The Industrial Revolution

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1027928145

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-159926

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Cunningham, William http://d-nb.info/gnd/128907487

Title:: The Industrial Revolution

Place of publication:: Cambridge

Publisher:: The University Press

Year of publication:: 1922

Scope:: xxii S., S. 404-886

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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THE REMOVAL OF PERSONAL DISABILITIES 759 apathetic on the subject, were now keenly alive to the advant- A D. 1776 age of retaining their new-found freedom; and on the main issue they were successful, for Trade Unions were permitted to exist, but the operatives and their friends were defeated on one very important point. The Act of 1824! had protected com- bined workmen from prosecution for criminal conspiracy under the common law, and this privilege was not continued®; though the enacting clauses of the Act of 1825 appeared to Place to confer this immunity®, The responsible authorities, however, construed the Act differently; being disinclined to give the unions free scope to develop, they took advantage of every opportunity to show the suspicion they felt’, Henceforward on Ly [rade Unions had a legal right to exist, but their members forming were in constant danger of overstepping the narrow limits Dnions was within which combined action was admissible®, But agreement 2/2; 1 5 Geo. IV.c. 95§ 2. ? It seems that the Committee hoped that the operation of the Common Law should be in future rendered more favourable to the workmen. * Your Com- mittee however in recommending that the common law should be restored are of opinion that an exception should be made to its operation, in favour of meetings and consultations amongst either masters or workmen, the object of which is peaceably to ‘consult upon’ the rate of wages to be either given or received, to agree to co-operate with each other in endeavouring to raise or lower it. and to settle the hours of labour; an exception, they trust, which, while it gives to those n the different classes of masters and workmen the ample means of maintaining sbeir respective interests, will not afford any support to the assumption of power or dictation in either party to the prejudice of the other, least of all that assumption of control on the part of the workmen in the conduct of any business or manufacture which is utterly incompatible with the necessary authority of the master, at whose risk and by whose capital it is to be carried on.” Report from the Select Committee on the Combination Laws (1825), 1v. 508. 3 Wallas, op. cit. 238. Place evidently had no great confidence in this view, however. The nature of the difference between the two Acts may be rendered clear when we recall the fact that a recurrence of the printers’ prosecution and sentences in 1810, which would have been prohibited by the Act of 1824, was perfectly possible under the Act of 1825. See above, p. 757 n. 2. 4 When, in August 1833, the Yorkshire manufacturers presented a memorial an the subject of * the Trades Union,” Lord Melbourne directed the answer to be returned that “he considers it unnecessary to repeat the strong opinion enter- tained by His Majesty's Ministers of the criminal character and the evil effects of the unions described in the Memorial,” adding that * no doubt can be entertained that combinations for the purposes enumerated are illegal conspiracies, and liable to be prosecuted as such at common law.” Webb, Trade Unionism, p. 127. 8 «Although combination for the sole purpose of fixing hours or wages had reased to be illegal, it was possible to prosecute the workmen apon various other pretexts. Sometimes, a8 in the case of some Lancashire miners in 1832, the Trade Unionists were indicted for illegal combination for merely writing to their employers that a strike would take place. (R. v. Bykerdike, 1 Moo and Rob, 179, Lancaster Assizes, 1832. A letter was written to certain coal-owners, ‘by order

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