CORRESPONDENCE.
A COMMENTARY IN AN EASY-CHAIR :
THE SKILLED AND THE UNSKILLED—WASHERWOMEN AND, RAG-PICKERS—SC A/WING WORK.
IT appears, which is a thing I had scarcely foreseen, that there are differences in the world as to the advantages of skilled over unskilled labour, at least for women, which is an opinion very remarkable at this stage of the world's histofry„ in which the welkin has rung with outcries and appeals to heaven and earth for work for women. Most authorities, I am glad to think, are of accord with Mr. Gladstone in respect to men, that the possession of a trade or craft is a kind of fortune to the worker, and that no skilled and industrious workman is likely to want occupation. But it would seem that the ladies, at least of the Trade-Unions, do not think so. That slop-workers should be trained to sew, does not enter into their programme. Their opinion is, that not only one man or one woman is as good as another, but also that one kind of work is as good as another. Let the rag-sorters be rag-sorters still, and let Melenda continue to slave helpless and hopeless over her button-holes. " It is better," says the lady, who appears as the champion of the female Trade-Unions, " that the conditions of those trades [rag-sorting, &c.] should be improved, than that the energy now spent in obtaining these results should be devoted to further overcrowding the ranks of skilled needlewomen by drafting- into those ranks women at present employed in other occupa- tions." That is to say that it is better to force a higher rate of remuneration for the meanest work than to raise the standing of the workers and teach them to do better. I do not suppose that this is really what Mrs. or Miss. Abraham, or some greater authority behind her, means,—who knows very well, no doubt, that to turn a rag-sorter, even if she• is a young woman, into a skilled needlewoman, is about as likely an attempt as to turn a thistle into a fig, or a bramble into a grape. But the rag-sorters, if they are young and able-bodied, might be perhaps turned into laundry-women,. who are always in demand, and able to earn good wages ; and I am ready to confess that I, for one, should esteem infinitely more the ladies who would give themselves to the admirable work of effecting that transformation, than those who attempt the Herculean and unprofitable task of forming the other uninstructed poor creatures into Trade-Unions.. Good washerwomen are as rare as good dressmakers. In country places where there are no great laundries in which washing can be executed on a large scale and by all manner of machinery, the unfortunate family which by bad luck loses its habitual washerwoman, has to go through many miserable experiments before it is fortunate enough to
find another ; and even the habitual washerwoman leaves much to desire in most cases. One of the luxuries of a great house, with plenty of room within and without, is the happiness, I have heard many ladies say, of having a laundry of one's own, where good washing, clean drying, and the polished glories of the smoothing-iron could be secured in perfection. These are not things that can be had without trouble ; and to advance the poor women by this better use, would do both them and the country a great deal of good,— more good than any patronage or forcing of the lower kinds of work could possibly do. Indeed, I cannot imagine a more noble aim for the Trade-Union itself than to give its attention to the training of its members to better things. This would be an object as noble as many of the present objects are unreasoning, impossible, and inhuman. But it is not an object that seems to commend itself to any one. Short hours, good pay, exemption as far as possible from all burdens, are things which are comprehensible by the meanest capacity. But every man who thinks on this subject must know for himself that there is a limit beyond which all the pressure in the world cannot make such claims efficacious. .Trade will glide off elsewhere, enterprise will find new channels. But the man who can and will do good work is almost always, save in case of misbehaviour, master of his fate.
I do not think I am at all convinced by the little trumpet from the Women's Trade-Union League. Why should we be driven into sending our girls to Girton, and giving them professions on the one hand, if on the other we are to keep down other people's girls (supposing, for the sake of argument, that they are girls instead of old women) to rag-picking, instead of driving them, if we can by every argument in our power, into skilled laundresses, or at least good washers and wringers, a wholesome, always-needed, never overcrowded trade, instead of the fcetid and disgusting labour which the Women's Trade-Union League has taken under its special wing. I should like to preach discontent in these regions, but not (though that may be needful, too) of their miserable wages, but of their miserable work. Learn to do something better, I should like to say,—something that is 'worth good wages, that is good work. Poor souls ! I would not discourage anything that was good for the inevitable rag- sorters. If the disagreeableness of work told to its advantage, and people were paid on account of the misery they go through in working, our scale of remunerations would be wonderfully revolutionised. But this is not the case. One kind of work is not as good as another, and never can be. That which requires patient thought and care and skill, is one thing ; that which requires none of these qualities, but mere legs and arms, is another. They can never be put on the same level. And according to all human probability, there will never be too many excellent workmen or workwomen in the world. I, who have no such responsibility as Mr. Gladstone, may venture to say that in the best of trades the work is often scamped in a way which is humiliating and painful, as well as a continual disappointment. But still, there is a world of difference between the man who knows how to do some special thing, and the man who knows nothing except to fetch and carry. " Can do," says a Scotch proverb, " is easy carried about."
It has often been a wonder to myself, to return to the question of distressed needlewomen, what becomes of all the excellent instruction in needlework which is given in the ordinary parochial, and also, I believe, in the Board schools. In many of the former, the girls are taught to do very good work. Does the faculty fall from them, one wonders, as their spelling does, after all the laborious days spent over it P But spelling is a thing that goes by nature, and even Royal Princesses and men of genius cannot be made to acquire it if the root of the matter is not in them. Either the girls do not retain the use of their needle when they are free of the discipline of school, or they find it too troublesome : and the slop-work is so cheap, so cheap ! As for the dressmaker in -every little village who goes out with her little sewing-machine for half-a-crown a day, as another lady is so kind as to inform me, I should like to know those villages. There is no such person in the neighbourhoods I know. The other day I was informed by a lady in Surrey that she had to wait a month until the one capable needlewoman of her district should find time to do a most simple piece of work for her, so overwhelmed was this one tolerable workwoman with work. There are, of course, dressmakers everywhere ; but when one appears who is capable, and knows what she is about, she is immediately mobbed, overwhelmed like that Surrey artist, pelted on all sides with work. The little dressmaker, with her little machine, going out smiling to make the maidservants' neat dresses, is an ideal picture which will make the mouths of many women water. Before she has made many such pilgrimages, she will be snapped up by some ambushed and anguished mother with two or three girls to clothe, or by the girls themselves, who cannot afford to go to Mesdames Marie or Louise except for their very best " things ; " and the end of that little dressmaker will be arrogance, and an inability to recognise, much less work for, her first humble patronesses.
Therefore, dear ladies, take heart of grace ; preach that gospel of work, good work, which has been extravagantly sounded, and strangely travestied, but yet is the best of creeds after all. We have all been preaching work for some thirty years or so, or let us say half-a-century, to the people who have no bread to earn nor living to make, and I am not sure that we have done so well in so doing as we com- placently think we have. It is sometimes better not to work if we would receive that teaching. It used to be thought that the man who reared children for his country, and planted trees, was doing the best he could for her, and I am myself greatly of that opinion still. But I think, of all the good things that benevolence can do, there is nothing so good as this, to teach those who must work how to work well. Put skill in their fingers,—teach them to do something that is worth doing. Let Melenda be led from her button-holes, which are a weariness to her soul—which are badly done, badly paid, and which do not merit good pay, first principle of all, but continually overlooked—to do good needlework, though it requires far more patience and trouble than perhaps she will care to give,—which, again, is another thing which is not thought of. This will be better for them all than anything else that can be done for them, and certainly than the Trade- Union which endeavours to make them believe that rag- picking, so long as you can get good wages, is as good a profession as any in the world.
Alas ! we are all too fond of stamping—even venerable statesmen, who make a grace of confessing the same—and statesmen unvenerable, who, if they had a real heart in their work, would not stop at the very perfunctory service of aiding and abetting in a row, but come out boldly like men, and " de- fend the people " practically, like that "young Mr. Harrison" who has been so unkindly jeered at, and who really for once has the courage of his convictions. "Assaulting the police," if you are so very sure the police is wrong, and that an Irish mob needs to be defended, is a genuine proceeding, and merits, in its way, approval as such, though it may not have been very wise. On the whole, that young gentleman, if he takes his beating like a man and does not whine, occupies a much better position than the Right Honourable who ought to have known better, and who only tried to provoke the police into horrifying the world by aiming a blow at him. For my own part, I think young Mr. Harrison's charge alone upon the constabulary, when all the strong right arms were waving about with little effect, was not a discreditable imprudence among all the cheap heroics that are about. He was carrying out his principles, and not stamping the work which as Home-rule Member no doubt he believes seriously, he has taken in hand.
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