The Express.
London, England, 1853-10-21 00:00:00

TO CORRESPONDENTS.

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LONDOS, FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21.

Fun a good while now the Lancashire and York-
shire people have had a gay and pleasant life,
—foxd cheap, trade brisk, with the prospect of
its continuing so,—through the increase of gold, Free
Trade, and undeniable agricultural improvement-
Unthr these influencts the lite of the greater number
of the people flowed on brightly and prosperously ;
all kinds of Friendly Societies were accumulating
money ; the poorest wet kers were fed and clothed,
and the shabby assumed an appearance of substantial
comfort. small tradesmen had good custom, and
gut in their motley easily. It was a matter of con-
cern to see a considerable number of the
labourers spending their improved means unwisely,
in drink and dissipation : and at that, as at all times,
it was a cause of deep regret and patriotic shame to
the friend, of all classes, that the education of the
operatives, though much improved, was not yet such
as to justify any very firm reliance on the continu-
ance of the popular prosperity. Such misgivings are
already only too surely confirmed. A cloud is
gathering. The old evil, are How ing back upon us,
anti we shall have to endure over again the miseries
with which the friends of the English operatives
are so mournful). familiar. It is just the old
story; only, this time, under circumstances
of some aggravation. Here we hare the
refusal to work while work is still to be had,
to be followed, as we too well know, by the bitter-
ness of disappointment when work is eagerly craved
and is not to be had. We have over again
the ancient delusion that the employers could, some-
how or other, pay any wages they chose if only they
would think proper to do so. Here we have over
again the enthusiastic promises of support which we
know, from the very nature of things, cannot pos-
sibly be fulfilled. We have already the proposal to
draw upon the funds of sick, burial, and other in-
surance clubs, thus throwing away the only security
of tens of thousands against a day of adversity. We
have over again the ignorant language of abuse of
the employers, which shows how very little is really
known of the determining circumstances of the
amount of wages. The address of the trades delegates
of Preston, on behalf of the factory operatives, is
grossly abusive in its tone in regard to the employers,
while extremely lavish in its promises of support to
the men. The time is at hand when the men who
thus denounce and promise will discover their impru-
dence. As the resources of their customers fail and
their own business falls off—when they have to re-
fuse further credit to those whom they are now mis-
leading—when bad debts compel them to draw back
from their rash promises—and when the quarrels arise
which always do ensue upon big eogagements un-
fulfilled, theso warm-hearted bat thoughtless trades-
men will deplore, as so many have deplored before,
their short-sightedness, and the misuse of their in-

fluence over those whom they are encouraging in
error at this day. All this we are to
have over again ; u if we had not seen
often enough the vehement hand-shaking of opera-
tives and tradesmen at the beginning of a strike,
and heard often enough their extravagant mutual
compliments and vows of eternal friendship, to be
followed in no long time by mutual disappointment,
distrust, anger, and alienation—when the customer

cannot pay his account, and the tradesman can give
no more money or credit. This we are to sce again—
and tho wistful countenance of anxiety, and the pale

hungry face, and the thin and threadbare clothes,
and the empty dwelling, and the full workhouse, and
the pawnbrokers' houses filled to the roof, and the
sick children whom the doctors cannot cure because
the medicine that they want is food. These are the
consequences of long and extensive strikes, as we all
know ; and there is nothing in the circumstances of
the present time to authorise a different expectation
The workman has a perfect right to put his owa
price upon his own labour, but experience shows that
trying to get a higher price by a wholesale strike is
Beldam productive of anything but loss to both
workman and employer.
. . _ .

Without looking back to the origin of the dispute,
or taking part with either side,—while heartily wish-
ing well to both,—we can show in a moment that t►e
operatives are not likely to grow rich by these
proceedings. There was first tho Stockport strike,
in which the employed claim the victory. They
obtained the wages they milted ; but it was a victory
ruinous to themselves, because it cut off the profits
of their employers' business, and thus diminished
the means of their own future employment—besides

which, it would take many months of uninterrupted
employment at their advanced wages to make
up to them for what they spent and relinquished
daring the quarrel. Besides some smaller strikes,
which have filled the streets of Manchester and Wi-
gan with unemployed men, the Wigan colliery strike
has thrown 16,000 men out of wages at once, be-
sides injuring the whole business of the
district by stopping the supply of coal,
As far an appears, 32,000 tons of coal per week
have been cut off for above a month, and 20,0001.
worth of wages have ceased to be paid on account of
that quarrel alone. Here is fearful loss, so far. The
deficiency of the harvest is no longer denied by any-
body ; and though, through the blaming of Free
Trade, we are sure of food as long as we have the
means to hay it from foreign countries, the failure c 4
the harvest is so much dead loss, largely influencing
the profits of manufacture, and therefore the fund
from which wages are paid. Then came the uncer-
tainty about war—an uncertainty more detrimental
to trade than war itself, when once fairly entered
upon. While nobody knows whether there will be
war, or can conjecture what will be the effect on
trade of this particular war, the employers are but
too glad to stop producing. It is said, and be-
lieved, in many districts, that the employers
see very willing indeed that their men should strike,
because they will We Les by closing their mills
than by going on at such a time. They also feel
themselves fairly set free from the obligation which
they have often fulfilled—ot supporting their men
through an adverse season; a service which can cer-
taioly never be expected of employers who have
been stripped of their profits in better times by
their men having taken advantage of the difficulties
of the capitalists' position. Amidst all this loss,
with winter coming on, prices rising rapidly and
fearfully, and anything but a good prospect for the
next harvest, as far as this autumn's sowing is con-
cerned, who is gaining by these industrial troubles?
None, unless it bee few agitators, who get supported,
and in some eases enriched, at the expense of the
turn-outs. The employers have lost enormously by the
stoppage of labour and of coal at a critical time.
The unemployed are losing enormously every week
by the stoppage of wages. The season for supplying
India with the fabrics of Preston and Wigan is pass-
ing away; and nobody will wonder if the custom of
India paws away too, when orders fail to be ex.- I

cuted. In Bradford, 3,000 looms wen standing still
last week ; and, while the men of Yorkshire and
Lancashire are at public meetings listening to
orators who tell them they will be buying mills
before Christmas, their wives are wondering at home
—not what they shall have for dinner at Christmas,
but bow they shall get a crust of bread for every
child. Already the grocers find the difference. The
money which has, for a long while past, bought
coffee and sugar, is now all wanted for meal and the
loaf ; and the bakers know that one of those hateful
winters is coming when they most either ruin them-
selves with giving hopeless credit, or turn the hungry
out of their shops.
And nearly all this distress is wilfully or igno-
rantly caused ! If every man of us had been sensible,
intelligent, and reasonable, we might have got over
the bad harvest, and weathered, with little injury,
the disturbance about a possible war. With Free
Trade for the firm basis of oar national prosperity,
we might, by some concession all round, have sus-
tained our industry and the independence of every
class. But some of us have shown themselves igno-
rant ; and, through ignorance, rapacious; and we
see the consequence in the tens of thousands who are
idling away the day in the streets, while watchers
are wide awake daring the hours of the night in the
mills. We need not draw more pictures; for the
story is an old one, and only too familiar. The
grief is that its pictures should have been shown,
and its moral disclosed so often in vain.

TIM model villain in many modern French ro-
' mances is the returned or the escaped convict. Even
the writers who delight in strong effects hesitate to
make any one responsible for a hitherto unheard-of
accumulation of crime,-except the malefactor who
has added to his experimental knowledge of iniquity
that gained by intercourse with hundreds as bad as
himself! We have hitherto been spared the unplea-
sant effects which the presence of returned convicts
in our society would doubtless occasion here, as well
as in France. We hare got rid of our malefactors
by a process which, while it is productive
of the best effects to ourselves, is the only one which
stand' much chance of doing good to them. We
have sent our convicts to colonies where their powers
of evil are repressed, and a door is opened to them of
reaching a position in which they will be free from
temptation to crime. We are, however, about to
change all that. The patriots, who in BARRINGTON'S
time wisely

Left their country for their country's pod,
are to be retained at home, and let loose upon the
society which they had formerly made their prey.

The Times yesterday, in an apologetic article,
introduced to the English public eight of these in-
teresting gentlemen, just arrived from the Warrior
convict ship. They bring, it is supposed, a clean bill
of health with them, and are to have free leave to
wander about her MAJESTY'S dominion. " The world
is all before them where to choose," with the slight
qualification of having a policeman as • kind of
" providence " for their guide. These eight purified
specimens of criminal humanity are turned into the
paradise which they once forfeited for their crimes,'
with "no other restriction" than this, that if they
be found consorting with thieves, or frequenting the
haunts of persons of bad character, they are to be
sent back again to the hulks without trial. There
is something like mockery in this. Where on earth
are these miserable beings, branded with crime,
to hide their heads if not with their frierds ? And
who are their friends likely to be? Do convicts
generally come from the "first families" in Bel-
gravia? Are their "disconsolate friends" weeping
their absence in Mayfair or Tyburnia ? Are these
Mends likely to be aristocrats or merchant princes,
or shopkeepers " well to do " in the world ?
Has the criminal, in fact, come from amidst
a society which is in the main rigidly
moral and incapable of brutality, or has he not
come most likely from the very universities where
men graduate in crime—from the crowded alley or
[ choked-up lane where filth, moral and physical, fills
the soul and the body with disease? It was from
here he emerged whea he made war upon society ; it
was in the depth of these multitudinous purlieus that
he returned, to spend in debauchery what was pur-
chased with crime. Where can he go to, if not
here, when he has expiated his crime by receiving
punishment? What will society have to do with
one who hos violated its laws and suffered its
vengeance? The convict must return to his old
haunts or to others like them. He mast live, and it
is not likely that his friends will keep him in idle-
ness. No one, or at least very few, will offer em-
ployment to a returned convict. There will be but
one opening for him,—that with which he was familiar
before conviction. The fear of starvation will hurry
him into the only course left. Despair will embitter
his feelings, and the chance is greatly in favour
of his exceeding his former measure of crime.
This is the sort of person who is to be set loose upon
English society : men who have taken high degrees
in crime—who have had their brutal natures pro-
bably enough made more brutal by the punishment
they have received—who would be glad of some
opportunity of paying back to society some of the
pain that society has inflicted on them—who will
be looked upon with suspicion by honest men—who
will be able to give no references by which they
may obtain honest employment, and who, as a
matter of imperious necessity, must break the very
condition under which they received their liberty,by
returning to their old haunts from the sheer impossi-
bility of finding shelter anywhere else. The legend,
" Take care of your pockets," which now meets the eye
occasionally in public places, may have to be attend
into " Take care of your throats." We shall be in
constant dread in railroad carriages, in solitary
places, in any situation where facilities to the com-
mission of crime are afforded, of meeting with speci-
mens of a race of men who have their natural instincts
sharpened by the terrible necesaities produced by
their isolation. We are about to make London as
mush as Paris.

What is the whole amount of the plea that is
offered in excuse for the introduction of the ticket-of-
leave system in England ? That some of the colo-
nies refuse to receive convicts. That this refusal is a
valid ground for not sending convicts to the colonies
in question cannot be denied. No colony should be
bound to receive felons against its will. But some
colonies are not in a condition to refuse. Some
colonies are anxiously desirous of having the
assistance of convicts in the work of pioneering
the road to prosperity. Labour to them is too valua-
ble to be rejected, even although it comes clothed
in a felon's garb. Has it been proved that full ad-
vantage has been taken of the wishes expressed by
these colonies? Has there been any attempt made
to prove that in the wide surface of territory which
is under British rule there are no other spots adapted
for penal purposes than the few colonies which are
ready to receive convicts ? Other countries
of Europe might plead the want of places
beyond their boundaries fitted to receive con-
victs, but this can never be asserted of
Great Britain. There are openings in numberless
places which have never yet been tried, and the
Government will not be justified in pouring upon us
a flood of moral pestilence from the hulks unless it
has exhausted endeavours to save us from the evil. 1

Among the attendant evils which the persistence in
the carrying out the new scheme will produce, is the
introduction of a system of police surveillance utterly
inconsistent with the laws under which we have