Chapter III · (continued 2)
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The temporary fillip given by the cotton-spinners’ trial and the Parliamentary Committee did not stop the steady decline of Trade Unionism throughout the country. Trade, which had been on the wane since 1836, grew suddenly worse. The decade closed with three of the leanest years ever known; and widespread distress prevailed. The membership of the surviving Trade Unions rapidly decreased. The English Stonemasons, perhaps the strongest of the contemporary societies, reduced themselves, in 1841, temporarily, to absolute bankruptcy by their disastrous strike against an obnoxious foreman on the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament. The Scottish Stonemasons’ Society, of equal or greater strength, collapsed at about the same time, from causes not known to us. The Glasgow trades had been completely disorganised by the disasters of 1837. The Lancashire textile operatives showed no sign of life; whilst such growing societies as the Ironfounders, the Journeymen Steam-Engine Makers and Millwrights, and the Boilermakers were crippled by the heavy drafts made upon their funds by unemployed members. The state of mind of the working classes was no more propitious than the state of trade. Fierce discontent and sullen anger are the characteristics of this period. Hatred of the New Poor Law, of the iniquitous taxes on food, of the general oppression by the dominant classes, blazes out in the Trade Union records of the time. The agitation for the “Six Points,” set on foot by Lovett and others in the Working Men’s Association of 1836, became the centre of working-class aspiration. The Northern Star, started at the end of 1837, rapidly distanced all other provincial journals in circulation. The lecturers of the Anti-Corn Law League increased the popular discontent, even when their own particular panacea failed to find acceptance. A general despair of constitutional reform led to the growing supremacy of the “Physical Force” section of the Chartists, and to the insurrectionism of 1839-42.
The political developments of these years are outside the scope of this work. The Chartist Movement plays the most important part in working-class annals from 1837 to 1842, and does not quit the stage until 1848. Made respectable by sincerity, devotion, and even heroism in the rank and file, it was disgraced by the fustian of many of its orators and the political and economic quackery of its pretentious and incompetent leaders whose jealousies and intrigues, by successively excluding all the nobler elements, finally brought it to nought. An adequate history of it would be of extreme value to our young Democracy.[301] Here it is only necessary to say that whilst the Chartist Movement commanded the support of the vast majority of the manual-working wage-earners, outside the ranks of those who were deeply religious, there is no reason to believe that the Trade Unions at any time became part and parcel of the Movement, as they had, during 1833-4, of the Owenite agitation, though some of their members furnished the most ardent supporters of the Charter. Individual trades, such as the shoemakers, seem to have been thoroughly permeated with Chartism, and were always attempting to rally other trade societies to the cause. The angry strikes of 1842 in Lancashire and the Midlands, fostered, as some said, by the Anti-Corn Law League, were “captured” by the Chartists, and almost converted into political rebellions. The delegate meeting of the Lancashire and Yorkshire trade clubs, which was conducting the “general strike” then in progress “for the wages of 1840,” resolved in August 1842 to recommend all wage-earners “to cease work until the Charter becomes the law of the land.”[302] For a few weeks, indeed, it looked as if the Trade Union Movement, such as it was, would become merged in the political current. But the manifest absurdity of persuading starving men to remain on strike until the whole political machinery of the country had been altered, must have quickly become apparent to the shrewder Trade Unionists. When Chartist meetings at Sheffield were calling for a “general strike” to obtain the Charter, the secretaries of seven local Unions wrote to the newspapers explaining that their trades had nothing to do with the meetings or the resolutions.[303] It must be remembered in this connection that the number of Trade Unionists was, in these years, relatively small—probably not so great as a hundred thousand in the whole kingdom—so that they could not have formed any appreciable proportion of the two, three or four million adherents that the Chartist leaders were in the habit of claiming. And it may be doubted whether in any case a Trade Union itself, as distinguished from particular members who happened to be delegates, made any formal profession of adherence to Chartism. In the contemporary Trade Union records that are still extant, such as those of the Bookbinders, Compositors, Ironfounders, Cotton-spinners, Steam-engine makers, and Stonemasons, there are no traces of Chartist resolutions; although denunciations of the “Notorious New Poor Law oppression” abound in the Fortnightly Circular of the Stonemasons;[304] whilst the Ironfounders, Compositors, and Cotton-spinners pass resolutions in favour of Free Trade. A partial explanation of this reticence on the more exciting topic of the Charter is doubtless to be found in the frequently adopted rule excluding politics and religion from Trade Union discussions—a rule which was, in 1842, protested against by an enthusiastic Chartist delegate from the Bookbinders at the Manchester Conference.[305] There must, however, have been something more than mere obedience to the rule in the unwillingness of the trade societies to be mixed up with the Chartist agitation. The rule had not prevented the organised trades of 1831-2
from taking a prominent part in the Reform Bill Movement. The banners of the Edinburgh trade clubs were conspicuous in the public demonstration on the rejection of the Bill of 1831. When the House of Lords gave way, the Birmingham Trade Unions themselves organised a triumphal procession, which was discountenanced by the middle class.[306] The records of the London Brushmakers show that they even subscribed from the Union funds to Reform associations. But we never find the trade societies of 1839-42 contributing to Chartist funds, or even collecting money for Chartist victims. The cases of Frost, Williams, and Jones, the Newport rebels of 1839, were least as deserving of the working-class sympathy as those of the Glasgow cotton-spinners. But the Trade Unions showed no inclination to subscribe money or get up petitions in aid of them. “Never,” writes Fergus O’Connor, in 1846, “was there more criminal apathy than that manifested by the trades of Great Britain to the sufferings of those men;” and he adds, “that if one half that was done for the Dorchester labourers or the Glasgow cotton-spinners had been done for Frost, Williams, and Jones, they would long since have been restored.” [307]
Insurrectionism, whether Owenite or Chartist, was, in fact, losing its attraction for the working-class mind. Robert Owen’s economic axioms of the extinction of profit and the elimination of the profit-maker were, during these very years, passing into the new Co-operative Movement, inaugurated in 1844 by the Rochdale Pioneers. The believers in a “new system of society,” to be brought about by universal agreement, were henceforth to be found in the ranks of the commercial-minded Co-operators rather than in those of the militant Trade Unionists. Chartism, meanwhile, had degenerated from Lovett’s high ideal of a complete political democracy to an ignoble scramble for the ownership of small plots of land. The example of the French Revolution of 1848 fanned the dying embers for a few weeks into a new flame; and many of the London trades swung into the somewhat theatrical fête of April 10, 1848, swelling the procession against which the Duke of Wellington had marshalled the London middle class. But the danger of revolution had passed away. A new generation of workmen was growing up, to whom the worst of the old oppression was unknown, and who had imbibed the economic and political philosophy of the middle-class reformers. Bentham, Ricardo, and Grote were read only by a few; but the activity of such popular educationalists as Lord Brougham and Charles Knight propagated “useful knowledge” to all the members of the Mechanics’ Institutes and the readers of the Penny Magazine. The middle-class ideas of “free enterprise” and “unrestricted competition” which were thus diffused received a great impetus from the extraordinary propaganda of the Anti-Corn Law League, and the general progress of Free Trade. Fergus O’Connor and Bronterre O’Brien struggled in vain against the growing dominance of Cobden and Bright as leaders of working-class opinion. And so we find in the Trade Union records of 1847-8, that vigorous resistance begins to be made to any movement in support of the old ideals. The Steam-Engine Makers’ Society suspended some of their branches for depositing the branch funds in Fergus O’Connor’s Land Bank. When two branches of the Stonemasons’ Society propose the same investment, the others indignantly protest against it as an absurd political speculation. And it is significant that these protests came, not from the cautious elders whose enthusiasm had outlived many failures, but from those who had never shared the old faith. When in 1848 the Yorkshire Woolstaplers proposed to take a farm upon which to set to work their unemployed men, it was the younger members, as we are expressly told, who strenuously but vainly resisted this action, which resulted ruinously for the society.
All this makes the close of the “revolutionary” period of the Trade Union Movement. For the next quarter of a century we shall watch the development of the new ideas and the gradual building up of the great “amalgamated” societies of skilled artisans, with their centralised administration, friendly society benefits, and the substitution, wherever possible, of Industrial Diplomacy for the ruder methods of the Class War.