their enemies, the manufacturers. In war the
injury of one party is the benefit of the other, and
since the working-men are on a war-footing towards
their employers, they do merely what the great potentates
do when they get into a quarrel. Beyond all
other bourgeois is our friend Dr. Ure, the most furious
enemy of the Unions. He foams with indignation
at the “secret tribunals” of the cotton-spinners,
the most powerful section of the workers, tribunals
which boast their ability to paralyse every disobedient
manufacturer, {222a} “and so bring ruin on the
man who had given them profitable employment for many
a year.” He speaks of a time {222b} “when
the inventive head and the sustaining heart of trade
were held in bondage by the unruly lower members.”
A pity that the English working-men will not let
themselves be pacified so easily with thy fable as
the Roman Plebs, thou modern Menenius Agrippa!
Finally, he relates the following: At one time
the coarse mule-spinners had misused their power beyond
all endurance. High wages, instead of awakening
thankfulness towards the manufacturers and leading
to intellectual improvement (in harmless study of
sciences useful to the bourgeoisie, of course), in
many cases produced pride and supplied funds for supporting
rebellious spirits in strikes, with which a number
of manufacturers were visited one after the other
in a purely arbitrary manner. During an unhappy
disturbance of this sort in Hyde, Dukinfield, and the
surrounding neighbourhood, the manufacturers of the
district, anxious lest they should be driven from
the market by the French, Belgians, and Americans,
addressed themselves to the machine-works of Sharp,
Roberts & Co., and requested Mr. Sharp to turn his
inventive mind to the construction of an automatic
mule in order “to emancipate the trade from galling
slavery and impending ruin.” {223a}
“He produced in the course of a few months a
machine apparently instinct with the thought, feeling,
and tact of the experienced workman—which
even in its infancy displayed a new principle of regulation,
ready in its mature state to fulfil the functions
of a finished spinner. Thus the Iron Man, as
the operatives fitly call it, sprung out of the hands
of our modern Prometheus at the bidding of Minerva—a
creation destined to restore order among the industrious
classes, and to confirm to Great Britain the empire
of art. The news of this Herculean prodigy spread
dismay through the Union, and even long before it left
its cradle, so to speak, it strangled the Hydra of
misrule.” {223b}
Ure proves further that the invention of the machine,
with which four and five colours are printed at once,
was a result of the disturbances among the calico
printers; that the refractoriness of the yarn-dressers
in the power-loom weaving mills gave rise to a new
and perfected machine for warp-dressing, and mentions
several other such cases. A few pages earlier
this same Ure gives himself a great deal of trouble