Harriet Martineau

“ It is nothing to us whether, in exhibiting the mischiefs of meddling legislation, we tell the story of the Maine Liquor Law in America, or the passport system in Austria, or sumptuary legislation in Sweden, or Sabbatarian enactments in England. Whatever illustrates our meaning is good for our purpose, and whatever best illustrates our meaning is best for our purpose. We prefer, on this ground, out of a pretty large class of stories which we might relate, the narrative of the proceedings of the Factory Inspectors, under the countenance of the government, since the opening of the war. ”

“ Our own fathers told us we had nothing more to fear from attempts to fix the rate of wages by Act of Parliament. Yet here we are once again in the midst of confusion and actual danger to our liberties, from the same tendency in busy and shallow minds to recur to legislation for the carrying of their objects, encouraged as that tendency is by the ignorance and carelessness of our law-makers and their constituents, as to the principles which should prescribe and limit the sphere of legislation. ”

“ When the question is of the mischiefs arising from meddling legislation, it is difficult to say which case out of any number may be most important through the harm done; for the harm done is altogether immeasurable in every instance: but we may safely say that no case could well be more serious than this of the rupture between the government and the body of textile manufacturers of Great Britain, because the issue to which the controversy is now brought is that of the supersession of either the textile manufactures or the existing factory law. ”

“ These were the gentlemen who had educated their people up to the needs of the time; who carried them through the stress by unexampled generosity, and who now see in the factory population about them the most favourably circumstanced class of workers—if not citizens—in the kingdom. ”

“ When we are in Paris, we thank our stars that we are not trammelled by law and police in every act of our lives; that we can buy a dose of medicine without a permit, and draw our supplies from the country without paying a tax at the city gates, When we talk by the fire-side with our elderly relations, we hear wonderful stories of the old plagues of excise intrusion, and the custom-house tyranny which made our whole coast a harbourage for smugglers ”

“ It may be thought needless to rebuke such misrepresentations on the part of any one who knows so little of human nature as to suppose that the most selfish of capitalists would subject himself to the annoyance and public inquiry, and certain expense,—to say nothing of the anguish of mind,—of having an operative killed or maimed in his mill, for the sake of any number of shillings. ”

“ Dickens might have been answerable for the burning of mills and the assassination of masters; and if no deadly mischief follows now, it will be because the workers understand their own case better than he does. The benevolence of their employers, educating them long before the Factory Law made education compulsory, and feeding them in times of hardship, has generated a mutual understanding, and a common intelligence, which go far to render Mr. Dickens's representations harmless ”

“ Is every drunken vagabond who lies down in the track,—every deaf old man who chooses the railway for his walk,—every fidgetty traveller who steps out while the train is in motion, in the face of extra-large print, on the station walls, which forbids him to do so,—to be regarded as the victims of the railway proprietors? ”

“ One of the duties of patriotism is to see that the besom is not turned from its course by fear or favour; that no damp, dirty corner is shut up from purification, in the hope that people will be too much engrossed to find it out: and it is in discharge of this duty that we now call attention to certain facts, showing that the false philanthropy, which is one of the bad growths of the recent time—the proud-flesh of our body politic—is corrupting our social condition, and encroaching on the very principles of our liberties, as actively as before the war began. ”

“ Dickens really believes in such a state of things as he describes, he should not meddle with affairs in which rationality of judgment is required; and if he can be satisfied to represent the great class of manufacturers—unsurpassed for intelligence, public spirit, and beneficence—as the monsters he describes, without seeking knowledge of their actual state of mind and course of life, we do not see how he can complain of being himself classed with the pseudo-philanthropists whom he delights to ridicule. ”

“ Who, after this, can share the indignation of the cotton owners, when poor operatives strike—when they subscribe money to sustain each other in a combination against what they believe—though not always rightly—to be grievous wrong. The operative strikes against hunger; against what he thinks hard dealing on the part of his employers. The employer strikes against humanity, and shows how hardly he can deal, by subscribing to help and be helped in a struggle against the necessity of furnishing protection to the lives of his workpeople. ”

“ These gentlemen are the employers of the factory population: that population, who, by their conduct during the years of adversity preceding the repeal of the Corn Laws, raised the hope and self-respect of the nation; showing, by their patience in suffering, their superiority to the old ignorance and prejudice, which rendered former periods of adversity seasons of outrage and fatal conflict with their employers. ”

“ In England, where there are no revolutions going forward,—either periodical, as in the United States; or occasional, as on the Continent,—it might be expected that the government, or at least the parliamentary portion of it, would have some notion, fixed enough for common use, as to what its own business was, even if speculative philosophers were still far from the end of their controversies as to the true scope of legislation, and function of the executive. ”

“ In a matter of literary judgment or taste, one may soften one's tone of criticism and opposition to the gentlest breath of dissent; but in a matter of political morality so vital as this, there must be no compromise and no mistake. ”

“ Yet, in this very present, so free, and so convenient in its freedom, there has been an advancing encroachment on the liberty of the citizen, aggravated since the war began to an intolerable degree, which justifies our appeal to government, and yet more to the constituents of government, to take care what they are about. ”

“ The Common Law provides securities against injuries from neglect or mismanagement in the regular course of the employments of workpeople of all orders. If the law is to be extended, as in the case of the mill-workers, to the prevention of "all accidents" from any instrument which can hurt or destroy, we must proceed to obviate all the dangers of life by law. Every landlord who erects cottages for his labourers must be legally compelled to put up fireguards, lest the children should be burnt. Every owner of houses must fence all the windows with gratings, lest people should fall out. ”

“ The operative has a right to withhold his labour when he is not satisfied with its reward; the master has no right to leave his machinery unfenced, when the law orders him to fence it; and, in spite of the phrase 'cases that can be legitimately dealt with,' it is evident that he associates with other masters that he may successfully oppose the law by the payment of a slight annual subscription. Application is made for it by the Association to all factory owners, at the rate of one shilling per nominal horse-power. ”

“ If we believed that their wits were wool-gathering in the East, we should recal them by a loud alarm about the danger of their liberties at home; but, confident as we are, that our neighbours are nearly as much in earnest as ever about affairs at home, we feel that we need only put before them certain facts of the day to induce them to watch their own liberties while sacrificing so largely as they are doing on behalf of those of all Europe. ”

“ The universal practice, in the preparation of the annual railway statistics, is to class under separate headings those who have suffered through and without fault of their own. Mr. Horner makes no such distinctions, and thus points out the innocent and injured employers to the indignation and jealousy of their operatives on precisely the same terms as the most culpable. ”

“ We have shown that the opinion of Lord Palmerston's instigators is met by that of several well-qualified persons. It is no business of ours to decide which opinion is the right one, or the most likely to be the right one. Our business is simply to show that Mr. Horner's representations of the temper and conduct of the millowners, in his Reports and elsewhere, are not justified by the facts. He has repeatedly declared that life or limb has been lost in the mill of A. B. or C., because the millowner would not save either by the expenditure of half-a-crown in hooks, or a few shillings in casing. ”

“ The false philanthropy, which is one of the unwholesome growths of a protracted period of abeyance of national objects, has so acted upon the ignorance and carelessness of society, in regard to the true function of our rulers, as to place us in more serious social danger than our fathers supposed we had yet to go through from such a cause. ”

“ What can instigate any lawyer, who cannot be supposed an interested party, to write such a preface as Mr. Tapping's, it is difficult to imagine. On opening it, my eye falls at once on a false statement, which ought to destroy the authority of all the rest. Mr. Tapping writes (p. vi.) that "the manufacturers have instituted the 'National Association of Factory Occupiers,' the special purpose of which, it is said, is to raise a fund for defraying thereout all fines for not fencing which may be inflicted upon members. ”

“ The issue of the next campaign in the East is, in the apprehension of wise men, of less consequence than the removal of late excrescences,—the unwholesome growth of an unprincipled sensibility,—which have overgrown the good old Common Law, which is found sufficiently protective of the workers in every other department of industry. ”

“ We must say that a mission to Borrioboola-Gha is an innocent enterprise, in comparison with that which Mr. Dickens has undertaken on behalf of meddling and mischievous legislation like that of the fencing clauses of the Factory Acts. If we had room, and if our object was to convict the humanity-monger in "Household Words" of all his acts of unfairness and untruth, we should go into the case of the boy in Mr. Cheetham's factory, who, in defiance of remonstrance, thrust himself into the extremity of danger, and was killed on the instant ”

“ The millowners understood this circular to convey an order that all shafts should be "permanently cased with wood or iron," Mr. Leonard Horner having repeatedly declared that sort of fencing to be the only secure one for vertical shafts, and for horizontal ones under seven feet in height; whereas he at the same time declared that rectangular hooks (of which more presently) are a security against one danger, "but not against other accidents;" while he stated in the same paragraph, that "adequate means must be adopted" "against all accidents from an horizontal shaft." ”

“ While every factory worker who is prevented from coming to work at nine next morning, by any kind of injury,—whether by a cut, or a bruise of thumb or forefinger (used in the spinning process) , or a kick or fall in the play-ground, or any hurt however slight,—is to be reported upon as gravely and precisely as if he had lost head or limb, the Parliamentary Committee rejected, by a majority of 108 to 10, a less stringent provision of the Mines and Collieries Bill. ”

“ From that time, it was not only the right hut the duty of good citizens to require from him some soundness of principle and some depth of knowledge in political philosophy. It is not within our scope now to show how conspicuous has been Mr. Dickens's proved failure in the department of instruction upon which he spontaneously entered. We need refer to only a single instance out of many,—as his Tale of "Hard Times." On this occasion, again, the plea of those who would plead for Charles Dickens to the last possible moment is that "Hard Times" is fiction. ”

“ It can hardly be necessary to offer any excuse for the commonplace aspect of the incidents of the story. The justification of the narrative lies in the one particular that an all-important principle is involved in it. Every reader will here think of ship-money. We need, therefore, say nothing about it,—at least, more than this. If it should flit across anybody's mind that we are making much ado about tiresome and trivial matters, let him then think of ship-money, and he will read to the end. ”