and foot, were unable to resist, save by violence, the unendurable oppression under which they suffered.

As might be expected, secret combination took the place of the open associations forbidden by law; and riot in public and malicious injury in private were the only weapons left to the hapless workers. Some trades indeed combined under the guise of Friendly Societies; but these were practically useless for trade defence, since trade defence took their funds out of the protection of the law.

Riot from time to time broke out during the seventeenth century, as when the framework knitters in London and Westminster rose in revolt, smashed some hundred frames, and were driven by starvation into such oft-repeated violence that, in 1727, an act was passed punishing framebreaking with death. Nor was this law inoperative, for, among other cases, we find loom-breakers in Spitalfields, in 1770, hanged in the front of the houses wherein the looms had been broken. In 1779 the rejection by the House of Commons of a Bill regulating this trade was followed by rioting in Nottingham, whither the trade had gone; and the whole district round Nottingham was for years in continual labor troubles; so that in 1811-12 we find Parliament again enacting the punishment of death for framebreakers. In 1805, "the London Fire Insurance Companies received letters of caution from the workmen, wherein they declared that, as Parliament refused to protect their rights, they would do so themselves; " and a factory on fire lent point to the warning. With the introduction of steam-machinery, the pressure on the workers was increased as machines took the place of men; while women and children also entered into competition with the male workers. All over the country rioting occurred. In Wiltshire and Somersetshire, in 1802, riots followed the introduction by the Master Clothiers of a machine for dressing cloth, called the Gig-Mill, by which one man and four children could do the work of thirty men. Organised bands of men, known as Luddites from the name of one of their leaders, destroyed machines in many parts of the country, until in 1810 and 1811 the whole land, well-nigh, was in a state of turmoil. During six years the Luddites carried on their work of destruction; and in one year, 1813, no less than

1 "Capital and Labor." P. 94.

eighteen of them were hanged at York. Some thousand stocking frames and eighty lace frames were destroyed by them in Nottingham.

In Scotland, the struggle was carried on in even rougher fashion. In the evidence laid before a Parliamentary Committee in 1824, a lurid light is thrown on the results of a policy which, forbidding open agitation for the redressal of grievances, threw men back on secret violence. We read of the spinners in Glasgow and the surrounding district:

"In 1819, 1820, and 1823 a series of outrages was committed of the most brutal and atrocious character. A great number of threatening letters are quoted in the report, of which the following extract will give some idea:

August 9th, 1823.

'We have given you long enough time to gether money to pay your expenses back agian to Belfast, therefore, we hope you will lave the wheels that you are on at presant to men that have a better right to them than you, on Monday first, and if you do not atten to this, will sarve you like Linzie Phillips.

"This we swaer by the living God.

'Signed by the Captain of the Blood Red Knights.' (Then a representation of a hand holding a sword with a pierced heart, two pistols, a coffin, etc., with death's head and crossbones.)

"Another letter is signed 'Captain of the Vitriol Forces'. A third is dated nine miles below hell'. · Others contain

allusions to the judgment seat of Christ, and other sacred things, mingling the most disgusting profanity with the most revolting atrocity.

"Another is a demand by Mr. Houldsworth's operatives that, as Mr. Dyson and James Fisher are too vigilant, they shall be reprimanded before the men; and that Mr. Russell shall be discharged, 'being no judge of his business' and also that J. McKenzie Phillips may not be admitted in future. This Phillips was subsequently vitrioled', his face burnt in places to the bone, and the sight of one eye destroyed.

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"Nor were others of these letters mere empty threats Several mills were set fire to; one manufacturer, writing in 1821 from Paisley, said that scarcely a night passed in Johnston without shots being discharged, and the lowest depths of cowardly brutality were reached, in vitriolthrowing and woman-beating. Tired of quarrelling with his men, one of the manufacturers hired women, and built a mill with machinery specially adapted to them; but

...

the women were beaten, and one old woman so severely that she died three days afterwards. Alexander Fisher

was shot at when in bed about one o'clock, Ang. 2nd., 1820: the shot lodged near the bed, and some of the glass was driven into the children's bed. He was again shot at on the 16th of September, about two o'clock in the morning. On the 29th of November, two men waylaid him on his way to work at six o'clock in the morning, and threw a quantity of vitriol over his face and breast, which burnt him dreadfully. On the 14th of December, he, having only just attempted to resume work, was again shot at while at the mill. On the 4th of January he was still without the use of his left eye.'

The strong language used in this report is not surprising, if the crimes are regarded apart from all circumstances connected with them. But those who realise the terrible position of these men, fighting for bare life against overwhelming odds, persecuted by the law, helpless in the capitalists' grip, will, while condemning the outrages, feel pity for, rather than wrath against the criminals. The beating of woman was shameful enough; but it should be remembered that the masters were using the women to starve out the men, and that the may be also driven by starvation yielded themselves as weapons to stab their men comrades. In a fight for life, the gentlest often become cruel; and these men had been brutalised by a life-time of injustice, misery, and degradation. The Scotch laws were worse even than the English, and the consequent brutalisation greater. Slavery was still in existence in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and Dr. Burton, writing of Fletcher of Saltoun (1653-1716), says:

women

"If Fletcher were not a slaveholder himself, he lived surrounded by slaveholders and their slaves. His paternal territory lay in that county of East Lothian, where the two classes of works labored by slaves-collieries and salt-workshad their oldest and still their chief establishment. The slaves went to those who bought or succeeded to the property of the works, and they could be sold, bartered, or pawned. What is peculiar and revolting in this institution is, that it was no relic of ancient serfdom, but a growth of the seventeenth century. The oldest trace we have of the bondage of the colliers and salt-workers is an Act of the year 1606, passed, as

1 Trade Societies and Strikes; report of the Committee on Trade Societies, appointed by the National Association for the promotion of Social Science, 1860. Pp. 357, 358.

it would seem, to strengthen somewhat as to them the laws so common at the time for restricting the pursuit of all occupations to those embarked in them. By interpretation of this Act, but more by the tyranneus power of the strong owners of the soil over a weak and unfriended community, slavery had been as amply established in the community where Fletcher dwelt, as ever it had been in Rome, Sparta, or Virginia." 1 With such a past lying immediately behind them, the wonder to me is that there was so little crime during these long years of desperate and apparently hopeless misery.

1

The Repeal of the Statute of Apprentices in 1814 did nothing to lessen, but, on the contrary, much to increase, the bitterness of the industrial conflict; the abolition of compulsory apprenticeship only served to intensify the terrible struggle for employment; and the abrogation of the assessment of wages at Quarter Sessions-which, instituted for the benefit of the master, had come to be a benefit to the workman, as interposing between his employer and himself-left him to the enforced acceptance of wages driven by unfettered competition below subsistence level. It is noteworthy that in this case, as in many others, laws initiated to help the employing class became, in the course of years, serviceable to the workers. The truth is that the condition of the workers deteriorated so rapidly that the minimum forced on them in the sixteenth century became the maximum they struggled to retain in the eighteenth. No more eloquent proof of their misery can be given than this one fact.

Continual prosecutions of workmen for transgressions of the iniquitous combination laws give the last touch of blackness to this gloomy picture. We read of men sent to gaol for the most harmless actions; of one linen weaver of Knaresborough suffering three months' imprisonment in 1805 for carrying a letter to York asking for assistance from other workmen. Of men fined and imprisoned for simple combination. Of a master using these laws to avoid payment of wages. Of a workman-who acted as chairman at a meeting at which two resolutions were passed-sentenced to a year's imprisonment, although his employer gave evidence that he himself had advised the passing of the resolutions; two other workmen, who acted as

Quoted in an interesting article on Fletcher of Saltoun, by John M. Robertson, in Our Corner for February, 1888.

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secretaries at the same meeting, suffered two years' imprisonment each. The sinful resolutions which brought such heavy punishment on these three men were: that advised the acceptance of a proposed compromise between masters and men; the second, "That as it is in the power of the manufacturer to compel the weaver to weave out his work in the loom or on hand, he is advised in such case to obey the dictates of the law; yet no injunction is hereby laid upon him by this meeting, and he is left entirely to his own discretion; but he is not to bring any more work from any manufacturer under the proposed advance mentioned in the first resolution".

The long-continued political agitation, carried on side by side with the industrial revolts, and intensified by the troubles consequent on the Corn Laws, brought matters to such a point that, in 1817, the terrified Government suspended the Habeas Corpus Act, and in 1819 stained itself with the blood of Peterloo. But repression and yeomanry charges do not cure disaffection, which springs from substantial grievances; and in 1824, Joseph Hume, the Radical, with some other members of Parliament, obtained a Parliamentary Committee to enquire into the working of the laws affecting labor, and the state of the law "so far as relates to the combination of workmen and others to raise wages, or to regulate their wages". A mass of evidence was laid before this Committee, showing that, as a rule, through the strikes and disputes, the men had exhibited marvellous self-control.

On the report of this Committee, was brought in by Mr. Hume and passed the 5 George IV, c. 95, which repealed the statutes forbidding the combinations of workmen, and enacted that no workman should be liable to be indicted or prosecuted for conspiracy, or to any punishment, for entering into any combination for advancing or fixing wages, altering the hours of labor, and so on. The passing of the Act was followed by a large number of strikes; and in the following year another Act was passed -6 George IV, c. 122-which repealed 5 George IV, c. 95, and while re-enacting the section which repealed the combination laws, yet, in the words of Mr. Wallace, who introduced the Bill, made "all associations illegal, excepting those for the purpose of settling such amount of