James Ritchie - Bessbrook and its Linen Mills

What has developed it to its enormous extent has been the application of steam. No longer the weaver sits in his isolated cottage. He is a hand in a mill, and weaving is a complex affair, requiring, to make it pay, gigantic operations and many hands. The factory system has many disadvantages, which tend to the mental, moral, and physical deterioration of the hands engaged in it. I write of one of the most successful efforts that has yet been made to free the factory of them, and to carry it on in a way advantageous, not only to the employer, but the employed. For these purposes it is necessary that the factory be an isolated one; that it should be a community by itself, an imperium in imperio , governed by its own laws, with its own special educational, religious, and philanthropic establishments; and that, above all things, it should be conducted on the principle, or rather practice, of total abstinence from all intoxicating drinks. I heard the Rev. Kegan Paul say at a temperance meeting, held in Exeter Hall this year, that in some parts of Dorsetshire, the county in which he resided, there were parishes with no public-houses in them, that in these parishes there were no paupers, that no cases came from them to the Petty-Sessions, and that the answer given by policeman, when asked by the magistrates whether he had ever taken a teetotaller into custody, was “No.” From many other districts in England, Scotland, and Ireland, a similar testimony reaches us. From all the judges of the land, from all our clergy, from all our prisons and penitentiaries – affirmation, mournful in its monotony, reminds us that drink is the bane of the working-man. This is confessed by all, whether they be temperance reformers or not. In many cases it is found that the higher the wages earned by the operative, the more drunken and dissipated are his habits. No fact has been more conclusively established. Where you shut up the public-house, the gin-palace and the beer-shop, you have less pauperism and crime, more honest, decent, sober living, than you have where these places are open. If this be true in England, where the people are more phlegmatic and less wild on politics and religion, it is trebly true of Ireland, where the people are supposed to be at all times too passionate and ready to take offence; where ages of political and religious partisanship have given to those passions an unnatural ferocity; and where the drop o’ drink seems to be especially potent in its working. I have travelled in most parts of England, Scotland, and Europe, but I never felt in the slightest peril from the character of my travelling companions. I have been very little in Ireland, but the most disagreeable journeys I ever made were on Irish railways. In each case the disagreeableness arose entirely from the extent to which my fellow-passengers had indulged in the national drink. Perhaps we get it adulterated in England. If so, we have reason to be thankful. Its effects on the Irish are, for the time, truly demoniacal. I have never seen people so maddened with drink as those of the sister isle. The temperate character of Bessbrook strikes you at once. There the difficult problem of carrying out a factory with the minimum of inevitable evil seems to have been satisfactorily solved.

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