THE JACQUERIE IN THE NORTH.
THE kind of Jacquerie which has prevailed in the mining districts, both of England and Wales, for the last ten days, suggests many thoughts. One of them is the folly of those optimists who believe that the necessity of governing by physical force is over, that the world has passed into a new stage, and that, in Europe at least, we can trust to -civilisation and the vote. The coalminers are supposed to be civilised, and possess the vote, yet no one doubts that but for physical force there would have been complete anarchy in many counties,—that the country-side in the mining districts would have been in the possession of men as rough as Englishmen were three hundred years ago ; that quiet houses would have been burnt ; that innocent men and women would have been killed ; that the poorer class of labourers would shave been beaten, starved, and expelled from the district, 'just as they are expelled, when they have broken rules, from any Polynesian island. To maintain order physical force ' has been required, just as it has been required. for the past thousand years, and in all probability will be required for a thousand years to come. The interest of the miners has overcome their reason, as in similar circumstances, that is to say, during a great and most painful loss of income, it always will overcome it. Nor can the force employed be the civil force, as the more reasonable optimists would affirm. The civil force can never be equal to the discontented in numbers, and has no advantage whatever except in its discipline. Two hundred police can do nothing with ten thousand miners. The -insurgents aro as brave as their opponents, are man for man probably their superiors, and are far more reckless of con- sequences and life. The fear of the law does something, -but that once overcome, the miners must win, and the use of the police only increases their self-confidence. It is 'necessary to call in men who can inflict death, just as in the old jacqueries, when the men-at-arms were killed-out by the peasants, it was necessary to call in the knights, who, by com- parison, were scientifically armed. And another and deeper thought which arises, is that the pity or " love," which is spreading so fast through the cultivated class, and is supposed to be the master-force of the modern world, has not reached down to the real population at all. The educated classes feel deeply for the managers, who do not receive the profits of the 'mine, but who, simply as servants doing their duty, try to protect their masters' property. The miners do not feel for them at all, but wreck their houses, burn their furniture, and even—at Llanelly—bash in their wives' heads. Nothing can be more pitiful than the position of the " blacklegs " in a mining district. They are men so poor, or so long out a employ, that rather than starve any longer, they accept inferior wages, to the injury of their comrades, and submit to a social obloquy of the severest kind. The middle class pities -them intensely; indeed, under the name of the "unemployed," reserves its pity for them too exclusively. The very course of legislation is deflected for their benefit, and the cities hardly dare move lest they should increase their number. The miners do not pity them at all; but, on the contrary, hold them to be treacherous enemies, beat them back from work with clubs, and would, but for the soldiers and police, put them to death in heaps. The "law of love" as regards them does not operate at all, and this mainly because they are too poor, too depressed, too much objects of pity to abstain from work. And, finally, the new intelligence of which we hear so much, has been of little good. Nothing can be more certain than that violence, by irritating the public, which is stronger than any single trade, irritates opinion, and makes it certain that a strike will fail; yet the miners, once excited, resort, to violence at once, just as five hundred years ago they would have resorted to insurrection. There is no im- provement, or one that is imperceptible to the eye. As to the people, it is to the middle class the one object of solicitude ; the " mass " for which everything is to be sacrificed; the " community " for which everything, justice included, is to be readily given up. The miners do not care for it at all. Their avowed idea is that the community should be charged more for its coal. If the millions of the poor are deprived of suffi- cient fuel, and have to do without warmth or means of cook- ing, the miners are entirely indifferent,—their single interest is that their own wages should not be reduced. They are as pitiless as the old lords ever were, and as ready to resort to violence.
We do not say this in the least to throw opprobrium on miners. On the contrary, we think that this time they have had terrible provocation. The reduction was, it is true, pro- vided for in the sliding-scale by which they contracted to abide ; but they hardly remembered their agreement, and for poor men, earning on the average 17s. a week, to lose 3s.
is a bewildering blow. If they had struck peaceably, we should have said that, although they were in the wrong, a good case, at all events in mitigation, could be made out in their behalf. Our object is not to condemn them, but to point out to their intellectual superiors, especially the journalists on their side, that they are the victims of a delusion. The world cannot afford to be governed as they would have it governed, by " pity " and " love " and " sympathy," instead of justice and rectitude. Granting even that the former is the ideal, which is not quite certain—for Nature is awfully pitiless, and God must be the Lord of Nature—the ideal is still too far off to be anything but a counsel of perfection. They go too far ahead of the facts, and make the mistake of the Quakers, who did not see that in a world with men in it at once bad and bold, non-resistance meant that the bad and bold should govern all the righteous, or at all events oppress them at will. It is infinitely best to govern by love when the loved will respond ; but when they will not, it is necessary to fall back on the elder virtue, Justice, and the old and half-forgotten law, that the pro- tection of the feeble against the strong—that is, in this case, of the " blacklegs" against the Unionists—is the first duty of the just Judge. Sympathy is a great quality; but the object of sympathy must be the right one; and at Llanelly that is Mrs.
Beith, and not the miners who smashed in her head. Love is probably the highest of the impulses; but are we to love the twenty-six soldiers threatened in their loft with blasting powder, or the ten thousand men who would not see that they were simply doing their duty to the democracy which employed them P It is the unreality of modern philanthropic thought which alarms us rather than the thought itself. Much of it, indeed, has its root in Christianity, and can therefore, if sincere, pro- duce nothing but good; but it is, in its manifestation, so apt to be insincere. It is utterly insincere, for instance, when we preach pity for the poor, and take the side of Unions which are prohibiting the very poor from earning wages that just keep body and soul together. There is no philanthropy in that, nor any Christianity either. What there is, is nothing but caste-feeling, as bitter and as unjust as ever was displayed by nobles or Kings. Just imagine, indeed, for a moment what would be said of any modern King who, to keep two-thirds of his subjects in high com- fort, prohibited the remaining third from over competing with them in ordinary labour That actually occurs in Russia in the case of the Jews, and the world rings with de- nunciations of such tyranny ; yet the Miners' Unions are doing the same thing, and much opinion among men who believe in the "law of love" is ready to support them. They apply the law only for the benefit of the strong, strong in votes, strong in physical strength ; which is the exact contrary not only of Christianity, but of that law of sympathy by which Christianity, it is said, is to be superseded. Those who have, are to have more than they had ; and those who have little, are to have nothing. That is what the persecution of " black- legs " comes to, and whatever defence may be made for R- and we are not blind to the advantages of a system of guilds, and have always fought for the right of artisans to combine —it is nonsense to talk of "modern morality" and that per- secution in the same breath. It is not by modern morality that it can be defended, but by the morality which drove the Moors out of Spain and locked up the Jews of Europe in malarious Ghettos. We can understand a ruthless scientific philosophy which says that the weak must perish that the strong may propagate themselves, and sacrifices a third of those who struggle in order that the road may be cleared for the remain- ing two-thirds to reach an ideal of comfort and leisure and education ; but then do not let us be told that this is the new philanthropy, this is the law of love, this is the system of thought which is so much more generous than Christianity. It is nothing of the sort. It is the caste-system carried straight out to its logical conclusion, and that not by com- petent judges, but by men who, when excited, rush to violence at once, and as often as not, confound the innocent with the guilty. Fancy stoning a soldier who, in obedience to orders, stands a peaceable sentry to protect a property, and then calling that "government by the law of love !"
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