31 8 History of the 



The excesses which people commit are often in their results 

 found to recoil upon themselves. The largest share of the 

 burdened county rates, out of which the manufacturers were 

 compensated for the losses they had sustained, had necessarily to 

 be contributed by the very class which the rioters hoped to benefit. 

 But let us not be too severe in our judgment : destitution and 

 hunger, when they speak from the tearful eyes of wives and 

 children, are unscrupulous monitors, and strike home too deeply to 

 admit of the exercise of calm reasoning, (c) 



But it was not the operatives alone in Rossendale who viewed 

 with such dread apprehension the advent of the steam-loom. At 

 this day it will scarcely be credited that the merchants and woollen 

 manufacturers of the Forest of Rossendale should have bitterly 

 opposed the introduction of tlie obnoxious machines into the 

 district ; yet such is the fact. At a numerously attended meeting 

 of the merchants and woollen manufacturers of the Forest of 



(c) A writer, commenting upon popular outbreaks, makes the following 

 just remarks: — " It was at the period when one of those feverish crises in th*e 

 history of the cotton manufacture threatened a servile war against the 

 introduction of some remarkable improvements in machinery, which appeared 

 likely to displace hand-labour to a great extent. Neither experience nor 

 political insight had yet taught workmen the truth, that England was by 

 these means about to make the peaceful conquest of the commerce of the 

 world, by clothing a large part of its varied peoples in almost everything but 

 articles of luxury. The starving spinner and weaver in the lone cottages and 

 homesteads on the edges of wild moors and ancient forests, or in the straggling 

 villages of the rugged valleys, could not be expected to discern the plenty to 

 be lavishly strewn by the new spinning-jenny, which deprived the family of 

 work at the spinning-wheel, or, at a later time, by the iron steam-loom, which 

 silenced the twelve hours' jingle and rattle of the cottage hand-loom. Any 

 such inventions seemed a devilish trick to rob the poor of bread; to drive 

 them from the comparative liberty of their lives in rural scenes to the close 

 alleys of the towns, and the hot atmosphere of the factory, in which they were 

 under a discipline more exact than that of the soldier, and more regular and 

 engrossing than that of any other form of labour. Starvation for a large part 

 of the people, and a lot worse than slavery for the rest, seemed a fate to 

 resist which a few lives would not be thrown away." — " Scarsdale," vol. i., pp. 

 28, 29. 



