The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1878-09-07 00:00:00

FRENCH STRIKES.

The word greve was known to employers of foreign
labour long before " strike " had found for itself a
home in our language. Etymologically, the French
word is more interesting than the English, for it en-
closes tragic historical recollections. The Place de la
Greve was on the banks of the Seine, near the Hotel
de Ville, and was notorious as the scene of most
of the public cruelties of French rule from the
reign of Charles IX. to the Revolution. For
years it was the usage amongst French workmen
when they were without employment and were
anxious to procure it to assemble at this Place de
la Greve, where they would wait till some master
employer would seek their services. And thus a
word grew up amongst the Paris working classes, by
whom "faire greve " was used as equivalent for to
seek employment. By a transition, not without pre-
cedent, 'grew," which originally testified to the cheap-
ness of the labour market, now signifies an intention
to refuse work. The first seriou.i strikes in Franca
occurred in the year 1820, and the French law with re-
gard to them was much more stringent than it ever was
with us. An edict of the 21 Germinal of the year
XL, while acknowledging the undoubted right of any
workman individually to claim higher wages, pro-
nounced all coalitions' whether on the part of
masters or of men, to be illegal, and this principal
was re-echoed in the code of 1810 and in the law of
1849. It was not till 1864 that the right
of combination was admitted on the Frenoh
statute book; but since that date, the only excep-
tions to full toleration are cases of fraud or violence.
It is said that, as a rule, French strikes come from
foreign intervention, and that the " International "
has been the cause of nearly all of them. The French
artisan is naturally hard-working and thrifty, and the
idea of striking work does not find favour with him.
Most of the important recent strikes have been orga-
nised elsewhere, and it has come to be a question
whether the simplicity of the edict of 1864 should not
be clogged with conditions. In one respect our work-
ing regulations contrast favourable with the French.
A strike in England is rarely entered into without
deliberate warning to the employers, or by them to
their workmen. There is often a compromise, and
almost always an attempt to bring one about; but in
France secrctueo and fandclenness enter into the pro.
gramme Ol the dolditionVi., Grebes

"The death of a husband and father, under circum-
stances investing it with more than common gloom,
left his widow and his four young children, two of
them boys and two girls, in a condition to be much
campassionated ; but happily in the worldly circum-
stances of the widow and orphans there was nothing
to call for pity. Mr. George Payne, who fell before
Mr. Clark's bullet at Wimbledon, was the second son
of Mr. Rend Payne, once a partner in the great London
banking firm of Smith, Payne, and Smith. At his
death, Mr. Rene Payne divided his great wealth
chiefly between his two sons, john and George, The
elder, John, was for years upon the Turf, and won the
Derby with Az.r in 1817; the younger, George,
succeeded to a large sum of ready money, and would
have come into possession of Sulby Hall, in North-
ampton, together with its rent roll of £14,000 a year,
if he had lived to reach his twenty-eighth birthday,
instead of dying in his twenty-seventh year. Both
brothers were among the gayest and fastest of their
West-end contemporaries, and, in days anterior to the
birth of Crockford's Club, they were celebrated as
nightly frequenters of the then fashionable gambling
haunts, Watier's and Graham's. They both possessed
the same charm of address which descended in in-
creased ratio to the lamented member of the Jockey
Club who has just passed away, and who was nephew
to the elder, and son to the younger brother. When
Mr. George Payne, the elder, died at Wimbledon, in
the September of 1810, his eldest son George was a
child aged six years. The boy succeeded to the im-
mediate possession of Sulby Hall: and his income of
£14,C00 a year was raised by careful management,
during a minority of fifteen years being augmented to
£17,000 a year, when its fortunate possessor came of
age in 1825. But, in addition to the income derived
from land—and half a century ago £17,000 per annum
went as far as £50,000 per annum will go now—Mr.
George Payne the younger succeeded to an accu-
mulation of £300,000 in ready money. Had the
Fairy Bountiful been called in to preside over
the birth of a favoured child, it would have been
impossible for her to bestow upon him richer or more
varied gifts. Wealth, health, a fascination of manner
to which two generations could show no parallel, a
masculine understanding, indomitable dourage, first-
rate business capacity, a natural gift of eloquence, a
frame of adamant, an inborn kindness of heart which
nearly sixty years of active contact with the world
could not subdue—such, briefly summed up, was the
George Payne' who entered life, though not yet of
age, in the spring of 1824.
"Sans de grands oublis he vie serait impossible. In
sketching, however hastily, the chequered career of
Mr. George Payne between 1824 and 1878, we have to
approach scenes begirt with all the most dangerous
temptations to which poor human nature can be ex-
pn
iod
as
majority N o r
duringoug hit t t
an
era o be forgottenhen that
gambling
n nhde attained
drunken-
ness were the necessary attributes of 'a man of fashion,'
when public opinion was inarticulate, when a long war
had exercised its demoralising effects upon the men and
women who passed through its baneful shadow, and
when to be dissipated was,
.
as Lady Teazle phrasas it,
to be 'in the mode.' • .
At any rate, the boy
started merrily enough at Eton and at Christ Church,
though he used laughingly to say in later years that
the only college to which he had ever belonged at
Oxford was the Mitre Hotel. His stud of Hunters
was the envy of contemporary sporting undergraduates,
and before he was requested to remove his name
from the books of Christ Church,' his fame as a first-
rate and plucky rider across country extended from
Chipping Norton to Bleeder. In the spring of 1824,
being twenty years of age, he came out in Lon-
don ; and from that hour until yesterday, no
man was more continuously upon the tongue or
under the eye of Vanity Fair." Pleasure,' as
Tlmekeray puts it, 'clashed her cymbals at his
feet,' and he was not less popular as a youngster
among the battered voluptuaries of George IV.'s Court
than he continued to be during the last half dozen
years of his life with the Prince and Princess of Wales
and with their childien. The invitations that he re-
ceived to Sandringham and Marlborough House were
more frequent than his many avocations permitted
him to accept, and among the innumerable telegrams
received durin? his last illness, none were more press-
ing or tender in their inquiries than those sent 14y the
Princess of Wales' whose husband and Lord Wilton
were among the too many friends admitted to the
dying patient's bedside during the last few weeks of
his life

"Mr. Payne died, as he had lived, in harness, for upon
the last active day of his life he was at Lewes Races.
One of his last bets was to lay seven fifties against
Beauclerc for the Leger; and even after his seizure
he was greatly interested in the success of Lord
Hartington's Rylstone. And yet, at this moment, it
is impossible wholly to dismiss the thought that he
might, had he chosen, have died in harness of a very
different kind. The late Lord Clanricarde, after hear-
ing him speak at a public dinner, was literally fasci-
nated, and declared that Mr. Payne's voice delivery,
and manner of speech so closely resembled those
of Mr. Canning that, upon shutting his eyes, he
fancied that he heard his own dead father-in-law
speaking once more. Mr. Payne was, in fact, one of
those extremely few Englishmen who have the happy
knack; so much more frequently implanted in French-
men, Irishmen, and Americans, of making a graceful
and spontaneous after-dinner speech, Iu addition, he
was an excellent man of business, and few men wrote
a better letter. His common sense was remarkable,
his judgment of character penetrating and incisive,
his fun and spirits were untiring when in congenial com-
pany, and such was his tact that' his wit, in the com-
bat as gentle as bright, Ne'er carried a heart-stain
away on its blade.' " . . . .