It seems to me that I cannot more appropriately conclude these chapters of bygone events within my own experience, than by a summary of those of the past condition of industry which suggest a tone of manly cheerfulness and confidence in the future, not yet common among the people. Changes of condition are not estimated as they pass, and when they have passed, many never look back to calculate their magnificence or insignificance. This chapter is an attempt to show the change of the environment of a great class of a character to decrease apprehension and augment hope. The question answered herein is: "Did things go better before our time?" When this question is put to me I answer "No." Things did not go better before my time—nor that of the working class who were contemporaries of my earlier years. My answer is given from the working class point of view, founded on a personal experience extending as far back as 1824, when I first became familiar with workshops. Many are still under the impression that things are as bad as they well can be, whereas they have been much worse than they are now. When I first took an interest in public affairs, agitators among the people were as despondent as frogs who were supposed to croak because they were neglected.
They spoke in weeping tones. There were tears even in the songs of Ebenezer Elliot, the Corn-Law Rhymer,* and not without cause, for the angels would have been pessimists, had they been in the condition of the people in those days. I myself worked among men who had Unitarian masters—who were above the average of employers—even they were as sheep-dogs who kept the wolf away, but bit the sheep if they turned aside. But Trades unions have changed this now, and sometimes bite their masters (employers they are called now), which is not more commendable. Still, multitudes of working people, who ought to be in the front ranks as claimants for redress still needed, yet hang back with handkerchief to their eyes, oppressed with a feeling of hopelessness, because they are unaware of what has been won for them, of what has been conceded to them, and what the trend of progress is bringing nearer to them.
     * Thomas Cooper—himself a Chartist poet—published (1841)
     in Elliot's days a hymn by William Jones—a Leicester poet—
     of which the first verse began thus:
 
          "Come my fellow-slaves of Britain.
          Rest, awhile, the weary limb;
          Pour your plaints, ye bosom-smitten,
          In a sad and solemn hymn."
Of course if there has been no betterment in the condition of the people, despair is excusable—but if there has, despair is as unseemly as unnecessary. Every age has its needs and its improvements to make, but a knowledge of what has been accomplished should take despair out of workmen's minds. To this end I write of changes which have taken place in my time.
I was born in tinder-box days. I remember having to strike a light in my grandfather's garden for his early pipe, when we arrived there at five o'clock in the morning. At times my fingers bled as I missed the steel with the jagged flint. Then the timber proved damp where the futile spark fell, and when ignition came a brimstone match filled the air with satanic fumes. He would have been thought as much a visionary as Joanna Southcott, who said the time would come when small, quick-lighting lucifers would be as plentiful and as cheap as blades of grass. How tardy was change in olden time! Flint and steel had been in use four hundred years. Philip the Good put it into the collar of the Golden Fleece (1429). It was not till 1833 that phosphorus matches were introduced. The safety match of the present day did not appear until 1845. The consumption of matches is now about eight per day for each person. To produce eight lights, by a tinder-box, would take a quarter of an hour With the lucifer match eight lights can be had in two minutes, occupying only twelve hours a year, while the tinder box process consumes ninety hours. Thus the lucifer saves nearly eighty hours annually, which, to the workman, would mean an addition of nearly eight working days to the year.
In tinder-box days the nimble night burglar heard the flint and steel going, and had time to pack up his booty and reach the next parish, before the owner descended the stairs with his flickering candle. Does any one now fully appreciate the morality of light? Extinguish the gas in the streets of London and a thousand extra policemen would do less to prevent outrage and robbery than the ever-burning, order-keeping street light. Light is a police force—neither ghosts nor burglars like it. Thieves flee before it as errors flee the mind when the light of truth bursts on the understanding of the ignorant.
Seventy years ago the evenings were wasted in a million houses of the poor. After sundown the household lived in gloom. Children who could read, read, as I did, by the flickering light of the fire, which often limited for life the power of seeing. Now the pauper reads by a better light than the squire did in days when squires were county gods. Now old men see years after the period when their forefathers were blind.
Then a social tyranny prevailed, unpleasant to the rich and costly to the poor, which regarded the beard as an outrage. I remember when only four men in Birmingham had courage to wear beards. They were followers of Joanna Southcott. They did it in imitation of the apostles, and were jeered at in the streets by ignorant Christians. George Frederick Muntz, one of the two first members elected in Birmingham, was the first member who ventured to wear a beard in the House of Commons; and he would have been insulted had not he been a powerful man and carried a heavy Malacca cane, which he was known to apply to any one who offered him a personal affront. Only military officers were allowed to wear a moustache; among them—no one, not even Wellington, was hero enough to wear a beard. The Rev. Edmund R. Larken, of Burton Rectory, near Lincoln, was the first clergyman (that was as late as 1852) who appeared in the pulpit with a beard, but he shaved the upper lip as an apology for the audacity of his chin; George Dawson was the first Nonconformist preacher who delivered a sermon in a full-blown moustache and beard, which was taken in both cases as an unmistakable sign of latitudinarianism in doctrine. In the bank clerk or the workman it was worse. It was flat insubordination not to shave. The penalty was prompt dismissal. As though there were not fetters about hard to bear, people made fetters for themselves. Such was the daintiness of ignorance that a man could not eat, dress, nor even think as he pleased. He was even compelled to shave by public opinion.
When Mr. Joseph Cowen was first a candidate for Parliament, he wore, as was his custom, a felt hat (then called a "wide-awake"). He was believed to be an Italian conspirator, and suspected of holding opinions lacking in orthodox requirements. Yet all his reputed heresies of acts and tenets put together did not cost him so many votes as the form and texture of his hat. He was elected—but his headgear would have ruined utterly a less brilliant candidate than he This social intolerance now shows its silly and shameless head no more. A wise Tolerance is the Angel, which stands at the portal of Progress, and opens the door of the Temple.
Dr. Church, of Birmingham, was the first person who, in my youth, contrived a bicycle, and rode upon it in the town, which excited more consternation than a Southcottean with his beard. He was an able physician, but his harmless innovation cost him his practice. Patients refused to be cured by a doctor who rode a horse which had no head, and ate no oats. Now a parson may ride to church on a bicycle and people think none the worse of his sermon; and, scandal of scandals, women are permitted to cycle, although it involves a new convenience of dress formerly sharply resented.
In these days of public wash-houses, public laundries, and water supply, few know the discomfort of a washing day in a workman's home, or of the feuds of a party pump. One pump in a yard had to serve several families. Quarrels arose as to who should first have the use of it. Sir Edwin Chadwick told me that more dissensions arose over party pumps in a day than a dozen preachers could reconcile in a week. Now the poorest house has a water tap, which might be called moral, seeing the ill-feeling it prevents. So long as washing had to be done at home, it took place in the kitchen, which was also the dining-room of a poor family. When the husband came home to his meals, damp clothes were hanging on lines over his head, and dripping on to his plate. The children were in the way, and sometimes the wrong child had its ears boxed because, in the steam, the mother could not see which was which. This would give rise to further expressions which kept the Recording Angel, of whom Sterne tells us, very busy, whom the public wash-houses set free for other, though scarcely less repugnant duty.
In that day sleeping rooms led to deplorable additions to the register of "idle words." The introduction of iron bedsteads began a new era of midnight morality. As a wandering speaker I dreaded the wooden bedstead of cottage, lodging-house or inn. Fleas I did not much care for, and had no ill-will towards them. They were too little to be responsible for what they did; while the malodorous bug is big enough to know better. Once in Windsor I selected an inn with a white portico, having an air of pastoral cleanliness. The four-poster in my room, with its white curtains, was a further assurance of repose. The Boers were not more skilful in attack and retreat than the enemies I found in the field. Lighted candles did not drive them from the kopje pillow where they fought. In Sheffield, in 1840, I asked the landlady for an uninhabited room. A cleaner looking, white-washed chamber never greeted my eyes. But I soon found that a whole battalion of red-coated cannibals were stationed there, on active service. Wooden bedsteads in the houses of the poor were the fortresses of the enemy, which then possessed the land. Iron bedsteads have ended this, and given to the workman two hours more sleep at night than was possible before that merciful invention. A gain of two hours for seven nights amounted to a day's holiday a week. Besides, these nocturnal irritations were a fruitful source of tenemental sin, from which iron bedsteads have saved residents and wayfarers.
Of all the benefits that have come to the working class in my time, those of travel are among the greatest. Transit by steam has changed the character of man, and the facilities of the world. Nothing brings toleration into the mind like seeing new lands, new people, new usages. They who travel soon discover that other people have genius, manners, and taste. The traveller loses on his way prejudices of which none could divest him at home, and he brings back in his luggage new ideas never contained in it before. Think what the sea-terror of the emigrant used to be, as he thought of the dreadful voyage over the tempestuous billows. The first emigrants to America were six months in the Mayflower. Now a workman can go from Manchester into the heart of America or Canada in a fortnight. The deadly depression which weighed on the heart of home-sick emigrants occurs no more, since he can return almost at will. A mechanic can now travel farther than a king could a century ago. When I first went to Brighton, third-class passengers travelled in an open cattle truck, exposed to wind and rain. For years the London and North-Western Railway shunted the third-class passengers at Blisworth for two hours, while the gentlemen's trains went by. Now workmen travel in better carriages than gentlemen did half a century ago. In Newcastle-on-Tyne I have entered a third-class carriage at a quarter to five in the morning. It was like Noah's Ark. The windows were openings which in storm were closed by wooden shutters to keep out wind and rain, when all was darkness. It did not arrive in London till nine o'clock in the evening, being sixteen hours on the journey. Now the workman can leave New-castle at ten o'clock in the morning, and be in London in the afternoon.
Does any one think what advantage has come to the poor by the extension of dentistry? Teeth are life-givers. They increase comeliness, comfort, health and length of years—advantages now shared more or less by the poorer classes—once confined to the wealthy alone. Formerly the sight of dental instruments struck terror in the heart of the patient Now, fear arises when few instruments are seen, as the more numerous they are and the more skilfully they are made, the assurance of less pain is given. The simple instruments which formerly alarmed give confidence now, which means that the patient is wiser than of yore.
Within the days of this generation what shrieks were heard in the hospital, which have been silenced for ever by a discovery of pain-arresting chloroform! No prayer could still the agony of the knife. The wise surgeon is greater than the priest. If any one would know what pain was in our time, let him read Dr. John Brown's "Rab and his Friends," which sent a pang of dangerous horror into the heart of every woman who read it. Now the meanest hospital gives the poorest patient who enters it a better chance of life than the wealthy could once command.
It was said formerly:—
     "The world is a market full of streets,
     And Death is a merchant whom every one meets,
     If life were a thing which money could buy—
     The poor could not live, and the rich would not die."
Now the poor man can deal with death, and buy life on very reasonable terms, if he has commonsense enough to observe half the precepts given him by generous physicians on temperance and prudence.
Not long since no man was tolerated who sought to cure an ailment, or prolong human life in any new way. Even persons so eminent as Harriet Martineau, Dr. Elliotson, and Sir Bulwer Lytton were subjected to public ridicule and resentment because they suffered themselves to be restored to health by mesmerism or hydropathy. But in these libertine and happier days any one who pleases may follow Mesmer, Pressnitz, or even Hahnemann, and attain health by any means open to him, and is no longer expected to die according to the direction of antediluvian doctors.
Until late years the poor man's stomach was regarded as the waste-paper basket of the State, into which anything might be thrown that did not agree with well-to-do digestion. Now, the Indian proverb is taken to be worth heeding—that "Disease enters by the mouth," and the health of the people is counted as part of the wealth of the nation. Pestilence is subjected to conditions. Diseases are checked at will, which formerly had an inscrutable power of defiance. The sanitation of towns is now a public care. True, officers of health have mostly only official noses, but they can be made sensible of nuisances by intelligent occupiers. Economists, less regarded than they ought to be, have proved that it is cheaper to prevent pestilence than bury the dead. Besides, disease, which has no manners, is apt to attack respectable people.
What are workshops now to what they once were? Any hole or stifling room was thought ............