The nailer is a Government servant.  But the Government only employs him indirectly.  It puts out contracts for rivets and nails to contractors who sublet their contract, so that the work reaches the nailer at third or fourth hand.  The Government, in the interest of public economy (Victorian England is famous for retrenchment), gives its contract to the lowest tenderer; and the policy of the lowest tender is responsible for the dumb-show we have watched.

To begin with, the nailer gets metal which does not suit him, so he has to change it, and this he does at the price of 2_d._ per 10_d._ bundle, at a metal changers, a relative of the fogger. (His friend who has to wait till Wednesday for his bundle is kept idling about in order that he may drink what is left of last week’s earnings at a ‘wobble shop’ which is owned by yet another branch of the family of fogger.)

When the nailer and his family have worked fourteen hours a day throughout the week, the nailer returns on Saturday with the nails, and receives 12_s._ for them.  These shillings he takes to the fogger’s store and exchanges for tea and other articles.  The shillings are ‘nimble’; we commend the rapidity of their circulation to Mr. Irving Fisher.  A fogger who pays out the shillings from his warehouse receives them back again in a few minutes over the counter of his store.  ’He will perhaps reckon with seven or eight at one time, and when he has reckoned with them, and perhaps paid them six, seven, or eight pounds, he will wait until they have gone to the shop and taken the money there as they leave the warehouse.  Then he goes into the shop himself for it, as he cannot go on paying without it.’[44]

But surely this is truck!  Certainly not.  There may be ‘fearful cheating’ with tea, but the nailer is not bound to go there.  He is perfectly free.  The only trouble is this:  it is a case of tea or no work the week following.  This is why, despite the Truck Act of 1831 and despite the known existence of the abuse, these practices are rife among the nailers as late as 1871, the year in which the Truck Commissioners issued the Report from which this scene is compiled.  The plight of the nailers is not the plight of factory operatives or miners; it is the plight of the frame-work knitters, of men who are bound by the intangible fetters of economic need to the uncontrollable devil of ‘semi-capitalism’.

2.  MINING OPERATIONS

1.  Coal was king of the nineteenth century.  The first steam-engine was built to pump water out of coal mines, the first canal was cut to carry the Duke of Bridgwater’s coal from Worsley to Manchester.  The first railroads were laid around Newcastle to convey the coals from the pit mouth to the river.  George Stephenson, the inventor of the locomotive, began life as a trapper on a Tyneside colliery.