MR. KINGSLEY ON LANCASHIRE. A_RLIA.MENT, after Easter and the budget,
will, it is said, occupy itself with Lancashire, and it is almost time. To the calamity which has fallen upon the county, and which seemed for a few months to hush the voice of the factious, partisans are now adding an amount of class bitterness as silly as unjustifiable. If the cotton lords are ruined, the landlords of three counties will find their rentals reduced one-half; if the operatives are dispersed, the agricultural labourer will lose a hope, and have to encounter a new competition; if the power of the capitalist is destroyed, so also will be the comfort of the men he employed. And yet men who can write like Mr. Kingsley, and think like the writers on the Times, are now busily arguing that the cotton trade does not matter, that the cotton lords are selfish as they were always expected to be, and that England has not subscribed such vast sums—a penny on the income-tax—in order that capitalists should obtain their needed labour cheap. Mr. Kingsley goes even farther than this, and taunts the Manchester men with setting at de- fiance the doctrines of political economy which they have so long professed, and which he himself believes most wise. One would think Mr. Kingsley had never heard of a Poor Law which, whatever its merits, is certainly not based on any law of supply and demand, but on the right of a population which does not own the land to be kept from starvation out of its fruits. So long as the right of relief is acknowledged at all, so long have politicians the right of discussing the ends, the mode, and the extent of that relief without reference to abstract doctrines ; and that is all the Lancashire capitalists have attempted to do. Of course, their own interest greatly affects their own view, just as it affects that of landlords, or clergymen or even Mr. Kingsley's pets, the agricultural labourers ; and so it ought. It is by the collision of interests, all frankly and defiantly stated, that the balance of English legislation is so well preserved. The millowners might just as well taunt the landowners with advocating emigration in order to save their own pockets from an increase of poor-rate.
What is the use of all this recrimination and hot feeling when the question lies so completely in the domain of the understanding ? It is admitted that after September neither charity nor poor rates will more than partially suffice for the people. It is admitted that a loan must be raised on the security of the rates, and almost admitted that this loan had better be lent from the State Exchequer. There is, of course, a dispute about its amount, alarmists suggesting eight mil- lions, though it is certain that 50,000/. a week will in any case be amply sufficient. That dispute will, however, dis- appear on the first statement from Mr. Gladstone, and the only real point for discussion is whether this money shall be devoted to assist emigration, or to the relief of such workmen as choose to remain in their towns.
For, the two side questions so steadily imported into the argument have little to do with the matter. No one wishes to stop voluntary emigration, even if any one had the power.
If Mr. Kingsley desires to export a few hundred families, and can raise a subscription for that end, the millowners are just as powerless to prevent him as they are little inclined. All they even pretend is, that as they and the landowners pay themselves the great bulk of the rates, they and the land- owners ought to have some voice in diverting those rates from the purpose for which they were imposed. That purpose was to prevent starvation, not to help people to emigrate, any more than to help them to marry. Of course, Parliament can alter the purpose, can impose a rate, if it likes, for giving everybody silver knee-buckles, or for teaching peasants to weave ; but then the change of system becomes a political matter, in which every class has a right to make its voice heard as loudly as ever it can. Nor, on the other hand, is it absolutely essential that relief should be so given as greatly to demoralize the people. Some demoralization there must be, but there need be no idleness among men and women under. forty, and just as little humiliation. They can be compelled to learn or to work, and for any bitterness of regard the dis- tributors of relief are to blame just as much as the men. Let them relieve their own labour by appointing sub-committees of operatives, and the discontent of class will soon cease to. impede their efforts. The real point on which all action must turn, is whether the cotton famine will last. If it will, if neither India, nor Egypt, nor Brazil, nor all of them together, can supply the needed material; and the blockade is never broken ; and the North is never tired of the war; and the South never geto its iron-dads; and European ingenuity cannot obtain the cotton its money-lenders have purchased; and the trade is to be ex- tinguished, or reduced to half its amount, then, of course, emigration is the only visible panacea. The people must be encouraged to drift away into other professions, and as we are all in these days of telegraphs acquiringa habit of impatience, a national grant may be made to make the drifting more rapid. Three millions sterling would, perhaps, enable us to export a, hundred thousand persons, and so get rid of the worst of the- pressure. The operatives are not very fit for hard work, we fear, and are not exactly the people a sharp American " boss "' would choose to perform his labour ; but still, in Canada,.
Australia, and New Zealand the demand is so boundless that they are sure, after a spasm of suffering, to be sooner or later absorbed. Why they should be so assisted, any more than the Coventry ribbon weavers, or the poor crapemakers of Norwich, or the wretched class who, in Spitalfields, still cling to the hand-loom, it might be difficult to explain, except by the fact that they are what no other class is—when discon- tented a political danger. The millowners might resist the plan even then, though we do not know that they would ; but we certainly, under those circumstances, should have no objection to urge. But are those the circumstances ? Is it a certainty that the cotton famine will last, or that the trade will be reduced for the future to a half or three-fourths its proportions ?
Nobody knows, any more than Mr. Kingsley, though he finds it convenient to assume that he knows all about it. Nobody has, or can have, a clear idea of the extent to wlich prices will rise when the markets of the world have been fairly cleared ; or of the effect producible on the crops in Egypt,.
Brazil, and India, by long continued high prices ; or of the time at which the ports of the South may be opened ;—Mr. Laird may know that—or of the price at which the South, with only free black labour, may be able to grow the plant. The probabilities are that there will be plenty of cotton, but that it will not be cheap cotton, and that the number of hands will, therefore, be considerably reduced. But nobody knows that this reduction will be more than the necessarily increased prosperity of the woollen, and linen, and mixed fabric mann-- factures will suffice to employ. Some writers use the odd syllogism, that as all these trades must increase, the cotton hands had better depart ; but they are of all men those best fitted to supply the new want. In this state of uncertainty to move off the great body of operatives is like cutting off a leg before we are sure that its state endangers the body. There will be, doubtless, a time of comparative certainty, and there will also be a time when endurance has been pushed to its limit ; but it is not certain that it has arrived, and the risk is too serious to allow of a political guess. The departure of half the workmen means the desertion of half the towns of the North, the reduc- tion of rents one-half, the loss of half a trade whose profit is equal to a shilling tax on the whole income of Great Britain. It is not merely that the workmen must go, but those whom the, sustain, machine-makers and builders, food-growers and tradesmen, these classes must all go too, or descend to a poverty as hard to relieve as that of the workmen themselves. Ashton will be as Bruges, and Manchester as Louvain—cities built for the mighty trade which has left them great but tenantless. To avoid a risk like this, a calamity such as Lancashire has not sustained since it was ravaged by Normans, is worth a little patience, a little courage, even a little political hardihood. Englishmen are not wont to give up their property because the suit waxes expensive, or even because they feel that the harass of litigation is wearing away their own minds. A little of their accustomed tenacity is all that the millowners ask them to show, and it is for showing it themselves that the apostle of muscular Christianity condemns them as evil and obstinate fools. They would be such if they asked the country to keep their hands ti// the cotton trade revived; but they only ask it not to export them till it is certain the trade is lost. The patient is mad who insists on keeping his bad leg till it is well ; but the patient who cuts it off before he knows it must go is at least as mad as he.
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