THE LANCASHIRE RIOTS.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5396, 13 July 1878, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE LANCASHIRE RIOTS.

(From the Loudon Spectator, May 18.)

The fierce rowdy spirit which for the past six mouths has been encouraged, more especially in London, by the Government and the leaders of the “jingo party,” is producing in the North its natural result. An appeal to the passions of the mob, and especially an appeal which seems to take the form of au approval of physical violence, always ends in one way,— the mob take the first opportunity of repeating the lesson they have rehearsed, in,the form of an attack upon their “natural enemies,” the employers or the well-to-do. The accounts from Lancashire, and more especially from Blackburn, make us doubt in what decade we are living. It is thirty years since such an outburst of class'batred has been roused by a trade quarrel. It was understood, indeed, that employers and employed had alike become too enlightened to resort to violence, and the-while on the one hand combination laws were abolished and military force superseded by polios, on the other terrorism was extinct, except in a form of picketing, hardly to be distinguished from moral suasion. Tho events of tho week, however, recall the times which preceded free trade. In no less than three, great towns a dispute, which was by no means ah insoluble one, has suddenly become so envenomed that houses have been sacked, mills burned down, and we greatly fear, individual masters threatened with assassination. "It .has become necessary to garrison towns like Blackburn, Burnley, and Preston, purely industrial . centre', and although the soldiers have not yet been ordered to fire, a bloody catastrophe seemed on Wednesday almost inevitable, aod one ■ house, Mr. Howard’s, at Oswaldtwhistle, has been defended by firearms. The ' rioting was most serious at Blackburn, where Mr, Kaynsford Jackson, the President of the Masters’s Association, resides, and where tho stoppage of tho mills has* Wised very acute distress, A meeting at Manchester to consider terms of compromise entirely failed, tho masters rejecting ail offers which involved a diminution in the out-turn, and tho news greatly excited the working population, who, rightly or wrongly, attributed tho refusal in part to Mr. Jackson’s influence. Tho leaders, it ,ap-' pears to be admitted on all hands, recommended moderation; but there is a spirit b£ violence in the air all through England, and the men accepted' violent counsels,, offered, It is asserted, by outsiders. Great mobs,'reinforced of course by roughs and criminals, attacked the mills, broke the windows of at least seven, and then started late at night to attack Mr. Jackson’s house; Ho had fortunately heard of the attack intended,through Mrs. Jackson, who had been abroad and was stoned in her carriage—an act unprecedented in England—and had just time, to seek refuge with his wife and children in a neighbor's house. Tho mob gutted his own residence,: burnt a haystack on the premises, and finally burned down the house, with ail the furniture it con-, tained. , Even the plate, according. to the accounts published in Manchester, was left untouched by the rioters, to perish iu tho flames. The rioters next dragged out the carriage, nud burnt it some distance off in the public road. Tho municipality were by this time in movement, soldiers had arrived from Preston, and

the mob dispersed; but on the following, day it reassembled, smashed the Town Hall windows, stoned th.? soldiers, and; threatened to burn down the Mayor's .house, not because he was au employer, but because he was doing his duty. Banda of men visited the suburbs, demanding money or food, and the demands wero in all instances reported acceded to. On Thursday the town was more, quiet, being in possession of some 4000 infantry and cavalry; bub the mobs, though cowed, were furious, and nothing but the presence of the military prevented a renewal of the work of destruction. At Burnley the scenes enacted: were almost worse, the police being kicked into helplessness—probably b3 T the roughs whom it is their duty to control—-arid a warehouse belonging to Mr. Kay, a manufacturer who works at’ the reduction of 10 per cent., was burned to' the ground. That is, Mr, Kay was harried for •working on terms which his workmen approved enough to accept. At Accrington and Preston the rioting was less serious, but in tho latter town an outbreak was expected every moment, and it is stated, though not officially, that the magistrates have applied to the Home Office for artillery. All this is most deplorable, not only on account of tho injury done to property, but on account of the new and savage bitterness it will engender between classes. The employers, and indeed all owners of property, are furious,', aud this time with som? reason. We; repeat, as we have said all along, that the men’s arguments are the ,best ; that the cause of the distress is the reduction of demand caused by the famines in India and China, by protected competition in America, by the renewed danger of war in .Eastern Europe, and by the losses which the well-to-do have sus-. tained at home ; and this cause can be met most directly by a reduction of production. Tho offer of the men to endure a reduction of of 10 per cent., if accompanied by short time, aseras to us a wise one, which should have been accepted ; bub employers, nevertheless, must decide for themselves whether or no they will go on. To concede the right of strike to the men aud refuse it to the masters is unjust ; nor if the Unions may combine to stop work, can the employers bo refused the same privilege. The men wonld think it monstrous if they were ordered to , work under menace of their houses being burnt down, yet this was the order which the mob wished to compel Mr. Jackson to obey. The Government aud tho magistrates are right, on grounds of policy, as well as humanity, in refraining from using force to the last moment, but if the riots con-‘ .txnue force must be employed, whatever, the consequences. Capital punishment is not the fitting penalty for bitterness in insisting on a lower price foiPlabor, nor can arson" be permitted because the unwise obstinacy of the masters, supposing them to be obstinate aud unwise, throws their operatives- out: of employ. The necessity of civilisation is that order should be maintained, even at the cost of life, and any weakness in such a crisis will inflict deep pecuniary injury on the operatives themselves. Every unpunished riot drives capital from a district,, and exasperates that want of confidence between employers and employed which more than any other cause tends to throw obstacles in the way of prosperous industry. The masters learn, as ou the Continent, to regard their mea 'as dangerous, and therefore to press every right against them; and the men learn to see in every reduction, however necessary, an act at once of plunder . and of depotistn. Peaceable agreement or contest is alike impossible without order, and though we utterly deprecate violence. A’? sure to deepen a bitterness already lamentable, if there cannot . be order without artillery, artillery there must be.. We do not believe in the existence of a mob in England which cannot be dispersed by cavalry ; blit tbe kind of force to be employed is a question of policy rather than of principle.: : ! ; - ‘ : . Bub we would ask the, sensible Tories among us to watch the scenes now occurring in Lancashire, and ask themselves whether they themselves are wholly free from fault. They have for, months past condoned proceedings which, in their , essence, are precisoly the same as those of.the Blackburn workmen,—attempts to suuhstitute terror for discussion. The attacks ,on Mr. Gladstone were precisely the same in principle as the on Mij. Jackson, aud proceeded from the same irrational, violent hatred of opponents, with this Aclili-. tionaL aggravation—that the mobs -in Mr, Gladstone's case were not blinded by-tem-porary household misery. Yet well-to-do Tories, though they “regretted” those displays iu words, rather approved them in their hearts; as indications of the-manly hatred of Englishmen for anybody who opposed'war. With the honorable exception of the Standard —-which has always some - glimmering of an idea of' what Conservative piaciples are, find that the supremacy of law is one of them—no Tory paper condemned those outrages heartily; and as for Tory members, they, when Mr. Gladstone voted for public debate on Lord Leitrim, instead of a holc-and-cornec attack upon his character, contented : themselves with an imitation of the mob. The example of men in office filters rapidly down, aud tbe violent language to which they have recently given tacib v sanction is takeA by the populace as an encouragement to violent deeds. Those deeds, it is'true, disgust aud 'alarm the Tories as much as their opponents, for they are directed against property, and the commercial independence of the rich, but they set the first example of giving way to that spirit of violence which is invariably in the long run directed against the prosperous., The true “residiura,” the multitude for which our language'has fortunately, no .name, does not permanently care for this or that party, bub for the abasement of all higher than itself; andi'the moment authority has ended, and a mob become supreme—often a respectable, or well-meaning mob, iu itself—this “ residium ” proceeds to fire and pillage; The Blackburn roughs, if they thought at all, thought it a fine, thing to. show that they, could terrorise an opponent like Mri Jackson, could' threaten his life, and destroy his. property and so did the roughs who attacked Mr. ‘Gladstone’s house in March.' "The rowdy spirit, the spirit which does not want either , to reason or to argue, or even to „ fight, but only to destroy, and so realise its own power to itself, was at the bottom of both incidents; and there is no spirit which in a country like ours of extreme social disparities, so the property-holders, whom Toryism so specially desires to protect.. The distress at Blackburn has not been caused by her Majesty’s Government, except so'far as their extravagance ‘and unrestfulness, and willingness to plunge Europe into war, have affected trade, butjirx the swiftness with which that distress produced disorder, in the foolishness which thinks that,the way to restore a manufacture is to burn down mills, wo see the unmistakable effect of the Tory spirit, when, as At present, allied with the democratic belief,in force./ The Tories: are sayeverywhere that the multitude .is .for them, ancl must rule. Will they surrender Blackburn to the multitude for three days ?