The Sun.
London, England, 1842-12-05 00:00:00

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LONDON
MONDAY MORNING. DECEMBER 5, 1842.

It has been stated by a Tory journal, in order
to discredit the manufacturing system, that wages
have declined during the last forty years; and
the statement has been admitted by a Whig
journal, because the supposed fact was thought
to tell against the Corn-laws. The statement is
very important. Is it true? Let its examine the
matter under two aspects—the amount of wages
and the rate of wages.

The last forty years embraces the whole of this
century, and within that ,period it is well known
that our population has increased amazingly, and
that this increase is principally a town popula-
tion. In France, and generally on the Continent,
when a man has acquired a fortune, he goes to a
town or city to enjoy himself; in England, on
the contrary, till our rural districts became un-
safe, people who made fortunes retired to live in
the country. The bulk of the owners of rent live
in the country. A great portion of the receivers
of interest also live in the country, and the bulk
of the new town population are the recipients of
wages, and live on them. It ig at the same time
true, that many of the inhabitants of towns re-
ceive profits, and partly live on them. Thus
shop-keepers,lmaster-manufacturers, merchants,
and bankers, have large capitals embarked in bu-
siness, and the major part of their income is the
profit of their capital, but a considerable share of
it is for intelligence, skill, and labour, in ma-
naging their capital, and partakes 'more of the
nature of wages than of profit. Mr. COBDEN well
described, at the Sheffield meeting, the labours
of the master-manufacturers, for which they re-
ceive wages :
The Manchester man is on 'Change every Tuesday
from twelve to one, when business to the amount of
five or ten thousand pounds is transacted with a nod
of the head, or a, monosyllable. He goes to Liver-
pool, the next day, to buy cotton. He examines the
staple, and looks to the quality ; he brings away the
invoice in his pocket, and pays the money himself,—
(Hear.) He goes home, and do you think he goes a
fox-hunting ? He daily superintends thp process of
cotton-spinning and weaving. Hb has no lawyer with
red tape to tell him when a spindle is out of place, or
he wants a new loom. He knows where' every strap
and whereabout premises should be ; and if they

are out of order, he himself directs them to be properly
adjusted. And what does he do with his son ? Do
you think his son is sent to the Continent, to come
back precocious in the worst vices to be picked up
there ? No ; his son rises at the ring of the factory-
bell ; is in the factory at six in the morning; sees
every man at his post ; and knows every one by sight
and name. This is the discipline of the factory-lord.

Besides master-manufacturers, shop-keepers,
and merchants, there, are, in all large towns, an
immense number of foremen and clerks, who are
paid generally by a fixed yearly salary, and no
body- acquainted with these classes will say that
.the amount of salaries or wages paid to them has
been diminished. As the bulk of the increased
population live in towns, and live on wages, it is
palpably untrue to assert that the amount of
wages, looked at as a whole, has declined within
the last forty years. On the contrary, the amount
has greatly, and, considering that England was
long ago described as an old country, incapable
of making much further progresses, wonderfully
increased.

Has the rate of wages then declined ? Do the
labourers of all classes get less per head ? To
get at a fair solution of the question, we
must consider not only the branches of labour,
which were in existence fiwty years ago, but the
new•branches of labour which have sprung out
of the great tree of industry. We will admit that
the rate of hand-loom weavers' wages has de-
clined, but power-loom weavers constitute an
entire new branch of business, and their wages,
tilt the year 1837, were comparatively high.
Latterly, the wages ofpower-loom spinners have
declined, but forty years ago their art was scarcely
known, and, till a recent period, their wages were
nearly double the amount obtained by any ordi-
nary unskilled manual labour which was pre-
viously in existence. The case is the same with
engineers, gas-fitters, machinists, and a whole tribe
of new artisans, who, till the decline of trade, in
1837, were much, and still are, somewhat better
paid than any artisans previously in existence.
In such trades as shipwrights, house-carpenters,
bricklayers, tailors, sail-makers, shoe-makers,
printers, and seamen, the rates of wages are as
it were fixed at so much per day, or month, and
has not, we believe, been lOwered for many years.
At the same time, the price of nearly all kinds
of consumable commodities, even of bread, in
spite of the landlord's terrible monopoly, has
sunk since 1815, so that, comparing the rate of
wages with prices, 'it has rather risen than de-
clined. The individuals of the trades may not
get full employment; they may be, and are just
now, many of them, out of work, but the rate of
payment, when they get employment, remains
much the same.

To all these classes must be added the shop-
keepers and master-manufacturers, whose wages,
as is evident from the fortunes they have made,
have increased enormously during the last forty
years. In conjunction with the improvement in
their condition, and in the condition of various
classes of artisans, the previous condition not only
of the English agricultural labourer, sup-
ported as a pauper forty years ago in
many counties out of the rates, but of
the Irish agricultural labourer, who has
come within these forty years freely into com-
petition with the English labourer, must be
remembered. Looking at all these circumstances,
which can be verified by statistical data, we have
no hesitiation in saying that the rate of wages,
as a whole—and not taking only the wages of
agricultural labourers and hand-loom weavers—
has increased as well as the amount. A sad and
disgraceful thing it would be for the Government
were it not so. The incomes of the landlords, of
the clergy, of all the officers of State, have been
much increased, and, severely as the present
condition of the labouring classes condemns the
Government, it would have been ten times
more to be condemned if all their vast skill and
exertions had in nowise tended to improve their
own condition.

We bold the assertion of our Contemporaries,
therefore, to be quite untrue, both as regards the
amount and the rate of wages. But both the
rate and the amount, it must be remarked, have
beCn raised and
.kept up only by those successive
improvements in machinery and successive
discoveries, which have called the new and well-
paid arts into. existence. The poor, wretched,
unfortunate agricultural labourers and hand-
loom weavers, are as bad off as possible, and the
only means by which their condition has been
at any time. improved, or can be improved, is
to draft off the hands from those employments
into the new employments which science, art,
and enterprise, continually introduce. For
them to be successful they require to be free,
and to give new employment, to the people it is
necessary that the law-maker remove all his
shackles from trade.

The journals of the manufacturing districts so
abound with accounts of meetings to promote
the repeal of the Corn-laws, that it is impossible
for, us to notice :all of them, much less insert the
reports. There have been, for example, nume-
rous and enthusiastic meetings at Huddersfield,
Halifax, and Kendal. Meetings are in progress
at GlitsgoW and Leeds. It is especially refreshing
also to notice, that while the zeal of the League.
and its friends redoubles, the country gentlemen
are in various places declaring that the tenants'
can only obtain remunerating prices by the town
population being able to purchase agricultural
produce. They are sensible that the introduction
of foreign produce under the tariff has had little
or no effect on prices, and some of them, as Mr.
'WniTmottE M.P. for Bridgenorth, has taken
pains to prove that to the conviction of the
farmer. In general, they are fast adopting Sir
ROBERT PEEL'S dictum, that manufactures and
commerce must flourish in order that agriculture
may prosper. From the general spirit evinced,
we are sure that the Parliament will next assem-
ble under very different feelings from those enter-
tained last session, and that the country gentlemen
will be favourably inclined towards free trade, if
they be not ready to grant all which the League
demands.
From the reduction of prices, the fall of rent,
and the increase of pauperism, the country gen-
tlemen begin to see and feel that they have little
chance of preserving their property unless they
can restore the prosperity of the country. The
mode in which the distress in the manufacturing
districts comes home to their pockets—the only
means, apparently, of making them feel—was
well described by Mr. C. WOOD, at the Halifax
meeting, on Tuesday last, and we shall quote his
remarks to show the country gentlemen that the
invasion of 'paupers from the manufacturing :disi
triets, with which they. were long ago threatened
by Mr. COBDEN, has actually taken place
:
Those (said Mr. Wood) who, like himself, lived in
those parts of the country less remote from the seats
of manufacture, were much more sensible of the evils
the Corn-laws entailed upon them than those who resided
in more distant parts. But he was glad of having this
opportunity of saying to that assembly that the agri-
culturists were beginning •to see that their inte-
rests were inseparable from those of the manufac-
turing community.—(llear, hear.) That which
operated prejudicially upon the manufacturers,
would, before long, tell most perniciously upon the
agriculturists.—(Cheers.) The distress among the
labouring population of the manufacturing districts
was extending in no slight degree to the agricultural
districts, and directly in consequence of the distress
of the former class. He sat weekly at the Board of
Guardians at Doncaster, a purely agricultural district,
some thirty or forty miles from Halifax. Why, what
happened every day ? A. case came. Who is this
man was the inquiry ? He replies, "lam a spinner,
from the neighbourhood of Huddersfield?" " What
, have you come for ?' he is next interrogated. "Whv,
the mill which I worked at has stopped; my children,