Suchergebnisse

In the heat of the battle for parliamentary reform William Cobbett preached to the working people of England in his inimitable blustery dictums. "[I]f you labour honestly," he counselled, "you have a right to have, in exchange for your labour, a sufficiency out of the produce of the earth, to maintain yourself and your family as well; and, if you are unable to labour, or if you cannot obtain labour, you have a right to maintenance out of the produce of the land […]". For honest working men this was part of the legacy of constitutional Britain, which bequeathed to them not only sustenance but, "The greatest right […] ofevery man, the right of rights, […] the right of having a share in the making of the laws, to which the good of the whole makes it his duty to submit". Nonetheless, he warned, such rights could not legitimately negate the toiling lot that was the laborer's fate: "Remember that poverty is decreed by the very nature of man […]. It is necessary to the existence of mankind, that a very large proportion of every people should live by manual labour […]".

The early decades of the nineteenth century are widely recognized as formative years for the English working class. During the first two decades a wide variety of trade groups struggled at both the regional and national levels to protect artisanal rights and unmuzzle the legally muted voice of labor (Prothero 1979; Randall 1991; Rule 1986; E. P. Thompson 1966). Success was at best uneven. Revocation of the Statute of Apprentices in 1813–14 was an alarming defeat for artisans who sought to protect their trade privileges from growing capitalist incursions. The successful repeal of the Combination Laws that had barred trade unions in 1824 encouraged a clamoring among many of London's trades to resuscitate wage rates, precipitating strikes in many industries. Also emerging from the lean years was a new understanding of the relations between capital and labor. "The interests of the masters and men," London's Trades' Newspaper pronounced, "are as much opposed to each other as light is to darkness" (Hollis 1973: 45).