As We Are and As We May Be - Walter Besant (most recommended books txt) 📗

Saxon times an association for the protection of his craft--a rough-and-ready association at first, a religious guild or fraternity, something which should persuade men to come together as friends, not rivals, what we should now call a benefit society, gradually developing into an association of officers, a constitution, and rules; growing by slow degrees into a powerful and wealthy body, having its period of birth, development, vigour, and decay. In illustration of such an association, I will sketch out for you the history of a certain London Company--what was called a Craft Company; a society of working-men who were engaged upon the same craft; who all made the same thing: as the Company of Bowyers who made bows, or of Fletchers who made arrows. The society began first of all with a Guild of the Craft, such as I have just mentioned; that is to say, all those who belonged to the Craft--according to the custom of the time, they all lived in the same quarter and were well known to each other--were persuaded or compelled to belong to the Guild. Here religion stepped in, for every Guild had its own patron saint, and if a craftsman stood aloof, he lost the protection and incurred the displeasure of that saint, so that, apart from considerations of the common weal, terror of how the offended saint might punish the blackleg forced men to join. Thus, St. George protected the armourers; St. Mary and St. Thomas the Martyr, the bowyers; St. Catharine the Virgin, the haberdashers; St. Martin, the sadlers; the Virgin Mary, the cloth-workers, and so on. On the saint's day they marched in procession to the parish church and heard Mass; every year each man paid his fees of membership; the Guild looked after the sick and maintained the aged of the Craft. The next step, which was not taken until after many years, and was not at first contemplated, was to obtain for the Guild--_i.e._, for the Craft--a Royal Charter. This favour of the Sovereign conferred certain powers of regulating their trade; and, this once obtained, we hear no more of the Guild--it became absorbed into the Company. The religious observances remained, but they were no longer put forward as the chief 'articles' of association. The powers granted by Royal Charter were very strong. The Company was empowered to prohibit anyone from working at that trade within the jurisdiction of the City who was not a member of the Company; it could prevent markets from being held within a certain distance of the City; it could oblige all the youth of the City to be apprenticed to some Company; it could regulate wages and hours of work; it could examine the work before it could be sold; and it could limit the number of the workmen. The Company, in fact, ruled its own trade with an authority from which there was no appeal. On the other hand, the Company exercised a paternal care over its members. When they were sick, the Company provided for them; when they became old, the Company maintained them; if any became dishonest, the Company turned them out of the City. You, who think yourselves strong with your Trades Unions (things as yet undeveloped and with all their history before them), have never yet succeeded in getting a tenth part of the power and authority over your own men that was excercised by a City Company in the time of Richard II. over its Livery.

Then, in order to maintain the dignity of the Craft, a livery was chosen, the colours of which were worn by every member. On their saint's day, as in the old days of the Guild, the Company marched in great magnificence, with music and flags and new liveries, with their wardens, officers, schoolboys, almsmen, and priests, to church. After church they banqueted together in the Company's Hall, a splendid building, where a great feast was served, and where the day was honoured by the presence of guests--great nobles, city worthies, even the Lord Mayor, perhaps, or some of the Aldermen, or the Bishop, or one of the Abbots of the City Religious Houses. Every man was bidden to bring his wife to the feast of the Company's grand day--if not his wife, then his sweetheart, for all were to feast together. During dinner the musicians in their gallery made sweet music. After dinner, actors and tumblers came in, and they had pageants and shows, and marvellous feats of skill and legerdemain.

Ask yourselves, at this point, whether it is possible to conceive of an institution more purely democratic than such a company as originally designed. All the craftsmen of every craft combining together, not one allowed to stand out, electing their own officers, obeying rules for the general good, building halls, holding banquets, and creating a spirit of pride in their craft. What more could be desired? Why do we not imitate this excellent example?

Yet, when we look at the City Companies, what do we find? The old Craft Companies, it is true, still exist; they have an income of many thousands a year, and a livery, or list of members, in number varying from twenty to four hundred, and not one single craftsman left among them. What has become, then, or the Association? Well, that remains, the shadow remains, but the substance has long since gone. Even the craft itself, in many cases, has disappeared. There are no longer in existence, for instance, Armourers, Bowyers, Fletchers, or Poulterers.

What has happened, then? Why did this essentially democratic Company--in which all were subject to rules for the general good, and none should undersell his brother, and the rate of wages and the hours of labour were regulated--so completely fail?

For many reasons, some of which concern ourselves: it failed, because the members themselves forgot the original reason of their combination, and neglected to look after their own interests; it failed, because the members were too ignorant to remember, or to know, that the Company was founded for the interests of the Craft itself, and not for those of the masters alone or the men alone. Now every Association must needs, of course, have wardens or masters; it must needs elect to those posts of dignity and responsibility such men as could understand law and maintain their privileges if necessary before the dread Sovereign, his Highness the King. The men they necessarily elected were therefore those who had received some education, master-workmen--their own employers--not their fellows. It speedily came about, therefore, that the masters, not the men, ruled the hours of work, the wages of work, the quantity and quality of work: the masters, not the craftsmen, admitted members and limited their number. Do you now understand? The officers ruled the Company of the Craftsmen for the benefit of the masters and not the men. Nay, they did more. Since in some trades the men showed a disposition, on dimly perceiving the reality, to form a union within a union, the masters were strong enough to put down all combinations for the raising of wages as illegal; to attempt such combinations was ruled to be conspiracy. And conspiracy all unions of working men have remained down to the present day, as the founders of the first Trades Unions in this country discovered to their cost. So the men were gagged; they were silenced; they were enslaved by the very institution that they had founded for the insurance of their own freedom. The thing was inevitable because they were ignorant, and because, if you put into any man's hands the power of robbing his neighbour with impunity, that man will inevitably sooner or later rob his neighbour. I fear that we must acknowledge the sorrowful fact that not a single man in the whole world, whatever his position, can be trusted with irresponsible and absolute power--with the power of robbery coupled with the certainty of immunity.

Well, in this way came about the first enslavement of the working man. It lasted for three hundred years. Then followed a time of comparative freedom, when, the wealth and population of the city increasing, the craftsmen found themselves pushed out beyond the walls, and taking up their quarters beyond the power of the Companies. But it was a freedom without knowledge, without order, without forethought. It was the freedom of the savage who lives only for himself. For they were now unable to combine. In the long course of centuries they had lost the very idea of combination; they had forgotten that in an age we call rude and rough they possessed the power and perceived the importance of combination. The great-grandchildren of the men who had formed this union of the trade had entirely forgotten the meaning, the reason, the possibility, of the old combination. In this way, then, the Companies gradually lost their craftsmen, but retained their property.

One very remarkable result may be noticed. Formerly, the Lord Mayor of London was elected by the whole of the commonalty. All the citizens assembled at Paul's Cross, and there, sometimes with tumult and sometimes with fighting, they elected their mayor for the next year. But since every man in the City was compelled to belong to his own Company, to speak of the commonalty meant to speak of the Companies. Every man who voted for the election of Lord Mayor was therefore bound to be a liveryman--_i.e_., a member of a Company. This restriction is still in force; that is to say, the City of London, the richest and the greatest city in the world, now allows eight thousand liverymen, or members of the Companies, to elect their chief magistrate.

Why do I tell over again this old threadbare tale? Perhaps, however, it is not old or threadbare to you: perhaps there are some here who learn for the first time that association, trade union, combination, is a thousand years old in this ancient city. I have told it chiefly, however, because the history should be a warning to you of London; because it shows that association itself may be made the very weapon with which to destroy its own objects; in other words, because you must find in this history an illustration or the great truth that the forms of liberty require the most unceasing vigilance to prevent them from becoming the means of destroying liberty. The Companies failed because they could be, and were, used to destroy the freedom of the very men for whose benefit they were founded. At present, as you know, some of them are very poor indeed: those which are rich are probably doing far more good with their wealth in promoting all kinds of useful work than ever they did in all their past history.

There followed, I said, a long period in which association among working men was absolutely unknown. The history of this period, from a craftsman's point of view, has never been written. It is, indeed, a most terrible chapter in the history of industry.

Imagine, if you can, crowded districts in which there were no schools, or but one school for a very few, no churches, no newspapers or books, a place in which no one could read; a place in which every man, woman and child regarded the Government of the country, in which they had not the least share, as their natural enemy and oppressor. Among them lurked the housebreaker, the highway robber, and the pickpocket. Along the riverside, where many thousands of working men lived--at St. Katherine's, Wapping, Shadwell, and Ratcliff--all the people together, high and low, were in league with the men who loaded and unloaded the ships in the river and robbed them all day long. What could be expected of people left thus absolutely to themselves, without any power of action, without the least thought that amendment was possible or desirable? Can we wonder if the