ABSTRACT
A chapter devoted to the railway labourer may be regarded as intrusive by some, and as gossipping by others; by a third class it may be considered as repulsive. But the “navigator” is necessary to the rail. He is an important portion of this new system of political economy. He risks life and limb to form the works which we admire. He braves all weather, he dares all danger, he labours with a power and a purpose which demand attention. For years he was disregarded by those who, availing themselves of his strength and skill, left him, when his daily task was done, to his own pleasures and his own resources. Rude, rugged, and uncultivated, possessed of great animal strength, collected in large numbers, living and working entirely together, they are a class and a community by themselves. Before the time of that great duke who called inland navigation into existence, this class was unknown; and in the works which bear witness to his forethought, the “navigator” gained his title. The canal manias which ensued created a demand and increased the body; the great architectural works of the kingdom continued it; and when the rail first began to spread its iron road through England, the labourer attracted no attention from politician or philosopher, from statistician or from statesman; he had joined no important body, he had not made himself an object of dread. Rough alike in morals and in manners, collected from the wild hills of Yorkshire and of Lancashire, coming in troops from the fens of Lincolnshire, and afterwards pouring in masses from every county in the empire; displaying an unbending vigour and an independent bearing; mostly dwelling apart from the villagers near whom they worked; with all the strong propensities of an untaught, undisciplined nature; unable to read and unwilling to be taught; impetuous, impulsive, and brute-like; regarded as the pariahs of private life, herding together like beasts of the field, owning no moral law and feeling no social tie, they increased with an increased demand, and from thousands grew to hundreds of thousands. They lived only for the present; they cared not for the past; they were indifferent to the future. They were a wandering people, who only spoke of God to wonder why he had made some so rich and others so poor; and only heard of a coming state to hope that there they might cease to be railway labourers. They were heathens in the heart of a Christian people; savages in the midst of civilisation: and it is scarcely an exaggeration to say, that a feeling something akin to that which awed the luxurious Roman when the Goth was at his gates, fell on the minds of those English citizens near whom the railway labourer pitched his tent.
