Chapter II: Part 2

Madame Floriani was almost disheartened. Had it not been for that strange little bit of principle in her, that she owed it to the society of her place to do something pleasant for it, she would have given up the attempt of amusing it in despair. But it was a matter of conscientiousness, and she did not like to be defeated. Fortunately, just at the moment when she was most dispirited, she found that she had really made some way. Her fascinating manners, her beauty, her grace, her knowledge of the world, the purity and innocence of her mind, her tact, and her imperturbable good-humour, at last had their weight. Added to which exterior circumstances, that great want of the human heart--that want of life, of pleasure, of sensation, which no ascetic folly can destroy, however it may distort--began to make itself felt. The Miss Winters and many of the younger girls ranged themselves on Madame Floriani’s side. They helped her in her soirées; they played at her games; they shared her picnics; they shot at her archery meetings, nay, they even danced to her waltzes; though Mr. Bentley was so angry that he did not speak to Miss Laura when he met her the next day, because he said, as the eldest, she ought to have known better, and was leading her younger sisters to destruction. Which made Laura cry, poor girl; but Helen called their incumbent a detestable little fellow; though she felt as if she had spoken blasphemy when she said it. Altogether Langthwaite was decidedly divided into two parties, because of the waltzing that went on at Madame Floriani’s Wednesday evenings.

No one could understand Mr. Bentley. He was the bitterest enemy Madame Floriani had; at least to judge by his conversation; and, yet, if it were so, why did he go so constantly to Whitefield House? and why, if he disapproved so highly of her conduct, did he still continue to attend her evening parties? He never missed one, by any chance, though the Miss Grandvilles and others were only waiting for his lead to follow him to open secession. And why did he turn pale when he saw her coming down the lane, and why did he turn red when he shook her hand? Miss Augusta Grandville, the youngest--she was thirty-four--who had been the beauty of the family and gave herself still the airs of a juvenile--Miss Augusta who had always been his fast ally, his most indefatigable district visitor, his head class teacher, his unfailing satellite, who would not have missed a missionary meeting nor a bible class for all the world--Miss Augusta was uneasy. She did not like these symptoms; she did not like Mr. Bentley’s leniency in still continuing to visit Madame Rosa; her voice was for war, an open declared right honest war, and she would be the incumbent’s shield-bearer. So, she said to him one day, after a peculiarly joyous evening at Whitefield House; adding what she thought an irresistible argument, or rather inducement: “If you will give up Madame Floriani, my sisters and I will follow you.” At which Mr. Bentley stammered and blushed; then sighed, and said nasally, “We must still hope for her conversion.”

Apple-cheeked Mr. Bentley was unhappy. He began even to look so: which was somewhat difficult to that insignificant countenance of his. But apple-cheeked Mr. Bentley was in love. Disguise it as he might to himself and to others, deny it, scorn and reject it--it was none the less true--he was in love with Madame Floriani. True, she was a heathen; but then her natural graces were so many! True, she was a woman of the world, an artist, a lover of frivolity--but then she was kind to the poor and so gentle in her temper! True, she was all that he most reprobated, all that he most abhorred; but then he loved her. What should he do? Marry her, and so lose his influence over the world he had governed so long? But should he lose his influence? The Grandvilles would be angry; perhaps they would leave Langthwaite--he wished they might; but he could manage all the rest. He should be rich too; very rich; and money always gives power. Mr. Bentley had no pious horror of that side of worldliness. Yes, on the whole he should be better off; even in Langthwaite. Yes, he would marry her.

These were his reasonings spread out over many days and weeks, during which time he was much at Whitefield House, often to Madame Rosa’s great inconvenience and annoyance. And indeed of late she had adopted the habit of denying herself; an offence which took all Mr. Bentley’s love to forgive. For it was a falsehood, he said; and worse--forcing her servants to lie for her. While Rosa only answered, “Mais, Monsieur l’Abbé, it is a thing seen--it is understood--everybody knows what it means when one says that Madame is not at home, or does not receive to-day.”

“In the world, that may be,” said Mr. Bentley; “but we do not understand such positions here.”

“Monsieur l’Abbé! are you not the same here as any where else? What is there so peculiarly virtuous in Langthwaite that you must make laws for yourselves against all the rest of the world, and condemn all the rest of the world? You don’t seem to think that there is any crime in pride and hatred, and self-sufficiency, and all that--only in happiness and gaiety of heart. It is monstrous!” cried Rosa, excited.

“Madame Floriani, I beg of you one favour, I have asked it before. Do not call me monsieur l’abbé, I am not a Romish priest, but a Protestant minister,” said Mr. Bentley, gravely.

“Oh, pardon!” cried Rosa, with a toss of her graceful head, and making that pretty little noise with her lips which you hear every Italian make when perplexed or dissatisfied. “Oh, pardon! It is so natural to me to call men of your profession abbés or curés, that I forget. I will try to remember.”

“At least there is one great difference between us,” said Mr. Bentley, turning very red.

“What do you mean?” asked the pretty widow tranquilly.

“Shall I tell you?” said the incumbent, in a voice that was meant to be caressing.

“If you please,” answered Rosa, nestling herself back in her easy chair, and putting up her feet on a tabouret.

“I mean,” said Mr. Bentley, after a short pause, and making a desperate rush, like a cart-horse at a fence. “I mean, that we Protestant clergy may marry, and the Romanist priest cannot.”

“Yes, that is true; and I don’t like married priests,” said Rosa quietly.

“Why, Madame Floriani?” asked the incumbent, trembling.

“From association, I suppose. It is distasteful to me.”

“Then you would not yourself?--” stammered Mr. Bentley.

“What?” and Rosa lifted up her eyes in astonishment at his voice.

“Marry a clergyman!” said Mr. Bentley, with a kind of roar; and down he came on his knees, first seizing her hand.

Madame Floriani slowly raised herself from a reclining posture. She looked at the young incumbent blushing and trembling on the ground before her; and gently drew away the hand he was holding between his own. And his own were so red! She was going to speak seriously; but--I am grieved to say it of Rosa who ought to have known better--the young man’s apple-face and awkward attitude were so ludicrous--the remembrance of all his absurd attempts at solemnity and asceticism came up so vividly in contrast with the ridicule and humiliation of his present position--it was such an unlooked-for offer, and was made so clumsily, that her gravity gave way, and she burst into a fit of laughter.

It was very wrong, and there was no excuse to be made for her; but the situation was very ridiculous--though she should not have laughed for all that. Mr. Bentley started up, seized his hat and very tight umbrella--it was a glorious day in July, but Mr. Bentley patronised umbrellas--and rushed from the house; turning round at the door to say, angrily, “Your place shall know me no more, madame!”

And so war was finally declared, and Miss Augusta Grandville was satisfied. I doubt if she would have been as content if she had known the full particulars of the casus belli. Mr. Bentley said it was the hardened and impenetrable nature of Madame Floriani--how that he had sought to convert her, and she had answered him only with mockery--and Madame Floriani said nothing. She only laughed; and drew a certain sketch, which she showed to the Winter girls under the strictest vows of secresy. Which, to their honour be it said, they religiously kept. Though, when Helen Winter met Mr. Bentley the day after she had seen that drawing, she turned so red in trying to look grave, that Laura pinched her arm, and said, “Helen! don’t be silly,” below her breath.

The Bentleyites were the strongest. In a short time Madame Rosa’s Wednesday evenings were almost deserted. All the very good avoided her and her house as if a moral plague existed around her. The Miss Grandvilles, indeed, very nearly cut her. They scarcely bowed when they saw her, and passed her very stiffly even in church. Sometimes they were afflicted with sudden short-sightedness, and did not see her at all. Miss Augusta, through being triumphant, could afford to be magnanimous; and she was a shade less distant in her manner: when met with Mr. Bentley, she was positively gracious. Then the Cantabs went back to their respective colleges, and the leaves began to fall. In the dreary autumn weather--the rain and fog and drizzling mist--that now came on, even her own adherents could not come out so often to see her; so that the sweet face grew sad in thinking of the bright sky and the warm hearts of Italy; and the joyous spirits sank in this social solitude, for want of love and sympathy to sustain it. The days were so grey and dark, she could not even paint; and in the Langthwaite lending library, were only dull histories or biographies. The mud and the rain frightened the soft half-foreigner, and kept her much within doors, moping in a dull Cumberland house, where the clouds came down so low, that they sometimes rested on the roof; and where the only visitors she saw were half-a-dozen good-hearted country girls, with not an idea amongst them beyond Berlin work or babies’ caps; which, to a woman accustomed to the best and most intellectual society of Rome, was scarcely sufficient mental distraction. What was she to do?--fight or retire? She thought of Italy, of her friends there, of the treasures of art, of the beauty, the free life, the ease, the love, the fulness of existence,--and she covered her face in her hands, while tears forced their way through her fingers. Then she thought of Mr. Bentley, and of his offer and of how he looked when he was down on his knees before her; and she laughed till she had a pain in her side. But she could not laugh for ever at Mr. Bentley and his offer, and the ennui of her life began to grow insupportable. It was reported at last that she was going away. It was Laura Winter who said so first, by Rosa’s permission, one day after she had been at Whitefield House. Madame Floriani had cried, and said that she was ill: the constant damp did not agree with her; and she had grown very thin and sallow rather than pale as she used to be; and she said, too, that she was dull; she could not bear it any longer. Her heart was Italian. It would not live in such an atmosphere; and then she had cried dreadfully, and Laura had cried too, for sympathy. As girls in the country always do.

So, Rosa owned herself beaten. Langthwaite morality had been too strong for her, and Langthwaite coldness too severe. Mr. Bentley had won the battle, and she cared now only for her retreat. She packed up her pictures and her books, her statues and her blue silk curtains; advertised Whitefield House for sale; and sold it well too. A retired sugar-broker bought it, and furnished it in gold and velvet. He had not a picture, nor a bust, nor a book; but he had hangings that cost a small fortune, and an assortment of colours that must surely please some one, as none in the whole rainbow were absent. Rosa had nothing to do with this; all she cared for, was to get out of Langthwaite, and to leave Cumberland clouds for Italian sunshine. She went to make her farewell calls. And, after having kissed all the Miss Grandvilles on both cheeks--for she was a generous, forgiving woman, with a loving heart and a perfect temper, and would not bear malice if she died for it--and after having shaken hands cordially with Mr. Bentley--who, like a foolish fat schoolboy, attempted to sulk--she turned her sweet face to the south, and left a climate that was killing her, and a people who did not love her, for the beauty and the graciousness of Italy.

But she left the seeds of discord behind her that soon bore deadly fruit. Deprived of their patroness, the Florianites sank to the ground. They were snubbed, maltreated, slighted, and all but extinguished. And when Miss Augusta Grandville at last got Mr. Bentley to consent to their marriage, not one of them was invited to the wedding. It was the day of retribution, and the Bentley faction were unsparing.

Madame Floriani did not forget her old adherents when she was established in her Roman home again; and after the Grandville marriage had turned out notoriously ill--for Miss Augusta was imperious, and Mr. Bentley obstinate--she invited the two Winter girls to Rome, and actually sent a man-servant all the way down to Langthwaite to take care of them on their journey. Which royal act nearly canonised her, though Mrs. Bentley said it was ridiculous, “And, good gracious! could not those two girls take care of themselves--if indeed they went at all, which if they had been her sisters they should not have done?”

Madame Floriani was very kind to her old friends. She took them everywhere, and fêted and petted them beyond measure. Their soft, pretty English faces, with their bright cheeks and long fair ringlets, made a sensation among the dark eyes and raven locks at Rome. The Miss Winters were decidedly the belles of their society--which is a woman’s state of paradise. Madame Floriani with her foreign notions set about marrying her young ladies. A task not very difficult; for foreigners like English wives; because they can trust them so much; and English women like foreign husbands, because they are more polite than their own countrymen. So Madame Rosa married them both--one to a count and the other to a baron. And when they went back to Langthwaite, which they did for their wedding trip, the people called them my lord and my lady, and treated them like queens. Even Mrs. Bentley yielded the past, which was a marvellous distinction, and made up for a great deal of the past. After all, then, Rosa had not entirely lost; the days of her teaching survived in her disciples, for Laura Winter settled at Langthwaite, and remodelled society there after the Floriani system. And now that Mr. Bentley was married, of course his influence was lessened; and all the young ladies who had tried to touch his heart by their austerity, now thought more of Laura’s foreign friends who came to see her, and who thought life without innocent laughter not worth the living.

MURMURS.

Why wilt thou make bright music
Give forth a sound of pain?
Why wilt thou weave fair flowers
Into a weary chain?

Why turn each cool grey shadow
Into a world of fears?
Why think the winds are wailing?
Why call the dewdrops tears?

Voices of happy Nature,
And Heaven’s sunny gleam,
Reprove thy sick heart’s fancies,
Upbraid thy foolish dream.

Listen! I will tell thee
The song Creation sings,
From humming bees in heather,
To fluttering angels’ wings:

Not alone did angels sing it
To the poor shepherds’ ear,
But the spherèd Heavens chant it,
And listening Ages hear.

Above thy poor complaining
Rises that holy lay;
When the starry night grows silent,
Then speaks the sunny day.

O, leave thy sick heart’s fancies,
And lend thy little voice
To the silver song of Glory,
That bids the World rejoice!

OUR WICKED MIS-STATEMENTS.

We meant to say no more upon the subject of the strike of Lancashire masters against Factory law, until we had seen the issue of a question raised before one of the superior courts; but the publication, by the National (or, as it should read, Lancashire) Association, of a pamphlet written by Miss Martineau, which attacks our veracity, compels us to speak, or to hazard misinterpretation of our silence. If no question of public justice were involved, we should prefer misinterpretation to the task of showing weakness in a sick lady whom we esteem. We have a respect for Miss Martineau, won by many good works she has written and many good deeds she has done, which nothing that she now can say or do will destroy; and we most heartily claim for her the respect of our readers as a thing not to be forfeited for a few hasty words, or for a scrap or two of argument too readily adopted upon partial showing.

The pamphlet in question is an essay written, as we are told in an introduction, for the Westminster Review, and declined on account of its manner of treatment. When we say that a part of its manner is to accuse this journal of “unscrupulous statements, insolence, arrogance, and cant,” and that amidst much abuse of “Mr. Dickens or his contributor”--“his partner in the disgrace,” another part of its manner is to abuse Mr. Dickens personally for “conceit, insolence, and wilful one-sidedness,” it will be seen that the editor of the Review exercised the discretion of a gentleman. We regret very much indeed that the National (or Lancashire) Association has been less discreet, and, by issuing the paper as a pamphlet at its own expense, has been less friendly to the lady than the lady wished to be to them. We are reluctantly compelled to show, that both in tone and argument Miss Martineau’s pamphlet, published by the Lancashire Association to Prevent the Fencing of Machinery, is--we will not forget her claims upon our forbearance, and we will say--a mistake.

And first, as to the tone. Using in her reply the manner pointed out by us, Miss Martineau says, that certain articles in the eleventh volume of this journal[A] put forward inaccurate statements, “in a temper and by language which convey their own condemnation.” But, lest it should be thought that what was wrong in us cannot be quite right in herself, Miss Martineau adds, on the same page, “I like courtesy as well as anybody can do; but when vicious legislation and social oppression are upheld by men in high places, the vindication of principle, and exposure of the mischief, must come before consideration of private feeling.” Now, confessing for a moment our defect of temper, might we not say, very fairly, that a writer who believes in his heart that resistance to a given law dooms large numbers of men to mutilation, and not few to horrible deaths, may honestly speak with some indignation of the resistance by which those deaths are produced; and that the same right to be angry is not equally possessed by an advocate who argues that the deaths cannot be helped, and that nobody has a right to meddle specially in any way with a mill-owner’s trade? But if any dispassionate reader of the articles to which Miss Martineau refers should pass from them to the personal invective with which they are met, he will not fail to perceive that we attacked only what we held to be an evil course of opposition to a necessary law, and abided firmly by the leading features of the case, apart from any personal consideration. We spoke plainly, as the case required, and with the earnest feeling that the case called forth; but it will be found, on reference, that in not one of these articles was an attack made upon any person whomsoever; that the chairman of the National Association was not named; that when cases of accident were necessarily cited, it was enough for us to say “a certain mill,” because we spoke of principles and not of persons. It will be found, also, that we took pains to disconnect our plain speaking upon one shortcoming; from a general disparagement of mill-owners; and that we went quite out of our way to occupy no inconsiderable part of these papers with a cordial reminder of the excellent enterprises and fine spirit that belonged to chieftains of the cotton class. Miss Martineau says for herself, that “in a matter of political morality so vital as this, there must be no compromise and no mistake.” We felt so too; but also felt that it would be a great mistake and a great compromise of principle, to intrude personalities on the discussion of it.

The history of the present pamphlet, given by its author in a letter to the “Association of Factory Occupiers,” is, that wishing to controvert the views of Mr. Horner, the Factory Inspector, she mentioned her desire to obtain the facts on both sides of the question “to a member of your Association, who visited me soon after;” and we cannot help feeling, that for the facts on both sides, which are so clearly only the statements on one side, and (we hope for her sake) for the temper too, the writer is indebted to her faith in the opinions of her friend. She thinks also, that the notes of a barrister who edited the Factory Act show “that it was high time the passionate advocates of meddling legislation should be met by opponents of such legislation who are, by position, likely to be at once dispassionate and disinterested.” To ensure this desirable result, a pamphlet written in a passion, is sent to be published and circulated by the Association directly engaged in maintaining one side of the matter, and composed of the persons most distinctly interested in its issue.

Vexed at the blindness of the barrister-at-law, who is as blind as ourselves, Miss Martineau goes on to say, in her prefatory letter, “What can instigate any lawyer, who cannot be supposed an interested party, to write such a preface as Mr. Tapping’s, it is difficult to imagine. On opening it, my eye falls at once on a false statement, which ought to destroy all the authority of the rest.” What is the “false statement” of Mr. Tapping? Mr. Tapping wrote that the manufacturers have instituted the National Association of Factory Occupiers, for the special purpose of raising a fund for defraying thereout all fines for not fencing, which may be inflicted upon members.... “This statement,” adds Miss Martineau, “is dated October second, eighteen hundred and fifty-five; whereas the Special Report of your Association, dated July, expressly declares that the Association will pay no penalties awarded under Factory Acts.” Miss Martineau’s difficulty would have vanished had she known the truth; which is this:--It was announced distinctly, by the founders of the Association, so long ago as the March previous, that they _would_ raise money to pay penalties; and it was only when they were made conscious of the danger of the ground so taken, that they forestalled the period of an annual report, and printed the so-called Special Report, in which they took pains to fence themselves off against legal accident. This report was their own stroke of policy, printed for themselves, and to be had only from their office. It was not advertised nor published; it was sent to members--it was there to use. As soon as it came into our hands, through a private source, we made our comments on it; but the date of its being written, though it has July on the cover, is the seventh of August. After it was written, it had to be printed, and it could then only have been by some unlikely chance that any tidings of it could have reached a barrister in London by the second of October. The public reports of the proceedings connected with the formation of the Association had informed him that there was a proposition to pay penalties incurred by occupiers who refused to fence. There was no other source of information open to him.

This point is of importance to us, and we for the second time place it beyond question that, before the appearance of the Special Report, the Association did combine to pay penalties, in obedience to the recommendation of a body of mill-owners who had gone to London with the hope of getting the Factory Act into discredit with the government. The recommendation was read at the meeting[B] in these distinct terms: “The deputation are of opinion, that a fund of not less than five thousand pounds should be immediately raised; and they suggest that all cases of prosecution which the committee of management are of opinion can be legitimately dealt with by the Association, shall be defended by, _and the penalties or damages paid out of, the funds of the Association_.” Whereupon it was moved, seconded, and unanimously resolved:

“That the recommendation in the report, to raise immediately a sum of not less than £5,000 be immediately carried into execution, and that an additional contribution of one shilling per nominal horse-power from each mill-occupier (making a total of two shillings) be at once called for, to enable the committee to carry out the recommendation to defend, _at the cost of the Association_, all cases of prosecution which they may consider fairly to come within the sphere of the Association.”[C]

We have only to add, that the report including these resolutions, besides receiving a wide notoriety through the newspapers, was printed and circulated by the Association itself, and that a copy of it was obtained by us before we wrote upon the subject. There can be no doubt, then, under what impressions the first members of the Association joined it, and of the accusation under which it justly lay until it thought best publicly to withdraw from a dangerous position.

On this same point, Miss Martineau is of opinion that “Mr. Dickens had better consider, for the sake of his own peace of mind, as well as the good of his neighbours, how to qualify himself for his enterprise before he takes up his next task of reform. If he must give the first place to his idealism and sensibilities, let him confine himself to fiction; and if he will put himself forward as a social reformer, let him do the only honest thing,--study both sides of the question he takes up. How far he is from having done this in the present case, a short, but not unimportant statement may show. He says, by his own pen, or his contributor’s [let us say, then, his contributor’s] ‘But the factory inspectors will proceed for penalties? Certainly they will; and then, if these gentlemen be members of the National Association of Factory Occupiers, they will have their case defended for them and their fine immediately paid.’ Yet while the writer declares his information to be drawn from the papers of the Association, he ignores the following conspicuous passages from their First Report”--the retractation then being quoted.

Now, setting aside the likelihood or unlikelihood of Mr. Dickens, to secure his peace of mind, taking ghostly advice from Miss Martineau, there is no doubt that in the said First Report the retractation was conspicuous, and that moreover, it was meant to be conspicuous; but we can hardly think it so conspicuous as to have been visible, not merely before it _was_ visible, but, as we firmly believe, even before it was so much as conceived. On the same line with the page 605 of this journal, upon which we are lectured, are inscribed the words “Household Words, July 28, 1855.” The number dated on that day was, in the usual manner, published three days previously, and issued in Manchester on the twenty-sixth of July, but the report which we failed to do the honest thing by citing was not written--as we find by the date against the chairman’s signature--until the seventh of August! When it reached us in September we at once (in our two hundred and eighty-fifth number) made public its purport; but we did not say what we may now say, namely, that there came with it a remark which we believe to be true, and which dates certainly go far to justify: that the Special Report--a thing not contemplated in the rules--was actually suggested by our comments,--that our journal, containing a wide publication of the illegal position of the recusant mill-owners, having reached Manchester on the twenty-sixth of July, was considered by the committee of the Association to necessitate retreat to safer ground by means of a Special Report, and that by the seventh of August, the report was completed and signed; after which, it has been further suggested to us, that July was put upon the cover, not without a hope that somebody might be misled into believing that it had really been produced several weeks sooner than it was. Be that as it may, we should not have supposed that the Association, for the sake of passing a so easily detected deception on the public, would have imperilled the reputation of an honourable lady by leaving uncorrected in her pamphlet a flagrant error, of which it could by no conceivable chance have been ignorant, and by suffering it to go forth, headed in small capitals, MIS-STATEMENTS IN HOUSEHOLD WORDS.

We turn with sorrow to the other contents of the pamphlet. As the pamphlet of the Association we are bound to show why it can only damage the cause of the Association with the government and with the public; we would have wholly spared the writer our present exposure of her mistake, if we could.

The pamphlet begins with some calm wise words about the war, by which the reader is prepared to expect a very different treatment of the immediate topic in hand than that which it is destined to receive. No sooner is the subject touched than the false keynote is struck, and of all persons in the world, it is Miss Martineau whom we find echoing the exaggerated lamentations of an injured interest. “The issue,” we are told, “to which the controversy is now brought, is that of the supersession of either the textile manufactures, or the existing factory law. The two cannot longer co-exist.” This is one of those remarkable predictions of which we are beginning, by a very long national experience, to understand the value. If the cry be not ridiculous enough in the form just quoted, how does it look thus--for we have it repeated afterwards in this more piquant way,--“It seems to be agreed by the common sense of all concerned who have any common sense, that our manufactures must cease, or the factory law, as expounded by Mr. Horner must give way.” We believe it was Mr. Bounderby who was always going to throw his property into the Atlantic, and we have heard of Miss Martineau’s clients being indignant against Mr. Bounderby as a caricature. And yet this looks very like him!

The pamphlet then adopts the precise tone of the mill-owners in speaking of the accidents as chiefly “of so slight a nature that they would not be noticed anywhere but in a special registration like that provided by the Factory Act. For instance, seven hundred are cases of cut fingers. Any worker who rubs off a bit of skin from finger or thumb, or sustains the slightest cut which interferes with the spinning process for a single day, has the injury registered under the act.” In the next place the yearly deaths by preventable accidents from machinery, which number about forty, are reduced to eleven, by excluding all machinery except the actual shafts, and throughout the pamphlet afterwards the number eleven, so obtained, is used--once in a way that has astonished us, as it will certainly surprise our readers. Even lower down on the same page the writer slips into the statement, that there are only twelve deaths a-year by “mill-accidents from all kinds of factory machinery.” We wish it were so; but in the last report, published before we made our comments, there were twenty-one slain in six months; one hundred and fifty had, in six months, lost parts of their right hands; one hundred and thirty, parts of their left hands; twenty-eight lost arms or legs; two hundred and fifty had bones broken; a hundred had suffered fracture or serious damage to the head and face.

In the report for the half-year next following, the deaths by machinery in factories were eighteen; one hundred and sixty-one lost the right hand, or, more generally, parts of it; one hundred and eighteen the left hand, or parts of it; two hundred and twenty had bones broken. Thirty-nine, therefore, was the number of deaths in the year last reported (a fresh half-yearly report is at present due), and there was no lack of accidents more serious than the “rubbing off a bit of skin.” Of the factory accidents, we are also told, not five per cent. are owing to machinery. If so, great indeed must be the number of the whole! But it is solely of the accidents arising from machinery that we from the first have spoken, since upon them only the law is founded which we wish to see maintained.

So far as we can understand the figures of the pamphlet, they arise from the ingenuity of some friend, who has eliminated from the rest those accidents arising out of actual contact with a shaft, and then put this part for the whole. But the law says, “That every fly-wheel directly connected with the steam-engine or water-wheel, or other mechanical power, whether in the engine-house or not, and every part of a steam-engine and water-wheel, and every hoist or teagle, near to which children or young persons are liable to pass or be employed, and all parts of the mill-gearing in a factory shall be securely fenced.” The whole controversy is about obedience to this law, and the consequences of resistance to it. The most horrible and fatal accidents are those connected most immediately with the shafts; the unfenced shafts are the essential type of the whole question, and the fencing of them implies necessarily the general consent to obey the law. For this reason we have, no doubt, in common with other people, frequently represented by such a phrase as unfenced shafts, the whole fact of resistance to the law, without any suspicion of the ingenious turn that might be given to the question on this ground, by an Association not ashamed to employ sleight of hand in argument.

And now that we discuss the figures of the pamphlet, we turn to another of the strange pages, headed Mis-statements in Household Words. We make, it is said, the extraordinary statement, that these deadly shafts “mangle or murder, every year, two thousand human creatures; and considering,” the writer adds, “the magnitude of this exaggeration (our readers will remember that the average of deaths by factory shafts is twelve per year) it is no wonder that he finds fault with figures when used in reply to charges so monstrous. When the manufacturers produce facts in answer to romance,” we proceed, it is said, “to beg the question as usual; in this passage: ‘As for ourselves, we admit freely, that it never did occur to us that it was possible to justify, by arithmetic, a thing unjustifiable by any code of morals, civilised or savage.’”

By that admission we abide--and by our figures we abide. This specimen of our mis-statements, of our “begging the question as usual,” is a yet more curious example of a question begged by the accusers, than that other proof of dishonesty which consisted in our not having read a document several weeks before it came into existence. We said, in the passage above cited, that the deadly shafts “mangled or murdered” so many persons a-year; that by the machinery left unfenced in defiance of the law, two thousand persons were mutilated or killed. The writer of the pamphlet has been led to beg wholly the addition of the mutilated on our side, and to set against it, on her side, only the killed, and not all those: only a selection from them of the persons _actually killed on shafts_; advantage being taken of the use of the phrase, deadly shafts, to represent machinery in unfenced mills. And that it is really meant, in the writer’s own phrase to “ignore” the fact that we counted the killed, is evident from a succeeding sentence. “If Mr. Dickens, or his contributor, assigns his number of two thousand a-year, his opponents may surely cite theirs--of three-and-a-half per cent. or twelve in a-year.” Our number, certainly, was wrong; but it erred only by under-statement. We might have said nearly four thousand, without falsehood. The number of deaths and mutilations together arising from machinery in factories, has been two thousand, not in a year, but half a year. Because we did not wish to urge the slight cuts, and the few scarcely avoidable mishaps which did not belong fairly to the case as we were stating it, we struck off some two thousand from the number that we might have given.

Our readers may now form some estimate of the strange weakness and unreasonableness of the pamphlet, issued by the Factory Association to refute us. There is not one strong point in it that affects the question; there is only one that seems strong, and to that the writer had in her own hands a most conclusive answer. Mr. Fairbairn, in December 1853, reported against the practicability or safety of fencing horizontal shafts. The answer to this is repeatedly contained in the Inspector’s reports for the half-year ending on the thirtieth of April last, cited at the head of Miss Martineau’s pamphlet. Their joint report states, “that a considerable amount of horizontal shafting under seven feet from the floor has been securely cased over in various parts of the country, and that strap-hooks and other contrivances for the prevention of accidents from horizontal shafts above seven feet from the floor, have been and are now being extensively employed in all our districts, excepting in that of Lancashire, and in places mainly influenced by that example.” And Mr. Howell is to be found reporting that in the west of England much new fencing had been done, and that the experiment had “been tried on a sufficiently large scale, and for a sufficiently long period to prove the fallacy of the apprehensions that were expressed, as to the practicability and success of fencing securely horizontal shafts. It has proved also that the doing so is unaccompanied by danger.” He gives illustration of this from the west of England, adding, however, that “in many instances, and more especially in the cotton factories in that part of my district which is situate in Cheshire and on the borders of Lancashire, little or nothing has yet been done, with some few conspicuous and honourable exceptions, to satisfy the requirements of the law in this respect.”

The pamphlet adds the Manchester cry of Fire! and quotes the agent of a fire-office, who gave it as his opinion, that if mills had boxed machinery they ought to pay increased insurance, because “away they would go without any possibility of salvation.” The agent of a fire-office, as we all know, may be the butcher, the baker, or the candlestick-maker, sage or not sage; and to judge by his language in this particular case, not sage. Now, however, when a very large number of mills out of Lancashire are habitually working fenced machinery, will the National Association be so candid as to tell us--not what some local agent has said, but what the fire-offices do?

Mr. Fairbairn’s authority against rectangular hooks is quoted in the pamphlet. He says they will increase the danger--would pull all about the peoples’ ears. But do they? In the last report which the writer represents as having been consulted for the other side of the question, the inspectors jointly state that “in none of our districts has any accident come to our knowledge from the coiling of a strap round a horizontal shaft where strap-hooks have been put up in the manner recommended.” And Mr. Redgrave reports thus from Yorkshire: “With respect to one of the precautions which is considered of great value in Yorkshire and other parts of my district--I mean the strap-hook, for preventing the lapping of the strap upon the revolving shaft; the fact that not an accident has been reported to me during the last six months as having been caused by the lapping of a strap upon a shaft, nor by one of the many thousand strap-hooks which have been fixed up in a very large number of factories, more or less in the different departments of fifteen hundred out of two thousand factories which constitute my district, in a large proportion of which, moreover, they have existed for many years, may be taken as conclusive evidence that the strap-hook does obviate the lapping of the strap, thereby preventing accidents, and does not increase the danger of the shaft and its liability to cause accidents.”

Our evidence does not end here, but we must have regard to space. We pass rapidly over the statements in the pamphlet that the men who die, die by their own indiscretion, or, as Miss Martineau expresses it, “climb up to the death which is carefully removed out of their natural reach.” This climbing up to death will occur to any sane man or woman, perhaps, as being excessively probable, but it is not true; very few deaths are the result of gross and active carelessness: some arise from a momentary inadvertence; but the reports of inquests constantly sent to us show that at least half who die, can in no fair sense be said to deserve any blame. The pamphlet itself quotes inadvertently the statement of an engineer, that “there should be a ready means of putting on the strap when the mill is in motion;” doing this is a common cause of death. Again, one man is seized by a loose end of his neckcloth, another dragged to his death out of a cart, because a cloth in it is accidentally blown by the wind against machinery.

Need we do more than allude to such arguments as, that if law compels the fencing of machinery (which while in motion thus can seize the passive stander-by) it ought to compel windows to be barred, because people can throw themselves out of them, and trees to be fenced, because boys can climb up and tumble down? If we take thought for the operative, working in the midst of dangerous machinery, are we, it is asked, to legislate “for every drunken vagabond who lies down in the track--every deaf old man who chooses the railway for his walk?” Need we answer such preposterous inquiries?

We have maintained that it is strictly within the province of the law to protect life, and to prohibit any arrangements by which it is shown that the lives of people in pursuit of their lawful and useful work, are without necessity endangered. Preventable accidents of every kind we have always declared it to be the duty of the legislature to prevent. We are told that Common Law suffices for all cases. It is hardly worth while to spend time in showing that it does not, and cannot provide for these cases. Common Law is the law as established for a given and considerable length of time, and it arose out of the fusion of much special legislation. It knew nothing of steam-engines, and it is impossible that it should have foreseen such cases as arise out of the new systems of railway and factory. Common Law will not make factories safe working places for the operative; special consideration must be given to the subject. When we learn, as Sir John Kincaid reports from Scotland, that a sufficient fencing of three hundred and fifty feet of horizontal shafting cost one factory only six pounds; that the casing of two hundred and fifty-one feet of shafting above seven feet from the floor--more precaution than was absolutely needed--cost another factory only eight pounds four; that a Paisley factory cased three hundred and twenty-four feet of such shafting most efficiently with block iron casing, for no more than sixteen pounds four, we refuse to listen to the cry of Mills on Fire--Ruinous Expense--Manufactures must cease--Fatal Principles--Property going to be pitched into the Atlantic--and simply wait until the recusant Lancashire Mill-owners have done calling names and litigating, and have learnt that if they will not voluntarily take the necessary steps to prevent the more horrible sort of accidents in their mills, they must take them by compulsion.

Miss Martineau suggests the impropriety of any discussion until doubt has been removed by the settlement of a point raised before the Court of Queen’s Bench. The whole matter is to remain in abeyance--things are to go on as they are, and there are to be no convictions--while the point mainly at issue is awaiting the decision of the higher courts. Let us see what this means. The point at issue, as the pamphlet rightly states, is the interpretation of the words “securely fenced;” and it was agreed some time ago that in the case of a certain prosecution for unfenced machinery, the question should go before the Queen’s Bench to determine whether machinery could be said to be otherwise than securely fenced when no accident could be shown to have been caused by it; whether the fact that such machinery had led to deaths and mutilations in other mills proved it, or did not prove it, to be insecure in a mill where, as yet, no blood had been shed. The question so raised is an obvious quibble, and even the known uncertainty of the law could scarcely throw a doubt over the issue of a reference to its supreme courts. Meanwhile the issue was raised. The great purpose and business of the Association seemed to be to raise it. One, at least, of the inspectors stood aside from the disputed class of prosecutions till the doubt so raised should be definitively settled. We ourselves now fall under reproof for not solemnly and silently awaiting the decision of the question, whether securely fenced means so fenced as that an accident shall not have happened, or so fenced that an accident shall not arise. We now learn upon inquiry, that while we have been waiting, and the Association has been claiming a twice-pending judicial decision, we find--what do our readers suppose?--that no case whatever awaits the opinion of the Judges!

We believe that we have now answered all the accusations laid against ourselves in Miss Martineau’s pamphlet. There is one citation of “actual resolutions of the Association,” side by side with our summary of their purport, presented as a “conviction of the humanity-monger,” of which we need say nothing, because it cannot fail to suggest to any person only moderately prejudiced, that our summary is very close and accurate indeed.

We will pursue the pamphlet no further, having set ourselves right. There is not an argument, or statement, or allusion in it that is not open to rebuke. It fails even in such small details as when a professor of Literature with a becoming sense of its uses, and that Professor the authoress of Forest and Game Law Tales, and of many volumes of Stories on Political Economy, should gracefully and becomingly think it as against Mr. Dickens, “pity, as a matter of taste, that a writer of fiction should choose topics in which political philosophy and morality were involved.” It fails when accusing us of “burlesque” and “irony,” because we put plain things “in the palpable way which a just-minded writer would scrupulously avoid,” and have, God knows, with a heart how full of earnestness, tried to make the suffering perceived that must have been involved in all these accidents. It fails even when against this “philo-operative cant,” its writer must needs quote Sydney Smith. “We miss Sydney Smith, it is said, in times like these--in every time when a contagious folly, and especially a folly of cant and selfish sensibility, is in question. This very case, in a former phase came under his eye”--and then we have two notes of what he said against the Ten Hours’ Bill: sayings with which, it happens, that the writer of these papers perfectly agrees. When a case really parallel to this, affecting, not the laws of labour, but the carrying on of trade in a way leading sometimes to cruel deaths came under his eye, we did not miss Sydney Smith indeed! The author of the paper upon climbing boys was the last person for Miss Martineau to quote. “We come now,” begins one of his paragraphs, “to burning little chimney-sweepers;” and the same paragraph ends by asking, “What is a toasted child, compared to the agonies of the mistress of the house with a deranged dinner?” Palpably put, and with a bitter irony, we fear!

We have done. We hope we have not been induced to exceed the bounds of temperate and moderate remonstrance, or to prostitute our part in Literature to Old Bailey pleading and passionate scolding. We thoroughly forgive Miss Martineau for having strayed into such unworthy paths under the guidance of her anonymous friend, and we blot her pamphlet out of our remembrance.

COMING SOUTH A CENTURY AGO.

Many amusing books (and many dull ones) come into existence through the clubs which have been following the fashion of the Bannatyne in Edinburgh, the Maitland in Glasgow, and the Camden and Grainger in England. The northern clubs have indulged the most in what the French call luxurious editions. They have benefited by the notion that each subscriber will, in addition to his very moderate subscription, sooner or later print a book for them at his own charge. And when a duke presents to one of these societies the Chartulary of Melrose at the cost of a thousand guineas, and an earl having paid as much for the printing of the Chartulary of Paisley goes on to produce four or five quartos of the Analecta of Woodrow, the example of liberality is set upon no trifling scale. As gifts, though not to be refused, are not always well chosen, volumes that are scarcely worth the pains of reading do occasionally appear. This by the way. We have been reading without any sense of pain one of the publications of the Maitland club--a piece of history relating to a family at present extinct in the male line, the Stewarts of Coltness, in Lanarkshire. Authorship ran in their blood. One of their family wrote a domestic narrative in the year sixteen hundred, which was the main source of a genealogical history of the race drawn up by a Sir Archibald one hundred and seventy-three years later. There were cavalier Coltnesses, and there was a Gospel Coltness; but the Coltness to whom we mean to pay attention in this place is a lady--a literary Coltness, married unto Mr. Calderwood of Polton, in Mid-Lothian. This clever dame descended into England, exactly one hundred years ago, and passed over Holland, on a journey to her brother, a political exile at Aix-la-Chapelle. She wrote a journal, and regarding England through a Scotch mist of her own, took notes in a shrewd way; sometimes canny, and sometimes (as regards the relative merits of the north and south), of a not wholly unquestionable kind. This lady had been bred up in the family of a distinguished crown lawyer; was accustomed to the best society in Scotland; was in her own family commander-in-chief over an amiable husband; and, if we may venture to state so much, forty years of age, when she, for the first time in her life, came south.

Mrs. Calderwood and her husband travelled from Edinburgh to London in their own post-chaise, attended by a serving-man on horseback with pistols in his holsters and a broadsword in his belt. There was a case of pistols in the carriage, more fit, perhaps, for the use of the lady than of the good-natured laird; who, being a man of accomplishments, took with him a pocket Horace to beguile the hours of wayfaring. They set out on the third of June; and, being on the road each day for twelve or fourteen hours, arrived in London on the evening of the tenth.