Birmingham.—Miserable State of the Artificers.—Bad Guns manufactured for the Guinea Trade.—Anecdotes of Systematic Roguery.—Coiners.—Forgers.—Riots in 1791.—More Excuse for Dishonesty here than in any other Place.
Thursday, July 7.—Birmingham.
You will look perhaps with some eagerness for information concerning this famous city, which Burke, the great orator of the English, calls the grand toy-shop of Europe. Do not blame me if I disappoint you. I have seen much, and more than foreigners are usually admitted to see; but it has been too much to remember, or indeed to comprehend satisfactorily. I am still giddy, dizzied with the hammering of presses, the clatter of engines, and the whirling of wheels; my head aches with the multiplicity of infernal noises, and my eyes with the light of infernal fires,——I may add, my heart also, at the sight of so many human beings employed in infernal occupations, and looking as if they were never destined for any thing better. Our earth was designed to be a seminary for young angels, but the devil has certainly fixed upon this spot for his own nursery-garden and hot-house.
You must forgive me, if I do not attempt to describe processes which I saw too cursorily, and with too little pleasure to understand. A sick stomach will not digest the food that may be forced down it, and the intellect is as little able to assimilate that for which it has no aptitude.
When we look at gold, we do not think of the poor slaves who dug it from the caverns of the earth; but I shall never think of the wealth of England, without remembering that I have been in the mines. Not that the labourers repine at their lot; it is not the least evil of the system, that they are perfectly well satisfied to be poisoned soul and body. Foresight is not a human instinct: the more unwholesome the employment, the higher of course are the wages paid to the workmen; and incredible as it may seem, a trifling addition to their weekly pay makes these short-sighted wretches contend for work, which they certainly know will in a very few years produce disease and death, or cripple them for the remainder of their existence.
I cannot pretend to say, what is the consumption here of the two-legged beasts of labour; commerce sends in no returns of its killed and wounded. Neither can I say that the people look sickly, having seen no other complexion in the place than what is composed of oil and dust smoke-dried. Every man whom I meet stinks of train-oil and emery. Some I have seen with red eyes and green hair; the eyes affected by the fires to which they are exposed, and the hair turned green by the brass works. You would not, however, discover any other resemblance to a triton in them, for water is an element with the use of which, except to supply steam-engines, they seem to be unacquainted.
The noise of Birmingham is beyond description; the hammers seem never to be at rest. The filth is sickening: filthy as some of our own old towns may be, their dirt is inoffensive; it lies in idle heaps, which annoy none but those who walk within the little reach of their effluvia. But here it is active and moving, a living principle of mischief, which fills the whole atmosphere, and penetrates every where, spotting and staining every thing, and getting into the pores and nostrils. I feel as if my throat wanted sweeping like an English chimney. Think not, however, that I am insensible to the wonders of the place:—in no other age or country was there ever so astonishing a display of human ingenuity: but watch-chains, necklaces, and bracelets, buttons, buckles, and snuff-boxes, are dearly purchased at the expence of health and morality; and if it be considered how large a proportion of that ingenuity is employed in making what is hurtful as well as what is useless, it must be confessed that human reason has more cause at present for humiliation than for triumph at Birmingham.
A regular branch of trade here is the manufacture of guns for the African market. They are made for about a dollar and a half; the barrel is filled with water, and if the water does not come through, it is thought proof sufficient; of course they burst when fired, and mangle the wretched negro who has purchased them upon the credit of English faith, and received them most probably as the price of human flesh! No secret is made of this abominable trade; yet the government never interferes, and the persons concerned in it are not marked and shunned as infamous.
In some parts of Italy, the criminal who can prove himself to be the best workman in any business is pardoned in favorem artis, unless his crime has been coining; a useful sort of benefit of clergy. If ingenuity were admitted as an excuse for guilt in this country, the Birmingham rogues might defy the gallows. Even as it is, they set justice at defiance, and carry on the most illegal practices almost with impunity. Some spoons which had been stolen here were traced immediately to the receiver's house: "I know what you are come for," said he to the persons who entered the room in search of them, "you are come for the spoons," and he tossed over the crucible into the fire, because they were not entirely melted. The officers of justice had received intelligence of a gang of coiners; the building to which they were directed stood within a court-yard, and when they reached it they found that the only door was on the upper story, and could not be reached without a ladder: a ladder was procured: it was then some time before the door could be forced, and they heard the people within mocking them all this while. When at last they had effected their entrance, the coiners pointed to a furnace in which all the dies and whatever else could criminate them, had been consumed during this delay. The coins of every country with which England carries on any intercourse, whether in Europe, Asia, or America, are counterfeited here and exported. An inexhaustible supply of halfpence was made for home consumption, till the new coinage put a stop to this manufactory: it was the common practice of the dealers in this article, to fry a pan-full every night after supper for the next day's delivery, thus darkening them, to make them look as if they had been in circulation. Assignats were forged here during the late war; but this is less to be imputed to the Birmingham speculators, than to those wise politicians who devised so many wise means of ruining France. The forgery of their own bank notes is carried on with systematic precautions which will surprise you. Information of a set of forgers had been obtained, and the officers entered the house: they found no person on any of the lower floors; but when they reached the garret, one man was at work upon the plates in the farthest room, who could see them as soon as they had ascended the stairs. Immediately he opened a trap-door, and descended to the floor below; before they could reach the spot to follow him, he had opened a second, and the descent was impracticable for them on account of its depth: there they stood and beheld him drop from floor to floor till he reached the cellar, and effected his escape by a subterranean passage.
You may well imagine what such people as these would be in times of popular commotion. It was exemplified in 1791. Their fury by good luck was in favour of the government; they set fire to the houses of all the more opulent dissenters whom they suspected of disaffection, and searched every where for the heresiarch Priestley, carrying a spit about on which they intended to roast him alive. Happily for himself and for the national character, he had taken alarm and withdrawn in time.
It ought, however, to be remembered that there is more excuse to be made for dishonesty in Birmingham, than could be pleaded any where else. In no other place are there so many ingenious mechanics, in no other place is trade so precarious. War ruins half the manufacturers of Birmingham by shutting their markets. During the late war nearly three thousand houses were left untenanted here. Even in time of peace the change of fashion throws hundreds out of employ. Want comes upon them suddenly; they cannot dig; and though they might not be ashamed to beg, begging would avail nothing where there are already so many mendicants. It is not to be expected that they will patiently be starved, if by any ingenuity of their own they can save themselves from starving. When one of Shakspeare's characters is tempted to perform an unlawful action, he exclaims, "My poverty, but not my will, consents." It is but just, as well as merciful, to believe that the same extenuation might truly be pleaded by half the criminals who come under the rod of the law.
Being a foreigner, I could not see Messrs Bolton and Watts's great works at Soho, which are the boast of Birmingham, and indeed of England. As these extraordinary men have by the invention of the steam-engine produced so great a change upon the commercial system, and thereby upon society in this country, I could have wished to have seen their own establishment; but it was in vain, and I did not choose by making the trial to expose myself to the mortification of a refusal.
