ***** one. Put me down for a copy, however: I suppose I must patronize your vanity or whatever else you call it. But what do you think of things now ? Our ministers are not fit to make tailors of”.

“Very true, Sir”

“Would you not rather live under the Emperor Nicholas than under a government like ours ?”

“I have more than once thought I should”.

“Well we shall soon have him here, and better him than the rabble. We want a vigorous government”.

Now these magnificoes care not one straw whether their king be called William or Nicholas, but when they talk of a ‘vigorous government, they intend that the slave-whip shall be wielded by themselves; they never imagine, for a moment, that a barbarian, as unlettered as his horse, might possibly knout the holy cross on their respectable backs, from huckster to huckster and from buttock to buttock ?

I know not whether they had the pleasure and the honour to inform Lord Wharncliffe that nobody likes the Reform Bill; but, I hope, neither he nor they will for wisdom until the long maned charger of the Scythian shout over his hay in their drawing rooms, ‘Aha ! where are they ? There is no occasion for the assistance of the Moscovite to complete our destruction; England can ruin herself.

Our great merchants and manufacturers acknowledge that their business is profitless, but they cannot see that there is a cause in operation which will deprive us of our trade, even if the master wholly resign his profits, and the artizan his wages. It is vain to reason with the least unreasoning of our magnificoes; not one of them can be made to believe that he has lost the ten thousand pounds which he never possessed. It is quite impossible, they all say, to lose what does not exist. The assertion is absurd, but seems unanswerable; and so Calamity, like an old women, lives for ever”.

There is one subject on which the great vulgar of this town are nearly unanimous in opinion - I mean the necessity of an issue of small notes. They know nothing about the laws of currency; on the contrary, if put to their choice they would, I verily believe, choose Pitt's inconvertible ones. We have, however, a few reasoning maniacs, who protend to know something of the matte,r and who presume to doubt whether Pitt's Bill or Peel's Bill has done most mischief.

They audaciously enquire, how it happened that a ministry, advocating the principles of free-trade, interfered with the natural laws of currency, and consequently with the freedom of trade in money ?

They actuary impugn the wisdom of encouraging a huge and mischievous banking establishment, to the injury of all the useful banks in the nation. They stupidly imagine that there is no difference, in principle, between a one pound one pound note and a five pound note; and they wonder, with the simplicity of idiocy, why we are compelled to have the note which we do not want, and prevented from having the note which we do want.

They innocently ask why bankers should not be allowed to issue one-pound notes, payable in gold at the counter, and with no other restraint than the mutual watchfulness and jealousy of the respective issuers ! When told that if one pound notes reappear, the gold coins will disappear, they reply that if so, very few gold coins can be wanted; and that, by an issue of small notes, controlled by no law but the natural law of the case

“one pound might indeed be made to do the work of five”.

When reminded of the crisis of 1825, they ridiculously assert, that the law alone was the cause of the crisis - that law which sagaciously made one over-grown bank liable to furnish specie for the whole realm and furnish it in greatest abundance, when directly interested in furnishing none at all.

For, they say, if the thousand banks of the empire had each been liable to provide gold (not bank paper) for the payment of its own notes, all the gold wanted would have been found; and no inconvenience whatever would have been sustained by them or the community. When told that theory is but theory, they sneeringly answer, that Watt's steam engine was theory fifty years ago.

These fellows, I have little doubt, would rather give a shilling for a peck of good foreign wheat than thrice that sum for the wheat same quantity and quality grown in their own country, If I were in authority, I would hang every man of them to-morrow. I know, Gentlemen, you do not agree with me on the Currency Question - and perhaps not altogether upon other points - but yon will be glad perhaps to give insertion to these opinions of the inhabitant of a great manufacturing town.

The people to be governed well must be known well.

I have the honour to be your most obedient Servant

Ebenezer Elliott

1833