The Sun.
London, England, 1844-04-10 00:00:00

THE ANTI-CORN-LAW LEAGUE

The position of the principal characters in the Anti-
Corn law League is about as ticklish a one as could
well be imagined. Here are a few men whose names
were not to be found in the book of fame yesterday or
early this morning, but who are now perched on the
topmost pinnacle, surrounded by a meridian glare of
notoriety. Half-a-dozen cotton-spinners and calico-
printers have become the world's talk. Moreover, at
present they are floating on the full tide of popularity.
They are the idols of that numerous and important class
who think that change is never out of season, and that,
if we must have change, the sooner the better. Not the
least nervous part of the business is that they hare
achieved their own greatness. They have not been born
great, nor has their greatness been thrust upon them.
The fates open their hands, it is true. The era is pro-
pitious. It is a rare combination of circumstances to
have the Premier himself a man of cotton, and a system
of agricultural protection at the same time. Something
or other must come of such encouragement and such
provocation. The blood and spirit of manufacture em-
brace its high destiny. The millowners rush forward
to occupy the breach which chance has opened. Cobden
becomes the captain of our fortunes, and Bright " the
cynosure of every eye."
Their stake is aggravated by the circumstance, that
they have put themselves into the most hostile possible
attitude to everything great and powerful, themselves
excepted. Princes, powers, and potentates, spiritual
and civil, are the daily sport of their tongues. Standing
on the boards of Covent-garden, it is their bold and sim-
ple rule to attack every individual, every class, every-
thing on earth, that is not likely to form part of their
present audience. Sure of their cause, of its vast im-
port, and awful sanctity, they denounce as their enemies
and the enemies of the human race, not merely every-
body who wags a tongue against them, but everybody
who, possessing a tongue, does not give them its active
and unreserved assistance. Nothing will satisfy them
till the whole bench of Bishops enter in procession
through the side scenes, lay down their mitres at Mr.
Bright's feet, and, addressing themselves to the " gods"
in the upper gallery, pronounce it the divinest of pre-'
cepts and first of human obligations, "to buy in the
cheapest market and sell in the dearest." As for the
country gentlemen—poor things !—it's quite shocking to
think how they come off at the hands of these universal
tormentors. If, therefore, the Leaguers should chance
to fall, it is quite evident they will fall heavy. Their
defeat will be celebrated by injured monopolies, despised
ranks, insulted dignities, calumniated persons. A hun-
dred several interests will demand their respective vic-
tims. Bright must be offered up to appease the grave
indignation of the bench, and Mr. Fox the wounded feel-
ings of the inferior clergy ; scarce will Cobden satiate the
deep vengeance of Whitehall ; the purer mactation of
Mr. Villiers will hardly calm the perturbations of our
fair aristocracy. The East and the West Indies will seve-
rally lead off perfect hecatombs of twenty guinea sub-
scribers. A mixed and eager crowd of great and small
proprietors, young ladies with portions, young gentlemen
with expectations, elder brothers with their rents halt
eaten up by settlements, and dowagers with life interests,
will scramble for the bodies of the smaller fry of the
League, for provincial stars, youthful debutants, and the
respectable seconders of the fourth, fifth, and sixth reso
lotions. Another Smithfield, another St. Bartholomew,
will close the awful scene.

But the greatest circumstance of peril remains. If it
were really a good-for-nothing cause, a mere ephemeral
object, puffed up into unjust dimensions, oblivion
would soon succeed on failure, and the disgraced
offenders would receive from time itself a virtual
amnesty. The world might never forgive, halt would
soon forget. On the contrary, the warfare undertaken
by these calico Titans, rude, grotesque, and fright-
ful as they are, is really an honest and noble
one ; that is, its objects are so. They don't see
it, but the greatness of their cause, the depth and
importance of their principles are their chief danger.
They trust to it and swagger. They think the end jus-
tifies the means. It must be virtuous, they think, to be
pursuing a sound and beneficial object. The manner of
doing it they fancy to be a minor consideration. We
must, then, tell them seriously and plainly, that this is
not the case ; and that they are themselves, at this pre-
sent moment, within an ace of leaving on the page of
history a lasting lesson to the contrary.
A great cause as often makes little men as it makes
great men. The greatest causes have made at least the
most notorious traitors and self-seekers. The man who
handles a vast negotiation as he would bargain with a
huckster, and puts the interests of the human race at the
bottom of his pedlar's pack, is only making himself the
scorn of ages. Better had he been content with the por-
tion of a worm, seeing that he was really no better than
one, than gibbet himself for the contempt of schoolboys
a thousand years to come.
Of course, we cannot make the Leaguers what they
are not of themselves. They must excuse the homely
earnestness of our proverb " We cannot make a
silk purse out of a sow's ear." It is for them, and
fur them only, to prove to the world whether they are
the benefactors of their kind, or cotton grubs. For
whom, and for what, do they ask that the country should
run such risks, for risks at least there are involved in a
greater freedom of trade ? For whom, and for what, do
they ask that important items of the revenue should be
surrendered, and the vested interests of the land should
be endangered ? For themselves only, or for the whole
nation, themselves included ? Is it their scheme of a
blessed futurity, that they are to build new mills, create
new manufacturing cities, dig new docks, lay down new
railways, enlarge their mansions into palaces, and their
pleasure grounds into parks, add town houses to country
houses, and ally themselves to the much hated, much
envied aristocracy ; while, all this time, the operative,
the mother of a family, the squalid youth, the sickly
girl, are to go on standing at the spindles for ever, winter
and summer, from half past five in the morning, by the
inexorable mill clock, to seven in the evening True,
they boast of their "flesh-pots." There will be all the
greater demand for labour, wages will rise, and you will
feed and clothe better. The potato-fed labourer will

envy your portion. But "if t 6 tale of the bricks which
they did make heretofore" is still laid upon them, what
is this but a well-fed bondage ?—such a bondage as a
free state should not allow in the helpless portion of its
citizens, in its females and minors.
The factory system is a great fact, one which we can-
not be blind to without permanent injury. The League,
as a witness to it, is another great fact. It has been
glad to wept that title. But there is one aspect of that '
original great fact which the League has hitherto been
miserably slow to recognise. There are now in this
country hundreds of thousands of women and young
persons chained to the steam-engine, with no power
whatever to change their employment, any more than if
they were indeed cast arid forged, and welded parts of
the fabric. Once in the factory, never out. IValls of
adamant and nine-fold Styx surround them, and for ever
close them in. Whatever power they may have to
better the other terms of their rigorous servicei they
cannot of' themselves procure a necessary abatement of
their daily toil. As a great fact, this vast portion of
our people must, if left to themselves, work to their
bodily and mental injury, to early decay, and shortened
Is it for these, as well as for the interests of capital,
that the League clamours so loudly for free trade ? If
not, we can only assure them that among all the names
that stink in this world, and will stink to eternity, that
union of the most outrageons importunity Fith the -i4st
Etclfishoesa, which the League would in that case present,

will be the most thorough, universally, and deservedly
loathsome and abominably.—Times.

FACTORIES BILL.

While we will yield to none in zeal and determi-
nation for a Ten Hours' Factory Bill, as a measure for
which the strongest case has been made out, and
which has become the plainest national duty, we
must, at the same time, be excused all the trammels
ofpartizanship. We will not and cannot deny that
the measure is attended w ith various risks ; but only
are we as sure as of anything in this world, that the
performance of a national duty will not be followed
by irremediable and immitigable evils. Time alone
can show how far the measure will affect the profit-
able working of the titctories ; and time alone can show
how far it will necessarily involve a proportionate
or even more than proportionate reduction of wages.
Let us hope for the best. It is the act of a whole
nation that is called for; so all' must expect to share
in the possible sacrifice. Perhaps the nation will
have to lighten the fiscal burdens of the manufac-
turer, the manufacturer to find himself not quite so
able to meet sudden bursts of demand, and the
operatives to be content with a rather lower scale of
wages, though sufficient, and probably less fluctuat-
ing than under the present system. Meanwhile we
will venture a few remarks, with a view to repress
too sanguine expectations, and to show the depth of
the question.
Apart from some unnecessary aggravations, the
most essential characteristic of factory labour—tedi-
ous mechanical drudgery—is as old as the world.
Employment of mere manual strength and skill, is
the portion of nearly all the human kind. There are
perhaps few who have not, on entering life, a chance
or two, an opportunity or two, of bettering their con-
dition and lifting their beads above the crowd. But
few, however, avail themselves of these openings, and
,the mass subside into one great level of toil and sor-
row, which our faith in the primeval curse compels us
to expect must ever remain. Legislation may alle-
viate the miseries of this class—if only by undoing,
in some instances, what it has done—but it cannot
cure them. Such is the general helplessness and im-
providence, and perhaps we ought to add perverseness
and degeneracy of mankind, that the mass will press
into any employment which affords a regular and suffi-
cient subsistence, however miserable the subsistence,
and miserable the employment.
Times never were and never will be very much
better in this respect. We will go back to a very
simple age, long before the days of steam—before
even the days of the spinning-wheel. In the "Iliad"
there is a most touching description, which might
stand for the type of the wool-spinner to the end of
the world. The two armies having come to a stand-
still at the Grecian camp, neither party either advan-
cing or giving way, the poet likens their position
to a woman, who works for daily wages and is true
and just in her dealings, holding a pair of scales. She
puts into them the weight and the wool she has spun,
which she adjusts till the two scales are equally
poised, that she may receive for her children the
miserable, hard, and shamefully scanty pay,—for
such is the force of the epithet employed. The in-
terest of this image is increased by a tradition men-
tioned in the most ancient life of Homer, that he is
here describing his own mother, and that the genius
which developed into the " Iliad" and the "Odyssey"
was first cherished on the miserable, hard, and shame-
fully scanty pay of a female woolspinner. The Latin
poet introduces another feature of the factory life in
his list of the omens of a coming storm ; the spark-
ling of the lamps, and the heads gathering on the
wicks, seen by the spinning girls at their night
work : .

" Nec nocturne quidem carpentes pensa puellse
Nescivere by emem."
In the interior of Africa Mungo Park found the
woman of the house, with the greater part of her
family, spinning cotton throughout a great part of
the night, and lightening their task with songs, one
of which is that extempore chant on the sad case of
the white stranger they had taken in. The labour of
grinding corn by the hand, imposed on females or on
captives, is uniformly described as being, what a de-
scription of the clumsy process would certainly lead
a most cruel drudgery. At the present
us to expect,
day, if we go into the villages of Buckinghamshire
and Northamptonshire, we shall often find nearly
half the female population at the lace pillow, twirl-
ing their bobbins for many hours of candle-light. at
either end of the winter day. The toil is so great,
that it is scarcely possible for the younger hands to
sustain it, amid the diversions and distractions of
home ; so they are crowded into miserable little
" schools," where the light of four or five con-
sumptive-looking " dips" is economically transmitted
and condensed through twenty glass bottles to as
many lacemakers. A girl of fifteen must work
hard to earn half•a-crown a.week, and the sedentary
nature of the employment is said to give an unhealthy
keenness to the appetite. In this case it is the com-
petition among the lacemakers themselves—the im-
mense increase in their number—much more than

the use of Nottingham net or any other external
cause, which has lowered the remuneration to that
starving point. The lacemakers of Normandy work
through a great part of the winter night in their
stables, among the cows, whose fragrant breath and
huge warm bodies serve them for stoves. Yet all
this, we may say, is nature, at least a very slight
portion of art ingrafted on rural life, certainly not
the result of any great tyranny—no mighty social
oppression—and almost utterly beyond the reach of
legislation.
Why do we bring up all this ? It might, of
course, seem to tell against us; but we have no
fears on that head, and therefore only wished the
truth to be seen as widely and deeply as the most
unsparing research and the most self-denying can-
dour can make it. There are those who talk on
the great legislative question before Parliament, as if
all but continual drudgery was not the portion of man.
It is his portion, and would not be so if it were not
also his best and mo-t salutary portion. Nature more
than art is continually chaining man to the plough
and the wheel : and nature works under a lord and
master. Philanthropists who close their eyes to this
great truth are sure, soon or late, to defeat their
own objects. But civilization does also introduce its
own evils, and those not the least. It is, then,
doubly incumbent on civilization to mitigate, to
diminish, to soften man's necessary lot of toil and sor-
row. Whenever we meet with an enormous mass of
suffering, brought to one head, with almost every con-
ceivable aggravation, and that in the midst of such
wealth and power and luxury as the world has no-
where hitherto witnessed, there surely may be re-
cognized a plain duty of national interposition. The
"law of suffering," as divines have called it, may be
pleaded for the consolation of the sufferers,—for the
consolation of unsuccessful benefactors,—but surely
not in excuse
apathy. Whatof wealthy, powerful, and luxurious
we can do, we must do. More than
that is not required. Society shows on its face a vast
superfluity of wealth and power,—enough to squander,
enough to abuse; surely this indicates a possibility
of relieving that mass 1:). poverty and labour with
which it presents so strong, so strange a contrast.—
Times.

There has been a debate on the Civil Contingencies
—always one of the most interesting items in a Com-
mittee of Supply. There was the old story of paying
the travelling expenses of foreigners of distinction, who
visited Great Britain ; •with the interesting addition of
paying the expenses of Prince Adalbert of Prussia, when
he went from Rio Janeiro to Para ; and some other
foreign Prince, when he went from Jaffa to Beyrout, and
thence to Constantinople. This may be all very cour-
teous, and all very generous ; and as it is well known
Great Britain has more money than she knows what to
do with, no doubt it is quite right for her to do so ; but
the question naturally rises— do our Princes and Prin-
cesses, when they travel abroad, have their expenses paid
by the countries through which they pass, or which they
go to visit ? If so, there is something like reciprocity,
though the balance would be considerably against us ;
but as we do not suspect this to be the case, why John
r l alone,"aeed leaving his name on the debtor's side ere he had
Bull plays the same part he has been doing for the last
half century, though, fortunately, now on a much
smaller scale. Only fancy, too, the Queen Dowager,
with her 100,000/ alear, sending in a "little bill" for
1001., for some trifling repairs to Marlborough House •
and the British Parliament being called upon to vote 684
for watering Park-gate-street, Dublin. Certainly these
Civil Contingencies are full of the most interesting
details I—Cheltenham Looker-on.
ONE or TILE BROWN'S.-_A fellow of gentlemanly
appearance and address has lately been conferring his
favours on several tradesmen of Canterbury, under the
nom de guerre of " Captain Brown," by giving very libe-
ral orders for clothes, boots, stationery, books, &c., pay-
ing small accounts, and getting his name inserted in the
waste book, and hence to the ledger, for larger orders,
and then withdrawing from the vicinity " by moonlight
jnxta-position on the creditor's, thus pre-
senting it nthiem with a " forget-me-not" as a " first flower
of spring." He took lodgings in Orchard-street, St.
Dunstan's, and was thought by his landlady to be a very
nice gentleman, and on his quitting his quarters he left
behind him his wardrobe inclosed in a carpet bag, which
thus making good the old French pro-
on inspection was found to contain a very old and dirty
shirt and a sack,
verb said to have been established at the building of the
tower of Babel, " Chacun son sac." Captain Brown has
the appearance of having been to sea, is about five feet
six inches in height,. black hair, and dark complexion,
and betrays great impatienee to be attended to in giving
orders,—Correspondent of the Kent Herold.
KING GEOIIGE TIIETIIIRD AND THE SCOTCH DIVINE,
—His Majesty, after the close of the American revolu-
tionary war, ordered 4 thanksgiving to be kept through
. :
A noble Scotch divine, in the presence
o
inquired, " For what are we to give thanks ,
St—hfittsliiikae itnig(Ttiion:girl:lllajesty has lost thirteen of your best pro-
vinces ? ' The King answered "No I" tiis it, then
(the ciivinp 44de.; (l'A that youi Majesty has lost 100,000
fives of your aunjcets in duo contest ?' " No, no !" said
the
" Isit, then, that we have expended and lost
a hundred
millions of money, and for the defeat and
tarnish
Majesty's arms. ?" 'S No *AA thing, i ing.
of
Four
said tho Ding Pleasantly: t` What, then, is the object
orthe thahksgiving ?" 1' Oh, to give thanks that it is
' uo worm"