The Express.
London, England, 1862-09-24 00:00:00

THE DISTRESS IN LANCASHIRE.

(fox ova arscim.

MANCHESTER, Barr. A

My first object will be to attempt to define, as
accurately as I can, the way in which this distress
has fallen upon the working classes, as a neoessary
preliminary to the description and discussion of
methods of relief. In so doing, I shall have to
enter upon minute details of manufacturing life,
which to some of your readers here may appear
trivial and superfluous, but which, as I have reason
to believe, are unknown to many even of those who
!ive in Lancashire, but yet are not engaged in the
characteristic trade of the county. And only they
who understand how the people work and live are
able to comprehend the precise difficulties which
beset both themselves and those who try to help
them.

A distinguishing peculiarity of the cotton trade
is the way in which it gives employment to almost
every member of a large family. Even the little
children divide their time between school and the
mill—their trifling earnings being subject to the
paymffneof the school fees. The elder girls are
weavers—an occupation which is becoming more and
more appropriated to the female sex. The father,
who may be a spinner or a dresser, earns the largest
wages—which are yet not large, in proportion to
the comfort in which the family are able to live by
the contribution of their several earnings. In a
factory where the raw material passes through all
the stages, from cotton to calico, it is safe (speak-
ing roughly) to estimate the average wages
of men, women, and children, at 108. a
week. In other words, the number of heads
divided by two will approximate to the number
of pounds paid in weekly wages. Now, the advan-
tages and disadvantages of this system to the work-
people are obvious upon the surface. As in the
colonies, a large family is a fortune to a man. At
the time of life when their ages run from 8 to 20,
the income of the household may be many pounds
a week. But then before that time he has passed
through a period of chronic poverty, when any in-
termission of work or any domestic misfortune will
have made itself severely felt. The eldest little
one, perhaps, is only 9 or 10 ; a child makes its ap-
pearance every year ; the mother, who, much to her
own and her children's hurt, has clung to the fac-
tory as long as she could, has found out at last that
her earnings will not pay the cost of nursing, and
unwillingly applies herself to the performance of
duties which she ought never to have delegated
to another. The whole family then is dependent
upon the father's wages, and any blow which pa-
ralyses hishand throws them all back into the
poverty from which it is so hard a struggle to
emerge. Again, a peculiarity of the system is, that
there are very few families in which it is not pos-
sible for some member to be a breadwinner. I have
known sick parents, with one or two helpless in-
fanta, suppoited for a while by the work of chil-
dren not more than ten or twelve years old. Old
people often owe their maintenance to the labour of
some unmarried daughter, who still faithfully
brings her wages which she brought them thirty
years before. A widow, loft with a brood of starv-
ing children, goes to the factory where she worked
as a girl, and, resuming the half-forgotten craft,
lila at least the comfort of providing
bread for those who would otherwise be
destitute. But while the factory system
in good times keeps many such cases as
these from total or partial dependence on the
pariah, it cannot remove them from the close
proximity to want, and they are the first to feel
such a calamity as the present. A household which
is in the receipt of fifty shillings or two pounds a
week, even though it be a very large one, can by a
comparatively slight effort of self-denial reduce its
expenditure to two-thirds of that sum. But when
three or four people are sparingly kept on 10s. or
12s. a week, half-work means something very like
starvation.

We hear sometimes much talk about thrift and
foresight ; applicable enough, I know, to many
cases. The isolated instances of working men who
acquire what is for them a comfortable indepen-
dence, and spend a quiet old age on the savings
of au industrious and frugal youth, are
enough to prove that such providence is
possible to many more. But the men of
whom I have spoken are precisely in the same posi-
tion as a young surgeon, or barrister, who has
married iu reliance on his own health and industry.
He can keep and educate his children as they are
born, and looks cheerfully forward through a period
of struggle to one of competence and ease. But
what if death comes meanwhile 1 His friends may
call him unfortunate in life's battle, but hardly
think of blaming him, and kind hands are stretched
out to help those whom he has left behind. So
these poor fellows have been struck down by a
calamity which might never have come at all, and
which was certainly quite out of the line of their
foresight ; what right have we to complain that
they have not money in the savings bank, and
store of clothing 1 They maintained themselves and
their children as long as they could get work ; what
more do we, similarly circumstanced, do in any
rank of society ?
Another reason wby this class of factory workers,
in especial, applied to relief funds for help at a very
early period is to be found in another feature of
our industrial system. Almost all the wages in a
factory are paid for piecework. By help of an
accurate method of book-keeping the weaver is paid
for the actual length of her web, the spinner for the
actual quantity of his yarn. The prices of work—
often the subject of anxious consultation and debate
between masters and men, are fixed according to an
abstract standard, and are substantially the same
throughout any single district. On this plan the
skill of the worker is obviously a variable quantity ;
on two adjacent pairs of looms,both driven at exactly
the same speed, and both, to the eye of the looker-
on, doing all the work without human help, one
woman will earn in the length of a week con-
siderably more than another, simply by her superior
quickness and adroitness in piecing the broken ends
of yarn. But there is another variable quantity,
the quality of the material, a quality which has
been gradually deriorating for months as rapidly
advancing prices have forced the manufacturers
downward in the scale. Poor cotton makes poor
yarn, and that again poor cloth, while the spinner
and weaver are both losers in the process. The at-
tempts which were made first to mix Surat with
cotton of a better quality, which have ended, in
many cases, in its sole use, or even in adulteration
with flax and waste silk, and other substances of
the same kind, have been necessarily attended with
an apparent loss to the workpeople. I say appa-
rent loss, because mills which have thus, by
dint of great effort, been kept open, would other-

wise have been closed, and the hands thrown
entirely out of work. But statistics of
labour in the manufacturing districts are fallacies
if this fact be not taken into the account. Six
days' work by no means represents six days' wages :
probably no more than four. The people are
quietly doing their local mills' material, of which,
two years afro, they would have tried to get rid by
a strike. They know the necessities of the case,
and are patiently striving to meet them. " Well,
John, how does it spin 1" said to one of his over-
lookers the other day a manufacturer, who by bold,
experiments in the use of various material has
managed to keep 2,000 people at work up to this
time. "Never do you mind how it spins, master,"
was the reply, " you only find us the stuff, and
we'll keep the factory agate."
The first brunt of the distress fell upon the shop-
keepers. Unfortunately for the best interests of the
working classes the credit system prevails all through
the district. Co-operative stores give no credit,
and there are a few shops in every town which
strictly adhere to the same method of trade : but
these are the exception which proves the rule.
Wages are for the most part paid fortaightly : the
rent, in the numerous cases where the manufac-
turer is an owner of cottage property, being de-
ducted. A large proportion of the surplus goes in
part discharge of the current account at the shop,
where the family procure the necessaries of life.
There is always a balance, more or less large,
which the shopkeeper tries to keep within reason-
able limits, but which he is by no means anxious
to wipe off altogether, lest his customer should
embrace the opportunity of going to another esta-
blishment. Even the shoemaker gives credit, and is
paid by instalments. The Scotchman, or pedlar, who
brings his goods from door to door, and who calls for
part payment every week till the debt is discharged,
makes great inroads upon the trade of the regular
draper. In some localities almost all the country
sale of tea is effected by pedlars, who, taking
advantage of the same pernicious system, get ss. for
what the Manchester grocer would charge 3s. ttd.
The disadvantages of the plan, in good times, are
chiefly on the side of the consumer, and are too ob-
vious to need enumeration here—an enhanced price
of goods, a restricted liberty of choice, a constant
load of obligation. But the balance is restored
when a strike, or an Intermission of trade like the
present, interrupts the regular payment of wages.
In the district which lies south-east of Manchester—

Ashton, Stalybridge, Dukinfield, Hyde, Glossop—a
strike of some six weeks' duration in the spring of
1861—imprudently entered upon to secure a rise
of wages, just as the increased price of cotton
was beginning to contract mercantile operations
—weakened both the shopkeepers and the work-
people for endurance of the greater calamity which
was impending. The consumption of articles of
food was little, if at all, lessened ; the people, ex-
ulting in the preceding period of prosperity, and
as usual not looking ahead, drew freely upon the
shopkeepers. Many men, I know, then let out
from one to five hundred pounds, according to the
extent of their business, very little of which had
been returned when the tide again began to ebb.
So at the commencement of the present difficulty
there was no attempt to restrict consumption, or
to confine it to absolute necessaries. The limit of
what the customer would take was in most cases
what the shopkeeper would give ; till, when credit
had been stretched to the uttermost, and a large
part of the tradesmen's capital was thus
locked up for an indefinite period, if not
absolutely destroyed, the system collapsed of itself.
Many small shopkeepers are now suffering only
leas than those who formerly drew their supplies
from them, while nearly all have been compelled,
as a measure of self-defence, to have recourse to the
ready-money trade. Some relief committees distri-
bute aid in the shape of tickets, exchangeable for
certain necessaries of life at any shop where the

recipient has been accustomed to deal, and after-
wards payable by the treasurer. From one point
of view the plan is not economical, as it interposes
the shopkeeper's profit between the wholesale price
of the goods and the consumer. But from another
it commends itself, as helping to sustain a class of
citizens whose losses by the calamity have been dis-
proportionately great, and may never be repaired.
But the hardest cases, in every way, are those
which after some mouths' struggle are only now
beginning to show themselves. There is a class
of working people—not perhaps so large
as it might be, but still numerous—eminently
distinguished by forethought and self-respect.
Their houses are clean and well furnished ' • their
clothing comfortable, and, to some extent, costly ;
while a cottage or two, or a little money out on
mortgage, or au account at the savings bank, testi-
fies to their care for the future. They are as homely
in the way of living as their fellows, and while
blending all their energies to maintain a respectable
position in their clam, often show no great anxiety
to rise above it. Content to be working men, their
aims are bounded by the ideas involved in that
word, and because bounded are the more perfectly
attained. Thanks to Sunday-schools, they are men
(especially the younger portion) of some degree of
education, pore over the penny paper, and are not
without political opinions, sometimes even acquire
some tincture of natural science, and nearly
always maintain a more or le'.s close con-
nexion with church or chapel. Many of them
are as proudly independent as any gentleman in
the land, and have always kept themselves, and
rightly, out of the reach of any patronising bene-
volence. What is their position now I Of what
avail has been their thrift and forethought, except
to enable them to fight a little longer than others
a hopeless battle with want 1 They may not come
to the relief committee so soon as their neighbours,
but they must and do come at last : the battle is
one which, iu the very nature of things, theycaunot
win. A case of this kind came under my notice
the other day. A skilled mechanic who is a most
favourable specimen of the class which I have tried
to describe, was, I felt sure, in need of aid, and
yet, I was equally sure, would never ask it. We
were neighbours, and I did not choose to put the
question to him face to face, bat sent to
him a friend of his own, with an intima-
tion that if he really wanted help it
was at his service, not through the medium
of any board. but as an act of neighbourly kindness.
He replied that his savings were exhausted, his
wages very small, and that he accepted the offer in
the spirit in which it was made. But the next
morning be came to say that he had reconsidered
the matter, and had decided differently. He bad
received no help as yet, and was unwilling to begin:
with an increased effort he could go on for a week
or two more, and in the meantime something might
turn up. And then he pleaded the case of a friend,
who was more deserving, he said, and more in want
than himself, and begged that whatever aid had
been designed for bum might be transferred to
the other. It is very hard to think that a man like '
this, with so many of the elements of true nobleness'
in him, should at last be driven (as to all
appearance must be the case) to the depen-
dence which he hates so mach ; harder still
that he should be exposed to the temptations to

moral deterioration which inevitably wait upon de-
pendence ; hardest of all, that be should lose his faith
in the long effort of industry and self-control,
which is the single hope of the working class, and
yet which in this case seems, by a sad fate, to have
done so little for them !

Biome social philosopher has said that every tem-
porary inundation of poverty leaves behind it a
permanent sediment of pauperism. There are
those who, at first honestly unwilling to accept
pariah relief, end by finding the bread of depen-
dence so sweet as never afterwards to relish any
other. So this difficulty has two sides—a physical
and a moral ; the first perhaps more obvious
to distant observers than the second. Their
imaginations are excited by reports, only too
true, of a population becoming every week
more completely the prey of cold and
hunger, and their anxiety is to keep the people
alive. We, who live in the midst of them, share
that anxiety to the full, for we see the suffering
which all are anxious to relieve, but we want to
do something more. We want, if we can, to keep
the people as they have been, and as, to a great
extent, they still are—honest, industrious, self-
dependent—e very hard task, when the subsistence
of a whole district is mainly provided by private or
public charity. The mischief is already showing
thielf in wars ways than ant I could point to
several instances where, in the course of but a very
few weeks, the reluctant appeal fur necessary help
has degenerated into something very like the artful
tale of imposture. Cases-1 dare say not very
numerous—have been known in which it was
found inure comfortable and profitable to dance
attendance at relief boards than to secure
and do what little work might still be
had. And although the amount expended
in any single township by guardians and
relief-board • combined seems miserably small in
comparison with the deficient circulation of wages,
yet it is often, I believe, as much as can with ad-
vantage be expended, except in fair commercial
exchange for work done. It is of no use disguising
from ourselves the fact that after benevolence has
done its best a large amount of privation must re-
main to be borue by the working classes. If to-
morrow such a sum as would replace the wages
which in ordinary circumstances would be paid
throughout the district fur the ensuing winter
could be put into the bands of relief committees,
and week by week distributed by them, the measure
which would most uompletely restore the physical
comfort of the workpeople would at the same time
most effectually destroy their moral well-being.
' Lancashire would be saved at the cost of being
irretrievably pauperised
I ought not to pan over, without a word
of record, the wonderful quietness with
which this misfortune has been borne. Not
only have there been no breaches of the public
I pane, no clamorous meetings to demand redress of
wrong, but the absence of private complaint has
been even more striking. It is no secret that paid
agitators have been at work to excite the suffering
population to ask for a recognition of the Confede-
rate States ; yet, so far, utterly without result.
Yet this is by no means a quiet population, crushed
into hopeless silence by a long period of low wages
and half work ; but one which, as the annals of the
last half century can testify, is quite apt enough
not only to complain, but to take the law into its
own hands, and to attempt wild measures of re-
form. I attribute this very remarkable fact, in
the first place, to the general extension of edu-
cation ; and secondly, and in especial, to the in-
fluence of the cheap press. The penny weekly paper,
the inner pages of which are printed in London for
use in a score of different towns, while the outer
pages receive the local news and advertisements of

is a more powerful engine of civilisation than
the readers of more costly prints are aware. It
carries the police news, the local controversy, the
report of the vestry meeting, and the like, which
every working man understands and likes to read,
and with all this a respectable epitome of the
week's intelligence, into thousands of hands where,
till a few years ago, a newspaper was an infrequent
luxury. And the reason why the working classes
of Lancashire and Cheshire have been quiet and
law-abiding during the sufferings of the last six
months is simply that they understand the cause of
their distress. They know that it is not their =s-
tem' fault, and that no forethought could have pre-
vented it. They look upon it in the same light as
they would look upon the failure of a crop which
was grown at their own doors. I do not know that
they follow the fortunes of either party in the war
with a very hearty sympathy ; the one object of
their desire is naturally that the war should come
to an end. But even so, they do not wish that the
end should be accelerated by any English interven-
tion, and are content to suffer and to wait, rather
than see their country adopt for their sakes an un-
just or a high-handed policy. Let it be once under-
stood that this is neither the silence of ignorance,
nor the apathy of despair, and it must surely be
recognised as one of the noblest facts even of a
history like our own.

BEPRESZNZATION OP STOKE-UPON-TRENT.

THE POLLING.

The greatest activity was displayed during the
whole of Monday night by the committees of Mr. Grenfell
and Mr. Beresford Hope, and at 8 o'clock yesterday morn-
ing the poll was opened in Hanley, Iltirskan, Tnnstell,
Langton, Stoke, and Fenton. At half•psat the o'clock the
following "state," compiled form returns made up W sine
o'clock, and sent in from all pada al tie loatiarias, was
posted at the Town-hall, Hanley, and was rassived with
tremendous cheering by Mr. Grastairs frisnds:—

Oradell

Hop.

*Akio

In this order the three candidates remand throughout
the day, but although Mr. Grenfell ultimately tnumphed
it will be seen by the subjoined returns that his *onset-vs-
sive rival ma him mechclocer than the nine o'clock 'state "
had appeared to indicate would be the case :
Tea Eleven Twelve Ow Two Half-past
o'clock. o'clock. 'o'clock. o'clock. o'clock. Two.
Oreafell 622 746 884 945 967 1008
Hope .. 437 565 7119 764 Bth 841
ghee .. 18 28 31 31 31 31
The harped einjeant was from the first literally
" nowhere," and the c,bjek of his orotestiog the borough
remains as great a myttery as ever. Mr. Hope throughout
the day stood in a majority at Stoke, Bunilem, and Toll-
MOB ; but in the other towns Mr. Grenfell was from the
first the favourite. At the close of the poll the number
wbo had voted for the several candidates at each towoditood
as follows : .

...-- .
GirodelL Bops. Shoe.
Tanstan ....... -....—. 192 ...... 1g ...... 2
Burgos
'
Healey 379
Stoke
76•626 ............ ...... 63 ...... 66
Lomita" 2/3 106

Total
The eleotion Wee conducted in ea orderly eranaer through-
out the district. _ _

---
At ties o'clock the returning officer declared the result of
the polling on the hustthge et Hanley, end the declaration
nes riesived with mingled grueus end cheering. Yr. C.:ren-
tal retuned thanks foe the honour which had been cca-
terted upon bias.

Emir Rust= RlSterl/471011.—DISrsrwcmiss-
MUT OF Ma. ROOPlClL.—Youtooky Mr. C. G. Adam, the
minim barrister for the diviree ef Zest merry, bald hie
court as the Vestry-ball. liennington•read, who the lids
of voters for the parishes of Cla Stratton, and
Lambeth were rewired and 'anode& Mr. Evan Have up-
on the part of the eosmrvatiree, Mr. Curtis ter the
and Mr. Barker es the part of the ovenesra. The
may OM of public lament was that of Witham Respell,
who was stuck eft the We of voters ow the ebbseldes el Mr.
Harker, the representative cd the °veneers, so appositive
being offered to the objeeti.m.

Gentlemen who require good and fashionable
dram al 4111p154 an iL in arterial and later Ayr at
Manama mai 1111,00111, 106, Strand, opposite Exeter lialL—
IniteribasnaLl

MERCANTILI INSUILNCES

NORWICH UNION FIRE OFFICE.
blab Med 1791.
Badness of the Mew is £70100,000
Duty paid to 1911 ELM
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The BONUS SYSTEM of the °Nes la pseuftrly 'granter oils
for MERCANTILE INSURANCES,
THREE-FIFTHS of the PROFITS of the OOMPANS being
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OFFICE in the UNITED KINGDOM.
For RATES and PRGSPECTI SEtt apply at the Society's
001cee, 6, Crescent, New Bridge.street, /LC, and aurrepotrart,
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222 REGENT-STREET, LONDON.
9 HATPIN BROTHERS thy model appointment to
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STsad OK KING WILLIAM-STREET.