JOSEPH HUME.
Emigration, however, was a painful remedy for famine in Ireland, because the Celt regards exile with horror. Nor was the emigrant in those days treated very much better in his journey over the Atlantic, than the slave during the time when tales of the “middle passage” thrilled the nerves of English philanthropists. The overcrowding in the ships was scandalous, most of them carrying double their complement of passengers, utterly regardless of the law. Twelve times as many died on the voyage, as perished in ordinary circumstances. In quarantine the death rate rose from 1·75 to 40 per 1,000. Three thousand emigrants are said to have perished in Montreal in half a year. The emigrants were weaklings, ill-fitted for the rough life of a colony, and, when they landed with the symptoms of famine fever, they were shunned like lepers, save when they found a refuge in a hospital. “There is no subject,” says the late Sir Charles Trevelyan, “of which a merely one-sided view is more commonly taken than that of emigration. The evils arising from the
THE WOODS BEFORE THE EMIGRANT: VIRGIN FOREST IN CANADA.
crowded state of the population, and the facility with which large numbers of persons may be transferred to other countries, are naturally uppermost in the minds of landlords and ratepayers; but her Majesty’s Government, to which the well-being of the British population in every quarter of the globe is confided, must have an equal regard to the interests of the emigrant and of the colonial community of which he may become a member. It is a great mistake to suppose that even Canada and the United States have an unlimited capacity of absorbing a new population. The labour market in the settled district is always so nearly full, that a small addition to the persons in search of employment makes a sensible difference; while the clearing of land requires the possession of resources and a power of sustained exertion not ordinarily belonging to the newly-arrived Irish emigrant. In this, as well as in the other operations by which society is formed and sustained, there is a natural process which cannot with impunity be departed from. A movement is continually going on towards the backwoods on the part of the young and enterprising portion of the settled population and of such of the fewer emigrants as have acquired means and experience, and the room thus made is occupied by persons recently arrived from Europe who have only their labour to depend on. The conquest of the wilderness requires more than the ordinary share of energy and perseverance, and every attempt that has yet been made to turn paupers into backwoodsmen has ended in signal failure. As long as they were rationed they held together in a feeble, helpless state, and when the issue of the rations ceased they generally returned to the settled parts of the country.”72
These considerations were rather lost sight of in this curious discussion which, with the best of motives, Lord Lincoln initiated. The feeling of the landed class as reflected in the debate was that, whenever too many people were reared on their estates, the Government should in some way or other help them to get rid of their surplus labour. In Ireland for years a redundant population had been encouraged for political purposes by the landlords who owned their votes; and it is curious to observe that those who favoured the growth of that population do not seem to have considered that they, and not the State, should assist them to emigrate. A redundant population in every case is obviously an incident of property in land, and it has to be endured and dealt with like any other drawback of territorial ownership. The landlord who has to pay out of his own pocket the emigration expenses of his surplus labourers, will not be eager to promote emigration to an extent likely to injure his country.
The weakness of the Government was further illustrated by their manner of dealing with the Labour Laws. They did not, like their predecessors in Sir R. Peel’s Ministry, flatly oppose all projects for lessening the hours of factory work. But they refused to make them Ministerial questions, though it must be admitted that Lord John Russell, undismayed by the attitude of the Radical manufacturers, did not flinch from supporting these benevolent measures.
Here it may not be amiss to say that for several years Lord Ashley had fought hard to get what was called the “Ten Hours Bill” carried—the Bill limiting the hours of employment of children and young persons in factories. The Tory Government had opposed and thwarted him. Radical Free Traders like Mr. Bright had been among his fiercest antagonists. Lord Ashley’s courage, however, was undaunted, and he persistently returned year after year to the charge. In 1846, unfortunately, he disappeared from the Parliamentary arena. He approved of Sir Robert Peel’s Free Trade policy, but deemed it his duty to resign his seat, so that his constituents in Dorsetshire, who had elected him as a Protectionist, might express their opinions on his change of front. They rejected him, and thus it came to pass that Mr. John Fielden, Member for Oldham, took charge of the Ten Hours Bill in his stead. Mr. Fielden was hopeful of making progress with the measure because, though Sir Robert Peel and his colleagues had steadily opposed it, the chief of the new Ministry, Lord John Russell, had favoured the project. Then it so happened that a large number of the old Tories who followed Lord George Bentinck were to be counted on as sympathetic allies. The repeal of the Corn Laws they regarded as a blow dealt by the manufacturing class at the landed interest. If they voted now for the Ten Hours Bill, they would in turn be dealing a blow at the manufacturing interest—and, moreover, they would be delivering a vote of vengeance against the Peelites. When on the 26th of January Mr. Fielden obtained leave to bring in a Bill limiting the hours of labour of women and children in factories to ten hours a day, the Government seem to have found it an embarrassing question. They therefore determined to treat it as an “open” one. They appear to have arranged that whilst the Chancellor of the Exchequer—Sir C. Wood—and Mr. Milner Gibson should vote against the Bill, Lord John Russell, Lord Morpeth, and Sir George Grey should vote for it, distinctly saying at the same time that they desired not a ten hours but an eleven hours Bill. It has been usual to represent the beneficent factory legislation with which Lord Ashley’s name is associated as one of the triumphs of Tory policy. It was nothing of the kind. For years the Tory Government, under Peel’s guidance, had resisted the measure, and Lord Ashley’s chief antagonist in those days was Sir James Graham. Lord Ashley was a Peelite himself—but Peel was one of the strongest opponents of a measure the principles of which, however, his father approved. Against the Bill the chief speakers were Mr. Joseph Hume, Mr. Bright, Dr. Bowring, Mr. Mark Phillips, and Mr. Roebuck. For the Bill were Mr. Fielden, Lord John Manners, Mr. Newdegate, Mr. Muntz, Mr. Sharman Crawfurd, and Sir Robert Inglis—an odd mixture of Liberals and Tories. On the 17th of February the second reading was carried by a vote of 195 to 87, and Lord John Russell received the most effusive expressions of gratitude from all parts-of the country, for using his influence as Premier in favour of the Bill. The third reading passed by a majority of 88, and in the Lords the opposition, despite the furious assault which Lord Brougham made on the measure, dwindled down so that the second reading was carried by a vote of 53 to 11.
Yet the Bill was not a model Bill. The Factory Act of 1844 fixed 69 hours a week as the working time for women and children. Mr. Fielden’s Act fixed the hours at 63 from the 1st of July, 1847, and at 58 from the 1st of May, 1848, But it allowed the period in the day when employment was offered to remain as fixed by the Act of 1844. The Act of 1847 was therefore systematically evaded. The ten hours’ work could be exacted between 5.30 a.m. and 8 p.m. Mills were accordingly kept running during the full period of employment, with what the mill-owners pretended to be “relays” of hands, but in such a manner that the inspectors found it impossible to prevent breaches of the law. The competition in business was so keen that an extension of the “shift” and “relay” system was inevitable—and the Act was so badly drawn that when the legality of the system was tested, the Court of Exchequer ruled that it was not forbidden.
The Session of 1847 was dull. Members were worn out by the reaction
THE LOWER WARD, WINDSOR CASTLE.
from the passionate excitement and the repeated shocks of those Ministerial crises which exhausted Parliament in 1846. One gap in the long line of Irish relief measures we can descry, and even then it was made by an eleemosynary measure giving compensation to West India planters for the loss they were likely to suffer