knew that his lungs were black as ink, and tough as parchment, and were on the point of stopping for ever, while his fine wages were gone, he could not tell how, and there was nothing for his widow and little ones but to go into the workhouse. So much for “a short life and a merry one!”
The sons who followed him to the grave as infants now find their occupation a very different one, and not much more dangerous than many other employments. Happily for them, though not for all parties at the time, there was, in their youth, a disastrous strike in their little town, and their father’s trade. The needle-pointers were misled, and suffered much hardship: and when they petitioned for work at the old wages, the employers imposed a new condition;—that they should honestly use the means provided for the preservation of their health. A fan-wheel in the midst of a group of grinding benches, each of which has its wheel covered so artfully as that the dust is whirled away from the workman’s face, conveys the whole collection of stone and steel particles out of the work-room, and blows it into some harmless place in the open air. I have seen the cloud issuing from an opening, and actually whitening a green bank for a considerable space. This white stuff would have turned human lungs black by the inflammation it would have caused; and, but for the apparatus, and the will to use it, the present workers at the wheel would long ago have been in their graves.
The same improvement has not taken place wherever steel is ground. We think at once of Sheffield, where the fork-grinder expects to die at thirty, and the grinders of razors and scissors a year or two later; and the tableknife-grinders at five-and-thirty; and the grinders of saws and sickles at nearer forty; but none so late as forty. The wretched men,—who, however, are proud of the peculiarity of their lot,—seem to be at about the same point that the needle-pointers elsewhere were at in the days of the mask and the canvas cylinder, and before the strike, to the failure of which so many lives are owing. Some of the first cutlers in the world have applied themselves to obviate the mortality among their men; but almost in vain. When they set up the fan-wheel, the men will take every opportunity of stopping its working. The words which they are reported to have used are these: “Trade is bad enough as it is. If the men live longer, it will be so overfull that there will be no such thing as getting a living.” They do, however, permit the dry-grinding to be turned into wet, as improved machinery works this effect. Knowing as they do that it is the dry-grinders who die, on an average, before thirty, while the wet-grinders live from two to ten years longer, they allow of such a quickening of their wheel, and such a drip of water over it as may detain a portion of the dust from entering their lungs. Of the dry-grinders, however, there are five hundred employed on forks only in the one town of Sheffield:—five hundred young men who have doomed themselves deliberately to an early death; and in such a way as to excite only disgust, instead of the sympathy and admiration with which all men are wont to regard any loose hold on life which has any respectability about it whatever.
The position of Sheffield is singularly bad in the scale of comparative sickness undergone by the working-classes, as ascertained by the managers of Friendly Societies; and yet there is no note taken of the fact that the lives, out of which this sickness is computed, are little more than half the ordinary length. In comparing the sick weeks in the life of a rural labourer and a Sheffield artisan, we ought to note, not only that the one has 52 weeks of illness to 95 of the other, but that the rural labourer’s term may extend to 60 years, while the Sheffield man’s ends at 40, or even 30.
Even without this, and supposing that all have an equal right to talk of their life “from twenty to sixty years of age,” what a preponderance of sickness there is in Sheffield! In town life generally in England the proportion of sick weeks in those years is somewhat under 55. In city life it is under 66 weeks; whereas in Sheffield it is just upon 95. No other town, and no city on the list before me, comes near it, even Leeds being under 63, and Rochdale under 57; and the ill-favoured and unpopular Stockport, the worst after Sheffield, under 85.
We shall know more about all these matters after the approaching Census: but we now perceive plainly enough that there is an enormous sacrifice of life in the commonest processes of manufacture, which a little more knowledge may enable us to obviate entirely, and which a better morality would at this day materially check. It is the terrible attribute of this sort of mischief, however, that it is at once cause and effect. Peril to life, of this particular kind, generates the immorality which, in its turn, creates the recklessness which again imperils life. The mere mention of Sheffield brings up the image of such recklessness in the minds of all who hear the name. The low regard for human life, and the propensity to violence for which the working population of Sheffield are notorious, must have some explanation: and the explanation is easily found in the excessive sickness and mortality of the place, through hardships for which the victims would murder any tyrant who imposed them, but which they inflict on themselves against all remonstrance and preventive efforts on the part of their employers. It is impossible to remain many days in Sheffield without perceiving how low and wild are the habits of a portion of the population; and every newspaper reader in the kingdom is familiar with “fearful outrages” of which the scene is Sheffield, and the occasion generally some trades’-union dispute. For the deeper cause we may look to the depraved state of bodily health, and the self-imposed doom of death under which a certain proportion of the citizens pass what they choose to call “a short life and a merry one.”
Their case is not like that of the Redditch needle-makers, an improved and improving one. In old times the grinders of Sheffield were scattered about over the neighbourhood—small groups of them being found beside any or all of the waterfalls which abound in that hilly district. They were always a rather wild and rough set of people; but they lived a free life of less toil than