chances of opportunities for increased work, which are constantly disappointed. The man or the family which thus falls into arrear, labours on under a pressure which can no more be shaken off, and a whole life is often embittered and rendered miserable by the negligence of days or hours at the commencement. For men in the condition of the greater part of the handloom-weavers, there is apparently at present little resource but the factory, as far as this ensures continuous employment, and certain, if moderate, earnings. But factories are liable to similar interruptions and chances with the undertakings of the workman; and the negligence or want of skill of the principal then entails a hard visitation upon his dependents. The factory is therefore but an uncertain remedy, and as such is no further dwelt upon in our Report than as asserting its victorious power for the present, and sounding the note of warning for the future. The folly of contending against steam power where mere manual labour is all that the weaver can command, is too evident to require illustration; since the possible stretch of mechanical improvement, even during the present generation, evidently defies calculation, and little reflection is requisite to see that the industrial classes must look forward to a period of increased mental activity, for which however the field will be in the same proportion extended as physical force is less in demand. If, as we have a right to expect, the hammer, the saw and the shuttle pass from the hand of the labourer to the machine, it is evident that the field for work demanding greater skill and intelligence will be widened, inasmuch as men must have houses before they can require furniture, and ships must be built before quadrants and compasses are wanted. We do not therefore anticipate any such revulsion as the transformation of all journey-hand into factory labourers, although it is clear that whole branches of trade may and must pass from hand-labour to machinery-power. We think too that such a change, instead of being matter of regret, will afford, and as far as it has been effected already, has afforded great relief to the consuming population, of which the labouring classes form the majority. The problem to be solved therefore appears to us to be, not to induce independent labourers, who are

able to remain so, to flock into the factories; but rather to point out the means that can be resorted to, in order to make individual exertion as profitable as possible both to the labourer and to the community. We shall see that this is the view of the subject which the general tendency of this valuable Report favours.

The result of the inquiry into the remuneration for the labour of handloom-weavers is judiciously placed at the commencement of the Report, and points out emphatically the waste of power and means which we have to lament under the present circumstances. The commonest descriptions of weavers' work are described as demanding so little skill that they are learned without exertion. The remuneration is however with some exactness measured by the strength and skill which the workman can or must employ; and in a table of wages, showing the earnings of weavers at present in the south of Scotland, the difference in the wages of first class workmen, or skilled male adults, and the second class, or young, old and female operatives, varies from thirty to seventyfive per cent. in work demanding equal skill. The difference in skill is still more highly compensated, as the weaving of coarse bombazines is shown to bring in 6s. 8d. to 78., while weavers of fine bombazines and challis are paid at the rate of 12s. 6d. to 148. 7d. per week. The lowest rate of wages for silk-weavers is stated to be received by the ribbon-weavers of Coventry, where the weekly payment averages 5s.; the highest is probably that earned by the velvet-weavers of Spitalfields and the tabinet-weavers of Dublin, which averages from 17. to 11. 5s. per week.

This discrepancy will afford us interesting matter for investigation presently; we continue the statement of the earnings.

According to Mr. Symons's return, of 51,060 handloomweavers in the southern counties of Scotland, only 28,366 were male adults earning the highest wages, which vary from 78. 6d. per week for ginghams and cottons, to 16s. 6d. and 188. for the best paid description of woollens. These 28,366 adults represent so many families, or 113,464 individuals; the remaining 22,694 looms are worked by women and youths at the lower rates of wages as stated above.

Mr. Muggeridge, who inspected the north-western district of England, gives even a more deplorable account of the earnings of the handloom-weavers in those parts. Four hundred and eighty-three families in the district of Ashton-under-Lyne are stated to earn upon an average 4s. 114d. per week by cotton-weaving. At Blackburn twenty-eight families are enumerated, the richest of which consisted of five individuals, of whom two were employed, earning conjointly 18s. per week; the poorest consisted of eight individuals, of whom four were able to earn together but 11s. 8d. per week. The district remarked as exceptional, from the spirit of contentment which seemed to prevail so far as to make the AssistantCommissioner deem it unnecessary to pursue his inquiries in it, was the neighbourhood of Bridport, in Dorsetshire, where able-bodied men, weaving sail-cloth and other strong linens, get from 11s. 6d. to 13s. per week as wages. But even here this contentment, which was earned with seventy hours' labour in the week, and which is represented to have subsisted with the nourishment of bread and cheese, with potatoes at night, and as much fuel as could cook them, only lasted up to the late advance in the price of bread, which is emphatically stated to be alarming.

Now if 12s. per week in times of plenty, in one of the most fertile districts, not over-peopled, and situated in the healthiest and mildest climate of our islands, be assumed, from this experience, to be the standard of wages at which a cheerful though laborious existence for our poorer fellow-countrymen may be fixed, what, may we ask, must have for years past been the condition of millions who were unable to earn anything approaching to this sum? Of the mass of labourers whose wages fall below 128. per week, the handloom-weavers do not even form the majority; for we have the authority in Parliament of an illustrious agriculturalist, that 9s. per week is considered, in less-favoured districts than Dorsetshire, a fair remuneration for field-labour. It will perhaps be easier to estimate the effects of such small earnings on a dense population, from the pictures given in the Report of the domestic sufferings of the industrious poor.

"The inference," says Mr. Austin in his Report on the south-western parts of England, " from all my evidence is, that the weavers, taken as a

body, are out of work one-third of their time, which reduces the income of the master-weaver, for one loom, to 8s. instead of 12s. per week, and that of the journeyman to 7s. instead of 10s."

During the time that the weaver has no work on his loom he incurs debts, a part of which he pays off when his earnings are higher, but he is rarely in advance of the world; few are ever in a situation to save in good times to provide for adversity; those who trust them are generally losers, and sell to them perhaps as much from charity as profit.

"He must consequently (if he do pay) pay dear for all he consumes; he must take just such bad or indifferent articles as they will let him have; he is, therefore, badly fed and at a dear rate.

"This is a sad demoralizing state of things, but it is true, and even extensively so.

"Referring to the evidence of a person deputed by me to go from house to house to inspect personally the condition of the weavers, and to obtain from each family a statement of income and expenditure, I find that 'in the seventy-four houses he has visited there is great distress. In some of them he was told that they had not a bit of bread nor a potatoe in the house, and he believes this to be true.'

"To sum up, I should say that one-third of the whole number were in a worse situation than the agricultural labourer in amount of income; onethird on a par in that respect, but without the advantages of cheap rent, occasional food and fuel, and a settled habit of life, arising from greater regularity in his wages and employment; the remainder are in tolerably good circumstances.”—Page 21.

"The houses of the cotton-weavers (which I was during my whole inquiry constantly visiting) but too well attest the reality of their generally depressed condition; their food is usually of a coarse description, and is often deficient in quantity.

"The furniture in most of their dwellings is scanty and miserable; their beds are often of straw, and seldom among the poorer class are they provided with clothing by day or with covering by night so good as the common day-labourers either in Scotland or in England. Sometimes I found articles of massive and even of handsome furniture, the relics of former and happier days, still treasured up with a pride which poverty cannot subjugate, and contrasting painfully with the pauper meal and care-worn features of the impoverished owner; in fact to me it appears that the hardship of their case, as regards at least the elder class of the weavers, consists less in the actual scantiness of their means, than in the bitterness of the contrast between past and present times: the income which formerly raised them as high, if not higher in social rank, than any other class of Scotch artisans, is gone from them; but the intelligence and education which then enhanced their prosperity, remain now to embitter their poverty: the case is far less painful of the younger generation, who have for the most part been accustomed to but little more means than they possess, and whose tone of mind and scale of education render the evils of a low physical condition less grievous and galling."--Assistant-Commissioner's Report, Symons, p. 4—7.

"In the neighbourhoods of Nuneaton, Bulkington and Foleshill, the

usual condition of a number of journey-hand families is that of the greatest dirt and misery; sometimes with no bedsteads, but beds of wrappers stuffed with straw, and without any linen to them. Sometimes the bed consists merely of chaff held together with bricks, and covered with a wrapper. Their food in these instances consists chiefly of bread and butter, potatoes, and a little tea, with occasionally a few scraps of bacon. This class is commonly in extreme distress, while the wife is bearing a family of young children, who can as yet render them no assistance; and when want of weaving-work comes upon them, they are utterly helpless. The joint earnings of the single-hand journeyman weaver and his wife, if she could continue uninterruptedly at the work, would only amount at most to the wages of an agricultural labourer whose wife was attending to domestic duties, for the non-performance of which scarcely any amount of earnings can compensate. The condition of the single-hand weaver is therefore much worse. When the children begin to work, the family earnings might rise to those of an agricultural labourer, and set the wife more at liberty for domestic duties, but she has not learned what they are. The weavers working together too at irregular hours, and with this want of domestic comfort, inevitably mismanage the narrow means they possess. Rudeness and misery seem to be the inevitable condition of the mere journey-hand in the single-hand trade."--Assistant Commissioner's Report, Fletcher, vol. ii. p. 7.

To the privations here described, not only those weavers are exposed whose earnings are constantly low, but those likewise whose employment is subject to fluctuation. "The in"ference," says Mr. Austin, "from all my evidence is, that "in the south-western parts of England, the weavers, taken "as a body, are out of work one-third of their time, which "reduces the income of the master-weaver for one loom to "88. instead of 12s. per week, and that of the journeyman to "78. instead of 10s." Mr. Otway gives a nearly similar account of the Dublin woollen-weavers, "who are," he says, "generally kept idle for want of work for one-third of each "year. The average earnings of the woollen-weavers, for the "last three years, amount to from 88. to 10s. per week, ma"king allowances for the time they are kept idle, and the "fines and deductions to which they are subject. The periods “of idleness, which are very frequent, act most injuriously "on the woollen-weavers," etc.

These fluctuations proceed from two sources; partly from the extension of, and improvements in machinery, which supersede hand-labour; and, in part, from the state of markets depending upon extraneous causes. The effects are, in both cases, equally felt by the working classes; and their attempts