Notwithstanding the benign attempt of Lord Palmerston to nod, Dovelike,
from the altitudes of the Home Office, a reconcilement of the warring mortals in the North of England, the conflict which passes by the name of " the Strike" begins to assume a very serious not to say an alarming aspect. The men show no signs of yielding; and, contrary to some reasonable expectation, the tribute which they receive from distant quarters does not fall off. We are very much inclined to ask, whether the hard and reserved bearing of the masters, by strengthening the idea that they were harsh and unjust, has not stimulated the motive to those contri- butions which the opposite bearing might so considerably have damped ? Thus backed, the men steadily reject any partial con- cessions hinted by the masters. As a body, the masters are not more yielding. At Preston, after a debate on a variety of sugges- tions, from a proposition that the factory-bells should ring as of old, to one that the delegate masters should adjourn for three months, it was resolved that they should adjourn for one month. The men persevere from week to week ; the Preston masters throw out their defiance for a month at a blow.
But the masters have received a new support, which the public had scarcely been led to expect. Hitherto the manufacturers of the different towns have pursued a separate course, each place for itself: they have now copied the combined tactics of the men, and have formed a league of all the cotton-district to support the mas- ters of Preston. Included in the league we observe even Burnley, where the men have been thoroughly vanquished; Blackburn, where the masters have never resisted ; Stockport, where the masters yielded; and Manchester, where the masters qualified resistance with temporizing. The local war is made general.
Lord Palmerston's Christmas-eve epistle is a reply to the me- morial which the Preston working people addressed to him six weeks previously. The reply is scarcely so happy an effusion as many in the Works of Henry John Viscount Palmerston ; but if the manner in which it dashes off the evidence that the Home Se- cretary is au fait in the political economy of the case falls short of his usual style in epigrammatic sketches, it must be confessed that a considerate gravity peculiarly became the occasion, and that the spirit of reconciliation which he suggests is eminently needed. One want even more urgent he points out—information. It is to be feared that both sides are to a great extent acting blindly, upon guess-work; and thus, by the random attempts of the two parties, each to enforce its own claim without having taken the pains to make out the justice and practicability of that claim, or probably without even having so much as taken the trouble to investigate for itself the very grounds of the claim, a wide tract of Northern England is handed over, in a winter of dearth and hard weather, to the worst asperities of an industrial war.
