5862

LAISSEZ FAIRE

labour would be eventually required. That had happened
in the cotton trade, where the conditions of the supply of
materials were quite different, and Sir Robert Peel argued,
from his experience as a cotton manufacturer, that the same
nied thing would occur in the woollen trade as welll. But he was
workmen of entirely mistaken ; the shearmen who had combined in a secret
glee society® were perfectly right in believing that they were being
ousted from employment by the competition of machines,
They had no hope of continuing to live by the trade in which
and roused they had been brought up. Under these circumstances, a
them into series of attacks on the new machines was ably planned and
apposition, yigorously carried out. The shearmen® had a very complete
secret organisation, the working of which has been dramatically
 pourtrayed by Mrs G. L. Banks®. One murder occurred
in connection with this outbreak, near Huddersfield®, and
there was an immense destruction of property.
This was the only branch of the Yorkshire clothing
trades in which the attempted introduction of machinery
was signalised by outbursts of mob violence®. The rioters
were closely associated with the Luddites, who had been
goaded into violent outbreaks by the distress they endured
as framework knitters in Nottinghamshire. The ecircumstances
 of the two trades were curiously distinct; the shearmen
 were agitating against the introduction of a new
machine. but this was not the case with the Luddites. as there

1 Reports, 1806, 1. 1033, printed pagination 441.
? They had a powerful combination in Leeds, before 1806, and called out all the
shearmen in Mr Gott's employ, because he took two apprentices whose age was
not in accordance with their rules. Reports, 1806, mv. 959, printed pagination 367.
8 Report from the Committee on the State of the Woollen Manufacture, 1806,
m1. printed pagination 15. 4 Bond Slaves.
5 Report from the Committee of Secrecy (Disturbed Northern Counties), 1812,
m. 809.
6 The rioters had been successful in 1780 in preventing the use of frames.
{See above, p. 625, n. 8.) Hirst, writing in 1844, says: “ About sixty years ago an
attempt was made to introduce machinery for finishing the cloth, both in the
West of England and in Yorkshire. The workmen raised the most violent
opposition to it, and after a severe struggle the masters in Yorkshire were
obliged to abandon the attempt, while in the West of England they succeeded.
They thus had a double advantage, for all their goods were manufactured under
their own care, while those in Yorkshire were manufactured in various parts and
brought to sell in the Cloth Hall, in Leeds, in the balk state. They were then
gent out to be finished, for there were few at that time who manufactured and
finished cloth.” Hirst, p. 10.