Chapter IV: Slavery in the British Workshops (2)

"'Well, if yer won't stand a pot,' quoth the tall man, 'I will,
that's all, and blow temperance. 'A short life and a merry one,'
says the tailor—

The ministers talk a great deal about port,
And they makes Cape wine very dear,
But blow their hi's if ever they tries
To deprive a poor cove of his beer.

Here, Sam, run to the Cock and Bottle for a pot of half-and-half
to my score.'

"A thin, pale lad jumped up and vanished, while my tormentor
turned to me:

"I say, young 'un, do you know why we're nearer heaven here than
our neighbours?'

"'I shouldn't have thought so,' answered I with a _naïveté_ which
raised a laugh, and dashed the tall man for a moment.

"'Yer don't? then I'll tell yer. Acause we're atop of the house
in the first place, and next place yer'll die here six months
sooner nor if yer worked in the room below. A'n't that logic and
science, Orator?' appealing to Crossthwaite.

"'Why?' asked I.

"'Acause you get all the other floors' stinks up here, as well
as your own. Concentrated essence of man's flesh, is this here
as you're a-breathing. Cellar work-room we calls Rheumatic Ward,
because of the damp. Ground-floor's, Fever Ward—them as don't
get typhus gets dysentery, and them as don't get dysentery
gets typhus—your nose 'd tell yer why if you opened the back
windy. First floor's Ashmy Ward—don't you hear 'um now through
the cracks in the boards, a-puffing away like a nest of young
locomotives? And this here more august and upper-crust cockloft
is the Conscrumptive Hospital. First you begins to cough, then
you proceed to expectorate—spittoons, as you see, perwided free
gracious for nothing—fined a kivarten if you spits on the floor—

Then your cheeks they grow red, and your nose it grows thin,
And your bones they sticks out, till they comes through
your skin:

and then, when you've sufficiently covered the poor dear
shivering bare backs of the hairystocracy,

Die, die, die,
Away you fly,
Your soul is in the sky!

as the hinspired Shakspeare wittily remarks.'

"And the ribald lay down on his back, stretched himself out, and
pretended to die in a fit of coughing, which last was alas! no
counterfeit, while poor I, shocked and bewildered, let my tears
fall fast upon my knees.

"'Fine him a pot!' roared one, 'for talking about kicking the
bucket. He's a nice young man to keep a cove's spirits up, and
talk about "a short life and a merry one." Here comes the heavy.
Hand it here to take the taste of that fellow's talk out of my
mouth.'

"'Well, my young 'un,' recommenced my tormentor, 'and how do you
like your company?'

"'Leave the boy alone,' growled Crossthwaite: 'don't you see he's
crying?'

"'Is that any thing good to eat? Give me some on it, if it
is—it'll save me washing my face.' And he took hold of my hair
and pulled my head back.

"'I'll tell you what, Jemmy Downes,' said Crossthwaite, in a
voice that made him draw back, 'if you don't drop that, I'll give
you such a taste of my tongue as shall turn you blue.'

"'You'd better try it on, then. Do—only just now—if you please.'

"'Be quiet, you fool!' said another. 'You're a pretty fellow to
chaff the orator. He'll slang you up the chimney afore you can
get your shoes on.'

"'Fine him a kivarten for quarrelling,' cried another; and
the bully subsided into a minute's silence, after a _sotto
voce_—'Blow temperance, and blow all Chartists, say I!' and then
delivered himself of his feelings in a doggrel song:

Some folks leads coves a dance,
With their pledge of temperance,
And their plans for donkey sociation;
And their pocket-fulls they crams
By their patriotic flams,
And then swears 'tis for the good of the nation.

But I don't care two inions
For political opinions,
While I can stand my heavy and my quartern;
For to drown dull care within,
In baccy, beer, and gin,
Is the prime of a working-tailor's fortin!

"'There's common sense for you now; hand the pot here.'

"I recollect nothing more of that day, except that I bent
myself to my work with assiduity enough to earn praises from
Crossthwaite. It was to be done, and I did it. The only virtue
I ever possessed (if virtue it be) is the power of absorbing my
whole heart and mind in the pursuit of the moment, however dull
or trivial, if there be good reason why it should be pursued at
all.

"I owe, too, an apology to my readers for introducing all this
ribaldry. God knows it is as little to my taste as it can be to
theirs, but the thing exists; and those who live, if not by,
yet still beside such a state of things, ought to know what the
men are like, to whose labour, ay, life-blood, they owe their
luxuries. They are 'their brothers' keepers,' let them deny it as
they will."

As a relief from misery, the wretched workmen generally resort to intoxicating liquors, which, however, ultimately render them a hundredfold more miserable. In "Alton Locke," this is illustrated with an almost fearful power, in the life and death of the tailor Downes. After saving the wretched man from throwing himself into the river, Alton Locke accompanies him to a disgusting dwelling, in Bermondsey. The story continues:—

"He stopped at the end of a miserable blind alley, where a dirty
gas-lamp just served to make darkness visible, and show the
patched windows and rickety doorways of the crazy houses, whose
upper stories were lost in a brooding cloud of fog; and the pools
of stagnant water at our feet: and the huge heap of cinders which
filled up the waste end of the alley—a dreary black, formless
mound, on which two or three spectral dogs prowled up and down
after the offal, appearing and vanishing like dark imps in and
out of the black misty chaos beyond.

"The neighbourhood was undergoing, as it seemed, 'improvements,'
of that peculiar metropolitan species which consists in pulling
down the dwellings of the poor, and building up rich men's houses
instead; and great buildings, within high temporary palings,
had already eaten up half the little houses; as the great fish
and the great estates, and the great shopkeepers, eat up the
little ones of their species—by the law of competition, lately
discovered to be the true creator and preserver of the universe.
There they loomed up, the tall bullies, against the dreary sky,
looking down with their grim, proud, stony visages, on the misery
which they were driving out of one corner, only to accumulate and
intensify it in another.

"The house at which we stopped was the last in the row; all its
companions had been pulled down; and there it stood, leaning
out with one naked ugly side into the gap, and stretching out
long props, like feeble arms and crutches, to resist the work of
demolition.

"A group of slatternly people were in the entry, talking loudly,
and as Downes pushed by them, a woman seized him by the arm.

"'Oh! you unnatural villain!—To go away after your drink, and
leave all them poor dead corpses locked up, without even letting
a body go in to stretch them out!'

"'And breeding the fever, too, to poison the whole house!'
growled one.

"'The relieving-officer's been here, my cove,' said another; 'and
he's gone for a peeler and a search-warrant to break open the
door, I can tell you!'

"But Downes pushed past unheeding, unlocked a door at the end
of the passage, thrust me in, locked it again, and then rushed
across the room in chase of two or three rats, who vanished into
cracks and holes.

"And what a room! A low lean-to with wooden walls, without a
single article of furniture; and through the broad chinks of the
floor shone up as it were ugly glaring eyes, staring at us. They
were the reflections of the rushlight in the sewer below. The
stench was frightful—the air heavy with pestilence. The first
breath I drew made my heart sink, and my stomach turn. But I
forgot every thing in the object which lay before me, as Downes
tore a half-finished coat off three corpses laid side by side on
the bare floor.

"There was his little Irish wife;—dead—and naked—the wasted
white limbs gleamed in the lurid light; the unclosed eyes stared,
as if reproachfully, at the husband whose drunkenness had brought
her there to kill her with the pestilence; and on each side of
her a little, shrivelled, impish, child-corpse—the wretched man
had laid their arms round the dead mother's neck—and there they
slept, their hungering and wailing over at last for ever: the
rats had been busy already with them—but what matter to them now?

"'Look!' he cried; 'I watched 'em dying! Day after day I saw
the devils come up through the cracks, like little maggots and
beetles, and all manner of ugly things, creeping down their
throats; and I asked 'em, and they said they were the fever
devils.'

"It was too true; the poisonous exhalations had killed them.
The wretched man's delirium tremens had given that horrible
substantiality to the poisonous fever gases.

"Suddenly Downes turned on me almost menacingly. 'Money! money! I
want some gin!'

"I was thoroughly terrified—and there was no shame in feeling
fear, locked up with a madman far my superior in size and
strength, in so ghastly a place. But the shame, and the folly
too, would have been in giving way to my fear; and with a
boldness half assumed, half the real fruit of excitement and
indignation at the horrors I beheld, I answered—

"'If I had money, I would give you none. What do you want with
gin? Look at the fruits of your accursed tippling. If you had
taken my advice, my poor fellow,' I went on, gaining courage as I
spoke, 'and become a water-drinker, like me'—

"'Curse you and your water-drinking! If you had had no water to
drink or wash with for two years but that—that,' pointing to the
foul ditch below—'If you had emptied the slops in there with one
hand, and filled your kettle with the other'—

"'Do you actually mean that that sewer is your only drinking
water?'

"'Where else can we get any? Everybody drinks it; and you shall
too—you shall!' he cried, with a fearful oath, 'and then see if
you don't run off to the gin-shop, to take the taste of it out of
your mouth. Drink! and who can help drinking, with his stomach
turned with such hell-broth as that—or such a hell's blast as
this air is here, ready to vomit from morning till night with the
smells? I'll show you. You shall drink a bucket-full of it, as
sure as you live, you shall.'

"And he ran out of the back door, upon a little balcony, which
hung over the ditch.

"I tried the door, but the key was gone, and the handle
too. I beat furiously on it, and called for help. Two gruff
authoritative voices were heard in the passage.

"'Let us in; I'm the policeman!'

"'Let me out, or mischief will happen!'

"The policeman made a vigorous thrust at the crazy door; and just
as it burst open, and the light of his lantern streamed into the
horrible den, a heavy splash was heard outside.

"'He has fallen into the ditch!'

"'He'll be drowned, then, as sure as he's a born man,' shouted
one of the crowd behind.

"We rushed out on the balcony. The light of the policeman's
lantern glared over the ghastly scene—along the double row of
miserable house-backs, which lined the sides of the open tidal
ditch—over strange rambling jetties, and balconies, and sleeping
sheds, which hung on rotting piles over the black waters, with
phosphorescent scraps of rotten fish gleaming and twinkling out
of the dark hollows, like devilish gravelights—over bubbles
of poisonous gas, and bloated carcases of dogs, and lumps of
offal, floating on the stagnant olive-green hell-broth—over the
slow sullen rows of oily ripple which were dying away into the
darkness far beyond, sending up, as they stirred, hot breaths
of miasma—the only sign that a spark of humanity, after years
of foul life, had quenched itself at last in that foul death. I
almost fancied that I could see the haggard face staring up at me
through the slimy water; but no—it was as opaque as stone."

Downes had been a "sweater," and before his death was a "sweater's slave."

When the comparatively respectable workshop in which Alton Locke laboured was broken up, and the workmen were told by the heartless employer that he intended to give out work, for those who could labour at home, these toil-worn men held a meeting, at which a man named John Crossthwaite, thus spoke for his oppressed and degraded class:—

"We were all bound to expect this. Every working tailor must come
to this at last, on the present system; and we are only lucky in
having been spared so long. You all know where this will end—in
the same misery as fifteen thousand out of twenty thousand of
our class are enduring now. We shall become the slaves, often
the bodily prisoners, of Jews, middlemen, and sweaters, who draw
their livelihood out of our starvation. We shall have to face, as
the rest have, ever-decreasing prices of labour, ever-increasing
profits made out of that labour by the contractors who will
employ us—arbitrary fines, inflicted at the caprice of
hirelings—the competition of women, and children, and starving
Irish—our hours of work will increase one-third, our actual pay
decrease to less than one-half; and in all this we shall have no
hope, no chance of improvement in wages, but ever more penury,
slavery, misery, as we are pressed on by those who are sucked by
fifties—almost by hundreds—yearly, out of the honourable trade
in which we were brought up, into the infernal system of contract
work, which is devouring our trade and many others, body and
soul. Our wives will be forced to sit up night and day to help
us—our children must labour from the cradle, without chance of
going to school, hardly of breathing the fresh air of heaven—our
boys as they grow up must turn beggars or paupers—our daughters,
as thousands do, must eke out their miserable earnings by
prostitution. And, after all, a whole family will not gain what
one of us had been doing, as yet, single-handed. You know there
will be no hope for us. There is no use appealing to government
or Parliament. I don't want to talk politics here. I shall keep
them for another place. But you can recollect as well as I can,
when a deputation of us went up to a member of Parliament—one
that was reputed a philosopher, and a political economist,
and a liberal—and set before him the ever-increasing penury
and misery of our trade and of those connected with it; you
recollect his answer—that, however glad he would be to help us,
it was impossible—he could not alter the laws of nature—that
wages were regulated by the amount of competition among the men
themselves, and that it was no business of government, or any
one else, to interfere in contracts between the employer and
employed, that those things regulated themselves by the laws of
political economy, which it was madness and suicide to oppose.
He may have been a wise man. I only know that he was a rich one.
Every one speaks well of the bridge which carries him over. Every
one fancies the laws which fill his pockets to be God's laws. But
I say this: If neither government nor members of Parliament can
help us, we must help ourselves. Help yourselves, and Heaven will
help you. Combination among ourselves is the only chance. One
thing we can do—sit still.'

"'And starve!' said some one."

Crossthwaite is represented as having preferred to endure want rather than work under the sweating system. But there are few men who possess such spirit and determination. Men with families are compelled, by considering those who are dependent upon them, to work for whatever prices the masters choose to pay. They are free labourers—if they do not choose to work—they are perfectly free—to starve!

The government took the initiative in the sweating system. It set the example by giving the army and navy clothes to contractors, and taking the lowest tenders. The police clothes, the postmen's clothes, the convict's clothes, are all contracted for by sweaters and sub-sweaters, till government work is the very last, lowest resource to which a poor, starved-out wretch betakes himself, to keep body and soul together. Thus is profit made from the pauperism of men, the slavery of children, and the prostitution of women, in Great Britain.

Some years ago the following announcement appeared in the Village Gazette:—

"Peter Moreau and his wife are dead, aged twenty-five years. Too
much work has killed them and many besides. We say—Work like a
negro, like a galley-slave: we ought to say—Work like a freeman."

Work like negro slaves, indeed! There is no such work in America, even among the slaves; all day long, from Monday morning till Saturday night, week after week, and year after year, till the machine is worn out. American slaves and convicts in New South Wales are fat and happy, compared with the labourers of England. It frequently happens that Englishmen commit crimes for the purpose of becoming galley-slaves in New South Wales. They do not keep their purpose secret; they declare it loudly with tears and passionate exclamations to the magistrate who commits them for trial, to the jury who try them, and to the judge who passes sentence on them. This is published in the newspapers, but so often that it excites no particular comment.

The parish apprentices are the worst-treated slaves in the world. They are at the mercy of their masters and mistresses during their term of apprenticeship, without protectors, and without appeal against the most cruel tyranny. In the reign of George III., one Elizabeth Brownrigg was hanged for beating and starving to death her parish apprentices. In 1831, another woman, Esther Hibner by name, was hanged in London for beating and starving to death a parish apprentice. Two instances of punishment, for thousands of cases of impunity!

"The evidence in the case of Esther Hibner proved that a number
of girls, pauper apprentices, were employed in a workshop; that
their victuals consisted of garbage, commonly called hog's-wash,
and that of this they never had enough to stay the pains of
hunger; that they were kept half-naked, half-clothed in dirty
rags; that they slept in a heap on the floor, amid filth and
stench; that they suffered dreadfully from cold; that they were
forced to work so many hours together that they used to fall
asleep while at work; that for falling asleep, for not working
as hard as their mistress wished, they were beaten with sticks,
with fists, dragged by the hair, dashed on to the ground,
trampled upon, and otherwise tortured; that they were found, all
of them more or less, covered with chilblains, scurvy, bruises,
and wounds; that one of them died of ill-treatment; and—mark
this—that the discovery of that murder was made in consequence
of the number of coffins which had issued from Esther Hibner's
premises, and raised the curiosity of her neighbours. For this
murder Mrs. Hibner was hanged; but what did she get for all the
other murders which, referring to the number of coffins, we have
a right to believe that she committed? She got for each £10.
That is to say, whenever she had worked, starved, beaten, dashed
and trampled a girl to death, she got another girl to treat in
the same way, with £10 for her trouble. She carried on a trade
in the murder of parish apprentices; and if she had conducted
it with moderation, if the profit and custom of murder had not
made her grasping and careless, the constitution, which protects
the poor as well as the rich, would never have interfered with
her. The law did not permit her to do what she liked with her
apprentices, as Americans do with their slaves; oh no. Those
free-born English children were merely bound as apprentices, with
their own consent, under the eye of the magistrate, in order
that they might learn a trade and become valuable subjects. But
did the magistrate ever visit Mrs. Hibner's factory to see how
she treated the free-born English girls? never. Did the parish
officers? no. Was there any legal provision for the discovery of
the woman's trade in murder? none."

"You still read on the gates of London poorhouses, 'strong,
healthy boys and girls,' &c.; and boys or girls you may obtain
by applying within, as many as you please, free-born, with the
usual fee. Having been paid for taking them, and having gone
through the ceremonies of asking their consent and signing bonds
before a magistrate, you may make them into sausages, for any
thing the constitution will do to prevent you. If it should be
proved that you kill even one of them, you will be hanged; but
you may half-starve them, beat them, torture them, any thing
short of killing them, with perfect security; and using a little
circumspection, you may kill them too, without much danger.
Suppose they die, who cares? Their parents? they are orphans, or
have been abandoned by their parents. The parish officers? very
likely, indeed, that these, when the poorhouse is crammed with
orphan and destitute children, should make inquiries troublesome
to themselves; inquiries which, being troublesome to you, might
deprive them of your custom in future. The magistrate? he asked
the child whether it consented to be your apprentice; the child
said 'Yes, your worship;' and there his worship's duty ends. The
neighbours? of course, if you raise their curiosity like Esther
Hibner, but not otherwise. In order to be quite safe, I tell you
you must be a little circumspect. But let us suppose that you are
timid, and would drive a good trade without the shadow of risk.
In that case, half-starve your apprentices, cuff them, kick them,
torment them till they run away from you. They will not go back
to the poorhouse, because there they would be flogged for having
run away from you: besides, the poorhouse is any thing but a
pleasant place. The boys will turn beggars or thieves, and the
girls prostitutes; you will have pocketed £10 for each of them,
and may get more boys and girls on the same terms, to treat in
the same way. This trade is as safe as it is profitable."[89]