North And South

“There are briars besetting every path, Which call for patient care; There is a cross in every lot, And an earnest need for prayer.” Anon. Margaret went out heavily and unwillingly enough. But the length of a street—yes, the air of a Milton Street—cheered her young blood before she reached her first turning. Her step grew lighter, her lip redder. She began to take notice, instead of having her thoughts turned so exclusively inward. She saw unusual loiterers in the streets: men with their hands in their pockets sauntering along; loud-laughing and loud-spoken girls clustered together, apparently excited to high spirits, and a boisterous independence of temper and behaviour. The more ill-looking of the men—the discreditable minority—hung about on the steps of the beer-houses and gin-shops, smoking, and commenting pretty freely on every passer-by. Margaret disliked the prospect of the long walk through these streets, before she came to the fields which she had planned to reach. Instead, she would go and see Bessy Higgins. It would not be so refreshing as a quiet country walk, but still it would perhaps be doing the kinder thing.

Nicholas Higgins was sitting by the fire smoking, as she went in. Bessy was rocking herself on the other side.

Nicholas took the pipe out of his mouth, and standing up, pushed his chair towards Margaret; he leant against the chimney-piece in a lounging attitude, while she asked Bessy how she was.

“Hoo’s rather down i’ th’ mouth in regard to spirits, but hoo’s better in health. Hoo doesn’t like this strike. Hoo’s a deal too much set on piece and quietness at any price.”

“This is th’ third strike I’ve seen,” said she, sighing, as if that was answer and explanation enough.

“Well, third time pays for all. See if we don’t dang th’ masters this time. See if they don’t come and beg us to come back at our own price. That’s all. We’ve missed it afore time, I grant yo’; but this time we’n laid our plans desperate deep.”

“Why do you strike?” asked Margaret. “Striking is leaving off work till you get your own rate of wages, is it not? You must not wonder at my ignorance; where I come from I never heard of a strike.”

“I wish I were there,” said Bessie, wearily. “But it’s not for me to get sick and tired o’ strikes. This is the last I’ll see. Before it’s ended I shall be in the Great City—the Holy Jerusalem.”

“Hoo’s so full of th’ life to come, hoo cannot think of th’ present. Now I, yo see, am bound to do the best I can here. I think a bird i’ th’ hand is worth two i’ th’ bush. So them’s the different views we take on th’ strike question.”

“But,” said Margaret, “if the people struck, as you call it, where I come from, as they are mostly all field labourers, the seed would not be sown, the hay got in, the corn reaped.”

“Well?” said he. He had resumed his pipe, and put his “well” in the form of an interrogation.

“Why,” she went on, “what would become of the farmers?”

He puffed away. “I reckon, they’d have either to give up their farms, or to give fair rate of wage.”

“Suppose they could not, or would not do the last; they could not give up their farms all in a minute, however much they might wish to do so; but they would have no hay, nor corn to sell that year; and where would the money come from to pay the labourers’ wages the next?”

Still puffing away. At last he said:

“I know nought of your ways down South. I have heerd they’re a pack of spiritless, down-trodden men; welly clemmed to death; too dazed wi’ clemming to know when they’re put upon. Now, it’s not so here. We known when we’re put upon; and we’en too much blood in us to stand it. We just take our hands fro’ our looms, and say, ‘Yo’ may clem us, but yo’ll not put upon us, my masters!’ And be danged to ’em, they shan’t this time!”

“I wished I lived down South,” said Bessy.

“There’s a deal to bear there,” said Margaret. “There are sorrows to bear everywhere. There is very hard bodily labour to be gone through, with very little food to give strength.”

“But it’s out of doors,” said Bessy. “And away from the endless, endless noise, and sickening heat.”

“It’s sometimes in heavy rain, and sometimes in bitter cold. A young person can stand it; but an old man gets racked with rheumatism, and bent and withered before his time; yet he must just work on the same, or else go to the workhouse.”

“I thought yo were so taken wi’ the ways of the South country.”

“So I am,” said Margaret, smiling a little, as she found herself thus caught. “I only mean, Bessy, there’s good and bad in everything in this world; and as you felt the bad up here, I thought it was but fair you should know the bad down there.”

“And yo say they never strike down there?” asked Nicholas abruptly.

“No!” said Margaret; “I think they have too much sense.”

“An’ I think,” replied he, dashing the ashes out of his pipe with so much vehemence that it broke, “it’s not that they’ve too much sense, but that they’ve too little spirit.”

“Oh, father!” said Bessy, “what have ye gained by striking? Just think of that first strike when mother died—how we all had to clem—you the worst of all; and yet many a one went in every week at the same wage, till all were gone in that there was work for; and some went beggars all their lives at after.”

“Ay,” said he. “That there strike was badly managed. Folk got into th’ management of it, as were either fools or not true men. Yo’ll see, it’ll be different this time.”

“But all this time you’ve not told me what you’re striking for,” said Margaret, again.

“Why, yo see, there’s five or six masters who have set themselves again paying the wages they’ve been paying these two years past, and flourishing upon, and getting richer upon. And now they come to us, and say we’re to take less. And we won’t. We’ll just clem them to death first; and see who’ll work for ’em then. They’ll have killed the goose that laid ’em the golden eggs, I reckon.”

“And so you plan dying, in order to be revenged upon them!”

“No,” said he, “I dunnot. I just look forward to the chance of dying at my post sooner than yield. That’s what folk call fine and honourable in a soldier, and why not in a poor weaver-chap?”

“But,” said Margaret, “a soldier dies in the cause of the Nation—in the cause of others.”

He laughed grimly. “My lass,” said he, “yo’re but a young wench, but don’t yo think I can keep three people—that’s Bessy, and Mary, and me—on sixteen shillings a week? Dun yo think it’s for mysel’ I’m striking work at this time? It is just as much in the cause of others as yon soldier—only m’appen, the cause he dies for is just that of somebody he never clapt eyes on, nor heerd on all his born days, while I take up John Boucher’s cause, as lives next door but one, wi’ a sickly wife, and eight childer, none on ’em factory age; and I don’t take up his cause only, though he’s a poor good-for-nought, as can only manage two looms at a time, but I take up th’ cause o’ justice. Why are we to have less wage now, I ask, than two year ago?”

“Don’t ask me,” said Margaret; “I am very ignorant. Ask some of your masters. Surely they will give you a reason for it. It is not merely an arbitrary decision of theirs, come to without reason.”

“Yo’re just a foreigner, and nothing more,” said he, contemptuously. “Much yo know about it. Ask th’ masters! They’d tell us to mind our own business, and they’d mind theirs. Our business being, yo understand, to take the bated wage, and be thankful; and their business to bate us down to clemming point, to swell their profits. That’s what it is.”

“But,” said Margaret, determined not to give way, although she saw she was irritating him, “the state of trade may be such as not to enable them to give you the same remuneration.”

“State o’ trade! That’s just a piece o’ masters’ humbug. 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 you it’s their part,—their cue, as some folks call it,—to beat us down, to swell their fortunes; and it’s ours to stand up and fight hard,—not for ourselves alone, but for them round about us—for justice and fair play. We help to make their profits, and we ought to help spend ’em. It’s not that we want their brass so much this time, as we’ve done many a time afore. We’n getten money laid by; and we’re resolved to stand and fall together; not a man on us will go in for less wage than th’ Union says is our due. So I say, ‘hooray for the strike,’ and let Thornton, and Slickson, and Hamper, and their set look to it!”

“Thornton!” said Margaret. “Mr. Thornton of Marlborough Street?”

“Aye! Thornton o’ Marlborough Mill, as we call him.”

“He is one of the masters you are striving with, is he not? What sort of a master is he?”

“Did yo’ ever see a bulldog? Set a bulldog on hind legs, and dress him up in coat and breeches, and yo’n just getten John Thornton.”