Big Industry in the Rhineland and Westphalia

Thus the centres of industry in Eastern Germany were still more or less sunk in the swamp of feudalism. The industrial centres of Western Germany on the other hand had almost reached the level of modern bourgeois society. The industries of Rhenish Prussia were more advanced in skills and more varied than those of Silesia or even of Saxony. It was a long way ahead of them also; in the whole of Germany this advantage was shared only by Rhenish Bavaria and Rhenish Hesse, in that since 1795 it had participated in the liberating bourgeois legislation of the French Revolution. The old indigenous industries, which in times past had been greatly encouraged by Germany’s great waterway, by access to the sea and by the mineral wealth in the ground, flourished under French domination. In the administrative districts of Aachen, Cologne, and Düsseldorf, almost all branches of industry were to be found: cotton, wool and silk industries with the dependent industries of bleaching, printing and dyeing, iron-founding and mechanical engineering, as well as mining, the manufacture of arms and other engineering industries. They employed a population of a density unknown in the rest of Germany.

Directly connected with the Rhenish Province was the coal and iron district, which provided it with part of its raw materials and belonged to it industrially. There was a reciprocal relationship between industry and an import-export trade with all parts of the world, which was very extensive by German standards, and a significant direct traffic with all the great emporia of world trade. The flourishing state of trade and industry encouraged the accumulation of capital; in the towns the feudal Estates fell apart, and their atoms reformed anew in the more and more sharply distinct classes of bourgeois and proletarians. Free possession of the land existed in the countryside. The small peasant predominated, free of all feudal burdens, but becoming more and more indebted to capital. The bourgeoisie dominated him through mortgages as it dominated the proletariat through wages and the petty bourgeoisie through competition. But the rule of the bourgeoisie was recognized and confirmed by the trade courts, the industrial courts, the assize courts, the whole material arm of legislation. For Germany it was a uniquely high level of economic development.

In its gradual growth, big industry in the Rhineland and Westphalia offered a colourful mixture of various capitalist forms of enterprise. In the Remscheid district, handicrafts had persisted and capital was content to play the role of middleman exporting every conceivable kind of commodity, which did not in fact make its rule any the gentler. In the Solingen district, it destroyed the guilds and depressed the armourers, once the most respected craft, which had been world-famous, to the poverty of a cottage proletariat. In Aachen, it brought the cloth-makers’ guilds to heel by hiring cheaper labour from the surrounding countryside. In the Krefeld silk industry, which from the beginning was organized on a merchant basis, the cottage weavers struggled obstinately for recognition as master craftsmen. They were fortunate enough to gain possession of their own looms by dint of great self-sacrifice, without realizing that they were thus merely forging even stronger capitalist chains to bind themselves. But Rhenish industry excelled in the early development of manufacturing and mechanized industries. The first mechanized spinning jenny in Germany was driven by water power by an Elberfeld manufacturer in 1783. Although the Solingen grinders rioted in 1826 against an atrocious truck system and the silk weavers of Krefeld rose in 1828 against an intolerable wage cut, countless masses of workers’ children at the same time fell victim in dumb silence to the Moloch of the machine.

The Prussian government bore, involuntarily, the credit for revealing these abominable conditions. In 1818 it learned quite by chance that a Rhenish manufacturer had set up a factory school. With that unique hypocrisy that has become proverbial as ‘Prussian wind’, the King publicly praised this worthy man in an order in council. Meanwhile the persecution of the ‘demagogues’ led to an investigation of schools, and the Minister of Culture, von Altenstein, demanded fuller information about that factory school from the authorities in Düsseldorf. It then emerged that the manufacturer who had been so highly praised possessed two spinning mills, in which children from six years of age were exploited day and night. In one of the mills 96 children worked on the day shift and 65 on the night shift, in the other 95 worked by day and 80 by night. A shift lasted 13 hours by day and 11 hours at night, with frequent additional Sunday working. The daily wage was not quite 20 pfennigs for the smaller children and 30 for the bigger ones, while adult workers received 10 silver groats for the same work. But the famous factory school consisted in this, that the day-shift children received one hour’s education and the night-shift children two hours. A senior financial Geheimrat , whose name has unfortunately not been recorded for posterity, reported to Berlin that the night-shift children were distinguished from the pale children of Berlin by their healthy, blooming appearance, and that night work had so little effect on them that on their way home, often more than a quarter of a mile away, they got up to all sorts of merry pranks. Sleeping by day, he considered, was as healthy as sleeping at night.

Altenstein did not regard the matter quite so complacently. He was a friend of Hegel and wanted to make his mark as Minister of Education in Prussia, with its famous universal compulsory education. His direction of the educational system was almost the only bright side to the whole degenerate administration of the Prussian state. His colleague, however, the Minister of the Interior, von Schuckmann, with whom he had to co-operate, had no objection to child-labour in factories. In order to convince him of the need to act, Altenstein instructed all the local authorities in the Rhenish Province, Westphalia, Silesia, Brandenburg and Prussian Saxony, to investigate the nature and extent of the use of child labour in factories. Although the authorities approached ran the inquiry in the old slapdash Prussian manner, taking no evidence from workers or their children, but only from the manufacturers and the occasional doctor, clergyman and teacher, their reports presented a picture that was nevertheless shocking.

Many thousands of children of the tenderest years, even as young as four, were worked to death in every branch of the textile industry, as well as in nail, bronze, buckle, armour, tapestry and other factories, paper mills and potteries. For an irregular working day of ten, twelve or even fourteen hours they were rewarded with a daily wage of a few groats and, as a report from Iserlohn puts it, a brief recreation with brandy, tobacco, lechery and play. In other reports it is stated: ‘Pale faces, dull and inflamed eyes, swollen bodies, bloated cheeks, swollen lips and nostrils, inflammations of the glands in the neck, malignant eruptions of the skin and asthmatic attacks distinguish these unfortunate creatures in point of physical health from children of the same class of the population who do not work in factories. Their moral and intellectual condition is equally degenerate.’ Even in areas of low economic development such as Brandenburg and Prussian Saxony, the very saddest conditions obtained. The municipal council at Luckenwalde announced that the children employed in the textile industry in the town grew up in moral degradation, and in the nail smithies of the Merseburg district children were used from four in the morning until six at night for the heavy labour of operating the bellows.

All this left the Prussian cabinet, with the exception of Altenstein, very cold. Even in 1826, when Lieutenant General von Horn reported to the King that the factory districts could no longer provide their drafts of recruits, nothing happened except that Schuckmann replied to a further warning from Altenstein, very coarsely, but with a deep insight into the nature of the Prussian military state, that the employment of children in factories was anyway less dangerous than giving them work that would further their intellectual development. Only when humanitarian manufacturers in the Rhenish Province made a fuss in the press and the Rhenish Provincial Diet demanded legal regulation of child labour did the government condescend, in 1839, not indeed to introduce, but at least to commit to paper, some limitations on the employment of children in factories. It took a further ten years before the complaints of the Rhenish workers about the truck system were heeded. Only after the salutary lesson of 1848 was a ban on the substitution of goods for wages decreed, and even to some extent seriously imposed. Until then the Prussian government had answered the workers’ complaints, the repeated representations of the Rhenish and Westphalian Provincial Diets and the passionate agitation of a few honourable manufacturers with ‘serious reservations and considerable doubts’ as to whether a ghastly method of profiteering committed at the expense of a poverty stricken and defenceless working class really ought to be banned. It was always ready, on the other hand, to suppress any unruly movement among the ill-treated workers by force of arms.

Anyway, the only link that held the Eastern and the Western Provinces of the Prussian State together was the intimate understanding the bureaucrats from east of the Elbe had of the Rhenish bourgeoisie’s lust for profits. Otherwise, the Rhinelanders were treated more or less as defeated rebels, and the attempt was made by constant attacks on their progressive laws to reduce them to the cultural level of Kashubia. Whatever culture and self-confidence they possessed was in open revolt against the Christian Teutonic government in Berlin, and it is not hard to guess with what fervent love the proletariat particularly responded to the paternal care of such rulers.