Direct employment, such as prevailed in the north of England, would have averted much of this evil.  There were no structural difficulties in the way of change.  Direct employment would not have meant a change to another class of work (this is what direct employment meant for knitters and hand-loom weavers).  The butty system existed and persisted through slackness and irresponsibility.  The owners paid compensation for accidents, when they might have diminished the number of accidents.  They paid commissions to middlemen with whom they might have dispensed.  The system made temperance impossible for the individual; and the masters, with the full approval of the Government, did their best to destroy the ‘pernicious combinations’ by which alone a standard of sober decency could be promoted.

5.  The Report of the Truck Commissioners (1871-2) enables us to complete the picture.  It also enables us to understand why, at this late day, truck was still rife in certain districts.

Truck and Tommy, truck-shop and Tommy-shop, are convertible terms.  Truck is from the French ‘troc’ = barter.  Cobbett tells us how the word ‘Tommy’ was used.  In his soldiering days the rations of brown bread, ‘for what reason God knows’, went by the name of Tommy.  ’When the soldiers came to have bread served out to them in the several towns in England, the name of Tommy went down by tradition, and, doubtless, it was taken up and adapted to the truck-system in Staffordshire and elsewhere.’[60] From the textile districts it had all but disappeared in 1871.  When the cotton manufactures went to outlying dales for water power, they were almost compelled to open stores for their workpeople.  Owen’s store at New Lanark was, in effect, a well-managed truck-shop; and the Truck Commissioners of 1871 reported that the New Lanark Company of that day was breaking the law.  But when the cotton industry was gathered in the towns, the need for company stores ceased.  Consequently, after the passing of the Act of 1831, which prohibited truck altogether, the masters very generally abolished the stores of their own accord; and survivals were jealously watched.

A collection of Factory Scraps, preserved at the Goldsmiths’ Library in London, contains a copy of the Factory Bill of 1833, with some pencil notes in Ostler’s handwriting which run: 

     Cragg Dale Facts

Truck System:  Little altered:  men knew they were imposed.  They pay in money now—­but compel them to buy at their own shops....  Wholesale warehouses at Rochdale say, ’Oh! put it sideways:  it will do for Cragg Dale masters to sell among their people.’

     Song:  ‘Lousy butter and burnt bread.’

About 1842 a curious perversion of truck was prevalent in parts of Yorkshire.  The trade depression in the Bradford district tempted disreputable woollen manufacturers to force on their operatives the products of the factory as part payment of wages.  Combers were given pieces of cloth, workers in shoddy mills bundles of rags.  But this utterly inexcusable fraud, no less than its more specious complement, the employer’s store, was rooted out by inspectors and factory reformers.  Therefore in 1854 the Government’s Commissioner was able to say that in a factory district like Lancashire truck was not only non-existent but ’impossible’.[61]