THE NEW FAITH.
TRADE, we have said, cannot do everything ; and among the novelties of the day, we notice a dawning conviction of the fact that the spirit of trade is not omnipotent. There are many things, indeed, that it can do, most admirable in their kind, but some not so admirable. The reader will remember the description of labour in the English collieries, disclosed by virtue of Lord Aahley's efforts : let him peruse the following account of labour hi the French coal and iron pits of Denain, given by Mr. Jones, manager of the works, and cited by Mr. Tremenheere in his report on mining in France and Belgium— "I have been here about a year and three-quarters. I came to take charge of the iron-stone pits. I worked as a collier and miner in Shropshire and Stafford- shire for thirty-five years. I was director of Mr. Williamson's pits near Bilston for ten years; and at the same time I worked some pits under Mr. Philip Wil- liams, of Wednesbury Oak, for about twelve years. I find the French workmen very attentive; they follow the work they are put to very steadily and faithfully; they are very civil and very respectful to their superiors; they are much before us for their manners; they never pass each other that they have not a civil or kind word to say to each other, and there is never any quarrelling or fighting among them. They are a contented, good-humoured people. The diet of a French col- lier is very poor compared with an English collier; soup, and bread with a very little butter, and white very poor cheese, vegetables, and a little fruit, very seldom any meat. They cannot do so much work as an English collier; but they are more contented with a piece of bread and an apple than an English collier with his beef-steak. They are very clean, both in their persons and their houses. I have been all over this mining district, and I never saw a cleaner and more de- cent set of people in my life. They would make most of our English colliers and miners ashamed. They never omit to wash their whole bodies after coming up from the pits; and they put on clean pit dresses never less than twice a week, some of them every day. A man, when he is coming dirty from the pit, will not stop till he has thoroughly cleaned himself. Sometimes I have offered a pint of beer to men after their work, when their hands are dirty; but they have said they would go home first, and when they were clean they would come back and take the beer. They are very careful and industrious with their gardens, which they take great pleasure in; and they store up vegetables for winter use, preserving some of them in lard. Their diet is suitable to their work; that is, as they live low, the quan- tity of work they do is in proportion. The work is exactly like the Staffordshire lougivall work. Nothing can be safer or more agreeable to work in than the pits als efemtry. They go to much expense about it; but, on the whole, consider- Mg the economy of time and labour it produces, I don't think it adds sixpence a ton to the selling price of the coal. Their priests have much influence over them; cud they attend mass, most of them, regularly. Each man is obliged to have a book, in which the date of coming to work at a place or leaving it is entered; and if his former master, on being applied to, gives him a bad character, he need not go and seek work elsewhere. There are about thirty Englishmen working here; I cannot say much in favour of their general conduct as compared with the French. If any thirty of the Frenchmen here were to be transferred to some parts of Staffordshire, they would be so disgusted that they would not stay; they would think they had got among a savage race."
Now in this account there appears to be one fact on which the mere spirit of trade would fasten—there is something under six- pence a ton to be saved on coals. It is true that all the excellent social condition described by Mr. Jones would have to be given up ; and in this country, our "intense competition," especially in the great colliery districts, might oblige employers to attempt the saving of that sixpence. If, then, you regard the colliers only as instruments for the production of coal, no doubt it is foolish to waste that additional sixpence per ton on their comfort, espe- cially as that comfort does not consist in the additional beef, which is the test of bodily welfare in this country. But we are inclined rather to view the coals as instruments for promoting the welfare of the colliers—of society at large also, no doubt, but in the first instance of those whose labour is expended on them. Therefore we hold that the sixpence a ton is well bestowed, even if its expenditure is not justified by the "haggling of the mar- ket," and its saving through competition is prevented. A new opinion is growing up in this country on such subjects. The interference with the unhurnanizing processes in our mines has worked well; the notion is gaining ground, that the welfare of the people is the thing to be sought iv thefirst instance, and that commerce by itself is not quite omnipotent to effect it. Bat, having awakened to the idea, we find ourselves not very intelli- gent or expert at realizing it. We perceive distinctly enough, that trade, which ultimately resolves itself into the mutual ex- change of the surplus produce of labour by individual barter, does not supply the motives, the spirit, or the apparatus for some great operations which need the accord of large numbers,—for things that will not "pay "—that is, will not show a profit on individual exchange, and yet are most essential to the welfare of living hu- man creatures, individually and socially. Some of the extra com- forts which keep the colliers of Denain within the pale of ci- vilized society do not "pay "—that is, do not afford a profit on individual exchange ; but they amply repay the society that consents to sacrifice sixpence a ton on coals, as a con- servative tax of so beneficial an influence. And there are operations of a yet larger kind in which we cannot make way, because we have the habit, now inveterate, though it was not al- ways an English habit, of trusting too exclusively to the motives and methods of trade. We are bunglers at carrying out great works for the community—such as town-drainage, or arrange- ments for extra-mural interment—when we compare our own achievements with those of people whose very existence is only half discerned through the haze and distance of the remotest anti- quity. A Pelasgian or an Etruscan would laugh at our official impotency to carry out works of drainage or establish extra- mural cemeteries: we are barbarians compared with those infant peoples. But they, probably, did not ask whether such works would "pay." They did not hang upon the statistical accounts, or await the fiat of a " board of trade," to know whether health was justified by a money profit, or decency consistent with par- simony. A "board of trade" is a very useful modern in- vention, its "statistical department" is a crowning grace ; but when we wait to consult either on matters beyond the scope of either, we are but trifling with statistics. We turn these over, to learn oracular divinations from them, to as much purpose as our ancient friends might have inspected and handled the en; trails of new-killed fowls. It is a superstition. Hence do we stand at the mercy of nuisances the most obvious, odious, and noxious. Our river is a common sewer, and we know it ; but yet we boggle, statisticize, legislate, survey, begin a little amendment with a vast cackling like that of a hen over her first egg; and all this because, instead of decreeing " simpliciter," that our nuisance shall be abolished, we are under some compulsion to try, at least, if we cannot reconcile the abolition to the laws of " .e. s.
which have no bearing on the matter. The "ornamental" waters of our Parks become filthy reservoirs of obscene odour, until an agitation, almost a rebellion, is engendered. Round the Serpen- tine, for instance, a conspiracy to coerce the state is openlytt work, under the Early-Closing Association ; and all to abolish a nuisance patent to the universe, and confessed by the official de- partment of Woods and Forests. Can Laputa furnish any more glaring example of circuitous effort to do a plain thing ? The Early-Closing movement is in itself an organized effort to bring about what mere trade prevents ; and so, to come back upon our first topic, are our mining improvements. These movements are indeed social conspiracies against the tyranny of the mere spirit of trade ; a great spirit in its own domain—that is, in com- merce—but not one so pure or exalted, or so potent, as to be the ruling spirit of the world. These conspiracies are reactionary movements, consequent on the overdone dogmatics of free trade and the presumptions of the ultra-crepidarian Manchester school : they are not reactions against free trade, but against the exclu- sive trust in that limited blessing : society is feeling the necessity of going beyond the seventh heaven chalked out for it by philo- sophers whose imagination was begotten in the factory and fed upon statistics.
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