United States or Azerbaijan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Salt, or rather Sir Titus Salt, has effected in the physical and moral condition of his workpeople. The plan of the works shows that Saltaire has been provided with a church, a Wesleyan chapel, and a Literary and Philosophical Institution. Large schools have been provided for boys, girls, and infants, with abundance of play-ground.
New Lanark failed as a commercial community through the visionary character of its founder; the Godin works at Guise have passed into the co-operative phase within the past five years, but Saltaire and Mulhausen still retain their proprietary business features. The class of ventures of which these instances are but the more conspicuous examples has peculiar characteristics.
I find a man, who might, if he pleased, live idly in the lap of luxury, working like a horse in the management of this place, bearing calmly not only toil and trouble, but perverseness and ingratitude. Surely, aesthetic culture would be a doubtful blessing if it made us think or speak unsympathetically and rudely of Saltaire. Four hundred thousand people at Manchester are without pure water.
Everything we use, nay, our veriest toy represents lives spent for us in delving beneath the dark and perilous mine, in battling with the wintry sea, in panting before the glowing forge, in counting the weary hours over the monotonous and unresting loom, lives of little value, one could think, if there were no hereafter. Let us at least be kind. I go to Saltaire.
But the European examples are older, such as Robert Owen's experiment at New Lanark in Scotland, Saltaire in Yorkshire, Dollfuss' Mulhausen Quarter in Alsace, and M. Godin's community in the French village of Guise, which are among the more familiar instances of investments originally made on business principles, with a view to the improved conditions of workmen.
A man in a dirty house, says Mr. Rhind, the medical attendant at Saltaire, is like a beggar in miserable clothing. He soon ceases to have self-respect, and when that is gone there is but little hope. Great attention is paid in Saltaire to education, even of the higher sort. There are day schools, night schools, mutual improvement classes, lectures, and discussions.
With every convenience and necessity, as well as every proper pleasure provided for them, with comfortable homes, and every inducement to stay at home, with fishing clubs, boating clubs, and cricket clubs, with schoolrooms, literary institutions, lecture-hall, museum, and class-rooms, established in their midst; and to crown all, with a beautiful temple for the worship of God, there is no wonder that Saltaire has obtained a name, and that Sir Titus Salt has established a reputation among his fellow-men.
In great works where an army of workmen is employed at Saltaire or in the Platt works at Oldham there must be many grades of promotion and many subordinate places of trust and emolument to which the workmen may rise by industry and probity without capital of his own. The general effect of the labour movement has been as I have said the industrial emancipation of the workmen.
Of course, it is far better than the free trade in drink, towards which Liverpool twenty years back took a long stride, with results most wretched and justly repented of. How deadly is now the propensity of the country, will sufficiently appear from an experience of the late Sir Titus Salt in his little kingdom of Saltaire.
Well, and as to the smoke Act itself: I don't know what heed you pay to it in Birmingham, but I have seen myself what heed is paid to it in other places; Bradford for instance: though close by them at Saltaire they have an example which I should have thought might have shamed them; for the huge chimney there which serves the acres of weaving and spinning sheds of Sir Titus Salt and his brothers is as guiltless of smoke as an ordinary kitchen chimney.
Word Of The Day