stage of the human morale. A man (at Sheffield, or in Borneo, or elsewhere) may suffer thrilling and intolerable anguish at seeing his infant burnt to death, or his wife crushed on a railway, and yet have no strong feeling at a comrade being struck blind, or a stranger beaten to death in a strike. He has no knowledge or sensation of the sacredness of human life; and it is enough for him if he can say “sarved ’em right,” or that he had orders to do it,—or that he did not mean to hurt this one, but somebody else. The whole case is one of barbarism through lack of cultivation, aggravated by material self-seeking, and the conceit which belongs to an age of development, whether the development takes place or not.
Those whom we hear likening the Sheffield case to that of the Americans who resort to lynch law; and, yet more, those who virtuously denounce American lynch law, and are yet unaware of Trades’ Union practices, should be reminded or taught that lynch law was originally, and still is, in outlying places, a sort of law, adopted in the absence of real law-courts. The inflictions by ruffians on helpless victims are not lynch law, but simple outrages, like those of Sheffield. When the Valley of the Mississippi was becoming settled, there was trouble from marauders and reckless vagabonds; and there were as yet no courts to keep them in awe. A certain farmer Lynch was held in esteem for his judgment and temper; and by common consent he was made a judge of strifes and complaints; and his decisions were so deferred to as to obtain the title of “Lynch’s law.” From that time, decisions with the form, but without the sanction, of law were called “Lynch law;” but, as might be expected, the title was in course of time abusively applied to all mob-sentences and inflictions, till it became only another name for mob-vengeance. There could never be any excuse for an appeal in our country to the American provisional tribunal, if it had preserved its original virtue: and the cowardly midnight assaults common in Sheffield bear no resemblance to even the corrupted use of lynch law in America, which is always open to the public, and the light of day. If possible, the Trades’ Union outrages are worse than even the coast piracy once prevalent in America, when wealthy persons were waylaid on their voyage between North and South, and left at the bottom of the sea. The only child of the celebrated Colonel Burr, of Ohio, a young married lady settled at Charleston, took ship, with her infant and nurse, for the Northern States, on the approach of the summer heats, and was never more heard of for a long course of years, when an old man, on his deathbed, revealed that he had been a pirate, and that he had been one of a crew which seized the vessel in which the unhappy lady had been a passenger. After being compelled to give up all her property, she was made to walk the plank, with her infant in her arms, the nurse being sent after her. Ghastly as this story is, it is less appalling than the systematic use of the infernal machines of Sheffield at this day,—less diabolically and causelessly malignant,—less revolting in connection with the state of society in which the assassination occurs.
We have, it is true, another enormity to deal with in the barrack murders which have been so frequent of late. These resemble the murders which take place wherever a debased population habitually carry arms. They remind us of the lowest order of Neapolitans, and of the “Mean-whites” of the American Slave-states and trans-Mississippi frontier,—degraded men who carry bowie-knives, or have the rifle for ever in their hands, in desperate fear of hostile Indians or exasperated negroes. The evil will be effectually dealt with, no doubt. The bad administration of our military affairs, up to the time when the lamented Sidney Herbert began its reform, introduced an element of vagabondism into our army which it will take some time to get rid of: but we see our way now to such an elevation of the character of the British soldier as will make it safe to permit all needful access to arms; and if, meantime, it should be considered necessary to disarm our troops in their barracks, the discredit cannot but so operate upon the soldiery as to enlist them on the side of discipline, sobriety, and honour. Great and grievous as the disgrace and calamity are, they are clearly only temporary. This is more than can be said of the “Sheffield outrages.”
There is no aspect of our social condition so threatening at present as the operation of Trades’ Unions on the liberties of the working-class. I may speak more fully of this another day: but I may say here, that that class lies under an oppression from some of their own order that no people could be for a moment expected to endure from any government or aristocracy now possible in Europe. If the Building-trades of London, and the Staffordshire colliers, and the Lancashire spinners are not maimed and murdered, and banished, as the Dublin and Glasgow “workies” were in O’Connell’s time, they are living under a more systematic and pervading tyranny: and in Sheffield both evils seem to have reached an extreme point. Will any class of the inhabitants of Sheffield permit this to go on?
We have all seen what comes of government by Trades’ Unions. We have seen the worsted and shawl manufactures driven from Norwich to Yorkshire and Paisley: and the ribbon manufacture from Coventry to Congleton and Macclesfield, and some French and Swiss towns: and the silk manufacture from Spitalfields to various provincial towns: and the hardware manufacture of Sheffield itself to America. We have seen that the desperation of jealousy and of fallen fortunes hardens men till they become lawless in their pursuit of a blind vengeance against honest comrades who only seek to earn their bread. We see this diabolical vindictiveness harboured at Sheffield in an age when education is spreading, and when it requires only the good conduct of a law-abiding working-class to put them in possession of extended and extending political rights. Do the inhabitants of Sheffield mean to sit down under this disgrace? Or will they bestir themselves to get rid of it? The world believes that they might, if all honest men would work together for that end. For want of concert, nothing effectual is done. Where midnight assassination is an established practice,