Capital Volume I

464 

 

Chapter 25 

 

the factory, from appliances for ventilation and for safety in mines, &c. It is the same here with 

the housing of the miners. Dr. Simon, medical officer of the Privy Council, in his official Report 

says: 

“In apology for the wretched household accommodation ... it is alleged that 

miners are commonly worked on lease; that the duration of the lessee’s interest 

(which in collieries is commonly for 21 years), is not so long that he should deem 

it worth his while to create good accommodation for his labourers, and for the 

tradespeople and others whom the work attracts; that even if he were disposed to 

act liberally in the matter, this disposition would commonly be defeated by his 

landlord’s tendency to fix on him, as ground-rent, an exorbitant additional charge 

for the privilege of having on the surface of the ground the decent and 

comfortable village which the labourers of the subterranean property ought to 

inhabit, and that prohibitory price (if not actual prohibition) equally excludes 

others who might desire to build. It would be foreign to the purpose of this report 

to enter upon any discussion of the merits of the above apology. Nor here is it 

even needful to consider where it would be that, if decent accommodation were 

provided, the cost ... would eventually fall – whether on landlord, or lessee, or 

labourer, or public. But in presence of such shameful facts as are vouched for in 

the annexed reports [those of Dr. Hunter, Dr. Stevens, &c.] a remedy may well be 

claimed.... Claims of landlordship are being so used as to do great public wrong. 

The landlord in his capacity of mine-owner invites an industrial colony to labour 

on his estate, and then in his capacity of surface-owner makes it impossible that 

the labourers whom he collects, should find proper lodging where they must live. 

The lessee [the capitalist exploiter] meanwhile has no pecuniary motive for 

resisting that division of the bargain; well knowing that if its latter conditions be 

exorbitant, the consequences fall, not on him, that his labourers on whom they fall 

have not education enough to know the value of their sanitary rights, that neither 

obscenest lodging nor foulest drinking water will be appreciable inducements 

towards a ‘strike.’”

73 

D. Effect of Crises on the Best Paid Part of the working 

class 

Before I turn to the regular agricultural labourers, I may be allowed to show, by one 

example, how industrial revulsions affect even the best-paid, the aristocracy, of the 

working class. It will be remembered that the year 1857 brought one of the great crises 

with which the industrial cycle periodically ends. The next termination of the cycle was 

due in 1866. Already discounted in the regular factory districts by the cotton famine, 

which threw much capital from its wonted sphere into the great centres of the money-

market, the crisis assumed, at this time, an especially financial character. Its outbreak in 

1866 was signalised by the failure of a gigantic London Bank, immediately followed by 

the collapse of countless swindling companies. One of the great London branches of 

industry involved in the catastrophe was iron shipbuilding. The magnates of this trade 

had not only over-produced beyond all measure during the overtrading time, but they 

had, besides, engaged in enormous contracts on the speculation that credit would be 

forthcoming to an equivalent extent. Now, a terrible reaction set in, that even at this hour 

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465 

 

Chapter 25 

 

(the end of March, 1867) continues in this and other London industries.

74

 To show the 

condition of the labourers, I quote the following from the circumstantial report of a 

correspondent of the Morning Star, who, at the end of 1866, and beginning of 1867, 

visited the chief centres of distress: 

“In the East End districts of Poplar, Millwall, Greenwich, Deptford, Limehouse 

and Canning Town, at least 15,000 workmen and their families were in a state of 

utter destitution, and 3,000 skilled mechanics were breaking stones in the 

workhouse yard (after distress of over half a year’s duration).... I had great 

difficulty in reaching the workhouse door, for a hungry crowd besieged it.... They 

were waiting for their tickets, but the time had not yet arrived for the distribution. 

The yard was a great square place with an open shed running all round it, and 

several large heaps of snow covered the paving-stones in the middle. In the 

middle, also, were little wicker-fenced spaces, like sheep pens, where in finer 

weather the men worked; but on the day of my visit the pens were so snowed up 

that nobody could sit in them. Men were busy, however, in the open shed breaking 

paving-stones into macadam. Each man had a big paving-stone for a seat, and he 

chipped away at the rime-covered granite with a big hammer until he had broken 

up, and think! five bushels of it, and then he had done his day’s work, and got his 

day’s pay – threepence and an allowance of food. In another part of the yard was a 

rickety little wooden house, and when we opened the door of it, we found it filled 

with men who were huddled together shoulder to shoulder for the warmth of one 

another’s bodies and breath. They were picking oakum and disputing the while as 

to which could work the longest on a given quantity of food – for endurance was 

the point of honour. Seven thousand ... in this one workhouse ... were recipients of 

relief ... many hundreds of them ... it appeared, were, six or eight months ago, 

earning the highest wages paid to artisans.... Their number would be more than 

doubled by the count of those who, having exhausted all their savings, still refuse 

to apply to the parish, because they have a little left to pawn. Leaving the 

workhouse, I took a walk through the streets, mostly of little one-storey houses, 

that abound in the neighbourhood of Poplar. My guide was a member of the 

Committee of the Unemployed.... My first call was on an ironworker who had 

been seven and twenty weeks out of employment. I found the man with his family 

sitting in a little back room. The room was not bare of furniture, and there was a 

fire in it. This was necessary to keep the naked feet of the young children from 

getting frost bitten, for it was a bitterly cold day. On a tray in front of the fire lay a 

quantity of oakum, which the wife and children were picking in return for their 

allowance from the parish. The man worked in the stone yard of the workhouse 

for a certain ration of food, and threepence per day. He had now come home to 

dinner quite hungry, as he told us with a melancholy smile, and his dinner 

consisted of a couple of slices of bread and dripping, and a cup of milkless tea.... 

The next door at which we knocked was opened by a middle-aged woman, who, 

without saying a word, led us into a little back parlour, in which sat all her family, 

silent and fixedly staring at a rapidly dying fire. Such desolation, such 

hopelessness was about these people and their little room, as I should not care to 

witness again. ‘Nothing have they done, sir,’ said the woman, pointing to her 

boys, ‘for six and twenty weeks; and all our money gone – all the twenty pounds 

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