Part 9 (2/2)
He has a little wheel which lies horizontally. He lays a portion of clay on the centre of the wheel, puts one hand, or finger if the vessel is to be a small one, in the middle, and his other hand on the outside, and, as the wheel turns rapidly round, draws up a hollow vessel in an instant. With his hands, or with very simple tools, he brings it to the shape he wishes, cuts it from the wheel with a wire, and a boy carries it off. The potter makes vessel after vessel, as fast as they can be carried away.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The English Potter.]
The potter's wheel is an instrument of the highest antiquity. In the book of Ecclesiasticus we read--”So doth the potter, sitting at his work, and turning the wheel about with his feet, who is always carefully set at his work, and maketh all his work by number: he fas.h.i.+oneth the clay with his arm, and boweth down his strength before his feet; he applieth himself to lead it over, and is diligent to make clean the furnace.”--(c. x.x.xix., v. 29, 30.) At the present day the oriental potter stands in a pit, in which the lower machinery of his wheel is placed. He works as the potter of the ancient Hebrews.
As the potter produces the vessels they are partially dried; after which they are turned on a lathe and smoothed with a wet sponge when necessary. Only round vessels can be made on the wheel; those of other shapes are made in moulds of plaster. Handles and other solid parts are pressed in moulds, and stuck on while they and the vessels are still wet.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Potter's wheel of modern Egypt.]
The vessels thus formed are first dried in a stove, and, when dry, burnt in a kiln. They are in this state called biscuit. If they are finished white, they are glazed by another process. If they are figured, the patterns are engraved on copper, and printed on coa.r.s.e paper rubbed with soft soap. The ink is made of some colour that will stand the fire, ground with earthy matter. These patterns are moistened and applied to the porous biscuit, which absorbs the colour, and the paper is washed off, leaving the pattern on the biscuit.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Moulds for porcelain, and casts.]
The employment of machinery to do all the heavy part of the work, the division of labour, by which each workman acquires wonderful dexterity in his department, and the conducting of the whole upon a large scale, give bread to a vast number of people, make the pottery cheap, and enable it to be sold at a profit in almost every market in the world. It is not ninety years since the first pottery of a good quality was extensively made in England; and before that time what was used was imported,--the common ware from Delft, in Holland (from which it acquired its name), and the porcelain from China.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Mill-room, where the Ingredients for Pottery are mixed.]
The history of the manufacture of porcelain affords us two examples of persevering ingenuity--of intense devotion to one object--which have few parallels in what some may consider the higher walks of art. Palissy and Wedgwood are names that ought to be venerated by every artisan. The one bestowed upon France her manufacture of porcelain, so long the almost exclusive admiration of the wealthy and the tasteful. The other gave to England her more extensive production of earthenware, combining with great cheapness the imitation of the most beautiful forms of ancient art. The potteries of Staffords.h.i.+re may be almost said to have been created by Josiah Wedgwood. In his workshops we may trace the commencement of a system of improved design which made his ware so superior to any other that had been produced in Europe for common uses.
In other branches of manufacture this system found few imitators; and we were too long contented, in our textile fabrics especially, with patterns that were unequalled for ugliness--miserable imitations of foreign goods, or combinations of form and colour outraging every principle of art. We have seen higher things attempted in the present day; but for the greater part of a century the wares of the Staffords.h.i.+re potter were the only attempts to show that taste was as valuable a quality in a.s.sociation with the various articles which are required for domestic use, as good materials and clean workmans.h.i.+p. It was long before we discovered that taste had an appreciable commercial value.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Wedgwood.]
We think that, with regard to buildings and the furniture of buildings, it will be admitted that machinery, in the largest sense of the word, has increased the means of every man to procure a shelter from the elements, and to give him a mult.i.tude of conveniences within that shelter. Most will agree that a greater number of persons are profitably employed in affording this shelter and these conveniences, with tools and machines, than if they possessed no such mechanical aids to their industry. In 1851 there were a hundred and eighty-two thousand carpenters and joiners; thirty-one thousand brickmakers; sixty-eight thousand bricklayers; sixty-two thousand painters, plumbers, and glaziers; eighteen thousand plasterers; a hundred thousand masons (some of whom were paviours); forty-two thousand gla.s.s and earthenware makers; besides an almost innumerable variety of subordinate trades--engaged in the production of houses, their fittings, and their utensils.
[21] Chapter viii. pp. 85 and 87.
CHAPTER XV.
Dwellings of the people--Oberlin--The Highlander's candlesticks--Supply of water--London waterworks-- Street-lights--Sewers.
It is satisfactory to observe that the increase of houses has kept pace with the increase of population. In 1801, in Great Britain, there was a population of ten million five hundred thousand persons, and one million eight hundred thousand inhabited houses. In 1851 there were twenty million eight hundred thousand persons, and three million eight hundred thousand inhabited houses. The numbers, in each case, had, as nearly as may be, doubled.
But it is not equally satisfactory to know that the improvement in the quality of the houses in which the great body of those who labour for wages abide is not commensurate with the increase in their quant.i.ty. It is not fitting, that, whilst the general progress of science is raising, as unquestionably it is raising, the average condition of the people--and that whilst education is going forward, slowly indeed, but still advancing--the bulk of those so progressing should be below their proper standard of physical comfort, from the too common want of decent houses to surround them with the sanct.i.ties of home.
In the great business of the improvement of their dwellings the working-men require leaders--not demagogues, whose business is to subvert, and not to build up--but leaders like the n.o.ble pastor, Oberlin, who converted a barren district into a fruitful, by the example of his unremitting energy. This district was cut off from the rest of the world by the want of roads. Close at hand was Strasburg, full of all the conveniences of social life. There was no money to make roads--but there was abundant power of labour. There were rocks to be blasted, embankments to be raised, bridges to be built. The undaunted clergyman took a pickaxe, and went to work himself. He worked alone, till the people were ashamed of seeing him so work. They came at last to perceive that the thing was to be done, and that it was worth the doing. In three years the road was made. If there were an Oberlin to lead the inhabitants of every filthy street, and the families of every wretched house, to their own proper work of improvement, a terrible evil would be soon removed, which is as great an impediment to the productive powers of a country, and therefore to the happiness of its people, as the want of ready communication, or any other appliance of civilization. The enormity of the evil would be appalling, if the capability of its removal in some degree were not equally certain.
Whatever a government may attempt--whatever munic.i.p.alities or benevolent a.s.sociations--there can be nothing so effectual in the upholding to a proper mark the domestic comfort of the working-men of this country, as their firm resolve to uphold themselves.
Still, unhappily, it is an undoubted fact that the most industrious men in large cities are too often unable to procure a fit dwelling, however able to pay for it and desirous to procure it. The houses have been built with no reference to such increasing wants. The idle and the diligent, the profligate and the prudent, the criminal and the honest, the diseased and the healthful, are therefore thrust into close neighbourhood. There is no escape. Is this terrible evil incapable of remedy? To discover that remedy, and apply it, is truly a national concern; for a.s.suredly there is no capital of a country so worth preserving in the highest state of efficiency as the capital it possesses in an industrious population. There is a n.o.ble moral in a pa.s.sage of Scott's romance, 'The Legend of Montrose.' A Highland chief had betted with a more luxurious English baronet whom he had visited, that he had better candlesticks at home than the six silver ones which the richer man had put upon his dinner-table. The Englishman went to the chief's castle in the hills, where the owner was miserable about the issue of his bragging bet. But his brother had a device which saved the honour of the clan. The attendant announced that the dinner was ready, and the candles lighted. Behind each chair for the guests stood a gigantic Highlander with his drawn sword in his right hand, and a blazing torch in his left, made of the bog-pine; and the brother exclaimed to the startled company--'Would you dare to compare to THEM in value the richest ore that ever was dug out of the mine?'
We may naturally pa.s.s from these considerations to a most important branch of the great subject of the expenditure of capital for public objects.
The people who live in small villages, or in scattered habitations in the country, have certainly not so many _direct_ benefits from machinery as the inhabitants of towns. They have the articles at a cheap rate which machines produce, but there are not so many machines at work for them as for dense populations. From want of knowledge they may be unable to perceive the connexion between a cheap coat, or a cheap tool, and the machines which make them plentiful, and therefore cheap. But even they, when the saving of labour by a machine is a saving which immediately affects them, are not slow to acknowledge the benefits they derive from that best of economy. The Scriptures allude to the painful condition of the ”hewers of wood” and the ”drawers of water;” and certainly--in a state of society where there are no machines at all, or very rude machines--to cut down a tree and cleave it into logs, and to raise a bucket from a well, are very laborious occupations, the existence of which, to any extent, amongst a people, would mark them as remaining in a wretched condition. Immediately that the people have the simplest mechanical contrivance, such as the loaded lever, to raise water from a well, which is found represented in Egyptian sculpture, and also in our own Anglo-Saxon drawings, they are advancing to the condition of raising water by machinery. The oriental _shadoof_ is a machine. In our own country, at the present day, there are not many houses, in situations where water is at hand, that have not the windla.s.s, or, what is better, the pump, to raise this great necessary of life from the well. Some cottagers, however, have no such machines, and bitterly do they lament the want of them. We once met an old woman in a country district tottering under the weight of a bucket, which she was labouring to carry up a hill. We asked her how she and her family were off in the world.
She replied, that she could do pretty well with them, for they could all work, if it were not for one thing--it was one person's labour to fetch water from the spring; but, said she, if we had a pump handy, we should not have much to complain of. This old woman very wisely had no love of labour for its own sake; she saw no advantage in the labour of one of her family being given for the attainment of a good which she knew might be attained by a very common invention. She wanted a machine to save that labour. Such a machine would have set at liberty a certain quant.i.ty of labour which was previously employed unprofitably; in other words, it would have left her or her children more time for more profitable work, and then the family earnings would have been increased.
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