badinage. He meant to have entered the lists at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, but in the issue he attended the Tournament of the Doves, at which the black rock accepted with an element of pride his destiny to fall by the hand of a duke, but would not deign to be worried by a dog, fluttered to the palisade, and died. True satirist of the people and the press, which with a delicate refusal of false shame retails the exploits of titled people upon Paddington platform, Disraeli's dialogue on railways has been in a measure prophetic. 'You came by the railroad?' 'A Great Revolution!' 'I fear it has a very dangerous tendency to equality.'

You may depend these railroads are very dangerous things.

Have you not heard of Lady Vanilla's trip from Birmingham? She came up with Lady Laura, and two of the most gentlemanlike men sitting opposite her; never met, she says, two more intelligent men. She begged one of them at Wolverhampton to change seats with her, and he was most politely willing to comply with her wishes, only it was necessary that his companion should move at the same time, for they were chained together! Two of the swell mob sent to town for picking a pocket at Shrewsbury races.

Mary Barton, one of the greatest of first novels, and one also of the first great novels of compassion, comes just midway between Sybil and Alton Locke. It was issued in two volumes under the pretended authorship of 'Cotton Mather Mills' in October, 1848. The publishers hoarded it for two months before they realized that the book had a fetching topical interest, and then offered the author to purchase the copyright for £100, which was welcomed. The year had witnessed revolution on all sides: the collapse of Metternich, the fall to earth of the July Monarchy, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, the breakdown of the People's Charter the Manchesthe Manches

ter School had killed it. Mary Barton will always hold a place as a work of art for its brilliant episodes, as a novel for its spontaneity, sympathy, color, and moderation, as a pathetic plea for the vanquished, as a starting point of a new rally among the Humanitarians. It has more of the spirit of Les Misérables than of Germinal. It remains, however, the finest scenario of a strike in English fiction. The plot revolves round the strike story. Plot, scenario (Manchester), and characters are slowly engraved upon the same plate in the writer's mind. Light and shadow are skillfully balanced, thought and emotion alternate; nothing is overdrawn, no side taken, no sermon preached, no personage obtruded. The world was thrilled and surprised at being taken by so simple a thing. 'Forcible, fair, even terrible in its truth,' was the verdict of one of the best critics of the day."

The tale revolves round the grievous destiny of Mary's father. Half-time, short food, and the death of an only boy from malnutrition while the parent saw the millowners fattening on plenty, made a Chartist of John Barton. In 1839 he was one of the delegates sent by the northern towns to explain their case to Parliament in London. The mortifications of this embassy embittered Barton still more; and, stung by a thoughtless insult, he takes the life of a young master. The suspicion falls on Jem Wilson, Mary Barton's lover - who has had a passage at arms with young Carson concerning Mary. John Barton in the meantime is a sinister union leader and organizer of those strikes, one of which forms a central feature of the tale. Unions from Glasgow, Nottingham, and other towns back up the power loom weavers of Manchester. The masters retort by placarding the walls with advertisements for weavers

from outside. In spite of policemen set to watch over the safety of the poor country weavers, in spite of magistrates and prisons and severe punishments, the poor depressed men tramping in from Burnley, Padiham, and other places to work at the condemned starvation prices were waylaid and beaten, and left by the roadside nearly dead. The police broke up every lounging knot of men-they separated quietly, to reunite half a mile farther out of town. The good Mrs. Gaskell moralizes at perhaps excusable length upon the knobstick philosophy of the hunger strikers. Charlotte Bronté in Shirley has much less sympathy with any variety of ostensible rebel. The description of the attack upon Moore's mill by the Luddites, or machine breakers, is one of the stern features of a book which many still love. More relentless is the description of the tracking down of the disaffected workmen and strikers:

The leaders he did not know. They were strangers: emissaries from the large towns.

Most of these were not members of the operative class; they were chiefly 'downdraughts,' bankrupts, men often in debt and often in drink men who had nothing to lose, and much—in the way of character, cash, and cleanliness to gain

These persons Moore hunted like any sleuth-hound; and well he liked the occupation: its excitement was of a kind pleasant to his nature: he liked it better than making cloth.

His horse must have hated these times; for it was ridden both hard and often: he almost lived on the road, and the fresh air was as welcome to his lungs as the policeman's quest to his mood; he preferred it to the steam of dyehouses. The magistrates of the districts must have dreaded him; they were slow, timid men; he liked both to frighten and to rouse them. He liked to force them to betray a certain fear which made them alike falter in resolve and recoil in action- the fear, simply, of assassination. This, indeed, was the dread which had hitherto hampered every manufacturer and almost every public man in the

district. Helstone alone had ever repelled it. The old Cossack knew well he might be shot: he knew there was risk; but such a death had for his nerves no terrors: it would

have been his chosen — might he have had

a choice.

Moore likewise knew his danger; the result was an unquenchable scorn of the quarter whence such danger was to be apprehended. The consciousness that he hunted assassins was the spur in his highmettled temper's flank. As for fear, he was too proud too hard-natured (if you will)

phlegmatic a man to fear. Many a time he rode belated over moors, moonlit or moonless, as the case may be, with feelings far more elate, faculties far better re

freshed, than when safety and stagnation environed him in the counting house. Four

was the number of the leaders to be accounted for: two, in the course of a fortnight, were brought to bay near Stilbro'; the remaining two it was necessary to seek farther off: their haunts were supposed to lie near Birmingham.

A novel, it was said, of daguerrotype portraits and of vivid scene painting, Shirley was produced in October, 1849; and it must probably have served as an inspiration to one or two episodes in Mrs. Gaskell's finer but even more unequal novel, North and South, issued in Household Words in 1854-1855. A link between Mary Barton and North and South, dealing in part with like themes, is to be found in Ruth, to which Hard Times in its turn is said to have had serious obligations.

"They have too much sense to strike in the South,' says Margaret Hale, sweetest and finest of heroines, in North and South. 'It's not that they have too much sense,' retorts Nicholas Higgins, 'but too little spirit.' These lads of forge and loom fought in profound ignorance of the chances and of political economy, but with a sort of heroic local passion for their class, and even for the poor good-for-naughts who could only manage two looms at a time.' Nicholas himself was a good man, but he would not hear of the state

of trade. Just a piece of master's humbug, he affirmed:

It's rate o' wages, I was talking of. Th' masters keep th' state o' trade in their own hands; and just walk it forward like a black bug-a-boo, to frighten naughty children with into being good. I'll tell yo' it's their part their cue, as some folks call it beat us down, to swell their fortunes; it's ours to stand up and fight hardfor ourselves alone, but for them round about us for justice and fair play. We help to make their profits, and we ought to help to spend 'em.

to and

not

Always the same delusion that there is a great pool of accumulated wealth that can be drawn upon almost indefinitely and an ignoring of the fact that wealth is being created almost momentarily by the labor of man, proceeding unceasingly from hand to mouth. But there was a keen racial, local, and anthropomorphic savor about the conflict in these heróic, old, one-sided strikes of eighty years since. 'What sort of a master is he?' asks Margaret of one of her friends.

Did yo' ever see a bull-dog? Set a bulldog on hindlegs and dress him up in coat and breeches, and yo'n just gotten John Thornton. as dour as a doornail; an obstinate chape every inch on him-th' oud bull-dog. He's worth fightin' wi', is John Thornton.

Even in these days of the early fifties, after the relaxation of Combination Laws, and in those of the importation of 'foreign' labor, the 'bulldog' won, hands down, as he was confident of doing; and Margaret herself, the ideal of sweet reasonableness, had little commiseration for the policy of the strikers or little toleration for their ways and means. 'What are they?' asked Margaret, and Nicholas is explicit in his reply:

Well, if a man does n't belong to the Union, them as works next looms has orders not to speak to him if he's sorry or all, it's a' the same; he's out o' bounds; he's

none o' us; he comes among us, he works among us, but he's none o' us. I' some places them's fined who speaks to him. Yo' try that, Miss; try living a year or two among them as looks away if yo' look at 'em; try working within two yards o' crowds o' men, who yo' know have a grinding grudge at yo' in their hearts to whom if yo' say yo'r glad, not an eye brightens, not a lip moves to whom if your heart's heavy, yo' can never say naught, because they 'll never take notice on your sighs or sad looks. Just yo' try that, Miss, ten hours for three hundred days, and yo'll know a bit what th' Union is.

Margaret will have none of it. 'And you belong to the Union! And you talk of the tyranny of the masters!'

Nay [said Higgins], yo' may say what yo' like! The dead stand between you and every angry word of mine. D'ye think I forget who's lying there, and how hoo loved yo'? And it's the masters as has made us sin, if the Union is a sin. Not this generation may be, but their fathers'. Their fathers ground our fathers to the very dust; ground us to powder! Parson! I reckon, I've heard my mother read out a text "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.' It's so wi' them. In those days of sore oppression th' Unions began; it were a necessity. It's a necessity now, according to me. It's a withstanding injustice, past, present, or to come. It may be like war; along wi' it came crimes; but I think it were a greater crime to let it alone. Our only chance is binding men together in one common interest; and if some are cowards and some are fools, they mun come along and join the great march, whose only strength is in numbers.

The personal side, the antagonism of personal idiosyncrasies and of opposing sentiments, has engaged the observers of industrial struggles far more even than in military or naval contests. The picturesque background, the obsession of personality, hero-worship, the calling of names—this naturally attracted the attention of Tom Carlyle to the subject, especially in Past and Present, as it has engaged the delineat

ing powers of the authors who have concentrated to-day upon popular disturbance, creators of the Iron Heel, The Portion of Labor, The Overman, Half a Hero, Sons and Lovers, Sir George Tressady, The Strike at Arlingford, Milvale, and The Safety Match. Whippets, Pickets, Hunger, Taunting Matches, and Personal Combatthese are counters which every reader of strike stories will have learned when and how to expect.

The books of fifty years ago that told us about factories and strikes and industrial conditions generally are very little considered to-day. Most are so negligible that they are neither seen nor heard. A great success when it appeared in the Cornhill Magazine was Abel Drake's Wife. It was soon reprinted, illustrated, dedicated to Dr. Macleod, and even dramatized. But who to-day can recall the story, touching in its simple pathos, of 'the young fellow that headed the strike that cost master such lots of money'? But Abel Drake's Wife appealed to a limited public. The great multitude of the 1870 period derived their contemporary impressions of strikes and their problems from two much more popular pens. The most popular novelist of that period, we sometimes forget, was Mrs. Henry Wood. A Life's Secret first appeared in The Leisure Hour in 1862. 'Strikes, as we all know,' wrote the authoress in 1867, 'have latterly been growing into notoriety.' The Leisure Hour may or may not have contributed to this result. The objective in 1862 was not dissimilar from the strike motive in Jack Cade, his time: to get ten hours' pay for nine hours' work. But at any rate the book was written 'for good,' the tenor of its sentiments was not liked, and substantial readers of The Leisure Hour were moved to angry remonstrance. Prosperity in the building trade was the causa causans. Nine

hours first would be demanded, then eight. "Taint free-born Englishers as is going to be put upon. . . . ... It'll be glorious times. We shall get a taste o' fowls and salmon, maybe, for dinner then!' The whole story was most superficial. Mrs. Wood knew nothing about the workers or their grievances, and the sketch of the meeting at the Bricklayers' Arms was written with the author's eye fixed firmly upon the gallery of the respectable middle class of the age of Spurgeon. The agitators of those days were deceptive, not because they were false, but because they were vague. Their heads were swelled with the fumes of Liberté and Egalité and 1848; they were not practical or astute, they did not know their job, they had no training and no encircling democratic federation upon which to lean for general support. Great is the change from this insincere and conventional ignorance to the natural ease, lively knowledge, and varied sympathy shown in An Agitator, written in 1894, and prefaced by a disclaimer of all personalities, by Clementina Black. But the book, of course, to which the public owed its chief knowledge, such as it was, of the industrial background, was the sensational Put Yourself in His Place, contributed to the Cornhill Magazine in 1869–1870 by Charles Reade, then at the summit of his fame. Reade set out deliberately to make his readers' blood boil, and in this object he unquestionably succeeds. The story contains other sensational factors, but its main drift is to represent the conflict between independent masters and workmen and the organized trades. The unions proceed against the masters by rattening, a variety of sabotage, and against the workmen who venture to defy their restrictions by horrible threats of the Jack the Ripper type and eventually by 'doing' or maiming. The secretary

of a Sheffield union of the period, an astute diplomat who professed the most kind and civil of methods and left all violence to the 'unauthorized' scum, is depicted in some detail in the person of the suave Mr. Jobson.

Many complaints are brought to us who advise the trades. When they are frivolous, we are unwilling to disturb the harmony of employers and workmen; we reason with the complainant and the thing dies away. When the grievance is substantial, we take it out of the individual's hands and lay it before the working committee. A civil note is sent to the master, or a respectable member of the committee calls on him and urges him to redress the grievance, but always in kind and civil terms. The master generally assents; experience has taught him it is the wisest course. But if he refuses, we are bound to report the refusal to a larger committee,

and sometimes a letter emanates from them, reminding the master that he has been a loser before by acts of injustice and hinting that he may be a loser again. I don't quite approve this form of communication. But certainly it has often prevented the mischief from spreading farther. Well, but perhaps he continues rebellious. What follows? We can't lock up facts that affect the trade; we are bound to report the case at the next general meeting. It excites comments, some of them perhaps a little intemperate; the lower kind of workmen get inflamed with passion, and often, I am sorry to say, write ruffianly letters, and now and then do ruffianly acts which disgrace the town and are strongly reprobated by us. Why, Mr. Little, it has been my lot to send a civil remonstrance, written with my own hand, in pretty fair English, and be treated with silent contempt; and two months after to be offering a reward of twenty or thirty pounds for the discovery of some misguided man that has taken on himself to right this very matter with a can of gunpowder or some such coarse expedient.

Henry Little was played by Henry Neville, and elicited the sympathy of vast crowds at the theatre. The trades use every weapon against the man who, forger, handler, and cutler at once, has defied every regulation of

the unions. First it is gunpowder, then a strike, then concerted outrage by hired bravoes. Put Yourself in His Place as a problem drama had some of the same kind of success that Never Too Late to Mend had earlier and Charles Warner in Drink had a generation later.

The revolution in the prospects attending a strike has been full circle in the course of a century. The impossibility of the strikers gaining in the struggle a hundred years ago has been demonstrated clearly by the historian. Men were prosecuted for combination, and to this it was impossible for them to retaliate. Masters could not be prosecuted for combination. In the first place, lawyers required, and still require, to be paid. To pay them money would have to be raised. How raise it without combination among the men? But combination was illegal. The Combination Law (39 Geo. III, c. 81) compels the men, but not the masters, to give evidence against one another. The one-sidedness of this dispensation is shown pathetically in Captain Swing, prosaically in a newspaper, the Tyne Mercury, of January 8, 1811.

Whereas upward of eighty colliers and workmen of Poynton, Worth, and Norbury Collieries, in Cheshire, on September 24 last, assembled together in a wood and there resolved upon demanding from their employers an advance of wages according to written terms read to the meeting, and afterwards delivered to the underlookers of the said collieries. These terms being so extremely exorbitant, and the restrictions as to working so improper, that it was impossible they should be complied with, and all the said colliers left their work at once, and remained out of employment for nine weeks, to the great damage of the collieries" and to the extreme inconvenience of the public for this unlawful and dangerous conspiracy a prosecution was commenced against the secretary and delegates of the conspirators, to answer which the undersigned were under recognizances to appear