The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1878-06-15 00:00:00

TilE BISHOP OF MANCHESTER ON
.
THE COTTON TRADE.
The Ilishep of Manchester has published the follow-
ing lett( r -
"it is beyond the bounds of hope that either or both of
the parties to the present unhappy struggle in North and
North eset Lancashire will listen to yet one more appeal,
which, as a Bishop of the Church of England, bound by his
office to promote peace and goodwill among men; as a
resident in Lancashire, having under his eyes the poverty
and su ,erings sustained for seven weary weeks and
threatm‘ leg to be indefinitely prolonged; and as an English-
man, de t ply interested in everything that concerns the well-
being and prosperity of his country, I venture to make to
hem. •
"I do not come forward in the character of an arbitrator,
or even of e mediator. I have felt and said from the first
that no outsider can understand the complications of the
cotton in lustry so well as those who are themselves engaged
in them and that the solution of the present difficulty must
be looked for, not from arbitration, but from conference,
conciliat, on—perhaps from compromise. Even if I had been
vain enough to suppose myself competent to play the part
which in s use of the earlier proposals of the operatives they
were ready to assign to me, the determined resolution ex-
pressed by the chairman of the Masters' Association in his
replies to lord Bateman and the Mayor of Burnley would be
quite sufficient to tell me that arbitration is a method of
settling differences which on the side at least of one of the
pal ties to the conflict would not be entertained.
"But the strike has now lasted seven weeks. The dele-
gates of the men, in their last maniissto, compute that by
the operatives on strike, numbering, with their families,
800,000 people, already £528,000 in wages, or £75,000 a week,
has been neither earned nor enjoyed; and the funds at
their disposal being exhausted, they are now making an
appeal to the trades of Great Britain and Ireland, and the
public generally, to support them in the struggle, which they
represent as an effort of the federated employers to crush in
detail the trade organizations established throughout the
United Kingdom for the protection of labour against capital.
In other words, 300,000 people, who might be maintained by
£75,000 honestly earned in wages week by week, are to be
sustained on a niggard and precarious charity, in order that
this industrial war may be (as I have said) indefinitely pro-
longed.
"Meanwhile, the angry passions inseparable from such a
state of things are making themselves felt on both sides.
It is sad to observe,' writes to me an earnest clergyman
from one of the towns where the struggle has been the
severest—' It is sad to observe the bitter feelings that are
gradually springing up; and the hardest words do not come
from the mouths of operatives only.' A speaker at a meeting
at Stockport said, 'lf the operatives were compelled to suc-
cumb to-morrow and make peace, it would be of only short
duration. If they had no reasonable hope of success in the
present struggle, they had, at least, shown their strength,
and prevented the attempt in the future of a further reduc-
tion.
"Now, this is a foolish way of talking, and a dangerous
and mischievous condition of feeling. No display of strength
can prevent a future further reduction, if such reduction is
necessary as the only way in which trade can be carried on
at a profit. If the operatives think that any man will either
put or keep capital in a concern which yields him no profit,
they are more ignorant than I can believe them to be of the
first principles of politico-economical science and of the
common motives of human nature. And it peace, when
made, is to be of no long duration, and further reductions,
should they become necessary, are opposed with the same
weapons and the same determination as the present one, it
requires no prescience to foretell the future of the cotton in-
dustry of Larcashire. It will become as much a thing of the
past as the manufacturing prosperity of Tyre.
"In the interests of labour as well as of capital I would
Invite the attention of both parties to certain phenomena
which have come within my own knowledge or observation,
and which I regard as typical The iron trade of South
Wales has disappeared, and Lord Aberdare told me, in hie
judgment, is not likely to revive. The look of the country
is described to me by those who have seen it as being as
desolate as it it had been overrun by a foreign foe. I was
told two days ago by a man, himsqf once a miner and now
the coachman of a Wiltshire friend of mine, who has
friends in the smitten . istrict, that the people are
emigrating in all directions—as he expressed it, are being
sent off by shiploads. What is the cause of this,' I asked,
wishing to ascertain the man's view of the case. 'Oh,' he
said, the strike; though I don't know what they strike for,
for they were earning, many of them, £2 10s. a week, and 20
years ago, when I worked in the pits from five o'clock in the
morning to seven o'clock at night, it was only with a
" scrabble " that I could make my pound or five-and-twenty
shillings.' At any rate, whether my informant's view of the
case is correct or not, here is a district, once the home of a
thriving and remunerative industry, now reduced to the con-
dition of a wilderness.
"A month ago I travelled up to London with the managing
director of one of the largest engineering works in Man-
chester, himself well known as a man of the highest
Intelligence and capacity for business. 'What are you
doing?' I asked. Not much,' he answered; we have
reduced our number of hands; and I do not know how
Much longer we may have anything to do for those who
remain. We have just had to refuse an order that would
have been worth £45,000' Why ?' I asked, with some
surprise. A foreign railway company invited us to tender
for 20 locomotives. We offered to build them for £2,200
each; the company would only give £2,000. There was
not much profit to be got out out of the transaction, but to
keep the men employed we were willing to have undertake,,
it, if we could save ourselves from loss. So we called tile
heads of departments together, who are all worki le- by
piece-work, and asked them if they would help us to aceep
the order by reducing in fair proportion the wages tba
were being paid to them, so as to leave some small mire',
of profit to the shareholders. They to a man refused, an..
we had to decline to enter into a contract which would have
been worth £45,000.' lam not able to estimate how much
of this sum represents the loss in wages to the men, whom
it would probably have kept in constant employment for
half a year. It may now have gone into the pockets of some
foreign competitor, whose existence Mr. John C. Fielden
and the great body of the operatives seem utterly to forget
or Ignore.'
"I was informed recently upon authority that seemed to me
sufficient that Bolckow, Vaughan, and Co. are sending the
pig iron which they have made Into Belgium to be manu-
factured into girders, rails, Bsc., and to be re-imported into
this country for use, simply because the work can be done
quite as well and more cheaply there than here.
" Mr. R. W. Dale, in his Impressions of America, pub
lished in the Nineteenth Century for April (p. 769), asserts
distinctly that in Birmingham itself merchants are import-
ing from the United States such articles as axes, hay-
forks, and agricultural implements of nearly every
description, sash pulleys and small castings of many kinds,
although it is estimated that freight and other expenses
add 17 or 18 per cent to the cost of the goods, while the
Lowell manufacturers, who are aghast at the prospect of
free trade, aie actually sending cotton cloth to Man-
chester, and in American retail stores cotton goods
are marked at a lower price than that at which goods of the
same quality could be sold in Liverpool or London. He
expresses a doubt whether, if the protective duties were
swept away to-morrow, our own manufacturing industry
would receive at mice the general stimulus which some
sanguine persons might anticipate. Leeds and Bradford
might become more active, but that the Lancashire and
Birmingham manufacturers would recover their old place in
the American market seems extremely improbable.'
"These instances and forebodings could easily be multi-
plied, if it were necessary; but I think that what I have said
is enough to show that the operatives' theory of the present
depression of trade—that it is solely due to over-production
—is not a complete account of the case, which, of course, if
to any extent it is due to foreign competition, anything that
enhances the cost of production at home, as working shors
time must do, throws the advantage still more into the
hands of our competitors abroad.
"Indeed, it is the one fact of this foreign competition so
seriously imperilling our position as a manufacturing nation
in the markets abroad, and, even if Mr. Dale's'impressions'
are true, in the market at home, that presses itself home to
my mind as the great motive that ought to stimulate both
parties to the present strife to a speedy reconciliation of
their differences. Whatever in a moment of temper and
resentment either the masters on the one hand or the men
on the other may say about their inability or their reluctance
to enter into trade relations upon terms of mutual confidence
—the masters denouncing the tyranny of trade unionism, the
men replying with an attack upon the insatiable greed of
the capitalists '—it cannot be to the permanent interest of
either party that the trade of this country should pass into
foreign hands.
"It seems a groundless and irrational fear in the mind of
the operatives that the federated employers are making'
.in this lock-out 'the first of a series of attacks upon the
different branches of trade organizations throughout the
United Kingdom,' with the object of breaking the whole
system down. It would be an absurd idea to think that
trade unionism, which is only a particular form of the
principle of combination—the instinctive resource of the
weak against the strong—could be put down by a policy of
this kind. Even if temporarily defeated, it would be
certain to rise again by its inherent vitality as a weapon of
defence. But it is quite certain that of trade unionism, as
of all weapons, both a good and a bad use can be made. If
trade unionism is used to obtain by fair and equitable
means fair and equitable terms from the employer for the
employed, no just complaint can be made against it; if it
is used merely to raise wanes, irrespectively of the quality
and the cost of the work done, often to the deterioration of
the one and the enhancement of the other, nothing can be
more indefensible, and in the long run more mischievous to
the true interests of those who resort to it. The joiners of
Manchester would have a sad tale to tell, if they told it
wholly and truly, of the results of their eleven months
strike. Mr. Lloyd Jones, an uncompromising advocate of the
cause of the working man, said the other day at the annual
demonstration of the North Yorkshire and Cleveland Miners'
Association—' During the many years he had advocated trade
unionism he had always impressed upon working men that
their first duty was union. He said that deliberately, not
because he wished to see them banded together that they
might oppress capital and injure the capitalist. If they
made that a leading thought, or a thought even, in their
union, their union would become an affliction to the nation,
as it would be an injury to themselves.' While Mr. Samuel
Morley—and no employer could show a more enlightened
interest in the highest welfare of his workpeople than this
gentleman—writing to the British Trades Council, said :
I believe trade unions have done good service in bringing
Aorkpeople ti act unitedly, and so in many districts they
have ceased to be a "rope of sand," and have been able to
insure better and more suet consideration from employers;
, but they have also, by transferring all negotiations as to
wages and conditions of work to middle men, who have
often no connexion with the work generally—none what-
ever almost always with the particular employer—altered
,fnaterially the character of the relationship between the
two classes. There is, Hear, ceasing to be the intimacy be-
tween masters and men which existed some years ago.' And
referring to the number of hours now worked per week, he
I adds lam clearly of opinion that unless some different
• arrangements are made involving some concessions, the
demand for English manufactures will greatly diminish.
Unhappily, we know to our costs that some markets for
certain classes of goods are gradually closing to us, and
while this is perhaps to be expected, I feel anxious before
ills too late to try whether I can induce representatives of
both sides who have influence to meet and consider whether
some amendments in our methods of conducting these nego-
liations and other points seriously affecting the interests of
the men could not be brought into action. English manu-
facturers cannot be consumed in England alone, and I con-
fess I tremble for the future of large numbers of English
workmen unless some changes are made.'
"These are wise and weighty words, and trade unions
must take care that in their eagerness to get the golden eggs
they do not kill the bird that lays them.
"The Bishop of Salford gave some excellent advice, equally
applicable to all, in the sermon which he preached in Bolton
last Sunday. He said we should have less to spend, and there-
fore we must spend less upon ourselves in eating and drinking
and other forms of what must be called luxury. A wise man
said that the prosperity of fools shall destroy them;' and we
all lived too fast and spent too much in those years when
we over-rashly thought that the good time would never end,
but that to-morrow would be as to-day, and probably more
abundant. The to-morrow has come and has dissipated these
dreams • and reasonable men who cannot command even
when they deserve success will adapt their style of living to
their means. Twenty-seven shillings a week instead of
thirty during a period of prices which are being reduced in
nearly all articles of necessary consumption does not mean
starvation, nor anything like starvation. It may mean a
limitation of expenditure, but it need not mean much more.
To the agricultural labourer in the South of England the
wages at which the Lancashire operative has struck would
mean wealth he has hardly imagined in his dreams.
"The operatives' own remedy for the depression—viz., 10
per cent, reduction in wages and working four days a week—
shows that they do not consider the reduction itself un-
reasonable, though, as I have already endeavoured to show,
the recommendation to work short time indicates that they
will persistently recognise only one cause of such depression.
Short time might stop the glut, but it would operate to our
disadvantage rather than to our benefit in the conflict with
the foreign competitor; and I fail to see how a man and his
family would be better off on 18s. a week for four days'
labour than on 275. a week for five days and a half.
"I do not think that a false pride or a dogged obstinacy
ought to prevent the men from returning to work on the
masters' terms if those terms can be proved to be necessi-
tated by the present conditions of trade. The masters say
they are working at a loss. Is there any reason for doubt-
ing the assertion, except perhaps in a few special and
favoured instances? Oen the joint-stock mills, in which so
I many otthe working class hohl shares, produce balance-sheets
during the last two years exhibiting a profit? How can
, capital be compelled, or why should it be compelled, to go
'on working till it is itsell exhausted I—or on what principle