farmers patrolling all night long, gibbets erected on Pennenden heath,
and bodies swinging on them, bodies of boys, eighteen or nineteen years
old. Six labourers of Dorsetshire, the most wretched county in England,
were sentenced to seven years' transportation nominally for
administering an illegal oath, really for Unionism. Thereupon all the
trades made a menacing demonstration, marched to Westminster, thirty
thousand strong, with a petition for the release of the labourers.
London was in an agony of fear, the Duke of Wellington prepared for a
great conflict, pouring in troops and bringing up artillery from
Woolwich. In 1840, again there were formidable movements, and society
felt itself on the crust of a volcano. Threatening letters were sent to
masters, rewards offered for firing mills, workmen were beaten, driven
out of the country, burned with vitriol, and, there was reason to fear,
murdered. Great masses of operatives collected for purposes of
intimidation, shopkeepers were pillaged, collisions again took place
between the people and the soldiery. Irish agrarianism meanwhile
prevailed, in a far more deadly form than at present. And these
industrial disturbances were connected with political disturbances
equally formidable, with Chartism, Socialism, Cato Street conspiracies,
Peterloo massacres, Bristol riots.
Now the present movement even in England, where there is so much
suffering and so much ignorance, has been marked by a comparative
absence of violence, and comparative respect for law. Considering what
large bodies of men have been out on strike, how much they have endured
in the conflict, and what appeals have been made to their passions, it
is wonderful how little of actual crime or disturbance there has been.
There were the Sheffield murders the disclosure of which filled all the
friends of labour with shame and sorrow, all the enemies of labour with
malignant exultation. But we should not have heard so much of the
Sheffield murders if such things had been common. Sheffield is an
exceptional place; some of the work there is deadly, life is short and
character is reckless. Even at Sheffield, a very few, out of the whole
number of trades, were found to have been in any way implicated. The
denunciation of the outrages by the trades through England generally,
was loud and sincere; an attempt was made, of course, to fix the guilt
on all the Unions, but this was a hypocritical libel. It was stated, in
one of our Canadian journals, the other day, that Mr. Roebuck had lost
his seat for Sheffield, by protesting against Unionist outrage. Mr.
Roebuck lost his seat for Sheffield by turning Tory. The Trades'
candidate, by whom Mr. Roebuck was defeated, was Mr. Mundella, a
representative of whom any constituency may be proud, a great employer
of labour, and one who has done more than any other man of his class in
England to substitute arbitration for industrial war, and to restore
kindly relations between the employers and the employed. To Mr.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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