HKB
districts, a couple of extracts from the Manchester Guardian may serve to show. They cover only a short period, and, even here, I have not all the numbers at hand:
Guardian, June 16, 1844, Rochdale Sessions.--Four dealers fined five to ten shillings for using light weights. Stockport Sessions.--Two dealers fined one shilling, one of them having seven light weights and a false scale, and both having been warned.
Guardian, June 19, Rochdale Sessions.--One dealer fined five, and two farmers ten shillings.
Guardian, June 22, Manchester Justices of the Peace.--Nineteen dealers fined two shillings and sixpence to two pounds.
Guardian, June 26, Ashton Sessions.--Fourteen dealers and farmers fined two shillings and sixpence to one pound. Hyde Petty Sessions.--Nine farmers and dealers condemned to pay costs and five shillings fines.
Guardian, July 9, Manchester--Sixteen dealers condemned to pay costs and fines not exceeding ten shillings.
Guardian, July 13, Manchester.--Nine dealers fined from two shillings and sixpence to twenty shillings.
Guardian, July 24, Rochdale.--Four dealers fined ten to twenty shillings.
Guardian, July 27, Bolton.--Twelve dealers and innkeepers condemned to pay costs.
Guardian, August 3, Bolton.--Three dealers fined two shillings and sixpence, and five shillings.
Guardian, August 10, Bolton.--One dealer fined five shillings.
And the same causes which make the working-class the chief sufferers from frauds in the quality of goods make them the usual victims of frauds in the question of quantity too.
The habitual food of the individual working-man naturally varies according to his wages. The better paid workers, especially those in whose families every member is able to earn something, have good food as long as this state of things lasts; meat daily, and bacon and cheese for supper. Where wages are less, meat is used only two or three times a week, and the proportion of bread and potatoes increases. Descending gradually, we find the animal food reduced to a small piece of bacon cut up with the potatoes; lower still, even this disappears, and there remain only bread, cheese, porridge, and potatoes, until on the lowest round of the ladder, among the Irish, potatoes form the sole food. As an accompaniment, weak tea, with perhaps a little sugar, milk, or spirits, is universally drunk. Tea is regarded in England, and even in Ireland, as quite as indispensable as coffee in Germany, and where no tea is used, the bitterest poverty reigns. But all this pre-supposes that the workman has work. When he has none, he is wholly at the mercy of accident, and eats what is given him, what he can beg or steal. And, if he gets nothing, he simply starves, as we have seen. The quantity of food varies, of course, like its quality, according to the rate of wages, so that among ill-paid workers, even if they have no large families, hunger prevails in spite of full and regular work; and the number of the ill- paid is very large. Especially in London, where the competition of the workers rises with the increase of population, this class is very numerous, but it is to be found in other towns as well. In these cases all sorts of devices are used; potato parings, vegetable refuse, and rotten vegetables are eaten for want of other food, and everything greedily gathered up which may possibly contain an atom of nourishment. And, if the week's wages are used up before the end of the week, it often enough happens that in the closing days the family gets only as much food, if any, as is barely sufficient to keep off starvation. Of course such a way of living unavoidably engenders a multitude of diseases, and when these appear, when the father from whose work the family is chiefly supported, whose physical exertion most demands nourishment, and who therefore first succumbs--when the father is utterly disabled, then misery reaches its height, and then the brutality with which society abandons its members, just when their need is greatest, comes out fully into the light of day.