Слике страница
PDF
ePub

promptitude. They omitted at Blackburn to stay the mischief in the nascent stage in which it is most easily checked. At another town the Mayor is said to have refused to read the Riot Act, although the conduct of the rioters clearly called for it. Two of the ringleaders of a violent mob at Darwen, which went about armed with bludgeons, pokers, hatchets, and other deadly weapons, and attacked the police, were caught, each man poker in hand, and dismissed, merely bound over to keep the peace, although several policemen had been badly injured. On the other hand, every pacific and persuasive influence was exhausted. This, of course, in principle, was right, but when it comes to an armed mob terrorizing the streets, frappez fort et frappez vite is the only practical rule of proceeding. The leaders of the mob in one of these parleys actually demanded that the police should be kept in their quarters, while they themselves were swaggering as it listed them through the town. And this proposal, we gather from published statements, was actually debated by the magistrates! The fact was, that after forty years of almost or wholly unbroken tranquillity, civil authority was taken at a disadvantage, and its representatives were unprepared. The soldiers charged, patrolled, and scoured the streets in several instances, but we have met with no recorded case of the actual use of their weapons. The police force seems to have behaved admirably. They were armed, at least in some cases, with cutlasses; but, though often suffering severely, used only their truncheons. Intrepid discharge of duty characterized their leaders. The Chief Constable of Lancashire, the Hon. Captain Legge, and his deputy, Captain Moorsom, were both badly hurt, one in the hand, the other near the eye. Several of the Inspectors or other chief officers of the police also figured amongst the casualties.

It had been hoped by all who valued the Lancashire operatives' character, that these outrages were not their work. That there ever floats about large centres of industry a considerable scum of idleness is undoubted. And many recruits to the mob may have been gathered from such sources. But when we look at the lists of prisoners arraigned for the various acts of violence, the illusion, we fear, is dissipated. That the police should in most cases have seized the wrong culprit, broken the wrong head, or sworn to the wrong individual, that the local papers, whose reporting staff and contributors live mostly on the spot, should have misdescribed the émeute as being that of weavers, spinners, and other mill hands, when it was really that of external roughs and loafers, is incon

ceivable. Thus we read, Blackburn Standard, May 11, ‘A crowd of operatives assembled and the stoning became more serious, until the police were obliged to charge.' Again we learn, ibid. May 25, that a mill manager named Ingham was assaulted by a violent party, all those identified being weavers or spinners. The same issue contains a report of a publican assaulted, and drink extorted by violence, the assailants identified being weavers or spinners. The Liverpool Courier, of May 25, summarizing from other local papers, records a charge against three men, two being weavers, for sharing in the assault on Col. Jackson's house near Blackburn, and another against eight men, of whom four were mill-hands, for going armed with sticks and stoning the police at Preston.

There is, at the same time, no reason to doubt that a large number of the more steady and respectable operatives bore no hand in the lawless acts and were heartily ashamed of their riotous brethren. But, as was asked by a correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, 'why did' such 'not freely enrol themselves as special constables, and thus help to quell the incipient reign of terror?' It is true that the weavers' committee put forth a notice,—' Every factory-worker is strongly advised not to hoot, shout, or otherwise annoy or molest any employer or employers, or to do any damage to their property, or even to mix up in any crowd whatsoever,' threatening that any so acting should receive no support; and afterwards put forth a vehement denunciation of the violence used and repudiation of all sympathy with it. None knew better than the weavers' secretaries that the men had better have burnt and wrecked their own cottages and furniture, as regards the interests of the strike-fund, than their employers' mills and residences. We, therefore, quite believe the earnestness of these manifestoes, but the observation is forced on us, that there would have been little call for such utterances, had not mill-hands been known to be sharing in the proceedings so denounced. Again, a Manchester paper tells us, 'The extremely bitter spirit engendered by the strike is not the least deplorable feature of it,' and, after commenting on the course taken by the employers, adds, 'these things would hardly have provoked riot, incendiarism, and assaults on the employers and their families, if the relations between masters and workpeople had previously been fairly satisfactory.' This 'bad feeling,' the writer believes, 'urged the badly disposed and the reckless among the operatives into crime, while it kept the more respectable from preventing disturbance until they were

startled by the excesses of the mobs,' and adds, 'that the exasperation of the most intelligent operatives was intense.'

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

Colonel Jackson, who from his copious experience and conspicuous sufferings, is entitled to express an opinion, while defending the general good character of the Blackburn operative,' 'reconciles' it 'with the bitter and revengeful hatred shown' against himself, through the incessant stimulus to ill-feeling applied by the delegates at the various public meetings, at which ejaculations, 'We'll shoot him! We'll hang him!' have followed the more exciting paragraphs of their speeches without reproof.' But then, who are the delegates? 'Operatives of the operatives' is the only answer. They are the concentrated essence of their class; i.e., if Colonel Jackson is right, the concentrated essence of its bitter feeling. We ought to add that, inconsistent as it may seem, the strike funds of the operatives have been largely subsidized by the employers themselves. Blinded by mob-passion the former forgot even mercenary gratitude, and rifled the very mills and homesteads from which they were drawing relief.

The dominant question for all classes, during this critical period of the cotton industry, was, how could the whole interest be kept from going to pieces? And this could only be solved practically by the employers taking upon themselves the responsibility of maintaining it. For the moment they looked to the social bond alone, and let political economy go. If they could not maintain the industrial army tolerably unbroken, the question whether employers or operatives prevailed in the end would be a purely speculative one. Even if they won, their victory would be useless, unless they kept the workpeople from being scattered meanwhile. In order to maintain the connexion, they used that most sacred of retaining fees, help in the day of need. In the first place they were social beings with human feelings; they were financial strategists afterwards; and their object was to bind Lancashire together, and prove to the rest of England, as in the days of the Cotton Famine, that she had one heart.

We fear very much that there are signs, notwithstanding, that the cotton industry can hardly ever again be what it was. Indeed, a much wider field than cotton seems open to the same prognostic. The spirit of trade-unionism threatens ruin to all the production of the country. The British workman has learned to grudge his labour, and as he is sowing so he will surely reap. He insists on short time; so did the hare, and despised the 'competitive power' of the tortoise.

SHORT NOTICES.

A Visit to the Roman Catacombs. By the Rev. J. SPENCER North-
COTE, D.D., Canon of Birmingham. (London: Burns and
Oates, 1877.)
The Catacombs of Rome, Historical and Descriptive, with a Chapter on
the Symbolism of Early Christian Art. By the Author of The
Buried Cities of Campania, &c. (London, Edinburgh, and
New York: T. Nelson and Sons.)

THESE two manuals are both intended for the same purpose-to serve as a guide to the Roman Catacombs, and each is good in its way the one is by a convert to Romanism, and is intended chiefly for the use of Roman Catholics, and the author has the advantage of being thoroughly well acquainted with his subject, only allowance must be made for the rose-coloured spectacles through which he views every object, and an evident and not unnatural wish to lead other people to follow his example. The other is in some respects the reverse; the author is a Protestant, and his book is very Protestant, and, unfortunately, he is not well acquainted with his subject. He appears to have compiled his book from other good authorities, without having ever been to Rome himself, if we may judge by his extraordinary and evidently unconscious blunders about localities.

We propose to give a concise account of each of these manuals, with a few extracts.

To begin with the Roman Catholic one, as on the whole the best, we are obliged to demur at the first page. Roma Sotterranea is a misleading title: it leads many an American or Englishman, who takes it in his head to see the celebrated Roman Catacombs, to expect to find them really under the city of Rome, and he is much surprised to find that they are generally two miles off, and some of them much more. The oft-quoted passage from S. Jerome has probably led to too many pilgrimages to the Catacombs, and seems to have been quoted for this object; these pilgrimages are not often very religious or reverential, and perhaps the modern Romans are not far wrong in saying that their main object is to bring money to the priests.

The woodcuts in this volume are very good and attractive, and convey the idea of the Catacombs extremely well, although they are not quite accurate. Dr. Northcote's attempt on p. 7 to show that the Catacombs have no connexion with the old sandpits, is going too far, from one extreme to the other; they are not sandpits, but they are almost all connected with an old sandpit road. When he says, to prove his point, that they happen not to be excavated either in sand or in stone, but precisely in a rock of intermediate consistency, too solid to be used as sand, too soft and friable to be used as

building stone,' he generalises too much from the one example that has been so admirably illustrated by the two brothers De Rossi ; it is not by any means true of all; the material necessarily depends on the nature of the soil in which the fossores had to make the graves; several of them are in clay, others in alluvial soil; besides tufa is a building stone, though soft, and not calculated to bear much weight. All the walls of Rome of the time of the Kings are built of tufa, although tufa sometimes may vary in quality, from the solid stone to mere sand. Tufa was originally volcanic dust, such as overwhelmed Pompeii, and Pozzolana sand is still tufa; it is commonly hardened by time and moisture, and some other circumstances, and varies greatly in colour also, but it is tufa still.

That 'the Roman Catacombs were made solely for the sake of burying the dead,' is absolutely true; but when Dr. Northcote goes to say, 'But by whom? and to bury what dead? we answer, and again without hesitation,-by Christians, and only to bury Christians,' he begs a question which is really a very doubtful one. Such is the

modern Roman theory, supported by the high authority of De Rossi (if not first proposed by him); the old authorities do not say so, and the large number of Pagan inscriptions found in the Catacombs does not agree with this theory; and when he says that all these pagan inscriptions were taken down as old marble only, he again begs the question. A large proportion of them have no appearance of having been taken there for that purpose, but as an actual inscription to be put on the grave of the person buried there, often with the mortar adhering to

it.

The Christian inscriptions have nearly all been carried away to be put in museums and churches, but the pagan ones were left where they are found. The assertion (p. 49) that, ‘as, in the beginning of the fifth century, they had ceased to be used as places of burial, so in the first half of the ninth, they ceased to be frequented for purposes of devotion,' is not borne out by the inscriptions. Though in the later period they are not common, they do not cease altogether; nor with the history of Anastasius, who records many restorations of them by the Popes in the eighth and ninth centuries. Dr. Northcote mentions, at page 50, the legend, as if it was gospel truth, that the bodies of SS. Peter and Paul had a temporary resting-place in the cemetery (or catacomb) of S. Sebastian ad Catacumbas; but he omits to mention that the Circus of Maxentius was also made ad Catacumbas, and that S. Sebastian's was long called the Catacomb, being probably the entrance to several, and this is the name of the valley under the hill, on which stands the tomb of Cæcilia Metella.

In inscriptions on tombstones, and in the graffiti, or scratchings on the plaster of the walls of the third century in Rome, the mixture of Greek and Latin words is very common; as may be seen in the guard chambers of the Palaces of the Cæsars on the Palatine, and in any collection of tombstones. The Greek kata, 'under,' and the Latin, cumba,' the hill,' is therefore very likely to have been the name given to this valley, and to the cemeteries in this valley, and those the earliest, Prætextatus and S. Urban's, as well as S. Sebastian's; that name was applied to them, and soon became the general name for

« ПретходнаНастави »