TOPICS OF THE DAY.
STATE OF THE COUNTRY—LANCASHIRE, BETHNAL-GREEN.
Tins is a subject of great importance ; and it is one which the !notion of Sir RICHARD VYVYAN, for a committee to inquire into it, will afford us an opportunity of fully considering. That there is much distress is undeniable ; that there is great and abounding folly among the workmen, to describe it in the gentlest terms, is equally obvious. The schoolmaster, it is said, is abroad ; but for all the good that his labours have effected, he might as well have staid at home. What can possibly indicate a more utter ignorance of first principles, than for a man who finds a difficulty in procuring employment, to destroy the property of his employer--to annihilate that capital from which, and from which alone, the wages of his labour are to be paid ? If the merchant is to be ruined, how is the weaver to live ? If the millwheel move slowly from the scantiness of the water-fall, will the stopping of the fountain make it move faster ? But setting aside its monstrous folly, what can be more atrociously unjust ? In all stoppages, partial or general, the merchant suffers soonest and most severely. If the weaver's wages are low, be sure' so are the manufacturer's profits. They rise together, and they fall together. Instead, therefore, of hatred, the manufacturers are entitled to sympathy. And %%hat is to be said of the injustice to the rest of the community? Is it to be borne, that whenever distress affects a manufacturing district, the sufferers are to seek consolation in the destruction of the instruments of general comfort—that, instead of endeavouring to obtain redress of their own grievances, they are to injure in their wantonness and anger the whole of their neighbours ? Such acts ought not to pass unpunished. If men will not learn wisdom by other means, they must learn it by the application of the rod. Every day serves to convince the most careless observer, that occasional distresses are inherent in every commercial system. As society advances in refinement, numerous trades arecalled into existence, and numerous modifications of existing trades are rendered necessary, in order to minister to its ever-varying calls. There is no permanence in its whims or its appetites: the slightest chance, the most trifling cause, may waken or end them. Hence stagnation, hence suffering in some department or other of industry, is sure to prevail even when trade is most prosperous. There are epidemics, indeed, which now and then visit a whole country; and under one of these we are now suffering; but even when these come not, there is ever some fever, more or less conla,doits, exerting its influence in a more or less limited circle. These alternations are inherent in a commercial system : they may be greatly palliated—they cannot be wholly removed. Freedom of trade may do nnich for their cure. The more extended the range of markets that are open to the merchant, the more likely is he to find a profitable vent for his wares. He that has but one, if he fail in it, must be wholly without resource. Under the prohibitory system, stagnations were necessarily more frequent, and always more severe, than they are at present. It is an inversion of all reasoning to attribute the present suffering to a cause which is doubly calculated to prevent its recurrence, or to diminish its intensity should it recur. The manufacturer, under the prohibitory system, is like the native of Egypt, who, if the Nile rise not to its fertilizing level, is exposed to inevitable famine : he that lives under the free system, has the advantages of the inhabitant of those lands where the earth is wetted, not by the rising stream, but by the falling shower, and where if there be drought in one month there is moisture in its successor. For the operatives of Lancashire we are at a loss to find anything like an excuse; but for those at Spitalfields we have none. The former have acted in so reckless and open a manner, that we are compelled to conclude, that, however absurd and pernicious its working, their distress was real and heartfelt. In a speech of one of their leaders, the question was put, "Will you starve, or hang ? " and the universal answer was, "Hang! hang!" Extreme distress, we say, is presumable from such language and such conduct ; for only extreme distress is so regardless of consequences. But what do our Spitalfields friends ? They use choice phrases at their meetings ; no violence is Perceptible; all their proceedings are cool and calculated ; and they choose the dead hour of night to creep out with stealthy pace and perpetrate their deeds of unprovoked wrong. Their aim is deliberate :—they are not like men in the blindness Of passion, venting their rage on the objects nearest to them—they seek out carefully the property of particular men, on whose fears they purpose to work. We regret to say, they have succeeded. The masters have agreed to comply, under the most direct threats, with demands which we believe and know they cannot afford to comply with, or it never would have been necessary to urge them. The compliance can, however, be but temporary. No manufacturer that is not lost to common sense will again intrust his property to men who are unable or unwilling to preserve it from destruction, if they have not joined in destroying it. The journeymen have gained a victory that will unfit them for ever again entering the field. We cannot pity them. That there is distress, great distress, in the district, we believe; and we are happy that by the benevolence of the public it has been partially redressed: but that part of it was self-inflicted, and no small part of it feigned, we are most confidently assured. It will hardly be credited, but it is nevertheless true—we have it on the authority of one who, from peculiar circumstances, knows the leadeis of these weavers well—the great part of those who formed the procession to Parliament were as regularly dressed up for the occasion as if they had been going to one of CHARLES WRIGHT'S. masquerades. The old coat, the skY-lighted bat, the torn shoes—all was false, all was supposititious. The Parties who thus figured as beggars were most of them men well to do, who would on any other occasion have thought it foul scorn to appear in any garments that were not both entire and good, and who had garments ' enough both for Sundays and week-days. Let us hear no more of Spitalfields regularity and Spitalfields distress, after such lawless proceedings as we have witnessed, preceded by such impudent and shameless quackery.
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