Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet by Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

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As long, I believe, as the Throne, the House of Lords, and the Press, are
what, thank God, they are, so long will each enlargement of the suffrage be
a fresh source not of danger, but of safety; for it will bind the masses to
the established order of things by that loyalty which springs from content;
from the sense of being appreciated, trusted, dealt with not as children,
but as men.

There are those who will consider such language as this especially
ill-timed just now, in the face of Strikes and Trades' Union outrages.
They point to these things as proofs of the unfitness of workmen for the
suffrage; they point especially to the late abominable murder at Sheffield,
and ask, not without reason, would you give political power to men who
would do that?

Now that the Sheffield murder was in any wise planned or commanded by the
Trades' Unions in general, I do not believe; nor, I think, does any one
else who knows aught of the British workman. If it was not, as some of the
Sheffield men say, a private act of revenge, it was the act of only one
or two Trades' Unions of that town, which are known; and their conduct
has been already reprobated and denounced by the other Trades' Unions of
England, But there is no denying that the case as against the Trades'
Unions is a heavy one. It is notorious that they have in past years planned
and commanded illegal acts of violence. It is patent that they are too apt,
from a false sense of class-honour, to connive at such now, instead of
being, as they ought to be, the first to denounce them. The workmen will
not see, that by combining in societies for certain purposes, they make
those societies responsible for the good and lawful behaviour of all their
members, in all acts tending to further those purposes, and are bound to
say to every man joining a Trades' Union: "You shall do nothing to carry
out the objects which we have in view, save what is allowed by British
Law." They will not see that they are outraging the first principles of
justice and freedom, by dictating to any man what wages he should receive,
what master he shall work for, or any other condition which interferes with
his rights as a free agent.

But, in the face of these facts (and very painful and disappointing
they are to me), I will ask the upper classes: Do you believe that the
average of Trades' Union members are capable of such villanies as that at
Sheffield? Do you believe that the average of them are given to violence
or illegal acts at all, even though they may connive at such acts in their
foolish and hasty fellows, by a false class-honour, not quite unknown,
I should say, in certain learned and gallant professions? Do you fancy
that there are not in these Trades' Unions, tens of thousands of loyal,
respectable, rational, patient men, as worthy of the suffrage as any
average borough voter? If you do so, you really know nothing about the
British workman. At least, you are confounding the workman of 1861 with the
workman of 1831, and fancying that he alone, of all classes, has gained
nothing by the increased education, civilization, and political experience
of thirty busy and prosperous years. You are unjust to the workman; and
more, you are unjust to your own class. For thirty years past, gentlemen
and ladies of all shades of opinion have been labouring for and among the
working classes, as no aristocracy on earth ever laboured before; and do
you suppose that all that labour has been in vain? That it has bred in the
working classes no increased reverence for law, no increased content with
existing institutions, no increased confidence in the classes socially
above them? If so, you must have as poor an opinion of the capabilities of
the upper classes, as you have of those of the lower.

So far from the misdoings of Trades' Unions being an argument against the
extension of the suffrage, they are, in my opinion, an argument for it. I
know that I am in a minority just now. I know that the common whisper is
now, not especially of those who look for a Conservative reaction, that
these Trades' Unions must be put down by strong measures: and I confess
that I hear such language with terror. Punish, by all means, most severely,
all individual offences against individual freedom, or personal safety;
but do not interfere, surely, with the Trades' Unions themselves. Do not
try to bar these men of their right as free Englishmen to combine, if they
choose, for what they consider their own benefit. Look upon these struggles
between employers and employed as fair battles, in which, by virtue of the
irreversible laws of political economy, the party who is in the right is
almost certain to win; and interfere in no wise, save to see fair play, and
lawful means used on both sides alike. If you do more; if you interfere
in any wise with the Trades' Unions themselves, you will fail, and fail
doubly. You will not prevent the existence of combinations: you will only
make them secret, dark, revolutionary: you will demoralize the working man
thereby as surely as the merchant is demoralized by being converted into a
smuggler; you will heap up indignation, spite, and wrath against the day
of wrath; and finally, to complete your own failure, you will drive the
working man to demand an extension of the suffrage, in tones which will
very certainly get a hearing. He cares, or seems to care, little about
the suffrage now, just because he thinks that he can best serve his own
interests by working these Trades' Unions. Take from him that means of
redress (real or mistaken, no matter); and he will seek redress in a way in
which you wish him still less to seek it; by demanding a vote and obtaining
one.

That consummation, undesirable as it may seem to many, would perhaps be the
best for the peace of the trades. These Trades' Unions, still tainted with
some of the violence, secrecy, false political economy which they inherit
from the evil times of 1830-40, last on simply, I believe, because the
workman feels that they are his only organ, that he has no other means of
making his wants and his opinions known to the British Government. Had he a
vote, he believes (and I believe with him) he could send at least a few men
to Parliament who would state his case fairly in the House of Commons, and
would not only render a reason for him, but hear reason against him, if
need were. He would be content with free discussion if he could get that.
It is the feeling that he cannot get it that drives him often into crooked
and dark ways. If any answer, that the representatives, whom he would
choose would be merely noisy demagogues, I believe them to be mistaken.
No one can have watched the Preston strike, however much he may have
disapproved, as I did, of the strike itself, without seeing from the
temper, the self-restraint, the reasonableness, the chivalrous honour of
the men, that they were as likely to choose a worthy member for the House
of Commons as any town constituency in England; no one can have watched the
leaders of the working men for the last ten years without finding among
them men capable of commanding the attention and respect of the House of
Commons, not merely by their eloquence, surprising as that is, but by their
good sense, good feeling, and good breeding.

Some training at first, some rubbing off of angles, they might require:
though two at least I know, who would require no such training, and who
would be ornaments to any House of Commons; the most inexperienced of the
rest would not give the House one-tenth the trouble which is given by a
certain clique among the representatives of the sister Isle; and would,
moreover, learn his lesson in a week, instead of never learning it at all,
like some we know too well. Yet Catholic emancipation has pacified Ireland,
though it has brought into the House an inferior stamp of members: and much
more surely would an extension of the suffrage pacify the trades, while
it would bring into the House a far superior stamp of member to those who
compose the clique of which I have spoken.

But why, I hear some one say impatiently, talk about this subject of all
others at this moment, when nobody, not even the working classes, cares
about a Reform Bill?

Because I am speaking to young men, who have not yet entered public life;
and because I wish them to understand, that just because the question of
parliamentary reform is in abeyance now, it will not be in abeyance ten
years or twenty years hence. The question will be revived, ere they are
in the maturity of their manhood; and they had best face that certain
prospect, and learn to judge wisely and accurately on the subject, before
they are called on, as they will be, to act upon it. If it be true that the
present generation has done all that it can do, or intends to do, towards
the suffrage (and I have that confidence in our present rulers, that I
would submit without murmuring to their decision on the point), it is
all the more incumbent on the rising generation to learn how to do (as
assuredly they will have to do) the work which their fathers have left
undone. The question may remain long in abeyance, under the influence of
material prosperity such as the present; or under the excitement of a war,
as in Pitt's time; but let a period of distress or disaster come, and it
will be re-opened as of yore. The progress towards institutions more and
more popular may be slow, but it is sure. Whenever any class has conceived
the hope of being fairly represented, it is certain to fulfil its own
hopes, unless it employs, or provokes, violence impossible in England.
The thing will be. Let the young men of Britain take care that it is done
rightly when it is done.

And how ought it to be done? That will depend upon any circumstances now
future and uncertain. It will depend upon the pace at which sound education
spreads among the working classes. It will depend, too, very much--I fear
only too much--upon the attitude of the upper classes to the lower, in this
very question of Trades' Unions and of Strikes. It will depend upon their
attitude toward the unrepresented classes during the next few years, upon
this very question of extended suffrage. And, therefore, I should advise,
I had almost said entreat, any young men over whom I have any influence,
to read and think freely and accurately upon the subject; taking, if
I may propose to them a text-book, Mr. Mill's admirable treatise on
"Representative Government." As for any theory of my own, if I had one
I should not put it forward. How it will not be done, I can see clearly
enough. It will not be done well by the old charter. It will not be done
well by merely lowering the money qualification of electors. But it may
be done well by other methods beside; and I can trust the freedom and
soundness of the English mind to discover the best method of all, when it
is needed.

Let therefore this "Conservative Reaction" which I suspect is going on in
the minds of many young men at Cambridge, consider what it has to conserve.
It is not asked to conserve the Throne. That, thank God, can take good care
of itself. Let it conserve the House of Lords; and that will be conserved,
just in proportion as the upper classes shall copy the virtues of Royalty;
both of him who is taken from us, and of her who is left. Let the upper
classes learn from them, that the just and wise method of strengthening
their political power, is to labour after that social power, which comes
only by virtue and usefulness. Let them make themselves, as the present
Sovereign has made herself, morally necessary to the people; and then there
is no fear of their being found politically unnecessary. No other course
is before them, if they wish to make their "Conservative Reaction" a
permanent, even an endurable fact. If any young gentlemen fancy (and some
do) that they can strengthen their class by making any secret alliance with
the Throne against the masses, then they will discover rapidly that the
sovereigns of the House of Brunswick are grown far too wise, and far too
noble-hearted, to fall once more into that trap. If any of them (and some
do) fancy that they can better their position by sneering, whether in
public or in their club, at a Reformed House of Commons and a Free Press,
they will only accelerate the results which they most dread, by forcing
the ultra-liberal party of the House, and, what is even worse, the most
intellectual and respectable portion of the Press, to appeal to the people
against them; and if again they are tempted (as too many of them are) to
give up public life as becoming too vulgar for them, and prefer ease and
pleasure to the hard work and plain-speaking of the House of Commons; then
they will simply pay the same penalty for laziness and fastidiousness which
has been paid by the Spanish aristocracy; and will discover that if they
think their intellect unnecessary to the nation, the nation will rapidly
become of the same opinion, and go its own way without them.

But if they are willing to make themselves, as they easily can, the
best educated, the most trustworthy, the most virtuous, the most truly
liberal-minded class of the commonweal; if they will set themselves to
study the duties of rank and property, as of a profession to which they are
called by God, and the requirements of which they must fulfil; if they will
acquire, as they can easily, a sound knowledge both of political economy,
and of the social questions of the day; if they will be foremost with
their personal influence in all good works; if they will set themselves
to compete on equal terms with the classes below them, and, as they may,
outrival them: then they will find that those classes will receive them not
altogether on equal terms; that they will accede to them a superiority,
undefined perhaps, but real and practical enough to conserve their class
and their rank, in every article for which a just and prudent man would
wish.

But if any young gentlemen look forward (as I fear a few do still) to a
Conservative Reaction of any other kind than this; to even the least return
to the Tory maxims and methods of George the Fourth's time; to even the
least stoppage of what the world calls progress--which I should define
as the putting in practice the results of inductive science; then do
they, like king Picrochole in Rabelais, look for a kingdom which shall be
restored to them at the coming of the Cocqcigrues. The Cocqcigrues are
never coming; and none know that better than the present able and moderate
leaders of the Conservative party; none will be more anxious to teach that
fact to their young adherents, and to make them swim with the great stream,
lest it toss them contemptuously ashore upon its banks, and go on its way
unheeding.

Return to the system of 1800--1830, is, I thank God, impossible. Even
though men's hearts should fail them, they must onward, they know not
whither: though God does know. The bigot, who believes in a system, and not
in the living God; the sentimentalist, who shrinks from facts because they
are painful to his taste; the sluggard, who hates a change because it
disturbs his ease; the simply stupid person, who cannot use his eyes and
ears; all these may cry feebly to the world to do what it has never done
since its creation--stand still awhile, that they may get their breaths.
But the brave and honest gentleman--who believes that God is not the
tempter and deceiver, but the father and the educator of man--he will
not shrink, even though the pace may be at moments rapid, the path be at
moments hid by mist; for he will believe that freedom and knowledge, as
well as virtue, are the daughters of the Most High; and he will follow them
and call on the rest to follow them, whithersoever they may lead; and will
take heart for himself and for his class, by the example of that great
Prince who is of late gone home. For if, like that most royal soul, he and
his shall follow with single eye and steadfast heart, freedom, knowledge,
and virtue; then will he and his be safe, as Royalty is safe in England
now; because both God and man have need thereof.

PREFACE.

_Written in 1854._

ADDRESSED TO THE WORKING MEN OF GREAT BRITAIN.

My Friends,--Since I wrote this book five years ago, I have seen a good
deal of your class, and of their prospects. Much that I have seen has given
me great hope; much has disappointed me; nothing has caused me to alter the
opinions here laid down.

Much has given me hope; especially in the North of England. I believe that
there, at least, exists a mass of prudence, self-control, genial and sturdy
manhood, which will be England's reserve-force for generations yet to come.
The last five years, moreover, have certainly been years of progress for
the good cause. The great drag upon it--namely, demagogism--has crumbled to
pieces of its own accord; and seems now only to exhibit itself in anilities
like those of the speakers who inform a mob of boys and thieves that wheat
has lately been thrown into the Thames to keep up prices, or advise them
to establish, by means hitherto undiscovered, national granaries, only
possible under the despotism of a Pharaoh. Since the 10th of April, 1848
(one of the most lucky days which the English workman ever saw), the trade
of the mob-orator has dwindled down to such last shifts as these, to which
the working man sensibly seems merely to answer, as he goes quietly about
his business, "Why will you still keep talking, Signor Benedick? Nobody
marks you."

But the 10th of April, 1848, has been a beneficial crisis, not merely in
the temper of the working men, so called, but in the minds of those who are
denominated by them "the aristocracy." There is no doubt that the classes
possessing property have been facing, since 1848, all social questions with
an average of honesty, earnestness, and good feeling which has no parallel
since the days of the Tudors, and that hundreds and thousands of "gentlemen
and ladies" in Great Britain now are saying, "Show what we ought to do to
be just to the workman, and we will do it, whatsoever it costs." They may
not be always correct (though they generally are so) in their conceptions
of what ought to be done; but their purpose is good and righteous; and
those who hold it are daily increasing in number. The love of justice and
mercy toward the handicraftsman is spreading rapidly as it never did before
in any nation upon earth; and if any man still represents the holders of
property, as a class, as the enemies of those whom they employ, desiring
their slavery and their ignorance, I believe that he is a liar and a child
of the devil, and that he is at his father's old work, slandering and
dividing between man and man. These words may be severe: but they are
deliberate; and working men are, I hope, sufficiently accustomed to hear me
call a spade a spade, when I am pleading for them, to allow me to do the
same when I am pleading to them.

Of the disappointing experiences which I have had I shall say nothing,
save in as far as I can, by alluding to them, point out to the working man
the causes which still keep him weak: but I am bound to say that those
disappointments have strengthened my conviction that this book, in the
main, speaks the truth.

I do not allude, of course, to the thoughts, and feelings of the hero. They
are compounded of right and wrong, and such as I judged (and working men
whom I am proud to number among my friends have assured me that I judged
rightly) that a working man of genius would feel during the course of
his self-education. These thoughts and feelings (often inconsistent and
contradictory to each other), stupid or careless, or ill-willed persons,
have represented as my own opinions, having, as it seems to me, turned
the book upside down before they began to read it. I am bound to pay the
working men, and their organs in the press, the compliment of saying that
no such misrepresentations proceeded from them. However deeply some of
them may have disagreed with me, all of them, as far as I have been able
to judge, had sense to see what I meant; and so, also, have the organs of
the High-Church party, to whom, differing from them on many points, I am
equally bound to offer my thanks for their fairness. But, indeed, the way
in which this book, in spite of its crudities, has been received by persons
of all ranks and opinions, who instead of making me an offender for a
word, have taken the book heartily and honestly, in the spirit and not in
the letter, has made me most hopeful for the British mind, and given me
a strong belief that, in spite of all foppery, luxury, covetousness, and
unbelief, the English heart is still strong and genial, able and willing
to do and suffer great things, as soon as the rational way of doing and
suffering them becomes plain. Had I written this book merely to please
my own fancy, this would be a paltry criterion, at once illogical and
boastful; but I wrote it, God knows, in the fear of God, that I might speak
what seems to me the truth of God. I trusted in Him to justify me, in spite
of my own youth, inexperience, hastiness, clumsiness; and He has done it;
and, I trust, will do it to the end.

And now, what shall I say to you, my friends, about the future? Your
destiny is still in your own hands. For the last seven years you have let
it slip through your fingers. If you are better off than you were in 1848,
you owe it principally to those laws of political economy (as they are
called), which I call the brute natural accidents of supply and demand, or
to the exertions which have been made by upright men of the very classes
whom demagogues taught you to consider as your natural enemies. Pardon me
if I seem severe; but, as old Aristotle has it, "Both parties being my
friends, it is a sacred duty to honour truth first." And is this not the
truth? How little have the working men done to carry out that idea of
association in which, in 1848-9, they were all willing to confess their
salvation lay. Had the money which was wasted in the hapless Preston strike
been wisely spent in relieving the labour market by emigration, or in
making wages more valuable by enabling the workman to buy from co-operative
stores and mills his necessaries at little above cost price, how much
sorrow and heart-burning might have been saved to the iron-trades. Had the
real English endurance and courage which was wasted in that strike been
employed in the cause of association, the men might have been, ere now, far
happier than they are ever likely to be, without the least injury to the
masters. What, again, has been done toward developing the organization
of the Trades' Unions into its true form, Association for distribution,
from its old, useless, and savage form of Association for the purpose of
resistance to masters--a war which is at first sight hopeless, even were it
just, because the opposite party holds in his hand the supplies of his foe
as well as his own, and therefore can starve him out at his leisure? What
has been done, again, toward remedying the evils of the slop system, which
this book especially exposed? The true method for the working men, if they
wished to save their brothers and their brothers' wives and daughters from
degradation, was to withdraw their custom from the slopsellers, and to
deal, even at a temporary increase of price, with associate workmen. Have
they done so? They can answer for themselves. In London (as in the country
towns), the paltry temptation of buying in the cheapest market has still
been too strong for the labouring man. In Scotland and in the North of
England, thank God, the case has been very different; and to the North I
must look still, as I did when I wrote Alton Locke, for the strong men in
whose hands lies the destiny of the English handicraftsman.

God grant that the workmen of the South of England may bestir themselves
ere it be too late, and discover that the only defence against want is
self-restraint; the only defence against slavery, obedience to rule; and
that, instead of giving themselves up, bound hand and foot, by their own
fancy for a "freedom" which is but selfish and conceited license, to the
brute accidents of the competitive system, they may begin to organize
among themselves associations for buying and selling the necessaries of
life, which may enable them to weather the dark season of high prices and
stagnation, which is certain sooner or later, to follow in the footsteps of
war.

On politics I have little to say. My belief remains unchanged that true
Christianity, and true monarchy also, are not only compatible with, but
require as their necessary complement, true freedom for every man of every
class; and that the Charter, now defunct, was just as wise and as righteous
a "Reform Bill" as any which England had yet had, or was likely to have.
But I frankly say that my experience of the last five years gives me little
hope of any great development of the true democratic principle in Britain,
because it gives me little sign that the many are fit for it. Remember
always that Democracy means a government not merely by numbers of isolated
individuals, but by a Demos--by men accustomed to live in Demoi, or
corporate bodies, and accustomed, therefore, to the self-control, obedience
to law, and self-sacrificing public spirit, without which a corporate body
cannot exist: but that a "democracy" of mere numbers is no democracy,
but a mere brute "arithmocracy," which is certain to degenerate into an
"ochlocracy," or government by the mob, in which the numbers have no real
share: an oligarchy of the fiercest, the noisiest, the rashest, and the
most shameless, which is surely swallowed up either by a despotism, as in
France, or as in Athens, by utter national ruin, and helpless slavery to
a foreign invader. Let the workmen of Britain train themselves in the
corporate spirit, and in the obedience and self-control which it brings, as
they easily can in associations, and bear in mind always that _only he who
can obey is fit to rule_; and then, when they are fit for it, the Charter
may come, or things, I trust, far better than the Charter; and till they
have done so, let them thank the just and merciful Heavens for keeping
out of their hands any power, and for keeping off their shoulders any
responsibility, which they would not be able to use aright. I thank God
heartily, this day, that I have no share in the government of Great
Britain; and I advise my working friends to do the same, and to believe
that, when they are fit to take their share therein, all the powers of
earth cannot keep them from taking it; and that, till then, happy is the
man who does the duty which lies nearest him, who educates his family,
raises his class, performs his daily work as to God and to his country, not
merely to his employer and himself; for it is only he that is faithful over
a few things who will be made, or will be happy in being made, ruler over
many things.