CLERKSHIPS versus HANDICRAFTS.
IS it very wrong to be a sedentary person ? The Muscular Christians, when they governed opinion, and before their ideas had been so much discredited by the approval and exagge- ration of them by Muscular Pagans, used to hint that to be sedentary was to be slightly contemptible, and to argue vehe- mently that a man might be fond of strong exercise and still be acceptable in God's sight, but they never quite ventured to assert that a sedentary man could not get to heaven. A faint idea that the Christian virtues were possible in a cripple, a blind man, or a man with an asthma, always lingered in their minds, and for scholarly sedentariness both C. Kingsley and T. Hughes always had a kindly pitying word. Some of our contemporaries, how- ever, seem strongly inclined to improve on their position, and to maintain that a taste for a sedentary life, unless you are very rich —in which case, of course, free-will is perfect, the rich man having discharged his obligation to society—has in itself some- thing of the nature of sin. Mr. Gladstone, in one of those myriad letters with which he favours correspondents so unworthy of his courtesy that they immediately send them to the papers—has recently happened to say he thought parents would be wise to prefer manual labour for their sons to the work of clerks, and immediately his opinion is reiterated by a score of pens, with every variety of exaggeration. The unlucky lads who prefer quill-work to bricklaying are condemned as cowards, ridiculed u "snobs," and even denounced as immoral persons, who have for- gotten the divine ordinance that "in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." It is hinted that to be sedentary is to be lazy, and to be lazy is to be vicious; and that consequently, if a clerk starves because an Ayrshire man will do his work on half his wages, he only enjoys a just retribution for his sinful preference of broad- cloth, bad pay, and "dignity," to corduroy, good pay, and "inde- pendence." It sounds a little hard to us, all that, and we wish there- fore to state the ease of the poorclerks, fret premising that in re- gard to what may be called the policy of if e matter we agree with their opponents. It is very much better for the State that every able-bodied man within it should produce something, and as every artisan must produce, and a good many clerks produce nothing, it is very much to be wished that there should be as many artisans as pos- sible and no unnecessary clerks. Still the obligation to be an artisan is, as -1 moral obligation, at most only a counsel of perfection, and we may be permitted without offence therefore to say just a passing word for the sinners, who do not reach quite up to the journal'at's ideal. In the first place, then, it is not every man who neels bread who can become, or who desires to become, a skilled artisan. Nothing that we know of in literature is more remark- able than the assumption of journalists, and especially of journalists who detest Trades Unions', that the typical artisan is a most com- fortable person, who " only " works with his hands, who is never over-pressed by competition, who is the most independent of men, and who gets better paid than the poorer clergy "for healthful and invigorating daily toil." They should try the life for three months. They would find that even in the more highly paid trades—we except one or two trades, like the coach-painters, which are really arts, and not trades at all, that is, are no more open to men with- out special faculties than success in fiddling is—the average artisan works ten hours a day—that is, from seven a.m, to six p.m., with an hour's interval for food and rest—at labour which is either severe, like masons' work ; or the work of those colliers who are always held up as the terrible example of over-paid handicrafts- men, and whose work is worse than most convict labour ; or monotonous, as in the manufactories of fabrics ; or requires close and continuous attention, like joiners' work, painters' work, and the work of printers. This toil is continued during five and a half, and in some cases six days of the week, throughout the year and all the years of life, and is performed in almost every case under very disagreeable conditions, either from exposure to the weather, as with bricklayers, or from crowded and over-heated workshops, as with printers and factory hands of all kinds, or from constrained or irksome attitudes, as in the exceptionally- attractive case of the house-painters. The gentlemen of the Telegraph should just change places for a week with first-class bricklayers laying a high wall in a March wind. The work is done, it must be remembered, continuously, no excuse short of disability from illness being admitted, and that disability involving loss of wages ; and under incessant supervision, which varies no doubt with the nature of the work, the importance of speed, and the personal disposition of the foreman, but which in every well-conducted business is and must be severe, searching, and unremitting. The talk about " independence " is all nonsense. In most trades, discipline is quite as rigid as in a regiment, though, of course, not enforced with the same penalties, and directed rather to the work than to the bearing of the workmen ; in one—the mer- chant shipping—it is much more oppressive ; and in several—in all mining operations, for example, and contractors' works—it is apt, from the violence of the language employed, to rouse in the un- accustomed excessive irritation. In fact, with all that is said about the rise of wages, and strikes, and workmen's bumptious- ness, and so on, the necessity of earning your bread by the labour of your hands involves, even in this country, a hard and strenuous life of monotonous toil, with few short respites and no long holidays, aggravated by the sense that if you wear out or break down there is nothing for you but your savings or the parish. There is nothing in such a life to whine about, and nothing more than the ordinary lot of man, but then there is also nothing to induce a youngster carefully nurtured to look on it with exceeding favour. If he happens to be a weakly man, or a sedentary one, or one fond of quiet—and there are such people, though journalists seem not to believe it—he probably looks at the position with the dislike and dread with which they would regard an order to reef topsails, and retreats willingly to the comparative calm of a clerkship. A clerk may and usually does earn less than a workman, though even here there is a confusion between the best men and the average men; but his work is less laborious, and as a rule taxes him much less ; it does not demand such early rising, it is performed under cover and in better rooms, and it is supervised in a very different and, to speak plainly, much less slave-driving way. The workman goes home tired out, the clerk goes home only bored, and the difference as regards the comfort of the evening is a very grave one. It is not unnatural, therefore, that clerk's work should be sought by too many persons, that the market should be over- stocked, or that salaries should be driven down till, as the clerks angrily complain, handicraftsmen are better paid. The anger is ridiculous, the artisan's and the clerk's -work being both handi- crafts, and the latter the easier to acquire, but that is no reason for denouncing the liking for clerk-work as either vicious or unbecoming. It is a perfectly respectable and reasonable way of gaining a living, though the living must, as education extends, and thousands compete for hundreds of places, be a very poor one, and though the occupation offers exceedingly few chances. The man who with the necessary physique and a few pounds throws it up and goes to the Colonies is a wise man and a brave one, but still those he leaves behind are neither "cads" nor fools, but merely persons who prefer a sheltered and unexhaustive though poor and monotonous life to a very hard one. Their choice is not the better one, but it is a blameless one.
There would be many clerks, though there were no question of caste in the matter, but there is a very serious one. It is all very well, and perfectly true to say there ought to be no difference between broad-cloth and fustian, that one work is as honourable as another, and that in an ideal world that work would be most respected which it took the most self-sacrifice to begin ; but as matters stand in this world of ours, which we could all improve if Heaven had the sense to consult us, there is this important differ- ence. The clerks can marry as they wish to marry, being clerks, much more easily than they could being workmen. The kind of girl who marries a clerk—we mean of course a clerk who intends to remain one, and live by that occupation—will not, as a rule, marry a workman, dreads the life of a workman's wife, dis- likes giving up the hope that she will get out of lodgings one day, and have a servant of her own, and a house where she can remain dressed all day. It is not the successful artisan she is thinking of—she knows nothing about him—but the half-successful one, the average artisan, whose wife works in her own department al- most as hard as her husband, who, like her husband, has a working costume of her own, and who lives, and it may be likes, if she is not too much put upon, a life which the clerk's sister simply cannot endure. She may be utterly unreasonable, though we think she has at least as much to say for herself as the clerk has, but still there she is, utterly irreconcilable, and till she is reconciled there will be no reconciliation, it is women in all grades, far more than men, who keep up the spirit of caste, and the lower their position in the scale, the finer are the distinctions they draw. The mere fact that workmen worth their salt must get dirty at their work, and that clerks worth their salt must not, constitutes, in their eyes an immovable distinction, which theypro- bably could not explain, but which they would never allow to be seriously denied. They do not, as is so often and so perversely said, want to see their husbands and brothers idle, but they want to see them "dressed like other people," to see them free of the evidences of labour, and to see them in circumstances which leave a hope that they may one day be in a better position, from causes other than mere savings. The feeling may be unreasonable, but it exists, and while it exists, the strongest of all human induce- ments will still induce men with any education to prefer any life, however poor, in which the women they value do not "look down" on them, to any life, however much better rewarded, or even intrinsically better, on which they do. The curate marries much better in his own eyes than the small tradesman with twice his income, twice his comfort, and no pretensions, and will not, if it be for that reason alone, exchange the pulpit for the counter. That the strength of the prejudice in favour of clerk-work over other kinds of handicraft is an evil, we admit, and an evil that will increase every year as education extends, but we do not expect, till all men are not only educated, but adopt pretty nearly the same ways of life, to see it disappear.
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