TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. BRIGHT AND THE NEW ZEALANDER.
AT Manchester on Thursday night, Mr. Bright was not as optimistic as he usually is, when he is reckoning up the great past results, and seeing in vision the still greater future results, of enfranchising the people. Apparently, the new and magnificent municipal palace in which he was speaking led his imagination, as such magnificence often will lead the imagination of poets, to thoughts of ruin and de- cay. He thought of Phoenician cities which had once been BO busy with trade, and which were now deserted wildernesses ; he recalled, in her season of prosperity, Venice, many of whose palace-gates are now overgrown with sea-weed, which, as Shelley said, "topple o'er the abandoned sea, as the tides change sullenly." And he related the question put to him five-and-thirty years ago by a friend (Mr. Henry Ashworth), in the ruin of Tantallon Castle, in Scotland :—" How long will it be before our great warehouses and factories in Lan- cashire are as complete a ruin as this castle ?" Evidently the question had affected his imagination,—partly, no doubt, because, as he remarked, the ruins of factories are the most miserable ruins of all, bringing home the sense of desolation, without the charm of bygone strength and beauty which hangs about medireval ruins. Thus in the midst of the evidence of Man- chester's wealth and public spirit, he could not help reverting to the prospect that this question suggested, the rather, that he evi- dently wanted to warn the artisans of the North of the dangers they may create for themselves by persevering in the policy which their Unions have recently adopted. But it was none the less somewhat quaint for Mr. Bright, who has always been the prophet of popular principles, and announced the great triumphs which those principles are to bring to modern civilisation, to take up the strains of Jeremiah at such a moment, and see "the fruitful place a wilderness, and all the cities thereof broken down," and "the whole land desolate," not for the sins, but for the mistakes of those who dwell therein. When Macaulay imagined his New Zealander sitting on the broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's, he was assuming that there might be some secret law which exhausts races and their civilisations after they have had their day. But Mr. Bright, when he contemplated the factories of Manchester in ruins, was indulging in no such dream as this. He was merely thinking that if the Trades' Unions do not soon become a little more reasonable than they now are, a great deal of business will go abroad to other nations, whose working-classes are less obdurate, and more willing to be guided by the views of their employers. His imagina- tion fills him with the vision of "Death coming up into the windows" of those many-windowed factories, and entering even into the grand municipal palace in which he was speaking, but not as the result of any mysterious principle of periodic• national growth and decay, but as the consequence simply of bad economical conceptions in the operatives, and consequent misunderstandings between them and the capitalists with whom they should co-operate. We are very far indeed from underrating the vast im- portance of these blunders or misunderstandings. We heartily wish that every operative who is employed or likely to be em- ployed in the cotton or worsted factories of England, would read and ponder the calm and wise article in the Economist of last week, on the controversy which is going on between them and their employers. They would see reason, we think, in that paper for coming to the conclusion that while half-time, or at least very short hours of work, at full wages, is the proper remedy for a clear case of over-supply, when more of any class of products has been .produced than the world can at all need for some time to come, it is not the right remedy for the diminished demand caused chiefly by diminished means, if there is good reason to believe that in case the cost of production could be some- what reduced, the demand would quite cover the ordinary rate of supply. We do not say that this is the true account of the languid demand now existing for English cotton and woollen goods, for we have not the adequate knowledge to judge that deli- cate and difficult question of fact adequately, but we do think the Lancashire operatives would be very wise in considering fully and frankly what is alleged by impartial authorities on the Capitalists' side. Undoubtedly, it is true that the capi- talists stand in a much better position than the operatives for judging of this matter. Half-time would be no less their interest than their workmen's, if they really saw no chance of increasing greatly the demand by diminishing the cost of their products; and the mere fact that they do not think this should count for much. They are in a much more advantageous position for estimating tha commercial condition of the various countries which are their customers, than their men can ever be, for their principal work in life has been the survey of the field of demand and the conditions of supply, while the work of the artisans has been. chiefly that of satisfying the demand. But though we think that on a delicate and difficult issue of this sort, tha judgment of the capitalist is more likely to be correct than the judgment of the acutest association of working-men, we state that impression only with reserve and parenthetically, for we are concerned not so much with the correctness or incor- rectness of Mr. Bright's view on this head, as with the very large inferences which he seems inclined to draw from it. We certainly do rest with some confidence on our belief that whether or not the tall Manchester chimneys be ever piled in crumbling fragments on the ground, and hidden by the growth of the invading forest, this ruin, if it comes about, will not be due to the misunderstandings between English workmen and English capitalists. The point which Cassandra prophets, and even Mr. Bright in his imaginative moods, seem to forget, is—that these misunderstandings are not limited to English labour markets, but on the contrary, will be only beginning in most foreign countries when they are almost ending here. Compare, for instance, the struggle going on at the present moment in the United States,—on which we have written in another page—with that which disquiets the cotton lords of Manchester and Bolton. Why, the demands of English artisans and the style of argument press ed by English Unionists are like products of the pure reason, as compared with the demands of the artisans of the United States, and the fashion in which they urge them. Take, again, the labourers of Germany or Belgium. No doubt, it is true that some of them are at present working at much lower rates of wages than our English artisans,—though in America, on the other hand, they expect much higher wages,—but then. this is only because their whole expectations have for generations been tuned to a low key. They are grumbling, just as our working-men are grumbling,—only with much. less knowledge of the subject, and much less disposition to be guided by practical considerations. German observers who are familiar with the discontents of the German labour market, and who come over to England, are astounded at the reasonableness and good-sense of the English artisans. Karl Marx can get no real support for his wild views of "Capital" amongst the English operatives. The "International," which obtains so much influence among the working-class abroad, is virtually a failure here. The simple truth is that as far as' the disposition to look economical facts in the face goes, the English artisan is a generation at least in advance of the artisan of France or Germany or the United States. It is- quite possible that our operatives are making a serious mistake now in declaring that the mills should work short time at full wages, rather than that they should work full time at reduced wages ; but it is not a mistake which is irreparable, and if it were, it would be as bad a look-out for many of foreign manufacturers as for us, for their workmen too are yearly making similar or worse than similar mistakes. Indeed, if English manufacturers are suffering now, the same, we believe, may be said of almost all their foreign competitors. It is not impossible that owing to a loss of the chief advantage which she has hitherto possessed over other countries,—cheap coal, and therefore cheap steam, —England may at some distant period lose her commercial leadership. But whatever may happen from physical causes like these, we can see no sign whatever at present that she will lose that superiority from the special moral causes which Mr. Bright most fears,—the obstinacy and irrational self-will of the operative classes. On the whole, we do not think Mr. Bright need have so prematurely translated Lord Macaulay's New Zealander from the banks of the Thames to the banks of the Irwell, unless, indeed, he holds that by drawing the picture of factories in ruins, he may press home the argument for reasonableness more vividly than he could do by keeping well within the limits of moral probability. Our operatives have still a deeper and mole unreasoning distrust of the capitalists than the rank and file ought to feel towards the Generals, but that dis- trust is rational and pliant, compared with the distrust of most of the same class abroad and in the United States.
Previous page
