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The Grand Trunk had even then an idea of encouraging social combination for change of scene, and it was quite a common thing for the operatives of the Milburn Boiler Company to arrange to get themselves carried to the lakeside or "the Falls" at half a dollar a head.
Sometimes manufacturing operations had to be suspended altogether, and during a frost, when the canals were frozen up, the communication was entirely stopped. The consequences were often disastrous, alike to operatives, merchants, and manufacturers. Expostulation with the Canal Companies was of no use. They were overcrowded with business at their own prices, and disposed to be very dictatorial.
Crispin and the guilds down, tariffs, syndicates, societies, statistics, social conditions in shoe towns, nationality of operatives, all these could be concisely set forth to show the dimensions, the centers of interest, the social and commercial relations of the business, etc.
How many old labourers, old operatives, or miners are now left to recall the wretchedness of that toiling and starving childhood before the corn-tax was removed? Few are remaining now, and they speak little and will soon be gone. The horror of it is scattered like the night, and we think no more of it, nor imagine its reality.
Although most of them may have but dimly understood that factory employment required the protection of a permanent organization for the operatives, and looked to the temporary combination provided by the strike for the remedy of their ills, still there was more in the air, and more in the minds of some of the girl leaders than just strikes undertaken for the purpose of abolishing single definite wrongs.
An officer of the Operatives' Union puts the number of sweat-shops in Boston at one hundred and fifty, but this does not include the smaller tenement-house shops that are beginning to develop here very rapidly. I have, myself, visited a number of these shops during the past few weeks. I will describe a few of them very briefly. Here is one in two rooms.
The name Ciompi strictly means the Wool-Carders. One set of operatives in the city, and that the largest, gave its title to the whole body of the labourers. For some months these craftsmen governed the republic, appointing their own Signory and passing laws in their own interest; but, as is usual, the proletariate found itself incapable of sustained government.
In addition to these more conspicuous elements, the crowd contained sober operatives of the skilled sort possessed of sufficient means to bring hither their families, including the baby; there were section-hands and foremen, slashers, mule spinners, beamers, French-Canadians, Irish, Scotch, Welsh and English, Germans, with only an occasional Italian, Lithuanian, or Jew.
"This fund has become absolutely necessary unless we wish to see the people starve in the streets. There are between six and seven thousand operatives and artisans in Medchester to-day who are without work through no fault of their own. It is our duty as citizens to do our best for them. Nearly every one in Medchester has contributed according to their means.
Sad rubbish to you! But seems it such rubbish to the poor man, to whom it promises a paradise on the easy terms of upsetting a world? For, ye see, those "Appeals to Operatives" represent that same world-upsetting as the simplest thing imaginable, a sort of two-and-two-make-four proposition.
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