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 Cornell University Library 
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 Industrial history of modern Engla^^ by 
 
 olin 
 
 3 1924 029 963 364 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029963364 
 
THE 
 INDUSTRIAL HISTORY 
 OF MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE HERBERT FERRIS 
 
 AUTHOR OF ^ 
 
 ' GERMANY AND THE GERMAN EMPEROR ' 
 * A SHORT HISTORY OF WAR AND PEACE ' 
 ' RUSSIA IN REVOLUTION * ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 1514 
 
 /^ 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 The purpose of this volume is to outline the facts 
 and to interpret the spirit of the economic history 
 of Great Britain in the last hundred and fifty years. 
 The writer believed it to be a useful task to focus 
 within such limits as these a narrative of the 
 social transformation through which the mother- 
 country of industrialism has passed since the 
 invention of the steam-engine ; and, from this, 
 he was led on to an attempt to characterise the 
 period, and the main current of thought which 
 the play of economic forces has provoked. 
 
 With so vast a subject, and great libraries 
 of undigested evidence challenging attention, it 
 seemed beyond hope to escape all the pitfalls in 
 the way of such an essay. The recent accumula- 
 tions of statistical material, in particular, must 
 be mastered, their essential results obtained, and 
 the contributory detail then eliminated, like the 
 scaffolding when a building is complete, lest the 
 large outlines be obscured. The writer enjoyed, 
 however, beside the interest of the task, the 
 stimulus of contact with industry and business 
 at several points. Trades translated themselves 
 back out of statistics into terms of flesh and blood|. 
 
viii MODERN ENGLAOT) 
 
 Machines and tools were found to be strangely 
 associated with types of character, collective and 
 personal, and these characteristics with certain 
 public institutions often credited with a very 
 different origin. The " working - classes " dis- 
 appeared, and an infinite variety of labouring 
 Britons emerged. Human nature constantly 
 asserted itself against academic formulae. This 
 experience may, or may not, be reflected in the 
 following pages ; but, assuredly, the student is 
 learning little of his country's past who caimot 
 see, behind the abstractions necessary to repre- 
 sent life in the mass, a procession of his own 
 forebears, more or less individual beings like him- 
 self, toiling, striving, hoping, suffering — chiefly unlike 
 himself in that they could not look forward into 
 those years which now lie below him like a many- 
 coloured landscape. To these humble dead, and 
 not alone to the conspicuous figures^ we owe what 
 we are and have. If such susceptibility can be 
 schooled to the scruples of sound investigation, 
 it will contribute reality to the catalogue of 
 events, and justice to the estimate of persons and 
 movements. 
 
 Arnold Toynbee set the example of dating the 
 " Industrial Revolution " between 1760 and 1840, 
 the years in which steam was brought into use 
 in the textile and iron trades, and was applied to 
 land and sea carriage. This treatment left the 
 story of the extension of the factory system in 
 the latter half of the nineteenth century, of Free 
 
INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 Trade, the " rural exodus," the urban "residuum," 
 and the new finance, to appear as a mere sequel ; 
 and it necessarily ignored certain other results 
 of the economic process, of which the establish- 
 ment of political democracy, collective bargaining,^ 
 compulsory education, old - age pensions, mini- 
 mum wage boards, and the decline of the birth- 
 rate are, perhaps, the most significant. Thirty 
 changeful years have passed since Toynbee's 
 noble spirit was quenched. Ideas for which he 
 had to fight have become common property ; 
 some things against which he fought are now only 
 curious survivals. The " social problem " is not 
 solved ; but a gentler, wiser temper prevails on 
 every hand. The Victorian giants are dead, and 
 already much of their noisy warfare is meaning- 
 less, except to the student. Nobody now calls 
 himself a disciple of Bentham or Ricardo, who 
 exercised an almost unlimited sway over a yet 
 earlier generation ; they are forgotten save by a 
 few pious scholars. Old questions have a com- 
 plexion that our fathers and grandfathers would 
 not have recognized ; new questions have arisen. 
 Alike in material affairs and in the world of thought, 
 we have passed into a period of normal develop- 
 ment. Throughout the Western world, the com- 
 monalty enjoy to-day, in a degree heretofore 
 unknown, the fruits of social peace. And 
 England, if she has no longer any monopoly of 
 the means to wealth, holds her moral primacy 
 among the nations. Dogma is dissolved ; privi- 
 
X MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 lege is limited ; prejudice is disabled in a day 
 when navvies become poets, and farm-boys live 
 to mould, by consent, not conquest, the destinies 
 of a continent. The sense of " fairplay " is re- 
 vived. Parties face each other at Westminster, 
 for the task of government could not be fulfilled 
 without them. But the voter does not wor- 
 ship his party ; and, behind all the shibboleths, 
 there is a constantly extended ground of common 
 agreement. 
 
 This is the historian's opportunity. A phase 
 in the process of time has been completed, a cycle 
 which we can examine, coolly, as a whole. A 
 period has become material for history ; that is 
 to say, something more than a day-to-day and 
 year-to-year chronicle has become possible, and 
 we can attempt to group its movements, ideas, 
 personalities according to their total significance. 
 Nothing, indeed, breaks the continuity of himaan 
 life ; but this period of a century and a half does 
 already reveal a unity, a prevailing character, of 
 its own. It is one of the major epochs of dis- 
 ruption and re-settlement which are marked as 
 clearly upon the plane of human history as Alpine 
 blocks upon the level crust of the globe. England 
 has been fundamentally re-made ; and from this 
 tiny island seismic waves have passed and are 
 yet passing to the uttermost ends of the earth. 
 The greatest of those governing personages with 
 whom the historians are mainly concerned look 
 small in the perspective of this mighty change. 
 
INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 Its sheer violence overclouds most of our story. 
 The individuals who emerge mimic the tumult 
 of the impersonal forces that drive them on, 
 shouting as the Wagnerian hero must shout 
 through an orchestral whirlwind ; while, in the 
 dim background, a multitudinous, indistinguish- 
 able chorus cries to the gods for help. 
 
 At length, a ray of light breaks upon the field 
 of strife, worse than any war, in which genera- 
 tions of Englishmen have been overwhelmed. In 
 the outset a failing struggle against machines 
 and novel forms of energy, it is seen to become 
 a struggle increasingly successful against the 
 anarchy of unrestrained competition. Wage 
 statistics figure little in the following pages, be- 
 cause it is practically impossible to construct 
 for the whole period a ratio of the innumerable 
 elements constituting an average real wage. But 
 there is abundant evidence, and economists gene- 
 rally agree, that the condition of the labouring 
 masses was not again as prosperous as it had been 
 in the first half of the eighteenth century until 
 towards the end of the nineteenth. At the former 
 point, there still remained something of an English 
 social settlement, an accepted condition of affairs 
 affording the humblest subject a certain security. 
 At the latter point, industrial anarchy and the 
 philosophy of anarchy had become hateful, and 
 the basis had been laid of a re-organization of 
 society which, without injuring the fortunate, 
 will again give a certain security to the humblest 
 
xii MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 subject of the realm. In the gulf between these 
 points lies our topic. 
 
 On closer examination, the industrial cycle 
 appears to fall into three part^ — a term of dis-^ 
 Solution, lasting from the middle of the eighteenth 
 century to the end of the Great War ; a term of 
 stagnation, lasting thence to the middle of the 
 nineteenth century ; and a term of slow recon- 
 struction, carrying us into our own time. It is 
 not suggested that every incident and every 
 actor in the immense drama of national develop- 
 ment can be covered by this or any other formula. 
 Life is not a Chinese puzzle ; and those who 
 protest (as we must do) against the mischief of 
 false abstractions in the past do well to walk 
 warily in this path. It is, however, very un- 
 likely that historical description will ever exert 
 the influence, or its errors work the mischief, that 
 once came of a priori philosophizing. Our aim 
 is to state and classify facts, not to deduce eternal 
 and immutable laws. If there be error — if we 
 have wrongly interpreted the enclosure of the 
 conmion lands, the mechanical inventions, the 
 protective tariff, the system of allowances, the 
 new Poor Law, Trade Unionism, Chartism, Free 
 Trade, the Factory, Health, and Education Acts, 
 the succession of trade crises and popular agita- 
 tions, or the attitude of parties toward any of 
 these events, correction is easy. 
 
 When we pass from the movement of events 
 to the movement of opinion, we are on more 
 
INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 debatable ground. Current thought is too valu- 
 able an index of the spirit of a period, and too 
 influential in its affairs, to be left out of account. 
 To speak of the Navigation Acts without naming 
 Adam Smith, of the triumph of Laisser Faire in 
 1834 without some reference to the philosophy 
 of Bentham, Malthus, and Ricardo, of the first 
 rising of organized labour without naming Dickens 
 and Carlyle, of the new social movement of the 
 end of the century without mention of TojTibee 
 and Henry George, William Morris and the 
 Fabian Society — this would be to waste some of 
 the most eloquent evidence of the time. To the 
 extent of some brief passages, the risk of bias 
 must be run. With the earlier thinkers just 
 named, there can be little risk; the others will 
 be regarded as objectively as is yet possible. 
 
 It is not by accident that these names fall into 
 three groups, which, in fact, correspond with the 
 triple division of our period just indicated. The 
 classic or orthodox economists hastened and 
 justified the disintegration of what remained of 
 the medieval settlement of Enghsh life. Their 
 sincerity is no more to be questioned than their 
 high talents. They as well as any could plead 
 historical necessity. But the fate of the bookish 
 doctrinaire dogged them. No more influential 
 school of philosophy ever existed ; yet none has 
 been so extensively discredited in the passage of 
 time. The reason for this remarkable change is 
 to be found in the succession of events presently 
 
xiv MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 to be traced. Their "inexorable laws" ex- 
 pressed a widespread desire rather than a scientific 
 synthesis ; when the needs of the nation and its 
 temper changed, the flaws in their ingenious 
 structure appeared plainly, and men turned else- 
 where for help. Meanwhile, masses of the people 
 were suffering hunger, cruelty, and neglect. 
 Carlyle and Dickens pre-eminently represent the 
 first puzzled revolt of conscience against these 
 miseries. With the establishment of Free Trade, 
 the lowest depth is passed; and, while the re- 
 volution in manufacture and finance is fulfilling 
 itself in one occupation after another, new pro- 
 phets arise who, much as they differ in their 
 prescriptions, agree in this, that unrestrained com- 
 petition has proved a curse, not a blessing, and 
 that, somehow, society must be organized, if the 
 greatest good is to reach the greatest number. 
 
 From this new starting-point, the characteristic 
 work of the twentieth century is developing, with 
 some such material assets as our appendices ex- 
 hibit, and others not so measurable — above all, 
 the will to learn, endure, and achieve. The 
 lesson of nineteenth - century industrialism has 
 been a hard one. We may easily make mistakes 
 in interpreting it. There is only one unpardon- 
 able mistake. Let no man doubt that the nation 
 which had the strength to pass this test will face 
 without fear the worst the future can reveal. 
 
 London, Uay 1914. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTION .... 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE GREAT DISRUPTION 
 I. A New Kind of Tyrant 
 II. The Three Factors . 
 
 III. The New Capitalism . 
 
 IV. The Market, and the Inventors 
 V. Labour on the Land . 
 
 VI. The Transformation of Industry 
 VII. The Victims : Speenhamland 
 
 PA9B 
 
 vii 
 
 1 
 5 
 8 
 13 
 20 
 26 
 33 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 FROM THE FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 
 (1801-1820) 
 
 I. The People are Numbered 
 II. In the Shadow of War 
 
 III. Agriculture under the Corn Laws 
 
 IV. The Rise of Manufacture 
 V. The First " Over-Production " Crisis 
 
 VI. Pioneers of Reform 
 
 42 
 48 
 64 
 73 
 101 
 109 
 
XVI 
 
 MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 CHAPTEK III 
 
 THE LOWEST DEPTH (1821-1834) 
 
 I. Rural England in the 'Twenties 
 II. Degradation of the Labourer . 
 
 III. Un-Natural History of the Slum 
 
 IV. The Radical Reformers 
 V. The Railway and Steamship . 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OP THE ECONOMISTS 
 
 125 
 133 
 
 147 
 157 
 172 
 
 179 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 ON THE VERGE OP REVOLUTION (1833-1849) 
 
 I. A Late Harvest ..... 201 
 
 II. The First Factory Acts .... 206 
 
 III. The New Poor Law ..... 216 
 
 IV. The General Strike ..... 227 
 
 ~^ V. The Chartists ...... 237 
 
 ^ VI. End of the Corn Law .... 248 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP (1850-1866) 
 
 I. Employment and Education .... 262 
 
 II. Problems of Peace and War .... 272 
 
 III. The Completion of Free Trade . . . 280 
 
 IV. Round with the Factory Inspectors . . . 295 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 XMTl 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 THE LIBERAL STATE (1867-1885) 
 I. Toward Democracy . 
 II. The Trade-Union Compromise 
 
 III. Co-operation, Thrift, Conciliation 
 
 IV. The Collapse of Agriculture . 
 V. A Trade Crisis Analysed 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE AWAKENING (1886-1900) 
 
 I. The "Residuum" Discovered 
 II. The "Sweating System" 
 
 III. At the Dock-Gates . 
 
 IV. Voices of the New Spirit 
 V. Resurrection . 
 
 VI. Organization . 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE NEW AGE 
 
 I. Population and Wealth 
 II. New Lamps for Old .... 
 
 III. Agricultural Revival . . . • 
 
 IV. Crusade of the Life-Savers . 
 
 V. Unemployment, Strikes, the Minimum Wage 
 VI. Conclusion . . . • • 
 
xviii MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 APPENDICES 
 
 ~ ■ PAGE 
 
 I. Population and Emigration : A. Early Estimates j 
 B. United Kingdom, 1821-1911 ; C. England 
 and "Wales, 1801-1911 ; D. The Chief Industrial 
 Counties ; E. The British Empire . . 549 
 
 II. Employment and Trade Unionism: A. Occupa- 
 tions, England and Wales, 1901 ; B. Trade Union 
 Membership, United Kingdom, 1901 . 556 
 
 III. Census oe Phoduction, 1907: A. Workers in- 
 cluded ; B. Net Output ; C. Industrial Output 
 by Groups of Trades ; D. Aggregate Value of 
 United Kingdom Produce ; E. Exports and 
 Imports ; F. Capital, Income, and Savings . 560 
 
 IV. Distribution or Income and Capital — Over- 
 Sea Investments .... 568 
 
 V. International Commerce : A. Exports, 1854-1912; 
 B. Exports of United Kingdom, United States, 
 Germany, and France, 1880-1913 ; C. Britain's 
 Best Customers, 1886-1911 . .573 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 XIX 
 
 VI. "Wages and Prices : A. Prices, 1818-1910 (Sauer- 
 beck) ; B. Purchasing Power of £1, 1895-1912 ; 
 
 C. The Course of Wages, 1780-1899 (Bowley), 
 1879-1910 (Board of Trade, and G. H. Wood) ; 
 
 D. Unemployment ; E. Wages in the Cotton 
 Trade, 1806-1906 (Wood) . . .576 
 
 VII. Births and Deaths, Wealth and Poverty . 582 
 
 A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . .583 
 
 INDEX 595 
 
tl'y-VVV:>i-) 
 
 ijun-:, ' :i,i.-Tii^r ,sa>ivr ./ ■; ^^^. 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL HISTORY 
 OF MODERN ENGLAND 
 
INDUSTRIAL HISTORY OF 
 
 MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE GREAT DISRUPTION 
 
 I. A New Kind of Tyrant 
 
 It is a very old speculation, but not yet altogether 
 unfruitful, why the great revolt of the end of the 
 eighteenth century took place in Paris, and not 
 even a pale copy of it in London. Britons flattered 
 themselves then, and flatter themselves still, on 
 their moderation ; this is the favourite answer. 
 " The riots which have taken place in many parts 
 of England and Scotland on account of the high 
 price of provisions " — so opens the Annual Register 
 for 1801 — " were neither so violent nor so obstinate 
 as they would have been in countries where there 
 is less moderation of character in the people and 
 less confidence in means of constitutional relief." 
 The writer added that " every candid mind was 
 less offended at the commotions of the populace 
 than struck with their forbearance and patience." 
 It is true that, with all its roughness, there is a 
 quality of moderation in the British nature, which 
 will take many blows if it can keep the sense 
 of " fair play " and " elbow-room." The great 
 A 1 
 
2 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. i. 
 
 constitutional advances which England had made 
 had undoubtedly entered into the character of the 
 nation. A conservative people in the heart of 
 them, even more than their great-grandchildren 
 are ; inured to hard labour and short commons ; 
 very ready to follow the Squire, and to see the 
 Calvinist Devil in the uniform of Napoleon 
 Buonaparte, a modicum of personal independence 
 was the thing they prized most. Outright serfdom, 
 still existing over the greater part of Europe, had 
 here faded out four centuries earlier. Internal 
 peace had given, for a century and a half, a stabil- 
 ity of social conditions unknown in any other part 
 of the civilized world. The power of monarchy 
 had been effectually limited. The Church was 
 not strong enough to be seriously oppressive. In 
 Parliament, a balance of merchant and landlord 
 had promised some benefit to the third party, 
 the universal worker. Outside, the infant news- 
 paper press could not be silenced. Except in the 
 form of government momentarily achieved, France 
 was far behind the island kingdom in political and 
 economic development. Nothing so old-fashioned 
 as the French Revolution could take place in 
 London. 
 
 The flash-point of pubUc anger varies mysteri- 
 ously ; but this much is plain. The oppressor in 
 France was so ancient and decrepit as to have 
 become contemptible ; and contempt for the present 
 powers is a strong groundwork for a revolutionary 
 faith. The British people were poor, and almost 
 
§ I.] THE GREAT DISRUPTION 3 
 
 voiceless in the State. They certainly could not 
 despise their political governors ; but, if the 
 Hanoverian Oligarchy had been as feeble as the 
 Bourbon Court, the real enemy would have 
 remained. It was, indeed, in an atmosphere of 
 free thought, amid strange stirrings of new life, 
 that men saw a titanic arm pierce the blue, take 
 one by one of their hoary instruments and institu- 
 tions, break them to pieces, and begin to rebuild 
 them with clumsy magic in the huddled streets 
 of industrial cities. 
 
 This was no medieval tyrant, foul in familiar 
 ways. Intelligence, even in its lower forms, will 
 command the mass of men ; and this thing, the 
 Machine, seemed marvellously to combine the wit 
 of a living being with the inexhaustible, inexorable 
 energy of Nature. Of successful protests there 
 could be but little hope. In the towns, men would 
 quickly decide to struggle for a share of the pro- 
 digious wealth that was to come. But England 
 was still mainly rural ; and in the shires, amid the 
 decay of patriarchal organization, the elder peasants 
 would dream, if they dreamed at all, in the spirit 
 of Gray's Elegy, of a return to the " good old days " 
 when the poor man could own his acre, and manual 
 skill counted, and the son stepped into the father's 
 shoes. Vain regrets ! Squire Western junior, a 
 high-farming disciple of Arthur Young, who would 
 not steal the goose from the common, but had no 
 scruples about stealing the common from the 
 poor human goose, was unconsciously recruiting 
 
4: MODERN ENGLAND [chap. i. 
 
 for his hated rival, the machine-owning capitalist ; 
 and, when the village had been emptied into the 
 workhouse, it followed as logically as the deductions 
 of Adam Smith, or the mechanics of his young 
 friend Watt of Greenock, that the workhouse would 
 be emptied into the factory. 
 
 Still, this was not the sheer, senseless barbarity 
 to which the nations had been accustomed in the 
 olden days. The greed of the French seigneur 
 was as stupid as cruel ; the greed of the cotton- 
 lord was directed by lively intelligence, and could 
 assume on occasion a philosophic garb, decorated 
 with the saving virtues, national and personal. 
 The machine-owners had behind them the full 
 force of a State, showing, it is true, little of the 
 efficiency of the steam-pump or the spinning-mule, 
 but still the most perfect of the age. They must 
 be favoured, for were they not to produce the 
 millions needed to bring the Corsican usurper to 
 his knees ? London — as preponderant, then, in 
 the life of England as Paris in that of France, and 
 as necessary to any proletarian rising — had been a 
 commercial and industrial city for centuries, had 
 tasted the wealth of the Indies before the rural 
 upheaval began, and knew of old how to keep her 
 lowlier citizens satisfied. It is a piteous stoiy, 
 this of the quick, unprepared, unsoftened trans- 
 formation of a people's life ; and yet there is in it 
 the grandeur and significance of a forward-pointing 
 Destiny. It is full of cruelty and heroic endurance, 
 of adventure and debasement ; alike in the wealth 
 
§ n.] THE GREAT DISRUPTION 5 
 
 and glory of the few and the misery of the many, 
 it reminds us of the Napoleonic battlefields, though 
 the conscripts of industriahsm had no eagles to 
 lead, or drums to cheer, them to the grave. And 
 in the one case, as in the other, our own life is so 
 built upon the results that we can hardly imagine 
 history taking a different course. 
 
 II. The Three Factors 
 
 When George III came to the throne, England 
 was far behind Western Europe in many of the 
 elements of civilization. Country life was isolated 
 and stagnant. The towns were ill-built, insanitary, 
 and ill-governed. Transport and travel were hardly 
 better than in the later Roman Empire. The 
 industrial arts were little developed ; coal, iron, 
 and steel were known, but little used. Within 
 two generations these conditions were transformed. 
 To understand the process of the remaking of 
 the British nation, we must get the important ele- 
 ments into closer outline and more logical order. 
 In doing so, there are opposite perils to be avoided. 
 The pre- Victorian economists translated the infi- 
 nitely complex play of wants and wills which 
 is our daily life into an infinitely simple play of 
 abstract factors, wherein a thousand little mistakes 
 cumulated at last into a fatal falsification. The 
 Victorian hero-worshippers wove the facts into a 
 fairy-tale, in which Kay and Arkwright, Watt and 
 Stephenson had brave parts, and Sir Gorgius Midas 
 
6 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. i. 
 
 made a splendid ogre. This was as false, if less 
 mischievous. It seemed to overstate the case ; 
 really it understated it, save as to the inventors, 
 who were, in fact, the servants, not the masters, 
 of the moving forces of the industrial revolution. 
 There is a portion of truth in both extremes, the 
 economic and the romantic ; the task of history 
 is to unite them. We must use abstractions, for 
 symbols are necessary to obtain simple statements 
 of complex developments ; but, in using them, we 
 must bear in mind that these formulae stand not for 
 mathematical, but for vital quantities, individuals 
 never twice the same, groups ever changing in their 
 composition, both groups and individuals exhibit- 
 ing in their variation a tendency which we, in the 
 vague optimism which we have inherited, still call 
 progress. 
 
 The conjunction of three main factors was 
 necessary to this radical transformation — (a )surplus 
 ; Cagjtal, (b) surplus Labour, (c) a new Market. 
 f| Whenever these major quantities come together, 
 .;the lesser conditions, such as Invention, better 
 I Communications, and a favourable State Policy, 
 I will soon appear. There is a world of diffCTence', 
 however, between a happy wedding and a forced 
 union of economic instruments. It is not im- 
 possible to imagine a conjunction of the three 
 factors which would proceed amicably, regularly, 
 with little pain, to the general advantage. But 
 few, if any, of the great economic changes known 
 to history answer to that description ; and what 
 
§ II.] THE GREAT DISRUPTION 7 
 
 began to happen at the end of the eighteenth 
 century in England is as far as possible from de- 
 serving it. The experience of a hundred years has 
 abundantly justified the expectation of the founders 
 of the new political economy that a vast increase 
 of national wealth would result from what they 
 called economic " freedom " ; but it has failed to 
 realize their prophecy that a higher social harmony 
 would spontaneouly arise. It is a tale of expansion 
 not along a straight, smooth path, but by violent 
 oscillations, involving larger and larger numbers of 
 people, bringing pure gain to few, pure loss to 
 many, a mingling of gain and loss, in which it is 
 hard to strike a balance, to most. Perhaps there 
 was a deep wisdom in the Parisian trinity where- 
 in Equality and Fraternity were linked with the 
 idea of Liberty. A Utopian speculator would say 
 that, had the main agents of the economic trans- 
 formation met upon more equal terms, the gain 
 would have been greater and the loss less grievous ; 
 but then there would have been no such thing as 
 the Industrial Revolution. They were no more 
 equal than the greed of Dives and the need of 
 Lazarus. It was their very inequality that pro- 
 duced their conjunction ; and for long the machines 
 which groimd out calico or iron rails may be said 
 to have been manufacturing also new forms of 
 inequality between Capital and Labour, and 
 between these partners in production and the 
 Consumer, the Market. 
 
8 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. l. 
 
 III. The New Capitalism 
 
 The accumulation of mercantile and manufactur- 
 ing profits had proceeded apace, and Avith no more 
 than temporary checks, for two centuries. The 
 rapidity with which London was rebuilt after the 
 Great Fire in 1666, and the speedy recovery from 
 the collapse of the " bubble " companies about 
 1721, are among many signs of the large resources 
 of the rising merchant class. At a time when poli- 
 tical influence rested mainly on landownership, 
 there was a natural tendency for merchants to 
 desire to become country gentlemen ; and this 
 was stimulated by possibilities of profitable invest- 
 ment which may be traced to the corn export 
 bounty, first added in 1689 to the protective 
 import duties. Of some of the results that followed 
 we shall speak more fully at a later point. The 
 era of scientific agriculture began : new implements, 
 new crops and effective rotation, better breeds of 
 cattle, new buildings and methods of organization, 
 were adopted. Striking successes encouraged the 
 movement, which became more and more capital- 
 istic in character. It tended more and more, that 
 is to say, to the enlargement of farms and the 
 substitution of large managership for small owner- 
 ship, since, in agriculture as in manufacture, 
 enlargement of the business enables economies to 
 be effected, crises to be weathered, the highest 
 skill to be hired, and sales to be made at the most 
 advantageous time and place. Undoubtedly, the 
 
§ ni.] THE GREAT DISRUPTION 9 
 
 advance of agricultural science in the later 
 eighteenth century was a national asset, though 
 one dearly bought at the cost of the Enclosure 
 Acts and the Com Laws. 
 
 But it was in trade and manufacture that the 
 most characteristic developmeiits of capitalism 
 occurred. Ever freer access to the Asiatic and 
 American continents brought a multiplicity of 
 fresh commodities, and a corresponding demand 
 for home manufactures to exchange for them. 
 Stimulated by the skilLof jQj:eign immigrants, it 
 created new crafts or processes. Stimulated by 
 foreign rivalries, it created British seamanship 
 and a "thousand devices of the counting-house. 
 The establishment of the Bank of England in 1694, 
 while entrenching capitalism in the very structure 
 of the State — ^that was the price we had to pay 
 for the early development of parliamentary control 
 — fostered credit, investment, and insurance, to 
 the general benefit of the nation. In this, as in 
 other ways, England bettered some very ancient 
 examples (let us rather say that Britain bettered 
 them, for the full union of England and Scotland 
 was a most important element in the matter 
 Ireland was long to play Cinderella to her unkind 
 sisters). Regular trading with borrowed capital 
 now became possible on a large scale. Joint-stock 
 corapanies, owning no local ties or customary 
 restrictions, sprang up for the most various 
 commercial purposes as the eighteenth century 
 progressed ; and, though they were not yet 
 
10 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. i. 
 
 organized for manufacture, the uncertainty of distant 
 ventures in a lawless time must have directed 
 many minds toward bolder experiment in home 
 production. 
 
 The strong localization of life, outwardly marked 
 by the difficulty and cost of transit and transport, 
 and the remains of guilds and other forms of quasi- 
 medieval regulation, were among the chief obstacles 
 which hindered the enterprising man of means. 
 If his name had not been legion, he would have 
 been longer powerless against this inertia. But 
 medieval conceptions of the good social order were 
 in the article of death. They scarcely breathed, 
 except in the obscurity of the countryside. The 
 British Islands were built by Nature for trade ; 
 let there be any considerable growth of population, 
 and the foreign commerce which is fatal to a static 
 and regulated society must follow. The State, as 
 it became able to protect the more usual trading 
 routes, grew more chary of granting the charters 
 and monopolies which had represented its utmost 
 patronage in earlier days. To this extent, commerce 
 was free. There remained risks, obstructions, and 
 losses in this outreaching of national energy almost 
 unimaginable to-day. Seizure of valuable cargoes 
 and vessels was a daily incident of the wars with 
 France. Shipwreck and piracy were common. 
 Smuggling was pursued on a vast scale. Every 
 long voyage was a dangerous adventure. But the 
 profits were commensurate with the risks ; and 
 the profits continued to be high when the risks fell, 
 
§ m.] THE GREAT DISRUPTION 11 
 
 when marine insurance became customary, and 
 banking facilities removed the more glaring temp- 
 tations to highway robbery and housebreaking. 
 
 Of the policy of the State, it may at least be 
 said that it was less mischievous than that of any 
 rival country. Walpole had aimed above all to 
 stimulate capitalist trading, and had .greatly suc- 
 ceeded. Until the later part of the eighteenth 
 century, in agricultural resources the country was 
 nearly self-sufficing ; it was against the manu- 
 facturers, not the landlords, that Adam Smith 
 directed his sharpest shafts. " By extorting from 
 the Legislature bounties upon the exportation of 
 their own linen, high duties upon the importation 
 of all foreign linen, and a total prohibition of the 
 home consumption of some sorts of French linen, 
 they endeavour to sell their own goods as dear 
 as possible. By encouraging the importation of 
 foreign linen yam, and thereby bringing it into 
 competition with that which is made by our own 
 people, they endeavour to buy the work of the 
 poor spinners as cheap as possible. They are as 
 intent to keep down the wages of their own weavers 
 as the earnings of the poor spinners ; and it is by 
 no means for the benefit of the work that 
 they endeavour to raise the price of the complete 
 work or to lower that of the rude materials. It is 
 the industry which is carried on for the benefit 
 of the rich and the powerful that is principally 
 encouraged by our mercantile system. That which 
 is carried on for the benefit of the poor and the 
 
12 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. t. 
 
 indigent is too often either neglected or oppressed." ^ 
 The Navigation Acts and kindred legislation 
 penalized the British people, and produced some 
 strange anomalies — ^for instance, there was said to 
 be, about 1790, some £70,000,000 of capital invested 
 in the West Indian trade, and only £18,000,000 in 
 the East Indian. Yet these laws were unquestion- 
 ably effective in keeping large populations, during 
 a critical period, in economic subjection to British 
 shippers, traders, and manufacturers. When the 
 policy of monopoly received the crushing blow of 
 American Independence, it was its political sponsors 
 rather than its commercial beneficiaries who suffered. 
 The United States were to be long dependent on 
 the island factory and money market. On the 
 other hand, India, which was to remain politically 
 dependent, did not very long suffer from the 
 sort of rapacity that disgraced British traders in 
 the eighteenth century, and received a clean and 
 regular government nearly as soon as the new manu- 
 facturing cities of Northern England. 
 
 There is one other chief obstruction to the growth 
 of capital to be noted. Warfare cost heavily, not 
 only at the time, but in permanent debt. Yet 
 England suffered less from war than Spain, Hol- 
 land, France, or Germany. There is, perhaps, no 
 stranger contrast in the length and breadth of 
 history than that of Germany, under native auto- 
 crats, ravaged by war after war — the Thirty Years 
 War (1618-48), wars with France (1672-97), the 
 > The Wealth of Nations, Book IV. ohap. vill. 
 
§ IV.] THE GREAT DISRUPTION 13 
 
 War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14), the Silesian 
 Wars (1740-5), the Seven Years War (1756-63),\ 
 the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars — and 
 England, under the strictly limited Hanoverians, ) 
 enjoying practically unbroken domestic peace. \ 
 The Whig settlement had many ugly features ; ' 
 this immeasurable blessing overshadows them all. 
 By the opportunity it gave for improvement in 
 agriculture and the industrial arts, and the assurance 
 of social order, security, and legal development, 
 the long maintenance of peace on British soil must 
 be accounted an all-important factor in the accumu- 
 lation of fluid wealth which gave England a more 
 than military primacy among the nations. 
 
 IV. The Market, and the Inventors 
 
 Two factors, of which the one largely determined 
 the early direction of capitalist industry, and the 
 other provided its characteristic instruments, may 
 be briefly noticed before we consider the influence 
 of events upon Labour. For the first time, England 
 came, in the eighteenth century, to depend, to a 
 large extent, upon foreign countries for her markets. 
 The full meaning of this change is not always 
 appreciated. It meant in particular three things. 
 (1) Since England was, by far and long, first in the 
 Held, it meant an expansion so rapid that men were 
 intoxicated, and often "Brutalized, by the possibili- 
 ties of selfish gain. Customary scruples, for ages 
 sanctified by the Church and enforced by the 
 
14 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. i. 
 
 State, were thrown off as mere superstition and 
 sentimentality. The plunder of India affords a 
 terrible illustration of this fact ; the traffic which 
 for a century carried 20,000 negroes a year into 
 Western slavery is another. When Holland fell 
 out of the race, and France was beaten in India 
 and Canada, native populations numbering 
 hundreds of millions began to be opened to the 
 approach of the English manufacturer ; and for 
 many years, while Europe was riven with war, 
 he was without any effective rival. It is this 
 unprecedented opportunity which called the in- 
 ventors and factory lords into being. (2) It was 
 necessarily a capitalistic expausionj because distant 
 foreign trade could not be effectively exploited on 
 any other lines. A Co-operative Wholesale Society 
 can to-day own tropical estates for the provision 
 of raw material, lines of steamships to bring it 
 home, and factories to work it up. Such a thing 
 was beyond the highest dreams of eighteenth- 
 century enlightenment. Foreign trade had bred 
 fluid capital, because, even in a time of high risks, 
 it gave the largest profits and promised the largest 
 increase. Here neither law nor custom obstructed 
 the play of crude energy in the arts of selling, and 
 every improvement of organization yielded an 
 immense reward. The independent craftsman 
 could not hope to compass such an effort. (3) The 
 character of the new machine trades was "leffgely 
 determined by this new type of market. India, 
 for instance, demanded cotton clothing ; it could 
 
§ IV.] THE GREAT DISRUPTION 15 
 
 take unlimited quantities of very cheap goods. 
 Since cotton does not grow in England, and is of 
 less value than wool in the English climate, it had 
 received none of those embarrassing attentions 
 from Parliament which were reserved for com- 
 modities in which grower, manufacturer, and 
 consumer had all claims to protection. This 
 proved another great advantage for foreign trade. 
 CoaJ-mining and iron-smelting were also recently 
 developed, and very fre^ from restriction ; they 
 offered the advantage of abundant native supplies, 
 and they, also, required, in the main, only uniform 
 routine processes to make them marketable. 
 
 From the first, therefore, the Industrial Revolu- 
 tion was mainly concerned with relatively low- 
 grade goods, portable and durable, of which the 
 raw material is abundant, which ask little training 
 or' special skill in the labourers, are sure of a large 
 and steady demand, and, in an unregulated market, 
 require no consideration except cheapness. 
 
 Although many of the inventors were working- 
 men who created others' wealth, but themselves 
 lived and died in poverty, it is proper to name 
 here the chief steps, before the end of the eighteenth 
 century, in that process of mechanical invention 
 which, by magnifying the business unit, definitely 
 severed the labourer from possession of the in- 
 struments of production. These inventions were, 
 broadly, of two kinds— improvement of old tools and 
 the creation of new, and the application to these tools 
 of non-human motive power, first that of running 
 
16 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. i. 
 
 water, then of steam. Every step must be en- 
 visaged, not as something sensationally new, but 
 as a link in a long chain, and as involving other 
 far-reaching changes — improvements of communi- 
 cations (roads, canals, shipping), of banking and 
 market facilities, and so on. Coal was not new; 
 iron was not new ; the idea of the steam-engine 
 was not new ; Jack of Newbury had a clothing 
 factory in the time of Henry VII, and employed a 
 thousand hands, some of whom he led to Flodden. 
 What was new and fateful was the marriage of 
 these agents under the direction of personal wealth. 
 Two groups of trades are of supreme importance, 
 and react continually upon each other — the mjnera l 
 and textile groups. The woollen manufacturenad 
 for centuries -been the largest and most favoured 
 of national industries ; but the chief textile inven- 
 tions were only very slowly transferred to it from 
 the cotton trade. This fact has usually been 
 attributed to the very insignificance of cotton at 
 the outset, and its consequent freedom from 
 regulation. There is another reason. Supplies of 
 raw wool cannot be multiplied nearly as rapidly 
 as those of cotton, and can never be so cheap. 
 The wool trade, therefore, offered no such possi- 
 bility of vast and rapid development for low-grade 
 markets. In 1733, Kay patented his fly-shuttle, 
 and in 1738 Wyatt patented his roller-spinning 
 machine worked by water-power ; but neither of 
 these inventions seems to have come into use, 
 perhaps because they were not perfected. No 
 
§ IV.] THE GREAT DISRUPTION 17 
 
 marked advance was made till 1764, when a Black- 
 burn weaver, James Hargreave, made his.&mrmmg- 
 jenny, a frame carrying a number of spindlesTeH 
 ij^^achine, which gave ten times as much yarn as 
 the hand-spinning wheel. Five years later — ^in the 
 birth-year of Napoleon and Wellington — ^Arkwright 
 perfected Wyatt's " water frame " ; and in 1775 
 he took out patents for carding, drawing, roving, 
 and spinning machines. By this time, which may 
 be considered the end of the preliminary period, 
 the import of cotton had increased threefold in 
 forty-five years. In the next twenty-five years, 
 it increased nearly tenfold. In 1779, another 
 working spinner, Samuel Crompton, produced a 
 hybrid machine, the ",jnule," which gave a finer 
 yarn by combining the jenny and the water-frame. 
 Finally, in 1785, Cartwright brought the weaving 
 up to the level of the new spinning process by his 
 invention of the power-loom, first applied to wool 
 yam.i ~ ~ 
 
 In the same year, Arkwright's patent expired, 
 and Watt and Boulton made their first steam- 
 engine for a Nottingham cotton mill. It was not 
 successfully applied to the power-loom till 1801. 
 Watt was not the inventor of the steam-engine; 
 indeed, very few of the inventors could hit upon 
 an absolutely new idea. Crude appliances moved 
 by steam had existed for centuries. Thomas 
 Savery had made the first commercially successful 
 steam-pump in 1693. It was very wasteful ; and 
 
 1 For a short explanation of these processes, see post, pp. 88-93- 
 B 
 
i^ MODERN ENGLANt) [chap. i. 
 
 Newcomen greatly improved it in 1705. Grandson 
 of a teacher of mathematics, and son of an instru- 
 ment maker, Watt was prevented from opening a 
 scientific instrument shop in Glasgow by the Cor- 
 poration of Hammermen, on the ground that he 
 had not served an apprenticeship. He was, how- 
 ever, appointed maker to the University ; and in 
 his workshop there he was called on to repair a 
 model of Newcomen's " fire " engine, which had 
 been adapted about 1736 (by Jonathan Hull) for 
 rotary motion. He soon afterwards became 
 engineering adviser to the Carron Foundry. The 
 essence of Watt's first invention (1769) was the 
 condensation in a vessel separate from the steam 
 cylinder ; and his later improvements depended 
 on the expansive use of steam. He also invented 
 the " indicator," and many other appliances, and 
 discovered the composition of water, possibly 
 earlier than Cavendish. Watt and his loyal and 
 courageous partner, Boulton, enjoyed their patents, 
 though they had to defend them in costly law-suits, 
 till 1800. The first considerable use of their steam- 
 engine was at pumping in Cornish tm-mines, which 
 were thus given a new lease of life. 
 
 We have followed the usual, but hardly the logical, 
 order in our narrative, for the development of the 
 new machinery and the new motive power depended 
 upon coal and iron being brought into their service. 
 Abraham Darby first made iron with coke in 1735 ; 
 Benjamin Huntsman succeeded in casting steel 
 ingots from crucibles in Sheffield in 1740 ; and 
 
§ IV.] THE GREAT DISRUPTION 19 
 
 iron rails were cast at the Coalbrookdale works in 
 1767. But it was not till the 'eighties that effective 
 smelting was "ca^ri^d on in large blast iurnaces, 
 using pit-coal and coke. The building of a cast- 
 iron bridge over the Severn in 1779, and Cort's 
 inventions for puddling and rolling in 1783, may 
 be regarded as opening the iron era. In 1740, 
 there were fifty-nine furnaces using charcoal, with 
 an average annual output of about 300 tons each. 
 Fifty years later, there were eighty-five furnaces 
 with an average output of 800 tons. By the end 
 of the century, the manufacture was definitely 
 transferred to the neighbourhood of the coal beds, 
 and timber had practically ceased to be used for 
 fuel. Yet again, the general use of coal necessitate^d 
 a general improvement of roads and other com- 
 munications ; and this, in turn, favoured the new 
 capitalist farming. The neglect of the British 
 coal-beds, which were known to the Romans and 
 slightly scratched in intervening centuries, affords, 
 perhaps, the best single illustration of the inertia 
 of medieval life, and the slowness of the awakening 
 to modern opportunities. Early in the eighteenth 
 century, there was an important coal trade from 
 Newcastle by coasting vessels. But it was only when^ 
 Newcomen's steam-pump and Watt's more perfect's 
 engine had made possible the deepening of mines 
 and easier haulage that it was possible to feed the 
 new factories with steam power. 
 
So MODERN ENGLAND [csap. i. 
 
 V. Labour on the Land 
 
 There was surplus labour ready by the time 
 steam-driven machinery was ready, and there 
 were ever new stocks of surplus labour for many 
 years afterwards, because the masses of the English 
 j people were in process of demoralization, and 
 because a demoralized population breeds quickly. 
 i This demoralization arose from a number of very 
 diverse influences, of which we must take two 
 groups first, because of their jerermanent and far- 
 reaching effects. These are ti^ebchanges in^agri- 
 culture which had been pijoqeeding slowly since 
 Elizabethan times, and t&e changes^in domestic 
 industry, especially, but not solely, as associated 
 with agriculture, with certain social changes 
 involved in these. 
 
 At the beginning of the eighteenth century, 
 although agricultural enclosure and improvement 
 had been long proceeding, a full half, perhaps 
 more, of the cultivated area — a quarter of the 
 whole area— of England was still held communally. 
 Its fields were tilled, and its meadows, woodlands, 
 and moors were enjoyed, either jointly, or in 
 division by agreement or lot, under regulations 
 of the unit of local government, the court of 
 the manor. The word " common " has come to 
 mean waste land ; but, although some of the best 
 lands had then already been obtained in full 
 private ownership by wealthy individuals under 
 one form of authority or another, there was still 
 
§ v.] THE GREAT DISRUPTION 21 
 
 enough in common possession to give a real, if 
 meagre security of life to the village poor. The 
 cottagers often owned their humble homes, and 
 small patches of land attached to or near them ; 
 they had customary rights, including pasture, 
 turf, and fuel — ^this last a most important benefit 
 before the days of cheap coal. The absolutely 
 landless man, outside the towns, was exceptional. 
 There might be, in a typical village, say Mr. and 
 Mrs. Hammond,^ four large, twenty-four mode- 
 rate, twenty-four small proprietors, and sixty-six 
 cottagers with common rights. In an open-field 
 village, there would be few day labourers without 
 either land or common rights ; and " the most 
 important social fact about this system is that 
 it provided opportunities for the humblest and 
 poorest labourer to rise in the village." 
 
 The appearance of the capitalistic landlords 
 meant death to this ancient order. They had 
 none of the patriarchal compunctions of the feudal 
 noble; and, since the power of the Crown was 
 effectually limited, they had little restraint to 
 fear. The hand of the Tudors had been heavy 
 upon the people ; but it had penalized the 
 conversion of arable into pasture land, and 
 the neglect of cottages and cottage allotments. 
 It had established apprenticeship and a legal 
 relation between wages and prices ; it had imposed 
 upon every parish the duty of employing or main- 
 taining its poor. Since 1688, the landlords were 
 • The Village Ldbower, pp. 32-3. 
 
22 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. i. 
 
 supreme. Parliament, whether under Whig or 
 Tory management, was their very willing servitor. 
 They controlled the Crown, Church, Judiciary, 
 and local government. Horace Walpole, George 
 Selwyn, and other gossips of the period have left 
 us such naive pictures of the proceedings at 
 Westminster when Enclosure Bills were in Com- 
 mittee, that the homilies generally accepted at 
 the time by respectable townsfolk about the 
 idleness and naughty insubordination of the com- 
 moners can no longer deceive. Another recent 
 writer. Professor E. C. K. Gonner,^ takes a more 
 conservative view of the subject than Mr. and 
 Mrs. Hammond, and, while admitting " the partial 
 extinction of the yeomen and small farmers," " a 
 temporary pressure on poor relief," a rapid 
 diminution of small independent holders, and an 
 increase of wage work, questions " the accusation 
 of general arbitrary or unfair treatment of the 
 small farmer or the poor owner." The usual 
 conclusion of economic students has been more 
 severe.^ Between 1700 and 1760, under 200 
 Acts, 287,845 acres, mainly of common field, 
 and 74,518 acres of waste only, were compulsorily 
 enclosed. In the next forty years, the Acts 
 numbered 2000, and the areas enclosed 2,428,721 
 acres of common field, and 752,150 acres of waste. 
 
 1 Common Land and Jndosure, 1912. 
 
 » Many contemporary witnesses are cited by Prof. Cunningham 
 in chapters vil. 16, and vli. 3, of his Growth of English Industry 
 and Commerce in Modern Times, 
 
§ v.] THE GREAT DISRUPTION 23 
 
 Very few of the poor villagers had any effective 
 voice in the process. They were helpless victims. 
 They could not follow the Commissioners through 
 their long inquiries. Few of them had capital 
 enough to work larger holdings. The only real 
 excuse for the men who used their monopoly of 
 political power so ruthlessly lies in the panic fear 
 that famine would succeed where Napoleon could 
 not, unless large-scale agriculture met the need. 
 " By nineteen out of twenty Inclosure Bills, the 
 poor are injured, and some grossly injured," said 
 Arthur Young, in 1801, himself, in earlier years, 
 one of the foremost advocates of the enlargement 
 of estates. It is not denied that the allotments 
 by which the dispossessed commoners were to 
 be compensated were inadequate, and were so 
 saddled with law costs, and costs of fencing and 
 draining (especially before the Consolidating Act 
 of 1801 eased the process), that the recipients 
 were forced to sell out for trifling sums which 
 enabled them to move into town or to emigrate. 
 Dr Cunningham remarks that " the enquiries of 
 the Board of Agriculture embodied in their 
 'General Report on Enclosures,' published in 1808, 
 appear to be decisive " as to the ruin of many of 
 the poorer inhabitants. The obstinate and violent 
 resistance not infrequently offered to the enclosure 
 of wastes is eloquent of popular feeling ; indeed, 
 the whole after-course of events becomes inex- 
 plicable if the existence of an immense and extreme 
 grievance be questioned. 
 
24 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. i. 
 
 I It was not only that the humble tillers of the 
 common field were turned into labourers, with 
 no other resource than a daily wage, under a 
 Settlement Law which either chained them to 
 their parishes or forbade them any hope of social 
 aid. The small tenant farmers felt simultaneously 
 the rise of rents, the competition of large farms, 
 and the pressure of increasing poor rates. They 
 reduced labour to a minimum, demolished cottages 
 by way of preventing pauper settlement — " that 
 they may never become the nests, as they are 
 called, of beggar brats," says Arthur Young — 
 and, finally, came to rely upon the monstrous 
 privileges of the Corn Law. Bad seasons in the 
 latter half of the eighteenth century led to violent 
 fluctuations of corn prices ; and, while large farmers 
 could gain by speculation, the small men were 
 overwhelmed. " The progress of agricultural im- 
 provements left its mark by drawing hard and 
 fast lines of cleavage between the classes in rural 
 society ; the smaller farmer who succumbed in 
 the struggle was all the more to be pitied because 
 the labouring class in which he had been merged 
 was entering on a terrible period of privation and 
 degradation." ^ 
 
 ' Cunningham : The Industrial Sevolulion, p. 662. Arnold Toynbee 
 says : " By Eden's time [1795] the practice of eviction had be- 
 come general, and the connection between eviction and pauperiam 
 is an indisputable fact, though it has been overlooked by most 
 writers " (Industrial Revolution, p. 80). 
 
§ VI.] THE GREAT DISRUPTION 25 
 
 VI. The Transformation of Industry 
 
 We must retrace our steps for a moment to 
 a point at which the new forces in agriculture 
 and manufacture meet. The old-time village 
 was the home of many industries. In the first 
 place, the cottagers made clothes, furniture, 
 farm appliances, tools, and other wares for 
 themselves and their neighbours ; and there were 
 regular small district trades — thatching, carpenter- 
 ing, saddlery, and so on. Secondly, there were 
 spinning and weaving and frame-work knitting 
 for a wider market, under a transitional system 
 in which the weaver, for instance, sometimes 
 bought yarn from an independent spinner, and 
 himself sold the cloth to a elethier ; sometimes 
 worked up yarn belonging to a merchant, who 
 took the cloth in payment. The merchant was 
 the midwife of the capitalist system. In isolated 
 villages, the cloth trade could continue on the 
 old lines ; its very wide diffusion thraugh the 
 country seems to have been motived in part by 
 the desire to be independent of the moneyed 
 employer. Where craftsmen were locally concen- 
 trated, his control developed ; and the intro- 
 duction of costly machinery put hard pressure 
 upon the independent worker. In the Eastern 
 and Western counties, there was least power of 
 resistance. In Yorkshire, the substantial farmer- 
 weavers were able to adopt both the fly-shuttle 
 and the hand-jenny, and readily did so ; it was 
 
26 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. i. 
 
 only when, about 1794, the cloth dealers began 
 to build factories on a large scale, and with 
 the introduction of steam-power, that domestic 
 industry was definitely doomed. 
 
 This is the most familiar, but not, of course, the 
 only, type of the revolution in industry. Some 
 old manufactures, like that of iron, necessarily 
 capitalist in character, were also revolutionized. 
 New trades like gun-making, paper-making, and 
 glass-making, could only be founded by wealthy 
 employers. In other cases, expensive materials 
 or tools were an important factor. Poor men 
 could not easily buy raw silk ; and they bought 
 all materials at a disadvantage. In Scotland, 
 the linen manufacture depended upon chartered 
 company banking. We shall see in a later chapter 
 that, while the hosiery trade pursued a more even 
 course than other textiles, a class of employers 
 early rose who owed their profits and power to 
 their ownership of machines which they let out 
 to home workers, rather than to skill of organiza- 
 tion or possession of materials. Some of the worst 
 troubles of the eighteenth century occurred in 
 this trade when the practice of apprenticing 
 workhouse children began. The stocking-knitters, 
 to defend their standard of pay, fought to maintain 
 the traditional and legal limitation of apprentices. 
 They failed, and in their despair set an evil and 
 foolish example of machine-breaking, too often 
 to be followed in the next half century. 
 
 The principles of laisser faire have been so ably 
 
§ VI.] THE GREAT DISRUPTION 27 
 
 expressed and defended, they so long enjoyed 
 authority in the national thought, that, even now, 
 when their force is spent, it is difficult for us to 
 regard sympathetically the effort of the artisans 
 to maintain the customary regulations. That 
 this effort was long and heroically supported, 
 recent research has made clear ; and it is certain 
 that it was based upon what had once been a 
 universally accepted tradition. In their hey-day, 
 the craft guilds embodied the assumption of a 
 common interest of masters, manual workers, 
 and consumers, as well as the interest of the State 
 in the maintenance of social peace. There were 
 always workers who were not embraced in this 
 privileged sphere ; still, the guilds set the standard, 
 and that with the full support (perhaps as the 
 agents) of the municipality, and the full coun- 
 tenance of the State. That a living wage should 
 be secured to the workers was as essential to this 
 idea as that the masters should get profit, or 
 the consumers quality and a reasonable price. 
 That every one might hope to become a master 
 was as essential as that every one must first be a 
 servant. All round, a standard of life had to be 
 maintained. As occupations not susceptible of 
 guild organization (transport and extractive labour, 
 for instance) increased, and as, first, the capitalist 
 middleman, and, then, the factory employer 
 broke through the ring protecting the skilled 
 crafts, a totally new conception grew up, chal- 
 lenging the old at every point. We may date 
 
28 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. i. 
 
 the change, broadly, as occurring between the 
 middle of the seventeenth and the middle of the 
 eighteenth centuries. At first, the opposition was 
 only vaguely realized, but gradually it defined 
 itself — an ideal of individual profit against an 
 ideal of social co-operation. There were good 
 arguments on both sides ; but circumstance 
 favoured increasingly the free initiative. The 
 workers saw the hope of rising to be employers 
 fade away, and independent home industry 
 become nearly impossible. They appealed to 
 law : they might as well have appealed to 
 the North Wind. The magisterial assessment of 
 wages seems to have been generally abandoned by 
 1750 ; but a new statute was passed for the West 
 of England clothing trade in 1756, and an Act was 
 adopted to enforce wage-rates among the Spital- 
 fields weavers as late as 1773. This was an 
 exception ; the social ideal was already defeated, 
 and three years later Adam Smith's great work 
 fell upon ground well prepared to receive the 
 seeds of the doctrine of freedom of contract and 
 laisser faire. Amid the terrible suffering of the 
 end of the century, there was, as we shall see, a 
 short-lived revival of the demand for a State- 
 regulated wage, both among agricultural and 
 industrial labourers. The Arbitration Act of 
 1800 authorized the enforcement of rates fixed 
 by arbitrators for the cotton weavers, but the 
 measure proved inoperative. In 1808, a fresh 
 effort was made, without effect ; and in 1813, 
 
§ VI.] THE GREAT DISRUPTION 29 
 
 the wages clauses of the Elizabethan statute 
 were repealed, in the teeth of working-class 
 opposition supported by many magistrates and 
 employers, and practically at the dictation of 
 Ricardo and other economists. 
 
 The unequal battle continued rather longer on 
 the indirect issue of apprentices. The crafts, 
 during the latter half of the eighteenth century, 
 were being flooded with untrained men, women, 
 and children, often brought by premium from the 
 poor-house. With pathetic bravery, the opera- 
 tives struggled against this competition. No 
 doubt, the Statute of Apprentices was sometimes 
 an obstruction to the improvement of trade pro- 
 cesses. But, so long as it held, " the" country 
 stood possessed of a great system of general 
 training and technical instruction ; great, because 
 whatever were its shortcomings, apprenticeship 
 contributed annually to the wealth of the nation 
 a large number of skilled workmen, and moulded 
 the character of a vast number of English boys, 
 whom it sent out into the world with the ability 
 to keep themselves from want and unemploy- 
 ment." 1 Time was when English life rested 
 upon this base. Every employer had himself had 
 to pass through the seven years' training. It 
 was a conservative regime, unfavourable to the 
 bold innovator, as well as to the unscrupulous 
 and extortionate. Among other social effects, 
 
 1 English Apprenticeship and Child Labour, by 0. Jooelyn Dunlop, 
 p. 223. 
 
30 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. l. 
 
 apprenticeship must have been an important in- 
 fluence in postponing marriage, and, so, in limiting 
 the increase of population. The growth of cottage 
 manufactures shook the guild system ; the herding 
 of workers into public mills as mere machine- 
 tenders destroyed it. Unfortunately, there was 
 no statesmanship equal to the work of adapting 
 old institutions to new needs. A few exceptional 
 craftsmen might foresee the storm that was coming, 
 and migrate into a more fortunate occupation. 
 The mass of them could but cry, with the sad 
 hymn- writer, " change and decay in all around I 
 see," and bear the suffering they could not avoid. 
 The new machinery did not need highly trained 
 hands to work it ; quality either became a negligible 
 matter, or was secured by the perfection of the 
 mechanical process. Apprenticeship continued in a 
 modified form in the trades requiring great manual 
 skill ; elsewhere, until the repeal of the Elizabethan 
 Statute, in 1813, it was too often a cloak for sweat- 
 ing and fraudulent indenture. 
 , .....Xhis^^^'S-theJDirtkdajL-QLIrade-TTnionism. There 
 had long been local friendly societies of ^workmen 
 for sick and funeral benefits, and for the aid 
 of members tramping in search of work. What 
 created Trade Unionism proper was the transforma- 
 tion of associated and regulated into divided and 
 unregulated industry, and therewith the need of 
 some means of maintaining the reward of labour. 
 The average worker had first lost his privileges as 
 a member of a guild, and had then lost his inde- 
 
§ n.] THE GREAT DISRUPTION 31 
 
 pendent position as cottage craftsman, by the loss 
 of his common rights and the impossibility of 
 competing with factory machines. If man was not 
 to be a mere commodity, ever cheapening in price 
 like iron or cotton, he must have some sort of ' 
 defence against a class of capitalist employers who 
 made no pretence to humanitarian scruples. The 
 pioneers were among the West of England woollen 
 workers and the Midland frame-work knitters. 
 Their appeal to the Government was vain ; but 
 every failure made the issue clearer and scattered 
 the spirit of combination. There was a classic 
 struggle in the Glasgow cotton trade. At a cost 
 of £3000, the operatives succeeded in getting a 
 wage scale fixed by the magistrates. The employers 
 refused to accept it, and 40,000 weavers went on 
 strike. The movement was broken by the arrest 
 of the whole Strike Committee, and the imprison- 
 ment of five of the leaders for terms of from five 
 to eighteen months. ^ At length, the greed of 
 employers was reinforced by political alarm ; and, 
 by Acts of 1 799 and 1800, all labour combination 
 was prohibited. "™~ 
 
 The Acts of 1720-25,, .pjccMiLting_cpmMnatioM 
 o f wor kmen, to raise wages (7 Geo. I, c. 13, among 
 journeymen tailors in London ; 12 Geo. I, c. 34, 
 among woollen workers ; 12 Geo. I, c. 35, among 
 brickmakers and tilers) had given a foretaste of the 
 ruthlessness of industrial capitalism. The researches 
 of Prof. Thorold Rogers and others show that, 
 1 Webb, History oj Trade Unionism, chap. i. 
 
32 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. t. 
 
 at that time, the ordinary peasant or artisan 
 could gain no more than a subsistence out of the 
 current wages. By 1750, there was a distinct 
 improvement. Agriculture was still the predomi- 
 nant occupation ; much of the land was in the 
 hands of the people ; and land and domestic 
 industries together offered a citadel of personal 
 independence, an assurance that town artisans 
 would not be generally underbid by country 
 paupers. Rents and prices were low ; the con- 
 dition of the labouring classes was better than at 
 any time in the near past, and better than it 
 to be until quite recent years. | But, while the^ 
 effect of enclosure was to give more employment 
 in fencing, drainage, and building, the second and 
 lasting effect was to reduce the amount of labour 
 needed, and this just when domestic industry was 
 beginning to collapse. At the same tii]^|ihe small 
 farmer was hit by the rapid riS£-Of rents due to the 
 progress of high farming, anra^by a succession of 
 bad seasons. It was not altogether a base material- 
 ism that led the governing class in this emergency 
 to favour manufacturers by repressing labour 
 agitation, and farmers by making bread dear. 
 Economic ignorance was even more rife than greed 
 for selfish gain. Dark clouds lowered on all the seas ; 
 and everything was sacrificed for a full Treasury. 
 War taxes and prices rose together. Thus, it was 
 injthejnost^griesxflislyijinfavourable circurastances^ 
 tha^the_comcidence of rural_ disruption with the 
 collapse of industrial regulation occurred. 
 
§ VII.] THE GEEAT DISRUPTION 33 
 
 VII. The Victims : Speenhamland 
 
 Poverty and riches were manufactured together. 
 Free competition was now the ideal of everyone 
 above " the lower classes," an ideal preached fana- 
 tically, and practised with a cold determination. 
 It was very quickly found that, for many mechanical 
 processes, women and children were as good as 
 men ; and the imprisonment and torture of chil- 
 dren in factories — ^the most characteristic form 
 of criminality in the next generation — ^had become 
 common before the end of the eighteenth century. 
 The adult victims, uneducated, voteless, forbidden 
 to combine peacefully, robbed of the old safeguards, 
 sometimes struck out blindly in retaliation. As early 
 as 1779, a spinning mill of Arkwright's was wrecked. 
 The troops were brought out ; pitched battles were 
 fought. A savage criminal code was strained to its 
 worst ; on one day, fourteen rioters were hanged. 
 Slowly, despair settled down on the countryside. 
 
 Even the last resort of the evicted, the Poor Law, 
 was made an engine of degradation. Its very vir- 
 tues, in the change of time, became vices. In the 
 great legislation completed in 1601, the duty of 
 finding work or sustenance for the very poor had 
 been expressed, necessarily, in the terms of a 
 static society, a life highly localized, and governed 
 by tradition. Poor relief was drawn from local 
 rates, limited to local residents, and administered 
 by the justices of the peace and parish officers. 
 Doles were general ; but the justices could and 
 c 
 
34 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. i. 
 
 did keep down prices, import supplies of corn, 
 buy materials and tools for the destitute to work 
 with, and force farmers and manufacturers, even at 
 a loss, to keep their customary number of hands.^ 
 It was, after the Civil War, a natural development 
 of this system which, by the Act of 1662, declared 
 that a pauper could obtain relief only from the 
 parish where, by forty days' residence (some other 
 conditions were added in later legislation), he had 
 gained a " settlement." It was only when society 
 was falling to pieces, and freedom of movement 
 had become essential for bread-winning, that it 
 could be said : " There is scarce a poor man in 
 England of forty years of age who has not, in some 
 part of his life, felt himself most cruelly oppressed 
 by this ill-contrived law of settlements." ^ 
 
 The fixing of wages by assessment of the 
 justices in quarter-sessions was older still, having 
 been an incidental provision of the Act of Appren- 
 tices of 1563. Certainly, it is not to be supposed 
 that the magistrates, themselves employers, would 
 be at any time too generous in the scales of pay- 
 ment they prBdaimed. All these arrangements — 
 apprenticeship, wages assessment, and poor relief 
 by settlement — are to be regarded as part of a 
 paternal system of governing a stationary society 
 based on common ownership of the land. Poverty 
 was the lot of the masses * ; yet it did not commonly 
 
 1 The Early History of English Poor Law Relief, by E. M. Leonard. 
 
 * Adam Smith : Wealth of Nations, Book I. chap. x. 
 
 * King and Davenant, at the end of the seventeenth century, 
 
§ VII.] THE GREAT DISRUPTION 35 
 
 mean shame and barbarity ; it was greatly softened 
 by custom and religion, and humanized by personal 
 relations. Now, the great landslide had carried 
 away nearly the whole of this structure. Things — 
 money and machines — were in the saddle, and 
 rode mankind. The land had become the land- 
 lords', and the abundance thereof. They were 
 not rich on the scale of their latter-day successors ; 
 for there were few coal-mines, great cities could 
 not yet be laid under tribute, safe and lucrative 
 investments were rare, company directorships and 
 stock-exchange gambling were hardly dreamed of. 
 But they held the substance of political power ; 
 they protected their families by strict settlement 
 and primogeniture, and strengthened them by inter- 
 marriage with wealthy merchants. Ancient duties 
 sank into abeyance ; noblemen, and even the lesser 
 gentry, spent much of their time and money in 
 London or abroad. Estates were property, farming 
 was a business, like any other. The poor man had 
 no property, no business, and no protection. The 
 King and the Privy Council, who once might have 
 helped him, had been pushed into the background 
 by the Cabinet and the Parliament of landlords 
 and merchants. Apprenticeship was going. The 
 gilds were passing away, or losing all sense of 
 their social purpose. Only relief by settlement, 
 
 estimated the number of paupers and beggars at 1,330,000 in a 
 population of 5,500,000. But suck estimates are of little value; 
 and Maoaulay's deduction from them is merely an instance of early 
 Victorian smugness. 
 
36 
 
 MODERN ENGLAliTD [chap. i. 
 
 with a half-forgotten power for assessing wages, re- 
 mained. Settlement, however, meant impossibility 
 of moving in search of the moving work, now 
 largely transferred from the Eastern and Western 
 counties to the North ; or, conversely, the search 
 for work involved the loss of the only claim upon 
 poor relief.^ 
 
 The blackest mark against the name of the 
 younger Pitt is not that he bltmdered in his esti- 
 mate of the power of France, or that he persisted in 
 drinking too much port, but that he never under- 
 stood the condition of his own people, and did not 
 seriously attempt to grapple with the gravest 
 problem of the day. The story goes that, during 
 a visit to Halstead in Essex, he embarrassed his 
 host by descanting with satisfaction on the pros- 
 perity of the people. On the following day, they 
 took a walk in the town ; and the statesman ex- 
 claimed, in astonishment, that he had no conception 
 England could in any part present such a spectacle 
 of misery. After emptying his pockets in alms, 
 he returned to London persuaded that something 
 must be done. This was in 1795, when he had 
 been twelve years in power, when financial diffi- 
 culties were already pressing, when wheat was at 
 108 shDlings, and the King was being received in 
 the streets with cries of " Bread ! " and " Peace ! " 
 Pitt brought in a perfunctory Bill for the formation 
 
 1 In 1795 some gross abuses of the law of settlement were abolished, 
 the removal of sick persons being forbidden, and the remoyal of 
 any persons until they had actually become chargeable to the rates. 
 
§ VII.] THE GREAT DISRUPTION 37 
 
 of " schools of industry," and the supply of cows 
 to the remaining small farmers and commoners. 
 The meastire was ridiculed, and withdrawn. 
 
 But something must be done. The first half of 
 the eighteenth century had shown the possibilities 
 of a severe administration of the Poor Law. Relief 
 could be refused if applicants would not go into 
 the workhouse, where there was one. Contractors 
 were engaged to farm out the relief, indoor and 
 outdoor. In many parishes the number of cottages 
 was reduced to a minimum so that as few persons 
 as possible might become chargeable on the rates. 
 " There was a regular crusade against the half- 
 vagrant, half-pauper class that subsisted on the 
 commons ; and the tendency of the authorities 
 was to treat their poverty as a crime." ^ Repres- 
 sion, however, though it may disperse, does not 
 cure social disease ; and this disease of poverty 
 was steadily growing. The administrative reaction 
 centring in Gilbert's Act of 1782, and in what came 
 to be known as the S pgenhamland policv, was not 
 mainly, as has sometimes been suggested, due to 
 sentimentality, but grew out of the necessities of , 
 the case, in the absence of truer remedies. Gilbert's 
 Act enabled the parishes which adopted it to form 
 themselves into unions for the building of work- 
 houses ; the church-wardens and overseers were 
 now only to raise rates, while guardians and jus- 
 tices of the peace directed the work of relief. The 
 Act practically removed the workhouse test, and 
 
 ' Cunningham, p. 578. 
 
38 MODERN ENGLAND [csap. t. 
 
 encouraged able-bodied men to seek work by promis- 
 ing tojjsupplement their wages by parish allowances. 
 Ten years later, with the problem becoming more 
 and more acute — the annual cost of relief rose in 
 this decade from a million and a half to two mil- 
 lion pounds — a feeling had grown up throughout 
 Southern England in favour of a revival of the 
 practice of fixing wages judicially in proportion to 
 the price of corn. The Suffolk justices petitioned 
 Parliament for legislation in this sense ; but all 
 authoritative opinion was hostile. Samuel Whit- 
 bread, a Radical before Radicalism was possible, 
 introduced a Minimum Wage Bill, but to no 
 purpose. We have seen how Pitt's tardy and inade- 
 quate proposal failed. Fox was more sympathetic, 
 but was powerless. Malthus scolded the " gentle- 
 men and clergymen " who countenanced what he 
 thought a revolutionary ideal. Burke declared 
 that wages must be left to find their level, and 
 that " the Squires of Norfolk had dined when 
 they gave it as their opinion that the rate of 
 wages might, or ought to, rise with the market of 
 provisions." 
 
 For almost the last time in English life, the 
 country gentlemen took it into their own hands to 
 work a great social change. Speenhamland, near 
 Newbury, now long sunk into insignificanceTwas then 
 a busy point on the Southampton, Bath,"and Ox- 
 ford coach routes. More than forty coaches passed 
 through it daily ; passengers broke their journey 
 at its prosperous hostelries ; and in 1802 a theatre 
 
§ VII.] THE GREAT DISRUPTION 39 
 
 was built for their pleasure. It was at the Pehcan 
 feSc^f which Quinn said it might well be so called 
 "from its enormous bill" — ^that the Berkshire 
 Magistrates held their famous meeting, on May 
 6th, 1795. They advised the farmers to increase 
 labourers' wages in proportion to food prices, and, 
 failing this, resolved themselves to make allowances 
 out of the rates in aid of wages upon a regular 
 scale in like proportion, namely, " when the gallon 
 loaf of seconds flour, weighing 8 Bbs. 11 oz., shall 
 cost Is., then every poor and industrious man shall 
 have for his own support 3s. weekly, either pro- 
 cured by his own or his family's labour, or an 
 allowance from the poor-rates, and for the support 
 of his wife and every other of his family Is. 6d. 
 When the gallon loaf shall cost Is. 6d., then every 
 poor and industrious man shall have 4s, weekly 
 for his own support, and Is. lOd. for the support 
 of every other of his family. And so in proportion 
 as the price of bread rises or falls, (that is to say) 
 3d. to the man and Id. to every other of the family 
 on every Id. which the loaf rises above Is." The 
 example was rapidly accepted; and, in the fol- 
 lowing year, it was partly endorsed by an extension 
 of Gilbert's Act enabling all parishes to abolish 
 the workhouse test, and to give out-relief to the 
 able-bodied. 
 
 Whether this wholesale imposition of pauperism 
 on Southern England was actuated more by mis- 
 guided pity, by fear of riot and rick-burning, or by 
 desire to evade the insistent demand of the labourers 
 
40 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. i. 
 
 for a minimum wage,i it may never be possible to 
 determine. TojTibee, who thought the problem 
 " might have been solved by common justice in 
 the matter of enclosures," calls it " Tory Socialism." 
 If they have any meaning, the words should imply 
 a serious political idea. There was deliberation 
 enough afterwards, as we shall see ; but we may be 
 sure it was crude impulse; rather than political 
 reasoning, that ruled the deliberations at the Peli- 
 can Inn. Probably the magistrates could not now 
 have enforced on employers a scale of wages, even 
 if they had wished to do so ; and the effort would 
 have had little support at Westminster. The 
 emergency, however, was grave ; something must 
 be done at once. That the " dining squires " 
 actually depressed the wages they claimed to 
 desire to raise, that they created poverty more 
 than any Poor Law could relieve, and deepened 
 the degradation which the revolution in agriculture 
 and manufacture had begun, we shall presently 
 show. But their blunders do not justify the scoffs 
 of Burke, the neglect of Pitt, or the pseudo-scientific 
 scorn of the laisser-faire economists. Panic, in 
 retrospect, is always a wretched spectacle ; and it 
 is difficult now to do justice to the Ministers who 
 suspended Habeas Corpus in 1794 and crushed 
 the political societies, or to the judges who sent 
 Palmer, Muir, and other obscure idealists to Botany 
 
 ' There Is a particularly interesting manifesto by labourers of 
 Heacham and two other Norfolk parishes demanding a Wage scale 
 based upon prices. The attempt to organize a movement of this 
 character broke upon the anti-combination laws. ( 
 
§ vii.] THE GREAT DISRUPTION 41 
 
 Bay. To how small a class these fears were limited 
 was shown by their one great failure, the abortive 
 prosecution of Holcroft, Hardy, and Home Tooke. 
 Government should be, above all, the art of social 
 adjustment. Much as may be allowed for the anx- 
 ieties of the external crisis on which the nineteenth 
 century dawned, it must be said that, even in the 
 direst emergency, external defence is but one-half 
 of the duty of statesmanship, and that, in a just 
 view, neglect of defence would be no more unpardon- 
 able than neglect of domestic welfare by those who 
 hold the seats of power. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 FROM THE FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO, 
 
 1801-1820 
 I. The People are Numbered 
 
 For once, the opening of a century marks a real 
 point in the development of a people, for it was in 
 1801 that the first British Census was taken. In 
 ancient times, social unity was of a quite different 
 kind, and was attained by quite different means, 
 from those of the modern world. It implied 
 efficient control of obedient masses of subjects by 
 a governing class small enough for all its parts to 
 be familiarly acquainted ; when this personal inti- 
 macy broke down, the State itself was in danger 
 of breaking down. In the Middle Ages, the bond 
 of society was found in local landownership, and 
 its mutual obligations. Everybody knew every- 
 body else in the village ; the King was far away, 
 only a greater landowner ; the Holy Empire was a 
 splendid myth, a ritual, an ideal, momentarily made 
 fact by some rare superman. The greater dimen- 
 sions, complexity, and vigour of modern life have 
 called into being, where geographical and historical 
 circumstances are favourable, a new form of social 
 union, the nation — a body of people so large that 
 
§ I.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 43 
 
 personal acquaintance even between all the impor- 
 tant persons is impossible, and objective knowledge 
 must be called in as an agent of conunon feeling. 
 
 The workman no longer sees his master ; the 
 spinner does not know the weaver ; the housewife 
 may not even know when the grain is sown and 
 garnered. The manufacturer can no longer count 
 his own goods, there must be a more or less elabo- 
 rate " book-keeping " ; the pack-horse has gone to 
 grass ; the merchant does not cross the ocean, 
 but depends on the reports of travellers and foreign 
 agents. The Minister must take the word of his 
 assistants, who must take the word of the county 
 officers, who, in turn, must take the word of the 
 justices and overseers of the parish. The Bishop 
 has ceased to be a missionary ; he is an adminis- 
 trator, the head of a hierarchy. Culture no longer 
 depends upon the aggregation of students in a 
 imiversity, but is every man's heritage in a printed 
 book. Government, trade, education, all necessary 
 to the growth of national life, must all now depend 
 upon impersonal agencies ; and the basis of this 
 impersonal relationship is exhibited in the Census. 
 
 It is the tacit acknowledgment that every human 
 being counts, that there is this much of divine in 
 human government — ^that it cannot allow the mean- 
 est being bom to appear or disappear without 
 the tribute of a modest record. The men who 
 first make it do not realize all its significance ; 
 they are chiefly troubled by this idea of Mr Malthus 
 that there are too many people for decency, or 
 
44 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ii. 
 
 by the rival idea that there are too few people to 
 cope with Napoleon. It would, indeed, be a poor 
 invention all whose uses appeared at first sight. 
 Scoffers say that statistics reduce a man to a 
 cypher ; let it be admitted that there is unavoid- 
 able loss in the effort to comprehend a complex 
 group of facts by means of an outline expressing 
 an average. There is infinite possibility of their 
 misuse ; on the other hand, statistics, truly seen, 
 give man a new value, for, here at least, all 
 are fellows, and all are equal. Implicit in this 
 bureaucratic invention of the Census was the very 
 unbureaucratic idea, slowly and painfully to be 
 realized, that every child born on British soil has 
 a claim upon the nation, and must in turn take, 
 in proportion to his ability, a share of that burden, 
 with all the rights attaching to it. It is idle to 
 lament the passing of the city-republic and the 
 village-community. They have passed ; and the 
 essential thing is to procure a corresponding ex- 
 tension of the purview of the State and the mental 
 horizon of the citizen. Personal acquaintance 
 within a small radius continues, too often in the 
 form of prejudice, and is yet influential ; casual 
 observation is encouraged to cocksureness by the 
 example of the newspaper. At such a juncture, 
 a spectacled gentleman in an obscure office may 
 perform an invaluable function. What is unique in 
 Smith, Brown, and Robinson is nothing to him ; but 
 he shows us what is common to them. For all that 
 is beyond individuality, that is, for all the routine 
 
§ I.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 45 
 
 of social life, he supplies a test of regularity and 
 accuracy, a means to justice. Many years had to 
 pass ere the problems of Government could be strictly 
 measurable ; but a beginning was made. And as the 
 art of counting progressed, every branch of science re- 
 ceived a stimulus.! Political economy was re-born ; 
 the science of public health was created ; in future, 
 history must be written with not a few respectable 
 protagonists only, but the whole people, in view. 
 
 All honour being given to John Rickman, assis- 
 tant-clerk of the House of Commons, who managed 
 the first three Censuses, it must be said that only 
 a very imperfect beginning was made in 1801. Ire- 
 land, although just united to Great Britain, was not 
 included till 1821. The enumeration was carried 
 out in Scotland by the parish schoolmasters, in 
 England by the parish overseers ; the prodigality 
 of the poor relief in this unhappy period alone 
 gave the figures the rough accuracy they possess. 
 A feeble attempt to count occupations yielded 
 results of little value ; it was not till 1831 that 
 employments were recorded on a considerable 
 scale, and even then the classifications were very 
 imperfect. In 1821, a record of ages was taken for 
 the whole kingdom ; in 1841 figures of marriages 
 
 1 A. L. Bowley, Elementary Statistics : " The whole doctrine of 
 evolution and heredity rests in reality on a statistical basis." The 
 Statistical Department of the Board of Trade was founded in 1832, 
 the Manchester Statistical Society in 1833, the Royal Statistical 
 Society in 1834, and the Registrar-General's Office in 1836. But 
 it is significant that in 1901, in publishing Ma Elements, Mr Bowley 
 had to observe : " There seems to be no text-book in English dealing 
 directly and completely with the common method of statistics." 
 
46 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ii. 
 
 and deaths were also available, and a firm basis 
 for future calculations was laid by the working of 
 the registration machinery. 
 
 The population of Great Britain in 1801 was 
 10,942,000. Ireland would give rather more than 
 five millions, making about sixteen millions for 
 the United Kingdom. By way of comparison, it 
 may be said that the population of France (within 
 its old frontiers) was then about 26| miUions, 
 and that of the United States (free whites only) 
 about 6^ millions. The British people were in- 
 creasing at a very rapid rate ^ ; that much is certain, 
 though exactly how rapid a rate, or how constituted 
 — whether chiefly by rise of births, or by fall of 
 deaths, or by immigration — cannot be accurately 
 determined. There are reasons for thinking that, 
 while there must have been a slight fall of the 
 death-rate, due to glimmerings of education and 
 sanitation, more varied food, and better clothes, 
 at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the 
 nineteenth centuries, there was probably a rise, 
 more marked than the contemporary estimates 
 show, in the birth-rate, due to the destruction of 
 the old static life, the demoralizing effect of the 
 poor-law, and the temptations of child employment. 
 The redistribution is even more remarkable than 
 the increase of population. London continued to 
 hold her own pre-eminence in the national life ; 
 otherwise, there was nothing to compare with 
 the rise of the industrial districts of the North. 
 • Seo Appendix I. 
 
§ I.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 47 
 
 In 1820, Lancashire had a milhon people, and 
 the West Riding of Yorkshire over three-quarters 
 of a million. Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, 
 and Liverpool exceeded 130,000, and Birmingham 
 100,000. Bristol, Leeds, Sheffield, Wolverhampton, 
 Newcastle, Nottingham, and Bradford followed. 
 It will be noticed that, in this list of thirteen cities, 
 there are five great ports, three of which faced, not 
 the old Continent, but Ireland and the New World. 
 Ireland occupied the most lamentable place in 
 the family picture. For centuries subjected to 
 every variety of oppression, her agriculture drained 
 to feed absentee landlords, her industries delibe- 
 rately crippled to appease British jealousy, the 
 Parliamentary independence conceded in alarm in 
 1782 had now been withdrawn, by a procedure 
 shockingly compounded of corruption and naked 
 force. The break-up of the clannish organization 
 in the Highlands after the '45 had involved misery, 
 though on no such scale ; but, while Scotland and 
 England suffered from the impersonal forces of 
 social evolution, and in due time reaped large 
 reward from the change, Ireland was the victim 
 of sheer human hatred and tyranny. The results 
 are marked deeply upon the history of the United 
 Kingdom throughout the century. In 1821 the 
 population of Ireland was 6,801,800 (more than 
 half as large as that of England and Wales, and 
 over three times as large as that of Scotland). For 
 twenty years after the Union, she paid for her own 
 costs of gbvemment and debt (the latter rose from 
 
48 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. n. 
 
 2 1 millions in 1793 to 113 millions in 1817), and 
 two-fifths of the general expenses of the United 
 Kingdom. Between two dreadful famines in 1817 
 and 1847 — on the latter occasion, a million people 
 died of starvation — ^there were many lean years. 
 Nevertheless, the population increased up to the 
 time of the Potato Famine. The Census of 1851 
 first showed a decline ; and this has continued 
 steadily to the present day. The depopulation of 
 Ireland, its constant poverty and intermittent 
 rebelliousness, its melancholy share in a stream of 
 emigration which carried overseas eleven million 
 souls in sixty years, enriching American life while 
 it was filling English slums, — all this constitutes a 
 tragic factor in our subject to which no sort of 
 justice can be done here, but which must by no 
 means be overlooked. 
 
 II. In the Shadow of War 
 
 There is one occupation of the British people 
 during the first fifteen years of the century which 
 must take precedence of others in our consideration, 
 not that it engaged the largest number of any, 
 but because it and its results governed and over- 
 shadowed all other natural activities. At the 
 opening of the great war, in 1793, the army and 
 navy counted together scarcely a hundred thousand 
 men ; before its close, England was maintaining 
 nearly a million men under arms, probably a fifth 
 of the entire adult male population, and was carry- 
 ing a burden of expenditure and debt for which 
 
§ II.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 49 
 
 previous history could afford no parallel. We 
 strike into the story of this titanic struggle at the 
 lucid interval when the Peace of Amiens was 
 negotiated, when the festival of the guillotine was 
 a fading memory, and it seemed possible that 
 First Consul Bonaparte might rest content with 
 the laurels of Marengo. 
 
 People prayed it might be, prayed with all the 
 piety of exhaustion. The English are slow pupils, 
 astonishingly loyal to incompetent masters. The 
 Corresponding Societies' Act of 1800, the last of a 
 series of repressive measures, had completed the 
 suspension of all constitutional guarantees of 
 personal liberty ; and this was not the most in- 
 credible of the things the people had undergone 
 at the hands of William Pitt and his sovereign. 
 When these two fell out over Catholic Emancipation, 
 the half-mad King obstinately refusing to fulfil 
 the pledge of honour to the Irish by which the 
 Union had been obtained, Addington, an admitted 
 second-rater, was dumbly accepted. Nobody cared 
 about the Union, except those who had been paid 
 to vote it ; and nobody could pretend to care 
 much for the honour of a Ministry and a Parliament 
 built upon corruption and privilege, and now 
 exercising a quite arbitrary power. The cession 
 of all the conquests of the war (except Trinidad 
 and Ceylon) went for nothing : " The Cape of 
 Good Hope ! " — we may imagine one of the Spital- 
 fields weavers exclaiming — " a pretty name, but 
 give me a loaf of bread ! " Napoleon had not yet 
 
 D 
 
50 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ii. 
 
 become the grand obsession of Europe. Nelson's 
 exploits at Aboukir Bay and Copenhagen had 
 wiped out the unhappy memory of the Nore and 
 Spithead mutinies ; and the raft-lumber at Boul- 
 ogne, while it kept a good many fussy persons 
 occupied on the South Coast, could not produce 
 a real national alarm. There is an anaemic sort 
 of common sense in such a time ; but we must not 
 look for active political intelligence. Hunger kills 
 the political spirit, and even pales the light of 
 patriotism. The best we can say is that, despe- 
 rately desiring peace, London would not gag the 
 scribblers and caricaturists who provoked the 
 Dictator of Paris to such strange tantrums. 
 
 Pitt, in his retirement, observed complacently 
 that Jacobinism in England was checked. No one 
 had a better right to flatter himself on this result 
 than the man who had five times raised the taxes 
 on spirits and tea, who had taxed glass till the 
 windows were built up, who had taxed sugar and 
 salt, timber, bricks, tiles, stone, and slate, hats and 
 hair-powder, sea-insurance and convoys, horses 
 and dogs, parcels by coach and canal, clocks and 
 watches, newspapers and advertisements, houses 
 and the servants in them, and who had failed only 
 in his efforts to tax gloves and mittens, the regis- 
 tration of births and marriages, and the modest 
 handmaiden of the middle-class. Never have the 
 possibilities of tax-gathering been so luridly illus- 
 trated. " The school-boy whips his taxed top " — 
 but we need not complete the hackneyed quotation 
 
§ n] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 51 
 
 of Sydney Smith's satire. The only merit of this 
 finance was that it hit everybody ; and Pitt's 
 progressive income-tax covers a multitude^of sins. 
 Only a measure of equality in sacrifice was wanting. 
 The Earl of Warwick told his fellow Peers that 
 farmei'S were making 200 per cent, profit, that some 
 of them " could afford to play guinea whist, and 
 were not contented with drinking wine only, but 
 even mixed brandy with it." This sounds spiteful. 
 It is certain, however, that the masses of the people 
 had endured to the last point. In January 1801, 
 after two bad harvests, wheat was at 187s. a 
 quarter, and the use of unmixed wheat flour was 
 forbidden. In March, it reached 153s. In course 
 of debates at Westminster which often bordered 
 upon the silly, and even the frivolous, Pitt argued 
 that " war of itself had no evident or necessary 
 connection with the dearness of provisions " ; to 
 which Sheridan replied that the 800,000 men in the 
 army and navy were consuming four or five times 
 as much as so many men in time of peace, and that, 
 if war were not the cause of high prices, then the 
 outlook was, indeed, deplorable. 
 
 After the proclamation of the preliminaiies of 
 peace, in fact, the price of wheat fell till it reached 
 68s. in December. Could there be better reason 
 for fire-works in Cheapside, triangles of tallow 
 candles in the windows of Fleet Street, and illumi- 
 nated pictures of Napoleon and George III in 
 Pall Mall ? There had been food riots of a half- 
 heai>ted kind in Birmingham, Nottingham, Coventry, 
 
52 MODERN ENGLAND [chai-. it. 
 
 Norwich, Sheffield, and Worcester— towns where 
 machinery was taking away more work than it 
 gave. Whether from ancient prejudice, or by 
 design of men who knew better, these disturbances 
 were nearly always directed against " forestallers 
 and regrators " — exponents of the art, once a crime, 
 now a virtue,! of buying cheap and selling dear. 
 Gangs of roughs had broken windows in Mark 
 Lane and the Borough, and had been easily dispersed 
 (there being still no nearer approach to a Metro- 
 politan Police than the watchmen and the Bow 
 Street runners) by parties of Volunteers. 
 
 Is there a moderation even in British hooligan- 
 ism ? Or were the hungry cowed by thought of 
 the frightful punishments which then took the 
 place of a good police and a just bench ? In no 
 other country, according to that chivalric and far- 
 sighted lawyer. Sir Samuel Romilly, were there so 
 many capital offences ; they numbered over two 
 hundred varieties, including cutting down young 
 trees, shooting rabbits, sheap-stealing, damaging 
 Westminster Bridge, appearing disguised on a 
 public road, and stealing property valued at five 
 shillings. Only, perhaps, a quarter of such 
 sentences were carried out ; but intimidation was 
 openly held to be the best way of preventing 
 crime, and the bench of Bishops was agreed in 
 
 " It is, of course, plain that whatever tends to the husbanding 
 of resources and to the equalization of prices is really advantageous, 
 and that the corn factors, in carrying out the law of supply and 
 demand, were a most useful set of men " (Bright's History of England, 
 iii. 1229). 
 
§ II.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 53 
 
 rejecting the answer that a mild but certain punish- 
 ment would be more effective. ^ Between 1805 and 
 1818, there were more than two hundred executions 
 for forgery alone. ^ Of the horrors of transporta- 
 tion and of incarceration in gaols which were 
 rightly called universities of crime, of the prevalence 
 of duelling and brutal sports, it is not necessary 
 to speak here. The reminder will suffice that we 
 are considering a time when violence and dishon- 
 esty were common not only in the lowest, but in 
 all levels of society. At the bottom, they were 
 the fruits of poverty and ignorance ; and there is 
 evidence that they increased rapidly during the 
 war, and slowly for some time afterward. 
 
 After a year and a half of retrenchment and 
 resumed trade with France, Addington replied to 
 Napoleon's quarrelsome messages with a declara- 
 tion of war, in May 1803 ; and there was no more 
 peace till Waterloo. The income-tax was reim- 
 posed at 5 per cent., with exemption up to £60, and 
 abatement to £150. Large bodies of Volunteers 
 were formed ; and Robert Emmet's boyish attempt 
 at " insurrection " in Dublin divided with the 
 Boulogne camp the attention of the scaremon- 
 gers. In May 1804, Napoleon declared himself 
 Emperor, and Pitt was recalled to office. A fifth 
 addition was made to the wine duties ; the port 
 duties were increased by 12j per cent. On May 
 24th, William Cobbett was tried, found guilty of 
 
 1 Smart : Economic Annals, 1801-20, pp. 227-31. 
 * Melville Lee : History of Police in England, p. 201. 
 
54 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ii. 
 
 libelling members of the Irish Government, and 
 fined £500. In June, the abolition of the slave-trade 
 was voted by the Commons, but negatived in the 
 Upper House. Pitt's last budget, in 1805, raised 
 the income-tax to 6| per cent., added 2| per cent, 
 to the port duties, and put new burdens on bricks, 
 glass, coffee, cider, vinegar, and salt. In the 
 autunm, Napoleon abandoned the Channel project ; 
 and on October 21st the victory of Trafalgar, at the 
 cost of Nelson's life, finally secured the safety of 
 England. Six weeks later, Austerlitz gave Napoleon 
 a supremacy on land equal to that of his stoutest 
 enemy at sea. Pitt died, broken-hearted over the 
 collapse of his Third Coalition, on January 23rd, 
 1806, only forty-seven years of age. 
 
 The Grenville-Fox " Broad-bottomed " Ministry 
 brought the income-tax up to 10 per cent., exemp- 
 tions being now allowed only on earned incomes. 
 All teas were taxed to 96 per cent, of the price; 
 and port duties were raised for the fifth time, by 8| 
 per cent. On the other hand, the free importation 
 of Irish grain was at last allowed. In September, 
 Fox died ; and a period of parliamentary mediocrities 
 began. After completing the humiliation of Prussia 
 at Jena, Napoleon proceeded to issue the " Berlin 
 decrees " forbidding trade with England, and 
 forfeiting all British property on the Continent. 
 The year 1807 opened with the British reply — 
 the " Orders in Council " forbidding trade with 
 France and her conquered lands, and further 
 restricting the rights of neutral powers. Napoleon's 
 
§ n.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 55 
 
 action provoked smuggling everywhere, to the 
 advantage of England, which had a practical 
 monopoly of sea traffic, and stimulated patriotic 
 resistance, especially in Spain and Germany. The 
 Orders in Council gradually led to war with the 
 United States, and confirmed the aggressive policy 
 of Great Britain with regard to private property 
 in naval war, which is maintained with modifica- 
 tions to this day. 
 
 The effect of the double blockade of Europe 
 upon British commerce was less marked than might 
 have been expected. The declared value of exports 
 had risen from 36 millions in 1800 to nearly 
 40 millions in 1807 ; it fell to 36-3 millions in 
 1809. Imports also fell by about 2 millions. 
 On March 25th, 1807, the gallant efforts of Wil- 
 berforce, Clarkson, and Zachary Macaulay were 
 rewarded by the vote abolishing the slave trade. 
 No ship was to clear from any port in the British 
 dominions with slaves on board after May 1st, 
 and no slave was to be landed in the Colonies after 
 March 1808. It is the one clearly glorious mark 
 upon an unhappy and inglorious time, and shines 
 the more for the blackness of the surrounding 
 distresses. The spirit of the nation had sunk 
 so low that the King was allowed to dismiss the 
 Ministry in order to prevent a measure of justice 
 being done to Irish Catholic officers in the army. 
 Soon afterwards, George became permanently in- 
 sane. Lancashire was suffering bitterly, with 60,000 
 looms idle, and the mobs were out in Rochdale 
 
56 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ii. 
 
 and Manchester. The small possibilities of new 
 revenue were now effected chiefly by " consoli- 
 dation " of existing taxes. Attempts to bring 
 the iron and cotton trades under tribute failed 
 before an unexpected resistance. 
 
 In 1808 began the six years' war in aid of the 
 independence of Spain and Portugal, a continual 
 drain of life to be added to the continual drain of 
 money. The ballot filled the ranks of the militia, 
 and bounties, rising as high as £60, procured a 
 plentiful enlistment thence into the regular army ; 
 while the navy was supplied by the press-gang, 
 the terror of every port. The officership of the 
 army was wholly determined by purchase or parlia- 
 mentary patronage. Wellington himself was no 
 exception to the rule ; "he was enabled to move 
 up from ensign on March 7th, 1787, to lieutenant- 
 colonel in September 1793, five steps in seven 
 years, during which he had been moved through as 
 many regiments — ^two of horse and five of foot. 
 He was only nineteen months a captain, and six 
 months a major ; and he had seen no war service 
 whatever when he sailed for Flanders in command 
 of the 23rd at the age of 23. . . . Contrast 
 with such promotion that of the poor and friend- 
 less officer who, after 25 years of service, six 
 Peninsular campaigns, and two wounds, found 
 himself still a captain at the age of 43." i 
 In an examination of the courts - martial of 
 the war. Professor Oman finds that the two 
 
 ' C. W. C. Oman : Wellington's Army, pp. 199. 
 
§ 11.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 57 
 
 commonest offences were desertion and plundering 
 of the peasantry. There were very few charges 
 of cowardice. Whether the savagery of the rank 
 and file made the lash necessary, or the lash made 
 savages of men upon whom wrong after wrong 
 had been perpetrated, has often been discussed. 
 Probably there is an element of truth on either 
 side. Virtues and vices are strangely distributed. 
 Napoleon was remorseless in theft and extor- 
 tion ; but the British use of the whip was regarded 
 in the French army as an atrocious and incom- 
 prehensible thing. It was apparently so well 
 understood in England that a country editor who 
 contrasted the British and the French practice was 
 sent to prison for eighteen months. A respectable 
 Guardsman at the age of sixty, on being trans- 
 ferred into the battalion at the Tower, received 
 300 lashes for being absent for a day. In 
 July 1809, there was a mutiny among the militia 
 at Ely. German cavalry were brought in to sup- 
 press them ; and the ringleaders were sentenced 
 to 500 lashes each. Wm. Cobbett, for denouncing 
 this barbarity, was sent to Newgate for two years, 
 and fined a thousand pounds. Sentences of 500 
 lashes were common ; and, in 1811, there was a 
 sentence of a thousand lashes, of which 750 were 
 actually inflicted. Palmerston, as Secretary at 
 War, resisted a proposal to hmit the number to 
 a hundred ; and the motion was rejected without 
 a division. 
 
 Crime and poverty were, in fact, as typical a 
 
58 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ii. 
 
 manufacture in the England of a century ago as 
 iron and cotton. Undoubtedly, the Peninsular 
 army contained many criminals ; and of the Irish 
 who composed a fourth or a fifth of every corps 
 many were drunken and quarrelsome. " It was 
 this scum," says Professor Oman, " a small pro- 
 portion of the whole, but always swimming to the 
 top when there was mischief to be done — ^peasants 
 to be plundered, or churches to be pillaged — ^that 
 provided the subject-matter for courts-martial. 
 Officers of undoubted humanity, and men in the 
 ranks who knew what they were talking about, 
 unite in stating that there was a residuum in the 
 Peninsular Army which could only be governed 
 by the lash. This small percentage of irreconcil- 
 ables provided the nucleus around which misconduct 
 sometimes grew to a great scale in moments of 
 special privation or temptation. In abominable 
 orgies like the sack of Badajoz, or the lesser but 
 still disgraceful riots of Ciudad Rodrigo and San 
 Sebastian, it was the criminals who started the 
 game, but the drunkards — a far more numerous 
 class — ^who took it up." ^ 
 
 Sir John Moore's retreat to Coruna and the 
 disastrous expedition to Walcheren in 1809 repre- 
 sent the lowest ebb of British military power. But 
 Wellington was now teaching his rowdies the art 
 of standing firm, in which they were to triumph 
 at Hougoumont ; while Napoleon was embroiling 
 himself in the fatal adventure that ended in the 
 
 ^ C. W. C. Oman: WelUngton's Army, pp. 212-13. 
 
§ II.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 59 
 
 retreat from Moscow and the dibdcle of Leipzic. 
 We may note in passing that a Bill was passed 
 in 1812 for the relief of insolvent debtors, and 
 that, during the next thirteen years, no less than 
 fifty thousand of these unfortunates were released 
 from prison. In the following year, British India, 
 the extent of which had been greatly enlarged by 
 Wellesley's conquests, was thrown open to all 
 traders. These are the years of the Luddite riots, 
 of bad crops and famine prices, of collapse in 
 foreign trade, and heavy depreciation of the 
 currency. The machine-breaking mania recurred 
 among the distressed Nottingham hosiery weavers 
 in November 1811, and spread rapidly. Unlike 
 the Captain Boycott of later fame, the Captain 
 Ludd who was supposed to organize the outrages 
 appears to have been a mythical personage. 
 Nineteen hundred soldiers were brought into 
 Nottingham ; but the disturbances continued for 
 two years here and in the neighbouring counties, 
 and were renewed in 1816. 
 
 It was fitly given to Lord Byron, in a singularly 
 fine maiden speech in the Upper House, on the 
 Coercion Act of January 1812 (the year of Childe 
 Harold), to anticipate the judgment of history on 
 these events. " To enter into details of the riots," 
 he said, " would be superfluous. The House is 
 already aware that every outrage short of actual 
 bloodshed has been perpetrated. During the 
 short time I recently passed in Nottinghajnshke, 
 not twelve hours elapsed without some fresh act 
 
60 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ii. 
 
 of violence. But, while these outrages must be 
 admitted to exist to an alarming extent, it cannot 
 be denied that they have arisen from circumstances 
 of the most unparalleled distress. When we are 
 told that these men are leagued together for the 
 destruction not only of their own comfort, but of 
 their very means of existence, can we forget that 
 it is the bitter policy, the destructive warfare, of 
 the last eighteen years which has destroyed their 
 comfort, your comfort, all men's comfort, that 
 policy which, originating with ' great statesmen now 
 no more,' has survived the dead, to become a curse 
 on the living unto the third and fourth genera- 
 tion ? ... At present the country suffers from 
 the double infliction of a useless military and a 
 starving population. You call these men a mob, 
 desperate, dangerous, and ignorant, and seem to 
 think the only way to quiet it is to lop off a few 
 of its superfluous heads. But even a mob may 
 be better reduced to reason by a mixture of con- 
 ciliation and firmness than by additional irritation 
 and redoubled penalties. Are you aware of our 
 obligations to a mob ? It is the mob which labour 
 in your fields and serve in your houses, that man 
 your navy and recruit your army, that have enabled 
 you to defy all the world, and can also defy you 
 when neglect and calamity have driven them to 
 despair. . . . Never under the most despotic of 
 infidel governments did I behold such squalid 
 wretchedness as I have seen since my return in 
 the very heart of a Christian country. How will 
 
§ n.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 61 
 
 you carry this Bill into effect ? Can you commit 
 a whole country to their own prisons ? . . . But 
 suppose one of these men, as I have seen them, 
 meagre with famine, sullen with despair, careless 
 of a life which your lordships value at something 
 less than the price of a stocking-frame, suppose 
 this man, torn from the children for whom he is 
 unable to procure bread, dragged into court, to 
 be tried for this new offence by this new law, still 
 there are two things wanting to convict and con- 
 demn him, and these are, in my opinion, twelve 
 butchers for a jury, and a Jeffreys for a judge." 
 
 Never, perhaps, before or since, has the voice 
 of the commonalty been echoed with such un- 
 mitigated daring in the sanctum of privilege* 
 The general economic crisis was reflected in a fall 
 in imports, in 1811, of nearly 13 millions, and in 
 exports of a rather larger sum. The depreciation 
 of the currency had been an aggravation of every 
 other burden since the suspension of cash payments 
 by the Bank of England in 1797. In 1801 the 
 average value per cent, was £91, 12s. 4d. ; in 1803, 
 £97, 6s. lOd. ; in 1810 it was down to £86, 10s. 6d. ; 
 in 1812, to £79, 5s. 3d. ; and in 1814 the lowest 
 point was reached, a hundred pounds nominal 
 being worth only £74, 17s. 6d., a depreciation of 
 more than a quarter. Under the Resumption Act 
 of 1819, the Bank recommenced giving coin for 
 notes in May 1821, and the depreciation disappeared. 
 
 On April 3rd, 1814, the Emperor abdicated ; 
 and there was nearly a year's truce. Dui'ing this 
 
62 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ii. 
 
 interval, the Treaty of Ghent closed the discredit- 
 able war with the United States, and closed it 
 to such good purpose that, for a century, peace 
 has continued between these cousin-nations, and 
 the safety of three thousand miles of unguarded 
 Canadian frontier has shown the possibility of 
 disarmament. During the last years of the French 
 war, with expenditure at £6 per head of population, 
 no great volume of new revenue could be obtained ; 
 save for fresh taxes on leather, glass, and tobacco 
 in 1812, and a sixth general increase of the port 
 duties by 25 per cent, in the following year, there 
 was nothing for it but to borrow, and borrow again. 
 In 1815, imposts were placed on various classes of 
 excise traders, on brewers and soap-makers, on 
 gold and silver plate, newspapers (the tax was now 
 4d. a copy), bills, and deeds. In June, the news 
 of Waterloo raised hopes soon to be damped; 
 and it became possible to close the accoimts of the 
 war, and to reflect upon them. 
 
 The first item of such an account should be the 
 toll of lives lost or maimed ; but no trustworthy 
 estimate exists under this head. Unlike human 
 bodies and souls, golden sovereigns are made to 
 be counted. In 1792, the national debt of Great 
 Britain was 237 millions ; in 1815, the debt of 
 the United Kingdom was 860 millions. " The 
 Great War proved more costly to us than all our 
 preceding wars taken together. The cost of the 
 war of the Spanish Succession had been 50 millions, 
 and that of the war of the Right of Search, 43. 
 
§ II.] riRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 63 
 
 The Seven Years' War cost us 82, and the war 
 of American Independence, 97. The cost of those 
 wars, taken together, was, therefore, 272 millions. 
 But the Great War cost us 831 millions." i Of 
 this sum, 68 millions had gone in subsidies and 
 gifts to foreign powers. Of the total cost, 622 
 millions were added to the national debt, and 
 209 millions paid out of current resources. The 
 figures for 1815 will serve to show how the latter 
 sum had been raised. In this year, the revenue 
 from taxes amounted to 74| millions (32 millions 
 being required for interest on the debt). Of this, 
 ej millions were Ireland's contribution ; 25| mil- 
 lions came from direct taxation in Great Britain 
 (including 14^ millions of income-tax, and 6| 
 millions from houses, servants, carriages, etc.), 
 and 38 millions from indirect taxation in Great 
 Britain (including 27 millions from food and 
 drink, 6 millions from raw materials and coal, 
 and 4 millions from manufactures). 
 
 Even upon the face of these figures, it is evident 
 that the bmrden fell chiefly upon the people, and 
 only secondarily on wealth. But they are very 
 far from representing the fulness of this result. 
 The rich, without complaint, contributed largely, 
 because they recouped themselves largely from 
 that part of the indirect taxation which was of 
 a " protective " character. Thus, the expressed 
 intention of the Corn Law of 1815 was to raise a 
 natural price of 61s. (the January average) to at 
 I Stephen Dowell : History of Taxation, ii. 209. 
 
64 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ii. 
 
 least 80s. by prohibiting cheaper imports. Assum- 
 ing these rates to be steady for a year, supposing 
 the consumption of wheat to be 9,000,000 quarters 
 (there is no exact estimate), and deducting one- 
 third of this as being consumed by the agricul- 
 tural population as food and for seed, we find the 
 cost of " protection " on this article alone to the 
 remainder of the nation to amount to no less than 
 £57 millions. Arbitrary as such calculations neces- 
 sarily are, because prices constantly fluctuate, and 
 consumption varies with them, they are useful to 
 indicate the radical difference between taxation 
 proper, the whole product of which goes into the 
 Exchequer, and protective or prohibitory duties, 
 the chief or sole result of which is to make the 
 many consumers pay higher prices for home sup- 
 plies for the benefit of a relatively small class of 
 producers. 
 
 How came legislation of the kind to be placed 
 and to be kept so long upon the statute-book ? 
 To understand this and other important circum- 
 stances of the time, we must look more closely 
 into the position of agriculture and the classes 
 dependent on it. 
 
 III. Agriculture under the Corn Laws 
 
 The three Censuses gave 35 "2 per cent, of the 
 families of Great Britain as occupied in agriculture 
 in 1811, 33-2 per cent, in 1821, and 28-2 per cent, 
 in 1831. The positive increase of the agricultural 
 class in twenty years was stated as 7-2, and of the 
 
§ m.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 65 
 
 trading and manufacturing classes 27 per cent. 
 Ireland was almost wholly, Wales was mainly, 
 dependent on agriculture ; Scotland drew large 
 profit from her fisheries. The estimates of national 
 capital and income at this period are vague and 
 uncertain.! But they concur with the other 
 figures in marking the trend from a preponderance 
 of rural to a preponderance of urban life, labour, 
 and wealth. Agriculture, indeed, was doubly 
 stimulated during the period we are dealing with. 
 There was a genuine spirit of scientific improve- 
 ment afoot. The King, who liked to be called 
 " Farmer George," patronized the movement ; 
 and the Board of Agriculture organized and ad- 
 
 • In a series of estimates of English wealth from 1690 to 1800, 
 Sir Robert GifEen arrived at a total property value in the latter year 
 of £1500 millions ; and he thought the proportion of laud to the 
 whole had fallen from sixty to forty per cent. Pitt, in 1798, esti- 
 mated the taxable incomes in Great Britain as amounting to £45 
 millions in rents of land, houses, etc., and £40 millions in profits 
 of trade and commerce. In a volume of Observations on Kit's 
 income-tax proposals, in 1800, the Eev. H. Beeke calculated the 
 total effective private capital of Great Britain at £1420 millions 
 (£720 millions being in land, £75 millions tithes, and £125 millions 
 farming capital) and the income at £92J millions, of which £44 
 millions came from the land. In 1812, Colquhoun, in his Wealth, 
 etc., of the British Empire, reckoned the capital of the whole 
 Kingdom at £2736 millions, and gave £1200 millions as the value of 
 land ; but he thought that the total income from commerce, naviga- 
 tion, and manufactures amounted to £183 millions, that from land 
 and mines together (Ireland included) to only £107 millions. Further 
 particulars will be found in Chap. 38 of Mr F. W. Hirst's edition of 
 Porter's Progress of the Nation. This edition summarizes the original 
 work — which must still be consulted by the historical student — but 
 b very useful in bringing the statistical record down to the end of 
 the century. 
 
66 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ii. 
 
 vertised it. The Board, founded in 1793, was not 
 a Government department, but another character- 
 istic English compromise, a sort of subsidized, 
 quasi-official corporation. Sir John Sinclair, as 
 its president, and Arthur Young, as its secretary, 
 worked indefatigably to popularize better crops and 
 a better rotation, better cattle-breeding, better 
 implements, drainage, and organization, and the 
 bringing into use of lands hitherto waste. Coke 
 of Holkham, Jethro Tull, Lord Townshend, and 
 other pioneers were held up as examples which 
 every patriotic landlord and farmer ought to follow. 
 Davy was induced to lecture in London from 1803 
 to 1813 on vegetable chemistry ; and it was at 
 the instance of the Board that Erasmus Darwin 
 wrote his Phytologia, or the Philosophy of Agriculture 
 and Gardening, published in 1799, three years 
 before his death. Darwin was a friend of Watt, 
 Boulton, and Wedgwood ; and there were other 
 links between the spheres of mechanical invention 
 and rural enterprise. The threshing-machine, 
 projected in 1758, was now in common use ; and 
 Cartwright had installed a steam-engine for the 
 Duke of Bedford at a cost of £700. Reaping-, 
 mowing-, and winnowing-machines, chaff-cutters, 
 and other implements were brought into use. 
 Farmers' clubs and cattle-shows multiplied. The 
 drainage of the fens of Cambridgeshire and Lincohi- 
 shire was taken up in earnest. The Eastern 
 counties and the Lowlands of Scotland were the 
 most active centres of experimental cultivation; 
 
§ni.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 67 
 
 but the whole country felt the current of new 
 life. 
 
 Enlightenment in the landlord and ingenuity 
 in the mechanician and organizer are not, however, 
 prime factors in producing such a change as this 
 in the most conservative part of society. Agri- 
 cultural produce cannot be multiplied magically, 
 like cotton cloth when steam is harnessed to 
 the loom. It was the increase of non-agricultural 
 population, the cutting-oft of foreign food supplies, 
 and the consequent high prices, that awoke these 
 imwonted energies in the farming class. England 
 had definitely become a wheat-importing country 
 in 1773, and had ceased to export twenty years 
 later. During that period, the price of com did 
 not average more than 46s., though bad seasons 
 and interference with maritime trade led to acute 
 fluctuations. The enclosing of less fertile lands 
 was one of a number of influences which produced, 
 at this time, a strong access of protectionist senti- 
 ment. By the Act of 1791, repealing previous 
 Corn Laws, a balance of export bounty and import 
 duty was arranged with the purpose of keeping 
 the price at about 54s. ; actually, from 1790 to 
 1799 it averaged 55s. lid. Thanks to the fact 
 that Napoleon's economic ideas were of that 
 peculiarly crude kind of Protectionism which sees 
 wealth only in exports, no effort was made to cut 
 off during the war France's food supplies to 
 England ; it was one of the costliest blunders 
 of the great conqueror's career. But the indirect 
 
68 
 
 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ii. 
 
 obstruction of commerce was sufficient, with de- 
 ficient harvests from 1798 to 1801, to run prices 
 up to an unprecedented figure in the latter year. 
 The rapid fall that followed led to an outcry; 
 and in 1804 foreign imports were practically 
 prohibited till 63s. a quarter was quoted. In 
 1810-11, when the crops of Prussia, Poland, and 
 Russia were absorbed by the hosts engaged for 
 and against the Moscow expedition, and in 1812, 
 during the war with the United States, the highest 
 recorded level was reached ; the coimtry was, in 
 fact, on the brink of famine. Again prices tumbled 
 down ; and again, when the wars were ended, 
 was heard the bitter cry of farmers who had been 
 induced to sink cash and credit in wheat-growing, 
 and now found themselves faced with American 
 and Baltic competition. The first result was the 
 Corn Law of 1815, prohibiting import (except of 
 the trifling Canadian supplies) till wheat stood at 
 80s.,^ rye, peas, and beans at 53s., barley at 40s., 
 and oats at 26s. 
 
 Every increase of the corn duties had been 
 
 1 The fluctuations in the price of 
 averages, may be thus shown : It 
 
 s. d. 
 
 Fell from 54 
 
 3 in 1783. 
 
 to 40 
 
 
 , 1786. 
 
 Rose „ 54 
 
 9 
 
 , 1790. 
 
 Fell „ 43 
 
 
 , 1792. 
 
 Eose „ 98 
 
 7 
 
 , 1796. 
 
 Fell „ 51 
 
 10 
 
 , 1798. 
 
 Bose „ 119 
 
 6 
 
 , 1801. 
 
 Fell „ 58 
 
 10 
 
 , 1803. 
 
 wheat, smoothed into annual 
 
 s. d. 
 
 Rose „ 89 9 „ 1805. 
 
 Fell „ 75 4 „ 1807. 
 
 Rose „ 106 5 „ 1810, 
 
 and „ 126 6 „ 1812. 
 
 Fell „ 66 7 „ 1815. 
 
 Rose „ 78 6 „ 1816, 
 
 and „ 96 11 „ 1817. 
 
 FeU „ 67 10 „ 1820. 
 
§m.] I'IRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 69 
 
 marked by an extension of the area of tillage. 
 In 1803, Sinclair " declared war," as he put it, on 
 waste land ; it was not, he said, enough to liberate 
 Egypt and subdue Malta, they must attack Finch- 
 ley Common and conquer Hounslow Heath. The 
 campaign against the few remaining commoners 
 was an easy success. From 1760 to 1769, the 
 number of Enclosure Bills was 385 ; in the next 
 decade it was 660 ; in the 'eighties 246 ; in the 
 'nineties 469 ; from 1800 to 1809 it was 847 ; and 
 in the following ten years, 858, there being 133 in 
 the year 1812 alone. In the first twenty years of 
 the nineteenth century, over three million acres 
 of land were so appropriated for cultivation. 
 
 This is the maximum of the enclosure movement. 
 Although more improvable lands remained, with 
 the existing communications they could not be 
 profitably exploited. Many of the new farms, 
 indeed, could only be profitably worked so long as 
 artificial prices prevailed ; but there is ground for 
 thinking that the average fertility of soil had been 
 somewhat improved. The rise of rents is significant. 
 It is thought to have amounted to 100 per cent., 
 or even 150 per cent., in the twenty years before 
 Waterloo. The rental of the Holkham estate 
 rose from £2200 in 1776 to £20,000 in 1816 ; but 
 this, of course, was a peculiar case. 
 
 " With scarcely any exception," said Porter, writing in 
 1836, " tte revenue drawn in tie form of rent from the 
 ownership of the soil has been at least doubled in every 
 part of Great Britain since 1790. In the county of Essex, 
 
70 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. n. 
 
 farms could be pointed out which were let just before the 
 war of the French Revolution at less than 10s. per acre, 
 and which rose rapidly duriag the progress of that con- 
 test, until, in 1812, the rent paid for them was from 458. 
 to 50s. per acre. This advance has not, it is true, been 
 maintained since the return of peace : in 1818 the rent 
 was reduced to 35s., and at the present time is only 20s. per 
 acre, which, however, is still more than double that which 
 was paid in 1790. In Berkshire and Wiltshire there are 
 farms which ia 1790 were let at 14s. per acre, and which 
 in 1810 produced to the landlord a rent of 70s., being a 
 fivefold advance. These farms were let in 1820 at 50s., 
 and at this time pay 30s. per acre, being 114 per cent, advance 
 upon the rent paid ia 1790. In StafEordshire there are 
 several farms on one estate which were let in 1790 at 8s. 
 per acre, and which, having in. the dearest time advanced 
 to 35s., have siace been lowered to 20s., an advance, after 
 all, of 150 per cent, within the half century. The rents here 
 mentioned, as being those for which the farms are now let, 
 are not nominal rates from which abatements are periodi- 
 cally made by the landlord, but are regularly paid, not- 
 withstanding the depressed prices at which some kinds of 
 agricultural produce have of late been sold. In Norfolk, 
 Sufiolk, and Warwickshire, the same, or nearly the same, 
 rise has been experienced ; and it is more than probable 
 that it has been general throughout the kingdom. During 
 the same period the prices of most of the articles which con- 
 stitute the landlord's expenditure have fallen mateiiaDy; 
 and if his condition be not improved in a corresponding 
 degree, that circumstance must arise from improvidence 
 or miscalculation, or habits of expensive living beyond 
 what would be warranted by the doubling of income which 
 he has experienced and is still enjoying." 
 
 Three great influences were at work modifying 
 
§ m.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 71 
 
 the constitution of rural society — ^the war and 
 war prices, enclosure, and the growth of manu- 
 factures. Unfortunately, means are lacking for 
 an exact estimate of their effect. England was 
 becoming a country of large estates ; but before 
 Waterloo there were yet many commoners and 
 yeomen. Even in 1831, when Census figures were 
 available, of 236,343 male occupiers of land, about 
 two-fifths employed no labourers, while the re- 
 mainder employed an average of only 5| labourers 
 per farmer. In Scotland, at the same time, of 
 about eighty thousand occupiers, more than two- 
 thirds employed no labourers ; and in Ireland 
 more than three-quarters of those engaged on the 
 land were poor cottiers.' British agriculture pre- 
 sented a marked contrast to that of France, with 
 its three and a half million landowners, three 
 millions of whom (with their families, two-thirds 
 of the whole nation) farmed on the average only 
 fourteen acres apiece. In 1831, the old race of 
 small independent cultivators was disappearing 
 from the countryside ; in 1815, many still remained. 
 Some had sunk to the status of day labourers ; 
 but the fact that the population of the agricultural 
 counties continued to increase, and even increased 
 more rapidly in the second than in the first decade 
 of the century, 1 suggests that it was not only the 
 landlords who profited by high prices and high 
 
 1 The population of Norfolk rose from 273,371 in 1801 to 292,000 
 in 1811 (7 per cent.), and to 344,368 in 1821 (18 per cent.). The 
 corresponding increases in Suffolk were 11 per cent, and 15 per cent. ; 
 Cambridgeshire, 13 per cent, and 20 per cent. ; Devon, 12 per cent. 
 
72 MODERN ENGLAND [ohap. n. 
 
 farming, although the main profits certainly went 
 to them. But, when the inevitable crash came, 
 it was the more disastrous because it involved a 
 host of weaklings, and not only a limited class of 
 substantial proprietors. Only when importation 
 was freed, and bread, among other commodities, 
 became comparatively cheap, were the effects of 
 land robbery — ^for that is what enclosure had 
 commonly been — ^fuUy manifest. 
 
 If, as the great Pitt had said, the war did not 
 make corn dear, peace should not make it cheap. 
 Whether they believed this or no, landlords and 
 tenants had acted as though high prices were in 
 the natural order, and must last. Much of the 
 new land brought into cultivation was very 
 inferior, and was doomed to suffer the process 
 which Ricardo crystallized in the " law of diminish- 
 ing returns." Good pasture was ploughed up. 
 Money was borrowed on mortgage to effect improve- 
 ments ; the prospect shone so bright that estates 
 were charged with annuities, jointures, and legacies. 
 While the poor of the towns famished, the farmer 
 forgot to grumble over his enhanced rent. The 
 awakening was sharp. In 1814, determined opposi- 
 tion from the towns had prevented the passage of 
 a new Corn Law ; yet the Act of 1815 — such was 
 the chorus of distress when sea traffic was reopened 
 — commanded very large majorities. Lord John 
 
 and 15 per cent. ; Dorset, 8 per cent, and 16 per cent. ; Essex, 
 11 per cent, and 15 per cent. ; Lincolnsbire, 14 per cent, and 19 per 
 cent. ; Somerset, 12 per cent, and 17 per cent. ; Sussex, 19 per cent, 
 and 22 per cent. ; Wilts, 5 per cent, and 15 per cent. 
 
§ IV.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 73 
 
 Russell, in one of his first speeches in Parliament, 
 declared that land, which had been generally let 
 on the calculation that a quarter of wheat would 
 be worth £5, had fallen to a half of its value in 
 the two years after the war. Farmers had to sell 
 their crops at any price to pay their taxes. Even 
 Malthus, who said there had never been a more 
 disastrous year for agriculture, and Brougham, 
 supported the demand for protection. Opinion 
 in the towns was all against the Corn Law ; and 
 among public men the Free Trade principle was 
 obtaining wider acceptance. But the economic 
 collapse that always follows a great war was 
 on this occasion so much aggravated that the 
 plea for exceptional treatment was irresistible. 
 Ricardo's explanations of rent and " diminishing 
 returns," published two years later in his Principles 
 of Political Economy, greatly stimulated clear 
 thinking on the whole subject. 
 
 IV. The Rise of Manufacture 
 
 Meanwhile, the business of manufacture was 
 passing through a change even more remarkable 
 than that which had overtaken agriculture. With 
 the repeal of the magisterial power of assessing 
 wages and of the obligation of apprenticeship, in 
 1814, the spirit of laisser faire and individual 
 adventure stood triumphant upon the ruins of the 
 ancient social order. Henceforth, the race would 
 be for the swift, the prizes for the strong. The 
 
74 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. n. 
 
 era of "Heroes and Hero Worship," prelude 
 to that of the " Struggle for Existence," was 
 opening. The "self-made men," who were to 
 found "the Manchester School," rose by their 
 own force, scorning State aid or inherited advan- 
 tage. Those who remained in the ranks admired 
 their energy and hardihood. In the early 
 freshness of the change, the successful were 
 well pleased with themselves. The nouveau riche 
 mill-owner began to claim equality in public life 
 with the lord of many hereditary acres ; the 
 inventor aspired to the honours of the privi- 
 leged order which boasted such names as Chat- 
 ham, Pitt, Burke, Fox, and Wellington. A bold 
 idea, now first seriously mooted. " The reign of 
 George III," said Brougham, " may, in some im- 
 portant respects, be justly regarded as the Augustan 
 age of modern history. The greatest statesmen, 
 the most consummate captains, the most finished 
 orators, the first historians, all flourished in this 
 period." Even the comfortable reformer of the 
 day could be thus satisfied. But a new power 
 was rising rapidly. When Napoleon was evidently 
 done with, men's thoughts turned to the achieve- 
 ments of the great engineers and architects — ^Watt, 
 Boulton, Rennie, Telford, Mylne, Jessop, Chapman, 
 Rumford, Huddart, Brunei, Watson, Maudslay 
 — of Crompton, Cartwi-ight, and Arkwright ; of 
 Murdock, who first made coal gas commercially; 
 Tennant, the Glasgow chemist and bleacher ; Ronalds 
 of Hammersmith, who passed an electric message 
 
§ IV.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 75 
 
 through a space of eight miles; Charles, Earl 
 Stanhope, who invented a printing-press and a 
 stereotype process; Bramah, the inventor of the 
 hydraulic press; Trevethick, the inventor of the 
 first high-pressure steam-engine and the first suc- 
 cessful railway locomotive ; Nasmyth, of the great 
 hammer ; Miller and Symington, the first builders 
 of a practical steam-boat, and a host of others. 
 Near to these stood a group of brilliant scientists, 
 some of them familiar figures at the Royal Institu- 
 tion (founded in 1799) : Dalton, Davy, WoUaston, 
 Faraday, William Smith, the father of English 
 geology, Cavendish, Herschel the astronomer, and 
 Kater, the creator of the Indian trigonometrical 
 survey. 
 
 Marvel upon marvel these men opened to the 
 astonished eyes of their fellows, eyes not sophisti- 
 cated, like ours, with board-schooling and journal- 
 ism, but stretched child-like to the sudden revelation 
 of worlds before undreamed of. What a challenge 
 to capable brains their famed examples uttered ! 
 " It is well known," says Porter, " that, by the 
 consumption of one bushel of coals in the furnace 
 of a steam-boiler, a power is produced which in a 
 few minutes will raise 20,000 gallons of water 
 from a depth of 350 feet, an effect which could not 
 be produced in a shorter time than a whole day 
 through the continuous labour of twenty men 
 working with the common pump." Here was 
 transmutation as miraculous as any the alchemists 
 conceived. But it had the merit of being " well 
 
76 MODERN ENGLAND [chat. xt. 
 
 known" and common property. All ears were 
 agog for news of still greater conquests over the 
 powers of nature. The age of Columbus is not 
 more wonderful than this era of domestic discovery 
 under the alliance of science and practical skill. 
 A generation later, when the glamour was obscured 
 by mill smoke and dyers' pollution, and the worse 
 smoke and pollution of greedy unbelief, our wild 
 Carlyle must stop in his ravings to dwell upon its 
 magic : "It now turns out that this favoured 
 England was not only to have her Shakespeares, 
 Bacons, Sidneys, but to have her Watts, Arkwrights, 
 Brindleys ! We will honour greatness in all kinds. 
 Prospero evoked the singing of Ariel : the same 
 Prospero can send his Fire-Demons panting across 
 all oceans, shooting with the speed of meteors on 
 cunning highways, from end to end of kingdoms, 
 and make Iron its missionary, preaching its evan- 
 gel to the brute Primeval Powers, which listen and 
 obey : neither is this small. Manchester, with its 
 cotton-fuzz, its smoke and dust, its tumult and 
 contentious squalor, is hideous to thee ? Think 
 not so : a precious substance, beautiful as magic 
 dreams, and yet no dream but a reality, lies hidden 
 in that noisome wrappage . . . ten thousand times 
 ten thousand spools and spindles all set spinning 
 there — it is, perhaps, if thou knew it well, sublime 
 as a Niagara, or more so." ^ 
 
 The industry which, in the year 1911, raised 260 
 million tons of coal, about a sixth of it for export, 
 
 • Chartism, p,82. 
 
§ IV.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 77 
 
 was, in the early days of the nineteenth century, 
 a much swaddled infant. Up to 1820, sea-borne 
 supplies had to bear a duty of 7s. 6d. a ton, and 4s. 
 of this remained until 1830. An organized restric- 
 tion of the output known 'as the " limitation of 
 the vend " was even more effective, in the region 
 of the Tyne, Wear, and Tees, in preventing growth ; 
 and this early combine had the unfortunate result, 
 characteristic of similar cartells in our own time, 
 of benefiting foreign countries by " dumping " 
 goods upon them at an artificially low price. 
 " It practically resulted that the same quality of 
 coals which, if shipped to London, were charged 
 at 30s. 6d. per Newcastle chaldron were sold to 
 foreigners at 18s. for that quantity, giving a prefer- 
 ence to the foreign buyer of 40 per cent." ^ Steam- 
 pumping had made it possible to sink deeper shafts ; 
 but the exploitation of the pit was still very rudi- 
 mentary. Until 1810, it was the custom to leave 
 large pillars of coal to support the mine roof ; 
 the substitution of wooden props effected a con- 
 siderable saving. The year 1813 is marked by the 
 invention of the steam boring-machine. In 1815 
 Sir Humphrey Davy introduced his safety -lamp ; 
 this not only protected the miners, but enabled 
 deeper and remoter levels to be cut. Mechanical 
 haulage underground only began to come into use 
 in 1820. The total quantity of coal shipped from 
 Newcastle and Sunderland in 1801 was about two 
 million tons ; of the land traffic there is no record. 
 1 Hirst's Porter, p. 220. 
 
78 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ii. 
 
 In 1819, the quantity of coal shipped coastwise 
 from British ports was 4,365,000 tons. About the 
 same time, it was estimated that over 10 million 
 tons were distributed inland by means of canals 
 and railways. In 1850, the total production was 
 estimated at 56 million tons, less than seven per 
 cent, of this being exported. In later years, export 
 has been upon a constantly increasing scale, in 
 considerable part to meet the needs of British ships, 
 both as fuel and outward cargo. 
 
 Probably the most degraded type of labour in 
 the country in the dawn of the century was that 
 of coal-mining. Far from the observation of the 
 great cities, and often hidden away in small hovel- 
 communities on a wild countryside, without any 
 education, or any possibility of sane social enjoy- 
 ment, selected for their physical strength, and 
 mercilessly exploited, the miners oscillated between 
 extremes of low vice and religious frenzy. The 
 employers held a greatly privileged position — 
 untroubled by the anxieties of elaborate machinery, 
 uncertain markets, or financial organization, they 
 had simply to get and sell to a steadily increasing 
 demand. Many of them were already wealthy 
 as landowners ; all of them could expect to amass 
 a fortune. Yet we find hardly a trace of interest 
 in the lives of the wretched men who slaved in 
 their subterranean prisons for thirteen hours a 
 day, or the women and children who crawled 
 about this underworld, chained like beasts to their 
 little wagons, and toiled up the long flights of 
 
§ IV.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 79 
 
 wooden stairs with loads of the " black diamond " 
 on their backs. In Scotland, the colliers had 
 only just emerged from legal serfdom. Through- 
 out the North a "yearly bond" was customary. 
 Wages often reached to double those of neighbour- 
 ing agricultural regions ; but such a life produces a 
 reckless and prodigal spirit. Moreover, the miners 
 were among the worst sufferers from cheating by 
 " truck." A thousand of them were killed yearly, 
 and seven or eight thousand seriously injured, by 
 colliery accidents. Forty years of experiment in 
 factory legislation had to pass ere, by the Act of 
 1842, the employment of women and of boys under 
 ten below ground was forbidden. An official 
 witness at that time declared that " the hardest 
 labour in the worst room in the worst conducted 
 factory is less hard, less cruel, and less demoralising 
 than the labour in the best coal-mine." In 1850, 
 official inspection of the ventilation and lighting 
 arrangements was initiated. The miner's lot is 
 still not an easy one ; but steady progress has been 
 made in ameliorating it since the middle of the 
 century. 
 
 It will be convenient at this point to dismiss 
 briefly the less important mining industries of the 
 United Kingdom. Tin and copper had been ex- 
 tracted, especially in Cornwall, from very early 
 times ; and the perfection of the steam-engine, 
 first for pumping, and then for hoisting the cage 
 and other uses, made it possible to reach immense 
 depths (in 1830 the Treseavon mine was 1,920 feet 
 
80 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. n. 
 
 deep. Thus, the produce of Cornish tin increased 
 from 2676 tons a year at the beginning of the 
 century to 4047 tons in 1830-34. The output of 
 white tin has since varied from four to ten thousand 
 tons a year. A much larger quantity of tin ore 
 is now imported ; and the average price has risen 
 from £87 in 1880 to £143 in 1905. The produce 
 of the copper-mines increased more rapidly, till it 
 reached a maximum of about twenty thousand 
 tons (£2,487,375) in 1854. Since then, it has fallen 
 to infinitesimal proportions, while the import has 
 grown, especially under the stimulus of demand 
 from the electrical industries. There are no early 
 statistics of lead-mining ; but a product of 64,000 
 tons in 1854 had fallen to 29,000 tons in 1907, 
 when the import of lead, pig, and sheet ore together 
 was over 200,000 tons, yielding goods valued at 
 £5-7 millions. The metalliferous mine workers are 
 much less hable to serious accident than coUiers, 
 but much more liable to consumption and other 
 occupational diseases. Considerable amoimts of 
 iron-stone, oil shale, and fire-clay are quarried in 
 the United Kingdom; and we owe a great deal 
 to our deposits of salt. Under the heavy excise 
 duty which continued till 1823, the production of 
 salt averaged about ten million bushels, four-fifths 
 of which was exported. In the twenty years fol- 
 lowing the removal of the duties, the consumption 
 increased fivefold ; and to-day, when every need, 
 domestic and manufacturing, has been satisfied, 
 there still remains a small margin for export. 
 
§ IV.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 81 
 
 We now turn to those major and fundamental 
 departments of modern industry, the iron, steel, 
 and derivative trades. We saw in the last 
 chapter their modest beginning. In 1802, there 
 wei-e still only 144 furnaces in England and Wales, 
 and 24 in Scotland, the average production 
 being about a thousand tons of pig-iron yeai'ly, 
 a marked advance upon the era of wood-fuel, but 
 a sti'ange contrast to the prodigious records of 
 to-day. Four yeai-s later, parliamentary inquiries 
 gave an estimated output of 250,000 tons ; and 
 the trade was strong enough to repel Pitt's attempt 
 to put a tax of £2 a ton on pig-iron. Porter cites 
 a private estimate according to which the figures 
 rose to 442,066 tons in 1828, to 581,367 tons in 
 1825, 702,584 tons in 1828, 1,000,000 tons in 1831, 
 1,500,000 tons in 1840, and, 2,000,000 tons in 
 1848. These totals will serve to show the rapid 
 acceleration of the rate of progress during the 
 first half of the century, and of the immense demand 
 for material for the most varied kind of manu- 
 facture, from the finest machineiy to the roughest 
 hardwai'e. The supply was, apparently, at all 
 times after the first years of the century, equal to 
 the home demand ; for, after the close of the great 
 wai", exportation increased in full proportion, 
 rising from a tenth to a quai'ter of the output of 
 pig and bai- iron. South Wales and South Stafford- 
 shire were for long the most considerable centres, 
 Scotland being a close competitor, and Shropshire 
 and Yorkshire following far behind. Sheffield, 
 
82 MODERN ENGLAND [chap, li, 
 
 thanks to the many neighbouring water-courses, 
 which provided power, and the abundant local 
 coal supplies, early became prominent in the 
 conversion of iron into steel. Most of the metal 
 used was imported from Sweden ; and it was 
 reckoned in 1835 that the steel furnaces of the town 
 used a hundred thousand tons of coal a year. 
 According to Porter, 9000 tons of steel were then 
 made yearly, of which a sixth was exported in an 
 unwrought form, chiefly to the United States. Much 
 of the remainder was converted into cutlery. 
 
 Birmingham, then the " toy-shop of Europe," 
 as Burke called it, and already one of its chief 
 small-arms factories, was, as it still is, the centre 
 of a very various group of metal trades classed as 
 " hardware." Babbage gives a table of Birming- 
 ham goods to illustrate the fall of prices (varjmig 
 from 40 to 85 per cent.) between 1812 and 1832. 
 They include anvils and awls, candlesticks and 
 curry-combs, chains, nails, screws, and locks of all 
 kinds, fire-irons, spoons, and stirrups. In many 
 of the smallware trades, a singular compromise 
 of industry prevailed which Porter thus describes : 
 " A building, containing a great number of rooms 
 of various sizes, is furnished with a steam-engine, 
 working shafts from which are placed in each 
 apartment or workshop, which is likewise fiirnished 
 with a lathe, benches, and such other conveniences 
 as are suited to the various branches of manufacture 
 for which the rooms are likely to be needed. When 
 a workman has received an order for the supply of 
 
f IV.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 8§ 
 
 such a quantity of goods as will occupy him a week, 
 or a month, or any other given time for their 
 dotnpletion, he hires one or more of these rooms, 
 of size and with conveniences suited to his parti- 
 cular wants, stipulating for the use of a certain 
 amount of steam-power. He thus realizes all the 
 advantage that would accompany the possession of 
 a steam-engine ; and, as the buildings thus fitted 
 up are numerous, the charges are low." 
 
 Two illustrations may be given of the restrictive 
 effect of State policy upon industry between the 
 great war and the adoption of the Free Trade 
 principle. The duty on gold and silver articles 
 being remitted to foreign traders, export was 
 encouraged, while at home plated wares took their 
 place, and gave Sheffield a new industry. The 
 glass manufacture afforded a more signal instance. 
 Excessive duties brought it to a stagnant condition 
 in the early years of the century ; and the com- 
 plicated regulations of the excise effectively pre- 
 vented technical improvement. Between 1801 and 
 1833, the population of the country increased by 
 one-half, the amount of glass used by only one- 
 eighth. Indeed, the quantity seems to have 
 decidedly declined by comiparison with the years 
 immediately preceding the French wars. This 
 lamentable fact, so eloquent of the poverty of the 
 time, was undoubtedly due to the tariff, which 
 was increased in 1794 by one-half, doubled in 
 1812, somewhat lowered for plate glass in 1819, 
 and finally removed only in 1845 by Peel, who truly 
 
84 MODERN ENGLAND [cmAP. n. 
 
 said that " no tax could combine more objections, 
 or be more at variance with all sound principles 
 of taxation." One result of its operation had 
 been that British scientists were for long depen- 
 dent, for instance for optical instrument glasses, on 
 foreign imports ; another was that a considerable 
 illicit manufacture of flint glass was carried on in 
 attics and cellars. 
 
 There was, in happy contrast to this obscurantism, 
 one important vein of sagacity in the latter days of 
 the Protectionist epoch. The reasons alleged in 
 favour of prohibiting the export of new machinery 
 and, if possible, new processes are every whit as 
 impressive as those adduced in favour of protec- 
 tive import duties. Nevertheless, the eighteenth 
 century restrictions intended to create a monopoly 
 of home invention were rapidly abandoned ; and 
 the export of machinery has ever since been one 
 of the largest and most lucrative departments of 
 British business. No far-sighted statesmanship 
 produced this result, but plain self-interest. Foreign 
 visitors were often refused access to mills containing 
 new machinery ; and attempts were occasionally 
 made to prevent the emigration of specially skilled 
 artisans. Nevertheless, the factory and railroad 
 engineers of the Continent — especially Germany 
 and Russia — and of America were commonly 
 trained by Scottish and English managers. " It 
 appears," a Commons Committee reported in 1824, 
 " that, notwithstanding the laws enacted to prevent 
 the seduction of artisans to go abroad, many able 
 
§ IV.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 85 
 
 and intelligent artisans have gone abroad to reside 
 and to exercise their respective arts, and that it 
 is extremely difficult, if not impossible, by law to 
 prevent artisans who may be so determined from 
 going out of the country." In the following year, 
 these laws were repealed. The export of certain 
 kinds of machinery remained under prohibition 
 for many years ; but there was little difficulty in 
 most cases in getting exemption under the dis- 
 cretionary powers of the Board of Trade. 
 
 The clash of interests was more apparent than 
 real. Since the machine-making must evidently 
 precede in their development the machine-using 
 trades, the would-be exporters had attained a 
 strong influence before the would-be prohibiters 
 could bring any pressure on Parliament. The whole 
 business of production was too prosperous to favour 
 such a rivalry. Manufactures in other lands were 
 undoubtedly benefited ; at the worst, that was 
 only a brief anticipation of the inevitable. On 
 the other hand, there was a great immediate profit, 
 a long start in the international race. Both the 
 manufactures making and those using machinery 
 were spurred on ; and it was not an evil thing 
 that the stimulus was continued in later years by 
 foreign competition. Meanwhile, England became 
 known throughout the world as the home of inven- 
 tion, and by her policy drew to herself both brains 
 and the necessary materials which she did not 
 herself produce. 
 But the miracle of the time was the growth of 
 
86 MODEEN ENGLAND [chap. ii. 
 
 the textile trades, and, especially, of the cotton 
 manufacture. In 1785, the import of raw cotton 
 had amounted to 18 miUion Ifes., most of this being 
 still used with linen warp ; in 1800, just before 
 Cartwright's power-loom came into use, it was 
 56 million Bbs. During the war, this figure was 
 not greatly exceeded ; but in 1817 it reached 116 
 million lbs. ; in another decade, it was doubled ; in 
 1835, it passed 333 million lbs. ; and by 1850 
 this prodigious volume of consumption was again 
 doubled. There is, perhaps, no more significant 
 phenomenon in the history of England. The 
 wool trade is not so easily measured ; but we know 
 that its progress, considerable as it is, has been 
 much slower than this. The whole increase of 
 supplies of raw material in the first third of the 
 century is estimated at 80 per cent. ; and exports 
 in that period increased very little. In 1840, 
 M'Cidloch estimated the total value of woollens 
 produced in Great Britain at £21 millions, the 
 number of employees at 332,000 ; the value of 
 cotton goods produced he put at £34 millions, 
 and the number of workers at about one miUion. 
 If it were our task here to trace the development 
 of political-economic thought, we should have to 
 show that the optimistic school of Robert Owen 
 rose as naturally from the contemplation of man's 
 power of exploiting a tropical product as the pessi- 
 mistic school of the Rev. T. R. Malthus rose from 
 the contemplation of the demoralized rural labourer. 
 The true synthesis of these things was not to 
 
§ IV.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 87 
 
 come for many years. The chief feature of the 
 miracle was not an industrial fact, the invention 
 of machinery and power, but an agricultural fact, 
 the necessarily greater plenty and cheapness of 
 cotton, a Southern vegetable product, as compared 
 with wool, a Northern animal product, or even 
 with linen. The inventors, of course, were quite 
 impartial ; and, as an ancient privileged industry, 
 the wool trade would have had the preference, 
 were that possible. But cotton rose in price during 
 the war less than wool ; and, afterwards, the 
 novel spectacle was presented of a trade being able 
 to get the whole of its raw material from thousands 
 of miles away more cheaply and regularly than a 
 rival trade which had boasted of having at its doors 
 the best supplies in the world. Wool at the end of 
 the eighteenth century was more than twice as dear 
 as it had been at the beginning. In 1814, the prices 
 were nearly identical ; but in 1821 wool was Is. 3d., 
 and cotton 9jd. per lb. ; in 1827 wool was 9d., and 
 cotton 6|d. ; in 1832 wool was Is., cotton 6jd. 
 The competition was, however, mutually advan- 
 tageous. English sheep-farming was quickened ; 
 the yield of native wool was improved in quality, 
 and greatly increased in quantity. 
 
 It is usually taken for granted that the general 
 reader has a sufficient understanding of spinning 
 and weaving and other primary industrial processes 
 to enable him to appreciate the machine revolu- 
 tion. This seems a rather large assumption in the 
 twentieth century, when the old handicrafts sur- 
 
88 MODERN ENGLAND [chap, m 
 
 vive in only a few remote corners of the country, 
 and when factory labour is so much divided that 
 few operatives see more than one stage of produc- 
 tion. Let us attempt very briefly to outUne the 
 nature of the great textile transformation. At the 
 beginning of the eighteenth century, wool, cotton, 
 and flax were still commonly spun by the ancient 
 means of distaff and spindle. The distaff was a 
 stick around one end of which the raw wool, 
 already cleaned and combed, was loosely wound ; 
 the spindle was a second stick which received the 
 flocculent stuff in the form of a continuous thread 
 or yarn. This is made possible by the peculiar 
 structure of the fibre : the surface of every hair 
 being covered with minute scales, the hairs inter- 
 lock when pressed together ; and, if they have' been 
 previously reversed, they interlock so strongly 
 that they can be drawn through a machine without 
 breaking. Holding the distaff under one arm, 
 the spinner coaxed out a thread, and fastened it 
 into a notch in the top of the spindle. The right 
 hand then set the spindle rotating (a ring of stone 
 or clay round the upper part helping to give a 
 steady momentum), by a half -throwing, half-turning 
 movement ; and, while the right hand spun, the 
 left was continually freeing from the distaff a new 
 supply. As the yarn became sufficiently twisted 
 and drawn out, it was notched at a farther point, 
 and so on till the spindle was full. The first im- 
 provement of this primitive labour was the very 
 simple one of the spinning-wheel, the spindle being 
 
§ IV.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 89 
 
 set in a frame, and rotated by means of a hand 
 wheel. Then a treadle was attached to the wheel ; 
 and, toward the end of the eighteenth century, a 
 double-spindle wheel was made, with " flyers " 
 or twisting arms attached to the spindles. The 
 main work was now not the actual spinning, but 
 the feeding of the spindle. 
 
 While the woman, in this nearly universal 
 home industry, produced the yarn, the man did 
 the heavier laboiu- of weaving it into cloth. This 
 consisted essentially in passing one system of 
 threads, called the woof or weft, alternately under 
 and over a transverse system of threads, called the 
 warp or web. Until about 1778, linen yarn was 
 always \ised for the wai"p ; only afterwards was 
 cotton spun strongly enough to be used alone. The 
 loom was thus a frame holding a row of yarns 
 (the wtu'p) in such a manner that certain threads 
 could be raised, and others depressed, while a 
 shuttle carried the weft-thread through them. 
 The process was substantially the same for cloth- 
 making, and for net- or lace-work, for the making 
 of fabric of uniform colour, and for pattern-weaving, 
 although the loom in the latter cases was more 
 complicated. Double weaving (Kidderminster 
 carpeting is an example) consisted in weaving 
 two webs simultaneously one above the other, 
 and interweaving the two at intervals so as to 
 form a double cloth. After weaving, the cloth 
 had to go through the " fulling " process, in which 
 the fibre was beaten or pressed so that the scales 
 
90 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ii. 
 
 interlocked closely ; it was then washed, " tented " 
 (stretched), dressed in various manners, and was 
 at length ready for the dyer. 
 
 We can now more easily realize what it was that 
 Hargreaves, Arkwright, Cartwright, ('rompton, and 
 Watt accomplished. The spinning-jenny * was a 
 simple arrangement by which a number of spindles 
 could be kept turning by a hand- wheel. At the 
 outset it enabled eight threads to be spun as easily 
 as one had been ; later, it was so much improved 
 that a little girl could work eighty or a hundred 
 spindles. The jenny, however, could not give 
 yam strong enough for the longitudinal threads, 
 or warp. This deficiency was met by Arkwright's 
 water-frame, a radically different machine, after- 
 wards, in improved form, known as the " throstle." 
 This consisted essentially of two pairs of rollers, 
 turned by water or steam power. The lower roller 
 of each pair was furrowed or fluted, while the upper 
 ones were covered with leather, the better to hold 
 and draw the raw cotton. Instead of being merely 
 compressed, therefore, as would be the case if 
 the rollers were smooth, it was drawn through 
 flutings, at first at a moderate speed, then, in the 
 second pair, more rapidly ; and, while the " sliver " 
 or " roving " was thus \>(:hifr drawn to a thread 
 of the desired tenuity, a twist was given to it by 
 an adaptation of the spindle and flyer arrangement. 
 
 ' There wan no Jenny in the chho ; the name U probably ft cor* 
 ruption of "engine." In thn Kftmc way, wc have Kll Wbltney'i 
 cotton " gin," or cleaning machine. 
 
§ IV.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 91 
 
 Crompton's " mule " combined parts of the jeraiy 
 and of the spinning-frame, and differed from the 
 latter chiefly in the method of twisting and winding 
 the thread. Both methods continued in use, as 
 they gave rather different results, the throstle 
 yam being of a closer twist, stronger and more 
 even, and thus better for warps and for thread- 
 making, while the " mule " gave a wider range 
 of fineness, a softer yam, good for both 
 twist and weft. Throstle yam cost more, but 
 commanded a better price. The cost of hand-mule 
 spinning led, after many efforts, to the creation of 
 the " self-acting mule," patented about 1825 by 
 Richard Roberts, and further improved by the 
 " quadrant winding motion " in 1830. 
 
 Meanwhile, power had been applied to the loom, 
 the first successful experiment being carried out in 
 1801 with two hundred looms in Mr Monteith's 
 weaving null at PoUockshaws, near Glasgow. 
 There were then already thirty-two steam-engines 
 applied to the spinning process in Manchester 
 alone. The power-loom made only slow headway 
 for many years. In 1813, there were believed 
 to be 2400 in use in England and Scotland, in 
 1820 perhaps 15,000, and in 1833, 100,000.^ The 
 number of the old hand-looms employed in the 
 cotton manufacture was estimated to be between 
 200,000 and 250,000 in 1820; and it rather 
 increased than diminished between then and 1834, 
 when evidence was given, before the Commons 
 
 * Balnes, History oj the Cotton Manufacture, 
 
92 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ii. 
 
 Committee on the condition of the weavers, that 
 there were nearly 50,000 in Scotland alone. This 
 is a singular fact, when we remember the demand 
 for more weaving capacity to meet the increase 
 of spinning, and the economy of production with 
 the aid of power. Baines gives a manufacturer's 
 estimate that, whereas a very good adult hand- 
 weaver could weave two pieces of shirting of a 
 certain kind per week, a steam-weaver only fifteen 
 years old, attending two looms, could in 1823 weave 
 seven similar pieces, and in 1826 twelve pieces ; 
 while in 1833 an older man, aided by a girl of 
 twelve years, could attend four looms, and weave 
 eighteen or twenty pieces This was a vast economy, 
 but not as striking as that effected on the spinning 
 side, and the necessary improvement of the 
 machinery was more slowly reached. The hand- 
 weavers made a desperate fight of it. They had 
 at first an advantage in being able to make finer 
 cloth than machinery could produce ; and cheap 
 yarn was a stimulus to them as well as to the 
 power-weavers (there was never too much yam, 
 because the surplus was promptly exported)i 
 For the rest, it was a question of lowering their 
 prices till the bottom point of a bare subsistence 
 was touched. During the crisis after the war, 
 handweavers' wages fell to pittances of from 9d. 
 to Is. 4d. per day of 16 or 18 hours. The sudden 
 and almost complete stoppage of hand-spinning 
 on the introduction of machinery and steam 
 appears, then, to have been merciful by com- 
 
§ IV.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 98 
 
 parison with the slow degradation of the hand- 
 weaver, sinking at every moment of special pressure 
 into indescribable misery. Nor was it only in 
 England that this effect was produced. Weavers 
 all over Europe welcomed the supplies of cheap 
 British machine-made yarn ; and the consequent 
 supersession of hand-spinning wrought no such 
 misery as followed the slower establishment of 
 factory weaving. 
 
 As surely as the dyer's hand shows his trade 
 does the technique of every industry, from the 
 simplest to the most complex, reflect itself not only 
 in the individual, but in the collective and social, 
 character of the workers. The historian of economic 
 development is often compelled to present labour 
 in the lump, a disembodied spirit resembling none 
 of the living labourers we have known in the past 
 or present, in one place or another. Space forbids 
 him to translate his shorthand back into the 
 language of real experience : all he can do is to 
 warn his readers from time to time that no symbol 
 can do justice to the infinite variety of human 
 beings and their affairs. We may illustrate the 
 point by noting the difference between the poor 
 weaver, whose lot we have just traced, and the 
 poor hosiery knitter referred to in preceding pages 
 as a victim of the disruption and a machine-breaker. 
 
 In the last resort, it depends on the difference 
 between a darn, and a loop or stitch. The cloth 
 weaving-frame, or loom, is nearly as old as history, 
 a hoary implement of household servitude. The 
 
94 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. n. 
 
 knitting-frame dates only from 1589^ and hand- 
 knitting seems to be not very much older. The 
 difficulty of mechanically reproducing the variety 
 of movements of the housewife's fingers is evident. 
 A young clergyman of Calverton, Notts, Wm. Lee, 
 M.A., solved the problem, however. " He did not 
 attempt to make a seamless stocking, but made a 
 fiat web of the proper shape, varying in its width 
 from calf to ankle, so that when the edges were 
 sewn together a properly shaped stocking appeared. 
 The machine, a contrivance of wheels and levers, 
 required eleven distinct movements to be made by 
 the hands and feet of the operator, but it achieved 
 the same result as the movements of the human 
 hand. To obtain this, each of the loops which a 
 hand knitter gathers side by side on one or more 
 pins, he placed upon the point of a separate needle 
 fixed in the frame, hence the name ' frame-work 
 knitting.' " ^ Long before the time of the great 
 textile inventions, this ingenious machine was 
 building up an important trade in London and 
 Nottingham, consisting not only of stockings but 
 brightly coloured piece-goods to be cut up for caps, 
 waistcoats, scarves, gloves, and shirts. By 1740, 
 there were 10,000 hand-frames at work, and the 
 operatives could live comfortably on half-a-week's 
 wages. At first, every frame-owner was also a 
 worker, though he might have journeymen ; and the 
 London trade, speaking through its livery company, 
 
 » " The Hosiery Trade," by Anthony Mundella : Co-operative 
 Wholesale Annual, 1893. 
 
§ IV.] liRSf CENSUS 1^0 PETERLOO 95 
 
 exercised a certain check upon individual rapacity, 
 even in the provinces. It was never, perhaps, a very- 
 wise control ; and it carried less and less weight in 
 Nottinghamshire. At the same time, many of the 
 home-workers, already hit by the agrarian revolu- 
 tion, were becoming dependent upon merchants 
 and lesser middlemen for the hire of their frames, 
 and were being subjected to the competition of 
 pauper apprentices who, when they grew up, them- 
 selves necessarily became frame-hirers. As early as 
 1710, there was frame-breaking in London, due to 
 the surplus of apprentices, and to depression from 
 the disuse of bright colours and fancy patterns. 
 Merchant employment constantly increased, at the 
 expense of individual work. With the lapse of 
 the old control, quality deteriorated ; and the com- 
 plaint resounded that honest workmanship had 
 become impossible. Wages fell, and work became 
 precarious, while bread was rising to famine prices. 
 The London company being now powerless to help 
 them, the workers founded, in 1776, what was, 
 perhaps, the first modern trade union. They then 
 obtained the introduction of a parliamentary Bill 
 to fix and regulate pay and frame-rents. Inquiry 
 showed that the renting system was a means of 
 extortion, and involved a continual surplus of 
 productive power which kept many workers at 
 starvation point. The Bill was thrown out ; but, 
 after the smashing of a hundred frames in Notting- 
 ham, a scale of payments was agreed to which 
 held till the end of the century. 
 
78 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. n. 
 
 And here we come to the great difference : it 
 was comparatively easy to hitch a steam-engine to 
 the loom; the knitting-frame remained a hand 
 machine until the middle of the nineteenth century. 
 Adaptations were invented : in 1758, Jedidiah 
 Strutt patented his attachment for making ribbed 
 hosiery; in 1764 began the modification of Lee's 
 frame on which the machine-made lace trade is 
 based. Silk knitting centred in Derby, woollen in 
 Leicester, cotton in Nottingham. The number of 
 stocking-frames did not greatly increase till after 
 the war. In 1812, there were estimated to be 
 30,000 ; in 1833, 33,000, mostly for making cotton 
 hose, engaging 73,000 workers, and a floating 
 capital of more than a million sterling. The net- 
 machine, rude as it was, had brought the patentees 
 large fortunes ; when the patent expired, it was 
 simplified and improved, so that the output was 
 multiplied twelve-fold, and a quantity formerly 
 valued at £5 could be sold for 2s. 6d. In 1833, it 
 was estimated that the bobbin-net trade embraced 
 837 machine owners, and a capital of nearly two 
 millions sterling. The net earnings of male opera- 
 tives were said to average 16s,, of women 6s,, and 
 of children 2s. 6d., a week. 
 
 The hand lace-maker suffered ; but the more 
 important occupation of stocking-knitting remained, 
 in the main, as it had been, a domestic industry. 
 The knitter was always poor, but he had not to 
 wage an impossible battle against a steam-machine ; 
 and, while it was limited to hand-labour, the 
 
§ IV.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 97 
 
 industry pursued a fairly even development. In 
 1804, there was an unsuccessful attempt to revive 
 the regulative powers of the London Company. 
 Parhament was again asked to suppress " spurious " 
 or " cut-up " goods, and to fix a minimum wage. 
 The Luddite outrages, because their authors com- 
 manded general sympathy, proved rather more 
 effective. After the repeal of the combination 
 laws, the frame-work knitters' union gathered 
 strength. There were still dire days before them ; 
 but by the time a rotary action was given, and 
 steam power was applied, to the stocking-frame, 
 free trade was accomplishing its beneficent work ; 
 and still many years were to pass ere the great body 
 of the trade passed into the factory stage. That 
 the hosiery manufacture thus escaped a degrading 
 convulsion must be the chief reason for the preserva- 
 tion of a high morale and intelligence in its opera- 
 tives, a fact illustrated in their pioneering work 
 for industrial conciliation. 
 
 One other among many trades subsidiary to 
 cheap cotton may be here mentioned. Despite 
 heavy duties, the printing of cotton cloths in- 
 creased tenfold in the first third of the century, 
 thanks to the substitution of metal cylinders 
 engraved with the pattern, in place of wooden 
 blocks, and, at a later date, to the introduction of 
 multi-colour printing. 
 
 Something was done, and more attempted, during 
 the first twenty years of the century to improve 
 the now seriously inadequate means of travel, 
 
 6 
 
98 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. n. 
 
 communications, and the transport of goods. To 
 modem eyes, the levying of rates at toll-bars seems 
 a very crude way of finding money for road-building ; 
 but in its time the turnpike system, despite un- 
 sound finance, inequality of incidence, and various 
 abuses, brought with it great benefits. The pack- 
 horse, the lumbering-waggon, the migrating herd 
 of cattle no longer received first .consideration. 
 Fast coaches carried passengers and mails daily 
 between the chief towns ; lighter types of waggon, 
 cart, and carriage followed the tracks firmly laid 
 by Telford and Macadam, and, in turn, brought a 
 crop of comfortable hostelries in their train. The 
 height of the coach and turnpike period was 
 reached in 1837, when tolls yielded a revenue of 
 a million and a half sterling. 
 
 At a cost of over five millions sterling, a network 
 of 2600 miles of canals had been created in England, 
 with 276 miles in Ireland, and 225 miles in Scotland, 
 during the latter half of the eighteenth century. 
 The port of London may almost be said to have 
 been reconstructed with the opening, in 1800-1, of 
 the Grand Junction and Paddington canals, and 
 in 1802-6 of the West India, London, and East 
 India Docks. 
 
 The " railroad " was already familiar, and the 
 steam coach was an accomplished fact ; the steam 
 locomotive was still to come. Wooden rails — 
 narrow planks bound by " sleepers " at intervals- 
 had long been in use at mine-heads and the water- 
 side for the easier carriage of heavy goods. The 
 
§ IV.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 99 
 
 Coalbrookdale works had begun to make iron rails 
 in 1767 ; the first iron tramway available to the 
 public on payment of tolls was opened between 
 Wandsworth and Croydon in 1803. In 1811, there 
 were 150 miles of such iron tracks in connection 
 with the canals, collieries, and iron-works of South 
 Wales. Trevethick's high-pressure steam loco- 
 motive, tried at Merthyr Tydfil in 1804, proved 
 more expensive than horses. In 1811, Blenkinsop 
 was more successful with his cog-wheel and rack 
 engine, at Leeds. Two years later, William 
 Hedley's "Puffing Billy" and " Wylam Dilly " 
 were running at a colliery near Newcastle ; and in 
 1814 George Stephenson's first engine, the " Blucher," 
 drew a load of thirty tons at four miles an hour up 
 a gradient of 1 in 450. While the experimental 
 period was thus wearing to a close, many snorting 
 vehicles were carrying adventurous passengers 
 upon the high roads. In the early days of the 
 locomotive engine, indeed, steam omnibuses were 
 crowded ; and perhaps it was chiefly the heavy 
 turnpike tolls and the resistance of the horse-coach 
 proprietors that prevented them from developing as 
 the motor-bus has done in our own time. 
 
 Meantime, steam power was being more easily 
 applied to water carriage. Robert Fulton had 
 constructed a small steamer, which behaved very 
 indifferently in a trial trip on the Seine in 1803. 
 Napoleon, viewing haughty Albion from his camp 
 at Boulogne, proved inexplicably, incrediblys blind 
 to the American inventor's blandishments. In 
 
100 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. n. 
 
 1807 Fulton's " Claremont," with an Englisfi- 
 built engine, covered the 142 miles up the Hudson 
 River from New York to Albany in 32 hours— the 
 first successful long trip. A steam barge had run 
 on the Thames in the first year of the century; 
 but it was not until 1812 that a regular passenger 
 service was started, Henry Bell's " Comet," a boat 
 forty feet long and of four horse-power, running 
 between Glasgow, Greenock, and Helensburgh, at 
 five miles an hour. In 1815, a paddle-steamer 
 built at Glasgow, and brought round by sea, began 
 to ply on the Thames from London to Margate ; 
 and we soon read that " from the costliness of these 
 vessels, their extensive accommodations and splen- 
 did decorations, they are universally designated 
 ' steam yachts.' " ^ This was the great time when 
 the China clippers could do as much as 436 sea 
 miles in a day's sail, thanks to build and rig, and 
 not less to the skill and daring evolved in two 
 hundred years of maritime adventure. Science and 
 money do not easily overcome such rivalry as this ; 
 and in 1835 the estimable Dr Lardner could still 
 describe as " perfectly chimerical, as much so as a 
 voyage to the moon," the voyage from Liverpool 
 to New York by steam which was, in fact, made 
 three years later. 
 The reaction after the war affected the volume of 
 
 1 Ijeigh's New Picture of London (1818), where it is estimated that 
 there were then 10,000 steam-engines in Great Britain, doing the 
 work of " 225,000 brewers' healthful horses," which would have 
 needed 1,237,500 acres of land to provide them with subsistence. 
 
§ v.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 101 
 
 British sea-traffic even more seriously than the war 
 itself had done. The registered shipping belonging 
 to Great Britain had been doubled between 1783 
 and the end of the century, had then risen to 2J 
 million tons in 1816, and fell somewhat short of 
 this figure in 1820. Except in 1810, 1814-15, and 
 1818, foreign trade varied little from the level of 
 30 millions of imports and 40 millions of exports 
 through the two decades. 
 
 V. The First " Over-Pboduction " Crisis 
 
 Returning to the course of events after Waterloo, 
 we note the alarming appearance of a phenomenon 
 which was to become a characteristic feature of 
 nineteenth-century industrialism, — the wave-like 
 movement of economic life between extremes of 
 " glut " and " boom," depression and a fever of 
 speculative expansion. Fluctuations, of course, 
 there had always been ; and periodic outbreaks of 
 speculative mania had occurred ever since joint- 
 stock-trading had risen to exploit the wealth of the 
 newly discovered East and West. But, before the 
 Industrial Revolution, there could be nothing like 
 the modern " trade crisis," the special featizre of 
 which is the trouble variously termed " over-pro- 
 duction " or " under-consumption." Natural con- 
 ditions, social conditions, and State policy all made 
 it impossible. Capital, credit, labour, and com- 
 modities were so limited in supply that there was 
 little possibility of excess power of production, and 
 
102 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. n. 
 
 therefore little speculation; and the restrictive 
 policy of the State made it still less. Widespread 
 famine sometimes occurred, and much more often 
 a local dearth. Nearly everything depended on 
 the produce of the land. The failure of a harvest 
 might mean terrible suffering, as it does among 
 the Russian peasantry to-day. Even this sort of 
 mischief, however, was of a different and more 
 limited kind than it now is. The Russian peasant 
 suffers not from a simple harvest failure, but from 
 the coincidence of a bad crop with a burden of 
 taxation proper only to a sound and wealthy in- 
 dustrial State. He has to sell his com in a foreign 
 market to pay the interest on enormous foreign 
 loans ; and he has to sell at the international price, 
 whatever it may be. The small subsistence farming 
 which was the prevalent type in England until the 
 middle of the eighteenth century offered no glorious 
 rewards ; neither did it involve the penalties of 
 modern agriculture, in which a general famine is 
 impossible, but prices, credit, and taxation may at 
 any point be factors as important as the weather. 
 Morland's pictures and the poems of Gray and 
 Goldsmith may idealize the old rural order ; yet 
 the significance of this broad fact, that the sturdy 
 yeoman and the hardy conamoner disappeared, 
 leaving the wealthy landlord and the pauperized 
 wage-labourer in their place, cannot be denied. In 
 industry and trade, the transformation gradually 
 became a much more considerable affair, and, 
 necessarily, in its early stage, the gain was least 
 
§ v.] riRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 103 
 
 and the loss greatest. It was an interval of sheer 
 anarchy. The old economic organization was 
 destroyed ; a new organization was not created. 
 A magical power of multiplying commodities fell 
 into greedy hands, without any social restraint. 
 The local market was outgrown ; so crude were 
 banking and transport, we can hardly speak of there 
 being a national market before the railway era ; and 
 foreign commerce was chiefly a disturbing factor, 
 leaping forward and falling back according to the 
 fortunes of the great war. 
 
 There was, therefore, in the early trade crises of 
 the century, something evil belonging to the old 
 order, and something which we have only come to 
 understand in recent years. We may liken the 
 one to an injury, the other to a contagion. More 
 depended then than now upon home agriculture, 
 which directly engaged a third of the population, 
 and in most years could feed the remainder also. If 
 a crop failed, every humble table in the land immedi- 
 ately suffered. If the harvest was abundant, prices 
 fell and the farmer gained nothing. The impossible 
 ideal of the landed classes who dominated in the State 
 was to maintain scarcity prices in days of plenty. 
 Thus, to the natural fluctuation of crops, the long 
 irregularity of foreign supplies owing to the war, and 
 the terrible weight of taxes, was added the artificial 
 obstruction of the Corn Law. Reasonable enter- 
 prise in farming was killed by this system as surely 
 as the consumer was injured. Manufacture and 
 trade partook no less, perhaps more, of the nature 
 
104 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. il. 
 
 of gambling. In the new machine industries; 
 especially, the power of production was so much 
 eiUarged that prices could fall greatly and yet profits 
 increase. The spirit of competitive adventure was 
 restrained, however, neither by wise calculation, nor 
 by social pressure. The art of marketing, as we 
 now have it, was undreamed of. All the available 
 skill was used in cheapening processes ; the rest 
 was left to chance. After Waterloo, shiploads of 
 goods were hurried oft to the Continent and America ; 
 and no one seems to have been so much surprised 
 as the owners to find that they could not be sold 
 except at ruinous prices. These are crucial examples 
 of the direct economic shock or injury.^ 
 
 As experience cured this kind of blunder, the 
 second sort of mischief, which we have likened to 
 a contagion, became more pronounced. The old 
 static, localized life was rapidly passing away. The 
 great mass of the people had come to depend on 
 wages, generally on day wages. They had no other 
 resource, no reserve power with which to resist 
 
 • The following export figures illustrate the fluctuations of this 
 period : — 
 
 Brass and 
 
 
 
 
 Copper 
 
 Woollen 
 
 Cotton 
 
 
 Bar Iron 
 
 Pig Iron 
 
 Manufactures 
 
 Cloths 
 
 Goods 
 
 
 (tons). 
 
 (tons). 
 
 (owts.). 
 
 (pieces). (£ millions). 
 
 1814 
 
 15,468 
 
 307 
 
 73,248 
 
 *638,369 
 
 20 
 
 1816 
 
 20,870 
 
 953 
 
 128,044 
 
 467,222 
 
 16-5 
 
 1818 
 
 42,095 
 
 3048 
 
 148,490 
 
 446,872 
 
 18-7 
 
 1819 
 
 23,765 
 
 906 
 
 115,998 
 
 340,044 
 
 146 
 
 1821 
 
 34,093 
 
 4484 
 
 149,444 
 
 375,464 
 
 16-0 
 
 1825 
 
 25,613 
 
 2815 
 
 • 
 
 90.064 
 1816. 
 
 384,880 
 
 18-3 
 
I v.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 105 
 
 the pressure of competition, exploitation, or fluctua- 
 tion. Merchants and manufacturers were similarly 
 falling subject to forces beyond their own control 
 — ^variations of demand, price, and credit. And, in 
 all this, there was a new sensitiveness, a quickness 
 of reaction which carried waves of stimulus or dis- 
 couragement, alternately, from one trade to another, 
 from end to end, and from bottom to top, of the 
 economic structure. Panic or elation — slow-going 
 at first, under cover of the fourpenny newspaper 
 stamp, then riding behind Stephenson's " Rocket," 
 finally flashing over land and under sea by the 
 electric cable : and never an attempt, only here and 
 there in some heretical brain the vaguest idea of 
 an attempt being some day made, to convert the 
 Gk)vemment of the land into a guiding intelKgence 
 amid the scramble for bread and wealth. We shall 
 see trade crises succeeding one another throughout 
 the century, developing into an irregular cyclic 
 movement, extending in scope and complexity 
 with the international extension of commerce and 
 the mutual dependence of businesses, and pro- 
 voking at length a general revision of political- 
 economic theory. At the outset, it is a story of 
 Homeric simplicity in which everybody seems to 
 be fighting desperately, and nobody seems to 
 understand why. Certainly not the " four-bottle " 
 statesmen of the Oligarchy, now watching the 
 arena with some vague alarm. 
 
 People were astounded that peace did not bring 
 immediate prosperity with it; they would have 
 
106 MODERN ENGLAND [chap, ii, 
 
 been still more astounded if they could have looked 
 forward over the next thirty years. It is difficult 
 even now to imagine the utter exhaustion and 
 derangement produced by twenty years of warfare 
 coinciding with radical economic change. Of such 
 a diseased condition, there can be no sudden cure. 
 Fifty millions of Government expenditure were 
 suddenly cut off ; while taxation was reduced 
 by seventeen millions — a relief urgently necessary, 
 which must in time bring a healthy reaction. 
 But the first result was seen in the disbandment of 
 three hundred thousand soldiers and sailors, who 
 swarmed over the country either competing for 
 wages with men already in desperate straits, or 
 falling upon the poor rates. The whole Western 
 world was pinched. Some day harvests might 
 grow more richly for the blood shed on the 
 Napoleonic battlefields, but not yet. Little more 
 than a coastal belt of America was under the 
 plough. The very fact that England approached 
 nearly, in normal times, to a self-sufficiency of food 
 supply made it difficult in emergency to obtain 
 other resources ; and the rise of prices was always 
 much greater than the deficiency of the harvest. 
 Thus, wheat ran up from 52s. 6d. in January 1816 
 to 117s. in June 1817. At the former date, rural 
 labourers were thrown out of employment ; at the 
 latter, the acutest distress appeared in the in- 
 dustrial towns. 
 
 The harvest of 1816 was one of the worst ever 
 known. It was estimated that a quarter of the 
 
§ v.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 107 
 
 agricultural rent of England, some nine millions 
 sterling, had to be remitted, and that thirteen 
 thousand persons emigrated. There was a general 
 withdrawal of credit ; and many small banks 
 failed. Perhaps the worst suffering was in Ire- 
 land, where the peasants were eating mustard- 
 seed, nettles, and potato-tops. In East Anglia, 
 there were serious riots, with rick- and bam-buming 
 — a new omen. In the Fens, the cultivation of the 
 low-lying land was largely abandoned. Gangs of 
 discharged labourers made a devastating march on 
 Ely ; thirty-four of them were sentenced to death, 
 and five were actually executed. In the Midlands, 
 there was a recrudescence of the Luddite riots, 
 many lace-frames being destroyed in the Lough- 
 borough district. The cessation of Government 
 orders for small arms was severely felt in Bir- 
 mingham, where, out of a population of 84,000, 
 about 27,500 were receiving parish relief in 1817. 
 Brougham told the House of Commons that the 
 average wage-rate of a thousand weavers had been 
 13s. 3d. a week in 1800, slightly higher in 1802, 
 10s. 6d. in 1806, 6s. 7d. in 1808, 5s. 2d. in 1816, 
 and " had now reached the fearful point of 4s. 3^d., 
 from which, when the usual expenses paid for the 
 loom were deducted, there remained no more than 
 3s. 3d. to support human life for seven days. How 
 could people sustain existence on such a sum ? 
 He had been told that half a pound of oatmeal 
 daily, mixed with a little salt and water, consti- 
 tuted the whole food of many of them. Charity was 
 
108 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ii. 
 
 out of the question — the case was far beyond 
 it." 
 
 Iron furnaces were blown out, coal-pits closed, 
 and factories shut. A body of unemployed colliers 
 set out for London to present a petition and two 
 waggons of coal, which they dragged with them, 
 to the Regent. They were stopped by the police, 
 and returned peacefully to their bare homes. Many 
 families, forbidden relief for lack of a legal " settle- 
 ment," wandered about the countryside, begging. 
 Others were carted thither and hither among the 
 fourteen thousand parishes of England at the cost 
 of the rates, in a mad endeavour of each dis- 
 trict to throw off all but its own paupers. Irish 
 immigration was already making itself felt. In 
 the report of the Commons Committee on mendicity 
 and vagrancy (1816), we read of a certain court of 
 twenty-four houses near Portman Square, London, 
 where seven hundred Irish lived in squalor, distress, 
 and profligacy, totally neglected by the parish, 
 and banned by their neighbours. The tribe of 
 Dick Tui'pin plagued the high-roads no more ; 
 but the city was infested at this time with thieves, 
 the police often being in league with them ; and 
 covered places like Covent Garden were the scenes 
 of nightly orgies, in which men and women, boys 
 and girls, took part. There is hardly a ray of 
 reason in the social prospect. A rural M.P., Mr 
 Curwen, proposed the abolition of poor rates, and 
 the substitution of a contributory insurance system 
 administered by parochial committees. He was 
 
§ VI.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 109 
 
 laughed out ; and, a generation later, Harriet 
 Martineau thought it " scarcely necessary to dwell 
 upon the practical absurdity of this benevolent 
 dream." The absurd dream has been reduced to 
 business fact in our own day. 
 
 VI. Pioneers of Reform 
 
 This black year, 1816, was the year of Cole- 
 ridge's Christabel and Kuhla Khan, of the third 
 canto of Childe Harold, of Scott's Antiquary and 
 Old Mortality. Keats was working at Endymion, 
 De Quincey at the new German metaphysics. It 
 could hardly be said of these that they were 
 "cradled into poetry by wrong." Circumstance 
 puts its stamp even upon genius. In the light 
 of the events of the time, the " Romantic Revival " 
 appears mainly as an evasion of painful realities, 
 an escape from the choice between subservience 
 and rebelhon, by a flight into the realms of 
 the supernatural, the supererotic, the barbarian, 
 the medieval. In the sensuous riot of The Erl- 
 King, my Lord Castlereagh is forgotten for a few 
 moments. The best that can be said is that Eng- 
 land, being less emasculated than the Continent by 
 long warfare, does not sink to the same depth of 
 morbidity. But everywhere the Romantic move- 
 ment is contaminated with sex license, opium, 
 insanity, and suicide. " My flame is still Marianna," 
 Byron writes from Venice to Thomas Moore (Dec, 
 24, 1816) ; and he continues : " And now what 
 
110 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. n. 
 
 art thou doing ? Are you not near the Luddites ? 
 
 Bv the Lord ! if there's a row, but I U be among 
 
 J How go on the weavers— the breakers of 
 
 frames— the Lutherans of politics— the reformers ? 
 
 " As the Liberty lads o'er the sea 
 Bought theii freedom, and cheaply, with blood, 
 
 So we, boys, we 
 Will die fighting, or Uve free, 
 And down with all kings but King Ludd." 
 
 Sojthrough two more stanzas — " an amiable chanson 
 for you, all impromptu. I have written it princi- 
 pally to shock your neighbour — , who is all clergy 
 and loyalty, mirth and iimocence, milk and water." 
 Shelley, indoctrinated by his father-in-law, Godwin, 
 shocked his neighbours to better purpose, risking 
 his Muse in outbursts which echo alternately the 
 Utopian individualism of Political Jtistice and the 
 thunders of Paine's Bights of Man and Age of 
 Reason. 
 
 In commoner soil political ideas were germinating 
 that were to grow strong, and presently to govern 
 British life. The propertied and ruling class, by 
 whatever party names it called itself, was now 
 saturated with the self-defensive instincts to which 
 Burke had given a formal and effective, if not 
 exactly a philosophic, expression. Yet the voice 
 of humane sympathy was never quite silenced.^ 
 
 ' The protest of Lords Lauderdale and Bosslyn against the Act of 
 1812 making machine-breaking a capital ofience deserves to be 
 quoted : " We think it our duty strongly and in distinct terms to 
 
§ VI.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 111 
 
 Some of the ablest of the Whigs were developing 
 towards what was to be called Liberalism; and 
 an independent school of Individualist Radicals 
 was beginning to gather. In 1815, Malthus stated 
 clearly the doctrine of rent — ^the surplus of the price 
 of the produce of land over cost of production, 
 this cost on the worst land regulating the price of 
 the whole supply. In 1817, in his Principles of 
 Political Economy and Taxation, Ricardo pro- 
 claimed the tendency of wages to fall to subsistence 
 level, and laid the basis of the orthodox economics 
 of the near future. We shall return to these 
 thinkers. While they wrote, there was appear- 
 ing in another quarter the first glimmer of a real 
 democratic movement. It was confused in its 
 ideas ; ignorant men played havoc with its en- 
 thusiasm ; but it had two sources of strength. 
 Poverty was, for these pioneers of reform, a fact of 
 daily experience, not an abstraction for theoretical 
 analysis. There is, too, something very British 
 in their faith, after a lifetime of disappointment, 
 that, with an effort, the State could be made the 
 servant of the people. On ways and means, they 
 were vague and instable. We see here, in fact, 
 in germ, the mixed elements still represented in 
 British working-class life by the trade unions and 
 co-operative societies, the Independent Labour 
 
 reprobate the unprecedented folly of attempting to enlighten the 
 minds of men in regard to what is beneficial to themselves by in- 
 creased severity of punishment ; whilst every sound principle of 
 criminal legislation makes ug regard such an addition to the long 
 list of capital offences with astonishment and disgust." 
 
112 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ii. 
 
 Party, the Fabian expert, wire-pulling for the 
 commonweal, the "Single Tax" enthusiast, and 
 even the " Syndicalist " advocate of " direct 
 action." Not that there was yet any definite pre- 
 vision of Socialism, or anything like a philosophy 
 of justice by violence. The violence was instinctive, 
 driven by despair, though it proved so contagious 
 in the case of the Luddite outrages as to suggest to 
 alarmed minds a diabolical organization. With the 
 definite commencement of a popular demand for 
 Parliamentary reform, violence subsided. Paine, 
 soldier and martyr of liberty, had died in 1809 ; 
 but his " soul was marching on." It was now that 
 Cobbett gained his great vogue. In November 
 1816, he boldly reduced the price of his Weekly 
 Political Register from Is. 0|d. for a single octavo 
 sheet to 2d., or 12s. 6d. per hundred copies. The 
 Register found its way wherever men could read ; 
 it was read aloud in village taverns and town 
 meetings, and continued to be a force till Cobbett's 
 death in 1833. 
 
 From this time, the Radical press (aided, from 
 1814, by steam printing) became the chief formative 
 influence upon popular opinion. Small groups of 
 reformers sprang up all over the country, meeting 
 sometimes in Methodist chapels, and requiring a 
 subscription of a penny per week from their 
 members. The leaders were humble men who had 
 received a little education in Sunday School, and 
 some practice in running local friendly societies. 
 Knowing nothing of this world, so touchingly 
 
§ VI.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 113 
 
 revealed to us in the recollections of the Lancashire 
 weaver, Sanauel Bamtord, the Government thought, 
 or pretended to think, that there was going to be 
 an '89 in London. Cobbett was denounced as a 
 sedition-monger, even while he was penning his 
 open letter against the Luddites. A House of 
 Commons elected by some fifteen thousand persons, 
 its majority, indeed, appointed by two hundred 
 wealthy patrons, the chief of them members of the 
 other House, was not likely to give a sympathetic 
 ear to the demands of the Hampden Clubs, the Union 
 Clubs, the Spencean Philanthropists, and other 
 bodies of agitators for annual Parliaments and uni- 
 versal suffrage. Rather was it concerned to extend 
 the game laws, already very severe, by making a 
 poacher, or even a suspect, liable to transportation 
 for seven years. Canning thanked God that the 
 House of Commons did not reflect the popular will. 
 This superciliousness of the Oligarchy was not its 
 worst fault, or the next twenty years might have 
 passed less unhappily. There was no organized 
 revolutionary movement; but there was almost 
 universal discontent. Francis Place, the Informa- 
 tion Bureau incarnate of Hume and his Radical 
 friends, declared that the Government employed 
 agents provocateurs. They admittedly employed 
 spies ; on the strength of informers' reports they 
 undoubtedly misrepresented innocent agitation, and 
 punished it, as dire conspiracy. 
 
 The Spenceans, who anticipated the agrarian 
 doctrine of Henry George, "the poor harmless 
 
114 MODERN ]^N(iLAND toHAP. ti. 
 
 a" as Place called them, "with their 
 UwToAsisting of an old Bible and three or four 
 small publications, a high pnest under the name of 
 librarian, and some forty or fifty followers," i were 
 held up to obloquy as authors of the Spa Fields riot. 
 This was, in fact, a mob-march from Bermondsey 
 to Cheapside, where the demonstrators and the 
 crazy youngster who led them were met, faced, 
 and easily dispersed, by the Lord Mayor, two friends, 
 and five constables. The description of the affair 
 by a secret Parliamentary Committee as " a most 
 formidable organization of desperate men " did not 
 prevent the City Council, a week later, from petition- 
 ing the Throne in favour of reform, and declaring 
 its grievances to be " the natural effect of the rash 
 and ruinous wars, unjustly commenced and per- 
 tinaceously persisted in." The strength of the 
 reformers lay in the ill-repute of the Government, 
 not in any capacity or organization of their own. 
 With Bamford's aid, we can see them, the Hampden 
 Club of London, at one of their meetings in the 
 Crown and Anchor Tavern. There is Sir Francis 
 Burdett, in the chair, a little higher than the 
 rest, proudly condescending ; Major Cartwright, a 
 veteran (bald-headed and gentle, he still sits in 
 effigy in Cartwright Gardens, near St Pancras) ; 
 Cobbett, jolly, obstinate, pugnacious, shrewd, the 
 supreme type of "John Bull" as Reformer «; 
 
 I «™ham Wallas, Life oj Francis Place, p. 121. 
 and sunburnt, with a bright smile, and an air compounded of 
 
§ VI.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 115 
 
 " Orator Hunt," a blustering demagogue ; and 
 Lord Cochrane, unaffectedly cordial. There is Dr 
 Watson, perhaps a real Jacobin; and there are 
 almost certainly some Government agents in the 
 group. The air is pungent with tobacco smoke; 
 and each man has a pot of porter before him. There 
 are motions and amendments, and points of order, 
 very naive and harmless. 
 
 i:,But when a missile was thrown at the Regent, 
 on his return from opening Parliament, and this 
 was followed by a foolish attempt to march a body 
 of petitioners — the " Blanketeers," so called from 
 the blankets and knapsacks which they carried — 
 from Manchester to London, all reasonable counsels 
 were swept aside. The Habeas Corpus Act was 
 hastily suspended ; and three Coercion Acts were 
 pressed through, for the prevention of " seditious " 
 meetings, the punishment of attempts to tamper 
 with the army, and the special protection of the 
 Regent. On April 1, 1817, at the Leicester Assizes, 
 eight men were convicted of Luddite outrages, and 
 six were executed a fortnight later. In June, a 
 band of men, armed with pikes and some old 
 guns, marched from Pentridge to near Nottingham 
 under the leadership of a framework-knitter named 
 Brandreth, whose family had received poor relief. 
 They were stopped and chased by a party of soldiers ; 
 
 the soldier and the farmer." Bamford adds that "he was dressed 
 in a bhie coat, yellow swansdown waistcoat, drab kersey small- 
 clothes, and top-boota. He was a perfect representative of what he 
 always wished to be, an English gentleman farmer." 
 
116 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ri. 
 
 ultimately, three of them were executed, eleven 
 were transported for life, and four for fourteen 
 years, while five were imprisoned for various terms. 
 Lords Landsdowne, Erskine, and Holland told the 
 Government plainly that there was no evidence 
 of a wide revolutionary spirit, and that the real 
 troubles were due to genuine discontent. Romilly 
 declared his belief that the whole of this " Derby- 
 shire insurrection " was the work of Government 
 emissaries. Bamford was arrested on suspicion of 
 high treason, brought to London, examined five 
 times before the Privy Council, and then discharged. 
 A State prosecution of twenty-four reformers at 
 York broke down completely. But the Govern- 
 ment scored one point : on March 28, 1818, William 
 Cobbett fled to America. During his two years' 
 absence, the agitation collapsed. 
 
 An access of speculative excitement was now 
 taken for a general revival of trade. Prices, both 
 agricultural and industrial, recovered sufficiently 
 during 1818 to stimulate enterprise. An interest- 
 ing sign of this is to be found in a well-organized 
 strike of Lancashire cotton-spinners, maintained, 
 by subscriptions and levies on other trades, for ten 
 weeks, but unsuccessful in the end. The relief was 
 quickly reflected in Parliamentary and public 
 discussion. Habeas Corpus was restored. Several 
 small measures were passed to prevent the payment 
 of wages by " truck." The evil operation of poor- 
 law relief in lieu of wages, which we shall consider 
 more fully in our next chapter, was mooted in 
 
§ VI.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 117 
 
 reports of a Committee presided over by Sturges 
 Bourne ; and, in the following year, a small 
 reform was effected. Another Committee, under 
 Brougham, exposed the scandalous lack of popular 
 schools, and the abuse of educational charities. 
 According to Brougham, there were in England 
 166,000 children in endowed schools, and 478,000 
 in schools dependent entirely on the casual support 
 of the parents — a total of 644,000 scholars, or 
 one-fourteenth of the population, as compared with 
 one-twentieth in Wales, and one-ninth in Scotland 
 (where every parish had at least one school)* There 
 were also 5100 Sunday Schools, having 452,000 
 scholars. Out of 12,000 parishes in England, 
 8500 had no school of any kind. £35,000 had been 
 spent in 1816 in purchasing the Elgin Marbles. A 
 million pounds was voted in 1818 for building 
 churches. The idea of spending State money on 
 instruction for the conamon people was dismissed as 
 foolish and dangerous. In vain a few enlightened 
 men demanded the restitution of moneys left by 
 " pious founders " for the education of the poor, 
 and diverted, or merely stolen. 
 
 Taxation remained inordinately heavy. The 
 unredeemed debt stood at £791 millions in 1819, 
 and the charges, including Sinking Fund, at £45 
 millions. No Budget could be squared without a 
 fresh loan. The resumption of cash payments, 
 inevitable as it was, and long overdue, was for long 
 after 1819 a serious disturbing factor, since debts 
 contracted in depreciated money had to be paid 
 
118 MODERN ENGLAND [ohap. ii. 
 
 at full value. To cap all, the trade revival suddenly 
 ceased. Drought in the shires was followed by 
 stagnation and a fall of wages in the towns. Parlia- 
 ment was at once inundated with petitions for 
 increased corn duties and poor-law reform. Robert 
 Owen's scheme for a system of farm colonies, 
 and his successful experiment in model industrial 
 conditions at New Lanark, were much discussed. 
 The agitation for parliamentary reform sprang up 
 with new force, led at Westminster by Lord John 
 Russell, and in the North by bodies of men who 
 now commonly assumed the name of Radicals. 
 For the first time, also, we find women participat- 
 ing with men in working-class meetings. Large 
 demonstrations were held during the summer in 
 Yorkshire, at Glasgow, Stockport, and Birmingham. 
 One of them, the occasion of the " Peterloo 
 Massacre," was to become famious in history. 
 Bamf ord, one of the lesser leaders, prints a convinc- 
 ing account of what occurred. I\all notice had 
 been given that a county meeting was to be held 
 on St Peter's Field, Manchester, to demand aboh- 
 tion of the Corn Law and a representative House 
 of Commons. No objection was raised. 
 
 In the hot, sunny morning of August 16, 1819, 
 contingents of quiet men, decently attired in their 
 " Sunday best," carrying flags and laurel branches 
 " as a token of amity and peace," well marshalled, 
 with a few bands of music, tramped up to town, 
 and took up their position in a dense mass, be- 
 tween fifty and eighty thousand strong, near the 
 
§ VI.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 119 
 
 " hustings." There was no interference, so far. 
 But a large military force, including horse artillery, 
 had been gathered ; and, directly the meeting was 
 opened, a force of mounted yeomanry (consisting 
 chiefly, it was said, of local manufacturers) and 320 
 Hussars were launched upon it, the apparent aim 
 being to arrest the speakers. Under this onslaught, 
 and in the consequent disorder, six or eight of the de- 
 monstrators were killed, and between four and five 
 hundred were injured. The thing itself was not 
 so bad as the crass stupidity of its authors, and the 
 commendation they received in the highest circles. 
 The news sent a wave of indignation rolling through 
 the country. Carlyle, looking back to this and like 
 events, spoke of "the treasury of rage burning, 
 hidden or visible, in all hearts ever since, more or 
 less perverting the efforts and aim of all hearts ever 
 since." 
 
 " The worst of it all is," Sydney Smith thought, 
 " that a considerable portion of what these rascals 
 say is so very true." Earl Fitzwilliam and the 
 Duke of Hamilton were more sympathetic. Earl 
 Grey, Lord Erskine, and others protested that the 
 Peterloo meeting was perfectly legal. But the 
 Government was deaf to all sense, and succeeded in 
 exciting Parliamentary alarm so far that six sepa- 
 rate "gagging" Acts were rapidly passed, effecting, 
 as Sir James Mackintosh said, an almost complete 
 suspension of the Constitution. The Seditious 
 Meetings Bill Hmited the right of attending meet- 
 ings to local residents, and required a prior notice 
 
120 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. n. 
 
 signed by seven householders. The Blasphemous 
 and Seditious Libels Bill enacted severe punishment, 
 including transportation, for second offences. The 
 Misdemeanours Bill expedited the procedure in such 
 cases. Another Act prohibited military training, 
 except under authority of a magistrate ; and the 
 Seizure of Arms Act gave powers of search and arrest. 
 Finally, the Newspaper Act required the payment 
 of stamp duties on all the cheap, small pamphlets 
 which were the chief means of ventilating public 
 opinion at the time. 
 
 On his accession, early in 1820, George IV 
 justified this Metternichian programme by reference 
 to a " flagrant and sanguinary conspiracy lately 
 detected." The nearest approach to such a thing 
 of which evidence remains lay in two events far 
 removed from each other, without any general 
 support, and crude to the point of absurdity in 
 design and execution. The first was the Cato Street 
 Conspiracy, a wild project to kill the Ministry 
 when they were at dinner together. An informer 
 revealed the plot ; its existence was known and 
 talked of in Ministerial circles six weeks beforehand. 
 London, however, was duly " panic-stricken " 
 by the " discovery." ^ Thistlewood, the leader, 
 
 ' " Those who are old enough to have a distinct recolleotion of 
 those times are astonished to think how great was the panic wliioh 
 could esdst without any evidence at all ; how prodigious were the 
 Radical forces which were always heard of, but never seen ; how 
 country gentlemen, well armed, scoured the fields and lanes, and 
 met on heaths, to fight the enemy, who never came ; and how, even 
 in the midst of towns, young ladies carried heavy planks and ironing 
 
§ VI.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 121 
 
 and four others were executed; and five persons 
 were transported for life. Edwards, the spy, or 
 agent provocateur, disappeared, to enjoy his pay. 
 In the following April, placards were posted in 
 Glasgow announcing a strike ; and forty or fifty 
 men marched to Kilsyth with the crazy notion of 
 seizing the Carron Iron Works. The yeomanry 
 dispersed them in the " battle of Bonnymuir"; 
 and three of the leaders were executed.. The fact 
 seems to be that the plight of the working people 
 was too desperate to leave them, any energy for 
 revolutionary plotting. Some respectable witnesses 
 say that the winter had been marked throughout 
 the manufacturing districts by an awful silence. 
 The opening of the Indian markets had greatly 
 stimulated the cotton trade ; and it had grown 
 with especial rapidity in Glasgow. The spinners, 
 who were said to number a third of an artisan 
 population of 200,000, could just make ends meet. 
 Weavers' wages were no more than 5s. 6d. a week 
 in 1819. Many families, thrifty and upright (there 
 was no poor relief for the able-bodied in Scotland), 
 were starving. Wages in Manchester and Salford 
 ranged from 6s. to 10s. a week, for a fifteen hours' 
 day. The Yorkshire woollen mianufacture had 
 shrunk by one-fifth in two years. A petition from 
 Coventiy in 1820 represented that it had become 
 customary to use roast wheat instead of tea and 
 
 boards to barricade windows in preparation for sieges from thou- 
 sands of rebels whose footfall was Ustened for in vain through the 
 darkness " (Harriet Martineau, History of (he Peace, i. 319). 
 
122 MODERN ENGLAND [chap, ii, 
 
 coffee, and prayed for protection from the excise 
 ofificers. At the end of the year, there was some 
 improvement, especially in the cotton trade. But the 
 agricultural outlook was as black as ever. Wheat 
 was varying between 60s. and 70s. ; and, though the 
 Corn Law had conspicuously failed to prevent a fre- 
 quent and acute fluctuation of prices, the most vocal 
 demand of the farmer was still for more protection. 
 Amid much puzzlement over these disturbing 
 phenomena, one conviction was rising clearly and 
 strongly in the mind of the more enlightened states- 
 men : that commerce and production must be 
 liberated from the thousand and one restric- 
 tive laws by which folly and selfish interest had 
 encumbered them. The nature of international 
 exchange was more accurately understood than 
 hitherto ; and Lord Lansdowne, in 1820, could 
 appreciate as well as another Lord Lansdowne in 
 1913 the mechanism of foreign trade.^ The 
 
 ^ Liberty of trade, he said, should be the rule, and restriction the 
 exception. There ought to be no prohibitory duties as such. The 
 Navigation Laws should be relaxed ; an entire freedom of transit 
 trade would encourage the warehouse system, and make our ports 
 a depot for foreign nations. He showed the absurdity of the pre- 
 ference to Canadian timber, especially satirizing the argument that 
 the longer voyage gave us the benefit in freights. " If a person 
 were to make an offer to carry all the mails of this country, using 
 twice the number of horses that were at present used, would that 
 be considered as a recommendation of the new proposal ? " Nor 
 could it be said that Russians would not take our manufactures in 
 return for their timber. They took them indirectly, through 
 Germany. " Whatever we received must be paid for in the produce 
 of our land and labour, directly or cirouitously. If better and 
 cheaper materials were imported, both manufacture and shipping 
 would be stimulated" (Hansard for 1820, i. 565). 
 
§ VI.] FIRST CENSUS TO PETERLOO 123 
 
 Commons' Committee then appointed reported that 
 " all restriction on trade, of whatsoever nature, 
 was an evil, only to be justified by some great 
 political expediency ; and, where such expediency 
 was not clear and manifest, the restriction should 
 be removed." A simplification of the hundreds 
 of protective statutes and a relaxation of the 
 Navigation Laws were specifically recommended. 
 Generally, it may be said that, from this time on. 
 Protection rested on vested interest and fear of 
 economic disturbance, not on any accepted theory. 
 In the case of manufactures, which enjoyed an ad 
 valorem tariff privilege of one-third or more, the 
 defence was becoming very weak ; but, as yet, few 
 leading men dared to contemplate the abolition, or 
 even an immediate lowering, of the corn duties. 
 With the tabling of the London, Glasgow, and 
 Manchester petitions, in May 1820, however, the 
 principle of Free Trade was placed effectively before 
 the country. The petition of the London merchants, 
 drawn up by Thomas Tooke, author of the well- 
 known History of Prices, is a political classic, and 
 perhaps the best of all very short statements of 
 the case for Free Trade. Incidentally, we may 
 note the following clauses as an answer to those 
 who have held that the case was ever made by 
 its advocates to depend upon the action of other 
 countries : " That nothing would more tend to 
 counteract the commercial hostility of foreign 
 States than the adoption of a more enlightened 
 and more conciliatory policy on the part of this 
 
124 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. n. 
 
 country. That although, as a matter of mere 
 diplomacy, it may sometimes answer to hold out 
 the removal of particular prohibitions or high 
 duties as depending upon corresponding concessions 
 by other States in our favour, it does not follow 
 that we should maintain our restrictions in cases 
 where the desired concessions on their part cannot 
 be obtained. Our restrictions would not be the less 
 prejudicial to our own capital and industry because 
 other governments persisted in preserving impo- 
 litic regulations. That, upon the whole, the most 
 liberal would prove to be the most politic course on 
 such occasions." 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE LOWEST DEPTH, 1821-1834 
 
 I, Rural England in the 'Twenties 
 
 The rural life of England between the close of the 
 great war and the Poor Law reform of 1834 was 
 markedly different from that of either the preceding 
 or the succeeding ages. The common lands had 
 gone ; except in the neighbourhood of the new 
 industrial centres, the commoners were now wage- 
 labourers on the land, dependent upon the small 
 share that fell to them of artificially high prices, 
 or upon parish doles. The yeoman-farmers were 
 disappearing under the triple pressure of rent, rates 
 and taxes, and violent fluctuations in the value 
 of their crops. To the superficial observer, the 
 immanence of an agrarian crisis was not evident. 
 The country was cultivated as it had never been 
 before. The great estates of the aristocracy and the 
 lesser demesnes of the business gentry stretched 
 far and wide, with new barns, trim hedges, clean 
 ditches, fat herds at pasture, root-crops that the 
 irrepressible Cobbett, riding by, hailed as parables 
 of political Radicalism,! and waving grain as 
 
 1 " Our system of husbandry is happily illustrative of our system 
 of politics. Our lines of movement are fair and straitforward. 
 We destroy all weeds, which, like tax-eaters, do nothing but devour 
 
 125 
 
126 MODERN ENGLAND [oha?. m. 
 
 to which the only doubt was whether there would 
 be a ruinous abundance. 
 
 This was the golden age of f ox-huntmg and game- 
 preserving, of the hunting parson and the farming 
 parson. On the main turnpike roads, the stage- 
 coach and the gentleman's travelling carriage kept 
 up a mild simmer of excitement ; but, in general, 
 the village was still self-contained and self-sufl&c- 
 ing. Over its three estates — parson, farmers, and 
 labourers — the squire wielded an almost un- 
 questioned sway. Usually, we may believe, it was 
 a good-natured, though rarely an enlightened, 
 despotism. The squire was a man of the past, a 
 relic of the national settlement of a century earlier, 
 untroubled about religion now that Popery and 
 Puritanism were equally impossible, confirmed in 
 his Tory instincts by youthful memories of the 
 Paris Terrorists and Napoleon. The Oligarchy 
 needed him, and he felt some glory reflected into his 
 corner of the shires from the London salons and 
 clubs. Great as the difference might be in wealth 
 and power, he rightly felt himself to be nearer in 
 essentials to the Duke, and even to " the King, 
 God bless him!" than to the illiterate and de- 
 moralized creatures who cowered in the shadow 
 
 the sustenance that ought to feed the valuable plants. Our nations 
 of swedes and cabbages present a happy uniformity of enjoyments 
 and of bulk, and not, as in the broad-oast system of Corruption, 
 here and there one of enormous size, surrounded by thousands of 
 poor, little starveKng things. The Norfolk boys are, therefore, 
 nght m calling their swedes Sadical swedes" (Sural Bides, i. 
 
§ I.] TllE LOWES* DEP^a Hi 
 
 of Hall and Park. His utmost adventure would be 
 a small imitation of lordly experiments in high 
 farming ; but there were liberal squires here and 
 there who would try to catch something of the 
 easy, common-sensible temper that distinguished 
 the protagonists at Westminster, from Walpole to 
 Palmerston. Bluff, hale, and hearty, the squire 
 thought better of rats than poachers ; he hated, 
 because he simply could not comprehend, any show 
 of manly independence in the " common people." 
 But he lived and died among his folk ; he was not 
 tainted with the love of wealth as such ; he thought 
 the greatness of England still depended upon the 
 patriarchate of his own diminishing class. Pro- 
 bably he viewed as suspiciously as roaring Cobbett 
 himself the mansions and lodges and suburban 
 houses of the " Squires of 'Change Alley." 
 
 The country parson, thanks to the Corn Laws, was 
 considerably risen from the lowly estate of Gold- 
 smith's Dr Primrose. A gentleman, a magistrate, 
 and the squire's boon companion, his position was 
 virtually recognized even by the Nonconformists, 
 until the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts 
 in 1828, and the removal of Roman Catholic 
 disabilities in the following year, made a semb* 
 lance of equality among Christian preachers. The 
 semblance has never become a reality on the 
 English countryside ; and, in those days, tithe was 
 a burden for which there was rarely any sort of 
 compensation. When enclosure had its full effect, 
 and rural depopulation began, the parson often 
 
128 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ni. 
 
 became an absentee tithe-collector.^ In August- 
 September 1826, Cobbett, on one of his rides 
 through Wiltshire, looked down from a hill by 
 Heytesbury into Somerset. " In looking down this 
 vale," he wrote, " one cannot help being struck with 
 the innumerable proofs of a decline in point of 
 population. There are twenty-four parishes, each 
 of which takes a little strip across the valley, and 
 I'uns up through the arable land into the down. 
 There are twenty-four parish churches, and there 
 ought to be as many parsonage-houses ; but seven 
 of these are stated to be unfit for a person to reside 
 in. Two are gone ; there are no parsonage-houses 
 in those two parishes ; there are the sites ; there 
 are the glebes ; the tithes remain, and the parson 
 sacks the amount of them. The falling down and 
 beggary of these parsonage-houses prove beyond 
 all question the decayed state of the population. 
 . . . Twenty-one of the twenty-four parishes 
 have only 4170 souls, men, women, and children. 
 What, I ask for about the thousandth time, what 
 were these twenty churches built for? Some of 
 them stand within a quarter of a mile of each othei'. 
 They are pretty near as close to each other as the 
 churches in London and Westminster are. ... As 
 to the produce of this valley, it must be at least ten 
 times as great as its consumption, even if we include 
 the three towns that belong to it. I am sure I 
 
 1 There was a certain Prebendary of Winchester who held two 
 rectories in Kent and an advowson in Devonsliire. One set of liis 
 parishioners became anxious as to his whereabouts, and advertised ; 
 it was then found that he had for some time been living in Rome. 
 
§ I.] THE LOWEST DEPTH 129 
 
 saw produce enough in five or six of the farm-yards, 
 or rick-yards, to feed the whole of the population 
 of the twenty-one parishes. But the infernal system 
 causes it all to be carried away. Not a bit of good 
 beef, or mutton, or veal, and scarcely a bit of bacon 
 is left for those who raise all this food and wool. 
 The labourers here look as if they were half- 
 starved." 1 
 
 The farmer is the least sympathetic figure of 
 them all. Twenty years of agricultural speculation 
 had sapped the rough manliness of the type, pro- 
 ducing a divorce of classes which proved in the end 
 to be as injurious to the middlemen as to those 
 beneath. War prices and protective duties had 
 yielded a margin of parasitic profit, the most of 
 which went to the landlord ; but enough was left 
 to the farmer to encourage expectations, ambitions, 
 and habits that were foredoomed to a bitter punish- 
 ment. For, as his most powerful critic said : " The 
 gay farm-houses with pianos within were not 
 improvements. The puUing-down of 200,000 small 
 farm-houses, and making the inhabitants paupers, 
 was not an improvement. The gutting of the cot- 
 tages of their clocks, and brass kettles, and brew- 
 ing-tackle was no improvement." Above all, the 
 reduction in the number of labourers, their wages, 
 and the length of their hiring (now never more than 
 eleven months — lest a " settlement " should be 
 produced) was not the way in which the rural 
 problem could be solved ; and the system of poor 
 
 » Rides, ii. 66-70. 
 I 
 
130 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. hi. 
 
 allowances, which had been originally chosen as a 
 means of evading the obligation to pay a living 
 wage, was now, in the dark days of the long peace, 
 an insupportable burden. 
 
 Market-day in the county town did not suggest 
 any such gloomy reflections as these. Through the 
 length of the main street, a jolly bustle broke the 
 six-days' sleep. In the low, crowded shops, the 
 ladies of squire and parson were laying in the week's 
 supplies of grocery, chandlery, drapery, and quack 
 medicine. The cobbled streets rattled with the 
 wheels of private carriages bearing glorious crests ; 
 and postboys tootled the arrival of the " Express " 
 coach from the nearest city. Now shone the 
 merry countenances of mine host of the George, 
 the Bell, or the Swan, and of his buxom spouse, 
 famed artist of sirloin and pasties. Sons and 
 daughters, stableboys and maids — every hand is 
 busy in the kitchen, or around the overflowing 
 board. In the evening, there may be a County 
 Ball or a Hunt dinner ; and then the ladies will 
 share the fun. Thus the gentry kept up their 
 spirits. They called it " keeping up the County." 
 
 Once their complacency was broken, as by a 
 volcanic eruption. The Jacquerie of the autumn 
 of 1830 is much more significant than the town riots, 
 following the rejection of the Reform Bill, by which 
 it has been somewhat overshadowed. It began 
 in Kent, perhaps provoked by an importation of 
 Irish labourers, more certainly by the supersession 
 of hand labour by threshing-machines. The first 
 
§ I.] THE LOWEST DEPTH 131 
 
 symptom of trouble was the delivery of threaten- 
 ing letters signed " Swing " ; then stacks were 
 burned, and threshing-machines broken. The 
 fever of incendiarism spread rapidly. Within two 
 or three weeks, mobs of labourers were scouring 
 the county, levying food, and demanding of the 
 farmers a wage of 2s. 6d. a day. In November, the 
 movement extended into Sussex. Except as a 
 precedent, " the conduct of the peasantry," said 
 the Times, " has been admirable. Each parish 
 has, generally speaking, risen -per se ; in many places, 
 their proceedings have been managed with astonish- 
 ing coolness and regularity. . . . Where disorder 
 has occurred, it has arisen from dislike of some 
 obnoxious clergyman, or tithe-man, or assistant- 
 overseer. The farmers universally agreed to their 
 demands." ^ They were, indeed, to some extent 
 sympathetic, as were other classes. There was 
 considerable difficulty in recruiting special con- 
 stables and yeomanry ; the troops were fully occu- 
 pied in the large towns, and could not easily be 
 moved from place to place, even when they could 
 be spared. Thus, the landlords, isolated and help- 
 less, bowed before the storm. Deputations, some- 
 times headed by a Nonconformist minister, waited 
 
 ^ In The Village. Labourer, Mr and Mrs Hammond suggest that 
 the success of the rising in Kent and Sussex was " due partly, no 
 doubt, to the fact that smuggling was still a common practice in 
 those counties, and that the agricultural labourers thus found their 
 natural leaders." It is possible, also, that an infection may have 
 been brought from Ireland, where the peasantry were familiar with 
 every expedient of agrarian revolt. 
 
132 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. m. 
 
 upon them, and they promised to give what was 
 asked. Village meetings were held, at which scales 
 of wages were fixed by agreement. By the end of 
 November, Berkshire, Hampshire, and Wiltshire 
 were afoot. Large mobs of labourers, often accom- 
 panied by small farmers, went about levying 
 contributions from householders, demanding a 
 wage of two shillings a day, and, if refused, destroy- 
 ing the threshing-machines. Two workhouses, 
 those of Selborne and Headley, whose draconian 
 regime was notorious, were burned down. 
 
 When the South Midland counties, from 
 Gloucester to Northampton and Buckingham, 
 became affected, and the mysterious " Swing " 
 joined hands with the equally unknown " Captain 
 Ludd," the Government took fright. Troops were 
 moved into the disturbed districts ; magistrates 
 were assured of support in any coercive step they 
 could take. Lord Melbourne issued a circular 
 forbidding the fixing of wages ; every kind of meet- 
 ing was prohibited. The movement collapsed as 
 rapidly as it had arisen. Eight hundred men were 
 tried, and many were capitally convicted. Only 
 four were actually executed ; hundreds of others 
 were transported or imprisoned. London recovered 
 from its panic in time to enjoy the Christmas 
 festivities ; but a plain word of the Times must 
 have remained in some minds : " Let the rich 
 be taught that Providence will not suffer them to 
 oppress their fellow-creatures with impunity." 
 
§ 11.] THE LOWEST DEPTH 133 
 
 II. Degradation of the Labourer 
 
 " Oppress ? " Mere poverty, even the extremest, 
 does not justify this hard word. But the Times 
 and the Reformers were right : rural England lay 
 under an oppression, deliberate and systematic, 
 debasing to body and mind, and had so lain for 
 thirty-flve years when the Southern labourers made 
 their last wild fight for justice. No system of 
 oppression is quite as simple as it seems ; and this 
 had several contributory elements — the Corn Law, 
 which forbade cheap food to the poor ; the Combina- 
 tion Laws, which forbade them to unite for the 
 protection of their only property ; the Enclosure 
 Laws, which had made them serfs on their fathers' 
 lands, and other works of the borough-mongers' 
 Parhament which, with eyes blind and ears deaf 
 to their misery, enacted such iniquities as these. 
 But beyond all in importance was the system, the 
 foundation of which we have traced to the Pelican 
 Inn, Speenhamland, of substituting parish doles 
 for a living wage. 
 
 The system had become greatly elaborated when 
 it was finally exposed and denounced by the famous 
 Poor Law Commission of 1834 ; and we shall de- 
 scribe it as it then stood, with the aid of the Report 
 of the Commission, one of the most remarkable of 
 all British State documents. Most summaries and 
 commentaries upon it written at the time, or in 
 the following half-century of laisser-faire liberalism. 
 
MODERN ENGLAND [chap, nu 
 
 134 
 
 ;.,^ii<,tice to its authors 1 by leaving the im- 
 do an injustice ^^.^ ^^ ^^^ ^^^ p^^^ ^^_^ ^^ 
 
 r-TaTgSous Uberality/' a " loose administration," 
 d that the English labourer was a naturally 
 depraved being who was, in some mysterious way, 
 enabled during the first third of the nineteenth 
 century to exploit the unfortunate ratepayer with 
 the aid of tender-hearted magistrates. This is a 
 caricature of history. Without idealizing the 
 labourer, or defaming the other and more power- 
 ful parties to any social arrangement of that 
 time, mere probability would indicate, and the 
 Report clearly proves, a very different balance of 
 responsibilities. 
 
 This, briefly, was the Poor Law System forty 
 years after the first establishment of allowances 
 in aid, or in lieu, of wages. Relief was given both 
 in kind and in money. In the former case, the 
 subsidy generally took the form of exemption 
 from rates, or payment of rent out of the parish 
 fund. Food and clothes were also given. But 
 money payments were more common ; and the 
 Report describes five varieties of allowance which 
 were found to be in operation ; 1, relief without 
 labour ; 2, the " allowance " method proper ; 3, 
 the " roundsmen " method ; 4, parish employ- 
 ment ; and, 5, the "labour-rate" method. In 
 the first of these cases, the family received a daily 
 
 ^ They were the Bishops of London (Blomeold) and Chester, and 
 
 ^wl- w ?f ' .*°"™^' ^''""''" W. Senior, Henry Bishop. Henry 
 Uawler, W. Conlson. James TraiU, and Edwin Chadvrfok. 
 
§ n.] THE LOWEST DEPTH 135 
 
 or weekly sum, so long as they were in need. Some- 
 times a small bribe was given to induce them to 
 remove to another parish. It was " more usual to 
 give a rather larger weekly sum, and to force the 
 applicants to give up a certain portion of their time 
 by confining them in a gravel-pit, or in some other 
 enclosure, or directing them to sit at a certain spot, 
 and do nothing." The second case is the original 
 Speenhamland method of grants in aid of wages. 
 In some places, it was resorted to only occasionally. 
 Elsewhere, it was systematic, " forming the law of 
 a whole district, sanctioned and enforced by the 
 magistrates, and promulgated in the form of local 
 statutes under the name of scales." The base of 
 calculation was the price of bread — ^thus, a single 
 woman received from the parish the price of three 
 quartern loaves per week ; a man, his wife, and three 
 children, the price of eleven loaves per week. Ad- 
 ditions were made in case of sickness or other special 
 kind of distress. The Chelmsford scale was based 
 on the price of flour per peck ; and, as this varied 
 from Is. 6d. to 7s., the family " make-up " or 
 "bread-money " varied from 9s. 4d. to £l, lis. 4d. 
 a week. It will be seen that the invitation to fraud 
 was flagrant, and not less so the invitation to large 
 families, legitimate or other, for " the birth of a 
 child endows the parent with an allowance, what- 
 ever his income." Theoretically, the allowance was 
 reduced according to the ascertained earnings of the 
 applicant. All the more reason why the earnings 
 should not be ascertained. " Many of those who 
 
136 MODERN ENGLAND [chap* m. 
 
 at particular periods of the year receive wages far 
 exceeding the average amount of the earnings of the 
 most industrious labourer, receive also large allow- 
 ances from the parish. The third variety of reUef, 
 the "roundsmen" system, consisted in "the parish 
 paying the occupiers of property to employ the ap- 
 plicants for relief at a rate of wages fixed by the 
 parish, and depending not on the services, but on the 
 wants, of the applicants, the employer being repaid 
 out of the poor rate all that he advances in wages 
 beyond a certain sum. This is the house row, or 
 roundsmen, or billet, or ticket, or stem system." 
 That is, the pauper was hired to the farmer at a price, 
 and thedifference between this price and the scalewas 
 made up by the parish. In some places, there were 
 regular weekly auctions of unemployed paupers ^— 
 the nearest approach modem England has made 
 to the slave trade. Relief by parish employment, 
 the fourth variety, was very unusual, only accounting 
 in 1832 for £854,000 of a total poor relief expen- 
 diture of over seven million pounds. The reason is 
 obvious. Not only did the demoralized men object 
 -to steady, organized labour. Not only was there 
 no staff equal to the task of organization. As the 
 Commissioners plainly say : " Parish employment 
 does not afford direct profit to any individual. 
 Under most of the other systems of relief, the imme- 
 diate employers of labour can throw on the parish a 
 
 First Report of the Commissionera for inquiring into the Administra- 
 tion and Operation of the Poor Laws in 1834. Reprint, 1885. P.P. 
 347, p. 20. 
 
§ n.] THE LOWEST DEPTH 137 
 
 part of the wages of their labourers. They prefer, 
 therefore, those modes of relief out of which they 
 can extract profit under the mask of charity," 
 Finally, there was the " labour-rate " system, con- 
 sisting in " an agreement among the ratepayers 
 that each of them shall employ and pay out of his 
 own money a certain number of the labourers who 
 have settlements in the parish, in proportion not 
 to his real demand for labour, but according to his 
 rental, or his contribution to the rates, or the number 
 of horses that he keeps for tillage, or the num.ber 
 of acres he occupies, or according to some other 
 scale." 
 
 Upon the relations of the Poor Law to the helpless, 
 we need not dwell at any length. Outdoor relief 
 of the impotent, a subject of anxiety for strict 
 administrators at a later date, had not then given 
 rise to any very considerable abuse. The workhouse 
 was badly governed ; lunatics,^ invalids, prostitutes, 
 and children were herded promiscuously ; and it is 
 evident that the genuine poor must have suffered 
 by the drain of funds in allowances to the able- 
 bodied. The practice of adding to the widow's 
 pension an addition for her children, and generally 
 a larger addition if they were illegitimate, was de- 
 nounced as inviting inimorality and idleness. But 
 the Commissioners reported that " the allowances 
 to the aged and infirm are moderate." 
 
 The substantial evil was not, then, the loose, 
 
 ' An Act was passed in 1828, the first ol the kind, to provide for 
 the care of pauper lunatics. 
 
138 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. m. 
 
 sentimental charity which it is the aim of instructed 
 philanthropists to-day to repress. It was some- 
 thing very different, very much less innocent, 
 something it is only possible to understand if we 
 keep in mind the course of events traced in the 
 preceding chapters. We saw that the " Speenham- 
 land policy" had a negative and a positive side. 
 The minimum wage demanded by the more intellir 
 gent labourers was refused. Doles were established 
 instead, not out of any overflowing generosity, but 
 because the people — ^their common rights lost for 
 ever, and their village industries ruined — ^were at 
 starvation point, and they must have some trifling 
 share in the system of loot known as the Corn Laws. 
 But why were " allowances " maintained so long ? 
 Why were abuses tolerated under which poor relief 
 cost over seven millions sterling in 1832, nearly as 
 much as inl818, when the reaction after the great war 
 led to the extremest distress ? There is no doubt 
 about the oppressiveness of the rates. An extreme 
 case is cited of a parish in Bucks, where they rose 
 from £10 in 1801 to £99 in 1816, and £367 in 1832, 
 when they " suddenly ceased in consequence of the 
 impossibility of continuing their collection, the 
 landlords having given up their rents, the farmers 
 their tenancies, and the clergyman his glebe and 
 tithes." The good parson, in fact, proposed — 
 strange idea ! — ^that the land should be handed 
 over to the able-bodied paupers, who, within two 
 years, he believed, " would be able and willing to 
 support themselves." In many districts, farms 
 
§ n.] THE LOWEST DEPTH 139 
 
 were left tenantless because the rate could not be 
 paid. Sometimes, the small ratepayer was in a 
 position actually less favourable than that of the 
 subsidized pauper. The whole system put a pre- 
 mium upon fraud, perjury, and vicious idleness. 
 And still it was maintained — not by the votes of 
 the men, who had none, but by their masters. A 
 Committee of the House of Commons in 1817 
 pointed out the gathering evil ; and, by 59 Geo. Ill, 
 c. 12, the power of the magistrate to order relief 
 was somewhat restricted, and the removal of Irish 
 and Scottish paupers, the appointment of repre- 
 sentative vestries and paid assistant-overseers, 
 and the rating of the owners of small tenements 
 were authorized. The assessment diminished down 
 to 1824^the year when peaceful combinations to 
 raise wages were first allowed. Then it began to 
 rise again ; and, ten years later, the situation was 
 so grave that reform was unavoidable. Without 
 doubt, the degradation of the labourer had become 
 widespread by this time. How could it be other- 
 wise ? A pauper, said the Commissioners, " has 
 all a slave's security for subsistence, without his 
 liability to punishment. As a single man, indeed, 
 his income does not exceed a bare subsistence ; 
 but he has only to marry, and it increases. Even 
 then, it is unequal to the support of a family ; but 
 it rises on the birth of every child. If his family 
 is numerous, the parish becomes his principal 
 paymaster. A man with a wife and six children, 
 entitled according to the scale to have his wages 
 
140 MODERN ENGLAND [chaS. irr. 
 
 made up to 16s. a week, in a parish where the 
 wages paid by individuals do not exceed 10s. or 
 12s., is almost an irresponsible being. All the other 
 classes of society are exposed to the vicissitudes 
 of hope and fear ; he alone has nothing to lose or 
 to gain. . . . Can we wonder if the uneducated are 
 seduced into approving a system which aims its 
 allurements at all the weakest parts of their nature, 
 which offers marriage to the young, security to the 
 anxious, ease to the lazy, and impunity to the 
 profligate ? " i 
 
 There is evidence that this profhgacy was some- 
 times confused with what we should now consider 
 legitimate attempts at political agitation ; while 
 it sometimes led to riot and a kind of outrage 
 better known in Ireland under the name of " moon- 
 lighting." The Commissioners speak of popular 
 discontent in that terrible period being everywhere 
 based upon a belief that all men had a right to 
 a subsistence — ^it was, indeed, a belief grounded, 
 not in the doctrine of the Chartists or the French 
 Revolution, but in the ancient law and custom of 
 the land, only recently discarded. In this connec- 
 tion, several significant references are made to the 
 agrarian riots of 1830. " The violence of most of 
 the mobs seems to have arisen from the idea that 
 all their privations arose from the cupidity or 
 fraud of those entrusted with the management of 
 the fund provided for the poor. . . . Wherever the 
 objects of expectation have been made definite, 
 
 ' Report, p. 37. 
 
§ II.] THE LOWEST DEPTH 141 
 
 where wages upon the performance of work have 
 been substituted for eleemosynary aid, and those 
 wages have been allowed to remain matter of 
 contract, employment has again produced content, 
 and kindness become again a source of gratitude." 
 And, referring to crime in 1830 : " Partly under 
 the application of force, but much more under that 
 of bribes, that paroxysm subsided ; but what 
 must be the state of mind of those who have to 
 calculate every winter whether they may expect 
 to be the victims of its return ? What would each 
 resident in a disturbed district then have given to 
 have saved to himself and his family not merely 
 the actual expense, but the anxiety, of that unhappy 
 period ? " 
 
 Perhaps this appeal to fear exaggerated the facts. 
 At the darkest moment in the darkest period of 
 the history of England, there was no reason why 
 the governing class should stand in awe of the 
 poor labourers of the countryside — ^until they had 
 votes, and freedom of movement and combina- 
 tion. At present, they had neither land, nor money, 
 nor arms ; they were forbidden to combine ; they 
 could not even move from their parish in search of 
 work without losing their " settlement," the claim 
 upon relief which might be their only escape from 
 starvation ; they lost harvesting and other extra 
 opportunities to Irish immigrants on this account. 
 The sturdiest of them were drifting into the slums 
 of the manufacturing towns, whither we shall 
 presently follow them- What power of intimida- 
 
142 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. m. 
 
 tion was left in the ever feebler remnant of the 
 village where Wellington's soldiers were born, ill- 
 fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, uneducated, and now 
 hopeless and degraded ? Yet some fear there was, 
 and well might be. 
 
 Of this the evidence leaves no possibility of 
 doubt — ^the report of the Poor Law Conamission 
 alone suffices to establish it : the effective cause 
 of the ruin of the English labourer was the rank, 
 obstinate, and widespread selfishness of the land- 
 holding class and their dependants. Mr and Mrs 
 Hammond say of the process of enclosiire what I 
 should rather say of the systematic refusal of a 
 living wage which followed, that " the governing 
 class killed by this policy the spirit of a race." 
 Any such disruption must work immeasurable havoc ; 
 and, while the ablest economists have been belied 
 by time, the passage of generations has but empha- 
 sised the truth of the poet's warning that the 
 destruction of " A bold peasantry, their country's 
 pride," must be an irreparable loss to the nation.^ 
 
 ' Even in 1775, Goldsmith saw to the heart of the matter. It 
 may be recalled that. In The Deserted Village, he sings the sad 
 fate of the emigrant, and refers pointedly to robbery by enolosuie : 
 " Where, then, ah ! where shall poverty reside. 
 To 'scape the pressure of contiguous pride ? 
 If, to some common's fenceless limits stray'd, 
 He drives his flock to pick the scanty blade. 
 Those fenceless fields the sons of wealth divide, 
 And even the bare- worn common is deny'd. 
 If to the city sped — ^what waits him there f 
 To see profusion that he must not share. 
 To see ten thousand baneful arts combin'd 
 To pamper luxury, and thin mankind." 
 
§ n.] THE LOWEST DEPTH 143 
 
 It is conceivable that, had agriculture been re- 
 settled upon a base of wage-labour, and rested on 
 it exclusively as manufacture has done, the rural 
 labourer might have climbed up to the light like 
 the artisan in the towns. Base influences, conscious 
 and unconscious, personal and of wider range, 
 forbade it. " The great source of Poor Law mal- 
 administration," say the Commissioners, "is the 
 desire of many of those who regulate the distribu- 
 tion of the parish fund to extract from it a profit to 
 themselves." Thus, " the employers of paupers 
 are attached to a system which enables them to 
 dismiss and resume their labourers according to 
 their daily, or even hourly, want of them, to reduce 
 wages to the minimum, or even below the minimum, 
 of what will support an unmarried man, and to 
 throw upon others the payment of a part, frequently 
 the greater part, and sometimes almost the whole, 
 of the wages actually received by their labourers. 
 • . . High rates, too, are a ground for demanding 
 an abatement from rent ; high wages are not." 
 The practice was highly infectious, very few farmers 
 having the intelligence or courage to anticipate 
 recent conclusions as to the " economy of good 
 wages." Even when the farmer, being the owner 
 of his land, had an interest in keeping the rates 
 down, " he may be interested in introducing the 
 allowance system into the neighbouring parishes, 
 if he can manage, by pulling down cottages or 
 other expedients, to keep down the number of 
 persons having ' settlements ' in his own parish. 
 
144 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. in. 
 
 Several instances have been mentioned to us of 
 parishes nearly depopulated, in which almost all 
 the labour is performed by persons settled in the 
 neighbouring villages or towns, drawing from them 
 as allowances the greater part of their subsistence, 
 receiving from their employer not more than half- 
 wages even in summer, and much less in winter, 
 and discharged whenever their services are not 
 wanted." Most landlords, in fact, " seem to have 
 acquired habits of thinking and feeling and acting 
 which unfit them to originate any real or extensive 
 amendment." Of the lesser interests involved, 
 the owner of jerry-built cottages who found in the 
 parish a generous and safe tenant, the petty shop- 
 keeper and publican who attended the vestries to 
 vote allowances to their customers and debtors, 
 the officials who winked at jobbery and fraud, we 
 need say nothing. 
 
 It is not to be supposed that these evils were 
 universal in rural England. On the other hand, 
 they were not limited altogether to the countryside. 
 " In towns," the Commissioners say, " the allowance 
 system prevails less, probably because the manu- 
 facturing capitalists form a small proportion of 
 the ratepayers, and consequently have less influence 
 in the vestries, than the farmers in country places. 
 But even in the towns it exists to a very formidable 
 degree." Here, as in the country, the small shop- 
 keeper might gain more from dole-receivers than 
 he lost as ratepayer ; and the owner of small 
 cottage property might obtain parish tenants, and 
 
§ n.] THE LOWEST? DEPTH 14S 
 
 be exempted from poor-rate. As to the lower 
 grades of manufacture, the Commissioners say : 
 " The object of machinery is to diminish the want 
 not only of physical, but of moral and intellectual 
 qualities on the part of the workman. Judgment 
 and intelligence are not required for processes 
 which can be performed only in one mode. Honesty 
 is not necessary where all the property is under one 
 roof or in one enclosure, and where it is difficult of 
 sale. Under such circumstances, it is not found 
 that parish assistance necessarily destroys the 
 efficiency of the manufacturing labourer. Where 
 that assistance makes only a part of his income 
 and the remainder is derived from piece-work, his 
 employer insists, and sometimes successfully, that 
 he shall not earn that remainder but by the greatest 
 exertion. (Unlike the farmer) the manufacturer 
 who can induce or force others to pay part of the 
 wages of his labourers actually may be a pure 
 gainer by it ; he really can obtain cheap labour " — 
 of course, at the cost of other manufacturers, other 
 owners of rateable property, and of unmarried 
 labourers. This argument is illustrated by cases 
 from the Leicestershire hosiery trade, ribbon- weav- 
 ing in the villages round Coventry, the small 
 workshops in Birmingham, the cloth trade in 
 Devonshire, and the Nottinghamshire stocking 
 manufacture. 
 
 The Commissioners were not required to pursue 
 the subject further than this. They could not 
 foresee that, with two and a half times the popula- 
 
 K 
 
146 MODEliN ENGLANt) [chap. hi. 
 
 tion in 1901, agriculture would maintain only about 
 the same numiber of persons as in 1831, and a consider- 
 ably smaller number of labourers.^ It is possible, 
 however, that the indirect effects of village pauperiz- 
 ation have been as grave as its direct results. The 
 wage of every man affects the wage of every other 
 man, and the " man at the margin " especially 
 influences the whole process. The effect upon 
 wages at the docks, for instance, of a new influx of 
 unskilled labour, as after the Irish famines, is very 
 evident. It is less often realized that the removal 
 of an element of stability in the lowest wage-strata 
 weakens the whole structure, that the degradation 
 of the humblest clophopper radiates, as it were, a 
 wave of degradation to the highest level in the 
 world of industry. In no other way can the low- 
 ness of wages in many departments of maniifacture 
 be accounted for. These businesses represent, as 
 compared with earlier methods of production, enor- 
 mous economies. It can be statistically demon- 
 strated that the reward of capital has increased 
 much more considerably than the reward of labour ; 
 doubtless, the consumer has also gained very 
 largely. Labour in industry has been affected 
 
 1 1831. {England and Wales.) 1901. 
 
 Population . . 13,897,187 Population . . 32,678,213 
 
 In agriculture . . 1,103,758 
 Including — Farmers 
 
 andrelatives (about) 310,000 
 Nurserymen, etc. 
 (about) . . 125,000 
 ■ Agric.labourers(about) 612,000 
 
 Occupied in 
 
 
 agriculture . 
 
 1,075,912 
 
 Including — Occupiers 
 
 
 employing labom-ers 
 
 1 161,188 
 
 Occupiers not employ- 
 
 
 ing labouieis 
 
 113,849 
 
 Agrio. labourers 
 
 799,875 
 
•I m.] teE LOWfiST^ DEPTH 1^ 
 
 adversely in relation to the other factors by the 
 large increase of population, and by the competition 
 of nations on a lower with those on a higher level ; 
 but a more potent influence throughout Western 
 Europe in the nineteenth century has been the 
 severance of the country-folk from the soil, their 
 desperate flight to the towns, and their mad destruc- 
 tion of one another in the struggle for bread.^ In 
 England, this thing need never have happened. 
 For more than half a century, British manufacturers 
 had nothing to fear from foreign competition. 
 Prodigious profits were made ; and the natural 
 increase of population could be easily absorbed. 
 Yet the almost miraculous economies of machine- 
 production are only microscopically reflected in 
 the wages even of skilled artisans ; and in the 
 lower levels hunger is always a next-door neighbour. 
 The largest single agent in this melancholy result 
 of a century's invention and toil is rural demoraliza- 
 tion and the unceasing rural exodus. 
 
 III. Un-Natubal Histoky of the Slum 
 
 The outcasts created the Slum, the worst of the 
 disease marks of laisser-faire industrialism. The 
 disease varies somewhat ; but there is a norm most 
 readily to be found, perhaps, in some of the lesser 
 Lancashire factory centres. The town was once 
 a sleepy community built around a small market- 
 
 1 Arnold Toynbee remarks, however, that "the efficiency of 
 English manufacturing labour is largely due to the very fact that it 
 is not able to shift on to the land " (Industrial Revolution, p. 103). 
 
148 MODERN ENGLAND [ohap. m. 
 
 place, on a small river, surrounded by green fields 
 and moorlands. Immigration, due to enclosure 
 and high farming, had gone on slowly before the 
 substitution of steam for water-power brought 
 the factory in from the lone hillside. Henceforth, 
 there is a ceaseless demand for workmen's cottages ; 
 and, the movement of aggregation being driven 
 by necessity, not choice, they are thrown up hap- 
 hazard, as rapidly and cheaply, and as near to the 
 factory, as possible. Water-supply, exigencies of 
 transport, and other considerations — among which 
 the proximity of the workers' ghetto, the labour 
 market, comes to be one of the most important — 
 lead to the concentration of factories within the 
 same small area. 
 
 The town grows, and grows. A rather larger 
 type of cottage is built, with cellars which can be 
 sub-let to the less fortunate late-comers. There is 
 now no pretence whatever of a " garden " ; and 
 the " yard," if not literally measured, contains a 
 very limited number of feet. Gaps in the grimy 
 rows of houses are filled up, what had once been 
 open courts and tiny squares being closed to sun 
 and air, save for covered entries. The spaces are 
 further abbreviated; then the narrow lanes be- 
 tween them disappear, and we have a region of 
 back-to-back cottages, many already decayed, 
 all poorly built, badly supplied with water, ill- 
 drained or undrained, a ready nursery for epidemic 
 disease. In larger towns, there is this variation — 
 the building of factories, markets, docks, and rail- 
 
§ m.] THE LOWEST DEPTH 149 
 
 way termini makes a central residence in time 
 less desirable for the merchant class. As they 
 move out after fresh air, the helots seize upon their 
 discarded mansions, divide them up into one- 
 room or two-room tenements, and " pig " there, 
 until dilapidation can no further go. 
 
 Writing in 1844, Friedrich Engels, in his Condition 
 of the Working Class, describes a walk through the 
 old tOAvn of Manchester : " Going from the Old 
 Church to Long Millgate, the stroller has at once 
 a row of old-fashioned houses at the right, of which 
 not one has kept its original level ; these are 
 remnants of pre-manufacturing Manchester, whose 
 former inhabitants have left the houses, which were 
 not good enough for them, to a population strongly 
 mixed mth Irish blood. Here one is in an almost 
 undisguised worldng-men's quarter, for even the 
 shops and beer-houses hardly take the trouble to 
 exhibit a trifling degree of cleanliness. But this is 
 nothing in comparison with the courts and lanes 
 which lie behind." 
 
 The view from Ducie Bridge he thus describes : — 
 
 "At the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, a 
 narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and 
 refuse, which it deposits on the shallower right bank. In 
 dry weather, a long stream of disgusting, blackish-green 
 slime pools are left standing on this bank, from the depths 
 of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise, and 
 give forth a stench unendurable even on the bridge forty 
 or fifty feet above the surface of the stream. Above the 
 bridge are tanneries, bonemills, and gasworks, from which 
 all drains and refuse find their way into the Irk, which 
 
150 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. in. 
 
 receives further the contents of all the neighbouring sewers 
 and privies. Below the bridge, you look upon the piles 
 of debris, the refuse, filth, and ofial from the courts on the 
 steep left bank ; here each house is packed close behind its 
 neighbour, and a piece of each is visible, aU black, smoky, 
 crumbling, ancient, with broken panes and window frames. 
 The background is furnished by old barrack-like factory 
 buildings. On the lower right bank stands a long row of 
 houses and mills ; the second house being a ruin without a 
 roof, piled with debris ; the third stands so low that the 
 lowest floor is uninhabitable, and therefore without windows 
 or doors. Here the background embraces the pauper 
 burial-ground, the station of the Liverpool and Leeds 
 railway, and, in the rear of this, the Workhouse, which, 
 like a citadel, looks threateningly down, from behind its 
 high walls and parapets on the hiQ-top, upon the working- 
 people's quarter below. 
 
 " Above Ducie Bridge, the left bank grows more 
 flat and the right bank steeper ; but the condition of the 
 dwellings on both banks grows worse rather than better. 
 He who turns to the left here from the main street, Long 
 Millgate, is lost ; he wanders from one court to another, 
 turns countless corners, passes nothing but narrow, filthy 
 nooks and alleys, \mtil after a few minutes he has lost all 
 clue, and knows not whither to turn. Everywhere halt 
 or wholly ruined buildings, some of them actually un- 
 inhabited, which means a great deal here ; rarely a wooden 
 or stone floor to be seen in the houses, almost uniformly 
 broken, ill-fitting windows and doors, and a state of filth ! 
 Everywhere heaps of debris, refuse, and offal ; standing 
 pools for gutters, and a stench which alone would make it 
 impossible for a human being in any degree civilised to 
 live in such a district. The newly-built extension of the 
 Leeds railway, which crosses the Irk here, has swept away 
 
§ ni.] THE LOWEST DEPTH 151 
 
 some of these courts and lanes, laying others completely 
 open to view. Immediately under tte railway bridge 
 there stands a court, the filth and horrors of which surpass 
 all the others by far, just because it was hitherto so shut 
 off, so secluded that the way to it could not be found without 
 -a good deal of trouble. I should never have discovered it 
 myself, without the breaks made by the railway, though I 
 thought I knew this whole region thoroughly. Passing 
 along a rough bank, among stakes and washing-lines, one 
 penetrates into this chaos of small, one-storied, one-roomed 
 huts, in most of which there is no artificial floor ; kitchen, 
 living and sleeping room all in one. In such a hole, scarcely 
 five feet long by six broad, I found two beds — and such 
 bedsteads and beds ! — which, with a staircase and chimney- 
 plaoe, exactly fiUed the room. In several others I found 
 absolutely nothing, while the door stood open, and the 
 inhabitants leaned agaiast it. Everywhere before the doors 
 refuse and ofial ; that any sort of pavement lay underneath 
 could not be seen but only felt, here and there, with the 
 feet. This whole collection of cattle-sheds for human 
 beiags was surrounded, on two sides by houses and a factory^ 
 and on the third by the river, and beside the narrow stair 
 up the bank, a narrow doorway alone led out into another 
 almost equally iU-buUt, Hl-kept labyrinth of dweUiags." 
 
 Throughout industrial England such object- 
 lessons in discontent met the eye ; and we may 
 guess how provocatively they worked in the mind 
 of Karl Marx, vividly conveyed by his friend 
 Engels, and confirmed by Marx's own experiences 
 in London. This scene from old Manchester is, 
 doubtless, an exceptionally black picture, although 
 it would be easy to multiply illustrations as grievous, 
 and it may be noted that, in the last twenty years 
 
152 MODERN ENGLAND [chap, hi, 
 
 of the century, there still remained in Manchester 
 ten thousand back-to-back houses which had to b6 
 closed by public authority as unfit for human 
 habitation. There are many factors in the creation 
 of slums other than the normal and general one of 
 concentrated industry in an unregulated commu- 
 nity. Individual weakness and vice weigh heavily 
 on both sides of the account : the ignorance, shift- 
 lessnesis, and viciousness of the more degraded 
 class of workfolk, for these are attracted to the 
 city as well as the honest and vigorous ; the greed 
 of rack-renting landlords and usurious money- 
 lenders ; the indifference of Bumble and the well- 
 to-do in general. But it is probably a safe rule to 
 minimize all such individual faults when we find 
 ourselves faced by a force of almost universal 
 validity, especially when the weaknesses of the 
 individuals appear to be very largely the fruit of 
 this larger influence. There is abundant evidence 
 to show that a very great part, perhaps the majority, 
 of the working class in the large ports, factory 
 towns, and cities lived, during the first half of the 
 nineteenth century, in conditions of squalor and 
 misery, and that, during that period, they received 
 little help either from the Government or the 
 municipalities, and not much more from private 
 philanthropists, towards the betterment of their 
 wretched homes. 
 
 The case of London presents some special features, 
 apart from sheer magnitude, which distinguish it 
 from that of the northern factory towns. The 
 
§ in.] THE LOWEST DEPTH 153 
 
 Metropolis was no mushroom creation of modern 
 industry and commerce, but a growth of long 
 centuries, proud and prosperous ages during which 
 the city held its own against the encroaching 
 power of the boldest national sovereigns, a 
 veritable City-State, standing out from among 
 the miscellany of mere towns and counties by 
 virtue of its' wealth, strength, and self-confidence, 
 its dominating traditions and firmly held privileges. 
 The city government was not, at the beginning of 
 the Industrial Revolution, as efficient as it had been ; 
 but it spoke for the most substantial body of 
 British citizens, and not seldom it could intervene 
 effectually in their defence. London has had slums 
 for centuries. In the middle of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, grave disorders were already giving anxiety 
 to enlightened magistrates like Sir John Fielding ; 
 at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the 
 population was larger than that which to-day 
 taxes the abilities of the city councils of Manchester 
 or Glasgow, with all the resources of modern science 
 at their control. Yet the City Fathers might have 
 risen to their task had it evolved normally. The 
 pressure of the great war, the rise of London as a 
 port, and an unceasing flood of poor immigrants 
 created a complex of problems beyond their wit 
 to control, or even to comprehend. As competi- 
 tive commercialism grew, and set up its sleeping 
 quarters all over the neighbouring hills, the old 
 civic and communal spirit faded away, and with 
 it the old governing capacity. 
 
154 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. hi. 
 
 The alien elements in London, though never very 
 large in proportion to the whole population, have 
 always been larger and more varied than those 
 of any other British city. They have, perhaps, 
 always justified themselves ultimately by some 
 special contribution to the general life ; but at 
 times they have been a serious disturbing influence, 
 and the gain of variety has been commonly offset 
 by a loss of social unity. The difficulties of the 
 factory town, the port, the market-town — each on 
 a vast scale, and with a diversity unequalled else- 
 where — are here combined with the concentration 
 of wealth and intelligence due to a national capital. 
 The reasons for the trend of poverty to an East 
 End and wealth to a West End are evident. The 
 distinction is, however, far from being absolute ; 
 there have been, and still are, slums, with somewhat 
 different features, at either point of the compass. 
 The relief, periodically necessary, of congestion in 
 the centre has too often meant only the transference 
 of the evil to a jerry-built suburb. 
 
 The main stream of traffic has always run parallel 
 with the river, from the Port in the east to West- 
 minster and the residential districts in the west. 
 With the establishment of railway communications, 
 northward and southward traffic was much stimu- 
 lated. Even in the time of the Great Fire, the in- 
 adequacy of the main arteries was felt ; and the 
 rejection of the plans of Sir Christopher Wren and 
 Sir John Evelyn for the reconstruction of the City 
 must be regarded as an historical calamity. Ever 
 
§ ni.] THE LOWEST DEPTH 155 
 
 since, the wealthier classes have moved outward, 
 stage by stage, followed by a swarm of poorer folk 
 who occupied their abandoned districts. It was 
 thus, for instance, that Soho, once a centre of 
 fashion, became a chief settlement of poor aliens 
 in the Metropolis. Wherever poverty obstructed 
 the main course of traffic, or jostled too flagrantly 
 with wealth, there was some hope of public improve- 
 ment. In the backwaters, and in the outlying 
 regions, slums grew up without interference. Engels 
 quotes some pitiful instances. Of 5366 families 
 numbering 26,830 persons, living in the Drury Lane 
 region in 1840, three-fifths had but one room per 
 family, and yet paid rents (4s 6d. for a second-story 
 room, 8s. for a garret) amounting to a total of 
 £40,000. In the aristocratic parish of St George, 
 Hanover Square, a thousand families had but one 
 room apiece. In Bethnal Green, at the same time, 
 according to the Rev. G. Alston, there were 1400 
 houses in a space of less than four hundred yards 
 square, and they contained 2795 families of about 
 12,000 persons. " It is nothing unusual to find a 
 man, his wife, four or five children, and sometimes 
 both grandparents, all in one single room, where 
 they eat, sleep, and work. I believe that, before 
 the Bishop of London called attention to this most 
 poverty-stricken parish, people at the West End 
 knew as little of it as of the savages of Australia 
 or the South Sea Isles." The Times thundered 
 against these scandals. " Let all men remember 
 this," it^cried in 1843, " that within the most 
 
156 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. m. 
 
 courtly precincts of the richest city of God's earth, 
 there may be found, night after night, winter after 
 winter, women, young in years, old in sin and 
 suffering, outcasts from society, rotting from famine, 
 filth, and disease. Let them remember this, and 
 learn not to theorise, but to act," 
 
 There had been ten Select Conamittees between 
 1798 and 1821 to report on particular improvements 
 (the Port, the rebuilding of London Bridge, the 
 approaches to the Parliament Houses, and so on) ; 
 and between 1832 and 1851 about a dozen more 
 Committees were appointed for like purposes. But 
 the work was dependent upon the revenue from the 
 coal duties ; and, until the Metropolitan Board of 
 Works was set up in 1855, there was no central 
 body to attack the ever-enlarging problem. At 
 that time " districts now connected by broad high- 
 ways were hindered from easy and direct commu- 
 nication with each other by labyrinths of narrow 
 and tortuous streets and lanes." For thirty years 
 the Board of Works continued, the meagre result 
 of its labours being the construction of about 16 
 miles of thoroughfare at a net cost of £11,517,000, 
 and the re-housing of less than eleven thousand 
 ejected labourers.^ 
 
 Terrible epidemics of cholera and typhus effected 
 more than Christian Socialist novels. Chartist 
 speeches, and newspaper articles — they made the 
 first breach in the laisser-faire doctrine, and pre- 
 
 ' London County Council: History of London Street Improvements, 
 1865-97, by Percy J. Edwards, p. 138. 
 
§ IV.] THE LOWEST DEPTH 157 
 
 sented convincing arguments for a new kind of 
 action. The feeble beginning of national schooling 
 and factory inspection, cheaper and better food 
 under Free Trade, railway communications, im- 
 proved police and other miunicipal services, the rise 
 of a national health service, the invitation of the 
 Colonies — ^these and other indirect agencies wrought 
 a great change. It was slow and partial, because 
 the evil constantly grew at one point while it was 
 being reduced at another. Even at the end of 
 the century, it could not be said that the duty of 
 the nation, represented by the State, in regard to 
 the housing of the people had received more than 
 tentative recognition. 
 
 The slum is as distinctive a monument of nine- 
 teenth-century industrialism as any other ; and no 
 true history of the British people can be written 
 without giving it prominence. 
 
 IV. The Radical Reformers 
 
 When the discredit of the Throne, now occupied 
 by a rake, and presently by a buffoon, had become 
 flagrant, the Oligarchy could not long evade the 
 choice — ^reform or revolution. In such a case, 
 popular tumult does but give the final touch to a 
 process of disintegration. The reign of George 
 IV was full of signs of impending change, of contra- 
 dictory acts eloquent of distracted counsels, and 
 an uneasy sense that to-morrow would be the day 
 of reckoning. The great war was passing into 
 
158 MODEBI* ENdLANB [ohas. nt. 
 
 history ; the men who sustained it were men of the 
 past, with no comprehension of the new problems 
 and forces. Even to carry on the routine of govern- 
 ment, it was necessary to introduce fresh blood. 
 But the kind of resistance which men like Eldon 
 offered to the rise of Canning, Huskisson, and Peel, 
 shows an infatuation of class-pride most unpromising 
 for a peaceful future. Peel could hardly be treated 
 openly as an adventurer, as the others were, being 
 the son of an immensely wealthy Tory who had 
 received a title for his services, and being, besides, 
 " quiet and modest, never forgetting or concealing 
 the fact of his origin." But, Harriet Martineau 
 adds, " there can be no doubt that, though Mr Peel 
 has managed the fact with all prudence and honesty, 
 and has long risen above the need of any adven- 
 titious advantages, he has felt the awkwardness 
 of being the son of a cotton-spinner innumerable 
 times in the course of his career. There is some- 
 thing in the way of his occasionally referring to 
 the fact which shows this." The reluctance of 
 the old Tories to disfranchize the rotten boroughs, 
 their reckless resort to prosecutions for high treason, 
 sedition, blasphemy, and libel, are less significant 
 than this extremity of self-conceit. 
 
 Huskisson's admission, as President of the Board 
 of Trade, into the Liverpool Cabinet, in 1823, 
 marks the first preliminary of their surrender. 
 " Really, this is rather too much," quoth Eldon ; 
 but rumours from the London Tavern of the effective 
 starting of a national reform agitation, from the 
 
§ iv.) d^HE LOWESi: DEp¥h 159 
 
 country of Cobbett having got the ear of the dis- 
 contented farmers, from Ireland of rebeUion, famine, 
 and typhus, and from Lancashire of strike riots, 
 were more alarming then anything the Lord Chan- 
 cellor could say. Something must be done. The 
 debt had actually grown by 11 millions since 
 Waterloo, and the interest by £700,000. Three 
 millions of taxes were taken off in 1821 ; and the 
 following three years witnessed a distinct revival 
 of trade and mianufacture. Huskisson at once 
 began the cutting-down of the Navigation Laws, 
 which was only to be completed sixteen years later. 
 The attempt to give British and Colonial ships a 
 monopoly of trade with Asia, Africa, and America, 
 conamenced by Cromwell, had, after the revolt of 
 the American Colonies, led to retaliation, and the 
 absurd spectacle of two nearly related countries 
 sending their ships each to the other in ballast, 
 bringing only return cargoes, and so each doubling 
 its costs of carriage. When this anachronism was 
 ended, after the war of 1814, by a mutual repeal 
 of restrictions, Portugal, Holland, and Prussia de- 
 manded the same reciprocal facilities, on pain of 
 retaliation if refused. At the same time, the in- 
 crease of the Atlantic trade showed how beneficia] 
 a larger measure of freedom must be. Accordingly, 
 in 1822 five Bills were carried relaxing the bonds on 
 foreign commerce ; and on June 6, 1823, Huskis- 
 son introduced his Reciprocity of Duties Bill, by 
 which all duties were to fall equally on all ships, 
 British or foreign, provided that the countries of 
 
160 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. lii. 
 
 their origin established a like equality. The ship- 
 owners grumbled ; but the measure was quickly 
 justified by the growth of British shipping. 
 
 Reform petitions were presented this year from 
 the City of London, Norfolk, and Yorkshire — ^the 
 last containing the signatures of 17,000 freeholders, 
 two-thirds of those in the county. Nevertheless, 
 Lord John Russell's reform motion was rejected 
 by a three-to-one majority in the Commons. A 
 relative prosperity and calm continued through 
 1824 ; and the session was marked by three notable 
 pieces of legislation, repealing the Spitalfields Act, 
 the restrictions on the emigration of artisans, and, 
 most important of all, the combination laws. 
 
 The Spitalfields episode illustrates the point of 
 view of these early Hberationists, They saw two 
 obstacles to the growth of the silk manufacture. 
 The greater lay in the import duties designed to 
 protect the trade from the competition of French 
 goods of lower price and better design. Thanks 
 to an increased and improved production of raw 
 silk in India, considerable progress had been made 
 of late ; and, in 1823, the value of the manufac- 
 tured stuffs was estimated at 10 millions. The 
 principal silk merchants now petitioned for the 
 removal of the duties on imported materials, oppos- 
 ing, however, any interference with the duties on 
 wrought silk. The second obstruction was the 
 ancient law empowering magistrates to fix for the 
 Spitalfields weavers a living wage — the last relic 
 of a forgotten economic order. Huskisson said he 
 
§ IV.] THE LOWEST DEPTH 161 
 
 could hardly account for the existence of such a 
 statute ; and it is manifest that he could not 
 understand the petition for its maintenance pre- 
 sented by Mr T. Fowell Buxton on behalf of 11,000 
 jburneymen weavers. The Commons agreed to the 
 repeal by a small majority ; but a stronger survival 
 of paternalism in the Upper House was shown by 
 the adoption of several hostile amendments, and 
 the matter dropped. Amid the excitements of 
 1825, the repeal was quietly carried, without dis- 
 cussion. Coincidently, the import duties both on raw 
 and manufactured silk were greatly reduced. This 
 approach to Free Trade had both a practical and 
 a theoretical value. It took away an indirect 
 bounty from a small class of capitalists, and brought 
 a health and vigour into the business which pre- 
 sently raised it above fear of competition, and even 
 enabled it to export considerable quantities of silk 
 goods to France. It had an even more important 
 effect in helping to extinguish smuggling, which up 
 to this time had cost the country at least a million 
 a year in loss of revenue and in naval and coast- 
 guard expenses.^ 
 
 The repeal of the magisterial power to fix wages 
 in East London had less practical than theoretical 
 
 * But from 1827 to 1843, just before the complete abolition of 
 the duties, half the silk goods imported from France were smuggled. 
 The consequent loss, either to the revenue (as compared with what 
 it would have been had all imports paid duty), or to the consumer 
 ,(if the duty had been lowered enough to prevent smuggling), In 
 these seventeen years, was estimated at £38,618,708. Cj. Hirst's 
 Porter, p. 349. 
 L 
 
162 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. in. 
 
 significance. The system was already dead ; this 
 was its burial. It marked the complete abandon- 
 ment by the community of any influence upon the 
 remuneration of labour ; and this full proclamation 
 of laisser faire may well have had a moral (or im- 
 moral) effect upon the employing class. For, of 
 two possibilities, one must represent the facts. 
 Either the old magisterial power tended to keep 
 wages up, in which case the weavers were right to 
 defend it, and the employers were only seeking to 
 force them to accept lower wages; or the magis- 
 terial power was in abeyance or was ineffective, in 
 which case the question was only one of principle, 
 and it was untrue to say that " meddling inter- 
 ference under an antiquated statute " was driving 
 the trade into other districts or abroad. The 
 magistrates of the time were not exactly revolu- 
 tionary meddlers, nor were they omnipotent ad- 
 ministrators. We are told that weavers' wages 
 in Spitalfields fell from 17s. a week in 1824 to 9s. 
 in 1829. This suggests that the judicial power had 
 been effective ; but it could not have long remained. 
 In any case, when it was abolished, a class of 
 justices who had been used to exercise a sort of 
 arbitral function between employers and em.ployed 
 came to an end; and a new magistracy exercising 
 little power except that of punishment arose. The 
 weavers now knew the worst. Human labour was 
 to be bought like horse labour, or steam-power, or 
 any other commodity, as cheaply as possible. Ten 
 years later, the silk trade had transferred itself to 
 
§ IV.] THE LOWEST DEPTH 163 
 
 the North ; and, of 30,000 operatives who had 
 " freely contracted " themselves into the service 
 of 238 mills, one-third were children under thir- 
 teen years of age, mostly girls ; another third were 
 "young persons," mostly girls, under eighteen, and 
 only 4114, were adult men. The manufacture had 
 greatly expanded ; the ladies of the crinoline era 
 co\ild wear two silk dresses where they had only 
 been able to afford one. But what had become 
 of the 11,000 Spitalfields journeymen ? 
 
 To do the Philosophical Radicals justice, they 
 proceeded at once to an attack upon the laws pro- 
 hibiting labour combinations. We saw in our first 
 chapter that, when the destruction of apprentice- 
 ship and other remains of the gild system began, 
 the creation of trade unionism was inevitable, unless 
 the mass of operatives was to sink into virtual 
 slavery. There was never any suggestion that 
 combinations of masters should be forbidden. 
 When paternalism was abandoned, the men also 
 must be allowed to protect themselves in the only 
 possible way, by union. This development was 
 evferywhere delayed by pathetically futile efforts 
 to recover the meagre defence of legal apprentice- 
 ship and magisterial arbitration. It was power- 
 fully obstructed by the Act of 1799, expressly 
 penalizing all associations — a measure of alarm due 
 in part to the rapid growth of trade unionism in the 
 Lancashire and Yorkshire textile trades — and by 
 the merciless punishment of strike committees. 
 This is the real origin of the conspirative element 
 
164 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. in. 
 
 which marked the democratic movement of the next 
 generation. Skilled handicraftsmen were not yet 
 numerous enough to be lightly flouted ; but in the 
 textile and other routine trades — where hand- 
 workers, with their old domestic tools, were pitted 
 against the factory machine, and women and 
 children against men — the spirit of greed was 
 unrestrained. Hume and his friends would hardly 
 have been able to manoeuvre through Parliament 
 in 1824 the repeal of the combination laws had it 
 hot been a postulate of their own economic doctrine 
 that neither by combination nor in any other way 
 could labour secure a higher wage than the play 
 of natural forces gave it. Even so, the majority 
 repented of its good deed in the following year ; 
 and, on Huskisson's initiative, the Act was modified 
 so as to penalize association for any but the most 
 peaceful kind of bargaiiiing as to wages and hours 
 of labour. A substantial gain was left, however; 
 and, from this point, trade unionism must be 
 watched as one of the rising powers in the national 
 life. 
 
 The second great commercial crisis of the century, 
 that of 1825, illustrates the economic principles of 
 which we spoke in connection with the first ; and 
 even more signally does it exhibit the demoralizing 
 consequences upon the more comfortable classes 
 of the loss of a long prevalent social faith, the 
 breakdown of one principle of cohesion in society 
 before another can be established in its stead. 
 The Christian settlement of Western Europe in 
 
§!iv.] THE LOWEST DEPTH 165 
 
 the later Middle Ages embodied, however crudely, 
 an essential principle of human government. It 
 recognized the all-importance of economic acts and 
 motives ; and, by its faith and its law, it set, or 
 sought to set, bounds upon the lusts of greed and 
 arbitrary power. Although the learned rakes of 
 the Restoration had got men to laugh at the super- 
 stitions of what they called the " Dark Ages," it 
 was a gentle laugh, not yet the leer of awakened 
 avarice. It is not the eighteenth century, but this 
 second decade of the nineteenth — the interval 
 between the fanatical careers of Joanna Southcott 
 and Edward Irving, the day of the bodysnatchers 
 and the treadmill — that witnesses the eclipse of 
 faith, and all of morals that rests on faith, in 
 England. What would More and Erasmus have 
 said to a prophecy that, in three centuries, the 
 humanism of the Reformation would have degene- 
 rated into a doctrine that reformers should rest 
 content while men amd women, boys and girls, 
 are being bought in the market-place like pigs of 
 iron or bales of cotton ? Let us stomach the un- 
 comfortable truth that, as the days of persecution 
 are those of deepest conviction, so the men who too 
 easily flatter themselves upon their enlightenment 
 and (liberalism may be ministering to license and 
 abetting tyranny. In the Tory factory reformers 
 and Radical Corn Law abolitionists, the twentieth- 
 century student finds a strange confusion of tongues. 
 The Individualists of the Chair did, indeed, reach a 
 logical Qonsistency, by purging their voluminous 
 
166 MODERN ENGLAND [oHAt. m. 
 
 writings of all trace of the real life that throbbed 
 around them. How did these ingenious and 
 amiable anarchists, the most influential of all the 
 Utopians known to history, come to wield so large 
 an influence, to dominate the thought of the next 
 generation ? Of their personal virtues there can 
 be no question ; but of most of their disciples we 
 may safely reply : For the same reason that their 
 opponents maintained the Corn Laws and pauper 
 allowances — ^because it paid. The Manchester men 
 were perfectly familiar with the view from Ducie 
 Bridge, and with worse things still. They took a 
 very mundane view of the Utilitarian philosophy ; 
 and they were too numerous to feel any shame. 
 So deep and universal was the confidence that it 
 would pay, that the havoc of 1825 was soon for- 
 gotten ; and the very masculine Miss Martineau, 
 telling the tale twenty years later, could shed 
 tears over the victims of the disturbance, and yet 
 discover not an inkling of its' real significance. 
 
 Schemers and dreamers conspired to blow this 
 gigantic bubble. Companies were formed helter- 
 skelter for the exploitation of ideas, some sound 
 enough, some purely fantastic. Legends of El 
 Dorado glorified the new-won independence of 
 South America ; and in four months ten millions 
 sterling was shipped thither in coin or bullion. 
 Miners were sent out to the Andes, and milkmaids 
 to the pampas ; the Birmingham merchants, in 
 their eagerness to be first in the market, exported 
 skates and warming-pans to Rio de Janeiro. Such 
 
§ IV.] THE LOWEST DEPTH 167 
 
 was the outer fringe of the mania of speculation. 
 The home market was flooded with the paper 
 money of the provincial banks ; and, up to the 
 height of the crisis, the Bank of England continued 
 to issue its notes freely. The lowness of the rate 
 of interest favoured borrowing and gambling with 
 borrowed money. From the Ministers at West- 
 minster down to the little shopkeepers and their 
 wives, everyone seems to have succumbed to the 
 fever. During the year, 286 private Acts were 
 allowed by the House of Commons for the estab- 
 lishment of shipping, canal, mining, gas, railroad, 
 banking, and insurance concerns. In Macclesfield, 
 newspaper advertisements announced that there 
 were " wanted immediately from four to five 
 thousand persons, from seven to twenty years of 
 age, to be employed in the throwing arid manu- 
 facturing of silk." But the imagined gold and 
 silver, pearls and precious stones, of the South 
 shone more entrancingly than any industrial enter- 
 prise ; and it was reckoned that, in 1824 and 1825, 
 no less than 86 millions of foreign loans were 
 floated. 
 
 The crash came in December. The bankers first 
 felt the pressure, then the merchants and manu- 
 facturers, then the people at large, fear deepening, 
 as failure followed failure, into widening disorder, 
 and finally into headlong panic. In six weeks 
 more than sixty banks failed. Credit was almost 
 extinct ; and, in face of a glut of unsaleable goods, 
 works of all kinds were closed. This time, the 
 
168 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. hi. 
 
 middle classes shared with the workers the suffering 
 of broken hearts and ruined homes ; and, if they 
 did not so often feel the pain of actual starvation, 
 they had their own peculiar ignominies of the 
 usurer and the bankruptcy court. The first 
 rioting in the North occurred at Sunderland in 
 August, when the^ soldiery were brought out against 
 a body of seamen on strike, who had attacked 
 what would now be called a " blackleg " crew. 
 Five persons were killed in this mSlee. Much more 
 serious conflicts occurred in Lancashire during the 
 following spring. Mobs of hungry out-o'-works 
 marched from town to town, looting bakers' shops,; 
 destroying machinery (in one day every power- 
 loom in the Blackburn district was smashed), firing 
 mills, and meeting the attack of the troops with 
 scythes, hammers, roughly made pikes, and old 
 muskets loaded with marbles. In Glasgow and 
 Dublin, Trowbridge, Carlisle, Norwich, and Bethnal 
 Green, there were less serious outbreaks. 
 
 The Government sat with folded arms through 
 the main period of this social convulsion, declaring 
 that it could do nothing. At last, influential 
 meetings of financiers were held to procure a 
 voluntary restoration of credit. The Mint was set 
 to work coining sovereigns ; the small-note currency 
 of the banks was prohibited ; and the Bank of 
 England offered advances on deposits of merchants' 
 goods. A quantity of corn in bond in the ports 
 was liberated ; and, after the severe drought of 
 1826, free import of oats, rye, beans, and peas was 
 
§ IV.] THE LOWEST DEPTH 169 
 
 allowed. The Colonial Office now began to assist 
 emigration. In 1820, 19,000 English folk had 
 sought happier homes oversea, in the following 
 year 13,000 ; in the prosperity of 1824 the number 
 fell to 8,000 ; in the despair of 1826 it rose to 
 14,000, and probably it would have risen much 
 higher if shipping facilities had been adequate. 
 
 It has been estimated that the crisis cost the 
 nation a hundred millions sterling. The figure has 
 no statistical value ; but it serves to remind us 
 that, amid the miseries of the decade following the 
 great war, the remissions of taxation and the growth 
 of industry and trade had enabled the middle and 
 upper classes to save money, as well as to enlarge 
 their houses and shops, their factories and estates. 
 Manchester and Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, and 
 other cities expanded greatly in this period. 
 
 The paving and lighting of streets began ; sub- 
 urbajti villadom was founded ; and the fishing villages 
 of Kent and Sussex found that the bathing-van 
 and the lodging-house might be more lucrative 
 than the smugglers' yawl. Even in the smaller 
 farm-houses, a contemporary tells us, " carpets, 
 china plates, and glasses, are to be seen, instead of 
 stone floors, trenchers, and drinking horns." The 
 savings-banks, opened in 1818, were making good 
 progress. The London Mechanics' Institute, 
 founded in 1823, had over a thousand subscribers, 
 and was being copied by a number of northern 
 towns. The great modem clubs were rising in 
 London ; the parks, markets, and streets were 
 
170 MODERN ENGLAm) [chap. m. 
 
 d- and the Thames Tunnel was 
 
 being ^'^P''°^^n-traps and spring-guns were still 
 projected^_^ i^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^ ^ ^^^,^ ^^^^ 
 
 lega (11^^ ^^^ gibbet over a cowed country-side. 
 But London University, founded in 1835, and the 
 Society for Promoting the Diffusion of Useful 
 Knowledge, founded in the same year by Brougham 
 and Lord John Russell, gave happier auguries ; 
 and voices like that of Dr Arnold began to call for 
 a humaner order. 
 
 The crisis of 1825 arrested this progress, and 
 made of many improvements so many pledges for 
 future redemption. But it effected a clearance, 
 and it acted as a warning. Many a man accustomed 
 to wealth and privilege learned in misfortune the 
 virtue and need of reform. The liberalism of the 
 Ministry, the disappearance of the Duke of York 
 and of George IV, the more frequent opposition 
 of Commons and Lords, the removal of Catholic 
 and Nonconformist disabilities, the slight modifica- 
 tion of the Com Law by Wellington's sliding-scale 
 in 1828, the stir of the French Revolution, and the 
 opening of the Liverpool-Manchester railway, to 
 which Huskisson's death gave tragic colour, in 
 1830 — these appear now as so many links in a 
 chain of preparation for the crucial struggle in 
 which the Oligarchy was at length overthrown. 
 
 Before that year was out. Lord John Russell's 
 Reform Bill had been carried through the Commons, 
 and its rejection by a majority of 41 Peers had led 
 to fresh disturbance. We have already spoken of 
 
§V.] THE LOWEST DEPTH 171 
 
 the rising of the agricultural labourers in the South, 
 and its suppression. The agitation in the towns 
 could not be suppressed. After the destruction of 
 Nottingham Castle, and the breaking open of the 
 prisons in Bristol and other places, a proclamation 
 was issued declaring the political unions illegal. It 
 had no effect ; and the failure of the Government's 
 action against Cobbett for inflammatory writing 
 exhibited the impotence of law when it challenges 
 the anger of a nation. A carnival of outrage and 
 coercion in Ireland, and a fearful visitation of 
 Asiatic cholera, deepened the gloom of the winter. 
 At length, the cry, " To stop the Duke, go for gold," 
 having resulted in £1,800,000 being withdrawn from 
 the Bank of England in three days — and the King 
 having consented to create Peers if necessary — ^the 
 Bill was swallowed by the Upper House, in June 
 1832. It disfranchised 56 nomination boroughs, 
 containing less than two thousand inhabitants, 
 which had returned 111 Members, and took away 
 one Member from 30 others, and two from Melcombe 
 Regis and Weymouth, thus vacating 143 seats. 
 Sixty-five Members were given to the counties, 
 two each to Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, and 
 nineteen large towns, including the metropolitan 
 districts, and one each to 21 other towns hitherto 
 unrepresented. The reformers had demanded adult 
 suffrage ; they got nothing of the kind. In the 
 counties, copyholders and leaseholders for years 
 were added as voters to the 40s. freeholders, and 
 tenants-at-will paying £50 a year received the vote. 
 
172 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. hi. 
 
 In the towns, a £10 household franchise was estab- 
 lished, and the voting rights of freeholders were 
 restricted. By supplementary Acts, the Scottish 
 representation was increased from 45 to 53 Members 
 (30 for counties, 23 for burghs), and the Irish from 
 100 to 105, with franchise changes similar to the 
 English. 
 
 The power of the landed Oligarchy was broken, 
 but it remained very influential in political, and 
 supreme in social, life. Parliament was now 
 dominated by the middle class ; few industrial 
 and no agricultural labourers received the vote. 
 A great change had been made, but so tardily that 
 more must soon follow. 
 
 V. The Railway and Steamship 
 
 The opening of the Stockton and Darlington rail- 
 way, four years after its authorization by Parlia- 
 ment in 1821, was a very modest inauguration of a 
 new economic era. A signalman riding on horse- 
 back in front of the engine represents for us the 
 fears of the time ; yet to draw a load of ninety 
 tons in thirty-four waggons at a rate of fourteen to 
 fifteen miles an hour was a prodigious feat. It 
 was immediately reflected in freight charges, and 
 indirectly in prices ; thus, the price of coals at 
 Darlington fell from 18s, to 8s. 6d. a ton. In 1826, 
 railway building was begun in Scotland, with the 
 Monklands Hne. In 1829, an English-built engine 
 was running in the United States, and, in the 
 
§ v.] THE LOWEST DEPTH 173 
 
 following year, the evolution of the American 
 locomotive commenced. The last doubts of the 
 commercial value of the new transport-power were 
 removed when, at the opening of the Liverpool- 
 Manchester line in 1830, Stephenson's " Rocket " 
 drew a load of thirteen tons a distance of thirty-five 
 miles in forty-eight minutes. The principal feature 
 of this, the first high-speed locomotive, was the 
 improved steam-blast for increasing the draft in 
 the furnace, so making a smaller boiler possible. 
 Progress in the manufacture of steel has brought 
 in its train many improvements in construction. 
 But essentially the steam-engine of to-day is the 
 steam-engine of Watt and Stephenson ; and, when 
 the best engineers have done their best, the rail- 
 way locomotive remains the least efficient, by waste 
 of fuel and mechanical imperfection, of all steam- 
 engines. 
 
 The rate of extension of British railways may be 
 thus shown : 
 
 1840 
 
 miles 1,331 
 
 1880 
 
 miles 17,935 
 
 1850 
 
 „ 6,635 
 
 1890 
 
 „ 20,073 
 
 1860 
 
 „ 10,410 
 
 1900 
 
 „ 21,855 
 
 1870 
 
 „ 15,310 
 
 1909 
 
 „ 23,264 
 
 1909— Authorised Capital, £1,403,000,000. 
 
 In the United States, building proceeded with a 
 more reckless rapidity ; the mileage in 1900 was 
 198,964. Railway construction began in Canada 
 and in Asia in 1853, and at the Cape in 1860. There 
 were in 1907, not counting tramways, 601,808 miles 
 
174 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. m. 
 
 of railways in the world, more than half being in 
 America, and less than a third in Europe. The 
 difference of methods and conditions of construction 
 is indicated by the fact that the paid-up capital per 
 mile in 1908 was £33,333 in the United Kingdom, 
 and only £10,372 in the United States. 
 
 The steamship advanced step by step with the 
 land locomotive, and it is to their co-operation that 
 the vast growth of world-commerce is largely due. 
 In 1820, the " Aaron Manby " made the voyage 
 from London up the Seine to Paris without break- 
 ing cargo ; in 1832 the " Elburkah," an iron steamer 
 of Liverpool, twice ascended the Niger ; and in 
 1838 the " Great Western " and " Sirius " crossed 
 the Atlantic, in 18 and 15 days respectively. The 
 earliest steam vessels, whether for river or ocean 
 service, were fitted with paddle wheels, and com- 
 monly with beam-engines ; some paddle-boats remain 
 upon the cross-Channel traffic to this day. But the 
 value of space, the disadvantages of the paddles in 
 heavy weather, the differing depths of freeboard 
 (there will be a difference of 20 feet in the water-line 
 of a modern tramp loaded or light), and the ad- 
 vances of steel machinery, which made possible a 
 faster-running engine, soon led to the adoption of 
 the screw-propeller. The first considerable experi- 
 ment was the " Great Britain," built at Bristol, 320 
 feet long, of 3500 tons burden, and 1000 horse- 
 power. In 1844, the number of iron vessels built 
 was so large as to require the establishment of a 
 special Lloyds classification. A decade later, the 
 
§ v.] THE LOWEST DEPTH 175 
 
 great advances of marine engineering began. John 
 Elder's four-cylinder engines (1854-56) introduced 
 much higher steam-pressures, and effected an 
 economy of 60 per cent, in fuel. Double, triple, and 
 quadruple types of compound engine followed. At 
 the same time, the introduction of the double- 
 bottom, of watertight bulk-heads, water-ballast, 
 and other structural improvements have increased 
 both the seaworthiness and the cargo capacity of 
 steamships. 
 
 Despite the obstructions raised by human folly, 
 the tides of economic life flow over all political 
 boundaries, and sooner or later fertilize every land. 
 The best that any nation can hope is, by some 
 natural advantage, to get the earliest benefits. 
 Some of the advantages which gave England a 
 long start in the Industrial Revolution were natural 
 monopolies, or were at least owned to an exceptional 
 extent. Such were the proximity of the coal- 
 measures and the iron-beds, and, with this, a 
 humid climate specially favourable to the textile 
 processes ; the raggedness of the coast-line, which 
 gave almost every important district access to cheap 
 water carriage, and, with this, the aptness for sea- 
 manship natural to an insular folk. Had the new 
 power and machinery been applied only to manu- 
 facture, our story would have proceeded on very 
 different lines. But no sooner had the great 
 inventions in productive industry begun to be 
 common property in the most advanced countries, 
 than the railway and marine engineers gave England 
 
176 MODERN ENGLAND [ohap. hi. 
 
 the second lift into the Steam Age. Hitherto, 
 domestic development had necessarily followed 
 the waterway and the highroad, on which physio- 
 graphic conditions were supreme, and speed, as 
 we understand it, was not. Manufacture had been 
 stultified by the smallness of the home market. 
 Foreign commerce, depending only on sea carriage, 
 was relatively easier, limited as were the capacities 
 of the best of sailing-ships ; hence, perhaps, those 
 superior foreign interests which made us masters 
 in the councils of Europe while cruel wrongs were 
 bringing our own people to the brink of revolu- 
 tion. The localization and specialization of industry 
 had gone on uninterruptedly for three-quarters of 
 a century ; the isolation of manufactures, their 
 remoteness from allied trades and from the cus- 
 tomer, was the trouble. The manufacturer wanted 
 a wider choice of situation, a readier exchange of 
 products and of services ; the merchant wanted a 
 larger market for commodities ; the worker needed 
 a wider market for his labour, cheaper and better 
 food, and generally better access to the good things 
 which invention had brought to birth. 
 
 These are the opportunities which the railway 
 created. Steam production gave trade energy ; 
 steam distribution gave it the no less essential 
 quality of mobility. Time and space were again 
 repulsed in their eternal struggle with the life- 
 principle. It was a social as much as an industrial 
 devolution. The whole of Western civilization 
 received a new stimulus — a new direction. A vast 
 
§ v.] THE LOWEST DEPTH 177 
 
 levelling of opportunities has followed in the wake 
 of the iron horse. In the main, it has been a level- 
 ling up, though lucky individuals have managed to 
 seize by far the greater part of the spoils. Land, 
 both rural and urban, has received, directly and 
 indirectly, an enormous increment of value, without 
 effort on the part of its owners. On the other hand, 
 the masses of the people have profited by the new 
 stimtdus to and the new economy in manufactures ; 
 by the opening up of large districts lying away 
 from the old highways, and the first realization of 
 their resources ; by the development of agriculture, 
 fisheries, and minor industries ; and by the complex 
 distribution of ideas through daily newspaper and 
 penny post— both children of the railway. 
 
 The most momentous creation of all is, however, 
 nothing less than the modem city, as distinguished 
 from the centre of a single local manufacture, 
 trade, or market. The supersession of an old high- 
 way and the towns upon it by some improved line 
 of communications is a very old phenomena in 
 history ; and, with the object-lesson of the auto- 
 mobile and electric-car before us, we already know 
 that the steam locomotive is not the last agent 
 of the kind to effect a wide redistribution of the 
 centres of human life and labour. The new facilities 
 of personal movement also aided the concentra- 
 tion of capital, the greater division of labour, the 
 exchange of abilities and of goods. It is easier to 
 feed five millions of people to-day than it was to 
 feed fifty thousand three-quarters of a century 
 
 M 
 
178 MODERN England [chap, m. 
 
 ago. Finally, railway property, commanding, as it 
 has come to do, the whole trade of the country, 
 has gathered round it, in its vast and rapid growth, 
 a great entourage of stock speculators, dividend 
 owners, and professional administrators. Pro- 
 fessor Hadley estimated some years ago that 
 railways represented a tenth of the total wealth 
 of the civilized nations, and a quarter, if not a 
 third, of their invested capital. A glance at the 
 Statistical Abstract for the United Kingdom will 
 show that an eleventh of the whole property assessed 
 to income tax is of this kind. But such figures 
 do less than justice to the important place which 
 railways have reached in the national economy ; 
 for many trades are directly dependent upon 
 them, and, all round, rapid and efficient commu- 
 nications must now be regarded as the basis of 
 industrial life. As this dependence becomes less 
 absolute, we can review impartially the oscilla- 
 tions between competition and monopoly which 
 characterize the Steam Age ; and we can appreciate 
 the prophetic affirmation of Mr Gladstone's Com- 
 mittee in 1844 (almost verbally anticipated by 
 Stephenson himself) that " competition would do 
 more injury to the railway companies than good 
 to the public," while, on the other hand, " the effect 
 of monopoly, both on the public directly, and 
 indirectly, on the railway companies, was to be 
 dreaded and guarded against." 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF THE ECONOMISTS 
 
 To cite the evolution of opinion without regard to 
 the facts out of which it arose is the most sterile 
 kind of history. There is no idealism so transcen- 
 dental as to be really independent of the time and 
 place of its birth ; and all philosophies, though their 
 authors may not realize it, are somewhere marked 
 with the stain of circumstance. If, indeed, these 
 gifts were as purely celestial as they seem to 
 innocent eyes, they would have little effect 
 upon the minds of ordinary men. For desire is 
 the great digestive, in mind or body ; and philo- 
 sophies, like grosser goods, are subject to a law 
 of supply and demand. The dumb, groping self- 
 interests of a generation accumulate. They demand 
 intellectual expression — and a David Ricardo or a 
 Karl Marx appears. They demand political ex- 
 pression — and a Liberal bench faces a Tory bench, 
 while a Labour leadership gathers sullenly outside. 
 They may demand religious expression ; and new 
 conflicts of Church and Chapel, Kingsleys and 
 Newmans, Maurices and Puseys, will arise. Lite- 
 rature will respond still more readily and finely ; 
 and you will get, in Scott, Coleridge, Shelley, Hazlitt, 
 
 X79 
 
180 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. iv. 
 
 and then in Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris, 
 a picture-gallery reflecting the hopes and hungers, 
 the ideals and anxieties of an epoch. Lastly, 
 science will feel the current of demand ; a Darwin 
 will find his kejTiote in an essay by a country 
 parson, which he took up to read " for amusement," 
 and a Huxley will give back to economics what his 
 master took therefrom. 
 
 These reactions of thought and social circum- 
 stance, though there is no more entrancing subject, 
 have been insufficiently studied. Why, for in- 
 stance, did what was afterwards called the orthodox 
 political economy emerge at this particular time ; 
 and why did so dry a system as the deductive 
 philosophy obtain a dominating influence in English 
 public life ? It is probably true that every new 
 school of thought that has appeared in the his- 
 tory of mankind may be traced to a large social 
 change, an unsettlement, or a resettlement, which 
 required, first, its heralds, then its guides and orga- 
 nisers, and, finally, its faithful few in the day of 
 failure. The new philosophy did not produce the 
 change in social organisation ; but, by its analysis 
 and glosses, it quickened an unconscious into a 
 partially conscious process, and provided arguments 
 for the growing number of those who were pre- 
 disposed to defend it. The laisser-faire doctrine 
 had this double strength — it was based upon the 
 greatest economic development of the era, and it 
 gave self-seeking the appearance of something 
 fundamentally beneficent and inexoi-ably necessary. 
 
CHAP. IV.] INFLUENCE OF ECONOMISTS 181 
 
 No more powerful combination of appeal can 
 be imagined ; and, gradually, literature, science, 
 religion, and governmental authority were brought 
 into its service. The mass of the people continued 
 to protest ; but their chief organ, trade unionism, 
 was deeply affected by middle-class individualism 
 until nearly the end of the century. Then the 
 whole theoretic structure broke down ; and it now 
 lies like an old machine abandoned on a slag heap. 
 This is a very remarkable phenomenon ; and, 
 without attempting to probe it deeply, we must 
 note briefly its character and consequences. 
 
 There are three books more sacred than all 
 others in the history of the old political economy : 
 Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), Malthus's 
 Essay on Population (1798, and 1803), and David 
 Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and 
 Taxation (1817). Smith, son of a Controller of 
 Customs, was Professor of Logic at Glasgow 
 University, and the first patron of Watt the in- 
 ventor. Malthus, son of a Surrey landlord, was 
 vicar of Albury, Essex, where he saw the agri- 
 cultural labourer at his worst, and Professor of 
 Political Economy at Haileybury. Ricardo, son of 
 a Jewish stockbroker, made a fortune in the same 
 business, bought the Irish pocket-borough of 
 Portarlington (there were only twelve constituents, 
 and he never visited them), and acquired great 
 influence in Parliament by his knowledge of finance, 
 then peculiarly valued. Personal experience of 
 the Customs, the vicarage, and the money-market. 
 
182 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. iv. 
 
 explains some differences between the three men, 
 the lapse of time more. Smith's book was a 
 glorified pamphlet aimed at the politician and man 
 of business ; and, synchronizing exactly with the 
 American Declaration of Independence, it drew an 
 indictment of the Navigation Acts, the Protective 
 tariff, and other obstructions to commerce, so 
 effective that the Free Traders of the next century 
 hardly needed further argumentative material. 
 Individualism — the theory that self-interest, oper- 
 ating through a perfectly free competition of 
 specialized units of labour and capital, would 
 automatically procure the greatest good of the 
 greatest number — was hardly more than implicit 
 in Smith. He welcomed Bentham's legal and 
 political elaboration of the principle ; his own 
 contribution was altogether concrete. The need 
 of personal freedom was a strong instinct with 
 Smith ; but the fact that he admitted, for instance, 
 the need of contract between employers and work- 
 men, because of their inequality in bargaining, 
 and such a phrase as that in which he describes 
 employers as being in a " tacit combination " to 
 restrict wages,i shows that he was far from having 
 reached a complete and consistent theory. He 
 
 ^ " It is not difficult to foresee which of the two parties must in all 
 ordinary occasions have the advantage in the dispute, and force 
 the other into a compUance with their terms. The masters, being 
 fewer in number, can combine much more easily. . . . Masters are 
 always and everywhere in a sort of tacit but constant and uniform 
 combination not to raise the wages of labour above the actual rate " 
 ( Wealth oj Nations, p. 28). 
 
CHAP, rv.] INFLUENCE OF ECONOMISTS 183 
 
 could have no idea of the revolution his young friend 
 Watt was to accomplish ; he did not even live to 
 see the power-loom at work. He will always be 
 honoured as a great liberationist, a forerunner, 
 who, however, cannot be saddled with the errors 
 of the priests who follow him. 
 
 Twenty years brought a vast change. The 
 Revolution, triumphant in America and France, 
 threatened in England. Godwin was preaching 
 the revolutionary gospel that poverty is the result 
 of bad government, and conjuring up golden 
 visions, more clearly outlined by Robert Owen, 
 of what England might be tuider a co-operative 
 commonwealth. Pitt's judges and magistrates and 
 soldiers gave one kind of answer to these apostles 
 of democracy, a dangerous answer, never successful 
 in the long run. Malthus did better. He invented 
 a dogma,! ^ formula duly compoimded of miracle 
 and morality, truly Calvinistic in its exclusiveness 
 and its show of relentless necessity, very comforting 
 to the few who could marry " prudently " and save 
 " prudently," properly excommunicative of the 
 rebellious outcasts of the countryside who had just 
 forced the hands of the too benevolent magistrates 
 at Speenhamland. A dogma must be capable of 
 short statement ; and our courageous parson did 
 not hesitate to state the whole process of human 
 
 ^ The first edition of the Essay did little more than marshal a 
 number of quite familiar arguments against the optimism of Godwin. 
 Malthus then concluded that his position " had not perhaps been 
 stated with sufficient force and precision " ; the edition of 1803 
 assumed, therefore, a more dogmatic form, 
 
184 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. iv. 
 
 evolution in a brief mathematical formula, thus : 
 Mankind tends to increase in geometrical, the means 
 of subsistence only in arithmetical, ratio. The sole 
 checks upon this poverty-producing tendency in 
 the nature of things are (1) positive (for instance, 
 war, pestilence, vice), or (2) prudential (for instance, 
 late marriage) ; and, as movements savouring of 
 democracy or communism — movements to limit 
 competition in labour, for instance — destroy pru- 
 dential restraint, they are (after the diabolical deity 
 of this creed) the great causes of poverty. 
 
 How did this superstition obtain its tremendous 
 vogue ? The Malthusian formula is an ingenious 
 falsification. It is false in its parts, and still more 
 false as a whole. If Godwin had had the type of 
 mind to give tabloid for tabloid, creed for creed, 
 he would have come as near the truth as may be in 
 a short statement of a very complex matter by 
 simply inverting the formula. For, as mankind 
 lives, by and large, upon the lower forms of life, 
 and as these forms are visibly more prolific than 
 man himself, it may be said that the power of sub- 
 sistence always tends to outstrip the power of 
 population — at least up to the point of the actual 
 overcrowding of the whole earth, a contingency 
 sufficiently remote not to concern us. But let us 
 not exaggerate our antithesis. The "tendency" 
 is not static ; it is a ratio of two ever-varying 
 factors. " Population " is not always and every- 
 where the same, nor is subsistence. These are 
 not mathematical quantities. Population does not, 
 
CHAP. IV.] INFLUENCE OF ECONOMISTS 185 
 
 as MaJthus suggested, grow, or even " tend " to 
 grow, everywhere and at all times at the same 
 rate ; neither is there any single rate of increase 
 of man's means of subsistence. A " law " which 
 can be defeated by " prudence " is evidently no 
 law. A law is a generalization not from some, but 
 from all, of the facts. But if Malthus had allowed 
 for the intelligence without which man does not 
 deserve the name of man, he would have had to 
 revolutionize his formula. It would then have 
 read something like this : So long as man is free 
 and willing to use his brains, his prudence, all the 
 faculties which constitute his superiority, to culti- 
 vate the fertility of nature, his subsistence is safe — 
 and only so long. This, however, would by no 
 means have served the purpose. To-day the facts 
 remain, the purpose has only a historical interest. 
 What could be said a century ago, and can be 
 said now with much greater confidence, is that 
 the increase of the means of subsistence depends 
 largely upon man's control over the natural re- 
 sources and powers of the globe, and that, so long 
 as his knowledge and skill in exploiting this natural 
 bounty grow in proportion to his numerical increase, 
 there is nothing to fear. It is only when, and in 
 proportion as, man becomes degraded, and loses 
 intelligent power over himself and his environment, 
 that that environment ceases to yield to him the 
 fruit necessary to support his increase. 
 
 It will be seen, then, that Malthus got his sen- 
 sational effect by falsifying the two factors of his 
 
186 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. iv. 
 
 ratio — ^by depreciating the potentialities of natural 
 supply, and by depreciating the intelligence of 
 man, which can as well be used to increase that 
 supply as, by " prudential restraint," to limit his 
 numbers. How did he persuade his generation 
 to accept this double misrepresentation ? Sub- 
 stantially, by assuming the permanence of the 
 morbid conditions of his time. We have seen that 
 the mass of the labouring population was, indeed, 
 demoralized, and that the art of conquering 
 Republican France, not the art of conquering 
 Nature, filled the minds of the educated and 
 governing classes. To support his first premiss, 
 Malthus invented a second — ^the " law of diminish- 
 ing returns," according to which, at a certain 
 point, the addition of new units of human labour 
 to the cultivation of a given piece of land will 
 result in proportionately smaller return. The case 
 of inferior lands brought into cultivation under 
 the (altogether unintelligent) stimulus of the Com 
 Laws was the classic illustration. Arnold Toynbee, 
 in one of his rare lapses,^ says that " this law is true." 
 It was, indeed, for long accepted as a true summary 
 of agricultural experience. But so very little true 
 is it as a resum^ of all the facts within modern 
 knowledge that later economists have invented a 
 " law of increasing returns " to account for cases 
 to the contrary.^ There are cases of increasing 
 
 ^ Industrial Revolution, p. 87. 
 
 " Mr J. A. Hobson discusses diminishing returns suggestively in 
 his Evolution of Modem Capitalism, pp. 372-74. Prof, S. J. Chapman, 
 
CHAP. IV.] INFLUENCE OP ECONOMISTS 187 
 
 and cases of decreasing returns, the former more 
 frequent in manufacture, and the latter in agri- 
 culture ; but there is no " law " in either direc- 
 tion, if we use the word " law " with any approach 
 to its significance in physical science. 
 
 For Malthus and his friends, however, the idea 
 of universal, inexorable law was essential. If 
 they had merely said that demoralized labourers 
 receiving "allowances" according to the numbers 
 of their families, tend to multiply more rapidly 
 than any subsistence they earn, they might have 
 got the Speenhamland policy abolished sooner ; 
 but they would not have explained away other kinds 
 of poverty, and they would have been producing 
 an argument for those who wished to raise, not 
 those who wished to depress, wages. If they had 
 merely said that, under tariff privilege, agriculture 
 is unprofitably extended, they might have got the 
 Corn Laws repealed sooner, but they would have 
 left Godwin and Owen and Cobbett in possession 
 of the field. In neither case would they have 
 founded a school of economics. Darwin would 
 have carried through his researches ; but there 
 
 in his Political Economy, pp. 68-73, distinguislies " abstract laws " 
 from " realistic laws," and gives one each for decreasing, increasing, 
 and constant returns. But he warns the reader that " there is not 
 yet among economists complete agreement upon this matter," and 
 that " one defect of the realistic laws is that they cannot be universally 
 affirmed. We have to introduce such qualifying phrases as ' usually ' 
 or ' generally.' The absolute laws attain absolute universality, but 
 only at the sacrifice of immediate applicability." It may be sug- 
 gested that, when so positive a word as " law " has been thus robbed 
 of all certainty, it is better not used at aU. 
 
188 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. iv. 
 
 would have been no generation of political Dar- 
 winians to misrepresent the natural order of society 
 as a " struggle for existence." Malthus restricted 
 his ambitions, in the main, to the discovery of one 
 or two " laws " which he persuaded himself were 
 of universal and inexorable operation. This gives 
 him a self-consistency which abler contemporaries 
 did not possess. Bentham possessed it in a high 
 degree ; yet he never really reconciled his prescrip- 
 tion of a free working of individual self-interests 
 with his statement of the aim of legislation as " the 
 greatest happiness of the greatest number " ; or 
 his keenness for popular education, public health, 
 and better communications, with his desire to 
 limit legislation to the negative task of obtaining 
 security for wealth, industry, and contracts. The 
 existence to-day of a " Malthusian League " is 
 evidence of the controversial advantage of a pro- 
 position so exceedingly simple as to be apparently 
 self-evident. 
 
 Malthus considered his " law " established in 
 " the first six pages " of his essay, the rest being 
 historical illustrations. Ricardo's was a subtler 
 and more powerful mind, and his work admits of 
 no such summary examination. But we may refer 
 briefly to his statement of the wage-fund theory, 
 the so-called "iron-law" of wages. The theory 
 was that the sum of wealth available at any given 
 moment for the payment of wages is not indeter- 
 minate, but is fixed by natural law ; the capitalists 
 cannot pay less, and the labourers cannot obtain 
 
ofiAP. IV.] DnFLUENCE OF ECONOMISTS 189 
 
 more. Trade-union action, therefore, cannot at 
 any given time effect a general rise of wages, though 
 it may enable one set of workers to get a larger 
 share of the product at the cost of the rest. Under 
 the Malthusian principle of necessarily excessive 
 population, the number of labourers increases 
 directly wages increase ; thus, the reward of labour 
 can rise little above what is necessary for subsist- 
 ence. Under the Malthusian principle of neces- 
 sarily diminishing fertility of land, rent will tend 
 to rise as commodities become dearer ; and, since 
 the total product is limited, profits will fall. Even 
 if the total to be divided increased more rapidly 
 than the number of labourers, therefore, the best 
 to be hoped for (the rise of prices cancelling any 
 rise of nominal wages) would be that real wages of 
 labour would be stationary. 
 
 Time has disproved the proposition ; for popula- 
 tion has doubled, and real wages have probably 
 doubled, since Ricardo's time. But this dogmatic 
 elaboration of the Malthusian " laws " imposed 
 on nearly all the ablest thinkers of the day, though, 
 curiously enough, it did not altogether impose on 
 Malthus himself. Ricardo's system gained, as 
 Toynbee says, an " unbounded ascendancy" over 
 his own and the next generation. Bentham spoke 
 of himself as the " spiritual father " of James Mill, 
 and of Mill as the " spiritual father " of Ricardo. 
 John Stuart Mill spoke of the Principles as " im- 
 mortal." Christopher North put Ricardo above 
 Adam Smith. Torrens spoke of him as " his 
 
190 MODERN ENGIANB Ichap. IV. 
 
 " Karl Marx built his revolutionary 
 great master.^ ^^^ conception of value as due to 
 
 fabo^^alone. De Quincey naively contrasts the 
 work of earlier economists with the astonishing 
 achievement of Ricardo, who " deduced a 'priori, 
 from the understanding itself, laws which first 
 gave a ray of light into the unwieldy mass of 
 materials, and constructed a collection of tentative 
 discussion into a science of regular proportions, 
 now first standing on an eternal basis." 
 
 This, strange to say, appears to be the secret of 
 the immediate and immense success of the old 
 political economy. It was a credulous, as well as 
 an unbelieving, time. There was neither the 
 means, nor often the desire, of precise information 
 as to the human elements of the industrial problem. 
 Malthus dared to propound a universal " law " 
 of population before the first Census had shown 
 the numbers of the British people, and before there 
 could be any but the vaguest idea of what the 
 birth-rate was or had been. The general registra- 
 tion of births, deaths, and marriages did not even 
 exist in Ricardo's day. He carried the abstract 
 method to a much further extreme than Malthus ; 
 but he brought so much subtler and more logical 
 a mind to the task that a disciple of the calibre 
 of De Quincey could glory in his having " deduced 
 a priori, from the understanding itself, laws . . . 
 standmg on an eternal basis." The characteristic 
 work of nmeteenth-century Science, based upon 
 impaitial and tireless observation and experiment, 
 
CHAP. IV.] INFLUENCE OF ECONOMISTS 191 
 
 was only just beginning. Philosophy was still 
 unspoiled for its imaginative flights by the earthy 
 taint of experimental psychology. Students of 
 theology had not dared to project a science of 
 " comparative religion " ; and the science of history 
 was barely adumbrated. It was, then, quite in 
 the spirit of the era that Senior declared political 
 economy to be " independent of facts." 
 
 It must not be supposed, because it was abused 
 a century ago, that the method of abstraction as 
 applied to social life was useless. As J. S. Mill 
 said of Bentham, " We have a large tolerance for 
 one-eyed men, provided their one eye is a penetrat- 
 ing one." The deductive method has been con- 
 tinued, and a mathematical school of economics 
 has arisen which, under the check of an accumulat- 
 ing body of precise evidence, has pursued valuable 
 lines of thought. But the method of abstract 
 science — the extraction of general and perma- 
 nent characteristics from particular and passing 
 instances, with its assumption that the results 
 can be quantitatively measured — is open to 
 peculiar difficulties and dangers in the sphere of 
 economics. The chief of them — apart from the 
 fundamental error in biology which has been 
 indicated above — are these : (1) the quantities in 
 question are inextricably mixed with human 
 nature, and they are, therefore, never exactly 
 repeated ; (2) there is a fundamental inequality 
 or unlikeness in the most important of these 
 quantities ; (3) the observer himself, in quest of 
 
192 MODERN ENGLAND [chap, iv, 
 
 a " law " in this field, is very liable to bias. The 
 first point is self-evident. The a 'priori philosophers 
 met it by assuming that things averaged out, 
 capitalists acting in the interests of capital, labourers 
 in the interests of labour, and rent-owners in the 
 interests of rent. This was probably true, on the 
 whole, though every day's experience gives instances 
 of men who do not act in the interests of them- 
 selves or their class. But the second point found 
 no recognition in the old political economy, and 
 herein lay its besetting sin. We may make 
 abstracts of the contributions of certain groups of 
 human individuals to the total of production, and 
 call one abstraction capital, another land, and 
 another labour. We may make another set of 
 abstracts to describe the rewards of these three 
 factors of production, and call them interest, rent, 
 and wages. Within each group, there are in- 
 equalities of contribution and reward ; but these 
 inequalities are not, perhaps, sufficiently gross to 
 invalidate the deduction. When we compare the 
 three factors as wholes, however, we meet with an 
 inequality of a much more far-reaching kind. 
 
 Labour differs from land and capital, in the first 
 place, in being inseparable from the life of its owner. 
 It is a faculty rather than a possession ; and, as 
 such, it is at once more precious and more perish- 
 able. If it become necessary, for theoretical 
 purposes, to regard it as a mass, we must be 
 scrupulously careful that the characteristics com- 
 mon to the individuals in whom alone it resides 
 
CHAP. IV.] INFLUENCE OF ECONOMISTS 193 
 
 are contained in the mass-description which we 
 adopt. Thus : (1) The labourers are many, and 
 much divided — hence competition is almost uni- 
 versal between them, and combination is difficult 
 to establish and maintain. But land is scarce, 
 capital is relatively scarce, and combination is 
 easy both to land- and capital-owners, so that their 
 maintenance-reward is rarely in doubt. (2) Units 
 of capital and land vary, but in no such radical 
 fashion as units of labour. A single worker may be 
 a man or a woman, young or old, single or with a 
 dependent family ; these are final inequalities, fixed 
 in the very constitution of human society. There 
 are many minor inequalities, due to the irregular 
 distribution of health, strength, and intelligence, the 
 variations of subsistence from time to time and 
 from place to place, and so on. (3) The owner of 
 capital and land can usually wait either to sell or 
 buy, and so can get the best price. The labourers, 
 except a few of the most skilled, are handicapped by 
 the fact that they usually cannot wait. 
 
 Broadly, we may say that land and capital 
 are homogeneous, scarce, durable, easily organized, 
 and unpressed for time ; while labour is hetero- 
 geneous, abundant, perishable, difficult of self- 
 organization, and always near to hunger. Now, 
 it is clear, without carrying this analysis further, 
 that any abstract description of the process of pro- 
 duction which assumes a likeness or equality in the 
 three agents is untrue to the facts, some of them 
 alterable, some unalterable, of human society. The 
 
 N 
 
194 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. rv. 
 
 old political economy was repugnant to the whole 
 working class of the time and to many humane 
 spirits, who denounced it as brutal and heartless. 
 That it tended to produce callousness in the average 
 disciple's mind seems beyond doubt. But it is not 
 the business of science to make pleasant reading. 
 The real faults of the Malthusian-Ricardian 
 economics were two : (1) It pretended to the 
 quality of science ; but it was, in the main, a work 
 of the imagination — a peculiarly logical type of 
 imagination, it is true. (2) Its " inexorable laws " 
 were false ; yet they were offered to every Tom, 
 Dick, and Harry of the market-place as working 
 principles worthy of implicit confidence. They 
 were generally accepted as such, not because the 
 process of reasoning was readily understood, but 
 because its practical implications were clear, and 
 were altogether to the taste of the positively or 
 comparatively wealthy folk who then monopolized 
 the advantages of education and the power of 
 government. Intellectually false in its foundation, 
 and morally false in its use, the orthodox pohtical 
 economy represented to the mass of the workers a 
 great refusal of justice, a denial of all hope. The 
 rich, it appeared, might become endlessly richer 
 because they were few ; the poor were doomed by 
 the " laws " of population and wages to eternal 
 penury because they were many. In the name of 
 liberty, progress was declared impossible. It is 
 not surprising that the names of the authors of 
 these doctrines were execrated. Francis Place, 
 
CHAP, ivj INFLUENCE OP ECONOMISTS 195 
 
 speaking of the working-men reformers of the 
 'twenties, says that " they denounced everyone who 
 dissented as a political economist, under which ap- 
 pellation was included the notion of a bitter foe 
 of the working classes — enemies who deserved no 
 mercy at their hands," This feeling, if unjustifi- 
 able, is no longer inexplicable. It was, perhaps, 
 deepened because it found no adequate intellectual 
 expression. As an influence in the events of the 
 Reform and Chartist period, it cannot be overlooked. 
 But few minds can tolerate logic unadulterated ; 
 and, when the mind has done its worst, the heart 
 will have its word to say. Probably, the extreme 
 believers in this cold creed were never as numerous 
 as their influence would suggest ; certainly, few of 
 them acted consistently upon it. Place illustrated 
 in his own person the conflict of abstract and con- 
 crete motive. Mr Graham Wallas observes that 
 he " never attained, perhaps never could have 
 attained, the intellectual force required for original 
 and creative economic thought." He was an 
 earnest disciple of Bentham, and a still more 
 earnest believer in Malthus's formula. Indeed, he 
 started as early as 1822, with great zeal, a neo- 
 Malthusian propaganda, and suffered as Charles 
 Bradlaugh and his friends were to suffer half-a- 
 century later. " The rest of the inner circle of the 
 Benthamites seem to have shared Place's opinion, 
 though he alone faced the public scandal." i But 
 Place knew too much of real life to be altogether 
 1 Wallas, Life oj Place, pp. 166-69. 
 
196 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. iv. 
 
 misled. He had no sympathy with the orthodox 
 view of the old Poor Law. " Mr Malthus," he said, 
 " denies to the unemployed poor man the right 
 to eat ; but he allows the right to the unem- 
 ployed rich man." Place vehemently defended the 
 workers from accusations of idleness and vice, 
 vindicated their refusal to undersell one another, 
 and urged the trade unions in the factory districts 
 to exclude women and children from the mills and 
 to lower hours of labour by general action. Scorn- 
 ful of Godwin — " prince of spongers " — and of 
 Owen, prince of dreamers, he never ceased working 
 in his own business-like way for political and social 
 reform. 
 
 A great variety of influence may be traced among 
 the middle-class writers, politicians, and adminis- 
 trators of the time. There is Edwin Chadwick, 
 labouring with equal zest to establish the health 
 service and the workhouse tesb. There is Nassau 
 Senior, making quite arbitrary calculations, which 
 are solemnly quoted in Parliament, to show that 
 all the profit of a factory is made in the last hour 
 of the day, and that, if this hour's work were cut 
 off, there would be no profit.^ There are the 
 spokesmen of the manufacturers who mix up laisser- 
 jaire precepts with smug dissertations on the pro- 
 sperity of the factory operatives.^ There are the 
 
 ^ Senior, Letters on the Factory Acts, 1837. 
 
 » Edward Bainea, in his History 0/ the Cotton Manufacture (1836), 
 saya " it is scarcely possible for any employment to be lighter," but 
 admits that the children " are confined for long hours and deprived 
 of fresh air ; this makes them pale and reduces their vigour, but it 
 
CHAP. IV.] INFLUENCE OF ECONOMISTS 197 
 
 well-to-do Nonconformists, confirmed in Ben* 
 thamite individualism by the fact that the Church 
 still monopolizes the patronage of the State. 
 Where, in this jtmcture, were the philosophic 
 Tories, with their professed love of the old moral 
 ties of society, their hatred of revolutionary for- 
 midae ? Burke's words, flung angrily at the 
 Jacobins of Paris, might now have been addressed 
 to the apostles of laisser-faire : " The age of chivalry 
 is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calcu- 
 lators has succeeded. . . . All is to be changed. All 
 the pleasing illusions which made power gentle, 
 and obedience liberal, which harmonized the dif- 
 ferent shades of life, and which, by a bland assimi- 
 lation, incorporated into politics the sentiments 
 which beautify and soften private society, are to 
 be dissolved by this new conquering Empire of 
 light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is 
 to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, 
 furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagina- 
 tion, which the heart owns, and the understanding 
 ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our 
 naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity 
 in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a 
 ridiculous and antiquated fashion. . . . Nothing is 
 left which engages the affections on the part of the 
 
 rarely brings on disease." He adds that, " though improvidence 
 and misconduct too often ruin the happiness of these families, yet 
 there are thousands of spinners who eat meat every day, wear broad- 
 cloth on the Sunday, dress their wives and children well, furnish 
 their houses with mahogany and carpets, subscribe to publications, 
 and pass through life with much of humble respectability." 
 
198 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. iv. 
 
 commonwealth." No second Burke arose to vindi- 
 cate the social principle. For this is a crucial 
 difference : political revolution, as in Paris, chiefly 
 injures the few rich; industrial revolution, as in 
 Manchester, chiefly injures the many poor. Disraeli 
 might have become a second Burke, had the circum- 
 stances been favourable. He voted repeatedly for 
 the repeal of the new Poor Law, voted in minori- 
 ties for inquiry into the Birmingham riots in 1839, 
 and for remission of the excessive sentences on the 
 Chartist leaders in 1840 and 1846, and put into the 
 mouths of his paper heroes such words as these : 
 
 " If a spirit of rapacious covetousness, desecratirig all 
 the hunianities of life, has been the besetting sin of 
 England for the last century and a half, siace the passing 
 of the Reform Act the altar of Mammon has blazed with 
 triple worship. To acquire, to accumulate, to plunder 
 each other by virtue of philosophic phrases, to propose a 
 Utopia to consist only of Wealth and ToU, this has been 
 the breathless business of enfranchised England for the 
 last twelve years, until we are startled from our voracious 
 strife by the wail of intolerable serfage." ^ 
 
 The few independent Tories who, from the verge 
 of the " voracious strife," hurled ill names at the 
 manufacturers counted for little. What did gradu- 
 ally count was the obstinate insubordination of the 
 people themselves, and the emergence— aided by 
 cholera epidemics and Chartist riots — of a sense of 
 national as distinguished from, and even opposed 
 to, purely individual interest. Hume, Bright, and 
 
 » "Sybil," Book I., ohap. v., 1845. 
 
CHAP, iv.] INFLUENCE OF ECONOMISTS 199 
 
 Roebuck continued to harangue the legislature on 
 the danger of interfering with the captains of 
 industry. But Macaulay, in one of the flashes of 
 perception which justify the romantic temperament, 
 anticipated, in a speech in May 1846, the verdict of 
 later years : 
 
 " Rely en it that intense labour, beginning too early in 
 life, continued too long every day, stunting the growth, of 
 the mind, leaving no time for healthful exercise, no time 
 for intellectual culture, must impair all those high qualities 
 which have made our country great. Your overworked 
 boys will become a feeble and ignoble race of men, the 
 parents of a more feeble progeny ; nor will it be long before 
 the deterioration of the labourer will injuriously affect 
 those very interests to which his physical and moral energies 
 have been sacrificed. . . . Never wiU I believe that what 
 makes a population stronger and healthier, wiser and 
 better, can ultimately make it poorer. If ever we are 
 forced to yield the foremost place among commercial 
 nations, we shall yield it to some people pre-eminently 
 vigorous in body and mind." 
 
 The science of political economy suffered through- 
 out the nineteenth century from the inadequate 
 information and the doctrinaire method of its 
 founders. But fact at length made itself felt in the 
 academic twilight. Economics fell back into its 
 proper place of handmaid to Politics. From the 
 publication of Maine's Ancient Law, in 1861, may 
 be dated a strong influence from the side of social 
 history. In 1869, J. S. Mill abandoned the wage- 
 fund theory. Jevons and Bagehot, in the later 
 
200 MODERN ENGLAND [chap, iv. 
 
 'seventies, stood for a less abstract view of State 
 functions than that expressed by Fawcett when he 
 said " we might as well think of regulating the 
 tides " as of determining wages by Act of Parlia- 
 ment. With Arnold Tonybee's Industrial Revolu- 
 tion (1884), the whole subject began to appear in 
 perspective, and an evolutionary view of both the 
 events and the philosophy of the period became 
 possible. By a curious irony, it fell to Herbert 
 Spencer, perhaps the stiffest individualist of his 
 day, to demolish the Malthusian principle which 
 was the chief strength of the individualism of the 
 earlier generation. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 ON THE VERGE OF REVOLUTION 
 
 1833-1849 
 
 I ■, . 
 
 I. A Late Harvest 
 
 This, of all the periods into which the story of the 
 century divides itself, shows most complication and 
 obscurity of motive, and is, therefore, most difficult 
 of summary description. There are five major 
 quantities to be kept in view, in the general course 
 of political and economic life : (1) the first great 
 Factory and Mines Acts, and the commencement 
 of serious health administration ; (2) the new Poor 
 Law ; (3) the commercial crisis of 1839, the Irish 
 potato famine of 1845-46, and the commercial crisis 
 of 1847 ; (4) the commingled agitation of Trade 
 Unionism, Owenism, and Chartism, and (5) the 
 Free Trade movement. We shall see that, despite 
 a great harvest of reforms, the new Parliament did 
 not win the confidence of the masses ; that the 
 country was brought again to the verge of revolu- 
 tion ; and that the agitation then suddenly expired. 
 Was it merely that the people were satisfied with 
 cheap food and expanding trade ? How are we to 
 account at once for the power developed by the 
 labour organizations, and its collapse ? 
 
 201 
 
202 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. v. 
 
 A list of the chief acts of the Reform ParUament 
 in these seventeen years (eleven years under Whig, 
 and six under Conservative, Ministries) indicates 
 the extent and character of the political change 
 that had been effected. First come two great 
 works of emancipation — ^the freeing of negro slaves 
 in the British possessions (with a solatium of twenty 
 miUions sterling to the slave-owners), and the 
 abolition of the remains of the East India Company's 
 monopoly, already cut down in 1813. Europeans 
 were now given free access to India both for trade 
 and residence ; equahty of status between natives 
 and foreigners, without bar of race or religion, was 
 also decreed. The China trade, hitherto reserved 
 to the Company, was thrown open ; it doubled in 
 the next decade, while British exports to India 
 increased threefold. The session of 1833 was also 
 marked by the tardy passage of Lord Ashley's 
 Factory Act, the provisions of which will be ex- 
 plained directly, of the first parliamentary grant in 
 aid of elementary education (£20,000), and some 
 small reforms in the Protestant Church in Ireland. 
 In the following year, that of the new Poor Law, 
 the last arbitrary dismissal by the Crown of a 
 Prime Minister (Lord Melbourne) took place; and 
 the Central Criminal Court was established. In 
 1835, the immense task of municipal reform, neces- 
 sarily postponed till the House of Commons had 
 been rescued from the influence of the borough- 
 mongers, was taken up. The Municipal Corpora- 
 tions Act put an end to the existing corruption, and 
 
§ I.] ON THE VERGE OP REVOLUTION 203 
 
 established, in 178 cities and towns having a total 
 population of two millions, elective councils, with 
 power over paving, lighting, police, rating, and 
 other local business. The Act had three limitations 
 which have been slowly remedied : it created only 
 a narrow franchise ; it did not touch London, which 
 sheltered as many scandals as all the other cities 
 put together ; and it left the counties in the hands 
 of the justices. 
 
 The year 1836 witnessed an important inquiry 
 into the sanitary condition of the industrial districts, 
 the establishment of the office of Registrar-General 
 of births, deaths, and marriages — ^henceforth the 
 chief fount of official statistics bearing on the health 
 of the people — and the removal of the bar against 
 Nonconformist marriages. Henceforth, marriage 
 was a civil act, the religious ceremony optional. 
 The next three years were a period of acute depres- 
 sion, in which the Chartist and Free Trade move- 
 ments emerged as organized forces. During this 
 period, the young Princess Victoria came to the 
 throne, with Prince Albert as her adviser ; English 
 tithes were commuted, and the Ecclesiastical Com- 
 missioners incorporated ; the newspaper stamp 
 duty was reduced to one penny and penny postage 
 established ; the principle of the new Poor Law 
 was carried over to Ireland ; and Lord Durham 
 was sent as Governor-General to Canada, there to 
 initiate a noble work of pacification. In 1839, the 
 Education grant was increased to £30,000 ; its 
 administration was lodged in a Committee of the 
 
204 MODERN ENGLAND [ohap. V. 
 
 Privy Council ; and the inspection of assisted 
 schools was commenced. In 1840, the transporta- 
 tion of convicts to Australia ceased ; self-govern- 
 ment under a responsible government was given 
 to Canada; and the Irish municipalities were 
 reformed. 
 
 The five following years, under Peel, the last 
 considerable period of Conservative rule for three 
 decades, yielded only one considerable achievement 
 in legislation, but this was sufficient to immortalize 
 its authors. In 1842, the first Act was passed for 
 the protection of coal-miners ; and Peel set up a 
 new sliding-scale of corn duties, abolished many 
 other protective duties, and revived the income- 
 tax to compensate for the revenue lost. More 
 duties were removed in 1844, and no less than 480 
 in 1845. It was in face of these measures, prophetic 
 of still more radical change, and of the consequent 
 agricultural outcry, that young Disraeli uttered 
 his famous description of such " Conservative " gov- 
 ernment as " an organized hypocrisy." The Irish 
 potato famine of the following winter suggested 
 wiser thoughts, and precipitated the re))eal of the 
 Corn Laws. The year 1847 saw the passage of 
 Fielden's " Ten Hours " Factory Act, the introduc- 
 tion of short service in the army, another financial 
 crisis, and a second cholera epidemic which led to 
 the passage of the Public Health Act of 1848, the 
 basis of administrative efforts that were to save 
 millions of lives before the century was out. Finally, 
 the Navigation Laws were totally repealed, and the 
 
§ 1.] ON THE VERGE OF REVOLUTION 205 
 
 abolition of the com duties (save Is,, which re- 
 mained for twenty years) came into full effect, in 
 1849. 
 
 In the short space of eighteen years, then, the 
 Crown had accepted its constitutional limitations, 
 the House of Commons and the little governments 
 of city and town had been cleansed, and the power 
 of the Peers had been checked. A number of free 
 Colonial democracies had been established in the 
 Western and Southern Hemispheres; slavery had 
 been abolished on British soil ; and the East had 
 been thrown open to trade, with some promise of 
 fair treatment for the natives. Henceforth, the 
 British people might call upon all lands for food 
 and materials of manufacture ; shipping was freed ; 
 and taxation was in part transferred to surplus 
 wealth. The beneficent work of factory and mine 
 Inspection, sanitary administration, and public 
 schooling was initiated. The world's history shows 
 nothing to equal this record, with the possible ex- 
 ception of the reforms with which Napoleon capped 
 the programme of the Fi-ench Revolution. And 
 yet the people were violently dissatisfied. Why ? 
 
 There is no single answer to such questions as 
 this ; but they help us to focus more clearly the 
 movements of the time, and to understand better 
 the permanent conditions of successful government 
 and social peace. It is evident that the buying-out 
 of the West Indian slave- owners, and the grant of 
 responsible government to Canada, could bring no 
 immediate relief to the hungry and voteless weaver 
 
206 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. v. 
 
 of the West Riding. In every land, domestic ques- 
 tions are of first moment ; and, among domestic 
 questions, the bread-and-butter problem must be 
 solved ere other boons can be properly appreciated. 
 In the second place, the harvest of reform does not 
 come up in a night ; and, if the sowing has been 
 long delayed, half the crop may be lost. Sydney 
 Smith said of the Reform Bill, " All young ladies 
 imagine as soon as this Bill is carried that they 
 will be instantly married," and cjoiically dismissed 
 the disappointed as " fools." When the fools are 
 numbered by the million, however, their disappoint- 
 ment becomes a matter of consequence. Viewed 
 absolutely, in isolation, these Factory and Mines 
 Acts, for instance, are notable achievements ; in 
 relation to the long-suffering of the operatives, and 
 the merits of the question as we now see it, they are 
 beggarly instalments of common justice given a 
 full generation too late. 
 
 II. The First Factory Acts 
 
 The story of the Factory Acts and of the shame 
 of child slavery in which they originated has often 
 been told; a slight outline of this struggle of common- 
 sense and humanity against dogma and heartless- 
 ness will, therefore, be sufficient in this place. The 
 first attempt to improve the health conditions of 
 industrial employment was the Health and Morals 
 Act of 1802, procured by Sir Robert Peel the elder, 
 who (this is his son's account of the matter) acted 
 
§ II.] ON THE VERGE OF REVOLUTION 207 
 
 as soon as magisterial complaint brought to his 
 notice abuses among the thousand apprentices in 
 his own factory which the overseer had previously 
 concealed from him. Such abuses had by that time 
 become very common, and had been formally de- 
 nounced by bodies of medical men in 1784 and 
 1796.1 With the help of a single narrative — ^that 
 of one Robert Blincoe, published in 1828 — we may 
 peep for a moment into this underworld. Blincoe 
 was an orphan who drifted into the St Pancras 
 Workhouse at the age of four years, and at seven 
 was apprenticed for fourteen years to a Nottingham 
 cotton-spinner. The formal consent even of chil- 
 dren being necessary, Blincoe and eighty other 
 little victims were told that cotton factories were 
 palaces where roast-beef, plum-pudding, and other 
 good things were to be had for the asking. This did 
 not prove exactly true. The children were kept 
 working for fourteen, and even sixteen, hours a 
 day ; they were beaten for the slightest mistake or 
 offence ; and sometimes they were tortured by the 
 overlookers, who would tie them to a beam close 
 over the whirling machines by way of teaching them 
 to hold their feet up, or would rivet irons on their 
 ankles and hips to teach them not to try to run 
 
 > Manchester Literary and PhUosophical Society Memoirs, 1784 ; 
 Beport on Parish Apprentices, 1815; Fielden's Curse of the Factory 
 System, 1836. In their History of Factory Legislation, Misses B. L. 
 Hutohins and A. Harrison, B.A., point out that " no materials exist 
 for anything like a statistical or accurate study of child-labour in 
 the eighteenth century " ; but there is evidence that children were 
 often overworked and ill-treated at home by their parents. 
 
208 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. v. 
 
 away. Locked in the factory while they worked, 
 and in neighbouring barracks while they slept, 
 these piiiful martyrs were as absolutely abandoned 
 by their kind as though they had been adult con- 
 victs on the way to Botany Bay, or negro slaves 
 on the middle passage. 
 
 Peel's first Act applied only to apprentices in 
 cotton mills ; it forbade their being worked more 
 than twelve hours a day, and laid it down that night 
 work should cease after a short interval, that 
 decent clothing, lodging, and food should be pro- 
 vided, and that all factories should be whitewashed 
 and ventilated. It was practically inoperative, 
 partly by reason of evasion, partly by a change of 
 the trade conditions. Before the application of 
 the steam-engine to textile machinery, the mills 
 were scattered along the streams of the country-side. 
 The irregularity of water-power favoured great 
 irregularity in the working-day ; and there were 
 no prying eyes in these out-of-the-way places. 
 Steam brought the factory into town, made work 
 more regular, and indirectly contributed to the 
 abandonment of pauper 'prentice labour. The first 
 effect of the Act, however, was simply to abolish 
 the formality of apprenticeship. In June 1815, 
 Peel again called attention to the need of a 
 protective law. " The practice of apprenticing 
 parish children in distant factories was," he said, 
 " as repugnant to humanity as any which had ever 
 been suffered to exist by the negligence of the 
 legislature ; and it was all the worse because of the 
 
§ II.] ON THE VERGE OF REVOLUTION 209 
 
 enormous abuses which existed in it. It had been 
 known that a gang of these children had been put 
 up to sale along with a bankrupt's effects, and trans- 
 ferred as part of the property. A case had come 
 to his knowledge where an agreement was made 
 between a London parish and a Lancashire manu- 
 facturer that for every twenty sound children one 
 idiot should be taken." i This appeal seems to 
 have made no impression, for the Bill proposed was 
 withdrawn after the first reading. The employers, 
 in fact, were no longer an uneducated class risen 
 by force from out of the ranks of labour. They 
 could express themselves, and buy legal or lite- 
 rary advocates ; and, from this time on, there is 
 obstinate resistance to every attempt to impose 
 conditions of employment. Their most plausible 
 argument lay in the fact that nobody then dreamed 
 of an inspection of the domestic workshops, where, 
 in the deepening distress of the hand-workers, the 
 lot of the children was often worse than it would 
 be in a factory. Robert Owen gave evidence 
 before Peel's Committee as to his own experiments. 
 He had no children in his mill under ten, and the 
 general hours had been gradually reduced from 
 fourteen to twelve, including an hour and a quar- 
 ter off for meals. The working strength of the 
 mill was so much improved that the loss was only 
 one farthing in Is. 8d. This example made few 
 converts. 
 In February 1818, pressed forward by Owen, 
 
 ^ Hansard, vol. xxx. 624. 
 
2 10 MdDERlf ENGLAND [chap. V. 
 
 the elder Peel returned to the charge. Presenting 
 a petition from Manchester cotton-spinners for a 
 •ten-and-a-half hours' day, he added that " he had 
 been in communication with some of these poor 
 men that morning ; and he declared he could nob 
 hear their statement, or witness their appearance 
 which confirmed that statement, without shedding 
 tears. In rooms badly ventilated and much over- 
 heated, they were compelled to work fourteen or 
 fifteen hours a day. Young persons might endure 
 such labour ; but after men attained a certain age 
 it became intolerable." This appeal was dis- 
 missed as sheer sentimentality ; nearly a century 
 was to pass ere British society was prepared to 
 recognize the hardness of life's evening in the 
 labouring classes. A few days later. Peel reintro- 
 duced his Bill, modified to forbid the employment 
 of children under nine (instead of under ten) and to 
 limit the working hours of those under sixteen years 
 to twelve per day. It was notorious, he said, that 
 children of a very tender age were dragged from 
 their beds some hours before daylight, and confined 
 in the factories for not less than fifteen hours. His 
 son, the future Free Trade Premier, added that 
 there was evidence of boys and girls of five and 
 seven years being employed ; and they were often 
 kept on Sundays from 6 a.m. to noon cleaning the 
 machinery. Lord Stanley distinguished himself 
 by arguing that Parliament should not, by such 
 interference as was asked for, sow dissension be- 
 tween parents and children ; and other noble lords 
 
§ n.] ON THE VERCE OP REVOLUTION 211 
 
 upheld " the great principle of Political Economy 
 that labour ought to be free." Again, the Bill was 
 dropped. In 1819, after further opposition, it was 
 carried. The Act applied only to cotton mills. 
 Years later, the future poet of democracy, Gerald 
 Massey, then a child of eight years, was working 
 twelve hours a day in a silk mill for a wage of 
 eighteen pence a week. 
 
 This commencement of factory legislation proper 
 was of very limited effect, even within its limited 
 field, and that for a moral reason and a practical 
 reason. The number of those who fully reahzed 
 and admitted the evil was very small (medical 
 witnesses in these early years were particularly 
 pusillanimous) ; and the lack of a special body of 
 inspectors made evasion of the law easy. On the 
 part of the operatives themselves, there was a con- 
 siderable obstacle in the growth of the system by 
 which the spinners themselves, not the mill-owners, 
 employed their child " piecers." In 1825, when 
 Sir John Cam Hobhouse obtained an amending Act, 
 limiting Saturday work to nine hours, and for- 
 bidding work during meal times, the customary 
 hours in Lancashire mills were from 5.30 or 6 a.m. 
 to 7.30 or 8 p.m., with two intervals for meals, 
 during which the children were commonly kept 
 cleaning the machinery. In 1831, a further amend- 
 ing Act brought all operatives under eighteen years 
 of age in cotton mills within the protection of the 
 twelve-hours day, and prohibited the night employ- 
 ment of all under twenty-one. Richard Oastler, 
 
^^^ to the Leeds Mercury on " Yorkshire 
 
 with his le*^*^'^ Michael Sadler, Tory Member for 
 Slavery," ^^ ^^^ p^^ themselves at the head of 
 ■"^^^Ten Hours' Day agitation. Sadler obtained in 
 1832 a Commons Committee whose report is in- 
 valuable as a collection of evidence of the industrial 
 conditions then prevailing. He lost his seat directly 
 after, being defeated by Macaulay ; and Lord Ashley, 
 later Lord Shaftesbury, became leader of the move- 
 ment in Parliament. A Royal Commission was 
 appomted, with the hope, at least on the side of the 
 employers, of shelving the subject. It reported, 
 however, that the existing law was " almost en- 
 tirely inoperative," children being commonly em- 
 ployed as long as adults, with the result that they 
 suffered physically and obtained no education ; 
 and that the only way of ending these wrongs was 
 to establish a special body of itinerant inspectors, 
 with power to enter any factory where children 
 v/ere employed, to order sanitary measures and 
 the fencing of machinery, and to enforce school 
 attendance. 
 
 It is this provision, probably due to Chadwick's 
 influence, that chiefly constitutes the importance 
 of the Factory Act of 1833, one of the first measures 
 of the reformed House of Commons. Hardly less 
 important than the establishment of that gallant 
 branch of the Civil Service, the factory inspectorate, 
 was the extension of the Acts to woollen, worsted, 
 
 thTn^oKl"^:- *°'^' ^^^"' ^<i silk mills. Further, 
 the prohibition of night work and the twelve-hours 
 
§ n.] ON THE VERGE OF REVOLUTION 213 
 
 maximum day were applied to all operatives under 
 eighteen ; children under nine were shut out of all 
 textile factories except silk-mills ; and a nine-hours 
 maximum day was gradually brought into opera- 
 tion for children under thirteen. Medical exami- 
 nation of children prior to factory employment 
 was also instituted, it being required that " some 
 surgeon or physician " should certify each child 
 under twelve as strong enough for work. The fac- 
 tory inspectors became a kind of perambulating 
 magistracy with executive powers. Unfortu- 
 nately, they were to be only four in number, and 
 the penalties for breach of the law were very 
 inadequate. 
 
 Eight years later, it still remained for Elizabeth 
 Barrett to utter her poignant " Cry of the 
 Children": 
 
 "Do ye hear tie children weeping, my brothers, 
 Ere the sorrow comes with years ? 
 
 ' For oh,' say the children, ' we are weary. 
 
 And we cannot run or leap ; 
 If we cared for any meadows, it were merely 
 
 To drop down in them and sleep ; 
 Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping, 
 
 We fall upon our faces, trying to go, 
 And, underneath our heavy eyelids drooping, 
 
 The reddest flower would look as pale as snow. 
 For, all day, we drag our burden tiring 
 
 Through the coal-dark underground ; 
 Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron. 
 
 In the factories, round and round. 
 
214 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. v. 
 
 ' For, all day, the wheels are droning, twining ; 
 
 Their wind comes in our faces, 
 TUl our hearts turn, our heads with pulses burning, 
 
 And the walls turn in their places ; 
 Turns the sky in the high window, blank and reeling. 
 
 Turns the long light that drops adown the wall, 
 Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling. 
 
 All are turning, aU the day, and we with all ; 
 And, aU day, the iron wheels are droning. 
 
 And sometimes we could pray : 
 " ye wheels " (breaking out in a mad moaning), 
 
 " Stop ! be silent for to-day." ' 
 
 ' How long,' they say, ' how long, cruel nation. 
 
 Will you stand, to move the world, on a child's heart. 
 Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation. 
 
 And tread onward to your throne amid the mart ? 
 Our blood splashes upward, gold-heaper, 
 
 And your purple shows your path. 
 But the child's sob in the silence curses deeper 
 
 Than the strong man in his wrath ! ' " 
 
 By the Coal Mines Act of 1842, the underground 
 employment of women and of children under ten 
 years was prohibited. Female labour at the pit- 
 head continued for a good many years. 
 
 The Short Time Committees continued their 
 agitation ; and on this ground Chartists, Owenites, 
 Tories, and Liberals met. In Yorkshire and 
 Lancashire, especially, a ten-hours factory day was 
 demanded on the specific plea, to quote one of the 
 resolutions, that " a restrictive Act would tend 
 materially to equalize and extend labour, by calling 
 
§ n.] ON THE VERGE OP REVOLUTION 215 
 
 into employment many male adults who are obliged 
 to spend their time in idleness whilst female chil- 
 dren are compelled to labour from twelve to sixteen 
 hours per day." A factor that has been of real 
 importance throughout the struggle for the legis- 
 lative protection of labour is alluded to in another 
 resolution, declaring that, " without a legislative 
 regulation of the hours of labour, the kind and 
 benevolent employer cannot stand against the com- 
 petition of his less feehng rival." The mutilation 
 of the Act of 1833 produced a momentary fever of 
 " direct action." Instead of a ten-hours, an eight- 
 hours day was now the objective ; and Fielden 
 wrote to Cobbett's Register proposing that the trade 
 unionists should prepare to get it for themselves 
 by means of a general strike. Nothing coming of 
 this fit of temper, a new Ten Hours Bill was drawn 
 up. The Government sought in 1835 to weaken 
 the Althorp Act by enabling children over twelve 
 to work full time. They were compelled to with- 
 draw this design ; but no further progress was 
 made for several years. The increase of women in 
 textile factories was then attracting attention, and 
 much was heard of " home " being " woman's true 
 sphere," an idea for which Mr Gladstone professed 
 his sympathy. In 1844, a Government Bill pro- 
 posed to establish the half-time system in the 
 textile trades (the working hours of small children 
 being thus reduced to 5| a day), and to limit young 
 persons and all women to a twelve-hours day. An 
 eimen^ment was carried by Lord Ashley reducing 
 
216 MODERN ENGLAND [ohap. v. 
 
 the latter to ten hours, but other divisions, in course 
 of very confused debates, gave a contradictory- 
 result. The Bill was accordingly withdrawn ; and 
 another was prepared and passed prescribing a 
 twelve-hours maximum. This Act had a number 
 of valuable administrative provisions suggested by 
 the experience of the first inspectors. 
 
 During 1846 and 1847, the Committees enjoyed 
 the aid of a successful weekly paper, the Ten Hours 
 Advocate. They fought strongly in the election 
 following the repeal of the Corn Laws ; and during 
 the depression of the following spring, when short 
 time was very convenient to the mill-owners, 
 Fielden got his Ten Hours Bill through its third 
 reading with a substantial majority, despite har- 
 angues by Hume, Bright, and Roebuck on the 
 danger of interfering with the right of manufacturers 
 to make a working profit. Demonstrations of joy 
 were held in many northern towns ; and a delegate 
 meeting in London declared itself " deeply grateful 
 to Almighty God," and determined " to promote 
 by every means in our power those religious and 
 social blessings which it has been the object of the 
 Bill to extend to the factory workers." 
 
 III. The New Poor Law 
 
 The maintenance of the Corn Laws long after the 
 old arguments had lost all plausibility, the hard 
 struggle to find work, in competition, on the one 
 hand, with steam-driven machinery, on the other, 
 
§ in.] ON THE VERGE OF REVOLUTION 217 
 
 with women, children, and pauper immigrants from 
 Ireland and the shires, the refusal of the vote to 
 the mass of working men in 1832, the barbarity of 
 the game laws, and the ruthless punishment of 
 agitators — these wrongs could not but excite, even 
 in gentle minds, a deep bitterness. And, as though 
 this were not enough, the new middle-class House 
 of Commons proceeded to erect, as an eternal 
 memorial of the laisser-faire economy, a national 
 prison for the English poor — ^the Workhouse. 
 
 As the Reform Bill shook the small class at the 
 top, so the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 
 shook the large class at the bottom, of British 
 society. Two facts distinguish the latter measure 
 among modem legislative adventures : the scientific 
 severity with which it regulated the lot of a large 
 part of the nation, accustomed for nearly forty years 
 to a totally different treatment, and the near 
 approach to unanimity in Parliament for the new 
 system, in contrast with the hostility of the un- 
 enfranchized mass of the laboiirers outside. The 
 second reading was carried in the Commons, on 
 May 9, 1834, by 299 votes to 20 ; in the Upper 
 House, the minority was only 13. Royal assent 
 was given on August 14, 1834. The central 
 authority, upon whose decrees the whole scheme 
 was to depend, was, in the first place, ap- 
 pointed for only five years. During that period, 
 popular opposition was so fierce ^ that the re- 
 
 * "In certain places, e.g. Bolton, Nottingham, and Macclesfield, 
 local authorities had been elected expressly to defeat the new law " 
 (Fowle, The Poor Law, p. 103). 
 
218 MODERN ENGLAND [chap, v, 
 
 appointment of the Commission remained in 
 doubt to the last. It was then renewed annually 
 for three successive years ; in 1842, it was estab- 
 lished for five years more ; only in 1847 was the 
 Poor Law Board erected into a Ministerial Depart- 
 ment ; and not till 1871 did it receive, under the 
 name of the Local Government Board, the verj 
 wide powers now existing. From the first, however, 
 the new Poor Law exhibited an absoluteness and 
 centralization of power over the operations of 
 elective and unpaid local authorities which are 
 unique in British government, and very difficult 
 to reconcile with the professed individualism of 
 many of the leading authors of the scheme. This 
 peculiar power was secured through the adminis- 
 trative machinery gradually built up, especially 
 through the inspectors, who keep the Board in- 
 formed of what is being done by Boards of 
 Guardians throughout the coiuitry ; the system 
 of audit, carrying with it refusal to pass any item 
 in local accounts that can be declared to transgress 
 the law ; and the control over local officials, who 
 may be discharged by the Board, but not by the 
 local authority without the Board's assent. But 
 more important than any influence by machinery 
 was the spirit of the law itself, definitely realized 
 at the outset by its authors, stated with unmis- 
 takable simplicity, and defended throughout with 
 unbending resolution, although never quite fully 
 embodied in practice. 
 
 " The fundamental principle with respect to 
 
§ m.] ON THE VERGE OF REVOLUTION 219 
 
 legal relief," said the Commissioners in their report 
 of 1839, " is that the condition of the pauper ought 
 to be, on the whole, less eligible than that of the 
 independent labourer." It was assumed that 
 everybody should, and nearly everybody could, 
 save against misfortune, and that — urates being 
 paid, ultimately as well as immediately, by others 
 than the poor — ^those who claim relief must, in 
 justice as well as of practical necessity, be content 
 with a condition " less eligible " than that of the 
 poorest freeman. Not only was the whole allow- 
 ance system described in our last chapter swept 
 away ; " all distribution of relief in money or in 
 goods, to be spent or consumed by the pauper in 
 his own house," was declared to be "inconsistent 
 with the principle in question." The first object, 
 then, was to stop out-relief ; in particular, able- 
 bodied persons were to be refused relief except in 
 the workhouse — ^the " workhouse test " of genuine 
 need. The country was, accordingly, divided into 
 " Unions " of parishes, each having its workhouse, 
 under the management of a board of guardians 
 elected by the ratepayers. The old conditions of 
 " settlement " were much modified ; and they have 
 since practically disappeared. A significant detail 
 which excited great indignation at the time was 
 the abandonment of the former efforts to discover 
 and penalize the fathers of illegitimate children 
 falling on the rates. The burden of providing for 
 the child until it was sixteen years old was now 
 thrown on the mother, subject to a power in the 
 
220 MODERN ENGLAND [chap, v, 
 
 justices to make a maintenance order against the 
 man, if found, no part of the payment so obtained 
 going to the support of the mother. 
 
 Every student of an earher age is looking, as it 
 were, through glasses coloured by the facts of his 
 own time ; the best he can hope is that this con- 
 temporary information may help to define truly, 
 not prejudice, his view. We are looking back upon 
 the gravest problem of eighty years ago through 
 experience of a society in which the principles of 
 the new Poor Law continue, but in association with 
 a number of fresh factors — ^for instance, higher 
 wages, cheaper food, free education, large expendi- 
 ture on sanitation, a great volume of charity, 
 ready hospital accommodation, old-age pensions, 
 and national insurance against illness and unem- 
 ployment — which greatly change the proportions 
 of the social question. It is one thing, in a society 
 where these and other aids to a healthy and sensible 
 life exist, to proclaim the principle that " the con- 
 dition of the pauper ought to be less eUgible 
 than that of the independent labourer." It was a 
 very different thing eighty years ago — in a society 
 offering none of these opportunities, a society 
 whose country poor had been compelled for a whole 
 generation to accept doles instead of a reasonable 
 wage — ^to proclaim a sudden and general stoppage 
 of out-door relief. It was so different a thing that 
 the twentieth-century reader must be astounded at 
 the hardihood of the authors of such a revolution. 
 Time has made it easier to appreciate the splendid 
 
§ m.] ON THE VERGE OP REVOLUTION 221 
 
 enthusiasm and single-minded devotion of Chad- 
 wick and his fellows in the cause of public-health 
 reform. That the more-than-Ricardian rigours of 
 the new Poor Law were conceived in those same 
 good hearts speaks eloquently of the influence an 
 economic dogma may obtain when circumstances 
 are favourable. 
 
 The " fundamental principle " had, indeed, to 
 be tempered. In the first place, persons over sixty 
 years of age were declared to be not necessarily 
 able-bodied, and the guardians were permitted to 
 grant them out-relief if they thought fit. Then, 
 according to the report of 1839, the Commissioners 
 " permit out-relief to the able-bodied in all those 
 cases of distress which are of most frequent occur- 
 rence, such as sickness, accident, bodily or mental 
 infirmity in themselves and in their families " — 
 such cases as burial, and widowhood for a period 
 of six months, or so long as there is any child de- 
 pendent on the widow, being soon added. While 
 out-relief has been permitted in emergencies like 
 these, the workhouse system has been slightly 
 modified in more recent years, chiefly in favour 
 of child inmates, by the classification of wards 
 and houses, the institution of special schools, the 
 boarding-out of children, and other measures. In 
 general, however, England was ruled throughout 
 the Victorian era on the " fundamental principle," 
 which may be said to have rested on the postulate 
 that the most desperate evil of the time was idle- 
 ness and thriftlessness among the poor, and to have 
 
222 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. v. 
 
 yielded three alternatives : (1) Every adult must 
 find continuous work, with pay sufiicient to main- 
 tain himself and his family ; or (2) he must save 
 enough at discontinuous work to carry him and 
 them through emergencies ; or (3), if he asks for 
 public aid, he will receive the barest maintenance 
 under conditions of social disgrace and political 
 disfranchisement . 
 
 We may illustrate the application of the principle 
 by citing some sentences from a volume already 
 quoted, The Poor Law, first published in 1881, by 
 one of its able and confident advocates, the Rev. 
 T. W. Fowle, M.A., Rector of Islip. " The two 
 chief evils to which poor relief gives rise," he says, 
 " are idleness on the part of those who can work 
 and will not, and improvidence on the part of those 
 who can make provision for possible sickness or 
 inevitable old age, but prefer to trust to the boimty 
 of the State. The first class was dealt with finally 
 and summarily in the Prohibitory Order (1844), 
 which forbids relief to any man capable of earning 
 wages. But the second was, by the express ex- 
 ceptions contained in that Order, left to the dis- 
 cretion of the local authorities, who have not been 
 slow to avail themselves of the opportunity. How 
 far the central authorities realized that this depar- 
 ture from their own admitted principles would lead 
 once more to the establishment of a gigantic system 
 of pauperism, in which the unthrifty and careless 
 were maintained at the cost or to the prejudice of 
 their more provident neighbours, does not very 
 
§ in.] ON THE VERGE OP REVOLUTION 223 
 
 clearly appear. Certain it is that it has been 
 turned by local administration to this end, and 
 that, too, in spite of warnings almost amounting 
 to threats, and expostulations almost descending 
 to entreaties, from the Poor Law authorities them- 
 selves." As these Guardians are ratepayers elected 
 by ratepayers, it might be supposed that self- 
 interest would be a sufficient spur to economy. 
 But this tendency is apparently counteracted by 
 the fact that they are also men, with a weakness 
 for discriminating between bad cases and sad cases ; 
 and this, strange to say, is the source of all the 
 mischief. For the " fundamental principle " is a 
 mathematical principle, a logical principle, any- 
 thing but a moral principle, or a guide in the art 
 of government. The principle is that not the idle 
 and vicious only, but the " improvident " (by which 
 is meant all who have not saved) also, must learn 
 that " destitution is the only legal ground to relief," 
 and that this relief will be the barest, hardest 
 minimum. From this point of view, there are no 
 good cases, or bad cases. "The character of the 
 applicant, if the plain truth must be told, has 
 nothing to do with it. Thus, if two men, under 
 precisely the same circumstances, apply for relief, 
 one of whom has borne a good character and suc- 
 cumbed to misfortune, the other has been just the 
 reverse, it is still not permissible, upon any sound 
 principle of Poor Law, to make a difference between 
 them. . . . No doubt the temptation to exercise 
 a moral discrimination is irresistible, and the 
 
224 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. v. 
 
 Guardians try, with some success, to achieve a 
 rough and ready justice, of which it may be 
 said that it is morally excellent, but it is not 
 Poor Law." ^ Where the law is properly ad- 
 ministered," the plain fact is that the workhouse 
 test has killed the spirit of investigation, as, by 
 the confession of its supporters, it was meant 
 to do." 
 
 Still, the crude desire for " moral excellence " and 
 " rough and ready justice " continued to struggle 
 against the spirt of laisser-faire legalism. In 
 London, and some larger towns, in 1852, an outdoor 
 " labour test " (the " stoneyard "), instead of the 
 house test, had to be permitted, as " a ' safety- 
 valve ' at a time of great and sudden depression of 
 trade." Great " laxity " has always existed in the 
 treatment of widows with dependent children, and 
 in the dispensation of medical relief. " An in- 
 jiu"ious notion has got abroad," said Mr Fowle in 
 1881, " that this kind of relief has not the same 
 pauperizing effects, and a fear is even expressed lest 
 the system degenerate into one of medical State 
 charity." Sure enough, he has to lament in a 
 later edition (1891) " the unwise enactment that 
 medical relief should not temporarily disfranchise 
 the person who received it," and the free medical 
 aid given by the London hospitals, " recalling once 
 more in a mitigated form the vices of the old Poor 
 Law." On the other hand, he does not grudge the 
 Act, tardily passed in 1886, providing for the care 
 1 Fowle, p. 121. 
 
§ III.] ON THE VERGE OP REVOLUTION 225 
 
 and training of pauper lunatics in special hospitals 
 and institutions. 
 
 Midway between outdoor and indoor relief is the 
 casual ward, another concession to emergency, 
 namely, to the fact that, if penniless men are to find 
 work, they must have some sort of shelter on the 
 way to it. This was the rule for " tramps " estab- 
 lished in November 1871 : " The order of admission 
 is available for one night only, and does not take 
 effect earlier than six in the evening in winter and 
 eight in summer." Till those hours, the tramp 
 could find no shelter at all, unless in those " wards 
 established by religious agencies," which, according 
 to Mr Fowle, " together with the meals, meetings, 
 and addresses, are almost certainly productive of 
 much harm." " The vagrant is searched and 
 bathed, his clothes taken from him, and, if necessary, 
 dried or disinfected. He is placed in a separate 
 cell, though the Central Board may as to this 
 approve of other arrangements, and is not entitled 
 to discharge himself before 11 a.m. the next day, 
 and then only if he has done the task-work — break- 
 ing stones, picking oakum, etc. — which has been 
 assigned to him. In the event of his having become 
 an inmate of the same ward twice in one month, he 
 may be detained till 9 a.m. of the third day after 
 admission. He receives 8 oz. of bread or 6 oz. 
 of bread and one pint of gruel or broth, for supper 
 and breakfast. There are no two opinions about 
 the entire inefficacy of the above arrangements, 
 and that for the plain reason that they sin against 
 p 
 
226 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. v. 
 
 the fundamental principle of making the relieved 
 person's condition worse than that of the self- 
 supporting labourer " — surely, a terrible reflection 
 upon the position of the free worker in the Victorian 
 Age. In 1882, the Casual Poor Act stiffened these 
 conditions by providing that the casual could not 
 discharge himself till 9 a.m. on the second day, and, 
 on a second appearance within one month, might 
 be detained until the fourth day. " But nothing 
 seems of any avail," comments our author, gloomily 
 contemplating the influence of the parliamentary 
 reform of 1885. " The Poor Law is, of all great 
 English institutions, the most thoroughly stereo- 
 typed ; and yet there are not wanting signs of a 
 spirit naturally resulting from the democratic move- 
 ment which may modify it. . . . We fear the 
 temper of the public mind is not what it was in 
 those golden days of scientific reform," 
 
 Remains " the House " — citadel and type of the 
 " fundamental principle," with its semi-penal 
 regime, its separation of husbands and wives, 
 parents and children. Even here, there is a ten- 
 dency to degenerate — ^into an almshouse. " But 
 its original conception still adheres to it, namely, 
 to ' subject the pauper inmate to such a system of 
 labour, discipline, and restraint, as shall be sufficient 
 to outweigh in his estimation the bodily comforts 
 which he enjoys.' " " Cheerless comfort," Mr 
 Fowle hastens to add ; this and a certain " cold- 
 blooded equity " make " the spirit of a workhouse." 
 
 The working folk continued to deny the " equity " 
 
§ IV.] ON THE VERGE OF REVOLUTION 227 
 
 of this system. Throughout England, till near the 
 end of the century, " the House " stood, for them, 
 as a hated symbol of heartlessness and injustice. 
 
 IV. The General Strike 
 
 We have noted that, in the earliest reform agita- 
 tion, those enhsted wavered between or divided 
 into two parts, the one favouring parliamentary, 
 the other direct and revolutionary, action. Twenty 
 years later, in the painful days following the Reform 
 Bill, the social movement was enlarged a hundred- 
 fold. The age of Cobbett and Eldon had passed. 
 The protagonists, now, were not an outworn oli- 
 garchy and small, scattered groups led by a few 
 firebrands or wirepullers, but a new class of Ministers 
 and manufacturers, practically unanimous in their 
 individualist creed, on the one hand, and on the 
 other, thousands of trade tmions, Owenite societies, 
 Chartist associations. Short Time committees, de- 
 claring strikes and suffering lockouts, organizing 
 mass meetings, processions, and petitions, publish- 
 ing newspapers, beginning to employ paid officials 
 and legal advisers, and making sensational appear- 
 ances on the threshold of the new Parliament 
 House. At first sight, the change would seem to 
 be all in favour of the latter. But in warfare — and 
 this was a suppressed civil warfare — mere numbers 
 may be a fatal encumbrance, and division of aim 
 is fatal. Once it had gained control of the legis- 
 lature, the well-to-do middle class shed its last 
 
228 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. v. 
 
 proletarian sympathies. Manufacturers, mer- 
 chants, and shopkeepers, as well as landlords, 
 were now on the defensive. Bentham and the 
 economists had given them a sort of faith ; the 
 Established Church, in the towns especially, was 
 at their service ; the wealthier Nonconformists 
 were only too anxious to make peace with the State. 
 The middle class held a virtual monopoly of the 
 educational apparatus of the time, including all the 
 regular newspapers. They were so strong that 
 broader views in non-essentials grew apace ; and 
 Whig developed into Liberal, Tory into Conser- 
 vative, without serious difficulty. But in daily 
 business life there was hardly a pretence of hiding 
 the iron hand in a velvet glove. Every expedient 
 known to the law was used to whittle down the 
 right of combination yielded in 1825. Peaceful 
 picketing was treated as intimidation, organiza- 
 tion as conspiracy. Men who struck without aid 
 or organization were pursued and imprisoned under 
 the Master and Servant Acts for leaving their work 
 unfinished. Strike leaders were prosecuted ; all 
 over the country masters endeavoured to force their 
 men to sign statements abjuring trade unionism. 
 Comfortable men and women looked across a gulf 
 of suspicion and alarm at " the lower classes " as 
 at a pestilent mob inoculated with the vices of 
 French Jacobins and Irish moonlighters. There 
 were splendid exceptions ; but this was the rule. 
 
 The workers were to find how long and difficult 
 a task it must be for poor, uninstructed men to 
 
§ IV.] ON THE VERGE OP REVOLUTION 229 
 
 realize the only potential strength that remained 
 to them. Politically, they had little direct influ- 
 ence, for few of them had votes. Economically, 
 they were in a position no less than desperate. 
 Freedom is the power of choice. When a com- 
 munity has lost its hold upon the land, its freedom 
 has been materially curtailed ; for the most obvious 
 alternative to a starvation wage has been taken 
 away. The first article of liberty for the average 
 man is the first week's wages he can save. A 
 generation later, when Free Trade had brought a 
 great increase of national wealth and the possibility, 
 therefore, of higher wages, liberal individualism 
 became very familiar among the English artisans. 
 In this earlier interval, it could not but appear a 
 cold mockery. To the honour of our people, be it 
 said that, while the new Poor Law excited deep 
 bitterness, there was no agitation for a revival of 
 the allowance system. They demanded, as they 
 had always done, a living wage. But how to get 
 it ? The distinction between moderates and revo- 
 lutionaries is primarily one of circumstance, a 
 bread-and-butter difference. Well-paid craftsmen 
 were then, are now, and always will be moderates ; 
 but a grain of intelligence makes the unskilled 
 labourer, clamouring against his fellows outside the 
 dock-gates, inflammable stuff. It is said that hunger 
 knows no law ; the most astonishing thing in the 
 world's history, however, is the patience of the toil- 
 ing millions imder the degrading rod of hunger- 
 But feed the mind in a starved body, and you 
 
230 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. V. 
 
 may look for trouble. Cobbett and a thousand pam- 
 phleteers had not worked for nothing. England was 
 aflame with discontent. Every type of platform 
 rang with apocalyptic anger and prophecy. On 
 all, the same thing was required ; and there the 
 unanimity ended. 
 
 Trade-imion policy (if that can be called policy 
 which was mostly crude instinct) varied through 
 the whole gamut between the formation of small 
 local benefit funds and the declaration of a grand 
 national strike. Robert Owen and his disciples 
 preached a communal reorganization of industry, 
 to be brought about, as they imagined, speedily and 
 peacefully, by the conversion of trade unions into 
 co-operative productive societies. The wide success 
 of this Utopian propaganda speaks as much for the 
 inexperience of his hearers as for Owen's energy 
 and genius. The Chartists believed ever3rthing 
 was to be obtained by democratizing Parhament. 
 The Factory Act agitation has been commonly 
 treated as only a humane movement for the pro- 
 tection of children and women ; in fact, it derived 
 much of its strength from the belief of adult male 
 workers — ^not at all a mean, and not an ill-founded 
 belief — ^that a shortening of juvenile hours would 
 indirectly shorten adult hours of labour, and so 
 absorb some of the surplus of unemployed, while 
 the family would gain as much by an improvement 
 of adult as it lost in juvenile wages. Finally, 
 the Free Traders threw a bridge across the widen- 
 ing gulf between the classes, and, with the aid of 
 
§ IV.] ON THE VEEGE OF REVOLUTION 231 
 
 Manchester money-bags, won a great reform which 
 considerably changed the national outlook for a 
 long generation to come. 
 
 These diverse currents were always present ; 
 but now one, now another, became the main stream 
 of opinion, and the others attendant eddies. Trade 
 unionism came first into prominence with the 
 efforts of John Doherty, leader of the Manchester 
 cotton-spinners ("a man of wide information, 
 great natural shrewdness, and far-reaching aims," 
 says Mr Webb i), and others, to form national 
 unions of individual trades, and then a single 
 iiational rniion embracing all trades. A textile 
 federation, of which little is known, was created 
 early in 1830 ; and, a few months later, a delegate 
 meeting at Manchester representing twenty trades 
 founded the National Association for the Pro- 
 tection of Labour. This body seems to have 
 enjoyed a vigorous life of about eighteen months. 
 Some 150 separate unions, with a total of, per- 
 haps, twenty thousand members, were enrolled. A 
 weekly paper, at the outset called the United 
 Trades Co-operative Journal, then The Voice of the 
 People, was maintained ; and at last it was claimed 
 that the Association had 100,000 members. The 
 employing class and the newspapers were very 
 much alarmed ; without training and a war-chest, 
 however, there is no army, and the National 
 Association ignominiously vanished. Humbler 
 though still considerable efforts had a little more 
 
 1 Hiatmy oj Trade Unionism, p. 104. 
 
232 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. V. 
 
 success. The first strong union of northern miners 
 Hved for about two years, going doAvn in the Reform 
 Bill crisis. A federal union of the building trades 
 spread rapidly during 1832 and 1833, published 
 an unstamped penny weekly paper, the Pioneer, 
 held a congress of 270 delegates claiming to re- 
 present 30,000 operatives, and actually began con- 
 structing a " Builders' Gild Hall " in Birmingham. 
 This and other unions of the day had inherited a 
 fantastic ritual, apparently imitated from that of 
 the Oddfellows, perhaps, also, of Freemasonry ; 
 and alarming accounts of their initiation of " lodge " 
 members, with hymn, prayer, and oath, pro- 
 strate under a drawn sword before a skeleton, fed 
 the fire of animosity lit by their more serious pro- 
 ceedings. The idea of a national labour organi- 
 zation — as the extreme trade unionists hoped, to 
 procure shorter hours by a " universal " strike, or, 
 as Owen hoped, for a still larger transformation — 
 was in the air ; and it crystallized early in 1834 
 in the shape of the Grand National Consolidated 
 Trades Union. " Nothing in the annals of 
 unionism in this country," says Mr Webb, " at all 
 approached the rapidity of the growth which ensued. 
 Within a few weeks, the union appears to have 
 been joined by at least half-a-million members, 
 including tens of thousands of farm labourers and 
 women. . . . How the business of this colossal 
 federation was actually managed we do not know 
 — ^none of its records have been preserved. Some 
 sort of executive committee sat in London, with 
 
§ IV.] ON THE Verge oe revolution 233 
 
 four paid officers. The avowed policy of the 
 federation was to inaugurate a general strike of 
 all wage-earners throughout the country. But, 
 from the very beginning of its career, it found 
 itself incessantly involved in sectional disputes. 
 The mere joining of ' the Trades Union ' was often 
 made the occasion of the dismissal by the employers 
 of all those who would not sign the ' document ' 
 abjuring all combinations." ^ In March 1834, a 
 strike of gas-stokers kept Westminster for some 
 days in partial darkness ; in April, practically 
 the whole industrial population ceased work for 
 several days by way of demanding an eight-hours' 
 day. The engineers won concessions, but most 
 other strikes failed. During the following summer 
 the whole movement collapsed, the national unions 
 breaking up into local trade clubs, and the Grand 
 National disappearing. 
 
 Not, however, before the Government and its 
 supporters had been given an opportunity of ex- 
 hibiting clearly the spirit that possessed them. It 
 did not contain the fu-st element of the right spirit 
 of government — a sincere effort to understand 
 the thoughts, sufferings, and needs of the people. 
 At the time when nearly every educated and respect- 
 able person had learned to talk the bloodless 
 language of the laisser-faire economics, the 
 finer side, the ethical stimulus, of individualism 
 was already exhausted. Thinking and feeling 
 men and women were groping their way toward a 
 
 * Webb, Trade Unionism, pp. 120-2. 
 
234 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. v. 
 
 better faith. Hood's "Song of the Shirt," 
 EHzabeth Barrett's " Cry of the Children," the war- 
 songs of Ebenezer EUiott, Charles Mackay, and 
 Gerald Massey, the novels of Dickens, George 
 Eliot, and Charles Kingsley (boldly announcing 
 himself as " Church parson and Chartist ") — ^these 
 were, or in the next years were to be, the inspira- 
 tion that saved the soul of England, not any 
 voice from the seat of public authority. The 
 occasion may be deplored, but the thing itself we 
 cannot weep over. The disobedience of the British 
 people is like the disobedience of British boys, 
 the weakness of our strength, a thing we hardly 
 trouble to conceal our pride in. Every Ministry 
 is on sufferance ; the survival of Gold-Sticks-in- 
 Waiting and Garter-Kings-at-Arms has always 
 this much of real meaning, that in Britain the 
 most powerful governor may be dismissed, and 
 government go on just as before. Such a people 
 will try " direct action " or indirect action, any and 
 every kind of action, rather than lie down under 
 flagrant wrong. Parliament itself is no sacred office, 
 but an instrument of this independent temper. 
 Carlyle anticipated in a few words the voluminous 
 philosophy which M. Sorel has provided for the 
 Syndicalists, when he lamented the too easy faith 
 in the efficacy of "The Charter": "They are 
 eithtr speakers for that great dumb toiling class 
 which cannot speak, or they are nothing that one 
 can well specify. Alas, the remote observer knows 
 not the nature of parliaments ; how parliaments. 
 
§ IV.] ON THE VERGE OF REVOLUTION 235 
 
 extant there for the British nation's sake, find 
 that they are extant withal for their own sake ; 
 how pariiaments travel so naturally in their deep 
 rutted routine, commonplace worn into ruts axle- 
 deep." 
 
 Lord Melbourne would see little to chose between 
 strike and Charter. " Can't you let it alone ? " 
 he would say to those of his Cabinet colleagues 
 who were not idlers. But, when the agricultural 
 labourers, now faced by the grim promise of the 
 workhouse, began to flood into the lodges of the 
 Grand National, and the gloom of lampless West- 
 minster answered to Owen's prophecy of demo- 
 cracy coming " like a thief in the night," panic 
 seized the whole of the governing class. Panic 
 is a cruel thing ; and this outbreak will be for ever 
 marked with shame by the case of the Dorchester 
 labourers. 
 
 If the labourers were not to have doles, they 
 must evidently have wages. In the village of 
 Tolpuddle, in Dorsetshire, the farmers at first 
 promised and gave the wage obtaining in other 
 districts, and then proceeded to reduce it shilling 
 by shilling. John and George Loveless and some 
 others thereupon established a " Friendly Society 
 of Agricultural Labourers," with the rules and 
 ritual, including the initiation oath, of the Grand 
 National. Everjrthing was done openly ; and the 
 magistrates, hearing of it, issued placards warning 
 the labourers that any who joined the union would 
 be liable to transportation. They were, in fact. 
 
236 MODEBN ENGLAND [chap. V. 
 
 - t,i T^^er an obsolete Act, passed after the 
 ^° 1 mutiny of 1797, which penalized the ad- 
 "^^^tstering of an oath by an unla-wful society— 
 ^l^vided that this village club could be proved 
 unlawful. Three days later, on February 24, 1834, 
 the Lovelesses and four others were arrested and 
 imprisoned. After a travesty of justice at the 
 Dorchester Spring Assizes, they were on March 8th 
 found guilty of administering oaths unlawfully 
 (there was no other charge), and sentenced to seven 
 years' transportation. Melbourne expressed his full 
 approval of the sentence ; and, by the middle of 
 April, the six men had sailed for Botany Bay. 
 
 Miss Martineau, none too sympathetic an observer 
 of any trade-union movement, contrasts this bar- 
 barous sentence with the long inaction of the 
 Government before a conspiracy of certain Orange- 
 men and Tory Peers to place the Duke of Cum- 
 berland on the throne.^ Trade-imionists and 
 Radicals were at once afoot throughout the 
 country ; and many demonstrations of protest 
 culminated on April 21 in a great procession carrying 
 a petition with more than a quarter of a million 
 signatures to the Home Ofifice — ^the first example of 
 what was to become a habit in British political 
 agitation. The Government still believed, or 
 
 ^ There were said to be 140,000 members in 381 Orange Lodges 
 In Great Britain, including thirty Lodges in the army ; and it was 
 stated that £20,000 had been spent on this plot. The Lodges were 
 quietly dissolved in 1836 ; and in the foUowing year, on Queen 
 Victoria's accession, the Duke of Cumberland became King of 
 Hanover. 
 
§ v.] ON THE VERGE OF REVOLUTION 237 
 
 affected to believe, that revolution was imminent. 
 Artillery was brought from Woolwich ; cannon 
 were placed on the roofs of Whitehall ; troops filled 
 the courtyards ; and 5000 special constables were 
 sworn in. Owen and his friends were, however, 
 equal to the occasion ; 50,000 men marched from 
 Kennington to Westminster and peacefully dis- 
 persed, and the myth of a conspiracy to seize 
 Ministers and the Royal Family was soon forgotten. 
 The " London Dorchester Committee," aided by 
 Hume, Roebuck, Perronet Thompson, Thomas 
 Wakley, and Daniel O'Connell, kept the scandal 
 in the public memory ; and in the summer of 1838 
 the reprieve of the victims was obtained. On 
 their return from Van Diemen's Land, they received 
 a public welcome, and a working-class subscription 
 of £1300 enabled them to settle on small farms. 
 This celebrated case had two good results : it made 
 it clear that the nation would no longer tolerate 
 the monstrous abuses of the criminal law against 
 which Romilly had spent his strength in vain ; and 
 it led to the abandonment of masonic mummery 
 by the trade unions. 
 
 V. The Chartists 
 
 " Direct action " had proved a broken reed in 
 the hands of labour groups having neither ex- 
 perience, organization, nor funds ; and the idea of 
 a " general strike " faded out of trade-union policy. 
 
238 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. v. 
 
 not to reappear for seventy years. The phrase 
 was, indeed, often on the tongues of Chartist 
 orators ; and there was very much more serious 
 evidence than this that the revolutionary temper in 
 the people had not yet run its course. The decade 
 ended in a three years' commercial crisis which 
 spread ruin and suffering far and wide. It began 
 with over-speculation, following upon several good 
 harvests. Nearly five hundred banks were poiu-ing 
 out their note issues, under the inadequate safe- 
 guards of the Act of 1826 ; and a wholesale collapse 
 of credit was only averted in 1837 by the Bank of 
 England coming to the aid of the gamblers. In 
 the United States, where the same mania had been 
 running for several years, the logical end was 
 reached : 618 banks broke in 1837, and 900 more 
 in the next two years. This crash reacted dis- 
 astrously upon British trade and manufacture. 
 Factories and works were closed ; whole streets 
 of houses were left empty in some of the northern 
 towns ; expendittire was everywhere cut down ; 
 starvation was so common that the draconian 
 rules of the workhouse system were necessarily 
 relaxed. The sense of helplessness after the rout 
 of the trade unions aggravated the sullen anger of 
 men who now saw even the poor right of public 
 meeting taken from them, and their leaders 
 imprisoned on the slightest pretext. How this fire 
 burned, we may gather from the wild lines addressed 
 to the girl Queen by the good-hearted Ebenezer 
 Elliott : " Here, too," he wrote — the reference 
 
§ v.] ON THE VERGE OF REVOLUTION 239 
 
 being to the recent suppression of the Canadian 
 rebellion — 
 
 " Here, too, oh Queen, thy woe-worn people feel 
 The load they bear is more than they can bear ; 
 Beneath it twenty million workers reel. 
 While fifty thousand idlers rob and glare, 
 And mock the sufierings which they yet may share. 
 
 The Drama soon wiU end ; four acts are passed. 
 
 The curtain rises o'er embracing foes ; 
 
 But each dark smiter hugs his dagger fast. 
 
 While Doom prepares his match, and waits the close. 
 
 Queen of the Earthquake ! wouldst thou win or lose ? " 
 
 It was under these clouds, and amid such rum- 
 blings of revolution, that the Chartist and Free 
 Trade movements were bom. The former came 
 of a junction of Hume, Roebuck, Place, and a 
 few other prominent Radicals, with Wm. Lovett, 
 Henry Vincent, and Henry Hetherington, leaders 
 of a lately formed " Working Men's Association " 
 in London, in May 1837. Formally, the Anti- 
 Corn Law League was inaugurated at a large 
 banquet in Manchester on January 22, 1839 ; 
 actually, it had been founded on September 18, 
 1838. The decided opposition of both Russell 
 and Peel to any further measure of reform, and 
 the apparent impossibility of moving them to 
 attack the tariff, led the Radicals into these two 
 mdependent moves. By way of precision, the 
 Radical-Labour Conunittee drew up in the form of 
 a parliamentary Bill, which they called " The 
 
240 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. v. 
 
 People's Charter," a purely political programme 
 based on the old familiar demand for universal 
 manhood suffrage, annual Parliaments, vote by 
 ballot, abolition of property qualifications, pay- 
 ment of members, and equal electoral districts. 
 Eleven M.P.'s signed the " Six Points " ; but some 
 of them lost their seats in the autumn election, 
 and all had soon lost touch with the Chartists. 
 Lovett, an able writer, a good business man, and 
 a Socialist of a moderate type, was only picking 
 up again the threads of the political work he had 
 done in 1831-2. Hetherington was the organiser 
 •par excellence. Vincent was a more typical Chartist 
 leader — " the young Demosthenes " of the move- 
 ment, said his admirers. " Vox, el proeterea nihil " 
 would be, perhaps, too severe a judgment upon 
 the first orators of the British labour movement, 
 for the vast open-air meetings which they com- 
 manded throughout the country during the next 
 few years must have required much self-sacrifice, 
 energy, resource, and skill in management. But 
 there was ever too much talk among the Chartists. 
 Sometimes it was noble talk, with a genuine edu- 
 cational intent ; sometimes it fell to vulgar and 
 inflammatory declamation. For the conditions that 
 made it sterile, by forbidding any fruitful action, 
 the Chartists were not to blame. Yet, it other and 
 finer types of leader had not been freely enlisted, if 
 the agitation had not been constantly dignified by 
 heroic devotion in the rank and file, it would not 
 have won the respectable place it holds in history. 
 
§ v.] ON THE VEilGE OP REVOLUTION 241 
 
 While the London group was sending out mis- 
 sionaries into the provinces, Thomas Attwood, 
 M.P. for Birmingham, who had revived the 
 " PoUtical Union " of that city, was preparing a 
 similar agitation in the Midlands. A Northern 
 Political Union was quickly formed by Radicals and 
 Labour men of Northumberland and Durham ; its 
 leading figures were the Irish demagogue Feargus 
 O'Connor, Dr John Taylor, handsome, honest, and 
 eloquent, Julian Harney, vain and passionate, at 
 his best with the pen, and a solid workman, Robert 
 Lowry. Scotland caught the infection after an open- 
 air meeting in Glasgow at which 200,000 men with 
 200 banners were present, on May 28, 1838. On this 
 occasion, Attwood stated the Birmingham plan, 
 which was to obtain and present to Parliament a 
 national petition for reform, " and if, after a fair 
 trial, the Legislature should refuse, then the work- 
 ing men, with such of the middle-class as might 
 be disposed to favour their views, should proclaim 
 a solemn and sacred strike from every kind of 
 labour." ^ " We have against us," he said, " the 
 whole of the aristocracy, nine-tenths of the gentry, 
 the great body of the clergy, and all the pensioners, 
 sinecurists, and blooksuckers that feed on the 
 vitals of the people " ; but, adds his reporter, " he 
 never seemed to contemplate the greatest obstacle 
 of all, the newly enfranchised middle class." A 
 month later, a crowd estimated at 80,000 gathered 
 on the Town Moor at Newcastle. At Nottingham, 
 
 ' Gammage : History oj the Chartist Movement, p. 21. 
 Q 
 
242 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. v. 
 
 two Nonconformist ministers and a farmer spoke. 
 In, the autumn, monster meetings were held in 
 iBirmingham and London, the High Bailiff of 
 Westminster presiding at the latter, and the Rev. 
 W. J. Fox and Ebenezer Elliott being among the 
 speakers. On September 25, John Fielden, M.P., 
 the Rev. John Rayner Stephens, an ex-Wesleyan 
 minister dismissed for taking part in political 
 agitation, and Feargus O'Connor addressed a 
 crowd, estimated to number 300,000, on Kersall 
 Moor, near Manchester ; and on October 15 a 
 meeting little smaller, with bands, flags, and 
 banners, was held on Peep Green, between Leeds 
 and Huddersfield. The glow of these and countless 
 other meetings was kept fanned by the journals 
 of the movement, chief among them Hetherington's 
 London Despatch and O'Connor's Northern Star, 
 and by other writings, of which those of Bronterre 
 O'Brien were the best informed and most influential. 
 It was necessary to invent new methods of propa- 
 ganda, for public halls were commonly refused, 
 or were too small ; and, in the winter of 1838-9, 
 the factory districts, in particular, were ablaze 
 with torchlight processions and meetings, where 
 banners bearing death's heads, daggers, red caps 
 of liberty, and threatening mottoes, were much in 
 favour. 
 
 The eternal crux of libertarian struggles appeared 
 more and more plainly. The Government would 
 yield nothing. The torchlight meetings were 
 prohibited ; Stephens, who had certainly delivered 
 
§ v.] ON THE VERGE OE REVOLUTION 243 
 
 iaflammatory speeches, was arrested and sentenced 
 to eighteen months' imprisonment. This only- 
 deepened the anger of the Lancashire operatives. 
 One of the Welsh leaders, John Frost, was deprived 
 of his magistracy by the personal action of Lord 
 John Russell. When delegates from all over the 
 country met in Convention, as they called it — ^that 
 is, in a series of quarrelsome gatherings in Bolt 
 Court, Fleet Street, London — in February 1839, 
 it was found that a majority was more or less im- 
 bued with the belief that no hope remained except 
 in physical force. Uncertain, divided, and really 
 impotent, they temporised, and then adjourned in 
 order to put certain proposals before a series of 
 meetings in the country. The proposed measures 
 included a run on the banks for gold, abstinence 
 from all excisable articles, exclusive dealing, arm- 
 ing, and a general sti'ike. At the same time, a 
 resolution was adopted urging that arms should 
 not be brought to the meetings, and that every 
 effort should be made to keep the peace. Great 
 demonstrations were again held on Kersall Moor, 
 Peep Green, and Kennington Common, in Liverpool, 
 Sunderland, Northampton, Glasgow, and many 
 lesser towns. Some of them had been proclaimed ; 
 yet they were held, in the presence of bodies of 
 soldiery and police, without disturbance. But, on 
 July 8, a meeting in the Bull Ring, Birmingham, 
 was violently broken up by an imported body of 
 metropolitan police. Dr Taylor, who had stood 
 between police and people and prevented reprisals, 
 
244 MOBEEN ENGLAND [chat. V. 
 
 was arrested, and died soon afterwards, his con- 
 stitution broken with overwork and anxiety. 
 Lovett and Harney (for denouncing it) and some 
 eighty others were also arrested in connection with 
 this affair. A week later, another attempt to hold 
 a meeting in Birmingham was the occasion of a 
 more serious riot ; several shops and houses were 
 fired, and the mayor and numbers of gentlefolk 
 fled from the town. 
 
 Meanwhile, Attwood had presented to the House 
 of Commons the great petition for the Charter, 
 some passages of which well deserve quotation : 
 
 " That we, your petitioners, dwell in a land whose 
 merchants are noted for their enterprise, whose manu- 
 facturers are very skilful, and whose workmen are proverbial 
 for their industry. The land itself is goodly, the soil rich, 
 and the temperature wholesome. It is abimdantly fur- 
 nished with the materials of commerce and trade. It has 
 numerous and convenient harbours. In facility of internal 
 communication it exceeds all others. For three and 
 twenty years we have enjoyed a profound peace. Yet, 
 with all the elements of national prosperity, and with every 
 disposition and capacity to take advantage of them, we 
 find ourselves overwhelmed with public and private suffer- 
 ing. We are bowed down under a load of taxes, which, 
 notwithstanding, fall greatly short of the wants of our 
 rulers. Our traders are trembling on the verge of bank- 
 ruptcy ; our workmen are starving. Capital brings no 
 profit, and labour no remuneration. The home of the 
 artificer is desolate, and the warehouse of the pawnbroker 
 is full. The workhouse is crowded, and the manufactory 
 is deserted. 
 
§ v.] ON THE VERGE OF REVOLUTION 245 
 
 " We have looked on every side ; we have searched 
 diligently in order to find out the causes of distress so sore 
 and so long continued. We can discover none in nature 
 or in Providence. . . . The energies of a mighty kingdom 
 have been wasted in building up the power of selfish and 
 ignorant men, and its resources squandered for their 
 aggrandisement. The good of a part has been advanced 
 at the sacrifice of the good of the nation. . . . The Reform 
 Act has effected a transfer of power from one domineering 
 faction to another, and left the people as helpless as before.. 
 . . . We come before your honourable House to tell youi 
 with all humility, that this state of things must not be 
 permitted to continue. That it cannot long continue 
 without very seriously endangering the stability of the 
 throne and the peace of the kingdom, and that if, by God's 
 help and all lawful and constitutional appliances, an end 
 can be put to it, we are fuUy resolved that it shall speedily 
 come to an end. We tell your honourable House, that the 
 capital of the master must no longer be deprived of its due 
 profit ; that the labour of the workman must no longer be 
 deprived of its due reward. That the laws which make 
 food dear, and the laws which make money scarce, must 
 be abolished. That taxation must be made to fall on pro- 
 perty, not on industry. That the good of the many, as 
 it is the only legitimate end, so must it be the sole study of 
 the government." 
 
 This petition, which required twelve men to 
 carry it, and bore 1,280,000 signatures, was debated 
 in the House on July 12th. Fielden seconded 
 Attwood's motion ; and Hume, Villiers, and 
 Wakley spoke with some sympathy. The division 
 showed 48 for, 237 against. " You may as well 
 petition the Rock of Gibraltar," cried Wakley 
 
246 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. v. 
 
 Bronterre O'Brien at this juncture saved the 
 movement from a tragic blunder by persuading 
 the Convention that the country would not re- 
 spond to a call for a general strike, or, as it was 
 called, " The sacred month." A few days later, 
 he was arrested for a recent speech, along with 
 other leading agitators in the north-eastern 
 counties. At Stockport, ten men were imprisoned 
 for possessing arms. But for the skill and tact 
 with which Sir Charles Napier managed his troops, 
 there would have been a real insurrection in the 
 North. At the Montgomeryshire assizes, forty 
 persons were found guilty of training, drilling, or 
 riot, and sentenced to various terms of imprison- 
 ment or transportation. At Warwick, Lovett was 
 condemned to a year in prison, and four Birmingham 
 men to death, the latter sentence being commuted 
 to transportation for life. Hundreds of the most 
 active Chartists were thus taken out of the ranks. 
 The harsh treatment of Vincent in prison led to 
 the most deplorable episode of all, the so-called 
 Monmouth rising. On the night of November 
 3-4, 1839, a body of miners and others, several 
 thousands strong, and armed with pikes, muskets, 
 arid bludgeons, marched down from the hills, 
 apparently with the intention of releasing Vincent 
 and his fellow-prisoners. John Frost accompanied 
 them. Arrived outside the Westgate Hotel, 
 where a company of the 45th Regiment was 
 stationed, the mob demanded the release of the 
 prisoners, and some shots were then fired into the 
 
§ v.] ON THE VERGE OF REVOLUTION 247 
 
 hotel. The soldiers replied, killing ten men and 
 wounding many more. At the subsequent trial, 
 the large number of witnesses who " turned Queen's 
 evidence " was popularly translated as confirming 
 the suspicion that official aid had been given to 
 the conspiracy. Frost and two others were con- 
 demned to death, and nineteen men to transporta- 
 tion or imprisonment. Ostensibly on the ground 
 of a technical irregularity at the trial, the death 
 sentences were commuted, and the three major 
 prisoners were transported for life. Their case 
 was the subject of much agitation ; but it was not 
 till 1850 that they received a conditional pardon, 
 and Frost was only allowed to return to England 
 six years later. 
 
 The first Chartist Convention, deprived by 
 arrest or resignation of many of its ablest members, 
 dissolved itself on September 6, 1839. In May 
 1840, Feargus O'Connor was condemned to eigh- 
 teen months in York Castle. The old journals of 
 the movement disappeared. The insurrectionary 
 stage was past. On July 20, 1840, a meeting of 
 delegates in Manchester established the " National 
 Charter Association of Great Britain," agreeing 
 that only peaceful and constitutional methods should 
 be used. But the old differences continued : there 
 was no agreement on policy for the 1842 election ; 
 and, while Lovett wanted a crusade of education, 
 Vincent wanted teetotalism, others wanted labour 
 churches or land reform, and a few joined David 
 Urquhart in denouncing the pro-Russian policy 
 
248 MODERN ENGLAND [ohap. v. 
 
 of Lord Palmerston. New men arose, Thomas 
 Cooper and Ernest Jones being the ablest of them. 
 Feargus O'Connor, more unstable than ever, per- 
 sisted, even survived the culminating fiasco of 1848, 
 to end his days in a lunatic asylum. 
 
 The body of the rank and file had long ago 
 been captured by the Radical reformers of the 
 Anti-Corn Law League, who, if they promised 
 less, had the merit of performing more. 
 
 VI. End of the Corn Law 
 
 There is nothing obscure or complex about the 
 eight years' campaign of the Manchester men for 
 the abolition of the protective tariff. It was 
 almost exclusively a campaign of education ; and, 
 great as was the opprobrium and the opposition 
 its missionaries had to suffer at the hands of the 
 landlord party, on the one hand, and the wilder 
 Chartists on the other, they never had to fear the 
 penalties of prison or exile. They began with two 
 important advantages : a single, clear principle, 
 harmonious with the philosophy and experience 
 of the time, and the vigorous support of the more 
 intelligent manufacturers and merchants. They 
 had the plain object-lesson of wheat at seventy- 
 seven shillings a quarter in time of peace ; but the 
 enemy was strong in the inertia of an ancient 
 and deepTrooted system. In December 1838, the 
 Manchester Chamber of Commerce passed a reso- 
 lution declaring that " the great and peaceful 
 
§ VI.] ON THE VERGE OP REVOLUTION 249 
 
 principle of Free Trade, on the broadest scale, is 
 the only security for our manufacturing prosperity, 
 and the welfare of every portion of the community." 
 Other cities were circularised ; and, at a public 
 dinner in Manchester a month later, there were 
 present eight hundred delegates and six members 
 of Parliament. At the opening of the session, a 
 Convention of 300 met in London, and assumed the 
 name of the Anti-Corn Law League.] In 1838, 
 Villiers' motion to consider the Corn Laws had been 
 rejected in the Commons by 300 to 95 votes. In 
 course of a debate in 1839, Melbourne, the Premier, 
 said : " To leave the whole agricultural interest 
 without protection, I declare before God that I 
 think it the wildest and maddest scheme that has 
 ever entered into the imagination of man to con- 
 ceive," The Radical Leaguers — among whom must 
 be distinguished Richard Cobden, M.P., John 
 Bright, M.P., C. P. Villiers, M.P., Milner Gibson, 
 M.P., George Wilson, W. J. Fox, Francis Place, 
 Hamer Stansfeld, Edward Raines, P. A. Taylor, 
 Dr. Bowring, M.P., Sir Thomas Potter, and Thomas 
 Ashton — knew that this infatuated Whiggism 
 was less to be feared than an explosion of popular 
 discontent. The press of the two great parties 
 was closed to them, until, by a flood of pamphlets, 
 leaflets, and circulars, and a swarm of lecturers, 
 they had proved their ability to reach the nation 
 independently. 
 
 It needed only a resolute, skilful attack to bring 
 off this great victory. The country party was 
 
250 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. v. 
 
 declining numerically, and had not the sense to 
 attempt a compromise. That the manufactm-ers 
 had a personal interest in getting cheap food for 
 their hands, and cheap material for their machines, 
 gave the agrarians a verbal retort, but no substantial 
 help. When, by the new Poor Law, the agricultural 
 labourer lost his wretched share of the profits of 
 the grain tariff, Protection lost its last rag of 
 decency. In the beginning, it had been possible 
 to represent it as a sort of bargain ; for twenty years 
 it had been a rank oppression, made possible only 
 by the refusal of political power to the nation. 
 The Trade Union and Chartist movements had 
 convinced all but the most obstinate that some- 
 thing must be done, and had stirred a more generous 
 spirit in thousands of hitherto satisfied minds. 
 Dickens, whose Boz, Pickwick, Oliver Twist, and 
 Nicholas Nickleby appeared between 1836 and 
 1839, and his Christmas Carol in 1843, incomparably 
 represents this wave of kindlier feeling. Carlyle 
 contributed his Chartism in 1839, and Past and 
 Present in 1843. Anyone who has heard an audience 
 of north-country workmen sing Ebenezer Elliott's 
 " God save the People " will understand the influence 
 of the " Com Law Rhymers." But, after all, plain 
 fact was the chief preacher. 
 
 A remarkable collection has been made of 
 reminiscences of these terrible years,^ and there 
 are few more grievous documents in the language. 
 
 1 The Hungry Forties. Descriptive letters, etc., with an Intioduc- 
 tion by Mrs Cobden Unwin. 1904. 
 
§ VI.] ON THE VERGE OP REVOLUTION 251 
 
 It reads like the story of a country ravaged by a 
 long war. The amenities of normal life had dis- 
 appeared. Everywhere men and, worse, women 
 and children, were struggling for a bare subsistence. 
 In the country, women, if wanted, could earn 8d. 
 or lOd. a day at field work, and children were taken 
 out to share their parents' toil as soon as they 
 could walk. A boy would start with a penny or 
 twopence a week for bird-scaring, as carter-boy 
 made as much as two shillings, and as milk-boy 
 four shillings : then the family could afford an 
 extra daily loaf. Adult labourers' wages were 8s. 
 to 10s. a week. Out of this, £6 a year might go in 
 rent. Potatoes, barley, and turnips figured largely 
 in the diet of the poor. Meat, white bread, and 
 butter were luxuries. Good meal and bad meal 
 were mixed together ; oats, pease, and rye took 
 the place of wheat ; burnt crusts and dried herbs 
 made a substitute for tea. The 4-lb. loaf cost ll^d., 
 tea from 5s. to 8s. per lb., common sugar 6d. to 9d. 
 A staple dish was a mess of potatoes cooked in the 
 three-leg iron pot of the time, with a little fat for 
 flavouring. After the potato failure especially, 
 swedes were commonly stolen from the fields. 
 Rabbits and small game were taken when possible. 
 There are piteous glimpses of shoeless, ragged, and 
 hungry children, not daring to ask their mother 
 for another helping. In the towns, there were no 
 swedes to steal, no fuel to gather, and work was 
 more irregular. Carpenters, masons, plumbers, 
 wheelwrights, made about 18s. a week, unskilled 
 
252 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. v. 
 
 labourers 12s. to 15s. But work came and went. 
 In 1841, there were said to be two thousand 
 houses empty in Preston, twelve thousand families 
 supported by charity in Manchester, and a fifth of 
 the population " on the rates " in Birmingham. 
 Incendiarism, breaking of mill machinery, and 
 highway robbery were frequent. In Newark, a 
 mob of men paraded through the streets carrying 
 little loaves dipped in blood on pikes, and crying, 
 " Bread, or Blood ! " That, in fact, was the choice. 
 It would be unjust to Cobden and Bright and 
 their fellows to leave the impression that their 
 triumph arose simply from the use of this material 
 emergency. Too long detained in the anterooms 
 of Whig Ministers, the Radicals now for the first 
 time came forth with a bold appeal to the intelli- 
 gence of the nation, and a programme not even 
 limited to national affairs, but prophetic of great 
 changes that were to come after many years in 
 international life also. Cobden fought a universal 
 and perpetual enemy in the only effective way, 
 with a principle of universal and perpetual vali- 
 dity ; that is why his name is still a battle-cry. His 
 triple prescription of Free Trade, Peace and Re- 
 trenchment, and Reform, was the answer not to 
 three different evils, but to three chief phases of 
 an universal evil. He attacked what were in his 
 time, and still are, throughout the Western world, 
 the most flagrant methods of despoiling the many 
 for the benefit of a few. Against the wrong of 
 tariff privilege, he set the right of unimpeded 
 
§ VI.] ON THE VERGE OF REVOLUTION 25S 
 
 purchase ; against the kindred wrong of foreign 
 adventure, he opposed a policy of economy and 
 concihation ; against other forms of monopoly and 
 privilege, as we gather from his words on the land 
 and education, he would, had he lived, have elabo- 
 rated further measures. The arbitration treaties of 
 recent years are as much a memorial of his life as 
 the immense material success of the Free Trade 
 system; and both show how far his work trans- 
 cended ordinary party divisions. 
 
 He had some of the narrowness of his time and 
 class. The world has passed beyond the bounds 
 of his individualism, as it has rejected the conclu- 
 sion he accepted from the Benthamite school 
 that colonies should be encouraged to " hive oft " 
 as independent nations. But his achievements set 
 him high in the annals of Britain, and they carry 
 with them the memory of a character honoured 
 by friend and foe alike. Peel gave to Cobden all 
 the credit for his greatest achievement. " There 
 are some Members of Parliament," said Disraeli, 
 " who, though they may not be present, are still 
 members of this House, are independent of dis- 
 solutions, of the caprices of constituencies, and 
 even of the course of time. Cobden was one of 
 these men." If he became, as Mr Balfour has said, 
 " the most effective of missionaries and the greatest 
 of agitators," it was because he added to patent 
 unselfishness and energetic devotion a rare com- 
 bination of other, apparently opposite, qualities. 
 He was very truthful, yet not tactless ; direct of 
 
254 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. V. 
 
 purpose and incapable of chicane, yet full of resource 
 in his propaganda ; vigorous and downright, yet 
 always winning and persuasive ; intensely practical, 
 but full of faith in human nature ; remarkable in 
 foresight, though bent on immediate tasks ; deeply 
 ethical, even in the midst of economic argument. 
 If his principles stood for half a century unchallenged, 
 and still stand, it is because he first made perfectly 
 sure of his facts. He spoke of agricultiu-e and 
 manufacture alike from experience. He travelled 
 in many lands, and learned everywhere. He never 
 allowed himself to become the slave of party, or 
 even of Parliament. Born in poverty, the hard- 
 ships of life showed him the way to the heart of the 
 people. Of him, more than any man of his time, 
 it may be said that he brought food to the hungry, 
 and peace where there had been a sword. 
 
 Cobden entered the House of Commons along 
 with the Tory majority under Peel, in the summer 
 of 1841. Signs of coming change soon appeared. 
 In 1842, Peel carried his sliding scale of corn duties, 
 and (the Free Traders' amendment having been 
 again rejected, by 393 to 90) then proceeded to 
 remove many duties from the tariff, and to sub- 
 stitute for them an income-tax. In 1843, the 
 League began to hold monthly meetings in Covent 
 Garden Theatre. In 1844, a commercial revival 
 yielded a surplus, and further duties were remitted. 
 There had been two good harvests, and the spirits 
 of the repealers were damped. Nevertheless, 
 Cobden spoke to such good effect, in March 1845, 
 
§ VI.] ON THE VERGE OF REVOLUTION 256 
 
 that Sir Robert Peel turned to Sidney Herbert 
 and said : " You will have to answer him ; I 
 cannot." In the lobby, afterwards, some one re- 
 marked that the speech would be hard to answer, 
 to which Peel replied in a low, grave tone : " It is 
 unanswerable." This summer he abolished 430 
 petty items of the tariff, and reduced the sugar tax. 
 
 Now fell the final argument. Cobden had said 
 that the Corn Law would not survive another 
 famine season. That autumn, three-quarters of the 
 potato crop and a quarter of the oats crop of 
 Ireland failed. The loss was estimated at £16 
 millions ; but no money figures could express the 
 cost to a people which lived on potatoes, with an 
 occasional herring and a little milk — ^the worst 
 housed, the worst fed, and the worst clothed 
 peasantry in Europe, the Devon Commission had 
 just said. In the south and west, many thousands 
 died of hunger before relief works could be organised. 
 The works were swamped — ^low as was the pay, 
 farmers left their land, and harvesters returned 
 from England, to get it. Half-a-million men were 
 kept, chiefly at road-mending. Ten millions sterling 
 were voted early in 1847 to cover the cost of relief. 
 Large voluntary subscriptions were also raised ; 
 and gallant men and women brought the helping 
 hand. For the first time, wholesale outdoor relief 
 was given in Ireland. Only by a great tide of 
 emigration to the United States was the strain at 
 length relieved. 
 
 On the first news coming, the League had organ- 
 
256 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. V. 
 
 ised public meetings throughout England. Peel 
 summoned the Cabinet, and proposed the opening 
 of the ports. Simultaneously, Lord John Russell 
 committed himself for the first time to the repeal of 
 the Corn Laws, a system, he said, " which had been 
 proved to be the blight of conmierce, the bane of 
 agriculture, the source of bitter division among 
 classes, the cause of penury, fever, and crime among 
 the people." Failing the support of his colleagues, 
 Peel resigned in December 1845. Russell tried to 
 form a Ministry, but could not get Grey and 
 Palmerston to act together. Peel, accordingly, re- 
 turned to power (with W. E. Gladstone as Colonial 
 and War Secretary). At a great demonstration of 
 the League in Manchester, £60,000 was subscribed 
 in an hour and a half. On the meeting of Parlia- 
 ment, at the end of January 1846, Peel announced 
 his conversion to Free Trade ; the time had come, 
 he said, when " that Protection which he had taken 
 office to maintain must be abandoned for ever." 
 
 The Repeal Bill, despite strong opposition, was 
 carried on March 15th, in the Commons, by 327 to 
 229, in the Lords, on June 25th, by 211 to 164. 
 Directly afterwards, the Protectionists took their 
 revenge by defeating the Government on its L-ish 
 Coercion Bill. Peel went down bravely, amid the 
 execration of his former friends, of whom Disraeli 
 was becoming the bright, particular star, and the 
 rejoicings of the people. " It may be," said this 
 fine English gentleman, on resigning office, " that 
 I shall leave a name sometimes remembered with 
 
§ VI.] ON THE VERGE OF REVOLUTION 257 
 
 expressions of goodwill in those places which are the 
 abode of men whose lot is to labour and earn their 
 bread by the sweat of their brow — a name remem- 
 bered with expressions of goodwill when they shall 
 recreate their exhausted strength with abundant 
 and untaxed food, the sweeter because it is no longer 
 leavened with a sense of injustice." 
 
 Once more, millennial expectations were doomed 
 to disappointment. Although repeal was to come 
 into full effect only in 1849, grain prices fell at once. 
 But two bad harvests in England and a continuance 
 of bad crops in Ireland made a melancholy change. 
 The price of wheat, which had been 50s. lOd. per 
 quarter in 1845, and averaged 54s. 8d. in the repeal 
 year, rose to 69s. 9d. in 1847. Only at the end 
 of 1848 did the gradual fall begin which, having 
 reached 40s. 9d. in 1852, was afterwards checked 
 by the stoppage of Russian supplies during the 
 Crimean War. The momentary return of high 
 prices was disastrously aggravated in 1847 by a 
 financial crisis due to railway speculation and a 
 short crop of cotton in America. The career of 
 Hudson, the " Railway King," is typical of the time 
 —after being M.P. for Sunderland and Lord Mayor 
 of York, and amassing a huge fortune, he failed 
 discreditably, and died a pauper. Up to 1844, only 
 about five millions had been spent on railway con- 
 struction ; in the following four years, no less than 
 £185 millions were raised. There could be no 
 immediate return proportionate to this enormous 
 investment ; and the folly of bankers again deepened 
 
258 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. v. 
 
 the mischief of stringency of money. The credit 
 crisis was met by the drastic step of suspending the 
 Bank Act ; but tens of thousands of workmen had 
 suffered unemployment before the manufacturing 
 districts began to recover. The Continent was also 
 groaning under bad harvests ; this complication 
 of troubles was at the root of the revolutionary 
 outbreaks of 1848. The internationality of markets 
 was, in fact, becoming a noticeable fact. 
 
 When Louis Philippe and his Queen, as plain 
 " Mr and Mrs Smith," landed at Newhaven on 
 Feb. 24, 1848, and made their way to Claremont, 
 Sir Robert Peel observed that a like fate would 
 have overtaken the English Royal Family but for 
 Free Trade. Paternal pride is a magnifying-glass 
 even in the family of politicians ; but it is, no 
 doubt, true that, but for the abolition of the Corn 
 Law, the revival of Chartism would have been a 
 much more serious matter. The mass of the people 
 were as far as ever from gaining the power of the 
 vote. They had no chance of getting more than 
 the poorest beginnings of an education. The sole 
 holidays they knew were periods when they could 
 get no work ; and only a patronizing charity or the 
 cold mercy of the workhouse saved many from 
 starvation. More than ever, they were dependent 
 upon the machines against which they could not 
 compete. What ray of hope could yet penetrate 
 into the slums, periodically swept by cholera, fever, 
 and small-pox ? This one wintry ray — that the bread 
 loaf would presently cost 8d. or 9d. instead of lid. 
 
§ VI.] ON THE VERGE OF REVOLUTION 259 
 
 On April 10, 1848, the remaining Chartists made 
 their last effort. Feargus O'Connor, now M.P. for 
 Nottingham, had announced that, after a mass- 
 meeting on Kennington Common, 200,000 men 
 would march to Westminster and present their 
 petition to the House of Commons. Lord John 
 Russell informed Prince Albert, on the eve of this 
 day of alarms, that the procession would be stopped 
 at the bridge, and that the Duke of Wellington was 
 making military preparations. In fact, troops 
 were ready, and 200,000 special constables were 
 enrolled, Mr Gladstone being one of them. " I have 
 no doubt of their easy triumph over a London mob," 
 said Lord John. " But any loss of life will cause a 
 deep and rankling resentment." Prince Albert's 
 reply is interesting : " I should be exceedingly 
 mortified if anything like a commotion was to take 
 place, as it would shake that confidence which the 
 whole of Europe reposes in our stability. I have 
 inquired a good deal into the state of employment 
 about London ; and I find, to my great regret, that 
 the number of workmen of all trades out of employ- 
 ment is very large, and that it has been increased by 
 the reduction of all the works under Government, 
 owing to the clamour for economy in the House of 
 Commons. Several hundred workmen have been 
 discharged at Westminster Palace ; at Buckingham 
 Palace much fewer hands are employed than are 
 really wanted ; the formation of Battersea Park 
 has been suspended, etc. etc. Surely this is not the 
 moment for the tax-payers to economize upon the 
 
260 MODERN ENGLAND [ohap. v, 
 
 working classes I And, though I don't wish our 
 Government to follow Louis Blanc in his system of 
 organisation du travail, I think the Government is 
 bound to do what it can to help the working classes 
 over the present moment of distress." ^ 
 
 Only 20,000 demonstrators appeared at Ken- 
 nington ; and Feargus O'Connor, descendant of 
 Irish kings, now reduced to trembling cowardice, 
 advised them to disperse. The grand petition, 
 taken in five cabs to the House, was found to bear 
 not five, but less than two, millions of signatures, 
 many of these being fictitious. The movement 
 died of humiliation. 
 
 A year later, the Free Trade principle was in full 
 operation ; and the magical growth of British 
 commerce, driven by steam, and guided by Rowland 
 Hill's penny post and Wheatstone's electric tele- 
 graph, had begun. The bottom of the pit of misery 
 into which the British people had been led at the 
 beginning of the century was reached and passed. 
 We shall have now the happier task of following 
 them in their slow upward course toward a new, 
 firmer, and juster social settlement than that whose 
 collapse had led to the sufferings we have traced. 
 Dickens and Carlyle, the Christian Socialists and 
 the " Young England " Tories, the Corn Law 
 rhymers and the Chartist orators, had not testified 
 in vain. After a long eclipse, England raised aloft 
 again before the world the lamp of liberty. Laisser 
 faire was not dead, but its dogmatic youth was 
 
 ' The. Letters oj Queen Victoria, ii. 107-8. 
 
§ VI.] ON THE VERGE OF REVOLITTION 261 
 
 gone After fifty years, the philosophy of the first 
 Census was beginning to be understood. Among 
 the good omens that mark this meridian of the 
 nineteenth century, not the least significant is a 
 voice from the Palace, telling a Liberal Minister 
 that it is not much to " triumph over a London 
 mob," and that his duty, if not a Socialistic organisa- 
 tion du travail, is at least to do what he can to " help 
 the working classes." 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE world's workshop (1850-1866) 
 
 I. Employment and Education 
 
 At the opening of the second half of the nineteenth 
 century, it will be well to take our stand once more 
 upon the most fundamental of all social facts, those 
 revealed by the Census, and to consider for a 
 moment the changes that fifty years had wrought 
 in the character and distribution of the British 
 population. 
 
 In the first place, its numbers had nearly 
 doubled, the increase being 93*5 per cent, for Great 
 Britain, 97'2 per cent, for England and Wales only. 
 Ireland, on the other hand, showed a decline, since 
 1841, of 1,700,000 persons, chiefly by emigration to 
 the United States ; and this decline has continued, 
 though at a slackening pace, to the present day.^ 
 Birth-rates and death-rates were not yet impeccably 
 accurate ; but we can compare the age-constitution 
 of the people of England and Wales in 1821 and 
 1851. At the earlier date 279 per thousand, at the 
 later only 247 per thousand, were under ten years 
 of age ; the mingled joys and pains of parentage 
 ' Appendix I. 
 
 262 
 
§ I.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 263 
 
 wciv, tlicn, somewhat reduced; the nation was, 
 literally, more grown up. Two-thii-tis of the popu- 
 IiiLioK lived in tlu; country and the small towns, 
 one-Lhird only in towii.s of 20,000 inhabitants or 
 moH!. Kill, l.lio i-ural popululiion was increasing 
 very nJowly (in Wiltshire and Argyll there was an 
 actual (l(H!liiio in the decade 18<li1-5]. ; in Heikshire, 
 Buckingham, Dorwel, Uic iix^rt'ase was only five per 
 cent.; in Norfolk and Suffolk only 7 per cent.). The 
 gen(;i'Hl increase of Knglaiul and Wales for these 
 ten ycar.s was 18 per cent., thni, oi' Durham 27 ])er 
 cent., Lanark 24 i)er cent., Lancashire 22 per cent., 
 Middlesex and Staffordsldre 20 ])er cent., the West 
 Riding 1 1 pen* cent. Looking biw^kward over the 
 half-ccntiiry, we find that, since 1801, the rural and 
 small town jjopulation had grown by 70 per cent., 
 that of London by 1<16 i)er vc.ut., the seaports 195 
 per cent., the mining and hardware towns 217 per 
 cent., the mining towns 224 per cent., and the 
 watering places 264 per cent. — a notable proof, this 
 last ligure, of increasing wealth.' 
 
 'i'ixe particulars of occupations in the early 
 Censuses are, unfortunately, not compoi'ablo ; but 
 we cannot be far wrong in supposing that, in the 
 middle of the century, one-fifth of the population 
 was dire<'tly dependent on agriculture, one-half on 
 trade, and the remainder on domestic service and 
 othei' employments. It is evident that the small 
 trades of the snudl towns counted then for much 
 more than they do now. But the textile trades 
 
 • Dtlitihfrom Report of 1861 Oefwu*, vol. i. pp. xxxlli.-xUx. 
 
264 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vi. 
 
 alone (cotton, calico, woollen, worsted, silk, and 
 linen) employed nearly a million hands in 1851. 
 There were also 1,760,000 agricultural labourers, 
 farmers, servants, shepherds, and graziers ; a 
 million domestic servants ; 430,000 milliners and 
 tailors ; 274,000 boot- and shoe-makers ; 219,000 
 coal miners. The iron shipbuilding, machinery", 
 and engineering trades were still in their infancy. 
 The army and navy numbered 178,000 men. 
 
 The Census of 1851 included a first attempt to 
 measure closely the educational facilities of the 
 kingdom ; and there is no better evidence than 
 the report on this subject of the practical failure 
 of the Benthamite individualists to obtain for the 
 masses of the people the one boon about which 
 there could be no manner of doubt. Until the 
 nineteenth century was well advanced, there was 
 hardly any day-schooling for the working classes in 
 England. The Sunday-schools, initiated in 1781 
 by Raikes of Gloucester, set a faint, wavering 
 flame burning in a few minds, just enough to make 
 the prevailing darkness visible. In 1796, Joseph 
 Lancaster started in Southwark the unsectarian 
 day-school system which led to the foundation, in 
 1808, of the British and Foreign School Society. In 
 1803, the Sunday School Union commenced its 
 work. Not to be outdone by the Lancasterians, a 
 body of orthodox dogmatists founded, in 1811, the 
 National Society for the Education of the Poor in 
 the Principles of the Established Church. From 
 that day to this, sectarian narrowness and rivalry 
 
§ I.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 265 
 
 have poisoned the springs of popular knowledge. 
 In 1836, the Home and Colonial School Society was 
 established ; and the Ragged School movement 
 (sadly appropriate name) followed. We have seen 
 that it was not till 1833, a year after Bentham's 
 death, that the first Parliamentary grant in aid of 
 public instruction was made. J. S. Mill, who had 
 greatly modified the laisser-faire principle, and 
 included in his Political Economy (1848) a moderate 
 argument for State provision (though not a State 
 monopoly, or even a rigid control) of education, 
 was moved by the fact, as he said, that the existing 
 charitable system " even in quantity is, and is 
 likely to remain, altogether insufficient, while in 
 quality, though with some slight tendency to 
 improvement, it is never good except by some rare 
 accident, and generally so bad as to be little more 
 than nominal." 
 
 Once more, it was not argument that broke up 
 the old doctrinaire theory of the relations of the 
 State and the citizen — ^Mill's argument was of the 
 simplest, and is to-day altogether inadequate — but 
 hard facts, impossible to ignore or evade. In 
 1839, a proposal to establish a Government normal 
 school was defeated by the Church, jealous for its 
 control over the greater part of the educational 
 machinery of the country. Four years later, the 
 Nonconformists took their revenge by defeating 
 plans for the education of factory children. In 
 1839, the management of the grant was trans- 
 ferred from the Treasury to an Education Com- 
 
266 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vi. 
 
 mittee of the Privy Council, and its amount was 
 increased to £30,000. Once engaged in this field, 
 it was inevitable that the State should go further 
 and further. The grant gradually rose to £100,000 
 in 1846-7, £260,000 in 1853, and reached in 1865 
 the respectable sum of £636,000. It was not 
 directly administered, but was supposed to be 
 shared among the chief organisations, sectarian 
 and unsectarian, in the form of subventions 
 toward the cost of buildings and of teaching. It 
 is to be noted, however, that, in the years 1839-50, 
 the Established Church received four-fifths of the 
 whole sum paid over.^ 
 
 The advance made up to this point may be 
 thus represented : 
 
 
 1818. 
 
 1833. 
 
 1851. 
 
 Day Schools 
 
 19,230 
 
 38,971 
 
 46,042 
 
 „ Scholars . 
 
 . 674,883 
 
 1,276,947 
 
 2,144,378 
 
 Sunday Schools 
 
 5,462 
 
 16,828 
 
 23,574 
 
 „ Scholars 
 
 . . . 477,225 
 
 1,548,890 
 
 2,407,642 
 
 Adult Evening Schools 
 
 
 1,545 
 
 „ „ Scholars 
 
 
 39,783 
 
 Literary, Science, 
 
 and Mechanics' 
 
 
 
 Institutions 
 
 . . ■ . . 
 
 , , 
 
 1,057 
 
 At first sight, these figures seem to show a satis- 
 factory increase, even when we allow for a growth 
 of population amounting to over fifty per cent. 
 But the report shows that, counting 600,000 
 children between three and fifteen years as per- 
 manently employed in industry, or, perhaps, a 
 million including those casually employed, there 
 * Census Beport, 1851, Education Volume, p. xvili. 
 
§ I.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 267 
 
 still remained 3,663,000 of school age. Again, if 
 children under three and over twelve were deducted, 
 there still remained over three millions. So that 
 nearly a million children at the most modest com<- 
 putation remained without any day-schooling — 
 this at a time when in Prussia elementary educa- 
 tion was compulsory for every chUd from five to 
 fourteen years. The reason for this national 
 neglect is given plainly by the authors of the 
 Census inquiry — it was the parents' need of the 
 beggarly earnings of their children. " Many obtain 
 permanent employment as early as the age of nine, 
 and all from that age upwards are considered 
 capable of certain kinds of agricultural labour. 
 Children begin to be employed in factories, in 
 needle-making, button-making, as errand boys, 
 and in various other capacities, some as early as 
 six, others at any time from six to ten. Among 
 the middle classes, children remain longer at school, 
 and the boys become apprentices, etc., at the age 
 of fourteen or fifteen. In very few cases is the 
 period of education protracted beyond fifteen." 
 
 The humane desire to get some poor modicum 
 of schooling for working-class children was an 
 important element in the movement for factory 
 legislation. At the beginning of the century, 
 Robert Owen had suggested a legal division of the 
 poor child's day between school and factory ; but 
 it was only with the establishment of the factory 
 inspectorate, in 1833, that this idea was forced 
 into the domain of practical politics. The in- 
 
268 MOBEKK ENGI.AHB tcsAP. VI. 
 
 ^v..« were ""avLthorized" to "establish, or 
 So?r tr establishment " of. schools for the 
 little toilers, between nine and thirteen years of 
 age, in cotton, woollen, and flax mills, who now 
 came under the guardianship of the law. But no 
 provision was made for this purpose ; and, indeed, 
 of what use could schools be to small children 
 after an eight-hours' day in a factory? A few 
 benevolent employers set a good example; in 
 general, the " dame's school " illustrated Mill's 
 dictum that education was " never good except 
 by some rare accident." The inspectors became 
 convinced advocates of State control ; and, as 
 a step thereto, Mr Leonard Horner revived the 
 idea of a " half-time " system, one set of children 
 being at school in the morning and at factory in 
 the afternoon, while another set worked in the 
 morning and studied in the later hours. At the 
 cost of a reduction of the factory age from the 
 ninth to the eighth year, this change was estab- 
 lished by the Factory Act of 1844. It is easy 
 to-day to see the weaknesses, and even the cruelty, 
 of the " half-time " system ; but m its time (and 
 toward the end of the century there were still 
 1 70, 000 half-time children on the school registers 
 good"^^*"^' 90,000 of these in Lancashire), it did 
 coi^..,?^^'*'^ ^^ an introduction to the era of free 
 
 fn area of e^*."^"™^^ ^"-^ reported that, within 
 
 ^^ «iost enterprS/^^^ ^^ ^°"' embracing one of 
 
 «ing and populous districts in 
 
§1.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 269 
 
 Lancashire, and including the boroughs of Oldham 
 and Ashton, with a population of 105,000, there 
 was not one public day-school for the children of 
 the working classes. The Act of 1844 provided for 
 the payment of fines in factory cases to schools 
 for the education of factory children ; and, in 
 the six following years, £1738 was so paid over in 
 Mr Horner's district. Three-quarters of this sum 
 went to Church schools. But the good were few, 
 the bad many ; and, in his report of 1850, the 
 inspector gives a lamentable picture of what this 
 meant. " The utter incapacity of the teacher ; 
 the small, crowded room ; the intermixture, and 
 often the predominance, of infants collected there 
 to eke out the miserable pittance of the teacher ; 
 the scarcity of books ; the tattered and dirty 
 conditions of those they have, generally the Bible ; 
 the larger proportion of the children doing abso- 
 lutely nothing for nine-tenths of the time they 
 are under confinement, and evidently enduring 
 all the pains of doing nothing ; the noise, and 
 the close and tainted atmosphere — ^these things 
 render a visit to such mock schools a most painful 
 duty, exciting feelings of deep regret that the 
 legislature should, year after near, do so very 
 little for the removal of this most dangerous and 
 crying evil, the root of numberless vices, the 
 source of incalculable loss." 
 
 In 1852, Sir John Kincaid reported upon the 
 ignorance of factory children in Scotland. Of 
 88 children over thirteen, at one mill, who pre- 
 
270 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vi. 
 
 sented themselves for certificates, 26 had "never 
 learned their letters, 17 knew their letters only, 
 17 had not got beyond small words, 11 could read 
 only, and only 17 could both read and write. 
 Rather than be troubled about their education, 
 the Scottish manufacturers refused to employ 
 children ; and, in 1850, only some nine hundred 
 under the age of thirteen were employed. In 
 1853, Mr Horner said that, of 427 schools in his 
 district, not one-fifth were good and efficient, 
 even according to the modest standards of the 
 time, while one-third were distinctly bad, and 
 one-seventh were positively mischievous. He com- 
 mented sarcastically upon the scriptural zoology 
 of the school library, and upon the zeal of the 
 philanthropic factory-owner who had two religious 
 tracts left at every house in his town regularly 
 every Sabbath. " Nothing," he added, " can be 
 more fallacious than statistical tables giving the 
 numbers of children attending schools if these 
 numbers be read as an indication that so many 
 children are receiving education." In 1854, 
 Inspector Redgrave published some remarkable 
 figures, the result of an inquiry embracing about 
 20,000 children. Only a quarter of these stayed 
 at school longer than two years ; and the average 
 for the whole number was only one year. Of 
 the children of the factory class, 10*7 per cent, 
 were learning reading only, 21-3 per cent, reading 
 and writing, 41 "7 per cent, reading, writing, and 
 four simple rules of arithmetic, and 26-3 per cent. 
 
§ I.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 271 
 
 also took grammar, geography, history, and some 
 higher arithmetic. Of the non-factory children, 
 47*4 per cent, had not got beyond reading and 
 writing, this inferiority being explained by the 
 fact that they were not, like the factory children, 
 limited to those over eight years of age. It 
 was added that 32 per cent, of " half-timers " 
 came to work and school ignorant even of the 
 alphabet. 
 
 These facts sufficiently indicate how slight was 
 the advance made in education until, by the Act 
 of 1870, the State itself undertook this essential 
 duty of a civilized society. Under voluntaryism, 
 the enlightenment of a few individuals was effec- 
 tually outweighed by the obscurantism a classic 
 instance of which is quoted in the Factory 
 Inspector's Report of 1856 from the Times (June 
 27th) : " A poor boy's education is reading and 
 writing. When he is once able to read, he has 
 got the key to further knowledge, and it must be 
 left to himself to use that key, or not. But it is 
 idle to expect that the demands of active life will 
 let you ordinarily give him more than this. You 
 cannot give the poor an education. You cannot 
 ordinarily do more than give them this key ; and 
 we must limit our ideas of what constitutes a poor 
 boy's education accordingly." The only possible 
 reply to a non possumus like this is an alteration of 
 political power. A wise middle-class Parliament 
 would have said that schooling should precede 
 the vote. In fact, however, the establishment of 
 
272 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vi. 
 
 board schools was the first great consequence of 
 the enfranchisement of the town workmen in 
 1867. 
 
 II. Problems of Peace and War 
 
 On May 1, 1851, the Prince Consort saw the 
 triumphant conclusion of two years' hard work in the 
 opening of the first great International Exhibition 
 of industrial, agricultural, and artistic products. 
 Joseph Paxton's palace of glass and iron in Hyde 
 Park was at least as remarkable as the unprece- 
 dented collection which it housed ; and the 
 success of the enterprise, despite opposition, despite 
 the jokes of Punch, and the bickerings of certain 
 diplomatists, was emphasized by the orderly 
 conduct of three-quarters of a million people who 
 witnessed Ihe ceremonies. It was, as Queen 
 Victoria proudly recorded, " a complete and 
 beautiful triumph, a glorious and touching 
 sight, a day to live for ever." It appeared for 
 a moment as though the Cobdenite millennium 
 had arrived. The depth of disappointment which 
 followed corresponded with the height of these 
 golden expectations. The following winter wit- 
 nessed Louis Napoleon's coup d'Hat, a French scare 
 in England, and the initiation of the Volunteer 
 movement. No sooner were the Channel coast 
 pleasure resorts found to be safe than the fears 
 and jealousy of England and France were attracted 
 to the southward gravitation of Russia ; and, from 
 
§ n.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 273 
 
 the end of February 1854 to March 1856, the 
 energies of these three nations were absorbed 
 in the Crimean War. Two odious Uttle campaigns 
 in Persia and China preceded the frightful events 
 of the Sepoy Mutiny, and the reconquest of India, 
 in 1857. This convulsion led in the following year 
 to the abolition of the East India Company, and 
 the assumption of full governing responsibility 
 by the Crown. In 1859, France and Austria toqk 
 to arms, and the dragging struggle for Italian 
 unity began. From 1861 to 1865, the North 
 American Republic was torn asunder by a conflict 
 which is estimated to have cost two thousand 
 millions sterling in money and a million good lives. 
 MeanwhUe, after a momentary union at the cost 
 of Schleswig-Holstein (1864), the long quarrel 
 between Austria and Prussia had come to a final 
 trial. In 1866, at Sadowa, Bismarck, Moltke, 
 and Roon proved their superiority, as exponents 
 of the arts of force, over the heirs of the Holy 
 Empire, and Austria appeared no more in German 
 affairs. In 1870-71, the German States turned 
 upon France, and proclaimed their federal Empire 
 in the palace of Louis Quatorze. The list of great 
 wars is not even concluded with the Russo-Turkish 
 war of 1877-8, for a new equilibrium had yet to 
 be established in Africa and Further Asia. 
 
 It is not wonderful that, amid this resurgence 
 of primitive passions, the young Peace Movement 
 should fall into disfavour, and the optimism of 
 Cobden and Bright, Victor Hugo and Elihu Burritt, 
 
274 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vl. 
 
 give place to misinterpretations of social evolution 
 as a perpetual and universal " struggle for life." 
 We have happily emerged at a point where a longer 
 and truer view is possible. The celestial visions 
 of 1851 were evidently unjustified; nevertheless, 
 they enshrined a vital truth. History gives no 
 countenance to the expectation of a Kingdom of 
 Heaven coming " like a thief in the night." Every 
 inch of progress must be won by effort ; and, just 
 because it means so much more than the absence 
 of war — ^because it involves not only security, law, 
 and order, but something of justice and equality 
 also — peace cannot be easily achieved. Inter- 
 national peace is a condition not of innocence, 
 but of organization; and nations must themselves 
 be organised before they can make a world-comity. 
 The organization of unequal units of any kind 
 must be difficult ; the organization of clans and 
 tribes, insular and continental, in every variety 
 of advance toward civilization, and, with these, 
 of urban States and rural States, unitary States 
 and federal States, republics and monarchies, 
 free-trading or protectionist, ancient or modern, 
 feudal or industrial, autocratic or democratic, 
 black, white, or yellow. Christian, Mohammedan, 
 Buddhist, or Confucian — ^this must necessarily 
 be the task of centuries. It is, nevertheless, the 
 task to which, by some law of the conservation 
 of human energy, man is inevitably compelled. 
 
 The post-Napoleonic settlement had opened, or 
 left open, four groups of problems which became 
 
§ n.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 276 
 
 more and more pressing as the effects of twenty- 
 three years of bloodshed and extortion passed 
 away : (1) It bargained away and parcelled out 
 the lands of Europe, without consideration of the 
 will of the inhabitants, or their natural and his- 
 toric divisions. This arbitrary work gave rise to 
 the problem of Nationality, which was at the root 
 of several of the conflicts named above. (2) It 
 established a reactionary alliance of rulers and 
 statesmen, by which the greater part of the Con- 
 tinent was kept under till the middle of the century. 
 The Metternichian regime forced a general de- 
 mand for political Democracy, and was at length 
 submerged in the flood of revolutionary feeling. 
 It left behind, however, the embryo of a system 
 of International Concert which has powerfully 
 affected European development, and has been 
 partially extended to the affairs of all the organized 
 States of the world. (3) Turkey was not affected 
 by the settlement after Waterloo ; Asia was 
 unaffected, and was still, indeed, little known ; 
 Africa was practically unknown beyond the coast ; 
 America, was, of course, unaffected. East and 
 West called with siren voices to the jaded sinners 
 of old Europe; and, by the opposite roads of 
 conquest and colonisation, men swarmed out to 
 subdue and fill the earth. Hence the problems 
 of Empire, which loomed large and larger as the 
 century advanced. (4) The peace after Waterloo 
 liberated the new economic forces of which Britain 
 was the cradle The factory machine, the steam 
 
276 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vi. 
 
 locomotive and steamship, the electric telegraph, 
 the daily newspaper, the joint-stock company, the 
 international bank — ^these and other instruments 
 of the economic revolution have already changed 
 the face of the globe. They have provoked an 
 immense increase of population (lately arrested 
 in the most progressive lands), a new education 
 and mobility, a vast augmentation of wealth and 
 comfort, along with much misery and discontent. 
 They have created new bonds of interest and 
 experience between peoples, and have at the same 
 time made new occasions of rivalry and new 
 possibilities of misunderstanding. They have 
 developed both property and labour into inters 
 national forces. And, incidentally, they have 
 produced three important schools of policy — 
 Protectionism, Socialism, and Pacifism. 
 
 In the development of the ideas and interests 
 involved in the names here italicised rests much 
 of the substance of the history of the last two 
 generations. To explain them in any detail is 
 beyond the purpose and proportions of such a 
 sketch as this. But, at the moment when, luider 
 the stimulus of fiscal freedom, England is seen to 
 become, for the first time, the " workshop of the 
 world," it is well to realize, by a forward glance, 
 some of the larger meaning of this departure. 
 It is with nations as with individuals : they live 
 not by competition only, or by co-operation only, 
 but by both co-operation and competition. This 
 ife-process is easily misrepresented. Wisdom 
 
§ n.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 277 
 
 rarely comes to the peoples except by experience — 
 so they are not fit for self-government till they 
 prove themselves invincible rebels ; they must 
 go through ages of barrack slavery and the hell- 
 fire of many battlefields ere they learn to set up a 
 court of arbitration ; they will submit to highway 
 robbery on an immense scale, it if be conducted 
 in proper Customs Houses by gold-laced officials, 
 under the name of Protection. There is something 
 peculiar to each, and something common to them 
 all. Almost all countries have some natural 
 advantages ; England's were great enough to give 
 her, for a short time, a clear primacy both in 
 material and political evolution. But monopoly 
 is a house built on sand ; and supremacy is a 
 mirage which may, indeed, reflect some distant 
 goal, but makes the wilderness of here-and-now no 
 more tolerable, Europe has spent much, perhaps 
 most, of the wealth of its new industrial processes 
 in obstructing the exchange of commodities, and 
 in setting up fortresses, armies, and fleets between 
 nation and nation. But, in spite of waste beside 
 which the worst prodigalities of the ancient world 
 seem mere child's play, the fertilizing stream of 
 common labotir sweeps on. Everywhere demo- 
 cracy gathers strength, and everywhere man's 
 energies overflow the barriers set up by ambitious 
 rulers and grandmotherly politicians. 
 
 The overriding fact henceforth to be borne in 
 mind is the world-wide play of economic influences. 
 The interest of the human drama is no_longer 
 
278 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vi. 
 
 concentrated upon the ancient European stage. 
 The earth is at last being opened up in earnest ; 
 and, in the first place, its outer parts become a 
 vast agricultural annexe to the old countries, more 
 and more turning themselves to manufacture. 
 Virgin soil, virgin forest, virgin mines yield a 
 rapid increase of the sum of available wealth. 
 Men and manufactures are shipped outward, food 
 and raw materials are brought back ; credit is 
 extended, interest is received. The exchange goes 
 even further than this. In the freedom of their 
 new homes, the colonists have the benefit of 
 elaborate precedents in law and government, so 
 that it is both easy and necessary to yield them 
 full control of their own affairs ; from the middle 
 of the century, the Canadian, Australasian, and 
 South African provinces gradually develop, through 
 various degrees of representative government, to 
 responsible government and confederation. The 
 lot of India and other possessions by conquest 
 could not be so happy ; but they gain the advan- 
 tages of social order, regular, honest administration, 
 and the stimulus (not an unmitigated advantage, 
 however) of Western capital and science. The 
 great variety in character and resources of these 
 widely separated communities represents, on its 
 economic side, a division of labour akin to that of 
 the factory system, but on a vastly larger scale. 
 The nations of Europe are closely bound by material 
 interests, but their condition is relatively similar ; 
 they contain each within itself a balance of in- 
 
§n.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 279 
 
 dustrial and agricultural elements, and are, there- 
 fore, in fact, largely independent. In the relations 
 of Europe, and especially of England, towards the 
 newly opened lands, there was a new degree of 
 mutual dependence. Without emigration, there 
 would be no colony ; without a constant stream 
 of investment and a readiness of credit such as is 
 usual among members of a family, the Colonies 
 could never have grown as they have done. This 
 was, in a degree, true also of England's relations 
 with the United States and some of the South 
 American republics. But the Colonies — in addition 
 to the aid of the leadership of the first commercial 
 and parliamentary State in the world, in addition 
 to the satisfaction of forming part of a liberal and 
 progressive league, free to exchange the widest 
 possible variety of products and services— have 
 enjoyed, during their youth, practically without 
 cost to themselves, complete protection, and 
 immunity from the military burdens other inde- 
 pendent nations have had to bear. 
 
 The reflex influence of the Empire upon British 
 life has been more mixed in kind. Suffice it here 
 to pomt out that it has largely determined the 
 course of our economic development, by stimulat- 
 ing shipping and manufacture (especially of cheap 
 goods), by limiting the need of home agriculture, 
 and by creating great banking and commercial 
 interests, and great civil, military, and naval services. 
 Although the Colonies have been allowed to raise 
 a large part of their revenue by means of 
 
280 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vi. 
 
 protective duties on British goods, the imperial 
 connection has helped, on the whole, to keep us 
 faithful to Free Trade, largely in consideration 
 for our interests and duties in India. 
 
 III. The Completion of Free Trade 
 
 Free Trade was not, and could not be, the work 
 of a day, or of one man. When Huskisson made 
 bis first attack upon the tariff in 1824, it was said 
 to include no less than 1500 Customs items. Little 
 more was done until 1842. There were then 1150 
 items in the lists of dutiable goods ; and what 
 particularly moved Peel was the discovery that 
 nine commodities yielded six-sevenths of the 
 total receipts, while many of the other duties 
 did not pay the cost of collection. Peel's working 
 principles were to abolish all prohibitions, to 
 reduce duties on raw materials to a nominal figure, 
 and those on manufactures to an average of about 
 twenty per cent. The items so dealt with in 1842 
 numbered 750. The result was so satisfactory 
 that, three years later, 430 duties, chiefly on raw 
 materials, were abolished outright, while many 
 others were again reduced. The tax on machinery 
 was now removed ; the coal, glass, and window 
 taxes soon followed. In 1844, for the first time 
 for years, there was a substantial surplus. " The 
 seeming paradox that a larger revenue might be 
 obtained from smaller duties had turned out," 
 as Sir Stafford Northcote said, "to be the simple 
 
§ m.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 281 
 
 expression of an economical law which appeared 
 capable of more extensive application than it 
 had yet received." The repeal of the Corn Law, 
 which became fully operative in 1849, carried the 
 movement far forward, for it marked the definite 
 establishment of the principle of a tariff for revenue 
 only. It remained for William Ewart Gladstone 
 to complete the work. 
 
 This was done by Gladstone, as Chancellor of 
 the Exchequer successively in the Aberdeen and 
 Palmerston Ministries, in his famous budgets of 
 1853 and 1860. The first did not fully embody 
 the Free Trade doctrine, for it avowedly left 
 finished manufactures subject to duties of about 
 ten per cent. But 120 duties were altogether 
 abolished, and 140 were reduced, these including 
 tea, cocoa, raisins, butter, and cheese. The soap 
 tax was removed, and the advertisement and 
 newspaper stamp-duties were reduced. Had it 
 not been for the Crimean War, which involved a 
 direct expenditure of seventy-seven millions sterling 
 (forty-two millions of this being added to the 
 Debt), the task of reform would have been pursued 
 more quickly. The budget of 1860 reduced the 
 four hundred remaining tariff items to about 
 fifty. Food was altogether freed, but for duties 
 on tea, cocoa, and currants, necessary for revenue. 
 All protective and differential imposts disap- 
 peared ; and not least among the resulting 
 benefits was that of a simple and economic 
 Customs system. 
 
282 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vi. 
 
 This final change was aided and consecrated 
 by the Commercial Treaty of 1860 with France, 
 negotiated by Cobden. The treaty was only in 
 form a bargain ; actually, it embodied the simul- 
 taneous resolve of two sympathetic Governments 
 to enter upon a more liberal course of policy. 
 The new departure in France, and the visible success 
 of British Free Trade, produced all over Europe 
 a general approximation toward the same fiscal 
 principles ; and this tendency, and the network 
 of " most favoured nation " treaties in which it 
 was expressed, held till about 1876. The complete 
 abolition of the Navigation Laws, in the foreign 
 trade in 1849, and in the coasting trade in 1854, 
 was also copied by Holland and other States ; 
 while the extension of tariff areas, especially those 
 of the German ZoUverein and of united Italy, 
 represented a further stimulus to exchange. No 
 small part of the prodigious expansion of British 
 commerce in the 'fifties and 'sixties was due to the 
 expansion, interrupted as it was, of the conunerce 
 of other European countries, in which the new 
 methods of production and transport were now 
 being rapidly introduced, French exports, for 
 instance, rose from £90 millions in 1859 to £123 
 millions in 1869, and French imports from £65 to 
 £126 millions. 
 
 Before we refer more particularly to the advance 
 of British trade in this period, two other disturbing 
 influences must be noted. The first arose from 
 the discovery of gold in California in 1847 and in 
 
§ ni.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 283 
 
 Australia in 1851 ; the second was exhibited in the 
 crises of 1857 and 1866. 
 
 The belief that the gold supply has been the deter- 
 mining cause of the extensive fluctuations of prices 
 in the latter half of the nineteenth century has re- 
 cently been subjected to a powerful challenge. ^ The 
 question is too complex for discussion here ; but it 
 will be safe to say that the supply of gold had a rela- 
 tively more considerable influence at the beginning 
 than at the end of the period, when collective credit- 
 trading had attained unprecedented dimensions and 
 stability. The increase of the average annual pro- 
 duction of gold from 1,760,500 oz. in the years 
 1841-50 to 6,350,180 oz. in 1851-5, even if we 
 allow for the absorption of some part of the output 
 in the arts, must have reflected itself to some 
 extent in a higher price of commodities. Mr Hirst 
 thus summarizes the relation of the two factors ^ : 
 " Taking wholesale prices as the measure of pur- 
 chasing power, we find that, up to the middle of the 
 century, the general level of prices fell at the rate 
 of a little over 1 per cent, a year, the world's pro- 
 duction of gold being £5,140,000 a year. In the 
 period from 1850 to 1873, prices rose at the rate 
 of about "35 per cent, a year, gold production rising 
 to £25,000,000 a year. In the twenty years or so 
 following 1873, gold production fell off, while the 
 demand for it increased, owing to the adoption of 
 the gold standard by many leading commercial 
 
 » Oold, Prices, and Wages, by J. A. Hobson, 1913. 
 « Hirst's Porter, pp. 54-5. 
 
284 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vi. 
 
 countries The annual production of the precious 
 metals fell to £24,500,000, while prices fell away 
 by about 1"61 per cent, a year. From 1896 to 
 1905, the average annual output was about 
 £58,100,000 a year, and prices rose about 1*85 
 per cent, each year. ... In the first of the periods, 
 the worker secured only a very slight advantage 
 by reason of the fall in prices, for the stringent 
 Corn Law prevented the price of bread from falling 
 with other commodities. In the second period, 
 the gold discoveries affected prejudicially the 
 position of the receiver of a fixed income, but the 
 stimulus to trade and the improvements in the 
 methods of production which were then being 
 made caused wages to increase far more rapidly. 
 In the third period, the wage-earner benefited 
 from falling prices as well as from rising wages ; 
 whilst in the last decade or so, there has been a 
 halt in conditions, owing to the upward tendency 
 of prices at a time when wages are not rising as 
 fast as hitherto." Since the last date referred to, 
 1905, there has been a further rise of prices, and 
 an increase of gold output to about £90 millions 
 a year.^ 
 
 The period with which we are dealing was, 
 then, characterized by a strong and very varied 
 stimulation of trade, due to the improvement of its 
 
 1 The price-standard here used is, of course, not impeccable ; it 
 does not include rent and some other important items in the normal 
 family expenditure, and wholesale prices are not a perfect repre- 
 sentation of retail payments. For various index-numbers, see 
 Appendix IV. 
 
§ m.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 285 
 
 instruments (manufacturing machinery, railways, 
 steamships, and jfuller currency), their freer opera- 
 tion under the new fiscal system, and the increased 
 consuming power both at home and abroad. So 
 great was the expansion that, despite the poor 
 organization of labour, wages advanced; and the 
 losses of the Crimean War and a bad harvest in 
 1853 were borne with comparative ease. The 
 lessons of the past were still unlearned. Freedom 
 is only one of the conditions of healthy activity, 
 whether in commerce or in other walks of life ; 
 the other main condition, discipline, was nowhere 
 met. Employers who spoke unctuously of the 
 need of disciplining the common people recognised 
 no need of disciplining their own greed of immediate 
 gain. Respectable burghers, fully assured of their 
 place in time and eternity, men and women whose 
 virtue forbade them to bet on horses or to stake 
 money on cards, were easily induced to gamble 
 in stocks and shares. In America, the spirit of 
 combat and speculation took extremer forms. 
 It was there the reaction and panic began, in 
 August 1857. Two months later, while the Eastern 
 trade lay under the cloud of the China War and 
 the Indian Mutiny, England felt this new blow. 
 The American houses suffered first, then the 
 banks dealing specially with the American trade 
 (very large quantities of United States railway 
 shares were already held in this country), and, 
 finally, the general body of manufacturers and the 
 commercial classes. The Bank rate having been 
 
286 MODERN ENGLAND [CHAt. VI. 
 
 raised to 10 per cent, without effect, the Bank 
 Act of 1844 1 was suspended, and an over-issue of 
 two millions sterling allowed. Many ironworks 
 and collieries were stopped ; scores of thousands 
 of workmen were discharged, and others were 
 subjected to heavy reductions of wages. From 
 England the shock passed to France, Germany, 
 Austria, Belgium, Italy, and Scandinavia ; it was 
 even felt in China, Australia, and South America. 
 The world-market had asserted itself. 
 
 The recovery was very slow, and it had only 
 well begun when the American Civil War broke 
 out. By this time, there were 2,887 cotton factories 
 in the United Kingdom, with 30 million spindles 
 and 400,000 power looms, employing nearly half 
 a million hands, and consuming between 40,000 
 and 50,000 bales of raw cotton per week, 85 per 
 cent, of which came from the Southern States. 
 When the North established its blockade, this 
 supply was decimated ; and, although India gave 
 some compensation, the total import fell in 1862 
 to a half, and it was not till 1866 that the former 
 total was reached. This meant temporary rum 
 for Lancashire. Mills were gradually closed, or 
 
 ' This Act had renewed the Bank charter for ten years, and con- 
 tinued the exclusive privilege of issuing paper money within sixty 
 miles round London ; but the ordinary banking and the note issue 
 departments were separated, and the issue was restricted to £14 
 millions over the actual bullion held. No new banks could issue 
 notes ; otherwise more freedom was given to joint-stock banks. 
 It was at this time that the great development of the use of cheques, 
 one of the most useful of modern business devices, began. 
 
§ m.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 287 
 
 put upon short-time ; and, in December 1862, 
 half a miUion persons were dependent on charity. 
 The number was reduced to 256,000 in the follow- 
 ing June, and to 180,000 by the end of 1863. A 
 national subscription for relief reached the noble 
 figure of £2,735,000 ; the number of paupers, 
 out-door and indoor, in England and Wales, never- 
 theless rose from 884,000 in 1860 to over a million 
 in 1864. The cotton famine was estimated to 
 have cost Lancashire, in loss of capital and wages, 
 about £12| millions sterling. The operatives 
 showed splendid courage in this desperate emer- 
 gency, and no disturbance of any kind broke their 
 stoical silence. It was at this time that the great 
 manufacturers and merchants, organized in the 
 Cotton Supply Association, began the search for 
 new supplies of raw material which has never 
 since ceased. 
 
 Years passed before the trade recovered. The 
 war had hit it at the height of its prosperity, 
 when much new capital — ^partly co-operative — 
 was being invested. The Surat and other commoner 
 kinds of cotton now introduced were more difficult 
 to work ; this led to a temporary reduction of the 
 speed of machinery, and to various expedients for 
 keeping the stuff moist during manufacture, to 
 the grave injury of the health of the workers during 
 the next thirty years. The latter result would, 
 perhaps, have been even more marked, but that 
 the cotton-mill population was considerably changed 
 by the crisis. There were, in 1863, 34,000 fewer 
 
288 MODERN ENGLAND [chap, vi, 
 
 operatives than in the previous year. The greater 
 part of these had emigrated. They had to be 
 gradually replaced, and the new hands could not 
 be so highly skilled. Fewer children were employed 
 henceforth ; and the pressure of the factory in- 
 spectors' work was transferred from the regulation 
 of hours to the attack upon unhealthy conditions, 
 especially excessive dust and moisture. The ex- 
 pensiveness of raw material (cotton ran up from 
 6d. to 28d, per lb.) stimulated the construction 
 and use of more perfect machinery, particularly 
 for the spinning of the new and difficult fibres. 
 Thus, the system of " ring spinning " — which 
 eased the drag upon the yarn, and made is possible 
 to drive the spindle at speeds (such as 13,000 
 revolutions a minute) impracticable with the old 
 fliers — although invented in 1830, only now came 
 into common use in England. Other notable 
 inventions had been the weft-stop motion (1841), 
 Howe's sewing-machine (184.6), Holden's square- 
 combing machine (1848), the double-acting 
 Jacquard loom, and Donisthorpe and Lister's wool- 
 combing machine (1849). Heilmann'-? cotton- 
 combing machine, which automatically separated 
 the long fibres necessary for fine spinning, first 
 shown at the Exhibition of 1851, now proved of 
 great importance. 
 
 The interactions of economic life might be almost 
 endlessly illustrated in connection with such a 
 crisis as that of the cotton famine. It was, for 
 instance, a great harvest-time for the other textile 
 
§ m.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 289 
 
 trades. Just as, during the Crimean War, jute 
 had gained by the cutting-oft of the flax supplies 
 of the linen manufacture, so now woollen, linen, 
 and flax benefited by the stoppage of cotton. 
 While Lancashire hungered, the mills of Ulster 
 did a roaring business. Australia and the Cape 
 were just becoming our chief sources of supply for 
 the great industries of the West Riding ; South 
 America and New Zealand were also beginning to 
 send cargoes of wool with cargoes of frozen mutton. 
 At the opening of the century, nine-tenths of our 
 wool had come from the native farmer ; fifty years 
 later, two-thirds was imported. The consumption 
 in the United Kingdom rose from 181 million lbs. 
 in 1850 to 364 million ISs. in 1870. The export 
 of woollen and worsted goods — ^which had fallen 
 from £9-3 millions in 1815 to £5-3 millions in 1840, 
 rose to £8 "5 millions in 1850, and then sprang to 
 £12-1 millions in 1860, and £21-6 millions in 1870. 
 The lowering of French duties under the Treaty of 
 1860 was a factor in this expansion, but the 
 American War was chiefly responsible. 
 
 The financial collapse of 1866, though the way 
 was prepared by the cotton crisis, is rather to be 
 attributed to the old plague of wild speculation, 
 assisted by the unsoundness of many of the banking 
 and financial companies created under the Limited 
 Liability Companies Act of 1862. During the 
 autunrn of 1865, the pressure of high bank rates 
 began to be felt. In the following spring, the 
 failure of the Joint-Stock Discount Company and 
 
290 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vi. 
 
 Barned's Bank, Liverpool, started a panic. On 
 May 9, the Bank of England put up its rate to 
 9 per cent. ; and on the next day the great firm 
 of Overend, Gurney, & Co., failed, with liabilities 
 amounting to ten millions sterling. Business came 
 to a standstill, and the rush to realise deposits 
 threatened a still larger disaster. For the third 
 and last time, the Bank Act was suspended^ and 
 five million pounds of uncovered notes were issued. 
 The fever then gradually subsided. 
 
 Nothing is more characteristic of this period, or 
 more significant of the material progress made, 
 than that the production of coal was doubled in 
 twenty years (56 million tons in 1850, 110 million 
 tons in 1870). In the mind's eye. South Lanca- 
 shire, West Yorkshire, South Wales, the Potteries 
 seem to have been covered with a permanent pall of 
 black smoke. Perfect combustion was regarded 
 as belonging to Utopia. Gas and oU power were 
 hardly thought of ; thirty years after the first 
 experiments in electro-magnetic and electro-static 
 induction, electrical power was known only in the 
 laboratory. It was the height of the Coal Age. In 
 this later day, when four-fifths of the weight of 
 British exports consist of coal, the importance of 
 this outward freight to the growth of the shipping 
 trade is well understood. Fifty years ago, the 
 proportion of the output exported was much 
 smaller ; but it was already a material considera- 
 tion to the " tramp " steamers that were beginning 
 to dispossess the sailing ship. The development 
 
§ m.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 291 
 
 of the iron-trade closely followed that of the coal 
 supply. Between 1850 and 1870, the world's 
 production of pig-iron was more than doubled, 
 rising from five to nearly twelve million tons, of 
 which Great Britain contributed a half, or more. 
 
 In this interval, the history of the modern steel 
 manufacture was opened. The discovery in 1856, 
 by Sir Henry Bessemer, of the " converter " 
 process, by which molten iron is cleared of all 
 carbon by a blast of air being blown through it, 
 and sufficient carbon is then added for perfect 
 conversion into steel, was the first chapter of this 
 immense change. It was soon possible, by this 
 method, to supply steel rails at lower prices than 
 those of wrought iron, and infinitely more durable 
 in quality. Ten years later, the Siemens brothers 
 invented the " open-hearth " process of more 
 complete combustion, by which varying degrees of 
 hardness may be given to the metal. In 1879, a 
 still more considerable advance was made by 
 the " basic " process discovered by Snelus, and 
 practically applied by Messrs Thomas & Gilchrist, 
 whereby phosphorus is removed from ores that 
 had been hitherto unusable, while the slag has a 
 manure value. 
 
 In two directions, especially, great results rapidly 
 followed this series of discoveries. The export 
 of machinery and mUl-work, which in 1855 but 
 little exceeded two millions sterling in value, in 
 1875 passed nine millions. The amount of ship- 
 building rose from 133,695 tons in 1850 to 342,706 
 
292 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vi. 
 
 tons in 1870. The construction of engines and 
 boilers was greatly improved. Docks and harbours 
 were extended, and many new ocean steamship 
 lines were established, among them those of the 
 Inman (1850), Allan (1852), Union (1853), British 
 India (1855), Anchor (1856), Guion (1866), and 
 British and African Companies. Hardly less 
 marked was the improvement of railway engines, 
 permanent way, and organization, and of city 
 communications, exemplified in the opening of 
 the Metropolitan Underground Railway in 1863. 
 Rapid transit by land and sea brought ever more 
 varied and cheaper food supplies. This conmierce 
 led in turn to the growth and better equipment 
 of town markets, on the one hand ; on the other to 
 the invention of methods of refrigeration and cold 
 storage, and hence to a great expansion of the fish, 
 game, and meat trades. Kirk's process of refrige- 
 ration (1862), and the introduction of Australian 
 tinned meat (1865), deserve mention here. 
 
 While the stimulating influence of trade upon 
 trade, and community upon community, was receiv- 
 ing such illustrations as these, a host of scientific men, 
 cheered in their laboratories by a general effusion 
 of interest in physical investigation, were pointing 
 the way to fresh conquests. Between the opening 
 of the College of Chemistry in 1845 and Mendeleeff's 
 classification of the elements according to a system 
 of periodicity in 1869, immense progress was made 
 both on the theoretic side and in the application of 
 the new knowledge of the constitution of matter. 
 
§ in.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 293 
 
 At a long interval, Faraday's discovery of benzene, 
 in 1826, was followed by the production of aniline 
 from coal tar, the formation of anthracene and 
 naphthalene, and (by W. H. Perkin between 1856 
 and 1866) of artificial mauve and alizarin. During 
 the 'seventies, the manufacture of aniline dyes 
 became an important branch of industry, and — as 
 with the Thomas-Gilchrist steel process — even 
 more important in Germany and France than in 
 this country. With the introduction of collodion in 
 1851, and still more with the introduction of the 
 bromo-gelatine plate twenty years later, photo- 
 graphy took its great and variously useful place 
 among the mechanical arts. Many improvements 
 were also made in the sulphuric acid, soda, and 
 chemical manure manufactures centring in the 
 malodorous vicinities of Runcorn, Widnes, St 
 Helens, and Northwich. While some of the old 
 metal industries stagnated or decayed, new metals, 
 aluminium, nickel, and manganese, in particular, 
 came into use. 
 
 England herself naturally gained the first and 
 greatest benefit from these new activities. Industrial 
 life was braced at every point. Vast fortunes were 
 made, and no small part of them was spent in 
 bettering the social amenities, public and private. 
 Articles of food and clothing, books, pictures, 
 furniture, that had hitherto been impossible 
 luxuries, began to find their way into the homes 
 of the working people. The result which alone we 
 can exactly measure lies in the expansion of foreign 
 
294 MODERN ENGLAND [coap. vi. 
 
 trade. Between 1850 and 1870, the exports of 
 British produce increased in value from £71 to 
 £199 millions. The dep6t trade alone grew to be 
 larger than our whole foreign commerce a gene- 
 ration before, the exports of foreign and colonial 
 produce rising from £18 to £44 millions. Neces- 
 sarily, the payment received for these exports, 
 for shipping services, and for the ever greater 
 volume of foreign investments, rose in proportion 
 — ^from £150 to £303 millions of imports. The 
 net tonnage of vessels registered at Lloyd's in- 
 creased in the same period from 3 "5 to 5 '7 million 
 tons, a half of this difference being represented 
 by steam and a half by sailing ships. These figures, 
 however, do poor justice to the growth of sea- 
 traffic, because voyages and dock services were 
 being constantly speeded-up, so that the actual 
 amount of shipping business was multiplied nearly 
 threefold in the twenty years. 
 . If there had ever been, since the days of Watt 
 and Stephenson, any doubt of England's destiny, 
 it was now resolved. As Mr Smiles and the news- 
 papers proudly proclaimed, she was pre-eminently 
 the workshop of the world. But that this triumph 
 of energy had not brought heaven down to British 
 earth was plainly evident to any who would look 
 around them. 
 
§ IV.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 295 
 
 IV. Round with the Factory Inspectors 
 
 The change of heart in the latter half of the 
 nineteenth century is evidenced in the enormous 
 mass of information, official and voluntary, with 
 regard to the condition of the people. Of this 
 material, no one part, perhaps, is more valuable 
 than the periodical reports of H.M. Inspectors of 
 Factories (and, in the later years, of Workshops). 
 These good men are ceaselessly spying out the land ; 
 their daily task takes them into great barracks 
 where thousands of operatives work under a rule 
 comparatively enlightened and humane, and into 
 holes and corners where masters, themselves poor 
 and ignorant, " sweat " a few unfortunate women 
 and children. Factory legislation is to-day obeyed 
 automatically ; evasions are not common, and few 
 prosecutions are necessary. It was not so in the 
 beginning. The laws had passed through Par- 
 liament with difficulty ; they had been opposed 
 by men like Hume and Bright, and others bearing 
 respected names, on the strength of a political 
 economy carrying general assent among educated 
 people. They had been narrowly limited in their 
 extent ; and this gave them an invidious character, 
 for why should the large cotton factory be penalized, 
 when the petty workshop, with its worse evils, 
 was untouched ? Heroically did the inspectors 
 grapple with their difficult task. Sometimes they 
 were defied, often obstructed, nearly always viewed 
 with antipathy ; but they held on, justified them- 
 
29e MODEBN ENGLAND [cHA^- Vl- 
 
 ;„ reports of thrilling interest, and won 
 selves i^^'-^P^^^ power. I have said that the 
 more m^ ^i^ion of real life killed the laisser-faire 
 pWlosophy. These men began their work, no 
 doubt, with the average prejudice of their time 
 against "State interference." What they saw 
 gave a new turn to their thoughts ; and two cir- 
 cumstances confirmed it. The first was the good 
 employer's objection to the ways of the bad 
 employer ; the second, the operatives' discovery 
 that they had at last obtained an impartial and a 
 powerful friend. 
 
 A glance through the Factory Inspectors' Reports 
 
 from 1850 to 1885 will give us a thousand realistic 
 details of working-class life. We shall see, in this 
 panorama of national industry, the domain of 
 machinery and large capital constantly extending, 
 the division of labour and the discovery of new 
 processes ever advancing. Infinite pains have yet 
 to be endured ; but a hope has faintly dawned. 
 The spirit of the industrial world is no longer one of 
 unchallenged anarchy. The State has been brou^t 
 to recognize that there is a national interest in the 
 health of working women and children ; from 
 this point, it must go forward to the full recognition 
 of its positive duties. But the beginning is very 
 modest. 
 
 For seventeen years, four inspectors had been 
 endeavouring to keep the cotton, woollen, worsted, 
 hemp, flax, tow, linen, and silk mills of the kingdom 
 under their eyes. Amid the rejoicing of the factory 
 
§ IV.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 297 
 
 districts, the Act of 1847 had proclaimed (as from 
 May 1848) a ten hours' day for women and young 
 persons. While the trade crisis lasted, there was 
 no great objection to this limit ; but, when the 
 depression passed, employers began to introduce 
 a system of relay working, "shuffling the hands 
 about," says Inspector Howell, "and shifting the 
 hours of work and of rest for different individuals 
 throughout the day, so that you may never have 
 one complete set of hands working together in the 
 same room at the same time." This made the 
 inspectorial prevention of over-working practi- 
 cally impossible. The system was denounced by 
 Inspector Leonard Horner as " pernicious and 
 unjust," " pernicious from the danger to which 
 the morals of these persons were exposed during 
 their hours of forced idleness, and unjust because 
 they were paid for ten hours only while they 
 were, in fact, at the disposal of their employers 
 for 13^ hours." The Law Officers of the Crown 
 declared the relay system to be illegal, but magis- 
 trates gave differing decisions. The Home Office 
 was opposed to strong action ; the inspectors were 
 divided. At last, a test case was taken, and the 
 system was pronounced legal. The Short Time 
 Committees thereupon renewed their agitation ; 
 and in 1850 an Act was obtained establishing a 
 uniform working day, that is to say, the hours of 
 work for women and young persons must come 
 within a twelve hours' limit — ^from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., 
 or from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. — allowing 1^ hours for 
 
298 MODERN ENGLAND [ohap. vi. 
 
 meals, and on Saturday work must cease at 2 p.m. 
 Although it extended the working week by two 
 hours, this was a considerable boon. Curiously, 
 enough, however, children were still liable to 
 employment between 5.30 a.m. and 8.30 p.m., the 
 Act of 1847 having applied only to women and 
 young persons ; and a return obtained in July 
 1850 showed that, in 257 factories, 3742 children 
 were kept at work assisting the adult men after 
 the women and young persons had left the mills. 
 Mr R. J. Saunders speaks of 1667 children being 
 employed in one district from 2 p.m. to 8.30 p.m. 
 without a stop for meals. This anomaly was rec- 
 tified in 1853, when an Act, passed at the instance 
 of Palmerston, brought children within the uniform 
 twelve-hours day, without altering the length of their 
 hours — 6| every day, or 10 hours on three alternate 
 days. 
 
 Captain Kincaid gives as " a fair sample of the 
 whole " in his district the case of a boy ten years 
 of age in a Dundee factory who was kept " wind- 
 ing " for his father from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., his 
 weekly earnings being fourteen pence. This, of 
 course, was illegal ; evasion of the law was very 
 common, one method being the presentation of 
 forged age certificates. The Act of 1844 had made 
 it possible to put down the more disgraceful 
 attempts at defiance ; but the law was very weak. 
 " Improvement in the sanitary condition of mills 
 can only be the subject of recommendation on the 
 part of the inspectors. With the exception of 
 
§ IV.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 299 
 
 two clauseS; one regarding lime-washing, and 
 another for the protection of workers in wet-spinning 
 flax-mills, the Acts contain no provision requiring 
 a matter obviously of the greatest importance for 
 the health of workpeople, congregated together 
 for more than ten hours a day, and this sometimes 
 in rooms heated to a high temperature, the air 
 impregnated with gross impurities." Factory 
 employment, it must be remembered, was being 
 continually extended : in 1838, there had been 
 95,000, in 1850 there were 164,000 operatives. 
 The employment of very small children had been 
 arrested ; but there were still 1550 children between 
 eleven and thirteen years of age working a ten- 
 hours day in silk mills alone. Full-grown women 
 only made seven shillings a week in power-loom 
 weaving at Glasgow, though this might rise, under 
 strong demand for labour, to ten shillings in some 
 factories. 
 
 In 1852, Mr Horner comments strongly on the 
 illegal over-working of women and children, and 
 especially " the wilful commission of the fraud by 
 persons of large property." In Glossopdale, for 
 instance, there had been an organised system of 
 disobedience. He gives a vivid account of a surprise 
 visit to a great mill employing thirteen hundred 
 hands. The inspector was ejected violently, amid 
 the yells of a mob of two or three hundred young 
 people, but returned with police support. The 
 blame for infractions of the law was usually put 
 on subordinates. A magistrate who had recently 
 
300 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vi. 
 
 tried a case became in turn himself defendant. 
 In 1853 Mr Horner complains again that the 
 penalties are altogether inadequate. It was found 
 that officers known in a neighbourhood could 
 not enforce the law at all, so that strangers had to 
 be brought in. Scouts were posted outside the 
 factories to give timely notice of an inspector's 
 arrival ; then the door would be fastened, the 
 engine stopped, and the gas turned low, while the 
 workers were let out by a back way. In the case 
 of a Mr James Greaves, of Oldham, " a gentleman 
 standing in a high position in society," the inspectors 
 found young persons hidden under parts of the 
 machinery, and a woman hidden in a basket. 
 Lord Palmerston might well believe that " bodily 
 activity, energy, and quick-sightedness are very 
 necessary in a detective service against habitual 
 and unscrupulous law-breakers." Still, " some- 
 thing attempted, something done," justified Mr 
 Horner in asking "the political economists who 
 predicted the ruin of our manufactures, if the 
 then-proposed restrictions of factory labour were 
 adopted," to look " fairly and candidly " at the 
 results. 
 
 One of the scandals of this period was the 
 increase of accidents in factories due to the in- 
 sufficient fencing of machinery. The Act of 1844 
 had required owners to fence all shafts and gearing, 
 but allowed a reference to arbitration if the in- 
 spectors asked for other machinery to be guarded. 
 Organized in a " Factory Law Amendment Associa- 
 
§ IV.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 301 
 
 tion," which in April 1855 became the " National 
 Association of Factory Occupiers " (Dickens 
 denounced it in Household Words as the " Associa- 
 tion for the Mangling of Operatives "), the em- 
 ployers began what looked very much like an 
 attempt to get the Factory Acts repealed, but 
 was ostensibly a protest against the fencing pro- 
 visions. On this point, they extorted in 1856 a 
 reactionary measure which placed mill gearing on 
 the same footing as machinery with regard to the 
 appeal to arbitration, and required fencing only 
 where women, young persons, and children were 
 liable to injury. This part of the law was not 
 strengthened until 1878, by which time hundreds 
 of operatives had suffered serious injury. 
 
 Open defiance of the regulations as to hours 
 grew infrequent ; but petty evasion, by turning 
 back the clock and similar devices, continued. 
 In 1857, Mr Howell reported " gross and general 
 violation of the law in the factories at Hyde, near 
 Manchester." In fact, the fines were so small 
 as not to weigh against the profits of overwork. 
 " The defects of the law," Mr Horner repeated 
 in the following year, " throw such obstacles in 
 the way of detection and conviction as to render 
 the inspectors nearly powerless." In 1860, there 
 was an organized immigration of young workers 
 from the rural districts into Lancashire. But, 
 generally, the employment of small children was 
 being restricted in the more highly developed 
 industries ; and the Cotton Famine of 1861-2 
 
302 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vi. 
 
 facilitated the whole work of the inspectors. Other 
 results of the American War were less favourable. 
 AVhUe scores of thousands of operatives were 
 unemployed, every one was surprised to hear of a 
 general improvement of health, and especially a 
 marked fall in the infant mortality. Afterwards^ 
 with the introduction of Eastern short-fibre cottons, 
 and of the practice of heavy sizing, a deplorable 
 increase of mill aUments, due to dust and heat, 
 was reported. As a rule, the inspectors lauded 
 the half-time system, without which children of 
 the factory class would have had little chance of 
 getting any education whatever. But the follow- 
 ing description of the lot of the Belfast half-timers, 
 in 1863, puts the matter in another light : " Living, 
 some of them, maybe, close to, but many a few 
 hiuidred yards away from the mill, they must rise 
 during all states of weather, both winter and 
 summer, at 5.45 a.m. at the latest, to be at the 
 mill and at work by 6. They then work from 6 
 to breakfast-time (8), go home to breakfast, return 
 at 8.45, and work till 12 in a moist and heated 
 atmosphere, with the thermometer often at 84° 
 Fahrenheit, and with the spindles revolving at the 
 rate of four to five thousand times a minute. At 
 12, they are permitted to leave the mill, go home, 
 ' take a piece,' i.e. a morsel of treacle and bread, 
 or dry bread in their hands, eating it as they go, 
 and hurry to school, where they remain till 3, 
 They then go home to dinner, i.e. to potatoes and 
 buttermilk when they can get it, often prepared 
 
§ IV.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 303 
 
 for them by a child younger than themselves 
 because the mother is working in the factory, or 
 dry bread again ; the day ending with another 
 meal of thin coffee, or red herring, as their circum- 
 stances will permit." 
 
 It had been commonly supposed up to this 
 time that there was something peculiarly evil in 
 textile factory employment that called for inter- 
 ference, at least for the protection of women and 
 children. The fact is that the textile industries 
 were first regulated because their size and concen- 
 tration made the police process relatively easy. 
 Of the conditions in scores of other manufactures 
 comparatively little was known until, the success 
 of this experiment fairly proved, the inspectors 
 began to look round for new lands to conquer. 
 The extension of the Acts to one business after 
 another was to be a slow and difficult task ; but 
 it was supported by the gathering evidence of 
 the Registrar-General's Reports, and of voluntary 
 inquiry, that overwork, bad sanitation, and a 
 shocking infant mortality prevailed not in one 
 direction only, but throughout industrial Britain. 
 Every step taken made the next step easier, not 
 only because experience removed fears and showed 
 the line of practicable advance, but because, the 
 larger the number of businesses under the law, the 
 nearer was the approach to equal justice. Most 
 influential of all, however, was the discovery — 
 anticipated in Macaulay's speech of 1848, but still 
 vastly surprising to almost every employer — ^that 
 
304 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vi. 
 
 shorter hours do not necessarily mean a smaller, 
 and may mean a larger, output. In the more 
 highly developed machine trades, this conclusion 
 was reinforced by the realization that the constant 
 improvement of machinery demanded an increasing 
 skill and vitality on the part of the operatives. 
 In trades peculiarly subject to irregularity, again, 
 it was found that, extra pay notwithstanding^ 
 overpressure produced much spoiled work, while 
 the intervals of underpressure represented a serious 
 loss of time. Such irregularity was usually the 
 result of fear of competition ; and the good employer 
 was now glad that an external agency should help 
 to establish a healthier system. 
 
 The calico print-works are a case in point. All 
 that Lord Ashley could get, in the Print Works 
 Act of 1845, was the prohibition of the employment 
 of children under eight years old, and of night 
 work in the case of children under thirteen and 
 women, while children under thirteen were to 
 attend school on thirty days in each half-year. 
 Bleach and dye works were exempted from this 
 Act precisely because irregularity was supposed 
 there to be unavoidable. In subsequent years, 
 several inquiries were held, with the result of 
 showing that boys of twelve often worked all 
 night, and girls for fifteen and sixteen hours for 
 months at a time, sometimes for eighteen hours 
 a day, in over-heated air. At length, in 1860, 
 bleach and dye works (except open-air bleaching) 
 were placed imder the Factory Acts ; and the 
 
§ IV.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 305 
 
 debates in the Commons were marked by a plain 
 confession by Mr Roebuck and Sir James Graham 
 of the mistakes they had formerly made in oppos- 
 ing factory legislation. After yet another inquiry, 
 the various Acts relating to print works and bleach 
 and dye works were consolidated, in 1870, some 
 special allowance being still made, however, for 
 overtime. 
 
 Another piece of special legislation — ^the Lace 
 Works Act of 1861 — ^touched the margin of a yet 
 larger and more difficult problem, that of home 
 work. Some hand-machines were still used in 
 private houses, a survival which, it was thought, 
 might be ignored, provided that factory conditions 
 were not made too rigorous. Moreover, some parts 
 of the factory work subsidiary to the power-machine 
 — ^the winding of the bobbins, and the dressing 
 and finishing of lace — might easily be transferred 
 to the neighbouring cottages if the limit of the 
 hours of children and women in the mills were 
 made too narrow. It is by the answer to argu- 
 mentative dilemmas like these that we can test 
 the spirit of a period. Twenty years earlier they 
 would have been fatal ; now they only weakened 
 somewhat the introduction of Factory Act con- 
 ditions in the lace trade. 
 
 The Factory Acts Extension Act of 1864 dis- 
 covered many compromises, some curious, some 
 merely squalid, between factory and home industry, 
 power and hand labour. Many cottage silk- 
 weavers in the Coventry district depended upon 
 
306 MODERN ENGLAM) [chap, VI. 
 
 the toil of little boys, who turned the machines 
 from morn to night. In the Potteries, it was 
 found that many operatives, working indepen- 
 dently, contracted to make articles at a certain 
 price, and hired their own assistants, while the 
 master found the shop and the material. Every- 
 where, machinery tended to produce a regularity 
 of work ; without it, there woidd be great fluctua- 
 tions both in orders and in the hours of work. 
 At this time, steam-power was rarely used ia 
 earthenware factories, the wheels being worked 
 " either by the hand or foot of a boy or a female. . . . 
 A boy sits in a sort of hole, or stands, to turn the 
 throwing wheel upon which the potter forms the 
 ware, or a woman stands at the potter's wheel 
 and turns it. Again, a woman stands upon a 
 treddle, and, by constantly jumping, gives motion 
 to the machine at which the tiu-ner finishes the 
 ware after it has been partially dried." " Wedg- 
 ing " — driving the air out of clay — ^was more 
 laborious still, " While the man smoked his pipe 
 at his ease, the child was hard at work, and the 
 length of the child's working day was much beyond 
 that of the man." Both the wedging and " bat- 
 ting " — ^the shaping process — could be, and occasion- 
 ally were, done by machinery ; but, in a community 
 on which the servile labour of women and small 
 children had been imposed as a necessity, what 
 would you have ? In the " stoves," where the 
 articles are dried, there was the further evil of a 
 hot, dust-laden air. 
 
§ IV.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 307 
 
 The Census of 1861 showed that there were 
 27,431 workers in the Staffordshire Potteries 
 (17,356 males and 10,075 females). Of these, 
 nearly six thousand were imder ten years of age, 
 and nearly five hundred were actually only five 
 years old. Of the " Five Towns," Longton was 
 reputedly worse than Hanley, Bm'slem, Stoke, 
 or Timstall, " whether for its imcleanly conditions, 
 the want of ventilation in its workshops, or as 
 being the most backward in general intelligence." 
 There was, said Inspector Baker, " no doubt 
 about the potters being physically a stunted race." 
 The children looked pinched and sallow. Hours of 
 work were very irregular, owing to fluctuation 
 of orders and the dissipation of heads of depart- 
 ments. In a trade where one process is closely 
 linked to another, disorganization or irregularity 
 in one part affects many consecutive workers. 
 The first attempt in the name of the State to bring 
 order and decency into this chaos revealed many 
 unhealthy conditions. In the slip-making rooms, 
 damp and steam caused a liability to asthma 
 and bronchitis. The flat-pressers, jigger-turners 
 (the jigger is the potter's wheel), and mould- 
 runners suffered from heat and dust. It was found 
 that, in 1864, 70 per cent, of the deaths of flat- 
 pressers in Longton, Fenton, Hanley, Stoke, and 
 Shelton, were due to phthisis and diseases of the 
 chest. The heat also led to over-drinking. Dr 
 Arlidge, whose researches into the causation of 
 industrial disease afterwards became famous, was 
 
308 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vi. 
 
 at this time senior physician of the North Stafford- 
 shire Hospital. His early conclusions as to the 
 excessive mortality among the potters had been 
 disputed ; but they were abundantly confirmed 
 by the investigations of the Factory inspectors. 
 The ravages of lead-glaze poison were beyond 
 doubt. " Among the patients of the North 
 Staffordshire Infirmary, the blue-line indication is 
 so common as almost to cease to be remarkable." 
 Most of the hands thus subject to colic and 
 paralysis were adult men, who were altogether 
 unprotected by the law, save that they were for- 
 bidden to eat in the workrooms. 
 
 While men, women, and children thus suffered 
 from crowding, hot and vitiated air, overwork, 
 insufficient and irregular food, the destruction of 
 home life was measured by an appalling infant 
 mortality. The inspectors' reports teem with 
 denunciation of cheap narcotics. They plead for 
 miodest reforms which have been generally secured 
 only in recent years, and pray for " the advent of 
 that time when life will be of more value in the 
 consideration of commercial economy than it now 
 appears to be." News-rooms were commended 
 by a Mayor of Stockport on the ground that, till 
 then" wives were able to stay at home, husbands 
 could not find any comfort there. The moral 
 condition of the Potteries was rather that of 
 neglect and squalor than of vice. Prostitution 
 was uncommon ; but there was much drunkenness, 
 recklessness, and ignorance. Ninety per cent, of 
 
§ IV.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 309 
 
 the children never went to school, and knew little 
 of discipline, instruction, or home comfort. " It 
 appears to me," says Mr Baker, " that the Potteries 
 have been but another unit in the mischief which 
 arises out of the absorption of all the labourers' 
 time in the production of that wealth by which 
 we are to become commercially great at the cost 
 of nearly every religious, moral, and intellectual 
 obligation." When the inspectors began in 1864-5 
 to introduce the half-time education system, 
 all the prejudices and objections, now dead in 
 the textUe districts, had to be fought over again, 
 and with them a good deal of parental apathy and 
 greed. When, in 1864, Mrs Adam Clarke started 
 her " nursery schools " in Longton, she found 
 all her experience at fault " in face of the heathen 
 ignorance of the parents, the utter absence of all 
 knowledge of household duties and management 
 among the women, and the appalling neglect 
 and suffering among the infants and very young 
 children." It is a state of society not inaptly 
 compared by one of the inspectors to " a locomotive 
 engine, with steam up, that has been started by 
 the hand of mischief, without a driver, and runs 
 away, knocking aside all the minor obstacles it 
 meets with, and, if not self-overthrown, stopping 
 only when either its fuel or its water is exhausted." 
 So rose the protest of humanity against the 
 wild riot of laisser-faire industrialism. When the 
 half-time provision first brought the children of 
 the Potteries into school, it was found that half 
 
310 MODERN ENGLAND [chap, vi 
 
 of them knew no more than the alphabet, and 
 94 per cent, were in a condition of general ignorance. 
 At last, in a small way, the schoolmaster was at 
 work. The large employer became a real cap- 
 tain of industry, for the Act gave him power to 
 impose, with the approval of the Home Office, rules 
 of ventilation and cleanliness upon operatives> 
 many of whom were themselves petty employers. 
 Gradually, machinery was introduced in place of 
 child labour ; improved " stoves " and " power 
 jiggers " came into use. Employers were sur- 
 prised at the increase of efficiency in their hands ; 
 and by the end of 1865, the inspectors could record 
 this vindication of the Act : 
 
 " It has white- washed and cleansed upwards of 200 
 workshops after a period of abstinence from any such 
 cleaning in many cases of twenty years, and in some entirely, 
 in which were employed 27,878 artizans, hitherto breathing, 
 through protracted days and often nights of labour, a 
 mephitic atmosphere, and which rendered an otherwise 
 comparatively innocuous occupation pregnant with disease 
 and death. It has greatly multiplied the means of ventila- 
 tion, and has even considerably reduced the temperature 
 of the stoves themselves, with a considerable saving of fuel 
 and with a readier effect on the ware. It has limited the 
 hours of female, adolescent, and infant labour by a very 
 considerable percentage over the ordinary and extraordinary 
 hours of labour of preceding times without diminishing 
 production, and with but a small temporary diminution 
 of the rate of wages. It has safely and usefully placed 
 upwards of 1600 children, most of them never at a day- 
 school before, in some of the best schools in the kingdom, with 
 
§ IV.] THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP 311 
 
 a moral and intellectual benefit of which, we cannot estimate 
 the value ; and it is reducing gradually by the gentlest 
 measures the insubordination of uncontrolled power to 
 the discipline of obedience. In the homes of the people, too, 
 there are higher perceptions forming ; ideas of domestic 
 enjoyments and of the social relations of life. Can there 
 be greater encouragement than these results show to 
 induce the legislature to carry the same work into other 
 trades in districts where it is even still more requisite ? " 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE LIBERAL STATE. (1867-1885) 
 
 I. TowARB Democracy 
 
 The Englishman's nature is to do first, to think 
 afterwards ; and he is generally surer of what he 
 has done than of what he has thought. We are 
 not an intellectually speculative race. The scorn 
 of theory is written all over our political history. 
 " Give me facts, feed me on facts," is a genuine 
 cry of the national heart. There have been 
 exceptions. In earlier chapters I have spoken of 
 the vogue of the twin doctrines of Surplus Popula- 
 tion and Laisser Faire ; but even there the real 
 force lay in the facts behind the doctrine. The 
 dominant feature of British public life has been the 
 growth not of philosophic schools, but of political 
 parties and social expedients. We have had no 
 Rousseau or Condorcet, no Marx, no List, no Henry 
 George, no Tolstoy. Our parties express a differ- 
 ence of temper and interest rather than of principle 
 — Whence their loose governance and frequent trans- 
 formation. Simple, clear-cut dogma is not favoured 
 by this moist, mild climate. The business of 
 public life Tgoes on amid a welter of apparently 
 
 812 
 
§ I.] THE LIBERAL STATE 313 
 
 incompatible ideas — very old ideas perpetually 
 modified — of which now one, now another, is 
 seized upon in a frankly utilitarian spirit. Many 
 of them have been dragged into politics from the 
 spheres of morals and science. Godwin's extra- 
 ordinary faith in the rapid perfectibility of ordinary 
 men had a powerful effect in the last years of 
 the eighteenth century, left strong traces in the 
 minds of the Radicals of the next generation, and 
 then disappeared. The rise of chemistry and 
 physics strongly affected political life. Opposite 
 deductions were confidently drawn from Darwinian 
 biology — ^the principle of universal strife, and that 
 of a social organism. Orthodox Nonconformity, 
 Unitarianism, Positivism, and Secularism have at 
 times been important factors in political develop- 
 ment. This confusion of influences is not to be 
 explained as an intellectual process, but rather as a 
 reflection of the changing circumstances of society. 
 It is those circumstances with which we are here 
 concerned ; but, by a reversal of the method of 
 the political theorist, we may again, in passing, 
 use the process of thought to throw light upon the 
 process of fact — ^remembering that the latter is 
 the substantial reality, and guarding ourselves from 
 the folly of taking names at their face value. 
 
 These names, " Liberal " and " Liberalism," 
 " Conservative " and " Conservatism," which now 
 came into prominence, and appeared to divide the 
 nation into nearly equal halves, have a meaning 
 wider than that attributed to them by partisan 
 
314 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vn. 
 
 expositors. They represent something more than 
 a superficial difference ; but they rise out of the 
 same national character. The Victorian humourist 
 stated only a partial truth when he spoke of every 
 English child being born " either a little Liberal, 
 or else a little Conservative." Normal Englishmen 
 are both Liberal and Conservative, with a bias in 
 the one direction or the other according to their 
 age, or the subject in hand, or the exigencies 
 of the moment. This Liberal-Conservative temper 
 is probably very ancient ; but it had often been 
 submerged by civil war, and other crucial events 
 which re-arrayed the nation into camps bitterly 
 hostile. In particular, it had been submerged 
 by the struggles and sufferings of the period of 
 the Great War and the Corn Laws. Now it was 
 restored, and something more than restored, for 
 there was, for the first time in British history, 
 a general and marked emphasis upon the Liberal 
 idea. Conservatism was there, as it always will 
 be in British life, holding wide tracts of power 
 by privilege and talent. But, from 1867 to 1885, 
 an energy, which we may broadly call Liberal, 
 in literature and speculation, outweighed the 
 Conservatism prevalent in religion as clearly as 
 Gladstone outweighed Disraeli at Westminster. 
 All extremes were discredited — Chartism was as 
 dead as the Duke of Wellington. From the Court 
 to the poorest of the new constituencies, there radi- 
 ated a genial confidence in the profit of throwing 
 the bounds of freedom wider yet. 
 
§ I.] THE LIBERAL STATE 315 
 
 Many factors contributed to this milder temper. 
 Some were personal : Gladstone himself, although 
 he seemed to march from battle to battle with the 
 flashing eye of one of his dear Trojan chiefs, was a 
 most powerful contributor to the social truce, for 
 millions of common citizens, seeing political genius 
 of the first order at length enlisted in their behalf, 
 learned a new patience, and the Commons House 
 became a real forum of the nation. Gladstone, too, 
 like Mill, had the faculty, rarer then than now, 
 of growing with the times ; and it was not till his 
 death that the nakedness of the old Liberalism 
 became plainly visible. But the most important 
 factor of the Liberal temper of the 'sixties and the 
 'seventies was the continuance of material pros- 
 perity. The population of the United Kingdom 
 increased between 1861 and 1881 by nearly five 
 millions (despite a decrease of a million in Ireland) ; 
 yet work was abundant and regular, and wages 
 are estimated to have risen in this period by no 
 less than 30 per cent. What better proofs could 
 be desired of the validity of Liberalism ? 
 
 In its history, we find two elements, not always 
 easy to reconcile — ^the one (inspired mainly by 
 the English, American, and French Revolutions), 
 belief in popular sovereignty ; the other (expressed 
 more confidently by the great Liberal thinkers), 
 belief in the unfettered individual. The latter 
 was certainly the more influential, because it 
 appealed direct to the everyday self-interest of 
 the most virile in the community. A few Con- 
 
316 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vii. 
 
 servatives approached the advocates of popular 
 sovereignty — ^for instance, as we have seen, in the 
 agitation for the Factory Acts — ^not because they 
 accepted the secular argument, but because their 
 religious feelings drove them to a sacrifice for the 
 welfare of the masses. But the main body of 
 Conservatives touched hands with the main body 
 of Liberal individualists. This is only another 
 way of saying that interest is stronger than 
 theory. 
 
 The liberationist movement of the Radical in- 
 dividualists had been an enormous success. The 
 destruction of the Protective tariff, the Navigation 
 Acts, the whole system of bounties and export 
 duties, had, just in time, cleared the way for a 
 marvellous expansion of foreign trade. The manu- 
 facturer felt the stimulus in the shape of cheaper 
 raw material and. an ever- widening market ; the 
 people at large in cheaper food and better wages. 
 The abolition of the magisterial assessment of 
 wages, the rule of apprenticeship, and other internal 
 restrictions, had helped the employing class. The 
 removal of obstacles to migration and emigration 
 helped everybody. The stoppage of rural doles, 
 a drastic piece of social surgery, though insufficient 
 and too late for a permanent cure, had brought 
 some health back into rural life. The reforms of 
 1834 did not produce popular sovereignty, but 
 they were a long step in that direction ; and the 
 deposition of the old oligarchy in Parliament, 
 the boroughs, and the country bench, everywhere 
 
§ I.] THE LIBERAL STATE 317 
 
 encouraged fruitful effort. The terrors of the 
 Church were fading away ; it had no longer a 
 monopoly even of the rites of marriage and burial. 
 The law was softened, and its administration 
 purified. Royalty no longer meant licence — ^the 
 Court of the widowed Queen mildly reflected the 
 Liberalism of its Ministers, preachers, and poets. 
 Publication, meeting, industrial combination, if 
 not completely free, were not arbitrarily forbidden. 
 The opportunities of education and healthy life 
 were slowly increasing. Finally, the British State 
 owed no small part of its prestige abroad to its 
 avowed sympathy with movements of liberation 
 in Europe, and its exemplary relations with its 
 colonies. There was gain here beyond weight and 
 measure ; there was enough that could be most 
 satisfactorily counted in pounds, shillings, and 
 pence. The Liberal idea marched triumphantly on. 
 Gladstone's Reform Bill having been defeated, 
 in June 1866, by a combination of Conservatives, 
 and Palmerstonian " AduUamites," the third Derby- 
 Disraeli Ministry came into power; A whole 
 generation had grown up under the middle-class 
 system of 1832, and demonstrations in the country 
 made it clear that fundamental change could no 
 longer be postponed, with whatever gloomy fore- 
 bodings the future Lord Salisbury might be filled. 
 Disraeli's greatest measure, the Household Suffrage 
 Act of 1867, with supplementary Acts of the fol- 
 lowing year, enfranchised all householders paying 
 poor-rate in Enghsh and Scotch burghs (in Ireland, 
 
318 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vn. 
 
 only those with a £4 rating quahfication) ; lodgers 
 paying £10 a year rent, and holding their tenancy 
 for a year ; and county occupiers paying £12 
 rent. Some small boroughs lost their representa- 
 tion, and none with less than 10,000 inhabitants 
 retained more than one member, the seats so freed 
 being given to the larger counties and towns. 
 In 1871, a change hotly demanded for half-a-century, 
 and hardly less important than the franchise itself 
 — ^the secret ballot — was reluctantly accepted by 
 the Peers. An evident act of justice remained to 
 be done ere the British polity could be said to rest 
 on a democratic foundation (not one person in a 
 thousand yet thought of enfranchising women). 
 It was only in 1885, the last year of the second 
 Gladstone Ministry, that the agricultural labourer 
 became, in the full modern sense, a citizen. The 
 county franchise was then assimilated to that of 
 the towns, several new forms of qualification being 
 introduced. At the same time, an important 
 redistribution of seats was effected, boroughs with 
 less than 15,000 inhabitants being deprived of 
 special representation, those under 50,000 having 
 only one Mem,ber, and other electoral districts 
 being equalized. London (with 62 members), 
 Liverpool, and Manchester-Salford (with 9 each), 
 other cities, and the manufacturing districts gene- 
 rally, could now speak in proportion to their real 
 strength in the State. Although property retained 
 some privileges at the polls, the Conservative 
 leaders declared that Mr Gladstone had " shot 
 
§ 1.] THE LIBERAL STATE 319 
 
 Niagara," and feared the worst for their own 
 party. But Britain continues to be Liberal-Conser- 
 vative ; and, in fact. Conservative Governments have 
 been in power for rather more than half the period 
 since Parliament was democratized. We shall see 
 that economic conditions have counted largely, 
 though most often indirectly, in this result. 
 
 The reform of 1867 led to a series of social changes 
 of which the most far-reaching was the establish- 
 ment, under W. E. Forster's Elementary Education 
 Act of 1870, alongside the old denominational 
 system, of elective School Boards having power 
 to build and maintain schools out of a local rate, 
 and to require the attendance of children between 
 five and thirteen years of age (raised later to 
 fourteen), dogmatic religious teaching being ex- 
 cluded. School Boards were established in Scotland 
 in 1872, when compulsory attendance was intro- 
 duced. Universal direct compulsion was only 
 adopted afterwards in England, under the Acts of 
 1875 and 1880. In 1891, fees in State elementary 
 day-schools were abolished by the Salisbury Govern- 
 ment ; in 1896, Mr Balfour enabled the Education 
 Department to make grants to voluntary (that 
 is, denominational) schools when a certain stan- 
 dard of efficiency was reached ; and in 1902 the 
 local control of State-aided education was trans- 
 ferred to the County Councils, committees of which 
 superseded the specially elected School Boards. 
 Board schools have been the object of much scof- 
 fing ; for long their beneficent work was obscured 
 
320 
 
 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vn. 
 
 by the dust of sectarian controversy; even 
 now, they are the schools only of the working and 
 lower-middle classes. There is, nevertheless, no 
 institution to which the country owes so much, 
 none that can claim a larger share in the honourable 
 advances of the last generation. UnhappUy, the 
 scholars' leaving age is still lamentably low ; a 
 small minority only are enabled to pass on to a 
 course of secondary or technical instruction, and 
 fewer still to the university. The broad result 
 of the Education Acts may be thus stated : In 
 1869 there were rather more than a million children 
 in attendance at about 17,000 elementary day- 
 and night-schools. There are now over six million 
 children on the registers of 35,000 schools ; and 
 the money raised for education has gradually 
 risen to £20,140,000 in 1902, and to £35,800,000 
 in 1912 — ^£19,200,000 of the latter sum consisting 
 of Exchequer grants, and £16,600,000 being raised 
 by local authorities. It is at least probable that 
 the quality of the care and instruction given has 
 risen proportionately with the quantity. The 
 factory inspectors reported in 1866 that half the 
 population of Belfast could not read a letter, and 
 that among applicants for factory employment 
 those unable to read were 25 per cent, in the West 
 of England woollen trade, 29 per cent, in the silk 
 trade, 34 per cent, in the cotton districts, and 
 66 per cent in the Potteries. Male illiteracy in 
 England and Wales fell from 19*4 in 1870 to 1-4 
 per cent, in 1907. Of the progress in higher 
 
§ I.] THE LIBERAL STATE 321 
 
 education, we can do no more than name the 
 following landmarks : the Public Schools Act of 
 1868 and the Endowed Schools Act of 1869, which 
 led to wide reforms ; the establishment of the 
 nucleus of Girton College in 1869, of Newnham in 
 1871, and of the Girls' Public Day School Company 
 in 1873, when, also, the University Extension 
 movement was founded ; the " whisky money " 
 grant for technical education in 1889 ; the incorpo- 
 ration of three Welsh colleges as the University 
 of Wales in 1893, followed by the establishment 
 of Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, and other 
 provincial universities ; and the foundation of the 
 Workers' Educational Association in 1903. 
 
 Postponing to our next section consideration 
 of the Act of 1871 fully legalizing trade unions, 
 we find that four groups of legislative measures 
 bearing directly upon industrial conditions belong 
 to the period with which we are dealing : (1) the 
 Factory and Workshops Acts of 1867, 1871, 1874, 
 and 1878; (2) the Public Health and Dwellings 
 Acts, 1875 ; (3) the Merchant Shipping Acts of 1873, 
 1875, 1876, and 1880; and (4) the Employers' 
 Liability Act, 1880, 
 
 It is significant that the first two Reform Bills 
 were both followed by important measures extend- 
 ing public control over the conditions of associated 
 labour. This extension was, indeed, required as 
 much by the working-out of the Industrial Revo- 
 lution in ever wider circles, as by the increasing 
 sensitiveness of the public mind to the consequences 
 
322 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vn. 
 
 of neglect. We have seen that the reports of the 
 Children's Employment Commission of 1862-7 
 first showed the barbarity common in workshop 
 and home employment^ and that the Act of 1864, 
 introducing regulation into the pottery, lucifer- 
 match, percussion-cap and cartridge, paper-staining, 
 certain branches of the bleaching and dyeing, and 
 the fustian-cutting, trades, was the first measure 
 of the kind including a domestic industry. The 
 Commission had shown that in many other direc- 
 tions — ^from the comparatively small scandal of 
 the straw-plaiting " schools," where mere infants 
 were crowded together at their premature toil, to 
 the ancient hosiery trade, the hardware manu- 
 facture (in which Birmingham alone had two 
 thousand children under ten years of age at work), 
 and the range of clothing industries, occupying 
 three-quarters of a million people, few of them 
 yet protected — ^there was crying need of interference. 
 In some cases, the cruelty thus revealed was foimd 
 to be as extreme as, and in mass it was very much 
 more extensive than, that which had given rise to 
 the first Factory Acts in the early years of the 
 century. Victorian optimism could not long bear 
 this spectacle. Prosperity had helped to dissolve 
 both extremes of political creed — Chartism at one 
 end, but, no less surely, Laisser-faire at the other. 
 There was to be in the next decade a cxirious reaction 
 against special interference with women's labour, 
 on the fanciful ground that it gave another artificial 
 advantage to the male sex. Generally, individual- 
 
§ I.] THE LIBERAL STATE 323 
 
 ism was beginning to fall back on the defensive. 
 The success of the Acts, and the flagrant evils 
 still existing unchecked, equally justified a fur- 
 ther advance, said Mr Walpole, in introducing the 
 twin measures of 1867. " We may even act, I will 
 not say upon a new principle, but upon one that 
 before the present occasion has never received 
 full recognition." Objection might be made to 
 interference with home and parental rights ; but, 
 where natural duties were neglected, the State 
 must become the " parent of the country." It 
 was, however, business sense and common humanity 
 rather than any high principle that smoothed 
 the way in Parliament. 
 
 The Factory Act of 1867 brought under regulation 
 blast-furnaces, copper mills, iron and steel mills, 
 forges and foundries, metal, machinery, and gutta- 
 percha factories ; paper, glass, tobacco, printing, 
 and bookbinding works ; and, finally, any premises 
 where fifty or more persons were employed in a 
 manufacturing process. The special provision for 
 dangerous trades, first made in 1864, was extended 
 in the case of the glass and metal trades ; on the 
 other hand, there was a deplorable number of 
 exemptions and modifications. The accompanying 
 Workshops Regulation Act applied to every place 
 where fewer than fifty persons were engaged in a 
 manufacturing process (except such as already 
 came under the Factory Acts). All home industries 
 were thus embraced, except as regards out-workers. 
 No child was to be employed under eight years of 
 
324 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vii. 
 
 age ; till thirteen, children could only be employed 
 on the half-time system ; young persons and 
 women were limited to a twelve-hours day (less 
 1| hours for meals), which, however, might vary 
 between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. — a proviso making 
 control very difficult. Worse still, as it proved, 
 the local sanitary authorities were entrusted with 
 the administration of the Act. With a few bright 
 exceptions, this expedient completely failed. If 
 the factory inspectors were tinequal to so great an 
 addition to their duties, the local sanitary authorities 
 were unwilling to assume the task, even when they 
 had the means of doing so. In 1871 the general, 
 and in 1878 the sanitary, supervision of workshops 
 was transferred to the factory inspectors, who 
 thus found themselves responsible for 110,000 
 manufacturing establishments, instead of about a 
 third of that number. Although a new class of 
 junior inspectors was created, the staff was still very 
 inadequate ; and for many years its work suffered, 
 in spite of the personal devotion this service has 
 always evoked. In 1875, Mr (afterwards Lord) 
 Cross's Textile Factory Act reduced the hours of 
 labour from 60 to 57 a week, and raised the 
 beginning age to 10 ; but it ignored the growing 
 evil of dust, moisture, and over-heating revealed 
 in the official inquiry conducted two years before 
 by Dr Bridges and Mr Holmes. A consolidation 
 of the law was now much needed ; and this was 
 accomplished, after inquiry by a Royal Commission, 
 in 1878. The working week for children in textile 
 
§ I] THE LIBERAL STATE 325 
 
 factories was limited to 56^, in non-textile factories 
 to 60 hours, employment under 10 years of age 
 being forbidden. The then prevalent depression 
 of trade probably accounts for the retrogression 
 marked in the clauses dealing with women's 
 and domestic workshops (leaving women's hours 
 unregulated), and for the agitation, supported 
 in Parliament, to get adult women exempted 
 altogether. Incidentally, the Consolidation Act 
 forbade the employment of children and yoimg 
 persons in certain dangerous branches of the white 
 lead and other trades, and provided that fines 
 for neglect to fence machinery might go to those 
 injured or their families. Its chief weakness was 
 not remedied until after the famous inquiry into 
 the " Sweating System " in 1889. 
 
 No grievances of this time appealed more strongly 
 to humane men than those of " Poor Jack," as 
 depicted by Samuel PlimsoU, M.P. for Derby. 
 When he began his crusade agaiast the " coffin- 
 ship " and its owners, the mercantile marine was 
 subject to hardly any supervision, and the tempta- 
 tion to unscrupulous adventure was at its height. 
 The iron steamship represented an immense 
 economy in transport ; and trade was increasing 
 beyond the power of shipbuilding. The result 
 combined the evils of the decay of one industry — 
 the old sailing-ship — and of the too-rapid exploita- 
 tion of a new one, the cargo steamer. New vessels 
 were turned out with an imheard-of speed, and 
 sent to sea without any proper tests ; while the 
 
326 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vii. 
 
 owners of the old sailing craft endeavoured to hold 
 their own by over-loading and under-manning, 
 sometimes deliberately sending them to a doom 
 inevitable, for the sake of the insurance money, 
 Plimsoll found that, in six years, over six thousand 
 coasting vessels had been wrecked, and many 
 thousands of lives needlessly sacrificed. His chief 
 aims in Parliament were to obtain a compulsory 
 survey of all unclassed ships, a maximum load-line, 
 and a test of the quality of iron to be used in 
 ship-building, and to abolish deck-loading, except 
 under special limitation, and the practice of carry- 
 ing grain cargoes in bulk. Inadequate powers of 
 control were given to the Board of Trade in 1871, 
 and somewhat extended in 1873, Plimsoll all the 
 while urging a larger effort. After a Royal Com- 
 mission, set up at his instance, had reported, 
 Plimsoll introduced, in February 1875, a Bill which 
 was abandoned six months later, because Disraeli 
 would give no further facilities. A dramatic 
 scene in the House followed, and Plimsoll, declar- 
 ing that he would "immask" certain "villains" 
 sitting there, was suspended. Great feeling was 
 now manifested in the country ; and in the autumn 
 the Government passed a temporary Act which 
 was strengthened in the following year. The 
 Merchant Shipping Acts of 1875 and 1876 estab- 
 lished a load-line, a limitation of deck cargoes, 
 and penalties for sending out unseaworthy ships. 
 In 1880, the special dangers of the grain-carrying 
 trade were dealt with, and Mr Burt carried a measure 
 
§1.] THE LIBERAL STATE 327 
 
 containing much-needed safeguards in regard to 
 the payment of seamen's wages, and aboUshing 
 imprisonment for breach of civil contract, to which 
 sailors alone were then liable. 
 
 Plimsoll claimed that, under the Acts with which 
 his name will always be associated, five hundred 
 vessels, " every one as rotten as a pear," were 
 broken up, and that, between 1876 and 1883, " no 
 less than 832 ships were stopped when about to 
 sail, were repaired, or had their loads greatly 
 reduced." Although " crimping " has been practi- 
 cally extinguished, and food and wages have 
 improved, there is still much hardship in the 
 merchant marine ; and it required a " Titanic " 
 disaster to demonstrate the need of adequate life- 
 saving appliances on the great passenger ships 
 now afloat. But greed no longer dominates this 
 splendid and most typical national service ; and 
 the Board of Trade on the one hand, Lloyd's 
 Registry, the British Corporation of Shipping, 
 and other surveying authorities on the other, are 
 able to secxu-e seaworthiness without seriously 
 impeding business or the progress of invention. 
 
 Another industrial reform, granted more grudg- 
 ingly than those just named, was embodied in the 
 Employers' Liability Act, 1880. Men and women 
 more fortunately situated have some difficulty in 
 realizing that masses of their fellows of the labouring 
 order are placed by the conditions of their work 
 in constant danger of injury. This is peculiarly 
 a penalty of machine industrialism ; it has, in the 
 
328 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vii. 
 
 past centiiry, involved immeasurable suffering; 
 and, of all the great evils of the time, it is, per- 
 haps, the one that has been most tardily and 
 feebly dealt with. " It appears in evidence," said 
 the Factory Commissioners of 1833, "that cases 
 frequently occur in which the workpeople are 
 abandoned from the moment an accident occurs, 
 their wages are stopped, no medical assistance is 
 provided, and, whatever the extent of the injury, 
 no compensation is afforded." Four years later, 
 a judicial decision (in Priestley v. Fowler) greatly 
 worsened the situation of the English workman — 
 Scotland only received the doctrine of " common 
 employment " thirty years afterwards. The 
 common law had made persons liable not only 
 for the consequences of their own neglect, but 
 for that of their servants when acting in the 
 regular course of their employment. An exception 
 was now introduced : the employer was no longer 
 liable to one servant for injury due to the neglect 
 of another servant employed with him. For in- 
 stance, a passenger injured in a railway accident 
 due to a signalman's error could claim compensation 
 from the company ; a driver or guard could not. 
 
 Having no financial liability, employers were 
 under the temptation of neglecting precautions, 
 and of ignoring the complaints and lurid in- 
 stances which are a constant feature in the 
 reports of the factory inspectors. Nothing at all 
 was done to remedy this evil till 1844, when a 
 general order was enacted for the fencing of shafts 
 
§ I.] THE LIBERAL STATE 329 
 
 in textile mills. As the speeding-up of machinery 
 proceeded, accidents became more numerous. 
 Although there were few mills that, could not be 
 fenced for a ten-pound note, the Lancashire 
 employers successfully withstood Palmerston's 
 gentle attempt to curb them. In his report for 
 1860, Inspector Baker gave figures showing that 
 one accident occurred for every 261 operatives 
 in cotton mills, every 348 in woollen, 389 in flax, 
 and 424 in worsted factories. In 1865 he remarked : 
 " The total loss of life by belts and shafts in the 
 workshops of the United Kingdom annually must 
 be something fearful to contemplate." As work- 
 shops were still uninspected, this opinion could 
 neither be proved nor disproved. It was then 
 supposed that textile mills were peculiarly danger- 
 ous ; but, as the area of regulation was extended 
 to cover machine and engineers' shops, iron mills, 
 shipbuilding yards, foundries, quarries, and all 
 manner of workshop, this comparatively hopeful 
 view was destroyed ; and the inspectors con- 
 cluded that the only remedy lay in enabling the 
 victims of accident to take inexpensive actions for 
 compensation. In 1876, one of the inspectors 
 noted that there was no power to inspect boilers 
 or to interfere with their position or construction, 
 adding : " We fine a man heavily for employing 
 females and children a few minutes' overtime ; 
 yet we allow him to blow up the same persons 
 with impunity so far as the law is concerned." 
 This was no idle turn of speech : in thp preceding 
 
YD. 
 
 HODEBN BNGI.AKD [chap. 
 
 ^^^ ^fil factory boiler explosions had been 
 
 four y*'*'^^' 8 persons being killed, and 535 injured, 
 reported, ^^^^^^j^^j j^q^ forbidden to clean machinery 
 Childr^^^ ^ ^^^ ^^ ^^^ district these three cases 
 ^^c^rred in as many days : A boy of 10 had his 
 right thumb crushed in the tappet-wheels of a 
 loom ; a boy aged 11 had his arm fractured by 
 being jammed between the tin rollers of a throstle- 
 frame ; a girl of 10 had three fingers severely 
 injured in taking paper from beneath a paper 
 cutter. 
 
 Such were the conditions against which the 
 Employers' LiabiUty Act of 1880, establishing 
 the responsibility of the employer to compensate 
 workmen injured in course of their occupation, 
 was directed. A judicial decision again weakened 
 the law, by permitting " contracting out," imder 
 arrangements by which both masters and men 
 contributed to an insurance fund wherefrom com- 
 pensation was paid. Accidents continued, even 
 such familiar ones as the " flying shuttle " : " It 
 appears to have been assumed that it was only 
 natural for shuttles to fly from looms, and that 
 an accident from such a cause was a part of the 
 routine of work in a factory." But a stimulus 
 had been given to the invention of guards for 
 machmery, as well as to greater precaution and 
 better organization in work-places. Although pro- 
 gress has been made, as there are still 15,000 fatal 
 
 presumed tSf fv,"" *^" ^"'*"^ ^^^^^""^ '' ^^^ ^' 
 that there ,s stUI room for improvement. 
 
§ II.] THE LIBERAL STATE 331 
 
 To these major achievements of the period 
 might be added a minor list which would include 
 the disestablishment of the Irish Church (1869) ; 
 the State purchase of the telegraphs (1870) ; the 
 proclamation of four days yearly as Bank holidays ; 
 the abolition of purchase in the army (a step 
 constitutionally important, as a decisive Ministerial 
 use of the royal prerogative) ; the formation of 
 the Local Government Board (1871) ; the Friendly 
 Societies Act (1874) ; the Married Women's 
 Property Act (1882) ; and the appointment, in 
 the same year, of the first working-man factory 
 inspector, Mr J. D. Prior, General Secretary of the 
 Amalgamated Carpenters. We must now turn 
 to the development of labour combination, in its 
 relation to the Liberal State on the one hand, and 
 to the essential economic conditions on the other. 
 
 II. The Trade-Union Compromise 
 
 The inequalities of temperament and experi- 
 ence which throw off from the watershed of upper- 
 and middle-class life currents of Conservative and 
 Liberal opinion have produced, and will probably 
 contuiue to produce, a somewhat similar division 
 in the world of labour. It is a division more 
 difficult to describe, because, among the masses 
 of the people, condition and temperament are 
 more various, yet less readily find expression. 
 In neither class is it merely a distinction of relative 
 wealth, for extremes very commonly meet in the 
 
332 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vii. 
 
 polling-booth. But as it was in Chartist times, so 
 it is now : there is a clear conservatism in the old 
 skilled trades, and as clear a tendency to revolu- 
 tionary ebullitions among the unskilled and un- 
 organized, or newly organized. The agricultural 
 labourer can hardly be called the exception that 
 proves the rule, because he stands in a category 
 apart. In dealing with this division of working- 
 class opinion, which came to open feud in the 
 'eighties, Mr and Mrs Webb, in their History of 
 Trade Unionism, still the authoritative work on 
 the subject, scarcely do full justice, perhaps, to the 
 orthodox side, to Wm. Allen of the Engineers, 
 Applegarth of the Carpenters, Guile, Odger, Coulson, 
 and other men who built up the older unions and 
 the Trades Union Congress. It is true that they 
 accepted, for the most part, the Radical individual- 
 ism of Bright and Cobden, and the somewhat 
 broader Liberalism of Gladstone, abandoning the 
 aim of a standard of life and an independent 
 Labour movement as a means of obtaining it. 
 That later years brought new needs and possi- 
 bilities, and therewith a new type of leader, is 
 only to say that these men were subject to the 
 lot of mortals. But it may be held that the work 
 that they did was essenlial, and could not have 
 been done otherwise. 
 
 The problem as it stood from 1850 to 1875 was 
 radically different from that of the following period. 
 The appeal to ancient law and custom for the 
 fixing of wages, limitation of apprentices, and 
 
§ n.] THE LIBERAL STATE 333 
 
 other boons, was dead and forgotten. Attempts 
 at a spontaneous rising, to culminate in a general 
 strike, were thoroughly discredited. Common-sense 
 indicated a third way — ^to create a new law and 
 custom, and, to that end, gradually to mobilize 
 the whole working-class in trade regiments, each 
 with its sound budget and expert staff. The 
 unthinking many would simply rejoice to get 
 out of the " himgry 'forties " ; to the thinking 
 few, the disappearance of Chartism was the over- 
 shadowing fact. It had failed — and, in the end, 
 failed ludicrously — ^for lack of sober leadership, a 
 sober aim, and sober organization. Having these 
 three requisites, the Anti-Corn Law League had 
 brilliantly succeeded ; and we have seen that 
 political realism had many more rewards to offer 
 its devotees. For the future of any kind of Labour 
 movement, moreover, " old " or " new," realist 
 or idealist. Church or Chapel, as it were, in quality, 
 three great steps must be won : Parliament must 
 be opened to the people ; schools must be opened 
 for the people ; and trade unionism must be 
 relieved of the remaining legal obstacles that 
 hampered it. The " alliance " by which these 
 great boons were obtained, and with them a series 
 of Factory and Workshops, Health and Dwellings, 
 Merchant Shipping and Employers' Liability Acts, 
 can at the time have seemed deplorable only to a 
 few doctrinaire extremists. It was not romantic, 
 but it rested upon hard, unselfish effort, and a 
 shrewd view both of human nature and the order 
 
334 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vn. 
 
 of progress. It was a compromise, and so a solvent 
 of prejudice. What it won lasted, because it was 
 not merely the reward of force. It failed at last, 
 not because it had always been a mistake, but 
 because certain factors which it had been possible 
 to ignore at length demanded attention, and it 
 found no way of meeting them. Then a period was 
 closed, perhaps the most fruitful in British history. 
 Every trade creates a variety of character. 
 By a natural selection, the pioneers in the task of 
 labour organization were skilled engineers and 
 builders, who at the outset were thinking only of 
 making order in their own ranks. The Amalga- 
 gamated Society of Engineers, founded in 1850, 
 was a combination of seven smaller bodies of 
 engineers, machinists, millwrights, smiths, and 
 pattern-makers, tired of the waste and ineffective- 
 ness of retail action. Their basis and rules were 
 most carefully elaborated, and became a model 
 that was widely followed. Since 1825, trade 
 societies could be lawfully established, but they 
 had no protection for their funds, and their activity 
 was jealously limited. The Engineers, therefore, 
 with legal aid, so drafted their rules (carefully 
 omitting any reference to strikes or disputes) 
 as to permit of their union being registered as 
 a friendly society, thus obtaining some protection. 
 This condition probably reacted with others to 
 make friendly benefits the basis of the new system. 
 The difficulty of the earlier unions had been to 
 keep their members in bad times. Provident 
 
§ n.] THE LIBERAL STATE 335 
 
 benefits would be a stout bond and a business 
 training in the present, a growing strength for the 
 future. By the same reasoning, strikes and all 
 rash demands were discouraged, the power of 
 critical action being as far as possible withdrawn 
 from local branches to headquarters, where the 
 salaried oflicials developed an art of industrial 
 diploma,cy, and challenged employers in general 
 to adopt the practice of arbitration and conciliation. 
 Great strikes continued to occur — of Preston cotton- 
 spinners in 1853, of the Yorkshire miners in 1858, 
 of boot- arid shoe-makers in 1857-8-9, of the London 
 building trade in 1859-60 — ^but they showed little 
 of the old bitterness and violence ; and they were 
 frequently, perhaps generally, successful, because 
 trade was steadily expanding. The spirit of 
 fraternal aid had not disappeared, but it was 
 transformed. The London builders, whose com- 
 bination the masters were bent on destroying, 
 collected no less than £23,000 in outside sub- 
 scriptions, including three successive weekly dona- 
 tions of £1000 from the engineers. Out of this 
 dispute arose the London Trades Council (which 
 became for a time something like a Cabinet of 
 the labour movement) and the Amalgamated 
 Society of Carpenters. The Ironfounders' Society 
 voted £500 to the Agricultural Labourers' Union 
 in 1874 ; and in the same year the seamen received 
 over £6,000 from various unions for their agitation. 
 It is significant of the narrower, intenser aims 
 of the growing unions, and their " junta " of 
 
336 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vn. 
 
 London leaders, that (though Robert Applegarth 
 became an active member) they gave no help and 
 took no interest in the establishment, on September 
 28, 1864, of " The International." Karl Marx had 
 been living in London, a poor exUe, for many 
 years. The German Social Democratic movement 
 inspired by him had just been started by Lassalle, 
 Liebknecht, and Bebel. The first volume of " Das 
 Kapital," which has been called, without exaggera- 
 tion, the Bible of modern Socialism, appeared in 
 1867. For Allen, Odger, and their fellows, these 
 events appear to have had no significance. The 
 London Trades Council refused to recognise the 
 International Workingmen's Association. Pro- 
 bably none were more surprised than they when 
 this feeble offspring of Soho refugees became the 
 bugbear of the European Chanceries ; certainly 
 they could not have imagined a day when the 
 Marxian doctrine of the class war would command 
 twice as many votes in the German Reichstag as 
 their own successors could obtain in the House of 
 Commons. Standard piece-work rates (the " Black- 
 burn list " is the classic example), extra rates for 
 overtime, a nine-hours' day, amendment of the law 
 of master and servant, extension of the franchise 
 and of factory inspection — ^these aims absorbed such 
 strength as they could spare from the routine of 
 union business. First the " Christian Socialist," then 
 the Positivist, leaders gave them invaluable assist- 
 ance. They were now a regular factor in the political 
 life of the country, and so manifestly honest, public- 
 
§ n.] THE LIBERAL ST'ATE 33? 
 
 spirited, and influential that the alarm created by 
 episodes like the Sheffield "rattening" outrages 
 quickly passed. Labour had become respectable. 
 
 The reward came in 1867, in the form of house- 
 hold suffrage. Lord Elcho's Act making breach 
 of contract by a workman punishable only civilly, 
 not criminally, except in aggravated cases, and 
 Mr Walpole's Acts extending State regulation to 
 workshops and lesser factories. Four years later, 
 by Mr Bruce's Act, trade unions were finally 
 recognized as lawful corporations, capable of 
 holding property, and, on condition of registration, 
 of taking legal measures, for instance, against 
 defaulting officers. A portion of the Bill by which 
 it was intended to define afresh the offences of 
 obstruction, molestation, and intimidation, was 
 carried as a separate (and distinctly reactionary) 
 measure, the Criminal Law Amendment Bill. 
 This led to a lively agitation, in which the labour 
 leaders were supported by Mr Mundella and other 
 prominent Liberals. The Gladstone Ministry, how- 
 ever, refused any further action. Employers were 
 left free to circulate black-lists and to organize 
 collective measures for " union-smashing " and 
 reduction of wages ; while workmen were punished 
 for using strong language, exercising the mildest 
 kind of pressure upon their fellows, or even for 
 leaving their work simultaneously. This retrogres- 
 sion helped to bring about the downfall of the 
 Liberal Government in 1874. The elections were 
 also made memorable by the return of the first 
 
338 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vit. 
 
 two Labour Members of Parliament — Alexander 
 Macdonald and Thomas Burt, representatives of 
 the miners. The Disraeh Cabinet proved amenable ; 
 and in 1875 imprisonment for breach of contract 
 was abolished, and peaceful picketing allowed. 
 
 By these stages, the now familiar methods of 
 collective bargaining in the industrial world were 
 established, and formally recognized by the State. 
 The Trades Union Congress, established experi- 
 mentally in 1864, claimed to represent 375,000 
 men in 1872, and 1,190,000 — including 100,000 
 members of the Agricultural Labourers' Union — 
 in 1874. What stood behind this imposiag show 
 of the " Parliament of Labour " ? The most 
 summary answer to this question, and the most 
 summary view of the policy of the " old trade 
 unionism," is contained in the following figures, 
 published by Mr George Howell, M.P.,^ of the 
 aggregate amounts spent up to 1890 in various 
 kinds of benefit by fourteen leading unions in the 
 engineering, building, and printing trades : 
 
 Sick Pay 
 
 Superannuation 
 
 Funeral benefit 
 
 Accidents 
 
 Benevolent Grants 
 
 Loss of Tools, etc. . 
 
 Out of Work (" Donation ") 
 
 Strikes 
 
 895,076 
 653,743 
 195,434 
 118,025 
 
 24,822 
 3,604,341 
 
 462,818 
 
 ' Trade Unionism, New and Old (1891), pp. 126-7. 
 
 £1,840,511 
 
§ n.] THE LIBERAL STATE 339 
 
 The " donation benefit," or unemployed allowance, 
 included "travelling relief," fares to jobs, and 
 some relief due to disputes ; like strike pay, it 
 fluctuated with the condition of trade. It is 
 certainly a remarkable fact that, of a total of 
 £7,794,770, no less than £3,727,611 was paid on 
 account of what may be called friendly society 
 benefits, to meet ordinary personal need, and less 
 than half a million for strike allowances. Of the 
 remaining and largest item in the list, unemploy- 
 ment grants, it is impossible to say how much 
 was due to personal disabilities, and how much to 
 the working of the industrial system. The figures 
 do, however, confirm other evidence that, in the 
 period with which we are dealing and for some 
 years afterward, trade unionism had completely 
 shed its old revolutionary tendencies, had lost its 
 political independence, and settled down into 
 social respectability^ and a virtual acceptance of 
 the competitive economy. 
 
 There was no magic in the personalities of the 
 London leaders to produce such a change as this. 
 The Parliamentary Committee manifestly expressed 
 the feeling of its constituents. Average men will 
 always regard a bird in the hand as being worth 
 two in the bush. It must be remembered, too, 
 that the boons which sapped the fighting spirit 
 of organized labour carried the State well beyond 
 the confines of laisser faire. Not only was the 
 Workman now a voter, and fully inclined to use 
 this new power ; not only were his children at 
 
HG13EBH B^^I^AK1> ton... VH 
 3*0 ^^ ^ gj.ga_t instrument been 
 
 school; 1^°* ""^^ uses in the future. Almost 
 built for "^^strial life of the country was at 
 the "^^f^g ^rarried on under the eyes of official 
 ^^spectors. The Liberal State seemed to ^'' 
 ^lendidly justifying itself. 
 
 be 
 
 III. Co-operation, Thrift, Conciliation 
 
 Before we consider the disasters which shattered 
 this optimism, three other institutions characteristic 
 of the time must be briefly noticed— the Co-opera- 
 tive and Friendly Societies, and Conciliation Boards. 
 Since the day, in 1844, when a few poor weavers, 
 with £28 capital, set up in Toad Lane, Roch- 
 dale, the first co-operative store, taking their turns 
 behind the counter, the movement had advanced 
 with giant strides ; but here, too, the pure milk 
 of the idealist gospel had been diluted to serve 
 the purposes of daily business. The Rochdale 
 Equitable Pioneers did not despise thrift ; but 
 they had visions of their dariag venture resulting 
 ultimately in the creation of a self-sufficing com- 
 munity. Unwittingly, however, they had initiated 
 a much more effective revolution when they decided, 
 subT^^ °^ dividing profits according to the capital 
 it"(afr'^^'*' °^ ^<J"»JJy among members, to divide 
 *al) amone"^"^^ ^ ^^^ ^^"** ^^^^^^^ on share capi- 
 *heir Purehafer^'^T?"^ members in proportion to 
 owners of the" stor« T^*"™^^' ^^o thus become 
 ^' ^*^« every inducement to 
 
§ ni.] THE LIBERAL STATE 341 
 
 faithfulness ; and co-operative distribution has 
 progressed until it embraces 1400 Societies with 
 2| million members (chiefly in the North, the 
 Midlands, and Scotland), a capital of £83 millions, 
 and sales amounting to £63 millions yearly. To 
 supply this mass of goods, two great wholesale 
 and manufacturing businesses, the English and 
 Scottish, foxmded in 1863 and 1868, have been 
 built up, owning mills, warehouses, and ships, 
 banking and insurance branches, and building, 
 selling, and letting cottages. The co-operative 
 workshop, productive society, or co-partnership, 
 have made comparatively slow progress ; and 
 the difficulty of the division of profit as between 
 consumers and producers is still an unsolved 
 problem. The Co-operative Union, founded in 1869, 
 a federal propagandist body, furthers the legal, 
 parliamentary, and educational interests of the 
 movement. Many of the distributive societies 
 make grants for educational and charitable pur- 
 poses, and are centres of civic patriotism ; but the 
 Owenite ideal of voluntary communism is an 
 ancient memory, and the co-operative societies 
 have hitherto refused to join in efforts for inde- 
 pendent labour representation. The important 
 growth of agricultural co-operation in Ireland had 
 a separate origin. 
 
 The period of the first recognition of trade 
 unions was also marked by important reforms in 
 the much older and very remarkable network of 
 friendly societies. These took two chief shapes^ 
 
342 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vii. 
 
 improvements of financial organization and State 
 supervision (dealt with by the Acts of 1875-6), 
 and improvements of the actuarial basis of benefits, 
 due to more thorough statistical study of the 
 mortality and sickness experience of the nation. 
 Sir Edward Brabrook, C.B., when Chief Registrar, 
 said that, " as there are no associations the benefits 
 of which are more important to their members, 
 so there are none that are managed with greater 
 rectitude, and few with greater success." It is 
 estimated that the friendly societies of the kingdom 
 now have six million members, and funds amounting 
 to £45 millions. In face of this monument of labour 
 and thrift, the power of the British working classes 
 for voluntary association and business management 
 cannot be doubted. Of many other testimonies 
 of the same fact, we can name but one — ^the 
 Working Men's Club and Institute Union, founded 
 in 1862, and still doing useful work. 
 
 One trade union may differ from another in 
 important respects ; the trade union movement 
 as a whole has evolved, like other organisms. 
 Co-operation, in practice, is not what its founders 
 foretold ; and it contains very diverse, if not 
 irreconcilable, elements. In describing the various 
 methods of obtaining and maintaining industrial 
 peace, we stand peculiarly in need of a pre- 
 cise terminology. " Arbitration," " conciliation," 
 " mediation," are words used with deplorable 
 indefiniteness ; and it would seem that the pro- 
 cesses for which they stand, and the history of 
 
§ m.] THE LIBERAL STATE 343 
 
 these processes, are little understood. The vogue 
 of the phrase " compulsory arbitration " — a faulty 
 and confusing, if not positively contradictory, 
 term — illustrates the need of some clear thought 
 on the subject. The Labour Commission of 1894 ^ 
 recorded the following definitions, which show 
 how elaborate the pacific processes had by that 
 time become : 
 
 Arbitration is the settlement, by one or more pre- 
 sumably impartial persons, of an issue on which the parties 
 have failed to agree. 
 
 Conciliation is the coming together of the parties for 
 the discussion of questions with a view to amicable settle- 
 ment. This word is often used where we should properly 
 speak of Mediation. 
 
 Mediation means the exercise of good offices by some 
 outside agency, with a view to avert an impending rupture 
 between the parties, or, if the rupture has taken place, to 
 bring them together again as soon as possible, without 
 itself acting as arbitrator, or making an award, though it 
 might sometimes make, and even publish, recommendations 
 as to the course which should be followed. In the latter 
 case, its action facUitates what may be called arbitration 
 by public opinion. 
 
 The various methods in practice of settling trade ques- 
 tions by means and institutions internal to trades may be 
 classified as follows, beginning from the bottom of the 
 scale, and working upwards to the most highly organized 
 institutions : 
 
 (1) Negotiations between individual employers cmd deputa- 
 tions, or representatives, of their own workmen. (Broadly, 
 little organized industries rarely advance beyond this.) 
 
 1 Final Beport (C.-7421), p. 49. 
 
344 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vn. 
 
 (2) Negotiations between individual employers, and trade 
 union officials from outside on behalf of their workmen. 
 
 (3) Negotiations between officials of trade unions and 
 officials of emjiloyers' associations. 
 
 (4.) Occasional meetings, with reference to wage-rates 
 and other general questions, between committees of trade 
 unions and committees of employers' associations, with, 
 possibly, at the same time, a standing joint-committee to 
 settle minor questions of the judicial order. 
 
 (5) More or less regular and periodical meetings between 
 Efuch committees for the dispatch of current business. 
 
 (6) Formation of joint-committees, or wages boards, 
 composed equally of employers and workmen, and meeting 
 at more or less regular intervals for the settlement of 
 general questions, with a regular constitution and rules of 
 procedure, and usually with a standing sub-committee to 
 deal with minor and local disputes in a judicial manner. 
 The wages board, or joint-committee, may either be for a 
 whole trade, or for a district section of a trade, or for a 
 single establishment. 
 
 (7) Reference of special cases to an arbitrator approved by 
 both parties. 
 
 (8) Embodiment in the constitution of joint- committees, 
 wages boards, or other courts of conciliation, of the principle 
 of referring to arbitration questions on which such bodies 
 fail to agree. Such rule of reference may be either with 
 regard to all questions, or with regard to a certain class 
 of questions only ; and the arbitrator or arbitrators may 
 either be standing referees, or be selected upon each occasion 
 ad hoc. 
 
 Developments later than these will be referred 
 to in a later chapter. So far, the analysis gives 
 no hint of any kind of compulsion ; and, in fact, 
 
§ III.] THE LIBERAL STATE 345 
 
 none was dreamed of. The Conseils de Prud'- 
 hommes in France, the Gewerbegerichte in Germany, 
 are imitated, if not derived from, the old guild courts. 
 The arbitration courts of New Zealand and Australia 
 in the twentieth century are definitely socialistic 
 experiments. The British conciliation board be- 
 longs to a quite different order of ideas. It is 
 neither mediaeval nor socialistic. It is essentially 
 a product of Victorian Liberal individualism. It 
 exhibits that almost extinct form of political and 
 social faith in its weakness and its strength. In 
 its weakness : for labour disputes still continue, 
 and hard experience has extinguished the rosy 
 hope that the social problem can be solved by 
 Voluntary agreements between masters and men. 
 In its strength : because the spirit of conciliation 
 and arbitration is of incalculable value to every 
 human society, and is indispensable to its growth 
 in freedom. 
 
 If the engineers made the model for modern 
 trade unionism, and a few poor Lancashire weavers 
 that of the co-operative store, the standing concilia- 
 tion board is due to the Nottingham frame-knitters. 
 
 We saw in an earlier chapter that stocking-knit- 
 ting is not, like cloth- weaving, an ancient industry 
 bound up with household servitude, but compara- 
 tively modern ; that the difficulty of the movements 
 involved delayed the transition from hand to 
 machine work; and that the knitters were thus 
 not overwhelmed, but, failing to re-establish 
 the older regulations, became pioneers of trade 
 
346 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vii. 
 
 unionism. It was only in 1840 that a frame with 
 one simple rotary motion came into use, not till 
 1845 that steam power was applied to it. The 
 machine for making circular web came still later. 
 " In 1860, there may have been about 1000 circular 
 frames in Nottingham, tiirning out their tubular 
 webs by the mile, and the same number of rotary 
 frames, both driven by power. But there were, 
 at the same time, from 20,000 to 25,000 of the old 
 frames spread throughout the country, and double 
 that number in the Midland district. Upon these 
 the frame-work knitters made nearly all the best 
 and most important classes of work." ^ Very 
 shortly after this, William Cotton, of Lough- 
 borough, adapted the rotary frame for the automatic 
 narrowing and widening of the web in the process 
 of knitting ; then the hand-frame was doomed, 
 and factory conditions ruled. But, in the mean- 
 time, while the skilled hand-worker could hold his 
 own, and the hosiers' unions, with nearly a century 
 of experience behind them, were an effective power, 
 reason was opportunely brought to bear ; and 
 collective bargaining came into being as a natural 
 resultant of existing forces. Chiefly through the 
 efforts of Mr Mundella, a board of conciliation, 
 representative of employers and employed, was 
 established for the Nottingham hosiery trade. 
 Its first meeting was held on December 3, 1860 ; 
 and it still exists, proud of its successes and its 
 
 1 A. J. Mundella : " The Hoaierv Trade," in the Co-operative Annual, 
 1893. 
 
§ ni.] THE LIBERAL STATE 347 
 
 example. In 1864, Sir Rupert Kettle took a like 
 part in the creation of an arbitration and conci- 
 liation board for the building trades in Wolver- 
 hampton. In 1867, smitten with admiration for 
 these bodies, the Government passed an Act which 
 would have enabled joint-boards constituted in a 
 certain manner to obtain by licence powers to 
 enforce their awards. Nobody wanted such powers, 
 and the measure was still-born. 
 
 The practice of conciliation was taken up by 
 one trade after another. Mr Webb ^ quotes Alex- 
 ander Macdonald as saying, in 1875 : " Twenty- 
 five years ago, when we proposed the adoption 
 of the principle of arbitration, we were laughed to 
 scorn by the employing interests. But no move- 
 ment has ever spread so rapidly, or taken a deeper 
 root, than that which we then set on foot. Look 
 at the glorious state of things in England and 
 Wales. In Northumberland, the men now meet 
 with their employers around the common board. . . . 
 In Durhamshire, a board of arbitration and con- 
 ciliation has also been formed ; and 75,000 men 
 repose with perfect confidence on its decisions. 
 There are 40,000 men in Yorkshire in the same 
 position." These words smack a little of the 
 newly enfranchised and newly recognized union 
 leader. Behind this crude enthusiasm, there were, 
 however, sober and elevated thoughts. One who 
 took a part in establishing the system says : "It 
 is conciliation (I use the word in its technical 
 1 Trade Unionism, p. 323. 
 
348 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vn. 
 
 sense as applied to a conciliation board composed 
 of equal numbers of representatives of both sides) 
 that we want. There is no sound principle to be 
 based on the assumption of two antagonistic 
 bodies, one of which is to be compelled to submit 
 to the other against its will. For there is no ultimate 
 coercive power that could compel 100,000 miners 
 to go down into the pits, or compel the mine-owners 
 to let them. I have been behind the scenes of 
 many ' arbitrations,' and can say that, when the 
 decision of the outside ' arbitrator,' ' judge,' or 
 ' referee,' has been either successful or permanent, 
 it is when he has been merely called in to ' save 
 the face ' of one party, or both, by registering 
 a settlement already negotiated. There is no 
 permanence or spiritual force in a decision, a judg- 
 ment, which leaves a sense of injustice. When 
 we have reached the first stage of having labour 
 on one side, and employers on the other, properly 
 organized in fully representative bodies, they are 
 ready for ' collective bargaining.' Then the great 
 thing is to make them realize that they must settle 
 it between themselves. They can fight, or they 
 can bargain ; and what is needed is the machinery 
 for unlimited, continuous bargaining ; just as, in 
 a constitutional country. Parliament is always 
 ' bargaining ' between Liberal and Tory demands, 
 the door always open, defeat only the starting- 
 point of victory. The best machinery is such as 
 was established in Nottingham in 1860, and after- 
 wards in many of the large industries, in which 
 
§ m.] THE LIBERAL STATE 349 
 
 there is a body, properly elected, representing 
 both parties in equal numbers, with no appeal 
 (except to the sword), and which must, therefore, 
 settle the dispute somehow. It meets regularly 
 and higgles and haggles, wrangles and manoeuvres, 
 obstructs and postpones and compromises, each 
 side only gaining anything by winning over a 
 ' moderate ' from the other side. If this little 
 safety-valve or regulator is steadily and continuously 
 at work in some dingy office, the mass of the trade 
 refers everything, great and small, to it, and 
 awaits the result. Strikes die out, as barricades 
 disappear from politics under constitutional rule. 
 Recurrent elections give each side the proper 
 opportunity of changing their representatives, and 
 thereby changing and modifying the spirit of this 
 governing, ' arbitrating ' body. Both sides settle 
 down to the habit of ' leaving it to the board.' 
 They know that their bargaining is unlike most 
 bargaining (such as buying a horse), in that they 
 cannot easily go elsewhere ; they are each necessary 
 to the other ; they must settle, sooner or later ; 
 and they had each better choose theu^ best wranglers, 
 and keep them wrangling, with the full knowledge 
 that there is no other way out. When this is the 
 established spirit, if a strike or lock-out comes, it 
 is generally by mutual arrangement, a sham-fight, 
 an excuse for a holiday, or a clearance of accumulated 
 stock." 1 
 It is important to realize fully the strength of 
 
 1 Letter from Mr A. J. Mundella to the writer. 
 
3S0 MODERN ENGLAM) [chap. vil. 
 
 this point of view, and this prescription, before 
 we consider its insufficiency, because, so far as they 
 go, voluntary arbitration and conciliation are of 
 greater utility to-day than at the time of which 
 we are speaking, and there is yet wide room for 
 their extension. It will be seen that, in their 
 fullness, they imply organization both of employers 
 and employed, and mutual recognition of the 
 organizations. But agricultural labourers, fisher- 
 men, and most women workers, to say nothing 
 of domestic servants, are almost wholly unorganized. 
 There are also large tracts of industry in which 
 employers still refuse to recognize the unions, or do 
 so only occasionally and grudgingly, so that even 
 so slight a concession to reason as a conciliation 
 board is denied. About three hundred such bodies 
 are, nevertheless, now in operation, administering 
 seventeen hundred agreements, by which two-and- 
 a-half millions of workpeople are affected, chiefly 
 in the mining, metal, textile, and transport trades. 
 This is pure gain. The Parliamentary process of 
 government is to a large extent, as is well suggested 
 in the opinion quoted above, a kind of concilia- 
 tion and arbitration. Nor is any state of society 
 imaginable in which oppositions of interest, such 
 as those of employers and employed, will not 
 arise, and will not have to be settled by negotiation 
 and non-legal judgment. In death, oppositions are 
 ended ; in life, they are only endlessly transformed. 
 Peace is not an end, but a process, an eternal 
 process so far as we can see, a modification of 
 
§ m.] THE LIBERAL STATE 351 
 
 warfare into what something (perhaps our conceit) 
 tells us are higher forms. The mind of man is a 
 court of arbitration in which the arguments never 
 cease, and which will only close when the last 
 mortal, in frosty solitude, surveys the follies of 
 the race. Arbitration is thus the very breath of 
 social life, the miniature of civilization. 
 
 So much being allowed, it must be added that 
 these considerations, while they help to bridge the 
 gulf of fifty eventful years, do not identify the 
 standpoints of the twentieth-century citizen and 
 the man of 1860. The latter discovered and applied 
 a true social principle ; but he saw it narrowly 
 through the medium of other ideas that have not 
 stood the test of time. For instance, he believed 
 that labour is a commodity like other commodities 
 (an economic error which we sought to expose in 
 an earlier chapter), and that wages must follow 
 prices. This belief, when the workmen ceased to 
 combat it, was evidently calculated to smoothe the 
 way for conciliation boards, which became a means 
 of proving to the men that prices had fallen, and, 
 therefore, wages must fall, or that prices had only 
 risen five per cent., and therefore no larger advance 
 of wages could be given. Distrust of positive 
 legislation, faith in competition and self-help, in 
 the general advantages of a self-acting industrial 
 machine, an optimism born of the progress of the 
 time, blinded even humane men to the existence 
 of a residuum of labour which lay beyond the hope 
 of benefit from expedients such as conciliation 
 
362 MODERN" ENGLAND [chap. vii. 
 
 boards. They do not seem to have dreamed of the 
 increase of this residuum, or (until it happened) of a 
 serious break in the trade prosperity on which all 
 the achievements of the Victorian era were based. 
 
 So long as the expansion of commerce and the 
 rise of wages continued, the mass of skilled trade 
 unionists were content to accept the orthodox 
 doctrine along with their share in the product, 
 giving their spare strength to the building-up 
 of unions, friendly societies, co-operative stores, 
 workman's institutes and clubs, and evening 
 classes. In the years of disillusionment that 
 followed, economic and political thought was 
 reborn ; and three great facts were forced into 
 prominence — ^unemployment, sweating, and the 
 periodicity and universality of trade crises. The 
 value of conciliation remained ; but its position 
 in the social perspective was greatly altered. 
 
 IV. The Collapse of Agkiculture 
 
 Life does not wait for the arni-chair philosopher 
 to revise his theories, or for the statesman to test 
 them. It goes on with its secret work of change, 
 always ahead of our slow apprehension ; and we 
 are fortunate if, a full generation later, we can 
 penetrate to the meaning of events which puzzled 
 the ablest contemporary thinkers. After the high- 
 water mark of 1874, Liberalism entered upon a 
 period of uncertainty, failure, and slow transfor- 
 mation, its decline, long concealed by Gladstone's 
 
§ IV.] THE LIBERAL STATE 353 
 
 genius, appearing all the more plainly when that 
 prop failed. What it lost in power, a new kind 
 of Conservatism gained. We have, incidentally, 
 shown that one of these forms of political belief 
 arose out of facts mainly of the economic order ; 
 its opposite may now be seen rising through a 
 large disturbance of economic conditions. Four 
 new groups of disintegrating influences may be 
 discerned in this period, two of them external — 
 difficulties in foreign relations, and of Imperial 
 rule — and two internal — a prolonged industrial 
 crisis, and a still more prolonged agricultural 
 crisis. To these should be added the distracting 
 Irish problem. The Irish Land Acts of 1870 and 
 1881 (establishing tenant right and fair-rent courts), 
 and the subsequent land purchase measures, are, 
 however, so closely bound up with elements alien 
 to our subject that no summary treatment of this 
 question can with advantage be attempted here. 
 The exhausting strain it entailed helps to ex- 
 plain the sterility of Liberal statesmanship in other 
 fields. In international policy, Gladstone was far 
 in advance of his time, and he failed to bridge the 
 interval, leaving only one markedly successful 
 example — ^the " Alabama " arbitration of 1871-2, 
 As to the Empire, the agricultural collapse, and 
 the dislocation of trade and industry in the 
 'seventies and 'eighties. Liberalism had no clear 
 lead to give. Disraeli and Salisbury had ; and 
 the country followed them into the Imperialist- 
 Protectionist reaction, 
 z 
 
354 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vn. 
 
 The " periodicity of commercial crises," Professor 
 Leoni Levi told the British Association in 1885, 
 " has often been noted. Experience tells us that 
 seven fat-fleshed, well'favoured kine-— years of 
 plenty — are generally followed by other seven 
 poor and very lean, ill-favoured kine — ^years of 
 famine." Referring to the crisis then passing 
 away, he continued : " Among the causes mentioned 
 are — ^the diminished production, and consequent 
 appreciation, of gold ; the heavy losses in agricul- 
 ture, consequent on several successive bad harvests, 
 accompanied by competition of large foreign 
 imports brought to this country at exceedingly 
 low rates of freight ; over-production in manu- 
 facture, shipping, iron, coal, in fact in every kind, 
 the effect of improved plant and machinery, as 
 well as of a larger amount and greater concentra- 
 tion of capital ; heavy losses by numerous destruc- 
 tive wars, and the large war expenditure yearly 
 incurred by the principal countries of Europe ; 
 extensive speculative investments utterly disap- 
 pointing in their results ; an excessive expendi- 
 ture on alcoholic beverages, and the improvidence 
 of the working classes ; the restrictive tariffs in 
 many States ; the cessation of great discoveries ; 
 and the revolution produced by the greater speed 
 in communication." No explanation of the theory 
 of a septennial cycle was offered, and it has been 
 discredited by later experience. Professor Levi's 
 items echo the conclusions of the Royal Commission 
 of 1882-6. Some of them may be doubted ; on 
 
§ IV.] THE LIBERAL STATE 355 
 
 the other hand, we might extend the list, if our aim 
 were not rather to discover a true, that is a pro- 
 portionate, causation. More briefly, then, we may 
 say that the crisis was essentially international, 
 and everywhere found peoples and Governments 
 unprepared ; that in Great Britain it was not, 
 as it were, a collapse in a level condition, but a 
 severe break in a rapid rise ; and that here the 
 havoc was chiefly due to the effect of a blessed 
 flood of cheap food imports on a home agriculture 
 weakened by high rents and bad seasons, and to 
 the effect of warfare and speculative investment 
 upon industries organized solely for the highest 
 power of production. Foreign industrial com- 
 petition, it is now evident, was a factor of trivial 
 importance until far on in the 'eighties, and then 
 it was much exaggerated. 
 
 Agriculture had prospered greatly under free 
 trade. The removal of tariff privilege had stimul- 
 ated improvements of various kinds. Reaping- 
 machines came into general use ; hay-cutting and 
 other machines were introduced ; the steam- 
 plough proved profitable on large farms with heavy 
 soil. The farmer learned to employ nitrate of soda, 
 ammoniacal, phosphate, and other manures. So 
 long as the high prices continued, much inferior 
 land could be kept under the plough. Drain- 
 age, reclamation, and intensive cultivation were 
 carried on upon a large scale. There was, indeed, 
 one unhealthy symptom amid this progress — the 
 labourers were steadily leaving the soil. Rents 
 
356 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vii. 
 
 rose rapidly during the 'fifties, when wheat, barley, 
 oats, and meat were still dear. In the 'sixties, 
 wheat fell, and the rent movement was checked; 
 but the average fertility of land was markedly 
 raised in these two decades. The old conditions of 
 village life were rapidly passing away. Railways, 
 while they helped the marketing of crops, the 
 steadiness of prices, and the cheapening of goods 
 as desirable in the country as the town, brought 
 with them also manners and ambitions hitherto 
 unknown to the farming class. It seemed that pros- 
 perity must continue, for the demand of the new 
 urban populations, especially for meat, was rising 
 far more rapidly than their numbers. The great 
 boom in trade from 1870 to 1873 reflected itself 
 in the shires. Wheat and rent rose together. 
 With twenty thousand labourers leaving the land 
 yearly, wages rose to thirteen shillings a week. 
 Then came the slump in trade, a heavy fall in 
 agricultural prices, due to American imports 
 and the resumption of agriculture in France 
 and Germany, and a succession of bad seasons. 
 From 1869 to 1878, there was only one very 
 good British wheat year — 1874 — and only two 
 others, 1870 and 1875, gave average wheat crops. 
 The worst harvests were those of 1876-7 and 
 1879. 
 
 ^ Acute fluctuations of price had always been the 
 curse of farming, as much under high protection 
 as in earlier and later days. But the prodigious 
 fertility of the American West was a factor 
 
§iv.: 
 
 THE LIBERAL STATE 
 
 357 
 
 altogether new to history, sure to last for 
 present lifetimes, if not for ever. The following 
 table will serve to show the relation of imports 
 and prices before and after the point at which 
 British wheat-growing on ordinary land became 
 impossible : 
 
 
 
 Average 
 Wheat Prices 
 per Imperial 
 
 Quarter. 
 
 Average Annual Imports 
 (Millions of Cwts.). 
 
 
 Wheat. 
 
 Barley. 
 
 Oats. 
 
 1851-5 
 1861-5 
 1871-5 
 1881-5 
 1891-5 
 1901-5 
 1906-10 
 
 
 8. d. 
 
 53 4 
 47 6 
 
 54 8 
 40 1 
 27 11 
 27 11 
 31 10 
 
 14 
 
 28 
 44 
 58 
 69 
 87 
 97 
 
 2-3 
 5-7 
 
 11 
 
 12 
 
 21 
 
 24 
 
 19 
 
 2-9 
 4-8 
 
 11-6 
 
 16-3 
 
 15 
 
 17 
 
 15 
 
 In the years 1875-9 the farmer was doubly hit : 
 the crops were deficient, and the prices fell. In the 
 following five years, the seasons improved, but 
 prices again fell heavily.^ In the following table, 
 the last column is given as approximately true by 
 Leone Levi, who, however, admits that the income 
 figure for 1880-4 does not fully represent the actual 
 reduction : 
 
 ^ It is interesting to note that they now for the first time fell below 
 the level of a century earlier. In the years 1771-90, wheat averaged 
 only 47s. per quarter. 
 
358 
 
 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vii. 
 
 ■ ■ ' 
 
 Average 
 
 Average 
 
 Value of 
 
 Kstimated 
 
 .■<:•'.[.. : 
 
 Yield, 
 
 Price of 
 
 Income 
 
 
 Bushels per 
 Acre. 
 
 Wheat per 
 Quarter. 
 
 Produce 
 per Acre. 
 
 from 
 Land. 
 
 
 
 s. d. 
 
 £ s. d. 
 
 Million £. 
 
 1865-9 
 
 27-8 
 
 53 8 
 
 9 7 
 
 89 
 
 1870-4 
 
 27-5 
 
 55 
 
 9 9 
 
 93 
 
 1875-9 
 
 24-0 
 
 47 6 
 
 7 2 
 
 99 
 
 1880-4 
 
 27-4 
 
 42 4 
 
 7 5 
 
 98 
 
 A revolution had now been effected in the food 
 supply of the United Kingdom. The available 
 quantity of wheat had not increased as rapidly 
 as that of meat and butter, though it had rather 
 more than kept pace with the growth of population ; 
 but the sources of supply were radically changed. 
 
 
 Wheat 
 
 Imports. 
 
 Million 
 
 Cwts. 
 
 U.K. 
 
 Produce. 
 
 Million 
 
 Cwts. 
 
 pW/d. 
 
 1852 .... 
 1885 .... 
 
 18 
 80 
 
 69 
 87-5 
 
 848 
 364 
 
 Many estimates of the losses involved in this sweep- 
 ing change were made, beside Leone Levi's ; 
 but none of them can be accepted as more than 
 approximately accurate. Beaconsfield thought the 
 loss on the 1876 harvest alone amounted to £26 
 millions. Mr Shaw Lefevre put the loss on the 
 wheat crops of 1875-80, as compared with 1869-74, 
 
§iv.] THE LIBERAL STATE 359 
 
 at £78 millions. Mr Robert Giften estimated the 
 deficiency in 1878-80 at more than £40 millions. 
 Perhaps the most trustworthy figures are those 
 put before the Royal Commission on Trade Depres- 
 sion,i in March 1886, by Sir James Caird, K.C.B., 
 Senior Land Commissioner for England. After 
 extensive inquiries in England, Scotland, and Wales, 
 he estimated that, comparing 1886 with 1876, out 
 of their " spendable income," in one year, 
 
 Landlords had lost £20,000,000 (30 per cent.). 
 Tenants „ „ 20,000,000 (60 per cent.). 
 Labourers „ „ 2,800,000 (10 per cent.) 
 
 £42,800,000 
 
 Basing himself chiefly on income-tax figures, 
 Caird also estimated that, in thirty years, agricul- 
 tural rent in Great Britain had varied thus : 
 
 1875. £41,000,000. 
 
 1877. £51,800,000 (26 per cent, rise). 
 
 1884. £49,900,000, 
 
 1886. £41,000,000 (probably). 
 
 The years 1893-4-5, when a new and still lower 
 price level was reached, were again years of heavy 
 loss, many bankruptcies, and a general fall of rent, 
 especially in the Southern and Eastern counties. 
 
 The most important results of this succession 
 of disasters were (a) to halve the area of British 
 wheat farming, (b) to reduce greatly the agricul- 
 ' Second Report, pp. 293-308. 
 
360 
 
 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vn. 
 
 tural population, and (c) to confirm the degradation 
 of the remnant of labourers who stayed in the 
 villages. The acreage under wheat fell from about 
 4 million acres in 1869 to 3,500,000 acres in 1871, 
 2,600,000 acres in 1882, and 1,900,000 acres in 
 1911. Permanent pasture steadily increased, and 
 this was one factor in the displacement of labour. 
 The following table shows briefly the double change 
 in the agriculture of Great Britain : 
 
 
 Millions of Acres. 
 
 Engaged in 
 Agriculture.' 
 
 Labourers and 
 Shepherds.' 
 
 Arable 
 Land. 
 
 Per- 
 manent 
 Grass. 
 
 1871 
 1881 
 1891 
 1901 
 1911 
 
 18-4 
 17-4 
 16-4 
 15-6 
 14-6 
 
 12-4 
 14-6 
 16-4 
 16-7 
 17-4 
 
 1,711,813 
 1,592,520 
 1,498,041 
 1,396,350 
 1,344,372 
 
 1,041,445 
 932,527 
 852,027 
 692,546 
 723,699 
 
 Broadly, a third of the agricultural labourers, 
 with their families — ^probably a million in all — 
 left the land in the last three decades of the century. 
 Sooner or later, many of them emigrated, after a 
 sojourn in the industrial towns and seaports, 
 where they had swelled the body of applicants for 
 unskilled and casual work. It seems safe to con- 
 
 * Male and female, except female relatives of farmers engaged in 
 work on the farm, and farmers' sons under 15 years old. 
 
 ' Males only, excluding sons and other relatives of farmers, etc. 
 Owing to changes of classification, the comparison of figures must 
 not be pressed too closely. The last figure is explained by an in- 
 crease of "agricultural labourers — ^not distinguished," in England 
 and Wales, from 348,072 in 1901 to 425,063 in 1911— -probably an 
 increase of miscellaneous labour on the land in quasi-urban districts. 
 
§ IV.] THE LIBERAL STATE 361 
 
 elude that those left behind in the country were 
 the older, weaker, more helpless, and servile 
 members of a class whose ancient safeguards were 
 now utterly destroyed, the most neglected and 
 despised class in the population, and the one that 
 had gained least by a century of material progress. 
 Joseph Arch's Agricultural Labourers' Union, which 
 had in 1881 a membership of 25,000, and paid 
 considerable sums in emigration aid and sickness 
 and death benefits, faded away. 
 
 The agricultural reports of the Labour Commission 
 of 1891-4 present a sad picture of rural decay. Mr 
 Arthur Wilson Fox's report on Norfolk and Suffolk 
 is typical. Here the young man's ambition ulti- 
 mately to obtain a farm was long dead. " There 
 is no such inducement in the Eastern Counties for 
 him to remain ; and it is certainly intelligible 
 that any young man with enterprise or ambition, 
 on a comparatively small wage, not always regu- 
 lar, with scarcely any prospect of improving his 
 pecuniary or social position as long as he lives, 
 should seek any other kind of employment." 
 Most employers complained that the men did 
 less work and were less skilled than formerly, a cir- 
 cumstance which Mr Fox attributed to " a more 
 educated generation shirking and resenting toil 
 which is comparatively badly paid, monotonous, 
 and productive of no material or social improve- 
 ment." Perhaps the one satisfactory tendency 
 recorded was the withdrawal of women and chil- 
 dren from field work, although the " gang " system 
 
Missing Page 
 
Missing Page 
 
364 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vii. 
 
 about £50 a year for ploughmen down to £20 
 for women workers. The " bothy " system of 
 lodging the unmarried men, and the " bondage " 
 system for women, were condenmed as fruitful 
 causes of demoralization, and some disease was 
 traced to bad cottage accommodation. The increase 
 of dairy and fruit farming was a hopeful feature. 
 Scottish farms employed less hands per acre than 
 English, but, on the whole, the Northern worker 
 was better paid and better off generally. 
 
 V, A Teade Crisis analysed 
 
 We must now turn back to the commercial and 
 industrial aspects of the crises of 1875 and 1883. 
 It is really a single crisis, with two acute points ; 
 for, as the Royal Commission reported in 1886, 
 " with the exception of a short period of prosperity 
 enjoyed by certain branches of trade in 1880 to 
 1883, the depression has proceeded with tolerable 
 uniformity, and has affected the trade and industry 
 of the country generally." The difficulty of truly 
 describing this, the severest of modern economic 
 disturbances, lies in its great complexity. The 
 bluebooks just referred to show how imperfectly 
 it was understood at the time. The evidence 
 was at once too plentiful and too fragmentary. A 
 generation was yet to pass ere the first Census of 
 Production was taken ; but the crude figures of 
 exports and imports, prices current, and various 
 trade records, gave manufacturers and merchants 
 
§ v.] THE LIBERAL STATE 365 
 
 abundant material over which to air their griev- 
 ances, and partisans — Protectionists and Free 
 Traders, Monometallists and BimetalHsts — ^their 
 theories and prescriptions. The physiology of 
 trade crises has still not received the attention it 
 demands of economists : forty years ago, the 
 keenest minds were overwhelmed by a phenomenon 
 then comparatively new and positively immeasur- 
 able — ^the world-wide contagion of economic disease. 
 In the strictly local life of olden times, suffering 
 arose directly, perceptibly, from an elementary 
 disaster, such as war, pestilence, or the failure of 
 crops. But the paradox of the 'seventies and 
 'eighties — a relative paradox, of course, for " over- 
 production " had been discussed long before — was 
 that, to all appearance, men were being ruined by 
 cheap food supplies, and the abundance of goods 
 of which all needed more than they could get. 
 Common-sense at once suggests the observation that, 
 if the reality corresponded to this appearance, the 
 commercial system approved by the orthodox eco 
 nomists was, to put it mUdly, a very crude affair, 
 calling for speedy alteration. 
 
 There was both truth and fallacy in this view. 
 Undoubtedly, the elaboration of economic life, 
 and the closer interdependence of different com- 
 munities and different classes within each, as they 
 bring advantages in good times, involve their own 
 peculiar disadvantages whenever the normal process 
 of trade is dislocated. The mechanism through 
 which exchange operates is a very extensive and 
 
366 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vn. 
 
 delicate affair. It is subject to inner breaks, and 
 to shock and strain from the current that flows 
 through it. In the former order, bankmg organiza- 
 tion and currency, in the latter increases and 
 transfers of productive, distributive, and consump- 
 tive power, take a leading part. In earlier crises, 
 we have seen the widespread mischief that accrues 
 from a breakdown of banking. In the present 
 case, the chief mischief within the exchangie 
 mechanism related to the currency. Gold was in 
 greater demand, as token of a swelling trade ; 
 but the supply was diminished not only by slack 
 production, but by the adoption of the gold stan- 
 dard by Germany and Holland in 1873, when large 
 quantities were exported from England. That is, 
 gold became dear ; or, in other words, commodities 
 became cheap as measured in terms of gold. One 
 of these commodities was silver, which was further 
 cheapened by mining activity, and by the Con- 
 tinental demonetization of silver. This was a 
 severe blow to India, not in her internal exchange, 
 which remained and stUl remains on the silver 
 basis, but in the payments which she must make 
 to England on account of interest on debt, purchases 
 of goods, and civil and military services. In time, 
 an adjustment was made under some of these heads 
 by writing down the exchange value of the rupee. 
 But it will be seen that the whole volume of the 
 foreign commerce of a country may be depreciated 
 by an obscure break or decay within the machinery 
 of trade. 
 
§ v.] THE LIBERAL STATE 367 
 
 Yet an injury in the medium of exchange can 
 hardly be as serious a matter as a great disturbance 
 at the inlet or the outlet of the current of trade 
 itself — ^that is, in production or consumption. 
 Disturbance of this kind rose, in 1875, from events 
 of an opposite character — destruction by warfare 
 in Europe, and by bad weather in England, on the 
 one hand ; on the other, the rapid opening of 
 immense areas of virgin soil in America, and 
 the increased power of manufactiu-e, especially in 
 England, and of transport. In the annals of the 
 time, these factors are almost inextricably con- 
 fused. It is, however, important to distinguish them 
 clearly in our minds, lest we make the evident error 
 of tracing evil to things good. 
 
 The war of 1870-1, the last of a series of destruc- 
 tive contests, crippled the two leading nations 
 of the Continent. This was the British manu- 
 facturers' opportunity. Exports, which had stood 
 at £180 millions in 1867, and £190 miUions in 1869, 
 rose in the first year of the war to £199 millions, 
 then to £223 millions, and in 1872 to a maximum 
 of £256 millions. In 1873, when France paid her 
 indemnity of £200 millions, and, for the rest, 
 was kept busy restoring the public and private 
 property that had been destroyed, this maximum 
 was maintained. But the loss of two competi- 
 tors now proved itself to be, also, the loss of two 
 consumers. The two countries had sacrificed to 
 their ambitions nearly 200,000 able-bodied com- 
 batants killed, and a larger number wounded. 
 
368 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vii. 
 
 France had now to pay the money pienalty--that 
 is, had to enter upon an arrangement by which a 
 sum of about £8 miUions was to be paid yearly 
 in perpetuity, or till the capital debt was redeemed. 
 Germany had to learn that a victory may be only 
 a degree less costly than a defeat. Much poorer 
 than France in hoarded wealth, she had been 
 deprived for many months of the labour of a 
 million of her stoutest men. With the return of 
 the armies, this labour-force was suddenly restored, 
 not to a normal activity, but in a feverish effort 
 to recover lost ground. The expenditure of the 
 French milliards — chiefly on railways, other public 
 works, and armaments — created a class of manu- 
 facturers and workers which was to be, in future 
 years, dependent on Government favours, and led 
 to a rage of industrial speculation. In five years, 
 the number of joint-stock companies increased 
 nearly fivefold. There being no corresponding 
 increase of the power of consumption — because, 
 while the French indemnity may be said to have 
 paid for the maintenance of the German armies, 
 it did not and could not compensate for the arrest 
 of wealth-making during the war — an acute reaction 
 took place in 1874 ; and serious depression con- 
 tinued till 1879, almost every branch of German 
 industry being affected. Between the two years 
 named, British exports declined from £239 millions 
 to the minimum of £191 millions, rising again to 
 £241 millions in 1882, and then once more falling. 
 Austria, always bound economically to Germany 
 
§ v.] THE LIBERAL STATE 369 
 
 much more closely than England is, received a 
 still more severe shock. 
 
 The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8 was an im- 
 portant factor in the second phase of the crisis ; 
 but its effect was more marked upon invested 
 than trading capital. The long prosperity of the 
 Victorian age had led to a great and, at last, a 
 reclcless increase of British foreign investments. 
 Among these were many loans to the petty States 
 of Central and South America, a half of which 
 were in default in 1875 (some are on the black-list 
 of the Council of Foreign Bondholders to this day).. 
 Most Turkish loans were held in England ; from 
 1876 to 1882 they paid no interest, and then only 
 a nominal amount. There were also heavy losses 
 on Egyptian and American securities. Russia and 
 Turkey were now weakened as purchasers ; and 
 these branches of British export trade, after a 
 momentary stimulation, suffered a corresponding 
 relapse. 
 
 The mischief of warfare is comparatively easy 
 to appreciate. It destroys capital and labour at 
 once ; it destroys past wealth, present wealth, 
 and the means of creating wealth in the future. 
 It thus compels more strenuous labour on the part 
 of a weakened community, and at the same time 
 compels abstinence — ^that is, it reduces the power 
 of consumption from which alone the demand for 
 labour can arise. The mischief of bad investments 
 is obvious. The mischief of a crop failure is also 
 
 easy to appreciate : there is direct loss to farmers, 
 
 2a 
 
S?0 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vn. 
 
 landowners, and labourers, and indirect loss to 
 others by the restriction of purchases. These are 
 all cases of immediate destruction of consuming 
 power, which conveys, in turn, a check to the 
 whole business of production. They clearly help 
 to explain the long depression of British trade, 
 during which factories, foundries, and ship-yards 
 were closed, wages and profits were reduced, and 
 when, as we are assured, the London repositories 
 were full of discarded carriages, hunters and racers 
 were sent to Tattersall's, houses were given up, 
 and the summer holiday resorts cried out for the 
 guests who came not. But the main cause of the 
 crisis is said to have been not these evident evils, 
 but something called " over-production," in other 
 words, a superabundance of cheap American 
 foodstuffs and cheap British manufactured articles. 
 Cheaper production and distribution, which nor- 
 mally stimulate consumption, are said on this 
 occasion to have produced a general and disastrous 
 "glut." We shall miss the whole point of the 
 1875-83 crisis if we do not reach a better under- 
 standing of this complex phenomenon ; and for 
 that reason we have separated the demonstrable 
 causes of direct loss — currency disorder, warfare, 
 speculation, and crop failure — ^and left " over- 
 production " to the last. 
 
 America, then pre-eminently the land of econo- 
 mic " freedom," and therefore, in the individualist 
 philosophy, of economic harmony, will afford us 
 the most considerable and glaring illustration of 
 
§v.] THE LIBERAL STATE 371 
 
 what actually happened. Here the worst wounds 
 of a terrible war had been healed, and the mar- 
 vellous natural wealth of the West was at 
 kngth being tapped. The Bessemer steel process 
 should have been an unmitigated blessing to 
 mankind, since it halved the labour needed to 
 make a mile of rails. The new wheat lands ought to 
 have been a pure addition to human wealth. But 
 the competitive system of exploitation, which is 
 tolerable in normal times, develops before any 
 special opportunity an orgie of greed the end of 
 which may be nearly as disastrous as a great war. 
 In a few years, 30,000 miles of railways, costing 
 something like £10,000 a mile, were built — ^in many 
 cases, by the way, built so badly that they had 
 presently to be reconstructed. Not only had 
 interest and dividends to be paid on this 
 £300,000,000 of capital (much of it drawn out of 
 other channels of production). Great mining, 
 iron and steel making, and other businesses were 
 called into being ; labour was attracted from every 
 side ; wages and prices rose sharply under the 
 hot demand. The rise of prices brought a flood 
 of imports (especially British) ; the rise of wages 
 brought a wave of immigration ; prices and wages 
 in Europe hardened in sympathy. The inevitable 
 and tragic break, which occurred in 1877, may 
 be described in several ways, according as we centre 
 our attention on the factors of production, which 
 are one end, or the factors of consumption, at the 
 other end of the economic process, or on the 
 
372 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vn. 
 
 complex mechanism of exchange which unites these 
 two. The orthodox theory was that invention, 
 by producing cheaper production, so stimulates con- 
 sumption that a larger and more varied produc- 
 tion is in turn created. In an ideal society, where 
 no one was dominated by greed or need, and normal 
 development was not disturbed by outer pressure 
 or temptation, this would, no doubt, occur. In 
 real life, the correspondence between the two ends 
 of the process, between production and consump- 
 tion, is so slow and imperfect that much of its 
 benefits may be lost in an interval of ruinous panic. 
 Production — ^railway building, in this instance — is 
 at length checked by high interest, high prices, 
 and high wages. Orders for material cease, and 
 prices fall. Labourers are dismissed, and wages 
 fall. Capital is cancelled, and interest falls. The 
 infection of prodigal — ^that is, excessive and ill- 
 directed — investment gives place to an infection 
 of parsimony, and the reaction spreads endlessly. 
 The promised crops are reaped ; but they have 
 to be sold so cheaply — that is, so many purchasers 
 have been disabled— that farmers on both sides 
 of the ocean are ruined. For hundreds of 
 thousands of workers, the benefit of cheap bread 
 is negatived by low wages and irregularity of 
 employment. 
 
 What the railway is to the Western Continent, 
 the ship is to the British Commonwealth. Always 
 a speculative enterprise, rising and falling with, or 
 in anticipation of, the obscure tides of commerce, 
 
§ v.] THE LIBERAL STATE 373 
 
 ship-buildihg flourished upon the American boom, 
 until the slow, grinding crisis of 1883-8 brought 
 about a stoppage by which tens of thousands of 
 men were thrown out of work, trade-union funds 
 were exhausted, and riotous gatherings of the 
 unemployed in London caused deep alarm.^ Here, 
 again, the increasing use of steel represented a 
 great national economy ; but the other side of 
 the account is weighted by the losses of iron 
 manufacturers, and the costs of the general eco- 
 nomic disturbance. It is needless to multiply 
 illustrations. 
 
 The signatories of the Majority Report of the 
 Commission of 1886 drew comfort from the fact 
 that the volume of British foreign trade, as distin- 
 guished from its declared value, showed little or 
 no diminution, even at the two acute points of 
 the crisis, and over the whole period showed a 
 considerable increase. The difference between 
 the quantity and the price measurements may be 
 shown thus : 
 
 1 It was estimated that the .carrying capacity of British sailing- 
 and steam-ships (taking the latter as three times as efficient as the 
 former) rose from 10,000,000 tons in 1875 to 14,600,000 tons in 1883. 
 The following figures of ship-building show the sharpness of the 
 fluctuation : 
 
 1880 
 
 796,221 tons 
 
 1881 
 
 . 1,013,208 „ 
 
 1882 
 
 . 1,240,824 „ 
 
 1883 
 
 . 1,329,604 „ 
 
 1884 
 
 820,000 „ 
 
374 
 
 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vii. 
 
 Annual 
 Average. 
 
 In £ Millions. 
 
 Per Head. 
 
 Shipping 
 Tonnage 
 cleared. 
 
 Im- 
 
 Ex- 
 
 Total. 
 
 
 ports. 
 
 ports. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 £ s. d. 
 
 
 1865-9 
 
 286 
 
 280 
 
 516 
 
 16 19 1 
 
 14,618,000 
 
 1870-4 
 
 348 
 
 288 
 
 636 
 
 19 19 3 
 
 18,780,000 
 
 1875-9 
 
 375 
 
 ■258 
 
 632 
 
 18 16 6 
 
 21,509,800 
 
 1880-4 
 
 408 
 
 298 
 
 706 
 
 20 1 
 
 27,673,000 
 
 The diminution of the value of exports in the 
 third period was wholly on account of foreign 
 countries ; the Indian and Colonial trade expanded 
 continuously. The difference between price and 
 volume may be again illustrated by the fact 
 that the exports of 1883, valued at £240 millions, 
 would, at the prices of 1873, have been worth 
 £349 millions. 
 
 If trade is substantially an exchange of com- 
 modities and services, not of money, and if the 
 volume of trade increased, how are we to explain 
 the " depression," with all its grievous incidents ? 
 In the first place, it must not be assumed that 
 oversea trade is a perfect index of the whole volume 
 of national business. We have seen that a loss of 
 " spendable income " of the agricultural class, 
 amounting to £42 millions in a single year, is reflected 
 in the foreign trade returns only in the form of 
 increased food imports. Depression in the building 
 trades and many other industries engaged in home 
 production and distribution only might co-exist 
 
§ v.] THE LIBERAL STATE 375 
 
 with a brisk foreign trade. Secondly, it is not 
 enough that there should be a positive increase 
 of trade. If the rate of increase be slackened — 
 and this was certainly the case in 1875 and 1883 
 — factories must be closed or put upon short 
 time, furnaces are blown out, a thousand kinds 
 of preparation for enlarged output are stopped; 
 and, at every such point, unemployment and 
 restricted consumption convey the contagion to 
 other kinds of business. Thirdly, we must note 
 what may be called the fallacy of totals and 
 averages. A statistical increase presents the 
 balance of many plus and many minus quantities. 
 But, in real life, gain and loss do not really balance 
 as they do in the perfect fluidity of statistics. 
 Even in the individual experience, the gain of one 
 day does not always or wholly extinguish the loss 
 of another. In the vast majority of lives, a slight 
 rise of wages merely means a slight alleviation of 
 the pains of poverty ; whereas any decrease means 
 actual hunger and other misery. Still less does 
 the gain of one class, whether of employers or 
 employed, compensate for the loss of another 
 class. The gain does not circulate fully ; for in a 
 critical time the instinct is to hoard profits, not to 
 embark them afresh. But, while gain concentrates, 
 loss distributes itself, falling to lower and lower 
 levels of society, and pressing most heavily upon 
 those least able to bear it. 
 
 It is very possible that, at this time, England 
 suffered less than the United States and the leading 
 
"^ ' Crude as it seems in retrospect, 
 
 nations of Europe^ system was the most highly 
 the ^"^^^'^^j.e most fluid, the most responsive 
 develope^^_^ ^^ possessed the most varied and 
 
 **idespread markets. Its directors were the most 
 experienced and probably the most able captams 
 of finance and industry in the world. Their credit 
 was the best ; and their greater accumulated 
 capital enabled them longer to continue improfit- 
 able transactions. 
 
 While it is impossible to measure acciu-ately the 
 
 incidence of the different factors separated above, 
 
 this slight analysis points to one clear conclusion. 
 
 What is called " over-production " chiefly means 
 
 disorganization. Where greed and need are masters 
 
 is chaos, not liberty. Production is then not a 
 
 smooth co-operation of land, labour, and capital, 
 
 but a more or less violent and wasteful struggle, 
 
 marked by alternations of idleness and reckless 
 
 adventure, over-estimates of demand Jeading to 
 
 feverish trausfers of energy from one product to 
 
 another, and a general mal-distribution of effort. 
 
 Exchange is not a smoothly working process, but 
 
 one in which the strains due to the irregularity 
 
 of the stream of business are aggravated by self- 
 
 mterested interferences with the mechanism itself. 
 
 Consumption is not a sane satisfaction of needs, 
 
 steadily expanding in quality as well as quantity, 
 
 anH !u "f*^''^^ balance of the stint of the many 
 
 the few Xlr^"'"'"' ''' ^"^^"^ °^ ^P^^'i^"^) °* 
 • ^^ether, m normal times, individual 
 
§ v.] THE LIBERAL STATE 377 
 
 self-interest is a sufficient and safe driving-power 
 for the business of a community, or not, it evidently 
 breaks down in face of an emergency. When, as 
 in the case we have examined, the three types 
 of emergency — wholesale destruction of wealth, 
 sudden new creation of wealth, and disturbance 
 in the medium of exchange — are combined, wide- 
 spread disaster results. 
 
 All this is now very clear, to the capitalist as 
 well as to the labourer ; forty years ago it was 
 not so at all. There was no sort of organization 
 in any department of production or distribution 
 to meet the demand of such a crisis. The mere idea 
 of organizing, even on a national scale, against 
 what was yet coming to be regarded as a periodi- 
 cal misfortune would have been ridiculed. Sir 
 Wm. H. Houldsworth, a Manchester M.P., member of 
 several Royal Commissions, and a typical figure of 
 the time, speaking at the Industrial Remuneration 
 Conference of 1885, said : " The first condition 
 which industry demands in order that it may live 
 and grow is freedom— freedom to spring where it 
 likes, to flow where it likes, to alter its course as it 
 likes, to disappear if it likes. ' Noli me tangere ' is 
 the true password of industry. And, to the thousand 
 voices which from time to time press on us nostrums 
 for the revival of dying trade, the only real and 
 sensible answer is, ' Why can't you let it alone ? ' 
 If you meddle with it, you will most likely kill it 
 altogether. . . . All industry is governed by the 
 great law of supply and demand. This law is to 
 
378 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vii. 
 
 trade what the law of gravitation is to matter. 
 One of its first effects is to cause fluctuation. . . . 
 How, then, is it possible to have any ' stability of 
 industrial employment,' or any ' steadiness in rates 
 of wages ' ? It is a question whether, if stability 
 and steadiness (that is, no falls, but also no rises) 
 were possible, it were desirable. The instability 
 and unsteadiness of trade are its best stimulant. . . 
 Only two suggestions occur to me. They are not 
 new, but, being founded upon the great law which 
 regulates trade, they cannot be too often insisted 
 upon. The first is, open new markets. The second 
 is, produce as cheaply as you can." ^ 
 
 This was Spartan counsel to men who had seen 
 their businesses ruined, their small savings devoured. 
 Yet the words were characteristic, and only a few 
 heretics had yet openly challenged the fatalism 
 they expressed. We have seen that the spirit of 
 laisser faire had become greatly weakened wher- 
 ever the appeal of individual suffering, or the 
 power of organized labour, demanded a compro- 
 mise. But the principle that, as a whole, the 
 business world must be left to regulate itself was 
 open only to a mUd doubt. During a generation 
 of expanding trade, manufacturers had grown 
 accustomed to regarding the economic process as 
 working smoothly, like their own engines, with 
 only an occasional jolt or jar. 
 
 To the average man the whole subject was as 
 abstruse as the differential calculus ; the main 
 
 ^ Beport of Conference, 1885, pp. 232-5. 
 
§ v.] THE LIBERAL STATE 379 
 
 body of trade unionists had tacitly accepted the 
 system into which they were born ; the average 
 merchant and manufacturer conducted their affairs 
 by rule of thumb, content that "the fittest" 
 should survive in what the new science told them 
 must be a relentless struggle. If taxation were 
 equitably spread, and the Budget balanced, states- 
 men had done their duty. The daily newspaper 
 was, indeed, beginning to supply a rudimentary 
 account of the markets and supplies of the world. 
 Banking was more stable than of old ; on the other 
 hand, the limited-liability principle, legalized by 
 the Joint Stock Acts of 1855 and 1862, covered, 
 especially in the hands of the professional company 
 promoter, much rash and injurious speculation, 
 and some actual fraud. In general, commerce 
 was a scramble, in which there was scant pity for 
 the hindmost ; and it does not seem to have 
 occurred to anybody that it would pay to keep a 
 man in a watch-tower to look out for approaching 
 trouble. The Royal Commissioners themselves, 
 to whom the puzzling problem had been remitted, 
 recommended more technical education, the sup- 
 pression of inequitable railway rates, the develop- 
 ment of canals. In fact, like Sir W. H. Houldsworth, 
 having diagnosed " over-production," they could 
 prescribe nothing but more " over-production." 
 They condemned the abuse of limited liability, 
 but failed to see in the principle of joint-stock 
 trading an instinctive effort on the part of capital 
 toward better organization. They deprecated 
 
380 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vn. 
 
 any idea of making the diplomatic and consular 
 services directly useful to trade. Only a minority 
 of protectionists conceived the possibility of any 
 bolder attempt to control the anarchy of commerce 
 in the general interest ; and their panacea was 
 evidently no cure for " over-production," or other 
 ills of an insular State dependent upon a world 
 market. 
 
 The doctrine of thrift has one memorial in this 
 crisis : it just saved the trade unions and friendly 
 societies from extinction. But, in the dark days 
 when the fires were put out and the engines 
 stopped, when the emigrant ship was fuU and the 
 bankruptcy courts were busy, men began to ask 
 themselves whether the doctrine of thrift and its 
 associated principles had not blinded them to a 
 need more vital even than the preservation of 
 trade unions, to wit, the preservation of trade itself. 
 An instinct of self-preservation tells us when a 
 social theory has broken down long before a scientific 
 account of the failure can be given ; and thought 
 gallops when hunger drives. The air is full of 
 questioning. It is all very well for the wealthy 
 employer to hail " instability and unsteadiness " 
 as " the best stimulant " of trade ; but how can 
 the poor be expected to accept this view ? Is 
 there not something like an antithesis between 
 " instability " in this sense, and the fluidity postu- 
 lated in the old optimist theory ? In the name 
 of freedom, an orderly expansion was promised; 
 must not order now be sought in another direction ? 
 
§ v.] THE LIBERAL STATE 381 
 
 The work of political reform had been nearly com- 
 pleted ; but of what use to those who made it was a 
 Government which stood impotent, if not indifferent, 
 before the gravest, and now the most characteristic, 
 form of social calamity ? The Royal Commissioners 
 had shown a touching regard for the dignity of 
 Her Majesty's Ambassadors and Consuls ; would 
 it not have been more to the point to require that 
 the State should aid the commercial community 
 at least by supplying it with early information 
 of important business developments ? The Man- 
 chester man might make light of the decay of agri- 
 culture ; could the nation afford to do so ? Above 
 all, was it quite beyond hope to procure closer 
 harmony of production and consumption ? 
 
 Amid various degrees of pessimism, three types 
 of answer to these and like questions gradually 
 crystallized out. Landlords, farmers, and a few 
 merchants representing decayed industries (promi- 
 nently, the sugar-refiners and West Indian planters) 
 revived the almost forgotten demand for Tariff 
 protection. A school of Imperialist thought arose, 
 and with more immediate success ; for, under the 
 belief that " trade follows the flag," four million 
 square miles of territory, principally in Africa, 
 were added to the Empire during the decade 
 following 1883. This reply proved very dis- 
 appointing and costly. Finally, a new Labour 
 movement appeared, into the origin and character 
 of which we must look more closely. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE AWAKENING. (1886-1900) 
 
 I. The " Residuum " Discovered 
 
 The features of the international trade crisis are 
 to be seen in miniature not only in disturbances of 
 national extent, but in the lesser fluctuations 
 which are always occurring in domestic industry 
 and commerce. Every Irish famine, the cholera 
 epidemics in the middle of the century, the harvest 
 failures, the railway mania and other excesses 
 of speculation, every collapse of a banking or trading 
 house, sent currents of injury vibrating through 
 the whole social fabric ; whUe, from the benefits 
 of every great discovery and invention, every 
 labour-saving device or improvement of method, 
 some deduction must be made on account of the 
 disturbance it created, in the absence of aids to 
 economic readjustment. A maximum of friction, 
 a miminum of security : these were the actual 
 characteristics of a machine constructed by the 
 spirit of gain out of the broken pieces of an organic 
 society. The perfect fluidity of the factors of 
 production and exchange, the " harmonies " ex- 
 pounded by Bastiat, are a myth of the old 
 economics. Directly we pass from the study to 
 
§ I.] THE AWAKENING 383 
 
 the world of affairs, we perceive that the injury 
 involved in this perpetual round of accident, 
 displacement, and speculation is so widespread as 
 to appear as a social disease rather than a series 
 of individual injustices. 
 
 The common benefit which should result from 
 every exchange of the products of divided labour 
 may in large part disappear, or be seized by the 
 party holding the stronger strategic position. This 
 is not necessarily the employer. In an analysis 
 of trade bargaining as it actually occurs, Mr and 
 Mrs Webb have shown that, " paradoxical as it 
 may appear, in the highly developed commercial 
 system of the England of to-day, the capitalist 
 manufacturer stands at as great a relative dis- 
 advantage to the wholesale trader as the isolated 
 workman does to the capitalist manufacturer." ^ 
 Evidently, there are limits to the rise of either 
 profit, interest, rent, or wages at the expense of 
 the other factors, just as there are limits to the 
 advantage consumers can gain from the competition 
 of producers. But, no less evidently, the productive 
 factor strongest in organization, in waiting power, 
 in bargaining skill, in the knowledge of market, 
 can, within these limits, greatly increase its share, 
 just as the consumers will gain in prices where 
 producers and distributors are unorganized, and 
 buying calls for little expert knowledge.^ We 
 
 ^ Industrial Democracy, S. and B. Webb, p. 662. 
 ' " With regard to the vast majority of the purchases of daily life, 
 no one but an expert can with any assurance discriminate between 
 
384 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. Vin. 
 
 may visualize every common article — a knife or a 
 bobbin of cotton, as much as a shop or a factory—^ 
 as the resultant of a series of price-battles ; and 
 these battles, like the cruder contests of nations, 
 are settled not by reason or justice, but by strength. 
 The final purchaser squeezes the retailer ; the 
 retailer squeezes the wholesaler ; the wholesaler 
 squeezes the manufacturer, who in turn squeezes 
 the provider of his raw material ; and retailers, 
 wholesalers, manufacturers, and raw material 
 providers all squeeze their workmen, subordinate 
 officers, and agents. The great mass of the com- 
 batants can do no other. As, in warfare, it is 
 only the regular forces of highly organized States 
 that can be trusted to obey Red Cross rules and 
 other restrictions, so in the industrial conflict it 
 is only the wealthy directors of prosperous, well- 
 established firms who can give model conditions 
 of labour and maintain perfect propriety in all 
 their dealings. Every type of " sweater " repeats 
 the plea of Romeo's apothecary : " My poverty, 
 not my will, consents." And, as fear breeds 
 hate between the clerks in one office, between 
 shop-walker and shop-assistants, between fore- 
 man and hands, so different labour groups in 
 the same trade are alienated by alarms lest 
 one encroach upon or sap the position of the 
 other. 
 
 The ethic of Victorian industrialism rested upon 
 
 shades of quality, and the ordinary oustomer is reduced to decide 
 by price alone " (Webb, p. 672). 
 
§ i.J THE AWAKENING 385 
 
 a breezy assiirance that fighting was the way of 
 life (perhaps that is why its sermons on behalf 
 of international peace and its example of free trade 
 were so sterile), and that one " self-made man " 
 who survived was worth a hundred weaklings 
 who went under. When Bentham declared the 
 spectacle of an enclosure to be " one of the most 
 reassuring of all the evidences of improvement 
 and happiness," we perceive the inadequacy even 
 of the most encyclopaedic book-knowledge. The 
 Manchester men who echoed the Benthamite 
 precepts knew quite well what business meant. 
 They were very ready to denounce the greed of Tory 
 landlords ; their own greed they found justified, 
 first by an economic doctrine, according to which 
 the rewards of capital and labour were inexorably 
 fixed by natural law, operating through a self- 
 adjusting mechanism ; secondly, by a biological 
 doctrine (attributed to the gentle Charles Darwin), 
 according to which there was no way of progress 
 save that of struggle and elimination ; often, also, 
 by a theological doctrine which promised the 
 continuance in another life of the same social 
 distinctions. These ideas have passed, along withf 
 the environment out of which they arose. They 
 must have had a meaning and use in their time 
 which we cannot recapture. But, while it suffices 
 for our purpose to depict the common features 
 of the Victorian economy, rather than any effects 
 of individual depravity, it is impossible not to 
 
 conclude that these doctrines greatly discour- 
 2b 
 
386 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. viii. 
 
 aged fair dealing, pity, faith, and generosity, not 
 only between employers and employed, but in all 
 classes. 
 
 Take, for instance, the individualis t-utilitari an 
 view of usury. The hatred of extortionate lending, 
 whicBrii~natural to a static agrarian society, is 
 much weakened in a rising mercantile community 
 by the general need of extended credit. The ortho- 
 dox economists, possessed by the wish to destroy 
 ancient restrictions, secured, in 1854, the repeal of 
 the usury laws. Long afterwards, in what has 
 been called the hey-day of the money-lender, 
 J. S. Mill was completely satisfied with this step. 
 He ranked the usury laws, next to Protection, as 
 a " mischievous interference with the spontaneous 
 course of industrial transactions," and declared that 
 they had been " condemuned by all enlightened 
 persons since the triumphant onslaught made by 
 Bentham in his ' Letters on Usury,' which may 
 still be referred to as the best extant writing on the 
 subject." Whether the law interfered or not, 
 the rate of interest would, he believed, be fixed by 
 the competition of borrowers, and the answering 
 competition of lenders ; but, in the former case, 
 some capital would be frightened away, and then 
 the price of credit would be raised, so that the 
 borrower would be actually hurt by the measure 
 conceived for his benefit, " It would be difficult 
 to point out any case in which such tenderness 
 on the legislator's part is more misplaced. A person 
 of sane mind, and of the age at which persons are 
 
§ I.] THE AWAKENING 387 
 
 legally competent to conduct their own concerns, 
 must be presumed to be a sufficient guardian of 
 his pecuniary interests. . . . The law seems to 
 presume that the money-lender, dealing with 
 necessitous persons, can take advantage of their 
 necessities, and exact conditions limited only by 
 his own pleasiu*e. It might be so, if there were 
 only one money-lender within reach. But, when 
 there is the whole monied capital of a wealthy 
 community to resort to, no borrower is placed under 
 any disadvantage in the market merely by the 
 urgency of his need." ^ Mill knew, by hearsay, 
 that there are unfortunates of all classes who, 
 having little or no regular security to offer, must 
 yet borrow ; but it is difficult to believe he had ever 
 met such a case in real life. Had he done so, 
 sympathy would have opened his eyes to three 
 kinds of consideration — political, economic, and 
 moral — destructive of his argument. 
 
 The political consideration is that there are 
 many manners and degrees of State " interference," 
 of which some may be mischievous in given circum- 
 stances, others useful. An extortionate money- 
 lender comes into Court to demand his pound of 
 flesh. If any evil bargain he has made is to be 
 there ratified without question, the State is made 
 a party to his extortion, and its character as a 
 guardian of equity is deeply prejudiced. It is, 
 however, necessary to the regularity of justice, 
 
 ' J. S. Mill : Principles of Political Economy, Bk. v. oh. x., § 2. 
 
388 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vni. 
 
 and the proper relation of the various functions 
 of the State, that any control over Shylock by the 
 Court should derive from definite enactment* 
 After many scandalous episodes had come to light, 
 a Parliamentary Committee, in 1897, recommended 
 one of two courses — either " that any interest 
 above a certain rate on loans advanced by pro- 
 fessional money-lenders should be irrecoverable 
 at law," or "that the Cotirts should have the power 
 to go behind any contract with a money-lender, 
 to inquire into all the circumstances of the original 
 loan and of the subsequent transaction, and to 
 m,ake such order as may be considered reasonable." 
 The first suggestion was rejected ; the second 
 was embodied in the Money-lenders' Act of 1900, 
 which required the registration of money-lenders, 
 and enabled the Courts to cancel or amend a bargain 
 considered " harsh and unconscionable." There is 
 here no interference with any but cruel contracts, 
 and then only if the lender invoke the aid of the 
 State to recover his money. Yet the Act is a 
 substantial check upon extortion. The economic 
 consideration overlooked by Mill is that, in such 
 cases, there is no real " competition." In the 
 respectable upper levels of credit business, where 
 good security can be offered, there is effective 
 competition on both sides ; but even here the 
 process of demand and supply is increasingly 
 eased by the growth of insurance, co-operation, 
 and other types of provision or safeguard. The 
 moral consideration which usury suggests to those 
 
§ I.] THE AWAKENING 389 
 
 who know the facts is one that dominates our 
 whole subject : wherever there is human suffering 
 that individual effort cannot help, and State action 
 easily can, this action may be invoked, not simply 
 for the sake of the immediate sufferer, but for the 
 good repute without which no State can now claim 
 the loyalty of its citizens. As Mill himself said, 
 in closing his great work : " Even in the best 
 condition which society has yet reached, it is 
 lamentable to think how great a proportion of all 
 the efforts and talents in the world are employed 
 in merely neutralizing one another. It is the proper 
 end of Government to reduce this wretched waste 
 to the smallest possible amount, by taking such 
 measures as shall cause the energies now spent by 
 mankind in injuring one another, or in protecting 
 themselves against injury, to be turned to the 
 legitimate employment of the human faculties, 
 and of compelling the powers of nature to be 
 more and more subservient to physical and moral 
 good." 
 
 In these words, the failure of the old economics 
 stood confessed. The " self-adjusting mechanism " 
 was found to be producing " wretched waste," 
 even in the best condition of society. The common 
 people had known that all along — ^hence their 
 crude essays in revolt, and their later, soberer, 
 and more successful, efforts of self-protection. A 
 stunted generation of factory operatives was there 
 to confirm the pathetically tardy discovery. 
 Capital had long entered upon a path of self- 
 
390 MODERN ENGLAND [chai-. vttt. 
 
 organization, for capital also may be said to abhor 
 the kinds of waste to which it is Hable, as nattire 
 
 „ is said to abhor a vacuum. T£,isserfaire,ja. fact. 
 
 I had never been, could never be, logical ly practised . 
 
 * Rising; 6rrtftr"l»en§m"or'Fll§m[tnrne^ 
 work, in the declining days of the Oligarchy, it 
 melted away like a polar berg in the Gulf Stream 
 of Democracy. It had weakened, but could not 
 destroy, the religious motive, and the sense of 
 community of interest, in society. The ancient 
 boon of a weekly rest-day was maintained. So 
 were, and are, the bars and privileges of the legal, 
 medical, and other professions. Landlordism sur- 
 vived the repeal of the Corn Laws. The flow of 
 promiscuous charity continued ; mercy, or pru- 
 dence, tempered the rigour of the workhouse test. 
 The cost of unrestrained competition in the 
 lives of the British poor is beyond measurement or 
 imagination. At last, however, by infinite pains, 
 the hardiest of the working classes had won two 
 means of defence against the essential injustice 
 and cruelty of individual bargaining : the Fact- 
 tory Acts and kindred legislation, now sure to be 
 extended, and the great structure of the trade 
 unions, with its buttresses in the friendly and 
 co-operative societies. But for the economic crises 
 of the 'seventies and 'eighties, this constructive 
 movement might have continued slowly, almost 
 unconsciously, to modify social conditions. As it 
 was, suffering and the sharpness of mind it brings 
 dissolved many old prejudices, and gave a new 
 
§ I.] THE AWAKENING 391 
 
 turn, a new colour, a desperate urgency to the now 
 universally debated " social question." 
 
 For the first time, the enormity and complexity 
 of the problem were clearly revealed. The great 
 mass of labouring people were, in fact, far removed 
 from the hopes raised by the older trade unions ; 
 and, if they gained indirectly, by the force of 
 example and shame, more than the zeal of a few 
 factory and workshop inspectors could directly 
 win for them, this minimum of health safeguards 
 and of leisiu-e left the battle of wages and regular 
 employment still to be fought. State regulation 
 of the conditions of labour was very inadequate, 
 as innumerable inquiries were to prove. The 
 inadequacy of trade unionism, even at its maximum 
 strength, may be seen in the figures of population, 
 employments, and trade union membership, printed 
 on a later page.^ At the date of the 1901 Census, 
 the imions had fully recovered their losses and 
 had reached a new high record. The population 
 of the United Kingdom was then just under 42 
 millions ; that of England and Wales, for which 
 details are given, was over 32 millions. Yet the 
 total force of trade unionism in the kingdom 
 was less than 2 millions, out of more than 14 
 millions of " occupied " persons in England and 
 Wales alone. A quarter of the whole number were 
 miners ; the building and clothing unions con- 
 tributed another quarter ; transport, the metal 
 
 * Appendix 11. 
 
392 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vm. 
 
 trades, engineering, and ship-building, a third 
 quarter. The number of organized women was 
 only 123,510 (6| per cent, of the whole army); 
 and nine out of ten of these were in the textile 
 trades. Two million domestic servants and a 
 million agricultural workers had no organization 
 whatever; a million persons employed in the 
 food trades, and, perhaps, a larger number of clerks 
 and shop assistants, had scarcely any. This was 
 the situation after some years of steady advance 
 and trade prosperity. Twenty-five years earlier, 
 on the eve of the great crisis, it was much less 
 favourable. In 1880, a mere skeleton remained 
 of the battalions that had been so hardly gathered 
 and drilled. Wages fell to hunger level ; hours 
 of labour and overtime were extended ; worse 
 still, hundreds of thousands of men were thrown 
 out of work altogether. The Amalgamated 
 Engineers paid £287,000 in unemployment benefit 
 in three years. After the failure of the City of 
 Glasgow Bank, most of the Scottish unions dis- 
 appeared. The one-tenth of the industrial popula- 
 tion which alone had felt, directly or indirectly, 
 the advantage of collective bargaining and benefits 
 was now almost defenceless and resourceless. 
 
 What of the remaining nine-tenths ? " To me, 
 at least," said Mr Frederic Harrison, at the 
 Industrial Remuneration Conference of 1885, " it 
 would be enough to condemn modern society as 
 hardly an advance on slavery or serfdom if the 
 permanent condition of industry were to be that 
 
§ I.] THE AWAKENING 393 
 
 which we behold, that 90 per cent, of the actual 
 producers of wealth have no home that they can 
 call their own beyond the end of the week ; have 
 no bit of soil, or so much as a room, that belongs 
 to them ; have nothing of value of any kind, 
 except as much old furniture as will go in a cart ; 
 have the precarious chance of weekly wages which 
 barely suffice to keep them in health ; are housed 
 for the most part in places that no man thinks 
 fit for his horse ; are separated by so narrow a 
 margin from destitution that a month of bad 
 trade, sickness, or unexpected loss, brings them 
 face to face with hunger or pauperism. In cities, 
 the increasing organization of factory work makes 
 life more and more crowded, and work more and 
 more a monotonous routine ; in the country, the 
 increasing pressiire makes rural life continually 
 less free, healthful, and cheerful ; while the prizes 
 and hopes of betterment are now reduced to a 
 minimum. This is the normal state of the average 
 workman in town or country, to which we must 
 add the record of preventable disease, accident, 
 suffering, and social oppression, with its yearly 
 roll of death and misery. But, below this normal 
 state of the average workman, there is found the 
 great band of the destitute outcasts, the camp- 
 followers of the army of industry — at least one- 
 tenth of the whole proletarian population, whose 
 normal condition is one of sickening wretchedness. 
 If this is to be the permanent arrangement of 
 modern society, civilization must be held to bring 
 
394 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vm. 
 
 a curse on the great majority of mankind." 
 Mr Harrison concluded that the fortunate few 
 skilled artizans had gained and were gaining much, 
 the average workman a little. " The destitute 
 residuum is, if relatively diminishing, positively 
 increasing in numbers, and is in a state of appalling 
 barbarism. The general improvement is of so 
 moderate a kind, and is accompanied with evils 
 so menacing to society, that the future of civili2a,- 
 tion itself is at stake." 
 
 What was this " destitute residuum," which 
 another religious leader, General Booth, of the 
 Salvation Army, called the " submerged tenth " ? 
 \It hovers mysteriously behind the grim statistics 
 of successive Registrars-General; and from this 
 source we can take evidence at once more precise 
 and more comprehensive than that of wage-rates or 
 figures of unemployment and poor-relief. In 1864, 
 Dr Farr had shown that whereas, in 63 " healthy " 
 districts of England and Wales, the annual mortality 
 of children under five years of age was 4 per cent, 
 of those living, in 151 other districts it averaged 
 8 per cent., exceeding 10 per cent, in Sheffield, 
 East London, Coventry, Nottingham, and Leeds, 
 and being 11-7 per cent, in Manchester, and 13-1 
 per cent, in Liverpool. That is to say, measured 
 by the " healthy " districts, the others, with a 
 population of 1,391,000, were sacrificing 64,909 
 children's lives yearly. Nor was this the only, 
 perhaps it was not the worst, horror. Conditions 
 which kill the weak weaken the strong ; and a high 
 
§ 1.] THE AWAKENING 395 
 
 infantile death-rate is a rough index of general 
 morbidity in a population. This rate rose conti- 
 nuously through the 'forties, 'fifties, and 'sixties ; 
 it fell slightly in the 'seventies ; only in the last 
 decade of the century did the effect of sanitary 
 administration, education, better wages, and other 
 civilizing influences become markedly visible. 
 
 The evidence of the liability of industrial condi- 
 tions, general and particular, for this record of disease 
 is overwhelming. We may cite, from a library 
 of bluebooks, two typical sets of figures. In 1891, 
 one-sixth of the whole population of " Proud 
 Lancashire " between the ages of ten and seventy 
 years were textile factory hands ; in towns like 
 Preston, the proportion rose to one-fourth, including 
 as much as a half of the female population of a 
 working age. These people spent one-third of 
 their working lives (56 hours a week out of 168) 
 in the mills — ^young and old, precocious children 
 and prematurely worn parents, turning out at 
 half-past five in the morning, indifferent to rain 
 or frost, tending the roaring machines all day 
 long at fuU nerve tension, in a damp, torrid atmos- 
 phere, where the cotton dust often hung as a 
 palpable cloud as much to be dreaded as the 
 imguarded shaft and the flying shuttle. Like 
 conditions existed in the woollen districts of the 
 West Riding. In such communities, neglect of 
 the home and the young, of education, and the 
 art of life generally, is as much a consequence of 
 a century of triumphant industrialism as are the 
 
„A political sense of the Northern 
 shrewdness ana f^^^^^ ^^^ ^ ^^^^jy measured 
 
 operative. ^^ between rural health and that 
 
 S Se^en^ LlSSire and Yorkshire towns : 
 
 Recorded Death-Rates, 1891, per 10,000 Zicing. 
 
 Diseases ti:„„.. 
 
 
 Total. 
 
 Phthisis. 
 
 Diseases 
 
 of 
 
 Eespir- 
 
 atory 
 
 System. 
 
 Diseases 
 
 oi 
 
 Nervous 
 System. 
 
 Three Agricultural 
 
 Counties . 
 Seven Factory Towns 
 
 164 
 244, 
 
 12 
 19-3 
 
 30-4 
 68-3 
 
 23-4 
 31-4 
 
 The second illustration is from a more complex 
 group of statistics ; but the calculations are later, 
 and therefore more carefully corrected. ^ These 
 show that — as compared with a general mortality 
 figure of 1000 for all males aged 25-65 years in 
 England and Wales, in the years 1900-2— clergy- 
 men, priests, and ministers reached only 524, 
 barristers and solicitors 750, while the industrial 
 groups ran up to double the average — 2235 in the 
 case of "general labourers." This, of course, 
 does not measure so much the direct as the indirect 
 and selective effects of the occupation : it is a 
 group of poverty-stricken weaklings. Dr Tatham 
 describes the recorded mortality of non-agricultural 
 
 QelS"? ^ oni ®"PPJ«™ent to the 66th Annual Report of the Itegistrar- 
 ai, IJOS,-' On Mortality in Certa" " .... .^ -. 
 
 ■ Tatham. 
 
 Years ibooT'^ "u J^^^*^'^'''*^^ i" Certain Oooupations in the Three 
 " ■«---s» oy Ur John ^ ' 
 
§1-1 
 
 THE AWAKENING 
 
 397 
 
 labourers as " enormous " at all ages. This is 
 shown in the following almost incredible figures : 
 
 Mortality among Labourers, 1900-2 
 
 (as Percentage. 0/ that 0} Agricultural Labourers). 
 
 
 Age 
 15- 
 
 Age 
 20- 
 
 Age 
 25- 
 
 Age 
 35- 
 
 Age 
 45- 
 
 Age 
 55- 
 
 65 and 
 over. 
 
 Labourer in Agrio. Districts 
 Platelayer, Navvy . 
 Geiteral Labourer in London 
 General Labourer in Indus- 
 trial Districts 
 
 100 
 187 
 232 
 
 332 
 
 100 
 114 
 230 
 
 292 
 
 100 
 112 
 339 
 
 405 
 
 100 
 134 
 427 
 
 554 
 
 100 
 131 
 365 
 
 498 
 
 100 
 132 
 229 
 
 366 
 
 100 
 72 
 79 
 
 177 
 
 Another of Dr Tatham's tables shows the mortality 
 from phthisis and respiratory disease in occupations 
 subject to this penalty. The figure rises from 171 
 among agriculturists^ to 285 among coal-miners, 
 320 in the wool manufacture, 415 in the chemical 
 trades, 422 in the cotton manufacture, 551 among 
 glass workers, 712 among file makers, 758 among 
 pottery workers, and at last reaches the appalling 
 point of 1557 in the small group of tin miners. 
 
 In the most literal sense, industrial anarchy 
 meant di&ease^and deajji. Whether it went as far 
 as national degeneration was a problem often dis- 
 cussed by sanitary inspectors, certifying surgeons, 
 and others who knew closely the lives of the poor. 
 The reports of the factory inspectors give us the 
 impression of a few men heroically trying to grapple 
 with a gigantic evil which constantly assumed 
 new forms. The textile factory was bad enough ; 
 
398 MODERN ENGLAND [chap, vm, 
 
 but " occupations infinitely more unhealthy, and 
 labour twice as hard physically, are to be found in 
 the factories brought under oxir inspection by the 
 Acts of 1864 and 1867," Mr Redgrave wrote in 
 1870. " For instance, I know of no cotton factory 
 in which young persons have to endure a tempera- 
 ture of 120 degrees, as they have in the ' stove ' of 
 a pottery. I know no actual labour more severe 
 than that of a fustian cutter ; and I know no 
 occupation more deadly than that of a millstone 
 cutter. In these, and perhaps a hundred more, 
 an hour's less labour a day would be the gain of 
 a year's life." The places now brought into review 
 were overcrowded, dirty, dark, and squalid, com- 
 pared with the great mills of the cotton and woollen 
 trades. " We see on most Mondays, at all events 
 far too frequently," said Inspector Baker, " listless 
 and hungering industry staring idle drunkenness 
 in the face, not daring to indicate dissatisfaction 
 with a state of things that renders homes desolate, 
 and perpetuates the ignorant and evil natures 
 that inhabit them. We marvel to see women at 
 the anvil and forge ; men nursing while the wives 
 toil for the weekly wages ; and infants everywhere 
 mewling in the arms of other infants very little 
 older than themselves, till one begins to think 
 that the old, old days of factory labour have 
 returned, and wonder whether what we see can 
 possibly exist in the advanced period of 1872." 
 One report of this period showed 18,706 women 
 engaged in what the inspector called " unsexing 
 
§ II.] THE AWAKENING 399 
 
 and degrading " work in blast-furnaces, iron mills, 
 foundries, nail, rivet, and bolt making, chemical 
 works, match, cartridge and powder factories. 
 The effects of factory work upon mothers was 
 constantly enlarged upon. The excess of lung 
 and other diseases was traced to the prevalence of 
 dust, gas, and overheating ; " phossy jaw," lead, 
 ai'senic, and mercury poisoning, and " poucy 
 cough " attracted more and more attention. We 
 have evil visions of little boys and girls carrying 
 about inconceivable loads of clay in the brickyards, 
 of "a class of men of the lowest habits, aban- 
 doned to drink and godlessness, rearing children 
 to slavery, vice, and premature graves." George 
 Smith of Coalville trumpeted the wrongs of 70,000 
 children on canal boats. 
 
 II. The " Sweating System " 
 
 But the most characteristic discovery of the 
 time is what was called the " Sweating System " 
 — very inappropriately so called, for the ills thus 
 collocated were most various and essentially un- 
 systematic. Nor were they new — witness Charles 
 Kingsley's pamphlet, Cheap Clothes and Nasty, 
 and his novel, Atton Locke. Sub-contracting 
 in the manufacture of army and navy clothing 
 seems to have been long in practice, and to have 
 spread to the ordinary ready-made and " bespoke " 
 trade, in which the master-tailor had hitherto 
 
400 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vm. 
 
 always been the employer, whether the work was 
 done in his own or outside workshops. The word 
 " sweating " was now understood in a wider sense. 
 It appears in the factory inspectors' reports first 
 in 1874, in a reference to the sewing trades at 
 Norwich. The sewing-machine is one of the 
 inventions that only slowly became effective. 
 Originally mooted near the end of the eighteenth 
 century, the first good model was produced in 
 1830, and an improved form in 1845, by a poor 
 French tailor named Thimmonier, who, like so 
 many other benefactors of the kind, died in poverty. 
 Two Americans, Hunt and Howe, followed ; and, 
 in 1850 and 1851, A. B. Wilson and I. M. Singer 
 secured their respective patents. Hundreds of 
 varieties of machine adapted to different materials 
 were presently elaborated ; and to some of these, 
 during the 'eighties, steam and gas power was 
 applied. 
 
 It is important to note that the sewing-machine, 
 though not unworthy of comparison in some re- 
 spects, differs from other leading instruments of 
 the Industrial Revolution in being, on the whole, 
 a distributive, rather than a concentrating, agent. 
 It has transformed the boot and shoe manufac- 
 ture, but, while great factories have grown up in 
 Northampton, Wellingborough, and other centres, 
 machine-sewn boots are also made in workshops 
 of every size; and in the clothing trades the 
 sewing-machine has been a principal factor in the 
 growth of home-work and of " sweated " occupa- 
 
§ I.] THE AWAKENING 40i 
 
 tions generally. "Villages heretofore silent," Mr 
 Lakeman wrote in 1874, " are resounding with 
 the buzz of sewing-machines and shoe-clicking. 
 Machinery has been applied to cocoa-fibre weaving, 
 to clothing, and, nnost surprising of all, to horse- 
 hair weaving. So great has been the increase 
 in the preparation of materials by the application 
 of improved machines that, wherever farm labourers 
 can be induced to come into towns, there employ- 
 ment is given them. A fortnight's probation 
 can turn out a shoe-clicker, and a girl can make 
 a coat after three weeks' trial." In 1877, Mr 
 Henderson observed that the sewing-machine had 
 made London " a great manufacturing com- 
 munity " ; and it was thought that the inspection 
 and regulation of its season and irregular trades 
 would prove easier than had been expected. This 
 optimism was quickly dispelled, as the attempt 
 to administer the Act of 1878 brought the inspec- 
 tors into contact with the " chamber-masters " and 
 " greeners " of Whitechapel, Spitalfields, and Shore- 
 ditch, and the dressmakers of St George's and St 
 James's. In 1880, there were estimated to be 
 two thousand workshop occupiers in East London, 
 employing an average of eight hands apiece. 
 Many of these were immigrant foreigners, chiefly 
 Jews. The workshops were commonly found to 
 be small, crowded, very dirty, overheated, and 
 unventilated. Wages were shockingly low ; hours 
 were long and irregular, and the workers so 
 ignorant and servile that the inspectors could get 
 2c 
 
402 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vni. 
 
 little help from them. In the West End dress- 
 making, a minority of saleswomen and showroom 
 hands were found to be relatively well treated, 
 though they were tied to the drapers' premises 
 under a singular pseudo-paternal rule. The lot 
 of the majority of milliners and dressmakers 
 approached more nearly to that of the " sweater's " 
 victims ; and many tragic stories were told in 
 ironical answer to the woman suffragists who 
 pleaded the principle of "individual liberty." It 
 was at this time, too, that the serfdom of the shop- 
 assistant first began to attract notice. 
 
 A public alarm as to infection from " sweated " 
 garments having passed away, the question was 
 overshadowed by the kindred, but more clamant, 
 problems of male casual labour (as at the docks) 
 and of unemployment in general ; until, in 1888, 
 on the proposal of Lord Dunraven, a Select Com- 
 mittee of the House of Lords was set up to exa- 
 mine the condition of the tailoring, shirt-making, 
 boot-making, furniture, and other trades in which 
 sub-contracting was believed to lead to peculiar 
 oppression. The Committee heard 291 witnesess, 
 and presented its final report in 1890. Meanwhile, 
 Mr Charles Booth had initiated the great scientific 
 investigation of London poverty to which I shall 
 refer again hereafter. Mr Booth's fourth volume 
 (with its contributions by Miss Beatrice Potter, 
 Miss Clara Collet, Mr D. F. Schloss, and Mr Aves), 
 and the reports of the Lords' Committee, at length 
 placed the phenomena of " sweating " in a clear 
 
§ n.] THE AWAKENING 403 
 
 light. The first result was to destroy the legends 
 that had grown about the subject. Good, kind 
 souls had invented a new devil, nanxed the Middle- 
 man, and he was widely supposed to be the author 
 of all the mischief. It now appeared, in the words 
 of the Committee, that middlemen were " absent 
 in many cases in which the evils complained of 
 abound " — ^where materials were given out direct 
 to the workers by large employers ; that they 
 were common where there was no sweating ; that, 
 where the middleman was found in a sweated 
 trade, he commonly worked as hard as the little 
 master or his hands ; and that " the middleman 
 is the consequence, not the cause, of the evil." 
 " There is no industrial system co-extensive 
 with the evils complained of," Mr Booth wrote, 
 " although there is, unfortunately, no doubt at 
 all that very serious evils exist. It is not one but 
 many systems with which we have to deal, each 
 having its special faults." 
 
 There was the practice of the wholesale clothiers 
 who, instead of hiring workpeople themselves, con- 
 tracted with some one to do so, materials being 
 provided and prepared by the wholesale house. 
 This " sweating " in the clothing trades " without 
 doubt facilitates a very acute form of competition," 
 even if the sub-employer carries out the contract 
 in his own workshops ; for the regularizing influence 
 of the great factory is lacking, and the contrac- 
 tor's interest is solely to reduce wages. Secondly, 
 the intermediary may only distribute and collect 
 
404 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vm. 
 
 the work, or superintend only a part of it ; this is 
 " the sweating system as it applies more parti- 
 cularly to female home-workers." Thirdly, the 
 wholesale house does not order beforehand, but 
 buys the goods from the makers as it wants them 
 — for instance, in cabinet-making — a plan which 
 " may be made a terribly efficient engine of oppres- 
 sion." Fourthly, " to take quite another field, 
 if the small master is able to obtain a constant 
 supply of learners (usually poor foreigners) who, 
 as ' greeners,' will work long hours in return for 
 bare keep, and so reduce the cost of production, 
 the result is to aggravate competition and depress 
 regular wages. This is the sweating system as it 
 applies to foreign immigration, perhaps its most 
 intense form. Finally, if systematic deductions 
 are made from men's earnings by labour masters, 
 who can thus pocket any difference that may 
 exist between the authorized pay and the lowest 
 competition-value of the work, we have sweating 
 as it applies to the Docks." ^ 
 
 In a large part of this area of economic disease, 
 the following are common features, and it will be 
 seen that they are mutually dependent : (1) Minnie 
 sub-division, both of (a) capital, and (6) labour, 
 (a) " The quite small workshop, which is, in truth, 
 no workshop at all, but an ordinary room in an 
 ordinary house, lived in as well as worked in, 
 stands at some advantage over the properly 
 appointed workshop of a larger size. The capital 
 ' Charles Booth ; Life and Labour in London, iv. 330-1. 
 
§ II.] THE AWAKENING 405 
 
 needed for a start is very small. A few pounds 
 will suffice, and the man becomes a master. It is 
 a natural ambition, and appeals with peculiar 
 force to the Jews. The wholesale houses can take 
 advantage of the competition which arises." 
 (b) This is only another way of saying that there 
 is a constant over-supply of unskilled labour, 
 which seizes the opportunity of making a sub- 
 sistence wage by an easily-learned detail process, 
 but commonly cannot rise to better work. (2) The 
 irregularity of work is even worse than the length 
 of hours. It is, says Mr Booth, " by far the most 
 serious trial under which the people of London 
 suffer, and results naturally from the industrial 
 position of small workshops and home-work. 
 High organization makes for regularity : low 
 organization lends itself to the opposite. A large 
 factory cannot stop at all without serious loss ; 
 the man who employs two or three others in his 
 own house can, if work fails, send them all adrift 
 to pick up a living as best they can." Irregularity 
 of work, with the demoralization it involves, is 
 greatly fostered by the economic dependence of 
 East on West London, where, to the general 
 fluctuations of the seasons, the weather, and pros- 
 perity, are added special fluctuations of fashion 
 and luxury. But it is just in these luxury, fashion, 
 and season trades that (3) women's work is most 
 common ; and women's work is usually badly 
 paid (10s. a week would be a high average at the 
 time we are speaking of), and is most difficult to 
 
406 MODERN ENGLAITO [chap. vin. 
 
 organize, and most liable to fall into squalid 
 servitude, whenever it is unskilled, superabundant, 
 and unaided by men's greater power of resistance. 
 (4) While competition is thus rampant within — 
 modified very slightly by workshop and sanitary 
 inspection, an occasional strike, and some pro- 
 miscuous charity — a community like East London 
 stands in the cross-fire of two kinds of outer com- 
 petition. Cheap German and other goods, some 
 also the product of " sweating," are imported, 
 by cheap sea-carriage, into the Thames. And, as 
 the men's workshops and the women's garrets 
 compete in one district, so both, with their sewing- 
 machines and other simple tools, are threatened 
 by the more and more powerfully equipped pro- 
 vincial factory. (5) Immigration, foreign and provin- 
 cial, is an important but very complex element 
 in the subject. The outbursts of persecution 
 of the Jews in Russia, in 1881-2, 1886, and 1891, 
 and the Bismarckian edicts against the Poles of 
 East Prussia in 1884, inflicted a terrible burden 
 of poverty upon East London. It was considerably 
 alleviated, and partly removed, by the efforts of 
 the Jewish Board of Guardians and other charitable 
 bodies. A good deal of rubbish was uttered in 
 course of the agitation which at length resulted 
 in the restrictive machinery of the Alien Acts. 
 The poor Jews were law-abiding and industrious, 
 they created trades of their own, and gradually 
 bettered their condition. As Mr Booth said: 
 " the movement of the Jewish immigrants, when 
 
§ II.] THE AWAKENING 407 
 
 once absorbed into London, is a movement upwards 
 from below." But this effort of " absorption," 
 which was to transform outcasts from Warsaw 
 into British citizens, was required of a community 
 already debilitated by two generations of industrial 
 struggle. Had East London been left altogether 
 to itself, had the United States been barred against 
 the very poorest, as it was soon to be, a deep 
 degradation must have resulted. Of the rural 
 immigrant, we shall speak in connection with the 
 problem of dock labour. (6) Akin to the influence 
 of immigration is what we may call the deposit 
 of the waterside. Every great port has its depend- 
 ency of sailors' wives, widows, children, and old 
 folk, with widows and orphans of fishermen, dock 
 labourers, and other poor workers ; and many of 
 these are driven by need into the ranks of the 
 " sweated " occupations. 
 
 " Sweating," in brief, is a general name for the 
 exploitation of certain particularly helpless kinds 
 of labour. The immediate " sweater " is commonly 
 one victim among the many, to be pitied like the 
 rest. The ultimate " sweater " is the consumer, 
 that is to say, society itself ; and in this sense 
 we may speak of there being a " sweating system." 
 Not that the apparent gain of cheap goods is all 
 real, for there are costs of workhouses, hospitals, 
 charities, sanitary, police, and other administrative 
 services, emigration, education, which such a 
 community cannot meet, and which must be paid 
 for by its neighbours. Nevertheless, it was a just 
 
408 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. viii. 
 
 instinct that led John Ruskin to bring home the 
 main responsibility to the body of well-to-do 
 consumers, who, if they are unable individually to 
 trace the history of their purchases, are all-powerful, 
 as voters, in regard to the policy of the State : 
 
 " Who are these poor ? No country is, or ever will be, 
 without them, that is to say, without the class which 
 cannot, on the average, do more by its labour than provide 
 for its subsistence. Now, there are a certain number of 
 this class whom we cannot oppress with much severity. 
 An able-bodied and intelligent workman, sober, honest, 
 and industrious, will almost always command a fair price 
 for his work, and lay by enough in a few years to enable 
 him to hold his own in the labour market. But aU men 
 are not able-bodied, nor intelligent, nor industrious ; and 
 you cannot expect them to be. 
 
 " Nothing appears to me more ludicrous and more 
 melancholy than the way people of this age usually talk 
 about the morals of labourers. You hardly ever address a 
 labouring man upon his prospects in life without quietly 
 assuming that he is to possess, at starting, as a small moral 
 capital to begin with, the virtue of Socrates, the philosophy 
 of Plato, and the heroism of Epamiaondas. ' Be assured, 
 my good man,' you say to him, ' that if you work steadily 
 for ten hours a day all your life long, and if you driak nothing 
 but water or the very mildest beer, and live on very plain 
 food, and never lose your temper, and go to church every 
 Sunday, and always remain content in the position in which 
 Providence has placed you, and never grumble, nor swear, 
 and always keep your clothes decent, and rise early, and 
 use every opportunity of improving yourself, you will get 
 on very well, and never come to the parish.' All this is 
 exceedingly true ; but, before giving the advice so confi- 
 
§ II.] THE AWAKENING 409 
 
 dently, it would be well if we sometimes tried it practically 
 ourselves, and spent a year or so at some hard manual 
 labour not of an entertaining kind— ploughing or digging, 
 for instance, with a very moderate allowance of beer, 
 nothing but bread and cheese for dinner, no papers nor 
 muffins in the morning, no sofas nor magazines at night, 
 one small room for parlour and kitchen, and a large family 
 of children always in the middle of the floor. . . . 
 
 " Let it be admitted that we never can be guilty of 
 oppression towards the sober, industrious, intelligent, and 
 exemplary labourer. There will always be in the world 
 some who are not altogether intelligent and exemplary. . . . 
 These are the kind of people whom you can oppress, and 
 whom you do oppress, and that to purpose. You know 
 the words about wicked people are, ' He doth ravish the 
 poor when he getteth him into Ms net. . . .' The nets 
 which we use against the poor are just those worldly em- 
 barrassments which either their ignorance or their improvi- 
 dence are almost certain at some time or other to bring 
 them into. Then, just at the time when we ought to hasten 
 to help them, and disentangle them, and teach them how to 
 manage better in future, we rush forward to 'pillage them, 
 and force all we can out of them in their adversity. For, 
 to take one instance only, remember this is literally and 
 simply what we do whenever we buy, or try to buy, goods 
 ofEered at a price which we know cannot be remunerative 
 for the labour involved in them. Whenever we buy such 
 goods, remember we are stealing somebody's labour. 
 Don't let us mince the matter. I say in plain Saxon, 
 Stealing — taking from him the proper reward of his work, 
 and putting it into our own pocket." ^ 
 
 > Euskin : The Two Paths, Lecture V. (1859). Mr J. A. Hobson'a 
 John Ruslcin, Social Bejormtr, presents a close examination of 
 Ruakin's arraignment of competitive industrialism and the political 
 economy baaed upon it. 
 
410 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. viii. 
 
 III. At thk Dock-Gates 
 
 The case of the London docker was unique only 
 in degree. Throughout the kingdom, the business 
 of transport has undergone a revolution collateral 
 with that of manufacturing industry ; and the 
 seaport is the central field and exhibition of the 
 one process, as the factory town is of the other. 
 In both cases, the exploitation of steam power 
 and the new machines depended upon there being 
 at hand a vast supply of floating labour ; and the 
 chief sources of this supply were the once prosper- 
 ous agricultural counties. The feeblest remained 
 behind in the villages. Throughout the century, 
 the stronger poured in unceasing streams into the 
 towns, to fill the gaps made by higher death-rates 
 and lower birth-rates, and to swell more and more 
 the balance of urban populations. 
 
 What, on the whole, was the quality of these 
 immigrants ? We have seen that the Irish were 
 driven by famine, and that the English villagers 
 were driven by extreme poverty, following upon 
 the stoppage of a demoralizing system of doles. 
 Yet, after as full an investigation as they could 
 make of London circumstances between 1887 and 
 1892, Mr Charles Booth and Mr H. Llewellyn 
 Smith ^ concluded that " the countrymen drawn 
 in are mainly the cream of the youth of the villages, 
 travelling not so often vaguely in search of work, 
 
 1 Booth : Lije and Labour of the People, vol. iii. chaps. 2 and 3, by 
 P, Llewellyn Smith, with statistical tables and maps. 
 
§ in.J THE AWAKENING 411 
 
 as definitely to seek a known economic advan- 
 tage. So far from finding their position in London 
 hopeless, as is often supposed, they usually get the 
 pick of its posts, recruiting especially out-door 
 trades which have some affinity with those to which 
 they have been accustomed in the country, and, 
 in general, all employments requiring special 
 steadiness and imposing special responsibility. 
 The country immigrants do not to any considerable 
 extent directly recruit the town unemployed, who 
 are, in the main, the sediment deposited at the 
 bottom of the scale, as the physique and power 
 of application of a town population tend to dete- 
 riorate." A private examination of the Census 
 papers afforded the chief evidence for this con- 
 clusion. It was found that, of every 1000 persons 
 living in London in 1881, 629 were born there, 
 343 in other parts of the kingdom, and 28 
 abroad. In East London and Hackney, only 280 
 per thousand were immigrants, chiefly from the 
 neighbouring agricultural counties. An important 
 element in this influx was that " much necessary 
 town-work cannot be efficiently done by town- 
 bred people " — ^the whole business of horse traffic 
 naturally tended to fall into the hands of country- 
 men, and this was largely true of the building and 
 coal trades and railway work. The minute 
 division of labour in London gives the provinces 
 an advantage as a training-ground for all-round 
 men ; and Mr Llewellyn Smith believed that there 
 was, therefore, a movement of better workmen 
 
412 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vin. 
 
 toward London, and of the inferior, who could not 
 earn the higher wage there current, away into the 
 provinces. Despite the various attractions of the 
 great city to the beggar, the odd- jobber, the 
 criminal, the inefficient, and the unfortunate, the 
 inquiry suggested that "it is among Londoners, 
 rather than countrymen, that lack of employment 
 is found." Of 514 dockers, 70 per cent, were 
 found to have been born in London, while two- 
 thirds of the remainder had lived for more than 
 ten years in the Metropolis. It was concluded that, 
 except at Millwall, where there was a distinct 
 excess of country-born labour, there was no per- 
 ceptible rural influx toward the docks, and that 
 " the major part of London poverty and distress 
 is home-made, and not imported from outside." 
 Londoners decay : " there is thus a vacuum 
 created, and a consequent indraught from around," 
 but this is "a vivifying, not a death-bringing, 
 stream." 
 
 This characterization of the rural influx into 
 London contradicted the general impression pre- 
 valent at the time; and, at fii*st sight, it does 
 not seem to agree with the results of our historical 
 analysis. In some respects, the statistics were 
 imperfect ; in others, they truly represented con- 
 ditions at the moment only. No one, so far as 
 the present writer knows, has made an adequate 
 study of the history of the structural changes in 
 the population of London. Mr Llewellyn Smith 
 was, perhaps, more closely familiar with the 
 
§in.] 
 
 THE Awakening 
 
 413 
 
 deterioration of poor life in the Metropolis than 
 in the counties and in Ireland. At any rate, he 
 based his conclusions on the 1881 Census, This 
 was before the rural exodus had reached its highest 
 point ; and it was so long after the Irish famines 
 as to bring in as " London born " a good many 
 laboiurers who were the sons of destitute Irish 
 immigrants. In 1840, there were estimated to 
 be 120,000 poor Irish in London ; in 1881, Mr 
 Booth found only 80,609, and they were spread 
 pretty evenly over the whole area.^ Figures 
 which represent the East End as the home of the 
 essential Londoner are not easy to accept ; but 
 this is not the place to discuss them in detail. 
 We note them as the best evidence of the kind 
 available, and pass on to the more certain facts of 
 the waterside situation. 
 
 Whatever his pedigree, the docker was un- 
 doubtedly an industrial residuum. The Thames 
 
 ' Mr Booth's figures may be summarized thus : 
 
 1881. 
 
 Popula- 
 tion. 
 
 Per Cent, 
 of Pro- 
 vincial- 
 born. 
 
 Per Cent. 
 Provin- 
 cial- and 
 Foreign- 
 born. 
 
 Number 
 of Irish- 
 born. 
 
 South London . 
 East „ . . 
 North „ . . 
 West „ . . 
 Central „ . . 
 
 Total . . 
 
 1,265,927 
 879,200 
 719,485 
 669,633 
 282,238 
 
 34-1 
 24-2 
 44-4 
 37-3 
 30-4 
 
 35-9 
 26-6 
 47-8 
 40-4 
 33-8 
 
 24,505 
 16,585 
 14,706 
 16,283 
 8,530 
 
 ; 3,816,483 
 
 341 
 
 36-7 
 
 80,609 
 
414 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vm. 
 
 trade — ^badly hit by the altered course of commerce 
 through the opening of the Suez Canal and the 
 development of the out-ports, was already declining 
 when the depression of the 'seventies and 'eighties 
 set in. Every new pressure — of labour to get a 
 better wage, or of shippers to lower freights and to 
 procure more rapid discharge of cargoes — ^tended to 
 produce greater irregularity of hours, and to make 
 casual labour ever more casual and uncertain. 
 At the West and East India, the London and 
 St Katherine, and the Millwall Docks, Miss Potter 
 (Mrs Webb) ^ found 2,188 regular hands, and an 
 average of 4,011 (swollen from time to time to 
 over 6,000) irregularly employed. The permanent 
 men made about £l. Is. a week. There would be 
 daily work at 3s. 6d. a day for 3,000 of the irregulars, 
 if it could be spread evenly through the year, and 
 at regular daily hours ; but there were 10,000 
 casual labourers, exclusive of waterside labourers, 
 resident in the Tower Hamlets alone, compet- 
 ing for this work, and every lapse of trade would 
 bring down new swarms of unfortunates to the 
 East End. " From my own observation as a rent 
 collector, and from other evidence, we know that 
 the professional dock labourer (as distinguished 
 from the drift of other trades, and from the casual 
 by inclination) earns from 12s. to 15s. a week, 
 supposing his earnings were to be spread evenly 
 throughout the year. But a large wage one week, 
 
 ^ Lije. and Labour, vol. iv. ohap. ii. 
 
§ IV.] THE AWAKENING 415 
 
 and none the next, or — as in the case of the wool 
 sales — six months' work and six months' leisure, 
 are not favourable conditions to thrift, temperance, 
 and good management." Sometimes this wage 
 would be reduced by " bribery and corruption 
 necessary to secure employment." " There is " — 
 this was in 1887 — " no union for trade or other 
 purposes among dock or waterside labourers ; 
 there is even antagonism, or at least utter indiffer- 
 ence and carelessness, between the different classes 
 of dock employes," and often, indeed, as to their 
 own condition. " But far more depressing to those 
 who work among these people even than this 
 indifference to their own condition is the sickening 
 cry of the sinking man or woman, dragging the 
 little ones down into a poverty from which there 
 is no arising." 
 
 IV. Voices of the New Spirit 
 
 These sentences described the facts as a particularly 
 competent observer saw them, and no one at the 
 moment would have dared to challenge the last 
 words. Yet the docker did rise up from the nether 
 depths ; and he was enabled to do so because, 
 at length, the national conscience was awakening 
 to some sense of the nature not only of such a 
 commercial crisis as the country was just passing 
 through, but of the day-to-day costs of the com- 
 petitive system in the lives of masses of workers 
 practically unable to protect themselves, A great 
 
416 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vOt. 
 
 social revival, the effects of which are still far 
 from being exhausted, had begun. A fine pen 
 and a large space would be needed to do justice to 
 this many-sided movement of thought and feeling 
 which redeemed the last years of the Victorian 
 Era and the nineteenth century, and pointed 
 forward to a re-creation of British society. 
 Here we can but indicate a few of its leading 
 manifestations. 
 
 In the first place, there was a striking access of 
 religious activity wherever the Churches came 
 into contact with the poor. The most remarkable 
 sign of this new spirit lay in the rapid progress of 
 the " Salvation Army," founded in 1878 by the 
 Rev. Wm. Booth, and now equipped with meeting- 
 halls, " barracks," shelters, and workshops. What- 
 ever may have been the faults of this clamant 
 propaganda, its courage and self-sacrifice far out- 
 weighed them ; and the continued vigour of the 
 " Army " after its founder's death shows that it 
 has met a real need. Throughout the religious 
 world, there was a stirring of dead bones. An 
 intellectual challenge must be translated into an 
 ethical challenge if it is to reach the mass of men ; 
 and in this case, as ever, heresy produced, directly 
 and indirectly, a crop of good works. 
 
 Religious motive of the broadest kind played a 
 large part in the establishment, during the 'eighties 
 and 'nineties, of a number of University and other 
 Social Settlements in the midst of the slums of 
 London and some of the larger provincial cities. 
 
§ IV.] THE AWAKENING 417 
 
 Toynbee Hall, Whitechapel, founded in 1885, 
 " as a memorial of Arnold Toynbee, and a practical 
 outcome of his teaching," was the pioneer and 
 model of these brotherhood-colonies. ^ " Model " 
 is hardly the right word, for experiment was 
 made on different lines, and the developments 
 were very various. It was the good fortune of 
 the Settlement idea to have for its chief apostle 
 a man of such a broad nature, so catholic, so wisely 
 simple, so rich at once in sympathy and common 
 sense, as Samuel Barnett. In the Church he rose 
 no higher than a canonry ; and this may have 
 been fitting, for he was no ecclesiastic, and, with 
 his own tabernacle (St Jude's) next door, would 
 have no taint of sectarianism or partisanship of 
 any kind at Toynbee. But no Archbishop of his 
 time wielded a more potent influence or enjoyed 
 more honour. He was a most typically English 
 saint ; and the inspiration he gave was infinitely 
 better than the most perfect of model institutions. 
 Indeed, his own later explanation of the " settle- 
 ment impulse " put distrust of institutions in the 
 forefront of the various factors. " Men at the 
 
 ' Oxford House, Bethnal Green, a distinctively Church of England 
 Settlement (Toynbee was completely unsectarian), was founded in 
 1885 ; Rugby House, Netting Hill, and Trinity Court, afterwards 
 Cambridge House, Camberwell, in 1889 ; Mansfield House, Canning 
 Town, in 1890 ; the Bermondsey Settlement and Newman House, 
 Kennington (Catholic), and the University Hall, afterwards the 
 Passmore Edwards Settlement, St Fancras, in 1891 ; Browning Hall, 
 Walworth, in 1894. Several of these have women's branches. The 
 Women's University Settlement, Blackfrlars, founded in 1887, was 
 the pioneer on this side. 
 2d 
 
418 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vm. 
 
 Universities, especially those who, directly or 
 indirectly, felt the influence of T. H. Green, were 
 asking for some other way than that of institutions 
 by which to reach their neighbours. They heard 
 the ' bitter cry ' of the poor ; they were conscious 
 of something wrong underneath modern progress. 
 . . . Charity organization societies had taught 
 them not to give doles. . . . The poor law, the 
 chief machine, seemed to have developed pauperism, 
 fostering the spirit which ' bullies or cringes.' 
 Philanthropy appeared to many to be a sort of 
 mechanical figure beautifully framed by men to 
 do their duty to their fellow-men." ^ 
 
 So, among a few finer-minded men and women 
 of the comfortable classes, a desire arose to give 
 not money, but themselves, to become neighbours 
 of the unfortunate, and this not simply to teach 
 them (Barnett saw the deadly peril of priggishness, 
 from the first), but to learn from them, to serve 
 them and with them, to make friends and do neigh- 
 bours' duty where it is least romantically attractive. 
 For six centuries, the work of individual churches 
 and individual reformers apart, this Franciscan 
 ideal of the fraternal life had never been placed on a 
 large scale before the people of England. Now, a 
 number of centres of light were springing up in 
 the darkest places, club-houses where fortunate 
 
 * University and Social SetUemenU. Edited by W. Besison, M.A. 
 See alao Practical Socialism, by S. A. and Henrietta 0. Barnett (1888). 
 Thie volume contains the address, delivered at St John's College, 
 Oxford, in Nov. 1883, which led to the foundation of Toynbee Hall. 
 
§ IV.] THE AWAKENING 419 
 
 and unfortunate could meet in perfect frankness 
 and equality. Barnett thought the two chief 
 results, fifteen years later, were to have mitigated 
 class suspicion, and to have helped to inspire local 
 government with a higher spirit. But, weak as 
 they are in proportion to their task, the Settlements 
 have touched life and stimulated it at so many 
 points, their clubs and classes, excursions, picture 
 shows and investigations, their poor men's lawyers 
 and nurses and visitors, their ties with every kind 
 of beneficent local activity, make so gallant a show 
 of unselfish effort, that we shrink from any kind of 
 measurement. The fruits of humanism are beyond 
 measure and beyond price. When the great dock 
 strike broke out there were at least two places in 
 East London where the combatants could learn 
 that there is something real and precious in those 
 shockingly misused names, " gentleman," and 
 " Christian." 
 
 In these and kindred minds, the spirit of Kingsley 
 and Maurice, of Carlyle and Ruskin, Browning 
 and Arnold, Swinburne and Morris, was distilled 
 to what Barnett once called a passion of patience. 
 There was a strong scientific tincture in the move- 
 ment, and sentimentality was generally decried. 
 But it rejected definitely the partial science of 
 the orthodox political economy, and, with par- 
 ticular decision, its philanthropic department. 
 " ' Scientific charity,' " said Barnett, " or the 
 system which aims at creating respectability by 
 methods of relief, has come to the judgment, 
 
420 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vm. 
 
 and has been found wanting. The outcome of 
 scientific charity is the working man too thrifty 
 to pet his children, and too respectable to be 
 happy. . . . Those who care for the poor see 
 that the best things are missed, and they are not 
 content with the hope offered by ' scientific charity,' 
 No theory of progress, no proof that many indi- 
 viduals among the poor have become rich, will 
 make them satisfied with the doctrine of laisser 
 faire ; they simply face the fact that, in the 
 richest country of the world, the great mass of 
 their coimtrymen live without the knowledge, the 
 character, and the fulness of life which are the 
 best gift to this age, and that some thousands 
 either beg for their daily bread, or live in anxious 
 misery about a wretched existence." 
 P' Out of a population of 70,000 in Whitechapel, 
 in the winter of 1885-6, about one-fifth, exclusive 
 of the Jewish commxmity, applied to the Mansion 
 House Relief Fund. In St George's, East, of a 
 population of 50,000, 29 per cent, applied. In 
 Whitechapel, only six out of 1700 applicants were 
 members of a benefit club. In Stepney, among 
 1000 applicants, there was only one member of a 
 trade union. In the Tower Hamlets, with a popula- 
 tion of half a million, the applicants represented 
 nearly 87,000 persons. Facts like these challenged 
 a wholesale revision of the current economics ; 
 but what they first demanded was scientific 
 examination, and this became another leading 
 note of the time. On every hand, writers entered 
 
giv.l THK AWAKENINO 421 
 
 i\w slums, ftnd told wluil. I lu'v siiw ; soiuo of these 
 imrmlivfN were m(>rrly scnsiiliDniil, yt-l. they 
 NliiTfd tli(> ])ubli»' iiil«T(\sl. vvillioiil, vvluch nolliiiig 
 could Imvo l)('ci\ (Uinc. Al. the siuuo tiuu', iu the 
 cffoi'ls ol' u few smlU-rctl iuilividuiils and p'oups, 
 tht" liiisis WHS litid (>r u iTiil ,s<'luK)l of ilosciiplivo 
 S(U'i()lony. 'riu' liirjj;osl. sinji;U" coiilribMlioii vvhh 
 llml. of Mr I'luu-U's Hoolh und his hrilliiiul; biuid of 
 invest inators, \vliost> iiuiuiry into London life imkI 
 Itibour dnriuv; I lie Insl two doi-iulcs of llu> oiMilury 
 tHvn]>i«'d s<'Vfnl<HMi yt'iirs (1H80-1!H)2). tuid liili-d 
 ivs uiuny Yolunu-s.' In liUrr yours. Mi- imd Mi'S 
 
 ' 'I'lio llritt voluuvti 111' l,if<! itml liiibour oj Ihf /Viiji/i' tit jMitdim w»n 
 (luliliiilii'il ill )SS», tlio soooiul In 18111. Mr Hooth (lion <>.\|h'iiUh1 t.o 
 oom|ilt>ti> hiti wKtli iu I'lmi' vulmiioH I TUo uroiiml oiivi'iwl b.v tlio 
 wiiiU In ft* I'uUiiwN : 
 
 Fmt Soiii'.i : I'luwti/t Viil. i,, 1Ciin(, Oonliiiil, Oiitor Nintli ivucl 
 vSoiilli liimilon iltwilliml, Vivl, li., liniiilou, stiwli by titivnt, with 
 •IftUuUod of imvorlv. Vol. ill.. Mmlivl ilwtilUugM. intlux i>f pmiuU- 
 tlon, the Jewish iuimn\uull\, oWldiou iiml oiluoivMoii. Vol. Iv.. ICuat 
 lioiuloM "nwimttnl" triuU'H. Sft'uiHi iSVnVs! Indimh'y: Vol. i., 
 Qenerftl olnwlllonHon i liiilKUut; li'mlr.t, wood «nd motiil woikoro. 
 Vol, il., Preolona molulM, wiUoliOii, iimti'iinuMvl.t, (5I11H.S, oliomiwils, 
 »to., |irintli\g «tul jxvjiof, toxlili> (iiuUvi. \'ol. ili., Pio,-i!i. fooils, 
 ilrink, dt<»lu'ii iiml olorUs, liiio.'tporti ivml o(l\oi' liilioov. \ol, iv,, 
 Pm(iiw*toiwl, (lou\t>»tip ii»rvlae, iuHtltiuiion.-t. t>t.o. Vol. v., Com- 
 jNM'Isonsii Crowding, iiovt>il,v,ooouiwUoMa, Smvt\v and oouoUiiilons. 
 TKiiii Smen Setiffioun /H/dtoitcr.*! Vol. i.. Dutor NorUi (u\il lOnut 
 Umvtloii. Vol. Il„ Innw Noilh, ICiwt. nnd W'ml iViitjul. Vol. ill.. 
 The Caty ftnd West Knd, Vol.lv., li\iirvSoiitli Umilon, Vol. v..Soulli 
 15h»1 iu\il t*oiitli\Vos(. Vol. vt,, Oiitor South Loudon. Vol. vii.. 
 Snuiiuiviy of I'ollglous iulUiouwa. A'ttiii/ Volume: Sooiitl iulluouo<>8. 
 l\iuoln.iion und Sumiuavj,— 'I'lio work luiutniuM uiiiuy uiiuvs, aonio 
 ooUnuvil. The luxt. (>»jjt> oonoludes wiMv the foUowinj; noble iisi'ira- 
 Uon I " Mfty Honu> gieat aovd, ntnsttu' of i\ aubUor and nobler alohemy 
 tlxnn iidno, dlmntftngle tlie oon^ued iiwnes, ivcouelle the appcucent 
 aontr«dt«tton« In aim, melt and commingle Ute v«urioiw Influenoee tor 
 
422 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vin. 
 
 Sidney Webb, with their studies of trade unionism, 
 the poor law, and local government ; Mr Joseph 
 Rowntree and Mr Sherwell, with their analyses of 
 the drink problem ; Mr A. L. Bowley and Mr G. H. 
 Wood, with their collation of wage statistics ; the 
 founders and teachers of the London School of 
 Economics, and the Sociological Society, and indi- 
 vidual workers too numerous to mention, have 
 carried on the impulse. 
 
 The Fabian Society, founded in 1883, is a bridge 
 between these scientific studies and definitely 
 political activity. It sprang from a small group 
 of young, middle-class idealists who had been 
 attracted by the teaching of the late Professor 
 Thomas Davidson of New York. Davidson, a 
 more distinctly intellectual and ascetic type than 
 Barnett, hoped much from the formation of 
 communities to live the " higher life." This 
 " Fellowship of the New Life " was also strongly 
 influenced by Wm. Morris, Whitman, and Edward 
 Carpenter. George Bernard Shaw and Sidney 
 Webb brought into it a more concrete spirit ; 
 but what really determined the opportunist and 
 reformative development embodied in the Fabian 
 Society was the demand of the time for a lead 
 toward a new practical statesmanship. The Society 
 declared its aim to be " the reorganization of 
 society by the emancipation of land and industrial 
 capital from individual and class ownership, and 
 
 good Into one divine uniformity of e£Eort, and make these dry bones 
 live, ao that the streets of our Jerusalem may sing with joy." 
 
§ IV.] THE AWAKENING 423 
 
 the vesting of them in the community for the 
 common benefit." Its early " tracts " are strongly 
 marked with the spirit of Shavian mockery. 
 
 " Under existing circumstances, wealth cannot be enjoyed 
 without dishonour, or foregone without misery. . . . The 
 most striking result of our present system of farming out 
 the national Land and Capital to private individuals has 
 been the division of Society iuto hostile classes, with large 
 appetites and no dianers at one extreme, and large dinners 
 and no appetites at the other. . . . Under the existing 
 system of leaving the National Industry to organize itself, 
 Competition has the efEect of rendering adulteration, dis- 
 honesty, and inhumanity compulsory. Since Competition 
 among producers admittedly secures to the public the most 
 satisfactory products, the State should compete with all 
 its might in every department of production. Such 
 restraints upon Free Competition as the penalties for 
 infringing the Postal monopoly, and the withdrawal of 
 workhouse and prison labour from the markets, should be 
 abolished. . . . The State should compete with private 
 individuals — especially with parents — in providing happy 
 homes for children, so that every child may have a refuge 
 from the tyranny or neglect of its natural custodians. . . . 
 Men no longer need special political privileges to protect 
 them against women. . . . The established Government 
 has no more right to call itself the State than the smoke of 
 London has to call itself the weather. We had rather face 
 a Civil War than such another century of suffering as the 
 present one has been." 
 
 This was " Tract No. 2 " (1884). Tract No. 3 
 (1885) consisted of " A Suggestion and a Warning 
 to Provident Landlords and Capitalists." As the 
 establishment of Socialism in England would mean 
 
424 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vin. 
 
 " nothing less than the compulsion of all members 
 of the upper class, without regard to sex or con- 
 dition, to work for their living," they were solemnly- 
 advised, in order " to avert conditions so frightful 
 and unnatural to them," to set up a peasant 
 proprietory, as "the peasant proprietor, having a 
 stake in the country, will, unlike the landless 
 labourer of to-day, have a common interest with 
 the landlord in resisting revolutionary proposals." 
 These and other squibs were presently withdrawn ; 
 and the Society settled down to the production 
 and circulation of Facts for Socialists, Facts for 
 Londoners, and detailed programmes of reform. 
 Fabian Essays (1889), by G. B. Shaw, Sydney 
 Olivier, S. Webb, William Clarke, Hubert Bland, 
 Graham Wallas, and Annie Besant was one of 
 the most stimulating publications of the time ; 
 and the Society counted for much, directly and 
 indirectly, in the early work of the London County 
 Council. 
 
 This was not the only formal expression of the 
 growth of definite Socialist opinions. The Social 
 Democratic Federation, formed in 1884 under 
 Mr H. M. Hyndman, had the advantage of a cer- 
 tain direct connection with the working classes, and 
 of an able and devoted knot of leaders ; but it 
 never attained a strong position in British political 
 life, perhaps mainly because of the very quality 
 which distinguishes the British from the German 
 mind. Karl Marx, long after his death, it is true, 
 came to exercise a considerable private influence 
 
§ IV.] THE AWAKENING 425 
 
 upon advanced economic thought in the land of 
 his exile ; but his strict disciples did not gain 
 anything from it. They were too much filled 
 with an economic dogma, too little with the need 
 of a political up-building. ^ Shortly after the 
 formation of the Federation, a number of followers 
 of William Morris, democratic, artistic, and emi- 
 nently peaceful anarchists, broke off and formed 
 the short-lived Socialist League. The Federation 
 ran three candidates in the elections of 1885, and 
 they polled a total of 657 votes, most of these 
 going to Mr John Burns in Nottingham. The 
 Independent Labour Party, led by Mr Keir Hardie, 
 at length gathered together, in 1893, a number of 
 lesser groups ; and this proletarian body united, 
 in February 1900, with the Fabian Society and 
 some of the most powerful trade unions to create a 
 Parliamentary Labour Party which, six years 
 later, had thirty representatives in the House of 
 Commons. After a lapse of a quarter of a century, 
 Christian Socialism was revived, in the form of 
 the Guild of St Matthew, in 1877 ; but this has 
 
 1 Mr J. R. Maodonald, M.P., pre-eminently the statesman of the 
 newer British Labour Movement, puts it thus : " Socialism cannot 
 succeed whilst it is a mere creed ; it must be made a movement. And 
 It cannot become a movement until two things happen. It must be 
 the organizing power behind a confluence of forces each of which is 
 converging upon it, but not all of which actually profess it as a con- 
 sciously held belief ; it must also gain the confidence of the mass of 
 the working classes. The Social Democratic Federation neglected 
 both these tasks " (The Socialist Movement, p. 234). A very British 
 point of view ! 
 
426 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vni. 
 
 been a spirit far wider in its growth than any 
 organization. 
 
 No recital such as this would be complete which 
 did not note the remarkable effect of the publica- 
 tion of Henry George's Progress and Poverty, 
 and of the lectures which he delivered in England 
 and Scotland in 1884. A poor American journalist, 
 George enjoyed a rare command of both the written 
 and the spoken word ; and both the book, first 
 privately printed in San Francisco in 1879, and 
 the speeches, had an immense success. The gospel 
 of " the land for the people," its logic warmed 
 by many an echo of the old Hebrew prophets, 
 resumed in some sort the long-forgotten heroic 
 campaign of Spence, Cobbett, and the early 
 reformers ; and the idea probably gained force 
 by the neglect of the land question during the 
 Victorian era. The alienation of the people from 
 the soil was a manifest fact capable of all manner 
 of injurious interpretation and effective illustration ; 
 and George's argument that private property in 
 land was essentially different from other kinds of 
 property, and dominated all others, that nationali- 
 zation of the land would completely solve the 
 social problem, and that the way to begin was to 
 throw the burden of taxation on to land values, 
 appealed to many who had no patience for Marx- 
 ian Socialism. Progress and Poverty was soon 
 circulating in hundreds of thousands of copies. 
 Ruskin was among those who welcomed its author 
 on his arrival in 1884. In many places public 
 
§ IV.] THE AWAKENING 427 
 
 halls were refused ; but the boycott only increased 
 George's popularity. A Land Reform Union had 
 already been formed to spread his doctrine, and, 
 re-christened the English Land Restoration League, 
 this body has maintained a continuous activity. 
 In economic history, Henry George will probably 
 be best remembered as the first well-known modern 
 teacher to base himself upon a downright contradic- 
 tion of the Malthusian " law " of population. 
 
 We have separated these several lines of heretical 
 thought and unselfish endeavour that gave a new 
 tang to the atmosphere of the early 'eighties ; 
 but, in fact, they were all mingled, one idea or 
 experiment crowding upon another, and finding, 
 incompatible as many of them were, a welcome 
 in young minds hungry for the confirmation of a 
 vague hope. The Liberal Government, captive 
 in Egj^t and Ireland, missed the signs of the time 
 — except Mr Chamberlain, who found applause 
 in talk of " ransom " and the " Unauthorized 
 Programme." What, he asked, are the rights of 
 property ? " Is it a right of property which per- 
 mits a foreign speculator to come to the country 
 and lay waste two hundred miles of territory in 
 Scotland for the gratification of his love of sport ? 
 Are the game laws a right of property ? Is it a 
 right of property that sailors should be sent to 
 sea to pursue their dangerous occupation without 
 any sufficient regard for their security ? Is it an 
 essential condition of private ownership of land 
 that the agricultural labourers in this country, 
 
428 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vm. 
 
 alone of civilized countries, should be entirely- 
 divorced from the land they till, that they should 
 be driven into towns to compete with you for work 
 and to lower the rate of wages, and that, alike in 
 town and country, the labouring population should 
 be huddled into dwellings unfit for man or beast ? " ^ 
 Such were the questions men asked themselves, 
 in high places and low ; and no man was more in 
 tune with the feeling of the country than the same 
 leader when he added : " We are told that this 
 country is the paradise of the rich : it should be 
 ours to see that it does not become the purgatory 
 of the poor." We are now in a position to under- 
 stand what at the time seemed the miracle of the 
 resurrection of the docker. 
 
 V. Resurrection 
 
 A new note of alarm, bordering on panic, was 
 added, on February 8, 1886, to the rising murmur 
 of public discussion. After a meeting of " un- 
 employed " in Trafalgar Square, which had been 
 addressed by Messrs Hyndman, Champion, and 
 Burns, a mob marched up Pall Mall and St James's 
 Street, throwing stones through the windows of 
 the principal clubs, and wrecked and pillaged a 
 number of shops in Piccadilly and South Audley 
 Street. The fit of violence worked off, the rioters 
 were easily dispersed in Oxford Street by a small 
 body of constables. Two days later, telegrams 
 
 ' Speech at Birmingham, January 6, 1885. 
 
§v.] THE AWAKENING 429 
 
 were received in the West End that mobs were 
 marching from the East, and the police advised 
 shopkeepers to prepare for attack. Nothing 
 happened beyond some stone-throwing; but the 
 new Government, sharing the scare of the trades- 
 men, announced its intention to prosecute the 
 Sociahst leaders. Burns, Hyndman, and Champion 
 were duly charged with incitement, and committed 
 for trial by the Bow Street magistrate on March 3, 
 but were acquitted without hesitation by the jury 
 at the Central Criminal Court. In the interval, 
 over £78,000 had been subscribed in response to 
 an appeal of the Lord Mayor for the relief of dis- 
 tress in London ; the distribution of this fund 
 was regarded by experts as affording a particularly 
 vivid illustration of the evils of promiscuous 
 charity. 
 
 During the following autumn, there were more 
 meetings of unemployed ; and on November 13 
 (afterwards called " Bloody Sunday "), a body 
 of Radical and Socialist demonstrators, endeavour- 
 ing to reach Trafalgar Square, which had been 
 closed, were met and broken up by police and 
 Life Guards. Many persons were injured, and 
 two died. For breaking through the police line. 
 Burns and Mr Cunninghame-Graham, M.P., suffered 
 six weeks' imprisonment. In February 1888, Lord 
 Dunraven declared in the House of Lords that 
 " no slaves were in so unhappy a condition as these 
 [sweated] free citizens of a free city," and obtained 
 his Select Committee. A few months later, a strike 
 
430 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vm. 
 
 of match-girls relieved the grey hopelessness of 
 the East End ; the Sailors' and Firemen's Union 
 was formed ; and the first London County Council 
 was elected, Burns being one of a strong group of 
 members committed to a programme of municipal 
 collectivism. About the same time, Mrs Besant 
 and the Rev. Stewart Headlam were establishing 
 on the London School Board the principle of a 
 " fair wage " clause in contract work, which later 
 became the general policy of local government 
 bodies. It was during the fu'st vacation of the 
 County Council that the great dock strike broke 
 out — a momentous accident, for a County Coun- 
 cil holiday meant a holiday for John Burns. 
 Another governing factor in what followed was 
 the beginning of a revival of trade ; yet another 
 was the success of a new kind of democratic 
 journalism, in the shape of the Star, an evening 
 newspaper under the editorship, successively, of 
 Mr T. P. O'Connor and Mr H. W. Massingham. 
 Labour had, at length, a mouthpiece in the daily 
 press. 
 
 Mr Ben Tillett had made in 1886 the first attempt 
 to organize the East London dockers ; but, after 
 running a fruitless strike at Tilbury Docks, his 
 Tea Operatives and General Labourers' Union 
 dwindled to some three hundred members. In 
 May 1889, Tillett joined with Burns and Tom 
 Mann in forming a Gas Workers' and General 
 Labourers' Union, which promptly secured a 
 reduction of the working day in the London 
 
§ v.] THE AWAKENING 431 
 
 gasworks from twelve to eight hours. Thus 
 encouraged, Tillett went back to the dockers, and 
 on August 13, 1889 — ^the men forcing their leader's 
 hand— a small dispute at the South-West India 
 Dock was made the occasion of a demand, sent 
 by letter to the directors, that henceforth no man 
 should be taken on for less than four hours at a 
 stretch, and wages should be raised to 6d. an hour, 
 and 8d. for overtime. Now all the combustible 
 material whose accumulation we have traced 
 seemed suddenly to take fire. Within three days, 
 ten thousand unskilled labourers on the north 
 riverside, together with the two unions of steve- 
 dores (the superior dockers of the export trade), 
 had struck in sympathy. A week later, practically 
 the whole work of the port was at a standstill. 
 Tillett had called Burns and Mann to his aid ; 
 and these three men organized and dominated for ten 
 weeks a campaign so vitalized by a great issue, 
 and so full of dramatic incidents, that it held 
 the breathless attention of the whole English- 
 speaking world. 1 By sheer genius of leadership, 
 the Battersea engineer became the unquestioned 
 generalissimo of a ragged army which assembled 
 
 * The Story oj the Dockers' Strike, by H. Llewellyn Smith and 
 Vaughan Naah, with an introduction by Sydney Buxton, M.P. (1890), 
 makes even to-day more interesting reading than many war 
 narratives. It is significant that Mr Burns, the hero of the story, 
 succeeding Mr Buxton, is now President of the Board of Trade, 
 and the first Socialist or Labour leader to attain Cabinet rank ; 
 while Sir H. Llewellyn Smith is head of the Labour Department, 
 and Mr Nash is Vice-Chairman of the Development Commission, 
 
432 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. viii. 
 
 daily on Tower Hill, and followed his straw hat in 
 innumerable processions. It was said that Burns 
 had bewitched London : certainly, his good relations 
 with the police, his iron physique, his humour, 
 his complete command of many thousands of rough 
 men who had never before followed a leader or 
 held to an organization, were prime factors in 
 the victory that opened a new chapter in British 
 industrial life. 
 
 There were two other things without which the 
 day and night toil of these leaders in organizing 
 food supplies and keeping their followers out of 
 mischief would have been fruitless. The first was 
 the enthusiastic support of the general public, 
 which operated in three ways : it made it impossible 
 for the dock directors to enlist any large number of 
 " blacklegs " ; it cowed them into submission to 
 a Mansion House Conciliation Committee, of which 
 Cardinal Manning, Mr Buxton, the Lord Mayor, 
 the Bishop of London, and Lord Brassey were the 
 leading members ; and it secured subscriptions 
 enough to maintain an elaborate system of strike 
 pay under which 440,000 relief tickets were issued. 
 The second, and relatively more generous, inter- 
 vention was that of the Australian people, who 
 have since proved themselves in many ways as 
 pioneers of democratic experiment in the Empire. 
 It is remarkable that, of a total strike fund of 
 £48,736, the general public at home contributed 
 £13,730, the Colonies cabled no less than £30,423, 
 while the British trade unions^{apart from those in 
 
I v.] THE Awakening 433 
 
 London, which had members to maintain) sub- 
 scribed only £4,473. 
 
 When due allowance is made for the poverty of 
 the old unions at the end of a prolonged period of 
 bad trade, it is evident that a break of sympathy 
 mainly accounts for this result. The dashing 
 campaign of a little band of Socialists was not at 
 all to their taste. Burns, Mann, and other of 
 these young agitators had challenged the rule of 
 the Parliamentary Committee root and branch, 
 its Liberal principles, its timid strategy, its stolid 
 self-satisfaction. At successive labour congresses, 
 from 1885 onward, the clash of the two schools 
 resounded. Now the formal ground of combat 
 would be the eight-hours' day, anon the nationaliza- 
 tion of the land, and yet again the establishment 
 of a standard minimum wage by State action. 
 But behind the discussion of these questions there 
 lay a deep difference of outlook and experience. 
 The " old gang," as they were dubbed, saw them- 
 selves solely as trustees for a great group of com- 
 binations that had emerged from the trade crisis 
 like so many once-brave vessels now battered and 
 waterlogged. To them, the Socialist programme 
 appeared at such a moment to be stark madness. 
 The substantial artisan they understood ; the 
 industrial residuum was nearly as unfamiliar 
 to them as to some middle-class explorers. The 
 idea that the provident funds on which all their 
 own victories were based could be dispensed 
 
 with, and even regarded as an obstacle to 
 
 2e 
 
434 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vm. 
 
 the formation of a fighting union, revolted 
 them. 
 
 The series of developments which we have just 
 traced could not, however, be long ignored or gain- 
 said. The example of the match-girls and the 
 dockers was too eloquent to bear mere contradic- 
 tion. " The full round orb of the dockers' tanner '! 
 illumined the whole social horizon. A month 
 after the strike, the new union counted 30,000 
 members, and was spreading overseas, as well as 
 in the provinces. Not only were fresh societies 
 started, with low contributions and markedly 
 political aims : the old organizations felt the 
 impetus. Within a year, the trade-union ranks 
 were swollen by the accession of 200,000 new 
 members ; and wage-sheets began to show the 
 result. It now became evident that the public 
 interest and sympathy which had followed the 
 " sweating " inquiries, and had sustained the 
 dockers' revolt, was no mere flash of sentimentality, 
 but a far-reaching change of heart and mind. 
 The invisible forces which created the " Progressiv- 
 ism " of the London County Council, and pressed 
 Mr Gladstone forward into the " Newcastle Pro- 
 gramme " of 1891, could not be shut out of the 
 counsels of the " aristocracy of labour." Henry 
 Broadhurst, George Shipton, and other leaders 
 admitted a modification of their views ; the 
 Society of Eingineers revised its constitution to 
 allow of the entry of all branches of the trade ; 
 the policy of federation was resumed ; a new 
 
§v.] THE AWAKENING 435 
 
 cordiality was shown toward women in industry, 
 and toward the workers of other lands. 
 
 The economic recovery which began in 1888 
 received a somewhat sharp check in 1890, when 
 export trade, in particular, was pinched, and the 
 great banking house of Baring was saved only by 
 means of a guarantee fund, headed by the Bank 
 of England, with borrowings from France and 
 Russia. A series of strikes and lock-outs in the 
 building, cotton, dockside, coal, and engineering 
 trades followed. The sceptics had prophesied that 
 the " new unionism " would collapse on the first 
 serious trial. The position of the waterside com- 
 binations was evidently precarious. Could this 
 hitherto hopeless mass of demoralized humanity 
 be held together ? If the advance could be main- 
 tained in London, it might be lost in the provinces ; 
 or, if lost on the Thames, it might be gained else- 
 where. For the large ports are more self-contained 
 and isolated than other industrial centres, and 
 their conditions vary widely. The question came 
 to the test of battle in Hull, during the summer 
 of 1893. A few enlightened employers had regarded 
 recent developments with a benevolent eye. " I 
 should like the power of the Unions to be stronger," 
 said Colonel Birt, General Manager of the Millwall 
 Docks. " All the little difficulties we have are 
 from the men who break the rules of the Union. 
 I should like to see the executive stronger." i 
 
 1 Labour Commission, 1891-4, Digest of Evidence, Group B, vol. i. 
 p. 48. 
 
436 MODERN ENGLAND [chap, vm: 
 
 But the majority viewed the goings and comings of 
 Mr Tillett, Mr Mann, and their emissaries through 
 the eyes of ancient prejudice ; and it was eminently 
 as a belligerent body that the Shipping Federation, 
 Ltd., was formed in 1890. The great strategic 
 idea of Mr G. A. Laws, its general manager, was 
 the establishment at all ports of " Free Labour 
 Registries," under the employers' control, offering 
 preferential employment, and, where these did not 
 succeed in destroying trade-union resistance, the 
 introduction of gangs of strike-breakers. The 
 promise of preference of employment appears to 
 have been first made during a strike against the 
 Shaw, Savill and other companies in London in 
 December 1890. Soon afterwards, the Federation 
 was ready to carry its levies here, there, and every- 
 where, for the purpose of defeating rebellious 
 natives ; and the number of disputes in which it 
 involved itself rapidly grew. All over the kingdom, 
 it came to be regarded as the implacable foe of 
 labour, a combination, as Mr Tillett and other 
 witnesses told the Labour Commission, " to boycott 
 Unions in connection with the shipping trade, 
 to lower the wages of seamen, and employ foreign 
 or casual workmen, or outsiders, non-unionists, 
 to introduce new labour into particular districts, 
 and to carefully honeycomb the Unions, and 
 prevent them from getting a chance." Mr Clem 
 Edwards charged the Federation with having armed 
 its " free labourers " with revolvers, and having 
 " deliberately gone into the agricultural districts, 
 
§v.] THE AWAKENING 437 
 
 and even to the Continent, in search of men, in 
 spite of the misery caused by the already over- 
 crowded condition of the labour market." In 
 reply, Mr Laws claimed the right to engage men 
 anywhere and to import them for his clients ; he 
 urged, also, that the law of " picketing " should 
 be amended to make " moral intimidation ille- 
 gal," and that " it should be illegal to strike for 
 the purpose of preventing ' free ' labour obtaining 
 employment." 
 
 The example of the " Pinkerton men " of America 
 was not needed to teach a later generation that 
 discussions of terms like " free labour " are only 
 useful in proportion as they reflect the facts of 
 everyday industrial life. For the greater part of 
 a century, England had Iain under the domin- 
 ance of the laisser-faire principle. True, the skilled 
 trades had been reluctantly allowed to tighten the 
 bonds of unionism through wide ranges of industry ; 
 but, though these " old " unions decidedly limited 
 the liberty of the employer to "do what he liked 
 with his own," they exercised their power gently, 
 and they gave him in return a regiment of labour 
 ready organized, and capable of enforcing upon 
 its members sliding-scales of wages, shop rules, and 
 arbitration agreements. Lawyers, doctors, and 
 other professional men enjoying the fruits of care- 
 fully preserved and regulated status, might be 
 expected most quickly to recognize the inevitable 
 trend both of labour and capital toward self- 
 organization. But we must remember that a 
 
438 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. viii. 
 
 passion of hope in one quarter nmy excite a passion 
 of fear and denial in another. In these feverish 
 days the issue was obscured by the fact that 
 neither side dared to state fully its logical aim. 
 Trade unionism necessarily involves a struggle 
 against non-union labour, as cartel-capitalism in- 
 volves the suppression of competitors. No work- 
 man would pay union fees if men not paying such 
 fees got as good conditions ; and general experience 
 shows that it is only when combined that routine 
 labour gets its due share of the product. But 
 the exclusion of non-union labour was not, and 
 could not yet be, raised to the dignity of a principle 
 by the Dockers' Union. So, too, Mr Laws could 
 hardly be expected to put into quite plain terms 
 his economic atomism. In fact, however, the 
 waterside labourer was asked to tolerate not alone 
 the individual who, whether from genuine scruple 
 or perversity, refused to join the great body of his 
 fellows, and yet managed to reap the advantage 
 of their sacrifice ; he had to stand by and see this 
 individual sought out and permanently hired by 
 a syndicate of employers formed for the express 
 purpose of weakening his own combination. What 
 the Hull strike, uncomplicated by any wage 
 question, made clear was that the waterside 
 workers did not want this sort of "freedom," 
 and that, wherever they were strong enough, 
 «iey would refuse to have it forced upon them, 
 ^ey were men of a distinctly better grade 
 than the London dockers, and a large majo- 
 
§ V.J THE AWAKENING 439 
 
 ritv — some 10,000 — were enrolled in various 
 unions. 
 
 On March 20, 1898. a Shipping Federation 
 registry was opened in Hull, with the usual promise 
 of prelwential employment. All and sundry 
 out of work — ai\d there must have been many 
 such in a population of 200,000 — were invited 
 to apply for engagement. After a lapse of a month, 
 only some three hundred men ans^vered the call. 
 This is the esseiitial fact, to which the i-est is only 
 a sequel. On April 5, the Federation began to 
 import " blacklegs." It had already refused in 
 su\y way to recognize the Dockers' Union or its 
 officials. On April 6, the men \\-ei"e polled by 
 ballot, and votetl. by S50i> against 5, for a strike. 
 Two days later, the port was blocked, unionists 
 and non-unionists, dockers, lightermen, seamen, 
 and coaiies, all leaving -vx-ork in protest against 
 the foreign iuN-asion. For six weeks, while overtures 
 of peace from civic authorities, justices, and 
 religious leaders were beii\g rejected by the Federa- 
 tion, the attention of the whole coimtry was drawn 
 to the quiet heroism aiul loyalty of this hungering 
 commvmity. The sense of Mr John Burns, and 
 of Mr F. Maddison and other local leaders, pre- 
 vailed against a foolish threat from London of a 
 national strike; instead, financial aid was poured 
 into Hull by tmions throughout the country. At 
 length, a i-ompromise was arri\'ed at, it being 
 tuireeil that neither registration under the Shipping 
 Fcxieraticoa nor membership of any imion should 
 
440 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vm. 
 
 carry with it "either preference or prejudice in 
 regard to employment." Neither side could claim 
 a complete victory ; but labour won the only 
 honours, and " union-smashing " was seriously 
 discredited. 
 
 VI. Organization 
 
 With this episode, the period of acute disturbance 
 which began with the commercial crisis of 1875 
 may be said to have closed. In tracing the events 
 of the following years, the political historian will 
 have to speak of events at home and abroad — 
 the retirement and death of Mr Gladstone, the 
 later phase of the Irish Question, the Armenian 
 atrocities, the Jameson Raid, the rout of the 
 Mahdists, the scramble for concessions in China, 
 the growth of a new Imperialism, and the South 
 African War — which absorbed much of the time 
 of Parliament, and radically affected the spirit 
 of the two great parties. Under the surface of 
 political life during these years, there was going 
 on, almost unseen and unheard, a vital process 
 of assimilation. Instinct, tradition, some broad 
 impulse may carry a nation, as they may carry 
 an individual, through an emergency ; but prin- 
 ciples, vaguely realized perhaps, yet rooted in 
 reality, are essential to its permanent growth. 
 The whole economic and ethical code which had 
 inspired the late Georgian and early Victorian 
 reformers was now in solution. A number of 
 
§'vi.] THE AWAKENING 441 
 
 startling new ideas had arisen, as to the lasting 
 value and practical outcome of which none but 
 dogmatists could be sure. The Social Democratic 
 Federation had already sunk into the background ; 
 but newspaper readers could not fail to remark 
 that Prince Bismarck and the young Kaiser had 
 no scruples about embarking upon large projects 
 of bureaucratic Socialism. The least that this 
 new national temper demanded was more informa- 
 tion and sober experiment. 
 
 The Sweating Committee of 1889-90 was followed 
 by the International Labour Conference in Berlin, 
 summoned by the Emperor William, and this, 
 again, by the Labour Commission of 1890-4, pre- 
 sided over by Lord Hartington. In course of this 
 last inquiry, the most extensive of its kind ever 
 yet attempted, 583 witnesses were examined, and 
 almost every phase of industrial life came under 
 the notice of the Commissioners and their assis- 
 tants. The reports and evidence fill fourteen large 
 volumes, and are of great value. One result was 
 the foundation, by Mr Mundella and Mr Burt, in 
 January 1893, of a Labour Department of the 
 Board of Trade. It was, at the outset, simply an 
 information bureau, with no executive powers, 
 its chief, Mr (afterwards Sir Robert) Giffen, 
 having a staff consisting of a Labour Com- 
 missioner (Mr Llewellyn Smith), four Labour 
 Correspondents (one a woman), and about thirty 
 clerks. The official Labour Gazette, first pub- 
 lished in May 1893, has ever since been ,a most 
 
442 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vra. 
 
 useful source of industrial statistics and kindred 
 information. 
 
 The Factory Act of 1891 made a first tentative 
 assault upon the " sweater's den." It required 
 every factory or workshop occupier to provide lists 
 of his outworkers and their places of employment, 
 and to furnish to every worker written particulars 
 of the rate of wages ; and it forbade them to 
 allow any woman to be employed within four 
 weeks after she had given birth to a child. The 
 special exemptions hitherto enjoyed by women's 
 workshops were repealed ; sanitary regulations 
 were extended to workshops in which only adult 
 men were employed ; and inspectors were given 
 a fuller right of entry to domestic workshops. 
 Above all, perhaps, the Home Secretary was 
 empowered himself to draw up special rules for 
 any trade or process which appeared to him 
 dangerous or injurious to health. During the 
 same year, the regulation of weaving sheds and 
 alkali works was strengthened, the Home Secretary 
 taking power to draw up rules for twelve or thir- 
 teen branches of the chemical trades ; and the 
 House of Commons adopted without a division the 
 proposal of Mr Plunket, First Commissioner of 
 Works, requiring the payment of current wage-rates 
 in Government contract work. Mr Shaw Lefevre 
 (Lord Eversley) followed this example, in December 
 1892, by requiring the payment of a minimum 
 wage of 6^d. an hour in the pulling down of Millbank 
 prison; and, in 1893, Sir John Gorst carried a 
 
§ VI.] THE AWAKENING 443 
 
 motion favouring model conditions in the naval 
 establishments. In the latter year, the Board of 
 Trade obtained power to suppress unreasonably 
 long working hours on railways. The year 1894 
 was chiefly notable for the vigour which Mr H. H. 
 Asquith threw into his direction of the industrial 
 departments of the Home Office. Many new 
 inspectors, including four women, were appointed ; 
 central offices were opened in the chief provincial 
 cities ; further special regulations were issued for 
 unhealthy trades, several of which were scheduled 
 as dangerous ; and in other cases exhaustive 
 inquiries were instituted. These administrative 
 measures led up to the Factory Act of 1895, which 
 fixed the weekly limit of working hours at thirty 
 for children, and sixty for young persons and 
 women ; raised the age limit for night work to 
 fourteen ; brought laundries under inspection ; 
 empowered the Home Secretary to prohibit or 
 limit the employment of any class of persons in 
 any dangerous process, to close insanitary work- 
 places, and to make special rules for workshops 
 where only men were employed ; and extended 
 safeguards against accident to docks and warehouses. 
 The Act also compelled local authorities to report 
 to the factory inspector measures taken by them 
 at his instance, a stimulus to administrative zeal 
 which was strengthened in 1901. 
 
 These measures do not exhaust the record of the 
 decade in social reform ; but, for the rest, it must 
 suffice to name the Housing Act of 1890 ; the 
 
444 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vm. 
 
 Free Education Act, 1891, and a measure giving 
 facilities for allotments ; the Parish Councils Act, 
 1892, followed by the institution of county councils 
 in Ireland, and borough councils (in place of the 
 old vestries) in London ; Sir Wm. Harcourt's 
 Budget of 1894, which first imposed graduated 
 death-duties ; the Employers' Liability Act, 1897, 
 weakened by contracting-out provisions, which 
 was extended to agricultural labourers in 1900 ; 
 and the foundation, in 1899, on the strength of the 
 work and ideas of Sir Horace Plunkett, of an Irish 
 Department of Agriculture and Fisheries. 
 
 These manifestations of the new spirit which 
 distinguished the close of the nineteenth centtiry 
 may be regarded from three points of view, with 
 somewhat different results. These may be called 
 the standpoints of social compunction, social jus- 
 tice, and social organization. 
 
 There is no more laisser-faire. Capital is sub- 
 jected to increasing restraint. There is practical 
 hesitation, but no doctrinaire scruple, about inter- 
 ference with the conditions of adult labour. It 
 being impossible to arrest the expenditure of the 
 State, both parties agree that wealth must be 
 taxed more heavily. The right of the State to 
 pry into every corner of the industrial world, to 
 publish the facts, to act at least as well as an aver- 
 age employer in its own workshops, to secure the 
 like decency in its contractors, and to impose 
 rules upon every occupation where sweating or 
 danger to life, limb, or health are proved to exist — 
 
§vi.l THE AWAKENING 44S 
 
 all this is admitted. As an effort of social com- 
 punction, as an attack upon the more crying 
 scandals arising from the anarchy of the preceding 
 period, it is a brave show, full of good promise. 
 The perspective is somewhat altered if we apply 
 to the results a counting-house or bread-and-butter 
 test. We shall see that these measures of the 
 'nineties, and the greater power of administration 
 that supported them, led to the saving of hundreds 
 of thousands of lives, and the avoidance of a 
 corresponding mass of weakness and misery. But 
 it is, unhappily, beyond question that they left a 
 large part of the nation still struggling against 
 abject poverty. In 1895, Sir Robert Giffen pub- 
 lished elaborate calculations according to which 
 the average of agricultural and industrial wages 
 amounted to only 24s. 7d. per week, while 24 per 
 cent, of the wage-earners made less than 20s.— 
 a sum on which a family cannot be decently main- 
 tained, even if there be no sickness or break of 
 employment. Mr Charles Booth's general con- 
 clusion carries with it a still greater authority : 
 
 " The result of all our inquiries makes it reasonably 
 sure that one-ttird of the population are on or about the 
 line of poverty, or are below it, having at most an income 
 which, one time with another, averages 21s. or 22s. for a 
 small family (or up to 25s. or 26s. for one of larger size), 
 and in many cases falling much below this level. There 
 may be another third who have, perhaps, 10s. more, or, 
 taking the year round, from 25s. to 35s. a vreek, among 
 whom would be counted, in addition to wage-earners, 
 many retail tradesmen and small masters ; and the last 
 
446 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vm< 
 
 third would include all who are better o£E. The 
 first group are practically those who are living two or more 
 persons to each room occupied. The next has, on the 
 average, nearly one room to each person ; while the final 
 group includes all those who employ servants, as well as 
 some of those who do not. Of the first, many are pinched 
 by want, and all live in poverty, if poverty be defined as 
 having no surplus. The second enjoy solid working-class 
 comfort ; and, of the third group, the worst ofE live in 
 plenty, and the best ofE in luxury." ^ 
 
 Evidently, the fruits of pity are no measure of 
 justice ; to build a truly civilized State, much 
 more is required than to make death by starvation 
 impossible. The conception of justice, however, 
 has become not simpler, but much more complex, 
 with the passage of time ; and the easy-going, 
 matter-of-fact conservatism of the British nature 
 supplies only a faint impetus toward its realization. 
 Politically, England had made immense strides, 
 and could boast of a machine of government on 
 the whole more efficient, and certainly more 
 adaptable, than that of any other large country. 
 At least as an ideal, equal rights to the vote, to 
 education, and to many ways of advancement, 
 were no longer denied — ^with one important ex- 
 ception, the enfranchisement of women. A large 
 number, rapidly increasing, of men in fortunate 
 circumstances had, by the end of the century, 
 
 1 ii/e and Labour, vol. ix. p. 427. Mr Booth remarked that " all 
 classes in London give largely in charity," and added : " It ia probable 
 that the poorest people give the most in proportion to what they 
 have " (p. 437). 
 
§ VI.] THE AWAKENING 447 
 
 passed beyond the negative idea of government 
 as ring-keeper of the economic prize-fight, and even 
 beyond the idea of government as a glorified 
 Charity Organisation Society, and, hke J. S. Mill 
 in his later years, looked forward to a considerable 
 growth of the positive functions of the State. 
 Probably, the great complexity of the social problem, 
 now of worldwide scope, accounts for the relatively 
 small part which theory and doctrine played in this 
 development of Socialistic thought, as compared 
 with the rise of Individualism a century earlier. 
 Now, as then, practical exigencies supplied the real 
 driving force. City fathers of impeccably orthodox 
 type found themselves building up great municipal 
 supplies and services of water, gas, electricity, tele- 
 phones, tramways, boats, tunnels, markets, baths, 
 libraries, picture galleries, museums, model dwellings, 
 advanced schools — enterprises in which, in 1899, 
 a sum of £88,379,931 was embarked. Civic pride 
 and the pressure of rates combined to lead them 
 into the revolutionary practice of charges upon 
 " betterment." Quasi-public boards were at the 
 same time being driven to the construction, some- 
 times by the aid of city corporations, of enormous 
 dock and harbour, ship-canal, and railway works ; 
 and, similarly, the central Government, whether 
 under Conservative or Liberal direction, must 
 reconcile itself to the humdrum details of manu- 
 facture and intermediate business on an ever- 
 enlarging scale. 
 In the corresponding development of organized 
 
448 MODERN ilNGLAKD [chap, viii, 
 
 labour as a political force, there is the same sub- 
 ordination of abstract to concrete motive. The 
 Independent Labour Party, founded at Bradford 
 in 1893 under the leadership of Mr J. Keir 
 Hardie, M.P., had a definite Socialist programme ; 
 but it departed widely from the Marxian rigidity 
 and the sharp materialist temper of the Social 
 Democratic Federation. Even so, only a small 
 number of the better-educated artisans were 
 enlisted ; and in 1899 a new departure was made. 
 The Trade Union Congress instructed its Parlia- 
 mentary Committee to call a conference of delegates 
 of its own and of the three Socialist bodies to 
 consider the question of direct labour represen- 
 tation in Parliament — of representation, that is, 
 independently of the group of " Liberal-Labour " 
 Members. The Conference was held in February 
 1900 ; and it was decided to form " a distinct 
 labour group in Parliament who shall have their 
 own whips, and agree upon theii* own policy, 
 which must embrace a readiness to co-operate 
 with any party for the time being engaged in 
 promoting legislation in the direct interests of 
 labour." This initiative was much strengthened 
 by the effect of the decision of the House of Lords 
 in the Taff Vale railway case, in 1901, and other 
 legal decisions, which for the first time enabled 
 employers to sue trade unions as such, and obtain 
 damages from their funds for individual acts of 
 their officials, and also gravely impaired the exist- 
 ing rights of strikers. In 1903, the constitution 
 
§ VI.] THE AWAKENING 449 
 
 of the Labour Representation Committee was 
 amended, the clause requiring " a readiness to 
 co-operate with any party " being inverted, thus 
 — " to abstain strictly from identifying themselves 
 with, or promoting the interests of, any section 
 of the Liberal or Conservative parties, and not 
 to oppose any other candidates recognized by this 
 Committee. All such candidates shall pledge them- 
 selves to accept this constitution, to abide by the 
 decisions of the group in carrying out the aims 
 of this constitution, or to resign, and to appear 
 before their constituents under the title of Labour 
 candidates only." In 1906, 29 of 51 such candidates 
 were returned. Later, the Miners' and Railway 
 Servants' Unions joined what was now called the 
 Labour Party, and 40 seats were won in the 
 elections of 1910. The party remains without any 
 dogmatic expression or theoretical explanation of 
 its demand for social justice. 
 
 The perspective again changes when we take 
 order and efficiency as a standard of national 
 progress ; for here the most conspicuous fact is 
 the organization of capital for its own purposes 
 and interest, the next most conspicuous the self- 
 organization of labour, and only after these the 
 organization of the common interests of society 
 as a whole. This priority substantially results 
 from the inherent differences between capital and 
 labour which we noted in an earlier chapter — 
 especially the greater mobility and staying power 
 of capital — and the difficulty of organizing the 
 2f 
 
450 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vm. 
 
 consumer, as such. The aggregation of capital 
 had gone so far by the end of the century (though 
 not yet so far as in the United States or Germany) 
 as to compel an advance of economic thought far 
 beyond any arising from considerations of social 
 pity or justice — mainly, no doubt, because the 
 division of capitalistic interests between " com- 
 bines " and firms not ready for combination 
 is favourable to such discussion. The more the 
 tendency toward combination is examined, the 
 more natural and inevitable it is seen to be ; and 
 the realization of this fact must deeply affect our 
 view both of the history of modern commerce and 
 industry, and of their future development. There 
 were " combines " in ancient Egypt ; joint-stock 
 companies date back to the beginning of the seven- 
 teenth century, and entered the field of manu- 
 facture before the end of the eighteenth. The 
 very processes which created a new era of competi- 
 tion created equally a new era of combination ; 
 and, so far as competition was the more marked, 
 and obtained the sanction of a generally accepted 
 philosophy, we must now envisage this as a very 
 short and peculiar episode of the national history, 
 necessarily limited to the years when England 
 enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the new methods 
 of manufacture and transport, and could afford 
 to ignore much waste in their exploitation. The 
 multiplication of competing businesses at home, 
 and the appearance of foreign rivals, closed this 
 abnormal period; and during the latter half of 
 
§ VI.] THE AWAKENING 451 
 
 the century the growing importance of economy 
 in manufacture and marketing led to all manner 
 of expedients of organization, of which the Trust 
 is the latest outcome. 
 
 There is a devil-myth to be exploded here, as 
 in the matter of " sweating." As there is no 
 " middleman " devil, so there is no monopolist- 
 devil. In both cases, there is an evil which assumes 
 an infinite variety of shapes and shades, and seems 
 to be a degradation of a virtue. The saving of 
 waste is an evident good. The invention of larger 
 unions of capital, skill, and labour for more efficient 
 production, like the invention of more perfect 
 machinery, is a good, but not always in its use 
 an unmixed good. The extortion of the last penny 
 of monopoly advantage is an evident evil. Between 
 the extremes, all manner of efforts to escape from 
 the penalties of cut-throat competition are to be 
 found. They are most numerous and various, 
 and reach the furthest elaboration, in the great 
 machine manufactures, and this for two reasons. 
 It is here that the power of over-production is 
 greatest, and united restraint becomes most 
 necessary ; thus, a desperate reaction against a 
 state of affairs due to the absence of any elements 
 of natural monopoly may result in an artificial 
 monopoly. Secondly, it is in those trades, manu- 
 facturing standardized articles by large-scale routine 
 process, that union can be most easily brought 
 about. For large uniform production, the essential 
 things are (a) easy access to credit and new capital, 
 
452 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vni. 
 
 (6) most advantageous purchase of raw material 
 (and therefore constant new supplies), (c) the best 
 machinery (and therefore the maintenance of re- 
 search and invention), (d) economy of management 
 and labour-wages, (e) association of processes and 
 use of by-products, (/) economy of selling (including 
 " travelling " and advertisement). Much depends 
 on (g) whether the particular market is expanding 
 or contracting, {h) whether the particular business 
 can fortify itself by means of patent or trade-mark 
 protection, or the preservation of secret processes ; 
 (i) whether the combination is based upon real 
 monopoly elements, natural or artificial, and real 
 economies, or is a factitious result of the greed of 
 the promoter. In the United States, Germany, 
 Russia, and other countries, the movement of 
 aggregation has been greatly stimulated, at the 
 expense of the general public, (j) by tariffs penaliz- 
 ing competitive imports. England has benefited in 
 this respect by her adherence to free trade, and by 
 the relative efficiency of her processes of govern- 
 ment — for the would-be monopolist knows that 
 public opinion can quickly convert itself into law if 
 it be provoked. In this as in other directions, 
 however, (k) the exercise of political influence tends 
 to become a more important purpose and result 
 of business combination, though it is most often 
 attained indirectly through the agency of trade 
 associations, local and national. Finally, (Z) gigan- 
 tic aggregations of capital make possible great 
 foreign enterprises, such as the exploitation of 
 
§ VI.] THE AWAKENING 453 
 
 gold-fields, oil-fields, and tropical forest produce, 
 railway -building, irrigation, and other public works. 
 Many of the advantages noted above apply as 
 well in the field of distribution as in manufacture. 
 When the inefl&ciency of the ordinary old-time 
 retail shop is recalled, the multiplication of " stores " 
 and "universal providers " at the end of the century 
 is not surprising, nor the later growth of companies 
 purveying food, drapery, drugs, and other supplies 
 through hundreds of branch establishments. The 
 trend is universal : wherever small concerns, espe- 
 cially those doing routine business, are uneconom- 
 ical, wherever competition has become immoderate, 
 wherever the prospect of monopoly is tempting, 
 combination sets in. Railways, motor-bus or taxi- 
 cab companies, cable companies ally themselves 
 to limit wasteful services. National prejudice does 
 not stay the establishment of " shipping rings," or 
 even the construction and arming of fleets for 
 foreign States. The variety of combination is as 
 wide as the variety of opportunity; but three 
 broad distinctions would cover most cases : (1) 
 alliances of independent concerns (to keep up 
 prices, to delimit areas, to economize services, to 
 share contracts, or for other specific purposes) ; 
 (2) aggregation of industries formerly independent 
 under a supreme control, under the form of sub- 
 sidiary companies (as in the series from the coal- 
 and iron-mine to the completed ship) ; (3) full 
 amalgamation (as in the cotton thread, screw, salt, 
 and alkali manufactures). 
 
454 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vm. 
 
 The only general restraint upon the tendency in 
 the United Kingdom is the requirement of full 
 publicity under the Companies' Acts. Some busi- 
 nesses peculiarly large in the element of natural 
 monopoly have, as we have seen, been taken over 
 generally by the municipalities ; but the central 
 Government has only in a few cases gone beyond 
 regulation. Even the provision of land and sea 
 armaments lies, for the most part, in the hands of 
 private contracting firms ; and there is here at least 
 one extreme case of anti-social monopoly, in the so- 
 called Armour-Plate Ring. The most notable illus- 
 tration of the State regulation of a private monopoly 
 business is offered by the railways. The revolution 
 in transport and transit followed the revolution 
 in agriculture and manufacture. Some important 
 consequences are traceable to this order of develop- 
 ment. Railways came before democracy ; but 
 they came under the Reformed Parliament, when 
 the laisser-faire school had done its best and 
 worst, and other forces were beginning to rise. 
 There was no vast virgin hinterland inviting pre- 
 datory greed, as in the United States ; yet cupidity 
 naturally sprang up in the track of the first loco- 
 motives. The costs of construction, largely for 
 land compensation and veiled bribery, were enor- 
 mous. Gradually, the companies developed a 
 series of powerful bureaucratic administrations, to 
 a large extent bound together by working agree- 
 ments, as a reaction from ruinous rate-cutting. 
 In 1840, the younger Stephenson declared before a 
 
§ VI.] THE AWAKENING 455 
 
 Select Committee that, " by exciting competition, 
 you increase the capital invested for the same con- 
 venience which would be otherwise obtained with 
 less capital," and therefore that, " wherever com- 
 bination is practicable, competition is impractic- 
 able." Both sides of this proposition have been 
 justified by seventy years of British experience. 
 The evil of waste reached its height when the steam 
 railway was reaching the maximum of its economic 
 influence, when the interests of a particular town 
 or district had become dependent upon a certain 
 line, which could thus make or mar its fortunes. 
 Sometimes — as over the Manchester Ship Canal, 
 and the Hull and Barnsley Railway — a city was 
 tempted in self-defence to mortgage its resources to 
 establish a competing system of transport. Rivalry 
 between two capitalist groups was then exaggerated 
 into a general social-economic conflict, city being set 
 against city, port against port, coalfield against 
 coalfield. Much of the desired gain was always lost 
 in the waste of these struggles. Outside this de- 
 liberate competition, there is a great class of losses 
 incidental to the uneconomical division of the 
 traffic lines of the country. Amalgamation, or some 
 other form of union, was the natural result of the 
 earlier conflict; and this also enabled the railway 
 companies to obtain control of canals, and to develop 
 great dock and shipping properties. 
 
 State regulation, in the interests of traders, 
 passengers, and workmen, has tardily followed 
 this monopoly development. The earlier waste on 
 
456 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. vin. 
 
 construction (British capital cost was twice as 
 large as that of the French and German, and four 
 times that of the American, railways) and afterwards 
 on competition — to say nothing of the cost of 
 250 boards, with their 1300 directors — became an 
 excuse for burdensome traffic rates, poor facilities, 
 and poor wages. No method of procuring reason- 
 able rates by outside pressure has been found ; and 
 it was only with the full constitution of the Railway 
 Commission, in 1873, that the principle of equal 
 treatment was effectively imposed. In 1893, the 
 House of Commons unanimously recorded its 
 opinion that the then recently revised traffic 
 charges and conditions were " most prejudicial to 
 the industrial, agricultural, and commercial interests 
 of the country." Further powers were again given 
 to the Railway Commission ; but it has become 
 plain that the policy of " regulation " reaches its 
 limit when it represses the more obvious kinds of 
 extortion. On the side of the passenger, the grave 
 situation of the great cities has been saved by the 
 invention of new methods of transit — especially 
 the electric tram and the petrol motor-bus ; but 
 the hesitant treatment of the railway problem is 
 largely accountable for the continuance of slum- 
 regions in all great towns. Until recent years, 
 railway labour has been particularly ill-paid, 
 exhausting by length of hours, and dangerous to 
 life and limb ; and there is still wide room for 
 improvement. 
 
 Thus, we see that, on every side of commerce 
 
§vi.] THE AWAKENING 457 
 
 and industry, competition as an ideal had been 
 abandoned before the end of the nineteenth century, 
 and some progress had been made in protecting 
 the workers, and the community at large, by the 
 experimental development of State rules. Any 
 fuller organization of the resources of the country 
 for the benefit of the whole people was left as the 
 trial task of a new era. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE NEW AGE 
 
 I. Population and Wealth 
 
 It is quite unlikely that twentieth-century England 
 will produce another Macaulay. Not that romance 
 is dead ; not that there is an end of heroic person- 
 alities. Is there no strife of ambitions, of interests, 
 of wills, of ideals ? As men progress in freedom, 
 they fight more, not less ardently, because they 
 have more real things to fight for, and the publi- 
 city of modern life creates a world-arena in which 
 the excitement never ceases. The soldier and the 
 arbitrary statesman have, indeed, lost their pre- 
 eminence ; but the combat whose weapons are 
 credit papers, and laboratory tricks, and mechanical 
 improvements evokes an energy and an interest 
 impossible to attribute to any ancient quarrel over 
 a royal marriage or succession. The author of 
 the American Steel Trust is as prodigious a being 
 as Hannibal or Napoleon, and shows himself of the 
 same breed not least by talking peace in his latter 
 days. The old forms of savagery decay ; yet 
 Cobden and his Manchester friends brought " not 
 peace but a sword " into millions of humble homes. 
 Most of the earth was roughly explored a century 
 
 458 
 
§ I.] THE NEW AGE 459 
 
 ago. The next task was to exploit its elementary 
 goods, to feed the swarming millions of its chil- 
 dren, to bring the fruits of the East to the West, to 
 dig the soil everywhere, and set up new markets 
 humming with polyglot demand. This proved no 
 less exciting, though in different ways. So, where 
 Fenimore Cooper's pioneers broke the solitude, the 
 wild cries of the Chicago wheat-pit now resound. 
 The robber barons of the Rhineland who took toll 
 of the merchants' caravan are represented by 
 Imperial customs officials, multi-titular and re- 
 splendent, administering a " scientific tariff." 
 Scholars are taught to scoff at the South Sea 
 Bubble; they grow up to look with other eyes 
 upon a gamble in " futures," or a " flutter " in 
 oil or rubber. Every piece of food we eat, every- 
 thing we wear, every tool we use, is full of the 
 romance of this transformation of the world's 
 business. Cotton, paper, steel, soda, wool, guano, 
 gunpowder, sugar, wheat, rubber — ^the expert has 
 done his best to vulgarize them ; yet there is not 
 one of these common things but could tell a tale of 
 adventure that would outshine the best of the old 
 fairy stories. 
 
 These tales will be told ; we shall not, however, 
 call them History. A new Macaulay would find 
 his stage too large and too crowded, the motives 
 of the play too complex ; in dealing with the later 
 nineteenth century, he would have to attempt a 
 manner of representation impossible within the 
 conventions of drama, showing a continually and 
 
460 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 rapidly increasing number of characters on a con- 
 tinually and rapidly enlarging scene. This may 
 not be true of a later period ; it is the essential 
 condition of any picture of the Victorian and post- 
 Victorian age. Behind every individual figure, 
 we see a jostling crowd in which the vital action 
 centres — as, at certain stages of a Greek drama, 
 the chorus carries on the plot. British population 
 leaps forward ; the North American continent is 
 filled up ; Asia and Africa are subjected to Europe. 
 Biography may help us to understand the char- 
 acter of this prodigious change of scene ; history 
 must show its extent and its average quality. It 
 is beyond exact measurement ; but we must use 
 our little yard-measures, and be glad that better 
 are at length being made. The reader will find, 
 after this chapter, a series of statistical appendices 
 from which, with a little industry, he can draw a 
 faint outline of his material environment. If we 
 did not remember the persistence of national 
 traits, we should say that the England with which 
 we began had completely disappeared. The 16 
 millions of population of 1801 have grown to 45 
 millions in 1912. London has grown from less 
 than a million to more than seven millions. London 
 and six English and Welsh industrial counties, 
 which had together less than 3 millions of in- 
 habitants, have now more than 20 millions. Town 
 is more dominant over country than country W£is 
 over town. To a large extent, the whole land is 
 urbanized. It is covered with roads incredibly 
 
§1.] THE NEW AGE 461 
 
 good by the standard of a century ago, with rail- 
 ways and tramways, telegraph and post offices, 
 banks, hospitals, elementary schools, churches and 
 chapels, police stations, gaols, workhouses, and 
 army and navy barracks. Every town has some 
 free provision of books and other means to culture, 
 some organization of philanthropy, apart from its 
 local government. The daily newspaper reaches 
 the remotest corners of the country. Only a few 
 sailors and fisher-folk and a very few farmers now 
 live in real isolation. Thus, interests and oppor- 
 tunities are incalculably multiplied. As the elec- 
 tric train is to the stage-coach, as the "Dread- 
 nought " is to Nelson's " Victory," as the automobile 
 is to the phaeton, the latest Manchester machinery 
 to the spinning-wheel, the telephone message to 
 the letter by hand, so is the speeding-up in every 
 part of our material life ; and it is not unfair 
 to conclude that the average wits have become 
 nimbler in proportion, whether or not we have pro- 
 gressed in the weightier matters of the law. 
 
 The forces that have thus united and quickened 
 the British people are also uniting and quicken- 
 ing the life of the whole globe. Its resources are 
 superficially known from pole to pole, and from the 
 highest peak of the Himalayas to the lowest deep 
 six miles below the surface of the Pacific. Aided 
 by the cable and wireless telegraphy, by cheap 
 books, daily newspapers, and the cinematograph, 
 the Londoner to-day is nearer to the Antipodes 
 than the^^Londoner of a century ago was to the 
 
462 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 Scottish Highlands, Thousands of families, per- 
 haps most families, have relatives or friends over- 
 sea ; and trade places upon every breakfast-table 
 an object-lesson in practical internationalism. 
 The British realm is no longer to be thought of 
 as a group of islands in the North Atlantic ; these 
 are but the capital province of a loose union 
 including a fifth of the population of the earth, 
 and illustrating its extremest diversities. We may- 
 think of the kingdom as a huge factory and a huge 
 free port, with some farms and parks, government 
 offices and arsenals, attached ; and we may think of 
 the Empire as a number of family estates scattered 
 all over the world, and falling into three orders — 
 the Colonies, which are virtually independent de- 
 mocracies, the naval stations, and the Dependencies. 
 It is true, and it is important to remember, that 
 British trade with foreign countries increases as 
 rapidly as British trade with the Empire,^ being 
 twice as large in exports and three times as large in 
 imports. The profits of British shipping lie to a 
 still larger extent in traffic with foreign countries ; 
 and although capital has naturally flowed away 
 from Europe toward the newly opened lands of 
 which Britain has a disproportionate share, the 
 larger part of British oversea investments still lie 
 under foreign flags.^ These three facts, now that 
 they are appreciated, put a certain check upon 
 the narrower kinds of imperialist sentiment, and 
 
 ' See Appendix V., § C. 2 See Appendix IV. 
 
§ I.] THE NEW AGE 463 
 
 large obstacles in the way of a return to Protection. 
 Nevertheless, the importance of the imperial con- 
 nection cannot now be ignored. It brings large 
 advantages, and it involves immense costs and 
 responsibilities. It affects the life of the island 
 kingdom at many points ; and it presents problems 
 of the utmost gravity for future solution. 
 
 In the eyes of the outer world, the British Empire 
 stands as a unit. In our own eyes, it falls into two 
 very different parts, the white population, and 
 other populations six times as large in the aggre- 
 gate. These latter, which lie chiefly within the 
 tropical zone, present a double difficulty, which 
 must inevitably grow as time goes on. The 
 imperial rule has become purer, more regular, and 
 more humane, but it remains for the most part a 
 benevolent despotism. Since the moral shock of 
 the South African War, particularly, feeling has 
 grown in the ruling race in favour of an extended 
 association of natives, in India and Egypt for 
 instance, in the work of government. The question 
 here is whether this feeling will continue to grow 
 as rapidly as the native demand, and practical 
 solutions be discovered for every difficulty as it 
 arises. A yet graver matter, perhaps, especially 
 in its economic aspects, is the increasing disparity 
 between the numbers of the two parts of the Empire 
 which we have distinguished. The more efficient 
 and humane white government becomes in Asia 
 and Africa, the more rapidly do the native popula- 
 tions grow. In fact, the natural increase of these 
 
464 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 populations in the last seventy years is vastly 
 greater than their increase by conquest or other 
 manner of acquisition, though the later Vic- 
 torian age was a period of unceasing imperial 
 expansion.^ 
 
 On the other hand, the British people, like the 
 peoples of North Germany, Scandinavia, and the 
 Eastern States of North America, are rapidly 
 approaching the point, already attained in France, 
 where the births do little more than compensate 
 for the deaths. The birth-rate in the United 
 Kingdom has fallen from 33 '8 per thousand in 1871 
 to 24*4 in 1911 ; the reduction of the death-rate— 
 the most splendid result of recent social progress — 
 is somewhat less than this ; and the rate of natural 
 increase has, therefore, fallen from 12"3 to 9'6 per 
 thousand. Two other facts must be considered 
 along with these. The first is the great increase 
 of emigration in recent years, under the stimulus 
 of Colonial inducements ; and this carries away 
 many of the stoutest of our people.^ The second is 
 that, whereas the death-rate cannot be very much 
 further reduced, there is every reason to expect a 
 further shrinkage of the proportion of births. It 
 is highly probable that, before the middle of the 
 twentieth century, the population of the British 
 Islands will be practically stationary at something 
 like 55 millions. The population of the United 
 States, the German Empire, and the British Colo- 
 1 See Appendix I., § E, cols. 3-5. 
 ' See Appendix I., § C. 
 
§ I.] THE NEW AGE 465 
 
 nies will then still be slowly increasing ; and the 
 tropical dependencies of Britain will be more pro- 
 lific than ever. This is not the place for speculations 
 upon the prospect thus opened out ; suffice it to 
 note, as one of the most momentous results of our 
 review, that, a century after Malthus, the question 
 for England is not whether she has too much 
 population for her resources, but whether she will 
 not soon have too little for the tasks she has 
 assumed. 
 
 While population is thus in course of arrest, 
 wealth accumulates at a prodigious rate. Recent 
 investigations, which are summarized in our third 
 and fourth appendices, give us some impression, 
 though they do not enable us to make an exact 
 account, of the material resources of the country. 
 The total capital of the United Kingdom is broadly 
 estimated at £15,000 Millions. According to the 
 report of the Census of Production, first taken for 
 the year 1907,^ only about a tenth of the whole 
 consists of manufacturing capital, including the 
 value of land and buildings ; and it is remarkable 
 that this capital is equal only to two years' net out- 
 put of industrial businesses (not including cost of 
 materials or transport). On the other hand. Sir 
 George Paish estimates the amount of British 
 capital invested abroad at £3,500 Millions, or more 
 than twice as much as the capital engaged in home 
 manufacture. The total annual income of the 
 country is put at about £2,000 Millions. This 
 
 1 Summarised, Appendix III. 
 2G 
 
466 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. IX. 
 
 appears to be shared, and contributed, approxi- 
 mately, in the following proportions : 
 
 Industrial Production (net) . £760 Millions 
 
 Agriculture and Fisheries . . 220 „ 
 
 Distribution .... 400 „ 
 
 Professional, Governmental, and other 
 
 Services .... 350 „ 
 
 From Foreign Investments and 
 Services (coming in, largely, as 
 imported materials) . . 240 „ 
 
 These sums are not, of course, strictly com- 
 parable : the revenue from foreign investments is 
 profit ; the " income " of industry, in this sense, is 
 the fund from which all the parties to the produc- 
 tive processes have to be paid. The figures serve, 
 however, to suggest some grave reflections. One is 
 the poverty of agriculture as a form of employment 
 relatively to its productive value. Another is the 
 surprisingly small predominance of manufacture as 
 measured by its net output. A third is the enor- 
 mous costs of transport and merchanting. The 
 expenditure on advertising in British newspapers 
 and other publications alone has been reckoned at 
 from £40 to £50 millions ^ ; and other parts of 
 the distributive process must also cover a good 
 deal of waste. The estimate for governmental, 
 professional, domestic, and other services contains 
 a large part, but not all, of the rapidly increasing 
 cost of armaments, which is pure burden. Perhaps 
 
 • The Newspaper. G. Binney Dibblee. 
 
§1.] THE NEW AGE 467 
 
 the most remarkable fact of all is the increasing 
 part which foreign investments play in the budget 
 of the British people. Their amount is increased 
 by £100 millions a year ; and the income from them 
 is estimated at from £140 to £170 millions, which 
 is equal to two-sevenths of the sum brought under 
 review of the Inland Revenue Department as in- 
 come, properly so-called, from business concerns, 
 professions, and private employments at home. 
 
 The distribution of the product of investment, 
 skill, and labour of various kinds may be subjected to 
 a closer and more real measurement by comparing 
 the inland revenue returns with those of the Census 
 of Production. The former show that families 
 numbering 5| millions receive nearly a half of the 
 recorded national income, while families numbering 
 39 millions have to be content with the other half. 
 Dr Bowley estimates that 12 per cent, of the adult 
 male workers of the kingdom, when in continuous 
 employment, receive no more than a pound a week, 
 while the wages of another 20 per cent, do not 
 exceed twenty-five shillings. An explanation of all 
 this positive or relative poverty has been discovered 
 in the tables of the Census of Production, comparing 
 the value of output of the various trades with the 
 numbers of workers employed. Thus, 3| million 
 workpeople were found to be engaged in trades whose 
 average output — ^the fund from which capital and 
 labour and all costs except materials must be paid 
 — was below £100 per head. It will be seen, indeed, 
 that this is about the average net output of the 
 
468 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 mining and manufactures of the country per head of 
 the workers employed. This fact has been some- 
 what hastily translated as meaning that the " wages 
 fund " must be much less than £2 a week per head, 
 and that the possibility of raising wages, whether 
 by trade union or other action, has therefore nearly 
 reached its economic limit. If the detailed figures 
 be examined, it will be seen that the average of 
 about £100 per head covers very wide differences, 
 the clothing trades, for instance, being considerably 
 below, and the chemical trades and public utility 
 services considerably above. It will also be found 
 that the lower output per head commonly corre- 
 sponds with a large use of female and child labour, 
 the higher output with a large use of skilled adult 
 male labour, and of machinery. There are other 
 grounds for believing that the increase of wages 
 must depend largely, perhaps mainly, on the 
 increase of productive efficiency. The same con- 
 sideration applies to the reward of the employer 
 as manager ; and there is no reason for doubting 
 that the efficiency, and with it the rewards, both of 
 management and labour, will continue to increase. 
 Since Lord Brassey gave the results of his experience 
 many years ago, a mass of evidence has accumu- 
 lated of the effect of better wages in stimulating 
 the energy and intelligence of workers. To a very 
 large extent, the increased power of machinery has 
 brought, and would have been impossible without, 
 an equivalent increase in the skill of the machine 
 operatives. There is no less reason to expect a 
 
§ I.] THE NEW AGE 469 
 
 continued improvement of labour than of organiza- 
 tion and machinery. 
 
 Two other important considerations must be 
 borne in mind. The theory of the Umited wages 
 fund seems to imply that the value of the output 
 of manufacture as named above is an intrinsic 
 value which can be increased, if at all, only by an 
 increased power in its own contributors. This is 
 not so. The £762 Millions of industrial output is 
 simply the total price (at the factory doors) to 
 which the distributive and consuming classes have 
 been able to beat down an industrial class weakened 
 by anarchic competition. If there is great waste in 
 distribution (such as over-advertising), and if the 
 industrial workers are not well organized to protect 
 themselves, some of that waste will be taken out of 
 their wages. If, on the other hand, they can extort 
 higher wages, the manufacturer will press harder on 
 the distributor, who will thus be driven to economy. 
 Again, manufactiu'er and distributor may be able 
 to pass on the extra cost of wages to the con- 
 sumer. Apparently, this has been comparatively 
 easy in recent years because of the rapid increase of 
 the general wealth. No part of this wealth is so 
 immediately and exclusively used in stimulating 
 production as increased wages. 
 
 Our second reflection is that economy and effici- 
 ency of production, as of other social processes, are 
 promoted not only by the endeavours of masters 
 and men, individually and in their respective 
 organizations, but by the endeavours of the nation 
 
470 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 at large, and particularly of its teachers and leaders. 
 These efforts, also, will take two directions : the 
 saving of waste, and the stimulation of productivity. 
 We have hardly yet got beyond the a, b, c, of these 
 two methods of progress ; but the suggestion may 
 be hazarded that these will rapidly become the 
 dominant ideas of the British polity. The first is 
 the more flagrant need. If the Board of Trade 
 were doing nothing else than procure the peaceful 
 settlement of a few labour disputes, it would be 
 making no mean contribution to the wealth of the 
 country. The cost of doctoring, a sufficiently large 
 item, is a trifle to the national cost of preventable 
 sickness. Statesmen who preserve peace in our 
 international relations are performing a service 
 measurable in millions sterling ; when they can go 
 on to reduce the present costs of armed defence, 
 there will be so much more to divide among working 
 Britons in wages and profits. And, if all waste were 
 stopped to-morrow, there would remain the task, 
 no less romantic and promising than in the days of 
 Watt and Stephenson, of better using not only these 
 islands and that neglected estate, the seas around 
 them, but the imperial territories for which we 
 are responsible. 
 
 II. New Lamps for Old 
 
 Judging by the Census of Production, industry — 
 including mining with manufacture — is now six 
 
§ n.] THE NEW AGE 471 
 
 times as important in the economy of the United 
 Kingdom as agriculture, measured by output, and 
 three or four times as important measured by the 
 numbers of persons occupied. In England and 
 Wales, the preponderance of industry is still 
 greater : little more than a million persons are 
 there dependent upon agriculture, as compared 
 with nearly a million in governmental services and 
 the professions, nearly two millions in commerce 
 and transport, two millions in domestic services, 
 five millions in the building, food, and clothing 
 trades, and a million and three-quarters in the 
 metal industries. The numbers occupied in trans- 
 port, wholesale and retail trading, and professional 
 and clerical work, have increased more rapidly in 
 recent years than of those engaged in manufacture ; 
 and the increase of women in commerce and the 
 professions is particularly marked. Three-quarters 
 of the wage-earners of the kingdom, in productive 
 industry, are men ; but girl workers are much more 
 numerous than boy workers. There are, in round 
 figures, 20 millions of " occupied " persons in the 
 Kingdom ; and only 2| millions of them are 
 organized in trade unions. If we cut out 3 millions 
 of domestic servants, another 3 millions in agri- 
 culture and fisheries, and 1 million of employers, 
 persons working on their own account, and soldiers 
 and sailors, this failure of trade unionism to grow 
 still remains a very significant fact. It is explained, 
 in the main, by the lack of combination among 
 unskilled labourers and among women, of whom 
 
472 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 there are 2 millions in manufacture, hardly any 
 of them organized. 
 
 It will be seen (Appendix III, C) that the in- 
 dustrial output of Scotland is only one-seventh of 
 that of England and Wales, and that Ireland is 
 very far behind. It will also be seen that the iron 
 and steel, engineering, and shipbuilding trades 
 form the most important group, with a net output 
 of £153 millions ; while these, with the mining and 
 textile groups, account for a half of the total of 
 national production. The aggregate value of in- 
 dustrial, agricultural, and fisheries produce, plus 
 expenses of transport and distribution, is estimated 
 to fall between £1782 and £1917 millions ; and, if 
 exports be deducted and imports added, there is 
 left a sum between £1663 and £1833 millions as 
 the total cost to consumers of goods consumed in 
 the United Kingdom in the year 1907. These huge 
 figures reduce the " fiscal question " to its true 
 proportions : it appears that the net import of 
 fully manufactured articles in a prosperous year 
 is equal to only 7 per cent, of the United King- 
 dom output. Nearly a third of this output was 
 exported. 
 
 Until a number of similar Censuses have been 
 taken, we shall not have a close measure of the 
 progress of British industry. Meanwhile, the 
 figures of foreign trade (Appendix V) tell a cheerful 
 tale. The record of exports gives us a summary 
 view of the fluctuations of the last sixty years. 
 They show a pretty steady expansion from 1854 — 
 
§ II.] THE NEW AGE 473 
 
 when these figures were first officially taken — ^to 
 1870. There is then the short "boom" of the 
 Franco-German War time, followed by the double 
 crisis the history of which we have given. Ten of 
 the years between 1873 and 1886 were years of 
 falling trade. There followed an improvement ; 
 but 1893-4 were very bad export years, and the 
 recovery was slow. This is the interval, imme- 
 diately preceding the South African War, when 
 Mr Joseph Chamberlain was moving toward his neo- 
 Protectionist crusade. With 1899, we enter upon 
 the period of the most remarkable expansion of 
 international commerce known to history. In 
 fourteen years, there are only two of recession, and 
 the total of British exports has been doubled. To 
 a small extent this phenomenal increase is only 
 apparent, being due to the universal rise of prices. 
 This consideration does not affect the international 
 comparison, which shows that, in exports of 
 domestic produce, the four leading countries, the 
 United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and 
 France, still hold the relative places they held 
 thirty years ago, and that, while the United States 
 and Germany have made some advance toward the 
 British position, this is accountable to their very 
 much greater populations. It is deserving of note, 
 in view of recent jealousies, that British exports 
 to Germany have increased more considerably than 
 to any other country. 
 
 The most satisfactory feature of British manu- 
 facture in recent years — since no land can now hope 
 
474 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 to obtain anjrthing like a monopoly of the world 
 market — is the tendency toward the production of 
 goods of the higher qualities. The cotton trade is 
 still largely governed by the demand of poor 
 countries ; and its continued expansion — ^the spin- 
 ning power increased from 44 million spindles in 
 1903 to 55 millions in 1911, the consumption of 
 raw cotton from 14 to 17| million cwts., and the 
 exports are now valued at over £102 millions — ^is a 
 unique testimony to the possibilities of long- 
 developed industrial skill and high organization 
 wielded by a vigorous race under the advantages of 
 the open-port system. Including auxiliary trades 
 and distribution, probably 3 million people now 
 depend for their livelihood upon the cotton manu- 
 facture. In the wool and worsted trades of the West 
 Riding, fashion counts for more, and there is more 
 local specialization, Huddersfield, for instance, being 
 famous for worsteds for men's suitings, Bradford 
 for women's dress stuffs, Halifax for carpets, Leeds 
 for ready-made clothing, Dewsbury for overcoatings, 
 cheap fancy tweeds, blankets, and rags. Belfast 
 and Dundee remain the two chief centres of the 
 linen manufacture, the jute trade being also con- 
 centrated in the latter town. Despite all the mis- 
 fortunes of the past, 30,000 operatives are still 
 engaged in the silk-industry, in London, Bradford, 
 Macclesfield, Leek, and other centres. It is claimed 
 that, for beauty of design and good make, British 
 silks are not now surpassed by the best productions 
 of France or any other country ; and, while Irish 
 
§ n.] THE NEW AGE 475 
 
 poplins hold their own, the diffusion of wealth has 
 created a large demand for new diaphonous fabrics, 
 rich brocades, the lesser wares of silk hosiery, 
 linings and threads, and mixed stuffs like crfepe de 
 chine. Coventry now puts out many millions of 
 pounds of artificial silk yearly. Concentration of 
 industry in a field where capital and labour have 
 been long used to intelligent co-operation is again 
 illustrated by the fact that five-sixths of the hosiery 
 and lace factories are still located in Leicestershire, 
 Nottinghamshire, and Derbyshire. 
 
 From time to time, alarm has been suggested by 
 a comparison of British and German exports of 
 iron and steel goods. Closer investigation shows 
 the folly of comparing totals the details of which 
 are not comparable (for instance, large quantities 
 of hardware, cutlery, implements, and tools were 
 included in the German but not in the British 
 figures). It also shows that the very great German 
 increase has been chiefly in lower-grade goods for 
 other markets than ours ; while British iron-masters, 
 who were formerly shippers mainly of pig, bar, and 
 railroad iron at £5 per ton, are now shippers of 
 goods from two to four times more valuable. ^ In 
 fact, industrial England has most effectually 
 "waked up " since the period of morbid introspec- 
 tion in the early 'nineties, and especially since the 
 
 ' For a detailed comparison, see the Times Financial Supplement, 
 March 19, 1913. The writer concludes that " our own trade is of a 
 very much higher type than that of our competitor, and it would be 
 of little consequence to us to find Germany immensely increasing 
 her exports." 
 
476 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 general shaking-up of the South African War. The 
 result is seen both in the improvement of old and 
 the invention of new processes and trades. In the 
 former order, we may cite as an instance the 
 marvellous advance made in recent years by 
 Sheffield manufacturers in the production of self- 
 or air-hardening steels by the use of an addition 
 of small quantities of tungsten, chromium, or 
 vanadium. This tungsten-chrome era, as it has 
 been called, of cutting-steel metallurgy, was opened 
 about 1870 by Robert Forrester Mushet of Sheffield, 
 who found that carbon steel alloyed with tungsten, 
 when cooled from a yellow heat in a draught of air, 
 was not only sufficiently hardened, but had an 
 increased thermal stability. About 1880, Mushet 
 further improved the result by the addition of 
 small quantities of chromium. In 1900, turning 
 tools were being made which would cut very mild 
 steel at a speed which rendered the nose of the tool 
 red-hot ; and later experiments have resulted in the 
 production of what is known as high-speed steel, in 
 which the thermal stability of the fortified hardenite 
 runs to about 700 degrees C. Even more remarkable, 
 in this latter period, has been the effect of additions 
 of the comparatively rare metal vanadium to plain 
 carbon steel or alloy steels in raising the yield-point 
 and the maximum stress. Beside improving struc- 
 tural steel, these inventions have, according to Prof. 
 J. O. Arnold, of Sheffield, increased fourfold the 
 cutting power of steel, and left Great Britain 
 supreme in this important branch of metallurgy. 
 
§ n.] THE NEW AGE 477 
 
 There are great and somewhat mysterious 
 differences in the efficiency of inventions, as 
 measured by the rapidity and extent of their 
 adoption. In some cases the delay is due to 
 mechanical, in some to social factors, in many to 
 both. The diffusion of wealth and the desire for 
 more personal cleanliness led in the last decade of 
 the nineteenth century to the tardy application of 
 steam power to laundry work, and to a rapid 
 multiplication of private and public baths. We 
 must suppose that the ease of locomotion on two 
 wheels would have been realized centuries ago, but 
 that the bicycle would then have been a very 
 costly, as well as a very clumsy, machine. With 
 the production of cheap steel, the rest was easy ; 
 and within a few years something like a social 
 revolution was wrought, young women, in par- 
 ticular, of the middle class being for the first time 
 released from the maternal apron-strings. What 
 was a difficult craze in the 'seventies became in 
 the 'nineties a national pastime, and then subsided 
 into a business convenience. It had given birth, 
 meanwhile, to a sub-invention of considerable im- 
 portance, though, in all but material and perfection 
 and cheapness of make, you may find it on the 
 chariot-wheels of the Pharaohs — ^the hollow rubber- 
 tyre. The Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Company 
 was floated on the top of the cycle " boom," with 
 a share capital of nearly four millions sterling. 
 For some years it did prodigiously well, and the 
 promoter is said to have made something like two 
 
478 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 millions out of the transaction. Then the fashion 
 began to wane ; cheap American bicycles began to 
 affect the market ; and in 1906 the capital of the 
 company was reduced to a little over two millions. 
 The cycle manufacture still flourishes, the exports 
 being valued at nearly two millions a year ; but it 
 is the coming of the motor-car that has saved the 
 rubber-tyre trade. The automobile is, perhaps, 
 the most characteristic embodiment of the luxury 
 and ingenuity of our time. Roads are built for it ; 
 hotels and stores and repair shops spring up in its 
 train ; the earth is ransacked for supplies of oil 
 and rubber which, when found, become matters for 
 riotous speculation. In a few years, horses have 
 become rare in city streets now filled with motor- 
 buses, taxi-cabs, private cars, and commercial vans. 
 The internal combustion engine, on which most of 
 these machines depend, goes back in idea to the end 
 of the seventeenth century ; and many efforts had 
 been made with coal gas, to little purpose, when, 
 in 1860, a Frenchman named Lenoir profited by the 
 object-lesson of the explosion of artillery charges. 
 Otto, in 1876, used the principle of compression of 
 the explosive mixture before ignition; and, since 
 then, there has been a rapid development both of 
 gas and oil engines. In 1886, light steam motors were 
 attached to bicycles and tricycles by American 
 makers ; and about the same time Daimler and 
 Benz, in Germany, began to use gas engines on 
 motor vehicles. The great advance came, however, 
 with the discovery of the advantages of petrol, 
 
§ II.] THE NEW AGE 479 
 
 with kerosene and oil fuel one of the chief products 
 of crude petroleum. Thanks to the petrol engine 
 and the rubber tyre, the automobile industry has 
 made phenomenal progress. England, hurriedly 
 abandoning, in 1896, her ancient traffic rules, 
 quickly caught up the rival countries ; and, while 
 the import of cars reached a maximum in 1906, then 
 rapidly falling, the British exports increased from 
 £240,000 in 1904 to £1,376,000 in 1910. 
 
 The internal combustion engine is being more 
 slowly applied to sea traffic. Here another very old 
 idea, only recently realized, has first established 
 itself. This is the turbine engine, in which, instead 
 of the familiar cylinder left by Watt, we have a jet 
 of steam playing directly upon a fan-like wheel 
 jacketed round the shaft. De Laval, a Swede, 
 successfully applied this contrivance to a cream 
 separator, in 1883. Parsons soon afterwards 
 entered into the field, proving that the turbine 
 could give extremely high speeds ; and it has been 
 gradually adopted in merchant liners and warships. 
 Motor boats are furnishing a great stimulus to the 
 North Sea fisheries, and to all kinds of small water- 
 traffic. The airship, the aeroplane, and the water- 
 plane are other children of the petrol engine as to 
 whose future it is impossible to speak with the same 
 confidence, wonderful as have been the exploits of 
 their inventors and pilots. The demand for petrol 
 has so rapidly increased that prices have sharply 
 risen, and there is an excited search for substitutes. 
 At the moment when the British Government, 
 
480 MODERN ENGLAND [cha?. ix. 
 
 despite the advantages of plentiful home supplies 
 of the old fuel, is beginning to substitute oil for coal 
 in the navy, it is impossible to doubt the great 
 future of oil fuel. But it is not at all likely that, 
 except for special purposes, there will be any 
 general substitution of petroleum for coal. The 
 world's production of liquid fuel, allowing for its 
 superior efficiency per ton weight, is hardly more 
 than one-fifteenth of that of coal ; most of it is 
 used for other than power purposes ; and coal will 
 continue to be preferable by reason of its cheapness 
 and regularity of supply. 
 
 It used to be supposed, similarly, that electricity 
 would supplant gas ; but this has not happened. 
 Electric lighting lagged strangely after Davy's 
 production of an arc light, from voltaic cells and 
 charcoal pencil electrodes, in 1810. The interest 
 excited by the arc lamps at the Exhibition of 1851 
 passed away ; and it was not until 1870 that the 
 Gramme dynamo introduced a commercially practi- 
 cable method of generating current. The early 
 electric lighting companies were mostly unsound, 
 and millions were lost in them. For a time, how- 
 ever, they shook the position of many gas com- 
 panies. The Jablochoff candle (1876) was followed 
 in 1878 by the incandescent carbon filament lamp, 
 improved by Edison and Swan in 1883. These 
 steps led to rapid progress. The gas companies 
 were thus spurred to new effort, and presently the 
 incandescent gas mantle gave them the honours, 
 while the use of gas-engines, stoves, and other 
 
§ ni.] THE NEW AGE 481 
 
 appliances also rapidly increased. Again the 
 electricians stepped forward, and the metal fila- 
 ment lamp, by its saving of current, has given an 
 immense impetus to the industry. The use of 
 electric traction made small advances, even for 
 tramways, till the end of the nineteenth century, 
 the cost of building conduits or erecting overhead 
 wires being the great obstacle. The discovery 
 that the South London electric trams had, by 
 1908, deprived the Brighton line alone of five 
 million passengers a year forced the pace. The 
 City and South London " tube " had been working 
 successfully since 1898 ; the Metropolitan Under- 
 ground had been " electrified." In December 1909, 
 the Brighton line between Victoria and London 
 Bridge, and, in May 1911, the Crystal Palace line, 
 were electrically worked. These and other experi- 
 ments have been completely successful. One of 
 the remarkable tables of the Census of Production 
 shows that about a quarter of the engine-power 
 found in British mines, factories, and other works, 
 was in 1907 used for driving dynamos to produce 
 electricity for power and lighting purposes. 
 
 III. Agricultural Revival 
 
 After many years of depression, British agri» 
 culture seems to be turning the corner, and to 
 be entering upon a happier period. The gross 
 income derived from the ownership of lands, culti- 
 vated or uncultivated, in Great Britain (as returned 
 2h 
 
482 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 under Schedule A of the income tax), and the rate- 
 able value of agricultural land in England and 
 Wales (as defined by the Agricultural Rates Act, 
 1896) fell steadily until 1908, when the former sum 
 was £42,135,000, and the latter £23,653,000. These 
 figures then slowly increased.^ The change of 
 cultivation in Great Britain may be thus shown : 
 
 Arable Land. Perm. Grass. Crops and Grass. 
 1883, acres . 17,319,000 15,065,000 32,385,000 
 1912, „ . 14,660,000 17,335,000 31,996,000 
 
 In the same period, the number of cattle has 
 increased from six to seven millions, while the 
 number of horses, sheep, and pigs has remained the 
 same. A considerable change in the character of 
 land holdings is taking place. Since 1905, 628 
 
 1 " It was not until about 1909," says Mr A. D. Hall, " that 
 there was any general recognition of returning prosperity. About 
 that time, it became difficult to obtain a farm if it had not some 
 patent disability attached to it. To-day, the process has gone still 
 further, rents have definitely risen with the demand for land that 
 cannot be satisfied, and in all parts of the country men are obtain- 
 ing very large returns indeed on the capital they embarked in the 
 business. Of course, every farmer has not been making money ; 
 bad business habits and slipshod management are far too common." 
 The writer doubts "if there are any more profitable enterprises 
 open at the present day than would be provided by a 2,000-acre 
 farm on good land with an adequate backing of capital." But 
 expert organizers are wanted; and "the great opportunities of 
 leadership landowners might exercise in the way of drawing their 
 tenants into co-operative marketing and purchase, or improved 
 methods of farming, are rarely or never exercised ; at their worst 
 landlords become mere rent receivers, and must inevitably be 
 crowded out unless they take some higher view of their function."-^ 
 A. D. Hall, A Pilgrimage of British Farming, 1913. 
 
§ in.] THE NEW AGE 483 
 
 large farms (exceeding 300 acres each) in England 
 and Wales have disappeared ; the number of 
 medium holdings (50 to 300 acres) has increased by 
 1,088, and of smaller holdings (5 to 50 acres) by 
 2,229. In these seven years, the number of 
 occupiers has increased by 3,313. Of 513,000 hold- 
 ings in Great Britain, only about 12 per cent, are 
 cultivated by owners, as compared with 86 per 
 cent, in the G^erman Empire, and 83 per cent, in 
 Denmark. A quarter of the whole farmed area still 
 consists of farms over 300 acres, and considerably 
 more than a half of medium-sized farms. But there 
 are now about 300,000 farms of from one to fifty 
 acres ; and it is certain that the movement for small 
 holdings, now only 15 per cent, of the whole, will go 
 much further. The vast importance of the agricul- 
 ture of the United Kingdom, even after all the 
 losses of past years which we have noted, is indi- 
 cated by the estimates taken for the Census of 
 Production, 1907,^ showing an output valued at 
 £210 millions, as compared with a net industrial 
 output of £712 millions. 
 
 The chief, but not the only, cause of the recent 
 improvement has been the rise of prices which 
 began in the mid-'nineties. Another factor is the 
 shaking out of weaklings, incompetents, and 
 aristocratic dabblers during the long depression. 
 In the effective application of capital, skilled 
 management, systematic organization, and the 
 development of marketing services, agriculture is 
 ' Appendix III., B. 
 
484 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 still very far behind manufacture. But there is a 
 great change for the better. Agricultural education 
 and investigation are being constantly improved ; 
 and the average farmer's attitude toward them is 
 becoming intelligently appreciative. Economy of 
 production has markedly advanced, both in the 
 adoption of improved machinery, and the alterna- 
 tion of crops, as well as in farm routine. The self- 
 binding reaper — an American invention continually 
 improved and cheapened during the last quarter 
 of a century — has converted the ancient harvest 
 festival into a modern industrial operation. It is 
 but one of many machines and appliances which 
 are transforming agriculture. They are important 
 for the saving of labour power, and must be counted 
 among the causes of the exodus of labourers to the 
 towns and the Colonies ; but they are also impor- 
 tant for the saving of time, which, in the climatic 
 conditions of England, may make all the difference 
 between profit and loss. So the mower, tedder, 
 transporter, and elevator have revolutionized hay- 
 making (and it should be recalled that the British 
 hay harvest is worth over £31 millions, or very 
 little less than the wheat, barley, and oats crops, not 
 counting the straw). The early disappointments 
 with artificial manures and concentrated feeding- 
 stuffs are also being forgotten, and new uses for 
 phosphate and other fertilizers are being discovered. 
 We may instance a single recent experiment con- 
 ducted at the Agricultural College at Kingston-on- 
 Soar. Here it was found that an expenditure of 
 
§ ra.] THE NEW AGE 485 
 
 29s. in manures for grass land gave in four years a 
 net profit per acre of £7, 16s. in milk alone. 
 
 In Ireland, a great social work is being achieved 
 by agricultural co-operation, the farmers in many 
 districts being enabled to control their own buying 
 and selling, to free themselves from the rule of 
 the " gombeen man," and to build up the begin- 
 nings of a new social life. In March 1913, there 
 were in England and Wales 478 co-operative agri- 
 cultural societies, with a membership of 48,000, and 
 a tiu"nover of nearly two millions sterling. The 
 most considerable development here is in milk 
 production ; it is estimated that fifty thousand 
 gallons of milk daily are dealt with by co-operative 
 dairy societies. Better farming and better market- 
 ing have reacted in producing better milk ; and 
 this has produced a constantly increasing demand, 
 although, foreign competition being impossible, 
 prices are easily maintained, so long as the trade 
 is organized. For some years the railways were 
 oblivious of their opportunity, and the farmer was 
 at the mercy of middlemen. Then organizations 
 began to spring up, which now largely control the 
 output, and have begun to establish central factories 
 for the conversion of surplus supplies into butter 
 or cheese. The total annual value of dairy produce 
 is now reckoned at £30 millions. In both special 
 and general farming, one of the greatest needs is 
 that of co-operative credit banks, the capital being 
 raised on the security of the members, which would 
 also be the best security for safe lending. 
 
486 MODERN ENGLAND [cha*. IX. 
 
 The condition of the labourer is still the blot 
 upon the escutcheon of British agriculture. It has 
 somewhat improved : average weekly wages in 
 England and Wales rose from lis. 9d. in 1866-70 
 to 15s. in 1906-8 — ^years in which the price 
 of wheat fell from 54s. 5d. a quarter to 31s. lid., 
 and beef from 6fd. to 5fd. per lb. This is not all. 
 The labourer obtains various allowances in addi- 
 tion to his wage. In 1907, the Board of Trade 
 estimated the whole average earnings of ordinary 
 agricultural labourers in England at 17s. lid. 
 Probably they have since reached in most districts 
 nearly to the meagre level of a pound a week. 
 Many unskilled labourers in towns have a lot hardly 
 less severe, for, if they earn four or five shillings 
 more, they have to pay much more for rent and 
 firing, something more for food, work is much 
 more irregular, and the whole conditions of city 
 life are less healthful. On the other hand, the rural 
 worker's hours are much longer, he has few or no 
 holidays, he is subjected to more petty tyranny, 
 cottage accommodation is generally inadequate and 
 commonly bad, there is no prospect of rising, and 
 there is no interest in village life. These circum- 
 stances help to explain the fact that, despite a 
 small improvement, 288,000 emigrants left the 
 United Kingdom for Canada alone in the years 
 1911-12. The most hopeful sign is the growing 
 appreciation of the importance of the agrarian 
 problem, and the readiness of all political parties 
 to consider it in a generous spirit. 
 
§ IV.] THE NEW AGE 487 
 
 There is one satisfactory sequel to the story of 
 the enclosures sketched in our early chapters. The 
 process of appropriation had gone so far at the 
 beginning of the 'sixties as to threaten the poor 
 remnants of recreation ground left around the great 
 towns, and in particular such " lungs of London " 
 as Wimbledon Common. Largely by the efforts 
 of Mr Shaw Lefevre, later Lord Eversley, a Select 
 Committee was procured in 1865 ; the enclosure 
 of surburban, and afterwards of rural, commons 
 was stopped, and public management was estab- 
 lished, without any attempt to determine legal 
 rights. From 1876 to 1899, there was some retro- 
 gression, and the veto power of the lord of the 
 manor has greatly interfered with the protection 
 of commons and the preservation of footpaths. 
 Much, however, has been accomplished ; and few 
 civilizing influences, in London particularly, count 
 for more than the admirably regulated parks and 
 open spaces. 
 
 IV. Crusade of the Life-Savers 
 
 We saw that, after the national agony of the 
 last serious trade crisis, there was born a sense of 
 compunction, a desire for greater social justice and 
 efficiency, which, stimulated by the wider suffrage 
 and the new schooling, and aided by the simul- 
 taneous decay of the landed interest and the 
 old economic dogmas, took form in a remarkable 
 movement of opinion and reforming activity. 
 
488 MODERN ENGLAND [ohap. ix. 
 
 These were the days when Lord Rosebery was 
 enthusiastic for the London County Council, and 
 every newspaper (it was before the coming of Mr 
 Harmsworth) had its column of " labour news " ; 
 when Mr Booth was completing his evidences of the 
 bulk of London poverty, and Mr Bowley was show- 
 ing how small a share labour had obtained of the 
 increase of national wealth ; when Sir William 
 Harcourt was adding the death-duties to the 
 resources of democratic finance, and playfully 
 declaring that " we are all Socialists now." " With 
 the widening horizon of interest and opportuni- 
 ties " — so spoke Mr Asquith, then Home Secretary, 
 busy curbing the " poisonous " trades, in a speech 
 at Liverpool in January 1893 — "there is an ever 
 larger field for a noble spirit of adventure. Behind 
 and beneath the surface of society, there are sights 
 terrible, appalling, and yet inspiring for those who 
 have eyes to see. The labourer who tills the fields 
 which are not his own, season after season in patient 
 industry, with no home for his old age beyond the 
 precarious bounty of public or private charity ; 
 the workgirl, old before her time, who lives a life 
 worse than that of a mediaeval serf, in the squalor 
 of the sweater's den ; the little child who cowers in 
 the cold and the darkness while it listens in terror 
 for the unsteady step which is to it the signal of its 
 parent's home-coming — ^these, surely, are figures 
 which, if we could only recognize it, are more 
 appalling to the imagination, and more stirring 
 to the sense of wrong, than any vision that ever 
 
§ IV.] THE NEW AGE 489 
 
 inspired Crusader or knight-errant. While these 
 things remain, there is work to be done, and there 
 are spurs to be won, by every soldier who has 
 enlisted in the army of progress." 
 
 The Unionist victory of 1895, and the develop- 
 ment of imperialism culminating in the South 
 African War, interrupted the pursuit of this chivalric 
 ideal ; but it was resumed with redoubled earnest- 
 ness when the war issue was settled. Much new 
 information as to the condition of the poor had 
 accumulated. To one investigation we may parti- 
 cularly refer. Mr Booth, in a less prosperous 
 period (1887-92), had shown that the classes in 
 which " poverty sinks down to want " counted 
 314,000 persons, or 35 per cent, of the population 
 in East London. Later, he had shown that, in the 
 larger area of " inner " London as a whole, in a 
 population of 4,309,000, there were 87,000 of the 
 bottom class, 316,000 of the next poorest, and 
 938,000 of the intermittently employed and ill-paid 
 classes, giving 30 per cent, of Londoners living in 
 permanent poverty. Finally, in 1894, he had shown 
 that nearly 30 per cent, of the population of Eng- 
 and and Wales — more than 40 per cent, of the 
 working and petty trading classes — over 65 years 
 of age were in receipt of Poor Law relief in course 
 of a year (one-third indoor, and two-thirds outdoor 
 relief) ; and that no administrative policy, strict 
 or loose, stood out as definitely the best in checking 
 pauperism of the aged. It was supposed that the 
 gravest of these results obtained only in London 
 
490 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 until, in 1901, Mr B. S. Rowntree made a scientific 
 inquiry into the economic condition of the 77,000 
 inhabitants of the city of York.^ In this typical 
 provincial town, as it was shown to be — applying 
 a test scale of the lowest cost at which families of 
 various sizes could be maintained in mere physical 
 efficiency — there were found to be no less than 
 20,302 persons, 27'84 per cent, of the population, 
 or 43"4 per cent, of the wage-earning class, who did 
 not reach the minimum requirement for decent life. 
 These figures tallied closely with Mr Booth's ; and, 
 supported by much fragmentary evidence, they 
 proved it to be at least highly probable that, in a 
 time of active trade, there were, in the English 
 towns of 15,000 inhabitants or more, five million 
 people in a state of more or less acute poverty. 
 It was, further, found that children were much more 
 numerous in these very poor families than in the 
 general population, and that, on the other hand, 
 the aged (65 years and over), who would be benefited 
 directly by a scheme of universal pensions, were 
 only 3'62 per cent, of the poor mass. 
 
 Nor could any ground be discovered for a com- 
 forting hope that things were getting better. The 
 Poor Law statistics — a very unsatisfactory test, it is 
 true, since they are affected from time to time and 
 from place to place by differences of administration 
 — rather suggested that there was no improve- 
 ment in the amount of pauperism, while its cost 
 was markedly increasing. Thus, in a " statistical 
 
 ' Poverty, A Study of Town Life. 
 
§rv.] 
 
 THE NEW AGE 
 
 491 
 
 survey " ^ of the official figures since 1871, when 
 they first became complete and fully reliable, 
 arranging them in periods corresponding with the 
 tides of trade, Lord George Hamilton obtained this 
 result : - 
 
 1871-2 to 1879-80 (9 years 
 1880-1 „ 1887-8 (8 „ 
 1888-9 „ 1895-6 (8 „ 
 1896-7 „ 1905-6 (10 „ 
 1906-7 „ 1909-10 (4 „ 
 
 Mean 
 numbers 
 relieved. 
 
 747,936 
 711,625 
 694,094 
 718,444 
 781,236 
 
 Mean of aver- 
 age annual 
 rates per 1000 
 of population. 
 
 31-2 
 26-6 
 23-8 
 22-2 
 22-25 
 
 The great reduction of children was balanced by 
 an increase of adult men relieved ; and the close 
 connection between pauperism and casual, un- 
 skilled, and agricultural labour was decidedly 
 demonstrated.^ 
 
 What could humane men, conscious of the 
 steady increase of wealth and enjoyment in their 
 own levels of society, say in face of facts like these ? 
 England was reaching the height of a wonderful 
 trade expansion. Sick of costly conquests and of 
 the " fiscal " feud, the country was keen to try 
 experiments in social reform. Challenged in the 
 field of foreign commerce more keenly than ever 
 
 ' Statistical Society Journal, December 1910. 
 
 • Of 1,709,436 persons who received relief in 1907, 538,680 (31-5 per 
 cent. ) were permanent paupers ; 630,000 were relieved for less than 
 four weeks in the year ; 640,000 were relieved for longer periods, 
 but not continuously. 
 
492 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 before, challenged by the democratic examples 
 of her own Colonies, challenged at home by the 
 newly-fledged Labour Party, it gave rein to its 
 generous impulses ; and within a few years, by an 
 effort in which men of all schools of thought had 
 their share, a series of measures were adopted which 
 may be said, without exaggeration, to have revo- 
 lutionized the social outlook. Old Age Pensions, 
 National Insurance against sickness and unemploy- 
 ment, Minimum Wage Boards, Labour Exchanges, 
 Town Planning, the Development Fund, the 
 measure to which no more limited title could be 
 given than " the Children's Act " : it is too soon for 
 any close judgment of these first-fruits of twentieth- 
 century conscience and ambition, and a hundred 
 lesser acts, legislative and administrative, of the 
 same order which have accompanied them. But 
 this much may be safely said : these things char- 
 acterize our time as plainly as the Enclosure Acts, 
 the Speenhamland meeting, the prosecution of the 
 London Corresponding Society, and Malthus's 
 Essay characterize the period with which om* 
 story opened. With all the differences, real and 
 factitious, of parties at Westminster, these measures 
 have, at least in idea, commanded general assent. 
 The boldness of the schemes for old age and sickness, 
 and the trivial beginning of a scientific development 
 of natural resources, seem to indicate that the 
 motive of pity has, so far, been much more powerful 
 than the businesslike sense of the profit of better 
 social organization. Whatever the motive, the 
 
§ IV.] THE NEW AGE 493 
 
 supreme fact is that the will of the nation has 
 moved, and moved decisively. Here, for the time at 
 least, lies the centre of gravity of British patriotism. 
 Postponing for a moment the directly industrial 
 measures, we may now consider briefly those the 
 aim of which was to protect and aid the young, the 
 old, the sick and injured, to develop national 
 resources, and to improve the dwellings of the 
 people. On the first of these points, opinion was 
 stimulated and directed in 1904 by the report of 
 the Commission on Physical Deterioration, which 
 made over fifty recommendations on such subjects 
 as over-crowding, milk supply, adulteration, the 
 medical inspection of children in schools, factories, 
 and workshops, provision for the underfed, and 
 the teaching of hygiene. The Education (Provision 
 of Meals) Act, 1906, effected one of these reforms, 
 enabling local authorities to provide meals for 
 children attending elementary schools, and to 
 recover the cost from parents where they are able 
 to pay.^ The Education (Administrative Provi- 
 sions) Act, 1907, imposed on local authorities the 
 duty of instituting free medical inspection and 
 treatment for children in elementary schools. 
 This step was required by the discovery that a 
 large proportion of scholars suffered from malnutri- 
 tion and from defects of the ears, eyes, and teeth. 
 The Children Act, 1908, was aimed at the abuses 
 
 • In 1911, the cost of free meals to the rates was £145,000 (£88,000 
 in London), only £1,507 being recovered from parents, and £2,796 
 being received in voluntary contributions. 
 
494 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 of baby-farming, gave the courts larger powers in 
 cases of cruelty, forbade the selling of tobacco or 
 drink to children, established special courts and 
 probation officers for youthful offenders, and 
 further regulated industrial schools. This legis- 
 lation has been supported by a very considerable 
 increase of administrative and voluntary labour. 
 The number of school children has practically come 
 to a standstill ; but the public cost of education 
 has rapidly increased (p. 320, ante), although few 
 children over 14 years of age have yet been brought 
 into public schools. In his statement on the 
 Estimates in 1913, Mr Pease said that 200 schools 
 for mothers had been established ; 780 nurses were 
 in employment in 21,000 schools ; 943 doctors were 
 giving medical service ; 31 authorities were contri- 
 buting to hospitals ; 56 had established school 
 clinics ; and expenditure on medical treatment was 
 being made by 229 authorities out of 317. • The 
 most liberal of our grandfathers would hardly have 
 dreamed of these things, which have been done by 
 general consent. 
 
 The feeling of the inadequacy of the Poor Law 
 and its harshness, particularly in the case of the 
 aged, was greatly strengthened by the information 
 provided by Mr Charles Booth, and by the findings 
 of the Royal Commission of 1893-5, which urged 
 that the deserving should receive either fully 
 adequate out-door relief or comfortable mainten- 
 ance in institutions. The demand for a system 
 of old-age pensions was actively countenanced by 
 
§ IV.] THE NEW AGE 495 
 
 Mr Chamberlain, and in 1906 a favourable resolu- 
 tion was carried in the House of Comnaons. In 
 April 1907, Mr Asquith, then Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer, pledged the Ministry to action ; and, 
 in May 1908, Mr Lloyd-George introduced the Bill 
 which received the royal assent on August 1. As 
 amended in 1911, it established non-contributory 
 pensions of five shillings a week at the age of 
 seventy for every British subject of twenty years' 
 standing resident in the United Kingdom, not 
 insane or a criminal, not in receipt of poor relief, 
 and not having other means beyond £21 a year. 
 In 1918, nearly a million old folk were in receipt 
 of pensions, at a cost of less than thirteen millions 
 sterling. The scheme was financed under the 
 graduated income-tax and super-tax provisions of 
 Mr Lloyd-George's famous Finance Bill of April 
 1909, which, rejected by the House of Lords, was 
 enacted a year later, after a Ministerial victory 
 in January 1910. The effect of old-age pensions 
 in reducing pauperism is illustrated by the following 
 comparative figures : — 
 
 England and Wales. January 1909. 1914. 
 
 Total number of paupers 850,460 646,313 
 
 Outdoor ditto .... 561,629 378,649 
 
 January 1906. 1913. 
 
 Total paupers over 70 
 
 years of age . . . . 229,474 57,770 
 
 Outdoor ditto .... 168,096 8,563 
 
 Very much more complicated is the system of 
 
496 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 contributory insurance set up by Mr Lloyd-George's 
 Act of December 1911. The great mass of the 
 working population between the ages of 16 and 
 70 come by obligation under the health section of 
 the scheme, which is worked to a large extent 
 through the existing friendly societies. The 
 financial basis is a joint contribution by employer 
 and employed of 7d. per week in the case of men 
 aftd 6d. in that of women, the employer being 
 responsible for payments and being authorized to 
 deduct the workers' contribution, 4d. or 3d., from 
 tv^ages. The State contributes two-ninths of the 
 paale and one-quarter of the female benefits. These 
 include medical treatment, sanatorium treatment, 
 sickness allowances (generally 10s. a week for men, 
 and 7s. 6d. for women, for 26 weeks), disablement 
 benefit (5s. a week indefinitely, after the cessation 
 of sickness benefit), and maternity benefit (30s. to 
 an insured woman, or the wife of an insured man). 
 Insurance against unemployment was a new, and 
 obviously a very difficult, venture. It was, therefore, 
 applied, in the first place, to o nly fou^ ."[^"^IPF "* 
 trades — building^ coLnstructioi]^ ," of /work°j thip— 
 '■feufiffing, and mechanical engineering, togethCTwith 
 
 ,£on-f5uii-mffg:^w-J3aflnitg:asa^&.^m 
 
 I In these employments,. 2^ million men at once 
 /became insm-ed. The sclieme may be applied to 
 /other trades, provided that the cost to the State 
 U does not exceed a million sterling per annum. Mas- 
 (j ter and man each pay 2^d. per week, and the State 
 Ifd., the odd fd. being for costs of management. 
 
§iv,] ..THE NEW AGE 497 
 
 The beniefit is normally 7s. per week unemployed ; 
 but only fifteen weeks' benefit can be drawn in one 
 year, and no more than one week's benefit for every 
 five contributions paid. At the age of 60, a work^ 
 man who has paid 500 contributions may recover 
 the whole, with interest, less the amount of benefits 
 received ; and an employer who keeps a workman 
 continuously employed throughout the year may 
 recover a third of his own contributions. Employers 
 may not deduct their own contributions from wages. 
 
 We may here note that the principle of 
 employers' liability for accident was, in 1906, ex- 
 tended to practically the whole field of industry, 
 including domestic servants. It was estimated 
 that six millions of workers thus gained the possi- 
 bility of compensation of this kind. In 1912, more 
 than three millions sterling was awarded as com- 
 pensation in 3,599 cases of death and 424,406 of 
 disablement, the average payments being, respec- 
 tively, £158 and £6, 3s. Od. Two other institutions 
 arising from the famous Budget of 1909 are the 
 Road Board, which administers an income of nearly 
 a million a year, coming from petrol duties and 
 carriage licences, for the improvement and construc- 
 tion of roads ; and the Development Commission, 
 which has an income of half a million, and has 
 subsidized agricultural and forestry^ research and 
 instruction, tobacco-growing, cattle breeding, and 
 harbour improvements. 
 
 These are comparatively " new-fangled notions " 
 
 of the duties of the State ; they belong essentially 
 2i 
 
498 MODERN ENOLAND [chap. li. 
 
 to the twentieth century, and the great change of 
 heart and mind it has witnessed. The housing 
 reform movement has a longer history ; and we must 
 refer to it more fully, by way of happy sequel to 
 our account of the rise of the slums. It may be 
 dated from the foundation of the Metropolitan 
 Association for Improving the Dwellings of the 
 Industrial Classes, in 1841, and its incorporation 
 four years later. Lord Shaftesbury was one of its 
 most active leaders ; and the Prince Consort showed 
 his interest by becoming president of a kindred 
 body, the Society for Improving the Condition of 
 the Working Classes. For many years, these and 
 other organizations worked to little effect, so far 
 as Parliament was concerned ; but public interest 
 was gradually aroused, and administrative action, 
 central and local, was stimulated. In 1851, two 
 Acts were passed enabling local authorities to 
 provide municipal lodging-houses for artisans, and 
 bringing common lodging-houses under control. 
 The former measure seems to have been quite in- 
 operative. The Nuisances Removal Act of 1855 
 made possible the closing of houses injurious to 
 health, and the abatement of overcrowding ; but 
 it was long ere these powers were put into force to 
 any considerable extent. In 1855 and 1866, Acts 
 were obtained to encourage the private building 
 of workmen's dwellings. In 1864, Miss Octavia 
 Hill began her work of model rent-collecting and 
 gradual reform, John Ruskin buying the buildings 
 in two courts, and giving them to her to manage. 
 
§ IV.] THE NEW AGE 499 
 
 This kind of philanthropic effort was taken up by 
 Miss Cons and others, and was slowly extended, 
 until the creation of a large volume of interest, 
 represented by the establishment of the Mansion 
 House Council in 1884, made bolder methods 
 possible. 
 
 The Artisans' and Labourers' Dwellings Act of 
 1868 (the Torrens Act) provided for the improve- 
 ment or demolition of existing buildings. This Act 
 seems only to have affected about two thousand 
 houses in five cities. At the same time, however, 
 considerable improvements were effected in Liver- 
 pool and Glasgow under private Acts. By the 
 Cross Act of 1875, powers of building or demolition 
 were extended to larger areas. This measure was 
 put in force on a large scale in Birmingham and 
 other towns. Still more important was the less 
 direct effect of the Public Health Acts of 1875 and 
 1891 (the latter limited to London). Further 
 Housing Acts followed in 1885 and 1890, the former 
 resulting from the Royal Commission of which the 
 Prince of Wales, afterwards King Edward, was a 
 member, and the latter amending and consolidating 
 previous legislation. In the next fifteen years, 
 loans amounting to £2,300,000 were raised for 
 improvement schemes. These Acts were further 
 amended in 1894, 1900, and 1903. Local autho- 
 rities now have extensive powers of inspection, 
 supervision, demolition, construction, and land- 
 purchase ; and the adoption of these measures was 
 i greatly enforced by the Town Planning Act of 1909, 
 
600 MODERN ENGLAND Icoaf. IX. 
 
 under which the Local Government Board can 
 move reluctant bodies to effective action. 
 
 In 1889, the birth-year of the London County 
 Council, Mr Frederick Greenwood thus summarized 
 his conclusions from an intimate knowledge of the 
 problem : " that the lack of house-room, the 
 enormous rents that have to be paid for accom- 
 modation which is insufficient for decency, let alone 
 for comfort, are one of the greatest grievances of the 
 poor in London ; that by none is it felt so heavUy 
 as by the more intelligent and provident of the 
 working classes ; that the education we are at 
 such pains to provide them does, by its most certain 
 and most desired consequences, promote rebellion 
 against the costly squalors of the workman's home ; 
 that, while education constantly enlarges the 
 longing for some share of the refinements of life, 
 the overcrowding which renders common decency 
 impossible, even when a cruelly disproportionate 
 part of the workman's income goes for rent, in- 
 creases ; that the causes of discontent are likely 
 to grow, while indisposition to bear with them grows 
 also ; and that while no legislative remedies that 
 are not worse than the disease can be found, yet 
 some that are plausible may be forced into experi- 
 ment." This prophecy has been both confirmed 
 and disproved, for, while legislation has been forced, 
 it has certainly not been found to give results 
 "worse than the disease." It is still, no doubt, 
 true that the main improvements have come less 
 from direct than indirect agencies — ^the advance of 
 
§ IV.] THE NEW AGE 501 
 
 education, popular government, and newspaper 
 publicity, the centrifugal effect of improved 
 railway and tramway communications, the check 
 at the source of overcrowding by the decline of the 
 birth-rate. But much has certainly been accomp- 
 lished in pulling down and building better, both 
 by private and public effort. About 150,000 
 persons have been housed in London by the 
 Metropolitan Association, the Improved Industrial 
 Dwellings Co., the Peabody Trust, and similar 
 bodies, which obtained land from the Board of 
 Works, in its day, at nominal prices. With the 
 advent of the London County Council, the period 
 of municipal provision on a large scale began ; and, 
 down to March 1911, the Council had spent some 
 three millions sterling on housing, and had 24,300 
 tenants. To 1906, 142 local authorities had availed 
 themselves of the powers of municipal building, 
 and 20,506 dwellings had been erected. ^ These 
 were, of course, only beginnings. In 1901, the 
 Census showed that 8^ per cent, of the population 
 of England and Wales {i.e. 2,667,506 persons) lived 
 in a condition officially described as overcrowded — 
 that is, having more than two persons per room. 
 In 1891, the proportion had been 11 J per cent. In 
 1911, it still stood at over 8 per cent., a figure 
 which shows how much has yet to be done to reach 
 a fair minimum of decent life-conditions. The 
 seaports and some northern industrial towns are in 
 
 '■ Details in The Municipal Yearbook, and The Housing Yearbook, 
 by Aid, W, Thompson. 
 
502 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 the worst, case ; and Scotland is decidedly behind 
 England. In Ireland, on the other hand, very- 
 great progress has been made, nearly forty thousand 
 cottages having been built up to 1912, at a cost of 
 eight millions sterling, by loan under the Land 
 Purchase Acts. 
 
 The Town Planning Act, 1909, consecrates an 
 idea new to this country, though long familiar on 
 the Continent. The establishment of Port Sun- 
 light by Messrs Lever in 1887, of Bournville by 
 Messrs Cadbury in 1889, and of the Hampstead 
 Garden suburb in 1904, showed what could be done 
 by enlightened private enterprise ; and types of 
 garden cities, garden villages, and garden suburbs 
 have been gradually evolved, many of them under 
 co-operative ownership and management. At 
 length, in 1909, the principle of collective organiza- 
 tion received the sanction of the legislature. The 
 first half of the nineteenth century was a period 
 of undisguised and unmitigated anarchy, the latter 
 half a period of regulation, at first timid, but 
 growing in efficiency, and of private effort to cope 
 with a problem far beyond the possibility of such 
 solution. The Town Planning Act, with its pro- 
 visions enabling local authorities to buy and 
 develop " land likely to be used for building 
 purposes," to limit the numbers of buildings per 
 acre, their height and character, and to claim 
 half the increase of value of any property rising 
 from such schemes, marks the definite abandon- 
 ment of laisser faire in this domain, and the 
 
§ IV.] THE NEW AGE 503 
 
 acceptance of the principle of public rights and 
 responsibility. 
 
 Is there any large result yet to show for the vast 
 expenditure involved in these far-reaching schemes ? 
 Oiiicial returns show that, in England and Wales 
 alone, what has been called the " beneficiary public 
 assistance," given in the forms of poor relief, educa- 
 tion, and old-age pensions,^ rose from £14,250,000 
 in 1891 to £24,170,000 in 1901, and £51,896,000 in 
 1911, and to something like £66 millions in 1913. 
 These are far from being the whole of the costs of 
 social betterment, which include expenditure on 
 public health and sanitation, factory, workshop, 
 and mine inspection, public baths and washhouses, 
 parks and commons, other municipal outlay, and 
 a large amount of private philanthropy. What is 
 there to place to the other side of the account ? 
 It is inevitable that rapidly expanding Budgets 
 should be subjected to questions like this, though 
 they admit of no full or exact reply. The highest 
 satisfactions of life are immeasurable in material 
 terms, and must rest upon a consensus of individual 
 experiences. But there is a class of evidence as 
 definite as could be desired, and of the largest 
 significance, to which we may here very briefly 
 refer. Let any unbeliever turn to the annual 
 reports and quinquennial supplements of the 
 Registrar-General of births, deaths, and marriages. 
 
 ' Including hospitals provided by local authorities other than 
 poor-law infirmaries, costs under the Unemployed Workmen Act, 
 1905, and the provision of meals and medical inspection and treat- 
 went of school children, 
 
504 MODERN ENGLAISTD [chap. ix. 
 
 He will find, in the first place, that th« general 
 death-rate of the kingdom has been reduced by- 
 more than a quarter in twenty years— from 20 per 
 thousand living in 1891, to 14'8 in 1911. He will 
 find that there are still very wide divergences of 
 health experience, some occupations, and districts 
 where certain occupations preponderate, having a 
 shockingly excessive mortality. But he will also 
 find a general and remarkable improvement in the 
 last twenty years, and particularly in the last 
 decade. For instance, the average yearly death-rate 
 (per 10,000 living) from tuberculous diseases in the 
 last decade of the nineteenth century was only 
 20 "2 in the agricultural county of Dorset, and was 
 39 -3 for England and Wales as a whole. From this 
 point, it rose to 43 'S in Birmingham, 45 in Bradford, 
 51 in Blackburn, 52*5 in Preston, 55 in Leeds, 
 59*5 in Manchester, 61"9 in Liverpool, 65*2 in Wigan^ 
 and 77"5 in Salford. Consumption, in fact, was 
 nearly four times as prevalent in rich Salford as in 
 poor Dorset. A longer view, however, throws the 
 emphasis on a very different result. The fight 
 against consumption is being waged most gallantly, 
 and already with splendid success, as the following 
 summary of thirty years' experience shows : 
 
i v.] THE NEW AGE 505 
 
 Phthisis — Annual Deaths per 10,000 Living 
 
 
 1881-90. 
 
 1891- 
 1900. 
 
 1910. 
 
 De- 
 crease. 
 
 Westmorland 
 
 14-5 
 
 9-5 
 
 6-4 
 
 81 
 
 West Riding 
 
 18-7 
 
 13-9 
 
 9-4 
 
 9-3 
 
 England and Wales 
 
 17-7 
 
 lS-9 
 
 10-1 
 
 7-6 
 
 Northumberland 
 
 21-6 
 
 16-7 
 
 11-4 
 
 10-2 
 
 Lancashire 
 
 19-7 
 
 15-3 
 
 11-8 
 
 7-9 
 
 London 
 
 20-5 
 
 17-3 
 
 12-2 
 
 8-3 
 
 That is to say, 27,000 fewer persons died in 1910 
 of phthisis in England and Wales than would have 
 died had the rate of 1881-90 been maintained. 
 What the saving of 27,000 lives a year may be 
 worth in " beneficiary public assistance " we leave 
 it to others to try to reckon. 
 
 V. Unemployment, Strikes, the Minimum 
 Wage 
 
 Three topics of large industrial importance 
 remain for mention : unemployment, with recent 
 measures to reduce it, or soften its effects ; trade 
 disputes, and measures to procure their peace- 
 ful settlement without the suffering of strike or 
 lockout ; and that measure which most clearly 
 shows the revolutionary change in British economic 
 thought, the State-imposed minimum wage. 
 ; Although there has not often been abnormal 
 
506 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 unemployment since the mid-'nineties, a consider- 
 able advance has been made in the understanding 
 of this complex disease of modern society. As in 
 the case of town-planning and national insurance 
 against sickness, we owe much to German examples ; 
 much again is owing to the long investigation of 
 the Poor Law Commission (1905-9). The crude 
 impulses of spasmodic charity, and the hardly less 
 crude trust in emergency relief works, have given 
 place to an honest recognition that unemployment 
 is a general and permanent malady calling for 
 general and permanent treatment, whatever special 
 measures may be rendered necessary by the larger 
 dips of the trade cycle. We say " an honest " 
 recognition, because it is, for the twentieth century 
 conscience, if we read it aright, as dishonest for 
 employers and society at large to trust to a reserve 
 of labour (necessary to the working of the in- 
 dustrial system), indifferent to how that reserve 
 manages to live, as it would be to require an army 
 or navy reserve without giving it any pay in time 
 of peace. This obligation, as well as the interest 
 of society in the physical fitness of all citizens, is 
 recognized in the system of national insurance 
 against unemployment, already outlined, to which 
 employers and the State, and not only the workmen, 
 make contributions. The next task is to prevent 
 the increase of the labour reserve, and to reduce it 
 as far as possible. This involves two kinds of 
 measures — the regularization of industrial employ- 
 ment (including special provision for times of bad 
 
§ v.] THE NEW AGE 507 
 
 trade), and the raising of the physique, intelligence, 
 and mobility of the individual worker. 
 
 Some, though very insufficient, progress has been 
 made in both directions. All over the country, 
 employers, municipalities, schoolmasters, and other 
 persons of influence are beginning to recognize the 
 mischief that comes of turning boys and girls out 
 of school into " blind-alley " employments, the 
 importance of physical culture and technical in- 
 struction, and the even greater importance of a 
 more extended general education, as a means to 
 more fruitful activity and adaptibility of mind. 
 One good feature of the insurance scheme is that it 
 gives employers an inducement to " decasualize " 
 their labour force. Seasonal and cyclical fluctua- 
 tions, and those due to changes of industrial 
 structure, open out a series of problems which 
 have yet to be grappled with seriously.^ The 
 most considerable step taken consists of the estab- 
 lishment in large towns throughout the country of 
 labour exchanges, worked by the Board of Trade in 
 close conjunction with the system of unemployment 
 insurance. The first experiments in the registra- 
 tion of workers seeking jobs were made by a few 
 private individuals, and afterwards by a few muni- 
 
 ' Mr B. S. Rowntree'a investigations showed that more than a 
 half of the unemployed in York were persona most of whom had 
 for years depended on casual work for a liveUhood, and that about 
 a half were not in any way disqualified for work. The author con- 
 cluded that "improved morale and increased technical ability, 
 important as they are, can never solve the problem unless they are 
 associated with wide industrial and economic reforms " (Unemploy- 
 ment, A Social Study, by B. S. Rowntree and B. Lasker, 1911). 
 
508 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 cipalities, from 1885 onward, being nearly always 
 associated with the administration of distress relief 
 funds. The Unemployed Workman Act, 1905, 
 while chiefly designed for the institution of relief 
 works, gave power to establish registries ; and the 
 Central (Unemployed) Body for London used this 
 power, setting up twenty bureaux which, in a 
 year, filled over thirty thousand vacancies. The 
 Labour Exchange Act, 1909, created more than 
 four hundred exchanges, with Post-Office co-opera- 
 tion, and a tentative system of travelling clerks 
 for the purely rural districts. About a million 
 vacancies were thus filled in 1912 ; and, in some 
 large towns, masters, with the agreement of the 
 trade unions, take hands only from the Labour 
 Exchange. It is provided by the Act that " no 
 person shall be prejudiced on account of refusing 
 to accept employment where the ground of refusal 
 is that a trade dispute which affects his trade exists, 
 or that the wages offered are lower than those in 
 the trade in the district." The Board of Trade is 
 empowered to advance travelling expenses to men 
 for whom work has been found at a distance ; and 
 most of the money so advanced is regularly 
 recovered. 
 
 The unemployed insurance system is worked to 
 the extent of one-quarter or one-third through the 
 trade unions or other voluntary associations, and 
 for the rest through the labour exchanges. It 
 came into operation only in July 1912, and benefits 
 began only six months later ; moreover, this was 
 
§y.] THE NEW AGE 509 
 
 a period of minimum unemployment, so that the 
 proof lies in the future. The administrative 
 practicability of the scheme is, however, regarded 
 as established ; it appears to have increased, not 
 discouraged, voluntary insurance ; and a sub- 
 stantial fund is accumulating against the next wave 
 of trade depression. Less than a fifth of the work- 
 men brought in in the first year (2^ millions) had 
 previously been insured against unemployment. 
 The grave fact is that, in six months of booming 
 trade, 560,000 claims to benefit were received. 
 Very few were fraudulent, and less than 9 per cent, 
 were disallowed. The claims were estimated to 
 represent 400,000 individual workmen. In most 
 cases, the term of idleness was short, representing 
 change rather than lack of employment. It is in 
 shortening these breaks that the labour exchanges 
 and other measures of organization will be service- 
 able. But, at the best, the discovery that at least 
 " one in every five or six of the workmen in these 
 trades has been unemployed at some time or other 
 during six months of exceptional prosperity " gives 
 matter for anxious reflection. 
 
 That, during this prosperous period, labour 
 disputes were unusually frequent and extensive 
 leads us to a new set of considerations. The follow- 
 ing figures measure what has been called the 
 " strike fever " : 
 
610 
 
 MODERN ENGLANt) [cha?. ix. 
 
 Years. 
 
 No. of 
 Disputes. 
 
 Persons Affected, j Duration in Days. 
 
 Average of 
 1901-10 
 1911 
 1912 
 
 463 
 903 
 821 
 
 221,058 4,258,859 
 
 961,980 i 10,319,591 
 
 1,437,032 40,346,400 
 
 i 1 
 
 It may be said at once that the exceptional 
 record of the last two years was due chiefly to the 
 great strikes of transport workers and coal miners. 
 The general railway strike, and the series of linked 
 strikes in the transport trades which followed it, in 
 1911, constituted an extraordinary effort of ill- 
 organized groups to improve their position, as 
 regards both wages and recognition of the unions, 
 ere the period of prosperity should pass. It was 
 largely successful in both respects ; and, in a year, 
 340,000 trade unionists were recruited, chiefly in 
 the ranks of unskilled labour. It showed a decided 
 tinge of the " Syndicalist," or quasi-revolutionary, 
 thought which is as embarrassing to Socialists of 
 the parliamentary order as to old-fashioned trade 
 unionists, and in some of its features recalled the 
 great struggles of the later 'eighties. The coal 
 strike of 1912 brought into the field, on the other 
 hand, a million men fully organized and long ex- 
 perienced in parliamentary action, intent not on 
 higher wages all round, but on a minimum that 
 would benefit only about a fifth of their number. In 
 these and many other cases, however, a general sense 
 
§ v.] THE NEW AGE 511 
 
 of the inadequacy of the workman's share in the 
 recent increase of wealth counted for much, and com- 
 manded sympathy in other classes. In a decade 
 of swelling fortunes, nominal wages had, as a whole, 
 been stationary, real wages had actually declined. 
 Of eight million adult men engaged in regular 
 occupations in the United Kingdom, nearly a third, 
 when in ordinary full work, were earning only 25s. 
 a week or less, over a half were earning only up to 
 30s. Add to this the tragic possibilities of sickness, 
 disablement, and unemployment, and the wonder 
 lies not in an occasional outbreak of " strike fever," 
 but in the mass of little, constant sacrifices which 
 make the growth of trade unionism possible. The 
 speeding-up of industrial processes and the rise of 
 industrial intelligence — compare the modern taxi- 
 cab driver with the ancient jehu ! — must needs 
 aggravate the problem. The average man's wants 
 grow, in fact, faster than his means of satisfying 
 them. The question of social peace would be much 
 simplified if we had nothing but law and order to 
 think of ; and the question of social justice would 
 be simplified if law and order did not matter a fig. 
 There may be some ideal point in philosophy at 
 which peace and justice are perfectly wedded : 
 peering through the dusty air of this most un- 
 philosophical world, it would seem that these starry 
 sisters are commonly at variance. History, it is 
 true, encourages us with proof that peace and 
 justice have both progressed, so that the reconcilia- 
 tion cannot be impossible. But, lest we take this 
 
512 MODERN ENGLAND [chae. ix, 
 
 comfort too easily, new forms of the old difficulty 
 are constantly arising. The would-be pacifist, in 
 this predicament, does well to remember that not 
 an indulgence of generous sentiment, but a scientific 
 understanding of the facts, will best aid him. 
 
 Thus, it is possible to exaggerate the mischief 
 and the " futility " of strikes, and to advocate per- 
 emptory methods of settlement, in such a way 
 as to give a false view of the industrial situation. 
 Taking all the disputes in 1910 which came within 
 the cognizance of the Board of Trade, we find that 
 only 16'3 per cent, of the workpeople were fully 
 Successful — and then sometimes rather against 
 other workmen than against employers — while 
 13"6 per cent, definitely failed, and the remainder 
 accepted compromises. The proportion of com- 
 promises has increased, that of both complete 
 success and complete failure has fallen greatly. 
 This may be a testimony to British reasonableness, 
 or it may be a reflection of the fact that, while the 
 organization of both capital and laboiir has pro- 
 ceeded rapidly, the stationariness of real wages has 
 prevented the trade unions from accumulating 
 strike funds. The total of income assessed for 
 income-tax increases by about £30 millions a year ; 
 the net increase of wages in 1911 amounted to only 
 about £1,400,000, which, according to Mr Philip 
 Snowden, M.P.,^ was more than extinguished by the 
 
 1 The Living Wage,, 1912. Mr Snowden argued that " a strike 
 never did bring much substantial gain to the workers," and that 
 " the strike is likely to be less efEeotive in the future even than in the 
 
§ v.] THE NEW AGE 513 
 
 loss of wages during the strikes. The loss, how- 
 ever, was for one year, the gain, presumably, was 
 more lasting ; and a strike leader would say that, 
 but for the strikes, the loss would be much greater, 
 and would be permanent. As to the mischief to 
 the community, grievous as it is, it also may be 
 exaggerated. Strikes are, at least, a great safety- 
 valve ; it might plausibly be argued that they have 
 saved England from revolutionary and anarchistic 
 movements familiar on the Continent, and have 
 given inevitable conflicts of interest a relatively 
 peaceful and orderly form. It is certain that the 
 workers will not lightly abandon this their last 
 moderate weapon. 
 
 We briefly distinguished, in an earlier chapter, 
 the methods of negotiation, conciliation, mediation, 
 and arbitration which were in use a generation since, 
 subject to the generally accepted principle that 
 wages must follow prices. Experience has suggested 
 
 past." He concluded that voluntary conciliation was "not strong 
 enough to deal with serious disputes," and warmly advocated " com- 
 pulsory arbitration." Incidentally, he scolded the Trade Union and 
 Socialist Congresses for condemning " compulsory arbitration " in 
 industrial, while demanding it in international, disputes. There is 
 vague thinking here. " Compulsory arbitration " is a misnomer 
 in any case ; and there could be no such thing in international life 
 without the creation of a coercive international authority, which no 
 democrat would advocate. Permanent or obligatory arbitration, 
 which is what most pacifists demand, is a very different thing, implying 
 no outside coercion, but only a general wiUingness to arbitrate, and 
 a moral obligation to accept an award when arbitration has been 
 entered upon. The kind of international settlement generally de- 
 manded is the same as that which trade unionists and employers 
 practise daily. 
 2K 
 
514 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 new kinds of pacific process ; and we may now 
 adopt a somewhat different classification of the 
 possible expedients, thus : 
 
 1. Investigation of disputes, and publication of 
 reports thereon. This elementary form of action, 
 valuable for the parties to any dispute, but even 
 more important for the guidance of Parliament and 
 public opinion, is illustra.ted by the usually admir- 
 able publications, regular and special, of the Board 
 of Trade. It makes the growth of well-informed 
 and equitable views on the remuneration of labour 
 more and more a function of good citizenship. 
 
 2. Direct Negotiation, by arrangements having 
 various degrees of permanency. The daily work 
 of ten millions of operatives cannot be conducted 
 without frequent differences arising ; but it must 
 be remembered that many are quietly settled 
 for every one which becomes public. In the latter, 
 direct negotiation is the commonest method of 
 settlement (accounting for half the usual number 
 of agreements affected) ; and it is wholly desirable 
 that this should continue to be so, for a voluntary 
 pact is worth many forced bargains. Its efficacy 
 is usually proportionate to the organization of 
 both parties, whose officials thus far resemble the 
 Diplomatic services and the Foreign Offices of the 
 international field. The recognition of trade union- 
 ism is now general throughout the skilled trades. 
 The principle may be said to be established. But 
 the great majority of unskilled and female workers 
 are still unorganized; and here the battle rages 
 
§ v.] THE NEW AGE 515 
 
 round the question whether a particular union is 
 really representative, and can govern its members, 
 rather than the general principle of collective 
 bargaining. Progress is also hindered by the 
 fact that, in many parts of the transport and 
 unskilled trades, the masters are not organized. 
 
 3. Mediation and Conciliation, that is, the offer 
 of friendly advice to the parties by some impartial 
 outsider, or the provision of guidance by standing 
 committees or referees. The Labour Department 
 has recently been very active in this field, and its 
 mediation has been effective even in some despe- 
 rate cases. Conciliation is in its nature elastic, and 
 it takes many forms, both spontaneous and per- 
 manent. Until 1907, organized conciliation counted 
 for comparatively little in the actual settlement of 
 disputes, simply because it was rather, and most 
 successfully, exercised to prevent their coming to 
 a head. In the great productive industries, how- 
 ever, much good has been effected by conciliation 
 boards representing a given trade, or section of a 
 trade, in a given locality, or representing a wider 
 or more mixed constituency. Most of these bodies 
 are particular trade boards ; the few general and 
 district boards have been less successful. The 
 coal and iron trades have been thus regulated for 
 many years ; and, in its general operation, over 
 seven hundred disputes a year are settled by this 
 method. In addition to the sliding scales they 
 administer, the work of the conciliation boards is 
 in some cases strengthened by special types of 
 
516 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 agreement, giving a character of obligation to the 
 process. Two instances may be cited. In the 
 cotton trade, the Brooklands agreement of 1893 
 forbade any stoppage of work until joint-com- 
 mittee negotiation had been tried. As amended 
 in September 1911, the agreement provided that 
 if, despite the conciliation machinery, a strike 
 or lockout should take place, representatives of 
 masters and men should meet within fourteen days, 
 and at least monthly thereafter, till the dispute 
 ended. Nevertheless, a great lockout in the cotton 
 trade took place during the following winter. A 
 lockout of boiler-makers in September 1910, said 
 to be due to infractions of an existing shipyard 
 agreement, led in March 1911 to the establishment 
 of a new compact under which the Shipping Federa- 
 tion, on the one side, and the unions, on the other, 
 gave individual and collective assurances that they 
 would go to the conciliation board without stopping 
 work, and would punish their offending members, 
 allegations of breach of the agreement to be dealt 
 with by joint-committee. The trouble here is not 
 that the men are unorganized, but that they belong 
 to different unions, the interests of which do not 
 always coincide. This agreement might, perhaps, 
 be most accurately called obligatory direct negotia- 
 tion. There is also a single case of what may be 
 termed guaranteed conciliation or arbitration— 
 that of the boot- and shoe-trade agreement adopted 
 in 1895, and several times renewed, by which a 
 sum of £1000 was deposited by either party 
 
§ v.] THE NEW AGE 517 
 
 against breach of the agreement or of awards 
 under it. 
 
 4. Arbitration proper — ^that is, the voluntary sub- 
 mission of a dispute to be tried on its merits by 
 some more or less impartial person or persons. 
 The process properly implies a voluntary submission, 
 and a judgment — not merely a conciliatory sugges- 
 tion ; but it may, or may not, involve acceptance 
 of the award. If the masters and men in any trade 
 undertake in advance for a term of years to submit 
 their differences to arbitration, this is permanent 
 arbitration ; if they also undertake to abide by the 
 judgment, this would seem to be best described as 
 permanent obligatory arbitration. In no case is 
 there any outside compulsion. Whether these pre- 
 cise terms be used or not, it is important that 
 the character and limits of the different processes 
 should be understood. It may be asked, for 
 instance, why the quasi-legal arbitration in com- 
 mercial differences, provided by the Act of 1899, 
 and now a valuable adjunct of the regular law- 
 courts, has never been imitated in the industrial 
 sphere — ^why, indeed, it was specifically excluded 
 by the Industrial Conciliation Act. The reasons 
 are not far to seek. Working-class opposition to 
 legally enforceable awards is not blindly unreason- 
 ing : it rises out of the facts of the case. Disputes 
 between two individuals, or even two nations, are 
 radically unlike disputes between an employer and 
 a body of workers. There are two main differences : 
 (1) the industrial dispute often is, or may become, 
 
518 MODERN ENGi^LAND [ohap. ix. 
 
 a matter of life and death — ^the employer may 
 be ruined, the workers may starve. On the other 
 hand, commercial men need not, and usually do 
 not, submit matters of life and death to the legal 
 arbitration of the Act of 1889, which is rather 
 regarded as a speedy and inexpensive way of dis- 
 posing of minor causes. Even in international 
 affairs, where there is no enforcement of awards, 
 matters of " honour and vital interest " are almost 
 universally excepted from arbitration ; and if this 
 exception should ever be generally abandoned, it 
 will be because war has become more intolerable 
 than any possible arbitral award. (2) Commercial 
 litigants are usually equal individuals, well within 
 reach of the arm of the law. In the relations of 
 employer and employed, there is always an 
 essential inequality, and on one side there is a 
 great lack of effective personality. Ordinary liti- 
 gants can wait, employers can perhaps wait, and 
 they have money to be seized. Workmen are, 
 for purposes of punishment, an elusive quantity. 
 And workmen cannot wait : in the last resort, their 
 only strength lies in numbers — a positive weakness 
 in a waiting game. These two differences are really 
 one. Workmen cannot easily be pursued at law, 
 because of their poverty ; and they cannot wait, 
 because they are always fighting over, or in the 
 region of, essentials. 
 
 The number of disputes settled by arbitration 
 has always been small. Thus, in 1910, only 24 
 disputes, affecting 8,224 workpeople, were so ended. 
 
§ v.] THE NEW AGE 519 
 
 But it must again be recalled that the existence 
 of arbitral arrangements is valuable in preventing 
 quarrels from ripening to the point at which they 
 are officially recorded. Conciliation and arbitration 
 have been most successful in the mining industry, 
 which accounts for over a third of the successful 
 cases in the last decade. The textile, metal, 
 engineering, and shipbuilding trades come next, 
 and the building and clothing trades — where labour 
 combination is weakest — a long way after. 
 
 5. Judicial or administrative process, including 
 what is called " compulsory arbitration." The 
 Canadian, New Zealand, and Australian experi- 
 ments are most interesting and suggestive, though 
 of little direct value in the more complex circum- 
 stances of Great Britain. Under the Canadian 
 Industrial Disputes Act of 1907, change in any 
 contract of employemnt in certain industries is 
 forbidden, except after thirty days' notice. If such 
 change be disputed, there is thus an interval for 
 investigation and conciliation ; and, until the 
 award has been published, a strike or lockout is 
 illegal, and is heavily penalized. The Canadian 
 Trade Union Congress in 1911 asked for the repeal 
 of this Act. Under the New Zealand Conciliation 
 and Arbitration Acts of 1894 and 1908— the first 
 pioneering measure being the work of Mr Pember 
 Reeves — " compulsory arbitration," that is, a 
 quasi-legal trial with penalties imposed by the 
 State, follows upon the failure of voluntary con- 
 ciliation ; and an agreement in the one case, or an 
 
520 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 award in the other, is legally binding not only on 
 the immediate parties, but on the whole trade in 
 the district concerned. The parties are then for- 
 bidden to strike or lockout, under penalties of £10 
 for a workman and £500 for an employer. In 
 industries supplying necessaries, masters and men 
 are further forbidden resort to strike or lockout 
 except after fourteen days' notice. In Australia, 
 there is both State and Federal compulsion of an 
 experimental kind ; and, in Victoria, wages boards 
 have fixed minimum wages in over ninety trades. 
 
 Such success as the Dominions have achieved 
 along these lines is proportionate to the differences 
 between their politico-economic position and that 
 of the Mother Country. The chief of these differ- 
 ences are as follows : the Canadian and Australasian 
 communities are relatively new, relatively small, 
 and preponderantly agricultural. They are per- 
 fectly free, homogeneous democracies, unhampered 
 by historic survivals, Old-world entanglements, or 
 the duty of governing great tropical dependencies ; 
 they do not yet even bear any substantial share in 
 the cost of imperial defence. Industry is a secondary 
 activity ; they have plenty of accessible land and 
 a sparse population ; on the strength of their 
 potential wealth they obtain easy credit. The 
 raising of the remuneration and conditions of labour 
 is, then, a comparatively easy task, requiring chiefly 
 the social will to check parasitism at one end and 
 monopoly at the other. This will is provided by the 
 Colonial spirit, arising from the fact that the 
 
§ v.] THE NEW AOE 521 
 
 Colonies were built up by men who sacrificed their 
 homes in the Old World in order to breathe a freer 
 air ; and it is, perhaps, aided by a protectionist 
 system which they regard as enabling employers to 
 pay good wages, not as enabling statesmen to pay 
 for great standing armies and navies. The British 
 circumstances are in all these respects radically 
 different. They are, above all, infinitely more 
 complex ; and an understanding of the various 
 processes distinguished above is essential to any 
 useful consideration of the possibility of extending 
 further the functions of the State in relation to 
 industry. In Great Britain, judicial or admini- 
 strative compulsion of this kind has been applied, 
 so far, in only two cases, to which we shall refer 
 presently — ^the sweated trades under the Trade 
 Boards Act, 1909, and coal-mining under the 
 Minimum Wage Act, 1912. This is not conciliation 
 and arbitration at all, but law. But much has 
 been accomplished since the first serious attempt 
 was made, in 1896, to give State stimulus to the 
 voluntary settlement of disputes. By the Concilia- 
 tion Act of that year, the Board of Trade was 
 empowered to make inquiries, to appoint a con- 
 ciliator on the application of one side, or an 
 arbitrator on the application of both ; and, under 
 Sir George Askwith, this sort of intervention has 
 developed triumphantly. 
 
 After the transport strikes of the summer of 1911, 
 the Government established an advisory Industrial 
 Council, consisting of twenty-six eminent repre- 
 
522 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 sentatives of employers and men in the great trades. 
 One of its first duties was to investigate the possi- 
 bility of securing a better fulfilment of industrial 
 agreements, when they are arrived at ; and the 
 report ^ is significant of the trend of opinion. The 
 Council, while noting that industrial agreements 
 must be left more elastic than commercial contracts, 
 found that " in most cases they are well kept." 
 The exceptions are generally in unorganized, or in- 
 completely organized, trades. " Where agreements 
 made through properly organized machinery for 
 dealing with disputes have been broken, it is fre- 
 quently found that they were made at times when, 
 owing to the abnormal conditions, great difficulty 
 must have been experienced in arriving at a fair 
 adjustment." Questions of interpretation arise ; 
 agreements should always provide for their refer- 
 ence to arbitration, strike or lockout being forbid- 
 den till the interpretation is obtained. The Council 
 favoured a delay before cessation of work, to 
 permit of mediation and " a pronouncement upon 
 the question at issue by some independent body 
 or impartial tribunal " ; but it declared against 
 " compulsory " arbitration. It had been proposed 
 that breach of agreement should be punished either 
 by monetary penalties, or by legally prohibiting 
 financial or other assistance to those in breach. 
 The Council pointed out, however, the importance 
 of maintaining the principle of collective bargain- 
 ing, which might thus be injured by the threat of 
 
 » Od. 6952 of 1913. 
 
§ v.] THE NEW AGE 523 
 
 such penalties deterring workpeople from entering 
 into agreements. There is also the obvious diffi- 
 culty of enforcement. " The conclusion of the 
 Council is that, in the long run, the fulfilment of 
 agreements is more likely to be secured by an 
 increased regard for the moral obligation, and by 
 reliance upon the principles of mutual consent, 
 than by the establishment of monetary penal- 
 ties, or the legal prohibition of assistance." With 
 regard to the extension of an agreement from the 
 immediate parties to a whole trade or district, 
 " especially where the workmen's organizations are 
 not sufficiently strong to secure general observ- 
 ance," the Council recommended that if, after 
 inquiry, the Board of Trade were satisfied that the 
 immediate parties were substantially representative, 
 and that the agreement was a proper one, it might 
 be declared extended, " and its terms thereupon 
 become implied terms of any contract of service in 
 the trade or district concerned." 
 
 A moment's reflection as to the actual structure 
 and functioning of industry will show how necessary 
 is the conservative spirit illustrated in these phrases. 
 Raw, wholesale compulsion is practically impos- 
 sible ; to attempt it would be gravely to discredit 
 the State, and to aggravate the possibilities of 
 conflict. Voluntary methods need patient waiting, 
 if only because they depend upon the development 
 of trade unionism, and its full recognition by 
 employers' organizations ; but they visibly succeed, 
 and they constantly create new expedients which 
 
524 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 carry the great movement forward. What could 
 law, with its peremptory and rigid method, accom- 
 plish in this field ? Men do not only strike for 
 increases, or against reductions, of wages. They 
 strike against the introduction of non-union labour, 
 against unpopular foremen, against the penalizing 
 of trade-union officials. They demand the restric- 
 tion of piece-work, the limitation of apprentices or 
 female labour ; in the end, they demand the re- 
 moval of " blacklegs," and the reinstatement of 
 the old hands. Then, there is the old, yet ever 
 new, problem of the " sympathetic " strike. How 
 are questions such as these to be judicially decided ? 
 The variety of industrial incident is indescribable. 
 In 1910, rather more than half a million persons 
 were engaged in 531 officially recorded disputes ; 
 one of these alone affected 102,000 persons, yet 
 it arose from the discharge of a single man. Nor- 
 mally, disputes about wages constitute about a 
 half of the total. A minimum wage is not alto- 
 gether easy ; but above the minimum, how are 
 differences to be judicially decided ? Neither 
 trade-union leaders nor captains of industry will 
 rush into these dark places. 
 
 That these practical hesitations about the legal 
 regulation of normal adult labour are not to be 
 confused with the dogmatic scruples of the Victorian 
 age is, however, proved by the rapidly extended 
 application, at the same time, of the principle of the 
 minimum wage. It began with the specifically 
 " sweated " trades. Here we are at the opposite 
 
§ v.] THE NEW AGE 525 
 
 pole from those occupations in which high organiza- 
 tion has made possible an orderly progress. Women 
 workers are almost wholly without combination ; 
 the fact that they rarely strike only reflects their 
 poverty, timidity, and fatalism, and their relative 
 lack of skill. Two-thirds of the women over 18 
 in the clothing trades earn less than 15s. by a full 
 week's work ; and ia the food and other trades 
 the level of pay is still lower. After the publication 
 of the Report of the Lords' Committee in 1890, a 
 movement arose to secure a legal " living wage." 
 For many years, its advocates cried in the wilder- 
 ness, along with Socialist orators who wished for 
 a larger use of the same prescription. The forma- 
 tion of the Women's Industrial Council and the 
 Anti-Sweating League marked a new sense of what 
 Lord Milner called " this national disgrace." In 
 February 1908, Sir George Toulmin introduced a 
 Bill for the establishment of wage-boards, with 
 power to declare a minimum wage in trades to be 
 scheduled by the Home Office. The mind of the 
 country was now prepared for a great advance. 
 The Government approved the principle of the 
 Bill, and referred it to a Select Committee on Home 
 Work. A year later, Mr Winston Churchill, for 
 the Board of Trade, introduced a Government 
 measure applicable only to exceptional industries, 
 which he characterized as unorganized, immobile, 
 and carried on under morbid economic conditions. 
 This " first modern proposal of Government 
 machinery to settle and enforce the rate of wages 
 
526 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 was," he said, " an experiment and a revolution." 
 Mr Balfour and Mr Lyttelton approved, with reser- 
 vations ; and the Bill received royal assent on 
 October 20, 1909. The Trade Boards Act em- 
 powered the Board of Trade to make, for any trade 
 or branch of a trade in which wages are " exception- 
 ally low as compared with other employments," a 
 provisional order setting up a board consisting of 
 representatives of employers and workmen in 
 equal numbers, with a smaller nunxber of nominated 
 members. These boards fix minimum time- and 
 piece-rates, which may come into effect at once by 
 agreement, and may be made obligatory by order 
 of the Board of Trade. Within four years, rates 
 had been so fixed in the following trades, embracing 
 about 400,000 workers : chain-making, machine- 
 made lace and net-finishing, paper and cardboard 
 box-making, ready-made and wholesale bespoke 
 tailoring (garments to be worn by male persons), 
 the sugar, confectionery, and food-preserving 
 trades, shirt-making, the sheet-metal and hollow- 
 ware trade (including tin-box and canister making), 
 and linen and cotton embroidery. An allowance 
 to cover loss of time and travelling expenses is 
 made to representative members of the boards. 
 The minimum wage usually varies from 2|d. to 3|d. 
 an hour for women — which have been estimated to 
 give the lowest possible weekly sum on which 
 physical fitness can be maintained — and is about 
 6d. an hour for men. Important provisions 
 prevent evasion by the increase of so-called 
 
§ v.] THE NEW AGE 527 
 
 "learners " ; thus, in the box-trade, all " learners " 
 must be certificated, they must receive some in- 
 struction, they are limited in number, and they must 
 reach adult pay after three years, or at the age of 18. 
 The early working of the trade boards has 
 revealed various difficulties, none of which seem to 
 be insuperable ; on the other hand, it has given 
 an immediate and remarkable stimulus to organi- 
 zation in the industries affected, on the part both 
 of workers and employers. Obstruction is much 
 reduced by the fact that the good employer wants 
 his " sweating " competitor to be penalized ; and, 
 among statesmen, it may now be said that there is 
 general acceptance of the minimum wage principle 
 as stated by Lord Milner (Dec. 6, 1907) : " The 
 sweating system impoverishes and weakens the 
 whole community, because it saps the stamina and 
 diminishes the productive power of thousands of 
 workers, and these in turn drag others down with 
 them. It means an industry essentially rotten and 
 unsound, because an industry which does not 
 provide those engaged in it with sufficient to keep 
 them in health is essentially unsound. Used-up 
 capital must be replaced ; and of all forms of 
 capital the most fundamental and indispensable is 
 the human energy necessarily consumed in the 
 work of production. The community has to make 
 good the inefficiency that sweating produces. I 
 know that many people think it impossible to 
 raise wages by law ; but the fixing of a limit below 
 which wages shall not fall is already not the 
 
528 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 exception, but the rule, in this country. , . , It is a 
 proposal that the State shall do for the weakest and 
 most helpless trades what the strongly organized 
 trades already do for themselves." 
 
 In this definition, and in the general understand- 
 ing of to-day, as, virtually, in that of the Lords' 
 Committee of 1890, " sweating " means any gross 
 underpayment. That this carries the case far 
 beyond the limits of the industries originally 
 described as " sweated " is indicated by two facts 
 with which our review may conclude. The first lies 
 in demands, emanating from both of the great poli- 
 tical parties,^ for the extension of the principle of the 
 Trade Boards Act to agricultural labour. This is a 
 much more difficult case than those already named, 
 
 ^ The National Home and Land League, of which Lord Saye and 
 Sele is chairman, and Lord Henry Cavendish- Bentinck, M. P. , president, 
 includes members of both parties. It urges the establishment of 
 Agricultural District Wage Boards, with prevention of an increase 
 of the hours of labour, and fixing of fifteen half-holidays in each 
 half-year. " A Group of Unionists " publishes (John Murray, 1913) 
 a project of agricultural policy, which would raise the income of 
 the Board of Agriculture from £158,000 to about £1,000,000, and 
 would establish Agricultural District Wage Boards to fix local 
 minimum wages. " This proposal," it says, " is in no way in con- 
 flict with historic Tory doctrines, which were laid down at the time 
 of the passing of the Factories Acts. The principle of Toryism is 
 not that freedom of contract cannot be interfered with under any 
 circumstances, but that it should not be interfered with unless the 
 policy of allowing such freedom has failed to produce desirable 
 results from the point of view of the State." Another group, the 
 Unionist Social Reform Committee, of which Lord Milner, Prof. 
 W. J. Ashley, and many M.P.'s are members, advocates the " prin- 
 ciple of the minimum or living wage," the frank abandonment of the 
 principle of buying labour in the cheapest market, and the legal 
 extension of voluntary wage agreements. 
 
§v.] THE NEW AGE 529 
 
 because of the wide variety of circumstance, the 
 lack of exact information, the difficulty of procur- 
 ing representation of the labourers, the strength 
 of prejudice among farmers, and the danger of a 
 further casualization of labour by pressure on the 
 old and less fit. It is certain, however, that the 
 rapid movement of opinion will soon result in 
 experimental legislation. 
 
 The second instance is already on the statute- 
 book, in the form of the Coal Mines (Minimum 
 Wage) Act of 1912. This was a much more notable 
 revolution than the Trade Boards Act, for it 
 applied to one of the greatest national industries, 
 carried on wholly by adult men, strongly organized ; 
 and it was aggressively demanded by the whole 
 body of the men, with the assent of a large number 
 of the masters. Only a special history could pro- 
 duce so complete a reversal of national policy as 
 this Act indicates ; and we must look backward to 
 understand it. 
 
 Collective bargaining has, in fact, been for many 
 years the rule in coal-mining, as in the iron and steel 
 manufactures, and this " not as a matter of con- 
 descension, or charity, or courtesy, but as a simple 
 matter of business." ^ Two circumstances con- 
 
 1 Prof. W. J. Aahley : " The. Adjustment 0/ Wages, a Study in the 
 Goal and Iron Industries of Oreat Britain and America," 1903. " Man- 
 faoturing on a large scale necessarily involves common rules. . . . 
 Looked at from the employers' point of view, a common rate of wages 
 is mainly a labour-saving device, . . . and the step is a short 
 one, though often difficult to take, from common rates to common 
 agreements." 
 2L 
 
530 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. iX. 
 
 tribute particularly to this result : labottr costs are 
 the chief costs in coal-mining ; and there is a high 
 degree of uniformity in the labour and material, 
 so that wage scales are easily constructed, but need 
 skilled interpretation on both sides. For these and 
 other reasons, conciliation boards, as we saw earlier, 
 have won many successes in this trade area. The 
 time when recognition of the unions was won was 
 the time, also, when the men accepted, tacitly or 
 specifically, the principle that wages must follow 
 prices. Hence the sliding-scales, beginning with 
 that of South Wales in 1875, and those of Durham 
 and Northumberland in 1877-8. The long fall of 
 prices, the bad trade and disastrous strikes of 
 the later 'seventies and 'eighties, made this simple 
 system intolerable. The northern scales were main- 
 tained till 1886 and 1889, and then abandoned ; 
 South Wales alone remained faithful. At the latter 
 period, the Yorkshire miners broke off from the 
 Northern union, demanding a more aggressive 
 policy, especially a living or minimum wage as a 
 first charge on prices. After a sixteen weeks' 
 strike in the Midlands in 1898, a Conciliation Board 
 was set up which, without any declared principle 
 for determining wage-rates, actually started with 
 both minimum and maximum limits. This example 
 was gradually followed in other districts ; and the 
 idea of a minimum wage thus entered, almost un- 
 consciously, into practice. But it was a minimum 
 which could only be defended by fighting ; and, 
 being a piece rate, it did not compel the coal-owner 
 
§ v.] THE NEW AGE 531 
 
 to keep his mine open all the week, and so did not 
 necessarily mean a " living wage." The demand 
 for a legal minimum would have grown more 
 rapidly but for the dividing influence of different 
 interests in the different coalfields (the Midlands 
 chiefly supply a home market, safe from foreign 
 competition ; South Wales can meet this competi- 
 tion by the high value of its steam coal ; the North 
 has not these advantages). Nevertheless, the de- 
 mand grew, and many coal-owners favoured it as 
 a steadying influence on prices, and a restraint on 
 gambling in futures and undue competition. For 
 some years, the miners' representatives on the 
 Conciliation Boards took a position of compromise, 
 insisting on discussing other trade circumstances 
 than price, bargaining on " reasonable grounds," 
 and for the rest (except in Northumberland and 
 Durham) demanding an eight-hours' day. No 
 doubt, victory on the last-named question encour- 
 aged the men to go forward, for the Coal Mines 
 (Eight Hours') Act of 1908 was a revolutionary 
 interference with the conditions of adult labour, 
 judged by old-time standards. The prosperity of 
 trade was another favourable circumstance. 
 
 Accordingly, in January 1912, the Miners' Federa- 
 tion of Great Britain polled its members on the 
 issue of a general strike for a minimum wage. A 
 majority of 330,000 miners were favourable ; 
 notices were given at the end of February ; and, a 
 fortnight later, over a million men were either on 
 strike or locked out. The effect upon the national 
 
632 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 life rapidly became disastrous. In the North, 
 thousands of factories were closed; everywhere, 
 railway services were reduced to a minimum. 
 Shipping was affected ; the provision of light, heat, 
 traction, and industrial power was threatened. 
 By March 20th, three-quarters of a mDlion of other 
 workers had been thrown out of emplojonent ; 
 coal had reached nearly double its normal price, 
 and every household was feeling the pinch. The 
 stocks in reserve at any time, though large enough 
 to make the fortunes of their owners when prices 
 suddenly rise, are insufficient to meet the industrial 
 and domestic demand for more than a few weeks ; 
 a stoppage of British miners is, therefore, the 
 equivalent of a complete failure of crops in an agri- 
 cultural country. There was, however, no disorder 
 or panic. Faced with a situation so grave, the 
 Government offered a locally variable minimum 
 wage, administered by district boards on the 
 model of those set up for the sweated industries. 
 The English masters were generally willing; 
 those of Scotland and South Wales refused ; the 
 unions stood out for a national minimum flat-rate 
 of 5s. a day for men working underground, and 2s. 
 for boys, with rates for hewers varying according 
 to local circumstances. 
 
 A settlement by negotiation having proved 
 impossible, the Prime Minister introduced in the 
 Commons, on March 19, as a matter of extreme 
 urgency, his Coal Mines (Minimum Wage) Bill, 
 Mr Asquith said he proposed this measure " with 
 
§ v.] THE NEW AGE 533 
 
 great and unaffected reluctance " ; and he pro- 
 tested that " it laid down no general principle " — 
 a suggestion disputed by both Conservative and 
 Labour Members. The Bill, ostensibly a temporary 
 measure, provided for minimum wages to be pay- 
 able from its enactment, the rates being determined 
 by local joint-boards having a chairman — elected, 
 or, failing agreement, appointed by the Board of 
 Trade — ^with a deciding vote. The boards were 
 also empowered to make special arrangements for 
 aged and infirm workers, and to fix " safeguards," 
 or conditions of regularity and efficiency, non- 
 compliance with which may deprive the worker of 
 the right to the minimum wage. The Bill had no 
 special penal provisions (miners simply obtained 
 the common-law right to sue for the declared 
 wage), and made no attempt to compel the owner 
 to keep the mine open, or the miner to go to work. 
 The Leader of the Opposition, Mr Bonar Law, ex- 
 pressed his mistrust and misgiving ; but Parliament 
 had no alternative policy before it, and the strike 
 must be ended. The Laboiir Party voted for the 
 Bill on the second reading, but against it on the 
 third, on the ground that the specific figures de- 
 manded by the miners were not included. Outside 
 St Stephen's, there was much loose talk about 
 "Syndicalism," although the coal-miners, with 
 their complete organization, their M.P.'s, and their 
 long practice in joint-board conciliation, did^ not 
 seem to answer well to this imported name. Public 
 sympathy, indeed, was generally with them ; two- 
 
534 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 thirds of the masters had accepted the minimum- 
 wage principle at the outset ; the Government 
 declared it to be " consistent with justice and the 
 best interests of the community." There was no 
 question here of disorder or breaches of contract. 
 Mr Vernon Hartshorn, one of the miners' leaders, 
 declared that " the Government was faced with the 
 most difficult problem that statesmanship had yet 
 been called upon to deal with " ; and this did not 
 at the moment seem a very great exaggeration. 
 Mr G. N. Barnes, M.P., would have preferred a 
 settlement by negotiation. Nobody was over- 
 confident ; but a trade, a section of which " could 
 not earn a reasonable minimum wage, through no 
 fault of their own " — a trade better paid than many, 
 though hard, gloomy, and dangerous — suddenly 
 found that, the conditions being favourable, only 
 the hardiest scruples could stand against its own 
 unanimity. The strike ended on April 8, when the 
 miners had lost a million and a half sterling in 
 wages, and the railways four millions in traffic 
 receipts. The Act came into force forthwith. The 
 minimum rates fixed by the district boards usually 
 fell short, by five or ten per cent., of the schedules 
 the strikers had demanded. 
 
 This momentous experiment — momentous politi- 
 cally, in the extension it gives to the method of 
 delegated legislation by joint local boards, as well 
 as economically, in its immediate purpose — can 
 be justified only on one ground, namely, that the 
 principle of a living wage for labour as a first 
 
§v.] THE NEW AGE 535 
 
 charge upon the product of national industry is 
 accepted. There is no finality in human affairs ; 
 it is not clear how the minimum wage is to be 
 defined (the subsistence wage of the chainmakers 
 and shirtmakers is not necessarily the same as the 
 " fair wage " of many State and municipal con- 
 tracts) ; and the application of the principle to 
 one occupation after another may be very slow. 
 But, even if we were not required to presume the 
 gravity of statesmen, the history of these several 
 measures would demonstrate that the principle has 
 entered into the national consciousness and will. 
 It is significant that the miners' minimum wage 
 arose by a conjunction of that humaner spirit 
 which we saw born after the last great trade crisis 
 with the practice of voluntary arbitration, the 
 final and most considerable expedient which could 
 be found to soften the collisions incidental to an 
 individualist organization of industry without 
 radically modifying that organization. The social 
 control over wages has been resumed after a break 
 of two centuries, during which these two leading 
 institutions of industrial democracy were created — 
 trade unionism, and organized conciliation. There 
 was no room in the mediaeval fabric for either of 
 them. Society was rigidly bound in a hierachy, 
 based on certain conceptions dictated by the 
 Church and naaintained by the State — conceptions 
 which took legal form because they were generally 
 accepted, because, in the small and simple com- 
 munities of those days, thorough regulation was 
 
536 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 comparatively easy, and unlettered minds dreamed 
 of no other way. Hence, civic regulation of 
 marketed goods to prevent fraud, of fair rates of 
 interest, of fair wages, of apprenticeship, and so on. 
 Everybody was paternally protected — consumer, 
 workman, employer ; everyone had his accepted 
 place and standard of living. This is a condition 
 of law in which there is no place for arbitration. 
 When, in the sixteenth century, the craft guilds 
 began to break down, and the appeal of the worker 
 was met in the famous Statute of Apprentices, 
 authorizing the justices to meet yearly to fix fair 
 wages, this was not, as Arnold Toynbee seems to 
 have thought,^ an arbitral, but a legal, process, 
 enforceable by heavy penalties. We have seen 
 that the assumption of a right to a customary or 
 living wage continued till the middle of the eigh- 
 teenth century, and even, feebly, till the beginning 
 of the nineteenth. By this time, the social spirit 
 of the old compact was as dead as the theology that 
 had sustained it ; distinct classes of capitalist 
 employers and lifelong manual workers had sepa- 
 rated out ; and neither the law nor the conscience 
 of the day had any remedy to offer for the collisions 
 of interest that arose between them. 
 
 The first impulse is to depict one class as op- 
 pressers, the other as its victims. Let us rather 
 say that they were both victims of an historical 
 necessity, represented by the steam-engine on the 
 one hand, and on the other by the processes of 
 
 ' Industrial Bevolution, p. 53. 
 
§ v.] THE NEW AGE 537 
 
 conquest and colonization which have opened out 
 successively America, Asia, and Africa. But, in 
 turn, this necessity has revealed another no less 
 commanding. It was quickly found that material 
 progress involved political democracy ; it has been 
 more slowly discovered that the interest of the 
 whole community must be supreme in the daily 
 round of business as well as in affairs called political. 
 The British people are very patient, very un- 
 responsive to selfish or revolutionary appeals. 
 They have, at a dreadful cost, tried laisser faire 
 pure and simple. They have tried, at great length, 
 the compromise by which employers recognized 
 the unions of skilled workmen, and the skilled 
 workmen recognized free capitalism, with its 
 corollary that wages must follow prices, while both 
 masters and men tacitly ignored the meaning of the 
 growth of a vast unskilled residuum. At the 
 moment when the conscience of the community 
 was awakening to the worst aspects of this com- 
 promise, the " aristocracy of labour " had begun 
 to discover that no voluntary combination of 
 skilled hands sufficed to secure a just remuneration 
 while the industrial structure could be described 
 as a box without a bottom, a room without a 
 strong floor. So it happened that, in an industry 
 far removed from mediaeval traditions, and equally 
 far from what are commonly called " sweating " 
 practices, the idea of a standard of life was re-born, 
 and the method of the district joint-board was 
 taken over from Whitechapel and Cradley Heath. 
 
538 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 In its modern re-appearance, the minimum wage 
 owes little or nothing to Church or State. It has 
 none of the arbitrariness of the ancient magisterial 
 assessments. But it has this in common with the 
 olden paternal legislation, that, amid a thousand 
 other acts in aid of the helpless or the handicapped, 
 and with many sanctions formerly unimaginable, 
 it expresses a social compact and a social ideal. It 
 definitely closes the chapter in British history in 
 which individual greed reigned supreme ; and it 
 enables us to look in the face the freest peoples 
 under our flag, or any other, and to dispute with 
 them the greatest hopes of the future. 
 
 VI. Conclusion 
 
 The road of history runs out of sight ; but it 
 has its crossways where the commerce of thought 
 comes to a halt, as grosser traffic to market. Look- 
 ing backward, from this turning, to the point far 
 below whence we started, the perspective of the 
 hard path which the British people have climbed in 
 the last century and a half appears more clearly. 
 The wonder of their endurance is not less, nor the 
 pitifulness of much of their pride, their blind 
 heroisms, their now impossible creeds. But a 
 period which, to the casual eye of to-day, may seem 
 merely fantastic, monstrous, incredible, assumes 
 for us a new significance and interest. 
 
 We have seen a nation torn from the soil, and 
 
§ VI.] THE NEW AGE 539 
 
 bound to strange machines in squalid towns. We 
 have seen them reduced to new kinds of serfdom, 
 because Napoleon must be beaten, and the landlords 
 be kept in comfort. And we have seen them, with 
 indescribable courage, struggling back by many 
 and devious tracks into the light, helped here and 
 there by men of fortune, braced everywhere by 
 memories surely engraved by pain and love. The 
 poignancy of this spectacle could not be borne did 
 we not feel that there must have been at its heart 
 a moral necessity, and that there must be in its 
 outcome something that will lift the name of 
 England higher than the best achievements we 
 have recorded. If it do not discover the soul of 
 good in things evil, the truth of history is an 
 ineffectual flame. In fact. Napoleon and Castle- 
 reagh were small, ephemeral adversaries beside the 
 impersonal forces we have been seeking to trace. 
 The greatest evil is ever the price we must pay 
 for the greatest good, the Angel with whom man 
 must wrestle ui the darkness. From the beginning 
 mankind has made its account with poverty. 
 Destiny at length sets a worthier task. The com- 
 manding fact henceforth is to be not poverty, but 
 wealth. Give me a cylinder and piston, and the 
 rest is easy. Give me the only steam-engine, and 
 I am master of the world. But then the world 
 has but exchanged one sort of poverty and despot- 
 ism for another. Wealth, or Commonwealth ? Is 
 man, or the machine, to be master ? Selfishness 
 makes the quickest answer ; and the transforma- 
 
540 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 tion proceeds. The mass of the victims of the 
 machine and its " inexorable laws " are voiceless ; 
 at first, there are ten inventors, and a hundred 
 exploiters of invention, for every " reformer." As 
 the mischief spreads, and the rewards of competitive 
 invention become scantier, the spirit of revolt 
 gathers force. The common British people cannot 
 let go the notion that government is essential to 
 a civilized society, even more essential against 
 domestic than foreign foes, and most of all essential 
 against the local exploiter of the poor. Conquered 
 where Napoleon could not conquer, by a machine 
 that Napoleon had not the wit to seize, in their 
 bitterness they still look for help to the hoary 
 invention of Simon de Montfort. To what should 
 England look, if not to a people's Parliament ? 
 
 The Thirty Years' War was not, perhaps, more 
 destructive than the unarmed struggle which began 
 directly after Waterloo, and saw a definitive vic- 
 tory only in 1885. Half-way through, it was found 
 that a reformed Parliament would not alone suffice. 
 There was now in possession not only a machine, 
 but a stoutly arrayed class of machine-owners, 
 abundantly served by legal, clerical, economic, 
 literary, and scientific attendants. The working 
 folk had won from this triumphant early Victorian 
 capitalism the right to cheap food, to some personal 
 freedom, protection, and education. This was 
 still not enough ; for it can never be enough for men 
 just not to starve. They must be separately 
 organized for daily bargaining. Years are spent in 
 
§ VI.] THE NEW AGE 541 
 
 building up trade unions, co-operative stores, friendly 
 societies, funds to secure a decent burial, and other 
 offerings to the god of thrift, and in experimenting 
 with more and more ingenious expedients in daily 
 bargaining. Again, the problem seemed at the 
 point of solution, when three forgotten factors 
 forced themselves into notice, in rapid succession : 
 
 (1) The Island-State must adjust itself to the 
 requirements of a world-wide Empire, the pressure 
 of rivals no longer to be despised, and the tempta- 
 tion of tropical markets ready to give gold, oil, and 
 rubber, for cotton-cloth, rum, and small-arms. 
 
 (2) There is a Trade Cycle, that might rather be 
 called cyclone, whereto every industrial country 
 must learn to adjust its mechanism of production 
 and exchange. (3) At the end of the storm, a 
 certain Submerged Tenth, of tragic mien, raises its 
 head above the flood. 
 
 These three quantities are at the base of our 
 modern situation. They still stand before us, 
 questions that must be answered, tasks that must 
 be fulfilled, irreconcilables that must be reconciled, 
 The utmost Edwardian England could do was, in 
 recognizing their existence, to prepare for the 
 abandonment of its inherited economic dogmas, 
 and the adoption of a new principle of social action! 
 In such emergencies, the reality of ancient powers, 
 like religion and nationality, is tested. We have 
 seen how religion was tested in Whitechapel, and 
 how the golden word of brotherhood, ringing across 
 the world, proved the salvation of the London 
 
542 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. tx. 
 
 docker. England can no longer live to herself 
 alone ; and we now understand that neither for 
 labour nor capital is there anything final in nationa- 
 lity. But a nation has resources not to be counted 
 in economic terms ; it is, and will probably remain 
 so far as we need attempt to see, a union of peculiar 
 strength. In this supreme modern problem of the 
 mastery of the wealth-making machine, the spirit 
 of nationality has an important part to play. It 
 speaks to us in our mothers' simple words. We are 
 no longer a, b, c, so many " factors of production," 
 but living souls, members of a household. Suddenly 
 we are aware of our relationship with ages, noble 
 in many respects, before the age of the machine, 
 with other climes where the worship of the machine 
 has never gone to such lengths. What shall it 
 profit a people if, in gaining a world, it lose its own 
 integrity ? Men and classes have been severed too 
 long ; there is one inclusive interest that can be, 
 here and now, effectively asserted — ^that of the 
 nation as a whole. 
 
 This collective interest may be envisaged vari- 
 ously. We have seen it expressed, in the last two 
 decades of the nineteenth century, in a sense of 
 compunction that, after so much wealth had been 
 heaped up, so much poverty, disease, ignorance, 
 and misery should be found to issue from the 
 same process. A just demand, admitted, is half 
 disarmed. Let us know the worst, these post- 
 Victorians seemed to say ; and, as revelation fol- 
 lowed revelation, prejudice was dissolved, dogma 
 
§vi.] THE NEW AGE 543 
 
 discredited, and the reconstitution of the British 
 household began. It is characteristic that pity 
 and justice should assume here a business garb ; 
 the cry that England must awake, and make herself 
 more efficient to meet the competition of younger 
 nations, has been a prominent note in the chorus 
 demanding the better organization of all the 
 material activities of society, so that there may no 
 longer be glaring waste or neglect of human faculty 
 and the bounty of nature. The best formula, it is 
 true, is liable to misuse. This word " organization " 
 may be translated to mean no more than that 
 many ill-paid clerks, with a beautiful card-index, 
 are kept to do work formerly disposed of by a few 
 capable men by wit and memory. There is even a 
 fashion of "scientific " regimentation and "speeding- 
 up," as there was a fashion of " slumming," If mere 
 rapidity of change be the test of progress, then, 
 indeed, the last generation — ^the age of the internal 
 combustion engine, the turbine, the practical 
 dynamo, and the filament lamp, of shorthand and 
 the card-index, the telephone and typewriter, of 
 the aeroplane and wireless telegraphy, of the girl 
 clerk and the Labour Minister — easily eclipses the 
 age of the steam-engine and the fiirst Reform Bill. 
 There may have been greater progress, or not ; if 
 so, it is not because mechanical invention is more 
 daringly active than ever before, not because 
 doctrinaires and amateurs are now generally 
 suspect, nor that the triumphs of speed fill all 
 minds, and the sacrifices they require are counted 
 
644 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 cheap. Access of speed may result in progress, or 
 not. It leaves unanswered the essential question : 
 Which is master, man or the machine ? Who 
 gains, the many or the few ? What is the aim, 
 more luxury and power, or more wisdom and 
 happiness ? 
 
 Twenty years ago. Western society echoed with 
 plaints of a mental and normal decadence, taking 
 extreme shape in two gloomy books by the late 
 Max Nordau. It was not difficult then to show 
 that an increase of actual insanity was unproved, 
 that the milder nervous maladies — ^neurasthenia, 
 hysteria, melancholia, and nerve debility — ^were 
 chiefly found in a small, pampered class, and that, 
 for the rest, other forms of disease would yield to 
 the treatment which had already banished small- 
 pox and cholera. Doctors protested that we used 
 our nerves too little, not too much ; that as, in 
 writer's cramp, the muscles are not too powerful, 
 but too weak, so the nerves are usually not over- 
 but under-sensitive. It was a period of growing 
 pains. The democracy was just arriving upon the 
 threshold of the worlds of knowledge, art, and 
 pleasure. Meeting the new and curious at every 
 street corner, seeing the world-comedy over the 
 foot-lights of a cheap press, it was not surprising 
 that they should display some extravagance. That 
 the bounds of human thought and hope should be 
 suddenly thrown wide without any loss or error 
 was not to be expected. Gradually, a genuine cult 
 of the imagination would grow up ; meanwhile, the 
 
§ VI.] THE NEW AGE 545 
 
 riew restlessness, curiosity, impatience must be 
 esteemed a vast improvement upon the old lethargy 
 and ignorance, a necessary stage in the evolution 
 of a maturer manhood. 
 
 To-day, the argument continues in a lower key. 
 Wealth has been heavily taxed. There are evident 
 benefits ; but how does the account balance, and 
 what of the future ? " Industrial unrest " is the 
 text of alarmed and pessimistic preachers. Could 
 any result have been more confidently predicated 
 of a generation of elementary schooling ? Does 
 England repent her awakening ? Does she repent 
 having established some equality of start and oppor- 
 tunity ? Is it not good to watch the approach of 
 the day when the romance which learning and 
 research already hold for the privileged scholar will 
 reach the mechanic at his bench, when a library 
 wUl be a part of every home in the land, and none 
 will speak of setting up a " ladder " for a few 
 athletes to climb from the board school to the 
 university, because the university will have been 
 brought down from its Olympian heights, and 
 made accessible to every youth of decent abilities ? 
 
 The desire without which this could not be is 
 growing, and it is good. Old England is burgeoning 
 with young vigour. In particular directions, the 
 national genius may have reached higher in the 
 past ; but at no time has there been such a volume 
 and variety of talent, earnest work, and fruitful 
 speculation. The results are already prodigious. 
 Nor should even the rarer of these results, in 
 2m 
 
546 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 physical science and literature, be attributed to a 
 mere academic movement ; they are fruits of a 
 vast growth of thought and energy which is fer- 
 menting throughout the whole body of the nation. 
 It is represented not only in public effort, but in the 
 private spirit of the people. There is less drunken- 
 ness, less slovenliness, less ugliness, less cruelty, 
 disease, and crime. One who has moved much and 
 long in city life now sees, especially among the 
 young, more bright, healthy faces, many more 
 capable hands. There is good evidence that, being 
 better fed and better dressed, hundreds of thousands 
 of young men and women are determined to polish 
 their minds also, as well for the sake of more intel- 
 ligent work as for more enjoyable leisure. The 
 improvement of manners is most strongly marked. 
 When Baron Liebig was reported to have declared 
 that " civilization is the economy of power, and 
 English power is coal," John Ruskin replied, im- 
 petuously : " Not altogether, my chemical friend. 
 Civilisation is the making of civil persons, a kind 
 of distillation of which alembics are incapable, and 
 does not at all imply the turning of a small company 
 of gentlemen into a large company of ironmongers. 
 English power (what little of it may be left) is 
 by no means coal, but is, indeed, of that which, 
 when the whole world turns to coal, then chiefly 
 lives." Chivalry was a word certainly incompatible 
 with the lower type of industry in the coal and 
 steam age, and still not to be lightly invoked, 
 But the demand for more active minds, not only 
 
§ VI.] THE NEW AGE 547 
 
 among masters, merchants, inventors, but among 
 the rank and file of every occupation, is more 
 favourable than heretofore to the growth of gentle- 
 manliness. The tyranny and servility of olden 
 days are disappearing. Woman has brought into 
 some departments of the world of commerce a spirit 
 of generosity and grace. Everywhere, force counts 
 for less, reason and public feeling for more. The 
 increasing frequency and importance of foreign rela- 
 tions work in the same direction. Business cannot, 
 indeed, be allowed with safety to become the whole 
 of life ; and so it cannot claim that full-orbed ideal 
 which belongs to the highest manhood. It is much 
 if we can discern beneath the surface of the daily 
 struggle the influence of the nobler spirit whose per- 
 fect flower we find in poesy and art and all pure faith. 
 A New Zealand statesman, Sir Joseph Ward, on 
 a recent home-coming from England, is reported to 
 have said : " Age has its beautiful side, but it has 
 also a terrible side ; and in the old country it has 
 a devastating effect. Wherever I went, I found 
 extreme poverty on the one hand, and extreme 
 wealth on the other. That is the difficulty caused 
 by age in an old land as the years pass. We should 
 try to keep the problem away from New Zealand." 
 There are thus two voices assailing the Island 
 State, critics of the Right and of the Left. Milton's 
 England was similarly assailed ; and the declaration 
 of faith in "liberty, the nurse of all great wits," 
 which the immortal poet hurled at both camps, 
 will suflice for this and many a day to come: 
 
548 MODERN ENGLAND [chap. ix. 
 
 " When the cherfulnesse of the people is so 
 sprightly up, as that it has not only wherewith to 
 guard well its own freedom and safety but to spare, 
 and to bestow upon the solidest and sublimest 
 points of controversie and new invention, it be- 
 tok'ns us not degenerated, nor drooping to a fatall 
 decay, but casting off the old and wrincl'd skin of 
 corruption to outlive these pangs and wax young 
 again, entring the glorious waies of Truth and 
 prosperous virtue destin'd to become great and 
 honourable in these latter ages." We, too, may see, 
 in the mind's eye, "a noble and puissant Nation 
 rousing herself like a strong man after sleep." By 
 the force not of authority or doctrine, but of sym- 
 pathy and understanding, she will again lead the 
 families of mankind, to purer victories. For the 
 spirit of to-day, at once scientific and humane, 
 accepts the doom of perpetual change by which all 
 our accomplishment is beset. We may guide, we 
 cannot arrest, the universal movement. We must 
 organise; yet the currents of life must have free 
 play. The industrial revolution has no beginning 
 and no end. Momently, new powers in nature are 
 discovered which may eclipse all the wonders of the 
 steam age, and therewith uncharted possibilities of 
 happiness and woe. Ceaseless transformation is 
 the one certain thing — ^this, and the power of the 
 human will, which, being forewarned, is forearmed, 
 and, being nobly du'ected, is invincible. 
 
APPENDIX I 
 
 POPULATION AND EMIGRATION 
 
 A. Estimates for Earlier Times — 
 England and Wales 
 
 Years. 
 
 Population. 
 
 Source of Estimate. 
 
 1100 
 
 1| millions 
 
 Based on Domes 
 day Survey 
 
 1377 
 
 2to2| „ 
 
 Poll-tax 
 
 1500-1700 
 
 2ito2^ „ 
 
 Thorold Rogers 
 
 1688 
 
 4,751,000 
 
 Gregory King 
 
 1700 
 
 5,134,000 
 
 Finlaison ^ 
 
 1750 
 
 6,039,000 
 
 1 
 
 1769 
 
 8,600,000 
 
 Arthur Young 
 
 1800 
 
 9,187,000 
 
 Finlaison ^ 
 
 B. The United Kingdom 
 
 (From the Oensua Beports) 
 
 The first complete Census of the kingdom was 
 taken in 1821. This and the following Censuses did 
 not include men of the Army and Navy and Merchant 
 Service at home. England, Wales, and Scotland 
 show a continuous increase, Ireland a continuous 
 decline since 1841. In 1821, Ireland had 32-6 
 per cent., in 1911 only 9'7 per cent., of the popula- 
 tion of the kingdom. The proportion of Wales has 
 
 i Quoted in 1831 Census Report. 
 
 649 
 
550 
 
 MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 increased from 3-4 to 4)'5 per cent., that of Scotland 
 from 10 to lOj per cent. 
 
 'i 
 
 s 
 
 O«005t-05rHi-©>«00 
 
 •6 
 
 s 
 
 i 
 
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 1 
 
 1 
 
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 1 
 
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APPENDIX 1 
 
 551 
 
 C. England and Wales 
 
 Census 
 Year. 
 
 Families 
 or Separate 
 
 Occupiers 
 (millions). 
 
 Population 
 (millions). 
 
 Increase 
 
 at each 
 
 Census 
 
 (millions). 
 
 Percentage 
 of Increase. 
 
 1801 
 
 1-89 
 
 8-89 
 
 
 • • 
 
 1811 
 
 214 
 
 10-16 
 
 1-27 
 
 14-00 
 
 1821 
 
 2-49 
 
 1200 
 
 1-83 
 
 18-06 
 
 1831 
 
 2-91 
 
 13-89 
 
 1-89 
 
 15-80 
 
 1841 
 
 (Not taken) 
 
 15-91 
 
 2-01 
 
 14-27 
 
 1851 
 
 3-71 
 
 17-92 
 
 2-01 
 
 12-65 
 
 1861 
 
 4-49 
 
 20-06 
 
 2 13 
 
 11-90 
 
 1871 
 
 5 04 
 
 22-71 
 
 2-64 
 
 13-21 
 
 1881 
 
 5-63 
 
 25-97 
 
 3-26 
 
 14-36 
 
 1891 
 
 613 
 
 2900 
 
 3-02 
 
 11-65 
 
 1901 
 
 7-03 
 
 32-52 
 
 3-52 
 
 12-17 
 
 1911 
 
 8 01 
 
 36-07 
 
 3-54 
 
 10-91 
 
 In the first four Censuses, the Army, Navy, and 
 Merchant Service at home were not included. 
 
 The proportion of urban population has steadily 
 mcreased from 50-2 per cent, in 1851 to 78-1 per 
 cent, in 1911, the rural proportion falling from 
 49-8 to 21-9 per cent. 
 
 The number of births between the last two Cen- 
 suses was 9,290,774, the deaths 5,245,852. The natu- 
 ral increase in the decade 1901-11 was, therefore, 
 4,044,922, the recorded increase only 3,547,426, 
 leaving a loss of 497,496 to be accounted for. 
 
 This is due chiefly, if not wholly, to balance of 
 emigration. The decennial excess of emigration 
 
552 
 
 MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 over immigration, at previous Censuses, is given 
 as follows : — 
 
 1861 122,111 
 1871 78,968 
 1881 164,307 
 
 1891 601,389 
 1901 68,330 
 1911 501,998 
 
 The above figures are for England and Wales 
 only. 
 
 The balance of outward over inward passengers 
 between the United Kingdom and non-European 
 countries shows a large increase in the last few 
 years. As against a yearly average of 180,000 in 
 the 'eighties, and 76,000 in the 'nineties, it was in 
 
 1901 
 
 72,016 
 
 
 
 1907 235,092 
 
 1902 
 
 101,547 
 
 
 
 1908 91,156 
 
 1903 
 
 147,037 
 
 
 
 1909 139,693 
 
 1904 
 
 126,854 
 
 
 
 1910 233,709 
 
 1905 
 
 139,365 
 
 
 
 1911 261,809 
 
 1906 
 
 194,671 
 
 
 
 
 
 In 11 
 
 yeai 
 
 ■s = 
 
 = 1,743,048 
 
 At the beginning of this period, most emigrants 
 went to the United States ; at the end, 80 per 
 cent, went to the British Colonies — in 1911, half 
 of them went to Canada. This is largely a result 
 of the Colonial policy of assisted immigration. 
 
 The net alien immigration into the United 
 Kingdom was about 18,000. 
 
 These (Table D) are the only registration counties 
 — except the quasi-metropolitan, Essex, Middlesex, 
 
APPENDIX I 
 
 553 
 
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 fl 
 
 fi! 
 
 n 
 
 ce 
 
 S 
 
 
 
 3 
 
 3 
 
 C3 
 1-1 
 
 ^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 3 
 
 ^ 
 
 
664 
 
 MODERN ENGLAlfD 
 
 and Kent — Shaving in 1911 a population of more 
 than 1,000,000. The Administrative County of 
 London for the first time shows a small decline in 
 the last decade, " Greater London " includes 
 Croydon, Wimbledon, Kingston, Richmond, 
 Bromley, Beckenham, Willesden, Tottenham, 
 Hornsey, Edmonton, Ealing, West and East Ham. 
 Three English counties — Cumberland, West- 
 moreland, and West Suffolk; five Welsh — ^Meri- 
 oneth, Montgomery, Cardigan, Radnor, and 
 Carnarvonshire; and four county boroughs — 
 Hastings, Halifax, Burton, and Canterbury — 
 show a decline of population in the last decade. 
 
 E. The British Empire 
 Population and Area 
 
 (SI 
 
 r J. A. Baines, C.S.I., in the Statistical Society JourncU, 
 
 
 
 
 July 1911). 
 
 
 
 Popula- 
 
 Increase (Millions). 
 
 Area. 
 
 
 1. By 
 
 2. By Growthu 
 
 
 
 
 tion 
 
 
 Acqui- 
 
 
 Square 
 
 
 
 
 (MiUions). 
 
 Total. 
 
 sition 
 
 On Ter- 
 
 On later 
 
 Miles 
 
 Addi- 
 
 
 
 
 since 
 
 ritories 
 
 Addi- 
 
 (Mil- 
 
 tions. 
 
 
 
 
 1841. 
 
 of 1841. 
 
 tions. 
 
 lions). 
 
 
 1841 
 
 203 
 
 
 
 
 
 8-5 
 
 
 18S1 
 
 241 
 
 37 
 
 18 
 
 19 
 
 
 8-7 
 
 •25 
 
 1861 
 
 258 
 
 17 
 
 1 
 
 14 
 
 2 
 
 8-8 
 
 •03 
 
 1871 
 
 280 
 
 22 
 
 
 19 
 
 2 
 
 8-8 
 
 
 1881 
 
 306 
 
 25 
 
 "•7 
 
 22 
 
 2 
 
 8-8 
 
 •05 
 
 1891 
 
 346 
 
 40 
 
 6 
 
 29 
 
 6 
 
 9-6 
 
 •73 
 
 1901 
 
 385 
 
 38 
 
 26 
 
 9 
 
 2 
 
 111 
 
 1'54 
 
 1911 
 Total 
 
 418 
 
 33 
 
 2 
 
 24 
 
 6 
 
 11-3 
 
 •18 
 
 •• 
 
 216 
 
 65 
 
 138 
 
 21 
 
 
 2-8 
 
APPENDIX I 655 
 
 Climatic and Political Distribution, 1911 
 
 
 Area. 
 
 Population. 
 
 Temperate 
 
 6,977,591 
 
 58,672,000 
 
 Sub-Tropical 
 
 1,204,368 
 
 7,786,000 
 
 Tropical 
 
 3,149,284 
 
 352,277,000 
 
 Dominions . 7,446,869 63,890,000 
 
 Crown Colonies 267,916 9,661,000 
 
 Protectorates 1,849,861 30,183,000 
 
 India . . 1,766,597 315,001,000 
 
 Total . . 11,331,243 418,735,000 
 
APPENDIX n 
 EMPLOYMENT AND TRADE UNIONISM 
 
 A. England and Wales, 1901 
 
 (Figv/res from the Census Reports.) 
 
 Total Population . . 32,678,213 
 
 Total " Occupied " . . 14,479,097 
 
 Total " Unoccupied or Re- 
 tired " . . . 18,199,116 
 
 All under 10 years old . . . 7,208,999 
 
 Unoccupied 10-13 years old . , 2,465,575 
 
 Wives (many " Occupied ") . . 5,717,537 
 
 Aged 70 and over .... 888,080 
 
 16,275,191 
 
 The " unoccupied " included 374,404 persons 
 in workhouses, asylums, prisons, and hospitals. 
 
 Groups of Occupations (Thousands) 
 
 Male. Female. Total. 
 
 Directing and other 
 
 Services — 
 
 Government . . 172 26 198 
 
 Defence . . . 168 . . 168 
 
 Professional . . . 311 294 605 
 
 651 320 971 
 
 666 ^-^— ^________ 
 
APPENDIX II 557 
 
 Male. Female. Total. 
 
 Distribution — 
 Commercial . 
 Transport 
 
 530 
 . 1,249 
 
 59 
 18 
 
 589 
 1,267 
 
 Domestic Services . 
 
 1,779 
 304 
 
 77 
 1,690 
 
 1,856 
 1,994 
 
 Building and Supply Trades — 
 
 Building, etc. . . 1,042 . . 1,042 
 
 Wood, Furniture, De- 
 corations . . 283 24 257 
 
 Brick, Pottery, Glass, 
 
 etc. ... 142 33 175 
 
 Gas, Water, Electricity, 
 
 Sanitary Services . 71 . . 71 
 
 1,488 57 1,545 
 
 Food Trades (Food, 
 Tobacco, Drink, Lodging) 774 299 1,073 
 
 Clothing Trades — 
 
 Textiles . . • 492 663 1,155 
 
 Dress .... 414 711 1,125 
 
 Skins, Leather, etc. . 80 25 105 
 
 986 1,399 2,385 
 
158 MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 Male. 
 
 Metal Trades- 
 Metals, Machines, Im- 
 plements . . 1,174 
 Precious Metals, Jewels, 
 Instruments . . 130 
 
 Female 
 
 63 
 
 18 
 
 , Total. 
 
 1,237 
 148 
 
 Other Manufactures — 
 Chemicals, Oil, Soap, etc. 
 Paper, Books, etc. 
 
 1,304 
 
 102 
 
 188 
 
 81 
 
 26 
 90 
 
 1,385 
 
 128 
 
 278 
 
 
 290 
 
 116 
 
 406 
 
 Extractive Industries — 
 Mining, Quarries, etc. 
 Agriculture . 
 Fishing 
 
 800 
 1,071 
 
 24 
 
 5 
 
 57 
 
 805 
 
 1,128 
 
 24 
 
 
 1,895 
 
 62 
 
 1,957 
 
 Total of above Groups 
 (— OOO's omitted) 
 
 9,471, 
 
 4,101, 13,572, 
 
 B. United Kingdom, 1901 
 
 Membership of Trade Unions at the 
 beginning of the year. 
 
 {Figures from the Report of the Chief Labour Oorreapondent of the 
 Board of Trade.) 
 
 Total Unions . . . 1,252 
 
 Total Membership . . . 1,910,614 
 
 Female „ . . . 123,510 
 
APPENDIX n 
 
 559 
 
 Rather over 10,000 members were outside the 
 
 United Kingdom. 
 
 
 The following groups tally as nearly as possible 
 
 with those of the preceding table : 
 
 
 Government and Local Govern- 
 
 
 ment Employees 
 
 40,009 
 
 Transport .... 
 
 169,272 
 
 Domestic Service . 
 
 nil 
 
 Building, Woodwork, etc. 
 
 253,270 
 
 Food and Tobacco 
 
 17,329 
 
 Clothing Trades- 
 
 
 Textile .... 
 
 220,939 
 
 Boot and Shoe . 
 
 35,123 
 
 Other .... 
 
 32,578 
 
 Metal Trades — 
 
 
 Metal, Engineering, Ship- 
 
 
 building 
 
 338,205 
 
 Enginemen 
 
 19,688 
 
 Other Manufactures — 
 
 
 Chemical .... 
 
 20,138 
 
 Printing, etc. 
 
 57,256 
 
 Mining, Quarrying 
 
 505,056 
 
 General Labour 
 
 113,549 
 
 Other 
 
 48,496 
 
 
 1,910,614 
 
 The membership of unions afifiliated to the Trade 
 Union Congress was, in 1913, about 2,250,000. 
 The membership of unions and societies affiliated 
 to the Labour Party in 1912 was 1,880,401. 
 
APPENDIX III 
 
 CENSUS OF PRODUCTION OF THE 
 UNITED KINGDOM, 1907 
 
 The following leading points are summarized 
 from the Final Report (Cd. 6320 of 1912, pp. 
 938, 7s. 6d.), to which the reader is referred for 
 many explanatory details. This, the first British 
 Census of Production, was taken in 1908 with 
 respect to the previous year. 
 
 A. WoRKEES Included 
 Probably within Scope of the Censtis 
 
 Employers . 
 
 Working for Employers . 
 
 Working on own Account 
 
 Actually Covered 
 Salaried 
 Wage-earners 
 Outworkers . 
 
 Average number 
 Maximum „ 
 
 260,000 
 
 8,390,000 
 
 600,000 
 
 9,230,000 
 
 491,847 
 
 6,493,129 
 
 102,147 
 
 7,087,123 
 7,219,000 
 
 It will be seen that large numbers of " occupied 
 persons " according to the Population Census are 
 not here included. 
 
 Particulars for Agriculture and Fisheries (nearly 
 8 million workers) were obtained from other Govern- 
 
APPENDIX in 561 
 
 merit Departments. Estimates were made for the 
 output of between 1 and 2 million industrial workers. 
 Of the 6| million wage-earners recorded, 74*4 
 per cent, were males and 25"6 per cent, females. 
 Those under 18 years of age numbered 965,000 — 
 12"6 per cent, of the male and 24"8 per cent, of the 
 female workers. 
 
 B 
 
 . Net Output 
 
 
 
 {At point of production) 
 
 
 'dustry — 
 
 
 £ Millions. 
 
 £ Millions. 
 
 Gross Output 
 
 of Scheduled 
 
 
 
 Trades 
 
 ... 
 
 1,765 
 
 
 Less Materials 
 
 . 
 
 1,053 
 
 
 Net 1 (see next table) . . 712 
 
 Trades not Scheduled . . 50 
 
 Agriculture — 
 Food and Fodder Produce, 
 Flowers, Seeds, Plants (Gt. 
 Britain, £151 millions ; Ire- 
 land, £45 millions) . . 196 
 Horses, etc., not for food . 3 
 Hides and Skins ... 6 
 
 Wool 4 
 
 Timber .... -9 
 
 Flax -4 
 
 762 
 
 210 
 
 Fisheries ...... 12 
 
 Total 984 
 
 (Not including imported materials and cost of 
 transport and merchanting. — See Table D.) 
 
 ' I.e. the sum of the additions to value made at the di£Eerent 
 stages of production. 
 2n 
 
662 
 
 MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 
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APPENDIX m 
 
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564 
 
 MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 D. Aggregate Value of United Kingdom 
 Pkoduce 
 
 
 £. Millions. 
 
 Industry (including materials) 
 
 Agriculture 
 
 Fisheries .... 
 
 . 1,234 to 1,249 
 210 
 12 
 
 hess Materials duplicated 
 
 1,456 to 1,471 
 71 
 
 £ MiUlons. 
 Exported (f.o.b.) . . 464 
 Sold for Consumption . 921 
 
 1,385 
 
 1,385 to 1,400 
 
 Tlus Duties .... 
 
 48 
 
 Ready for Consumption or 
 Export 
 Less Exports at 
 
 factory price 430 to 410 
 = Goods made 
 and consumed 
 
 in the United 
 
 Kingdom . 1,003 to 1,038 
 
 1,433 to 1,448 
 
 Value added in Transport and Dis- 
 tribution — 
 To Home consumed Goods . 315 to 415 
 
 To Exports . . . . 34 to 54 
 
 1,782 to 1,917 
 
APPENDIX m 665 
 
 £ Millions. 
 Final Sales for Consumption or 
 
 Export 1,782 to 1,917 
 
 Less Exported (f.o.b.) . . 464 
 
 Home Consumption only . . 1,318 to 1,453 
 
 Pl^ls Net Imports for direct 
 consumption, and duties, 
 carriage, and profits . . 345 to 380 
 
 Total Cost to Consumers of Goods 
 consumed in United Kingdom 
 
 (1907) 1,663 to 1,833 
 
 E. Exports and Imports 
 As Percentages oj United Kingdom Output 
 
 Exports Net Imports 
 (1907). (1907). 
 
 1. Food, Drink, Fodder, 
 
 Plants, etc. . . 5 60^ 
 
 2. Raw Material of Industry 29^ 128 
 
 3. Finished Products of In- 
 
 dustry ... 25 7 
 
 The value, at port of shipment, of exports of 
 home produce and manufactures in 1907 equalled 
 33 per cent, of the value, at place of production, 
 of the net output, and 23 per cent, of the gross 
 output, of the United Kingdom. 
 
 • " Over 30 % of the food Imports consisted of materials to be 
 further worked up in the United Kingdom." 
 ' Almost all coal. 
 
566 MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 The net imports equalled 43 per cent, of the net 
 and 30 per cent, of the gross output of the United 
 Kingdom. 
 
 F. Capital, Income, and Savings 
 
 £ Millions. 
 The Manufacturing Capital of the 
 
 country (including value of land, 
 
 buildings and plant, and working 
 
 capital) in 1907 is estimated at . 1,400 to 1,600 
 Wear and Tear and Maintenance of 
 
 Capital in industry, agriculture, 
 
 transport, and trade, requires . 170 to 180 
 
 There is available for new capital 
 
 investments in the United King- 
 dom 170 to 190 
 
 New Investments outside the 
 
 United Kingdom (largely paid for 
 
 by exports) are estimated at . 100 
 
 Income from Foreign Investments 
 
 is estimated at ... 140 
 
 Income from Shipping and other 
 
 foreign Services is estimated at . 100 
 
 The Total Income of the United Kingdom in 
 1907 is estimated thus : 
 
 Goods Consumed or exchanged by 
 
 classes engaged in production and \;^ 
 
 , distribution .... 1,248 to 1,408 
 
 .Carry forward, . 1,248 to 1,408 
 
APPENDIX m 567 
 
 £ Millions. 
 Brought forward, . 1,248 to 1,408 
 
 Value of Services exchanged for 
 Goods and other Services (includ- 
 ing ownership of houses, etc., 
 railway passenger receipts, postal 
 services, domestic and govern- 
 ment services, professional and 
 artistic incomes) . . • 350 to 400 
 
 New Savings and Investments of 
 all classes (including income from 
 foreign investments) . . . 320 to 350 
 
 1,918 to 2,158 
 
 This confirms previous estimates 
 that the national income was 
 about £2,000,000, 
 
APPENDIX IV 
 
 DISTRIBUTION OF INCOME AND 
 CAPITAL 
 
 Recent estimates of the Total 
 
 Capital of the 
 
 United Kingdom are as follows :- 
 
 - 
 
 
 £ Millions. 
 
 F. W. Hirst, 1905 . 
 
 . 13,036 
 
 1909 . 
 
 . 13,986 
 
 R. A. Macdonald, 1900 . 
 
 . 13,500 
 
 1909 . 
 
 . 15,800 
 
 L. G. Chiozza-Money,! 1908 :— 
 
 £ MilUons. 
 
 Public Property- 
 
 558 
 
 Private Property in United 
 
 
 Kingdom . 
 
 10,567 
 
 Private Property Abroad 
 
 2,637 
 
 1<? '7fl*> 
 
 
 XOj 1 \J^ 
 
 1912 . 
 
 . 15,000 
 
 Mr Chiozza-Money shows, from the Inland 
 Revenue reports, that, of £300 millions passing 
 at death (in 80,000 separate estates), about two- 
 thirds was left by 4,000 persons. 
 
 In the same work, he points out that the amount 
 of gross profits assessed to income-tax — i.e. on 
 incomes exceeding £160 per annum — which was 
 
 * Riclies and Poverty, 10th edition. Chap. v. 
 
APPENDIX IV 569 
 
 £909 millions in 1908-9, is almost exactly a half 
 of the estimated income of the nation. On this 
 basis, he thus estimates the distribution of the 
 national income as just given : — 
 
 Number. Income, £. 
 
 Persons with incomes of 
 
 over £160 and their 
 
 families (5 persons) . 5,500,000 909,000,000 
 Persons with smaller 
 
 incomes and their 
 
 families . . . 39,000,000 935,000,000 
 
 44,500,000 1,844,000,000 
 
 The first line may be divided by separating 
 families having an income over £700. These 
 were 1,400,000 in number, with a total of £634 
 millions. Thus, of the whole nation, in 1908, 
 
 £ Millions. 
 
 1,400,000 " Rich " persons enjoyed . . 634 
 
 4,100,000 " Comfortable " persons enjoyed . 275 
 39,000,000 " Poor " persons enjoyed . . 935 
 
 A Committee of the British Association on " the 
 amount and distribution of income other than 
 wages below the income-tax exemption limit " 
 repqrts the following findings {Statistical Society 
 Journal, December 1910) : — 
 Number of Occupied persons paying in- 
 come-tax (est.) .... 800,000 
 Occupied persons other than manual 
 workers not paying income-tax (pro- 
 fessional, shop assistants, etc.) . . 4,100,000 
 
 «t,v_ 
 
570 MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 Aggregate Earned Income . . £285 millions 
 
 Aggregate Earned and Unearned 
 
 Income ..... 385 „ 
 Dr A. L. Bowley thus estimates the wages of 
 adult male workers when in continuous employ- 
 ment : — 
 
 Wage. 
 
 Number of 
 Men. 
 
 Percentage 
 
 Under 15s. 
 
 320,000 
 
 4 
 
 15s. to 20s. 
 
 640,000 
 
 8 
 
 20s. to 25s. 
 
 1,600,000 
 
 20 
 
 25s. to 30s. 
 
 1,680,000 
 
 21 
 
 30s. to 35s. 
 
 1,680,000 
 
 21 
 
 35s. to 40s. 
 
 1,040,000 
 
 13 
 
 40s. to 45s. 
 
 560,000 
 
 7 
 
 Over 45s, 
 
 480,000 
 
 6 
 
 Sir George Paish read important papers on 
 " Great Britain's Capital Investments in Indi- 
 vidual Colonies and Foreign Countries," before 
 the Royal Statistical Society, in June 1909 and 
 December 1910. 
 
 He estimated thus the total amount invested : 
 Up to the end of 1907 : 
 
 In the Colonies and India £1,312 millions 
 In Foreign Countries . £1,381 
 
 £2,693 millions 
 
 (bringing in an income of £139 
 millions = 5*2 per cent, per 
 annum) 
 Added in 1908 .... 130 
 
 Carry forwai-d, £2,823 millions 
 
APPENDIX IV 571 
 
 Brought forward, £2,823 millions 
 Added in 1909 .... 160 „ 
 „ „ 1910 . . . . 165 „ 
 
 Net Total of British Foreign In- 
 vestments, including private busi- 
 ness capital, but deducting foreign 
 capital in British companies or 
 loans, probably . . . £3,500 millions 
 
 About a half of the total is invested in North 
 and South America. After the United States, 
 more capital had been provided to Canada than 
 to any other country (£373 millions, now being 
 increased at the rate of £30 millions yearly, or 
 £40 millions including private business). The 
 Australasian Colonies have absorbed £380 millions 
 (two-thirds of this being Government loans). 
 South Africa £351 millions (a third in mining 
 companies), and India £365 millions (mostly for 
 railways). Argentina has received £269 millions, 
 Brazil £94 millions, Mexico £87 millions, Japan 
 £54 millions, Egypt £44 millions, and Russia £38 
 millions. Only £7 millions are invested in France, 
 and £6 millions in Germany. 
 
 The largest items to the end of 1907 were as 
 follows : 
 
 lotal Amount Average Bate 
 (£ Millions). of Interest. 
 
 American Railways . . 600 4'5 
 
 Colonial and Provincial Govern- 
 ment Loans . . . 375 3*71 
 
 X 
 
572 MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 Total Amount Average Rate 
 (£ Millions). of Interest. 
 
 Foreign Railways . . .286 4-7 
 
 Colonial „ • • 189 4-0 
 
 Financial, Land, Investment 187 3-3 
 
 Gold Mines . . . . 161 9-3 
 
 More than half of the new capital added in 
 1908-10 went for railway purposes. 
 
 Sir George Paish concluded that " the great 
 increase which British investors are deriving from 
 their investments in other lands is small in com- 
 parison with the total income they may ultimately 
 derive." The amount of new investment is now 
 about equal to the amount of interest accruing. 
 Appreciation of property in one direction at least 
 equals depreciation in another. In the above 
 calculations, all foreign loan capital not now 
 bearing interest is excluded. 
 
 In addition to the income from these sources, 
 there is that due for shipping, financial, broker- 
 age and other services, and tourist traffic. Pro- 
 bably the total income due from abroad is thus 
 £300 millions a year ; and, as the trade balance 
 is only £140 millions, a sum of £160 millions is left 
 for reinvestment. 
 
APPENDIX V 
 
 INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE 
 
 A. The Ebb and Flow or Foreign Trade 
 Total Exports and Re-Exports 
 
 (Tears of increase on right side, of decrease on left, of each column.) 
 
 Tears 
 
 £ Millions. 
 
 Years 
 
 £ Millions. 
 
 1854 . 
 
 .. 115 
 
 1872 . 
 
 .. 314 
 
 1855 . 
 
 .. 116 
 
 1873 . 
 
 311 .. 
 
 1856 . 
 
 .. 139 
 
 1874 . 
 
 297 .. 
 
 1857 . 
 
 .. 146 
 
 1875 . 
 
 281 .. 
 
 1858 . 
 
 139 .. 
 
 1876 . 
 
 256 .. 
 
 1859 . 
 
 .. 155 
 
 1877 . 
 
 252 .. 
 
 1860 . 
 
 .. 164 
 
 1878 . 
 
 245 .. 
 
 1861 . 
 
 159 .. 
 
 1879 . 
 
 .. 248 
 
 1862 . 
 
 .. 166 
 
 1880 . 
 
 .. 286 
 
 1863 . 
 
 .. 196 
 
 1881 . 
 
 .. 297 
 
 1864 . 
 
 .. 212 
 
 1882 . 
 
 .. 306 
 
 1865 . 
 
 .. 218 
 
 1883 . 
 
 305 .. 
 
 1866 . 
 
 .. 238 
 
 1884 . 
 
 296 .. 
 
 1867 . 
 
 225 .. 
 
 1885 . 
 
 271 .. 
 
 1868 . 
 
 .. 227 
 
 1886 . 
 
 268 .. 
 
 1869 . 
 
 . . 237 
 
 1887 . 
 
 .. 280 
 
 1870 . 
 
 .. 244 
 
 1888 . 
 
 .. 298 
 
 1871 . 
 
 .. 283 
 
 1889 . 
 
 . . . 314 
 
 673 
 
 sx 
 
years 
 
 £ jyiuuons. 
 
 I ears 
 
 ■b JXLXUAUXXO* 
 
 1890 . 
 
 .. 328 
 
 1902 . 
 
 .. 349 
 
 1891 . 
 
 309 
 
 1903 . 
 
 .. 360 
 
 1892 . 
 
 291 .. 
 
 1904 . 
 
 .. 371 
 
 1893 . 
 
 277 . . 
 
 1905 . 
 
 .. 407 
 
 1894 . 
 
 273 .. 
 
 1906 . 
 
 .. 460 
 
 1895 , 
 
 .. 285 
 
 1907 . 
 
 .. 517 
 
 1896 . 
 
 .. 296 
 
 1908 . 
 
 456 .. 
 
 1897 . 
 
 294 .. 
 
 1909 . 
 
 .. 469 
 
 1898 . 
 
 294 .. 
 
 1910 . 
 
 ., 534 
 
 1899 . 
 
 .. 329 
 
 1911 . 
 
 .. 556 
 
 1900 . 
 
 .. 354 
 
 1912 . 
 
 .. 599 
 
 1901 . 
 
 347 .. 
 
 
 
 B. The Trade Rivals 
 Exports of Domestic Produce 
 (in £ Millions) 
 
 
 Average. 
 
 
 
 
 Exports 
 of Mfrs. 
 Average 
 per Head 
 1909-11. 
 
 1880- 
 1884. 
 
 1896- 
 1900. 
 
 1909. 1911. 
 
 1913. 
 
 United Kingdom 
 United States . 
 Germany . 
 France 
 
 234 
 166 
 166 
 138 
 
 2491 
 237 
 192 
 150 
 
 378 
 354 
 324 
 228 
 
 454 
 428 
 398 
 246 
 
 525 
 510 
 495 
 275 
 
 £7 8 9 
 1 15 5 
 3 15 6 
 3 3 11 
 
 1 Before 1899, the export of ships, boats, and tlieir machinery- 
 about £9 millions in that year — was not included. 
 
APPENDIX V 
 
 575 
 
 C. Britain's Best Customees 
 (in £ Millions) 
 
 Exports (British 
 Produce) to 
 
 Annual Averages. 
 
 
 1885-89 
 
 1890-94 
 
 1896-99 
 
 1905 
 
 1911 
 
 British India 
 United States 
 Australasia . 
 Germany 
 France 
 Holland 
 
 Total to- 
 Foreign Countries 
 British Possessions 
 
 31 
 28 
 23 
 16 
 15 
 9 
 
 30 
 26 
 20 
 18 
 15 
 9 
 
 28 
 20 
 21 
 22 
 15 
 8 
 
 40 
 24 
 23 
 30 
 17 
 13 
 
 52 
 27 
 40 
 39 
 26 
 18 
 
 147 
 79 
 
 156 
 
 78 
 
 158 
 81 
 
 216 
 113 
 
 297 
 156 
 
 Impoets from 
 
 Annual Averages. 
 
 
 1885-89 
 
 1890-94 
 
 1895-99 
 
 1905 
 
 1911 
 
 United States 
 France . 
 British India 
 Australasia . 
 Germany 
 Russia . 
 
 Total from — . 
 Foreign Countries . 
 British Possessions 
 
 85 
 39 
 33 
 24 
 25 
 20 
 
 98 
 44 
 30 
 30 
 26 
 21 
 
 110 
 51 
 26 
 31 
 27 
 21 
 
 115 
 
 54 
 36 
 40 
 35 
 33 
 
 124 
 51 
 45 
 57 
 43 
 41 
 
 293 
 
 87 
 
 322 
 96 
 
 355 
 97 
 
 437 
 127 
 
 508 
 171 
 
APPENDIX VI 
 
 WAGES AND PRICES 
 
 A. Prices of 45 Commodities 
 
 {Sauerbeck's Average Index Numbers) 
 
 (1868-77 = 100) 
 
 1818-1827 . 
 
 . Ill 
 
 1893-1902 . 
 
 . 66 
 
 1828-1837 . 
 
 . 93 
 
 1894-1903 . 
 
 . 66 
 
 1838-1847 . 
 
 . 93 
 
 1895-1904 . 
 
 . 67 
 
 1848-1857 . 
 
 . 89 
 
 1896-1905 . 
 
 . 68 
 
 1858-1867 . 
 
 . 99 
 
 1897-1906 . 
 
 . 70 
 
 1868-1877 . 
 
 . 100 
 
 1898-1907 . 
 
 . 71 
 
 1878-1887 . 
 
 . 79 
 
 1899-1908 . 
 
 . 72 
 
 1888-1897 . 
 
 . 67 
 
 1900-1909 . 
 
 . 78 
 
 1898-1907 . 
 
 . 67 
 
 1901-1910 . 
 
 . 73 
 
 B. Purchasing Power of £l 
 (Value of a sovereign measured by its capacity 
 to purchase quantities of 23 selected articles of 
 food. — Labour Depart., Board of Trade) 
 
 Year. 
 
 1895 
 
 1896 
 
 1897 
 
 1898 
 
 1899 
 
 1900 
 
 1901 
 
 1902 
 
 1903 
 
 676 
 
 s. 
 
 D. 
 
 Year. 
 
 20 
 
 
 
 1904 
 
 20 
 
 
 
 1905 
 
 19 
 
 3 
 
 1906 
 
 18 
 
 6 
 
 1907 
 
 19 
 
 4 
 
 1908 
 
 18 
 
 5 
 
 1909 
 
 18 
 
 4 
 
 1910 
 
 18 
 
 3 
 
 1911 
 
 17 
 
 11 
 
 1912 
 
 S. D. 
 
 18 
 
 17 11 
 
 18 
 17 7 
 17 2 
 17 3 
 
 16 11 
 
 17 
 16 3 
 
APPENDIX VI 
 
 577 
 
 C. The Course of Wages 
 
 Dr A. L. Bowley's Index Numbers 
 (The last decade = 100) 
 
 1780-1790 
 
 40 
 
 1840-1850 
 
 60 
 
 1790-1800 
 
 45-50 
 
 1850-1860 
 
 65 
 
 1800-1810 
 
 55-65 
 
 1860-1870 
 
 75 
 
 1810-1820 
 
 65-70 
 
 1870-1880 
 
 95 
 
 1820-1880 
 
 65 
 
 1880-1890 
 
 90 
 
 1830-1840 
 
 60 
 
 1890-1899 
 
 100 
 
 " Wages generally increased from 50 to 100 per cent, 
 between 1780 and the Battle of Waterloo, and at one time 
 during the war period they reached a very high point indeed. 
 Some trades were able, chiefly through their trade unions, 
 to maintain the pecuniary advantage gained, and in that 
 case their wages are not even now (1900) greatly above the 
 rate then prevailing. Retail prices of necessities are, 
 however, very difierent. . . . Materials are very plentiful 
 for the period 1830-40, chiefly because the prolonged 
 depression of that decade caused so large a number of 
 writers to turn their attention to the condition of the wage- 
 earners. In the period 1830-60, wages in the cotton industry 
 increased about 2s. on 10s., although there was a faUing- 
 off until 1845-6. Building trades and town artisans did 
 not improve their earnings by so large a percentage. The 
 wages of seamen increased over 10 per cent, between 1840 
 and 1860. The average increase for compositors was 10 per 
 cent. ; wages of agricultural labourers increased from 10s. 
 to lis. 7d., and those of miners diminished. Between 1860 
 and 1891 increases were very general, and averaged about 
 35 per cent. ; but the increase was not uniform throughout 
 the period, and money and real wages took very different 
 2 
 
578 
 
 MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 courses through the storray period of the 'seventies. 
 Between 1891 and 1898, wages were on the whole stationary, 
 except that they have fluctuated in the mining industry, 
 and that in the building trades their rate of increase has 
 come up to the general average."' — Wages in the United 
 Kingdom (1900), p. 125. 
 
 Real Wages. 
 
 (Mr G. H. Wood's 
 
 Average Index-Nos., 
 
 alloTidng for Retail 
 
 Prices, and for 
 
 Unemployment.) 
 
 121 
 
 131 
 
 143 
 
 157 
 
 163 
 
 170 
 
 170 
 
 169 
 
 176 
 
 1791 
 
 175 
 
 170 
 
 164 
 
 160 
 
 163 
 
 168 
 
 170 
 
 159 
 
 1572 
 
 161 
 
 ' Minimum since 1893. 
 
 Money Wages. 
 
 (Board of Trade Index, 
 
 Nos., 1900=100.) 
 
 1879 
 
 • 
 
 83-3 
 
 1880-41 > 
 
 
 
 84-9 
 
 1885-9 I i 
 
 
 
 84-3 
 
 1890-4; 1 
 
 
 
 90-2 
 
 1895 
 
 
 
 89-1 
 
 1896 
 
 
 
 
 89-9 
 
 1897 
 
 
 
 
 90-8 
 
 1898 
 
 
 
 
 93-2 
 
 1899 
 
 
 
 
 95-3 
 
 1900 
 
 
 
 
 1000 
 
 1901 
 
 
 
 
 99-0 
 
 1902 
 
 
 
 
 97-7 
 
 1903 
 
 
 
 
 97-2 
 
 1904 
 
 
 
 
 96-6 
 
 1905 
 
 
 
 
 970 
 
 1906 
 
 
 
 
 98-4 
 
 1907 
 
 
 
 
 101 -7^ 
 
 1908 
 
 
 
 
 101-2 
 
 1909 
 
 
 
 
 99-9 
 
 1910 
 
 
 
 
 100-2 
 
 Maxima. 
 
 
 
 
 « I 
 
APPENDIX VI 
 
 579 
 
 D. Unemployment. 
 
 From the bad time of . . . 
 Employment, as shown by the general un 
 
 employed percentage, improved till 
 Fell off steadily till 
 Improved till 
 Fell oft gradually till 
 Recovered till . 
 Relapsed again in 
 Recovered till . 
 Relapsed again in = . , . 
 Subject to break of engineering strike in 
 
 Recovered till 
 
 Relapsed during South African War till 
 Recovered slightly till 
 Relapsed again in ... . 
 Enjoyed great expansion to end of 
 
 1862 
 
 1865 
 1868 
 1872 
 1879 
 1882 
 1886 
 1890 
 
 1893-4 
 1897 
 1899 
 1904 
 1906 
 
 1907-8 
 1913 
 
 (See W. H. Beveridge's Unemployment, p. 40.) 
 
580 
 
 MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 E. Wages in the Cotton Trade 
 (Mr G. H. Wood, in the Statistical Society Journal, 
 June 1910.) 
 
 AVBBAQlt iNDEX-NtTMBBES. 
 
 Maximum 
 FaUing . 
 Falling . 
 Falling . 
 
 Minimum 
 
 Little change . 
 
 Factory minimum 
 
 Rising . 
 
 Bising 
 
 Bise and fall . 
 
 Minimum 
 
 Minimum 
 Becovery 
 Slowly rising . 
 Quick rise 
 
 1806-1809 
 1810-1819 
 1820-1829 
 1830-1839 
 
 Factory 
 opera- 
 tives. 
 
 Hand- 
 loom 
 
 weavers. 
 
 All work- 
 people. 
 
 122 
 126 
 119 
 115 
 
 114 
 
 110 
 
 121 
 147 
 180 
 
 187 
 
 176 
 185 
 207 
 222 
 
 193 
 
 148 
 
 95 
 
 76 
 
 75 
 75 
 75 
 
 170 
 
 140 
 
 105 
 
 96 
 
 92 
 
 106 
 
 105 
 
 118 
 
 147 
 180 
 
 187 
 
 176 
 185 
 207 
 222 
 
 1830-1833 
 
 1840-1849 
 
 1847-1850 
 
 1850-1859 
 1860-1869 
 1870-1879 
 
 1874-1877 
 
 1878-1881 
 1880-1889 
 1890-1899 
 1900-1906 
 
 Mr Wood says : " Very high wages were obtained 
 in the very early years of the century ; a great 
 and rapid fall took place for 25 years ; and the 
 high average of 1806 was not again attained until 
 the 'seventies, and probably not until the 'nineties. 
 
 " Between 1860 and 1906, the average wage of 
 all employed has advanced from lis. 7d. to 19s. 7d., 
 or by 69 per cent. Of this advance, about 7 per 
 
APPENDIX VI 681 
 
 cent, (or lOd.) is due to increased rates of pay, and 
 about 13 per cent, (or Is. 6d.) to the employment 
 of relatively more adults and less children. The 
 remaining 49 per cent, (or 5s. 8d.) is due, therefore, 
 to increased efficiency of operative and machine." 
 
!«."! 
 
 APPENDIX VII 
 
 Births and Deaths, Wealth and Poverty, in 
 THE United Kingdom 
 
 
 Per 1,000 of Population. 
 
 In £ Millions. 
 
 
 
 
 Yield of 
 
 Income 
 
 Deposits 
 in P 
 
 
 Birth- 
 rate. 
 
 Death 
 Kate. 
 
 Paupers. 
 
 Id. of 
 
 Income 
 
 Tax. 
 
 Reviewed 
 
 for Income 
 
 Tax. 
 
 & Trustee 
 Savings 
 Banks. 
 
 1871 
 
 33-8 
 
 21-5 
 
 39-3 
 
 1-6 
 
 482 
 
 55 
 
 1881 
 
 32-5 
 
 18-7 
 
 29-0 
 
 1-9 
 
 601 
 
 81 
 
 1891 
 
 30-4 
 
 200 
 
 25-3 
 
 2-2 
 
 678 
 
 120 
 
 1901 
 
 28-0 
 
 171 
 
 23-6 
 
 2-5 
 
 867 
 
 206 
 
 1906 
 
 270 
 
 15-7 
 
 25-7 
 
 2-6 
 
 944 
 
 230 
 
 1907 
 
 26-3 
 
 15-5 
 
 25-2 
 
 2-7 
 
 980 
 
 232 
 
 1908 
 
 26-6 
 
 15-3 
 
 25-2 
 
 2-7 
 
 1,010 
 
 235 
 
 1909 
 
 25-7 
 
 150 
 
 25-5 
 
 2-7 
 
 1,011 
 
 241 
 
 1910 
 
 250 
 
 140 
 
 24-3 
 
 2-7 
 
 1,046 
 
 247 
 
 1911 
 
 24-4 
 
 14-8 
 
 24-0 
 
 
 
 294 
 
 In the Census of 1911, householders were for the 
 first time required to give information of the 
 fertility of existing marriages ; and the student of 
 the population question should refer to these 
 reports. A further return in this Census shows 
 the excessive death-rate among children of women 
 engaged in industry. 
 
 682 
 
A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 In the effort to keep the following Ust within bounds, many titles 
 of works, both of general and particular interest, have been omitted. 
 In the first category are the general histories of the period, from 
 Stanhope and Leeky to the Victoria Oouniy Histories ; biographies, 
 memoirs, and correspondence of public men (with a few excep- 
 tions), and reference books, from The Annual Register and the 
 Parliamentary Debates to the Encydopcedia Britannica and the 
 Statesman's Year-hooTc. The most summary list of Reports of Koyal 
 Comnussions and Parliamentary and Departmental Committees, and 
 of other PubUc Papers, including the statutes and periodical returns, 
 would have been inconveniently long. Some of the most important 
 inquiries and publications have been mentioned in preceding pages, 
 and lists can be obtained of the parliamentary printers and pub- 
 lishers. No mention is made of periodical publications, important 
 as are some working-class journals, in particular. The Economic 
 Journal and Review, the Statistical Society's Journal, the Economist 
 and the Sociological Review, the Annals of the American Academy, 
 and the Quarterly Journal of Economics, abound in valuable material, 
 as do the reports of the Trade Union, Co-operative, Social Science, 
 Pubhc Health, and other Congresses. 
 Some of these omissions are made good in the following 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHIES 
 
 Btoton, T. E. In " Financial Crises." 
 
 Cambridge Modem History. In the sixth and later volumes. 
 
 Co-operation, Bibliography of. Published by International Co-op. 
 
 Alliance. 
 Cunningham, W. In " Growth of British Industry and Commerce." 
 Day, Clive. In " History of Commerce." 
 Dictionary of National Biography (works named in). 
 Ely, R. T. In " Outlines of Economics." 
 Fabian Society. What to Read. 
 
 883 
 
584 MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 Gboss, 6. Bibliography of British Municipal History. (1897.) 
 Hasbaoh, W. In "History of the English Agricultural Labourer." 
 HuTomNS, B. L., and Habbison, A. In " History of Factory Legis- 
 
 lation." 
 JoNBS, E. D. In " Economic Crises." 
 Palobavb, B. H. I. References in " Dictionary of Political Economy." 
 
 (1894-9.) 
 SoNNENSOHEiN, W. SwAN. The Best Books : a Reader's Guide 
 
 (PoUtical Economy, Social Economy , Trade, and other Sections). 
 Taylob, Isabel. Bibliography of (nearly 800 works on) Unemploy- 
 ment and the Unemployed. Pref. by S. Webb. (1909.) 
 Webb, S. and B. In " Trade Unionism," " Industrial Democracy," 
 
 and " Local Government." 
 Tbaill, H. D. and Mann, J. S. In last two vols, of " Social England." 
 Catalogues of the British Library of Political Science (London School 
 
 of Economics), Royal Statistical Society, Toynbee Hall, and 
 
 other libraries. 
 
 The following seems to be the most convenient arrangement of 
 titles ; but the interest of most of the works extends over a longer 
 period than that of the chapters under which they are ranged. 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 Andebson, A. History of Commerce. (1787-9.) 
 
 AHDBiliADiiS, A. La Pondation et I'Histoire de la Banque d'Angle- 
 
 terre, 1694-1844. (1901.) 
 Bbsant, Sir W. London in the Eighteenth Century. (1902.) 
 Bbentano, L. History of Gilds and Origin of Trade Unions. (1870.) 
 Campbeli,, R. The London Tradesman, 3rd ed. (1757.) 
 Chalmebs, G. Estimate of the Comparative Strength of Great 
 
 Britain and Losses of her Trade. (1782.) 
 Chabnook, John. History of Marine Architecture. (1802.) 
 Cunningham, W. Growth of English Industry and Commerce. Vol. 
 
 ii., Modern Times — generally to 1846. 
 
 The latter part of this standard work has been reprinted under 
 the title, " The Industrial Revolution." (1908.) 
 Day, Clive. A History of Commerce. Chaps, xx.-xxiii., xxviil.- 
 
 xxxviil. (1907.) 
 Deeoe, D. A Plan of English Commerce. (1728, and later editions.) 
 A Tour through Great Britain. (1748.) 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 585 
 
 Eden, Sir F.M. The State of the Poor, from 1066. (1797) 
 
 Observations on Friendly Societies. (1801.) 
 
 Fkancis, J. History of the Bank of England. (1847.) 
 
 Frankun, Benjamin. The Interest of Great Britain in her Colonies. 
 
 (1761.) 
 Fbbnoh, G. J. Life of Samuel Crompton. (1862.) 
 Garmkb, R. M. History of the English Landed Interest. (1893.) 
 
 Annals of the British Peasantry. (1895.) 
 
 GoNNBB, B. 0. K. Common Land and Enclosures. (1912.) 
 Gbaham, H. G. Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century. 
 
 (1901). 
 Haldane, R. B. Life of Adam Smith. (1887.) 
 Hammond, J. L. and B. The English Labourer, 1760-1832. (1911.) 
 Hasbach, W. History of the EngUsh Agricultural Labourer. ( 1908. ) 
 Lambert, J. M. Two Thousand Years of Guild Life. (1891.) 
 Macphebson, D. Aimals of Commerce. (1805.) 
 Mantoui, p. La B6volution Industrielle au 18^ Si^ole. (1906.) 
 Mabtin, F. History of Lloyd's and of Marine Insurance. (1876.) 
 NiOHOLLS, Sir G. History of the EngUsh Poor Law. (1854.) 
 Phillips, J. General History of Inland Navigation. (1803.) 
 PosTLETHWAYT, M. Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce. 
 
 (1774.) 
 Pbioe, B. An Essay on the Population of England. (1780.) 
 RoBEBTS, G. Social History of the Southern Counties. (1856.) 
 RoBEBXSON, J. M. Pioneer Humanists. (1907.) 
 Rogers, J. E. Thoeold. Industrial and Commercial History of 
 
 England. (1884.) 
 
 Six Centuries of Work and Wages. (1894.) 
 
 History of Agriculture and Prices, 1259-1793. (1888.) 
 
 Bolt. Dictionary of Trade. (1756.) 
 
 SoHMOLLBE, G. The Mercantile System. (1902.) 
 
 SoRivENOB, H. Comprehensive History of the Iron Trade. (1841.) 
 
 Sinclair, Sir John. Statistical Account of Scotland. (1791-9.) 
 
 History of the Public Revenue. (1803.) 
 
 Smiles, Samuel. Men of Invention. (1884.) 
 
 Lives of Boulton and Watt. (1865.) 
 
 Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. (1776.) 
 
 Stephenson, R. The Linen Trade of Ireland. (1847.) 
 
 Sydney, W. C. England and the English in the Eighteenth Century. 
 
 (1892.) 
 Temple, W. An Essay on Trade and Commerce. (1770.) 
 
586 MODERN ENGI^KD 
 
 --«'^*-^l'^^;ts''~r;iGre!tBx^ain. (1776.) 
 
 W?oLT str H TBUBMAi.. Industrial England in the Middle of the 
 
 Bisliteenth Century. (1913.) 
 Young, Abthtjb. The Farmer's Letters to the People of England. 
 
 (1768.) 
 
 (Ed.) Annals of Agrioulture. (1784-1815.) 
 
 Tours— North of England. (1770-1.) 
 
 „ Southern Counties. (1768.) 
 
 „ Ireland. (1780.) 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 " Alfred " (Samubl Kydd). History of the Factory Movement, 
 
 1802-47. 
 Babbage, C. On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactnrea. 
 
 (1832.) 
 Bainbs, E. History of the Cotton Manufactm-e in Great Britain. 
 
 (1835.) 
 Bamfobd, S. Passages from the life of a Radical. (1844.) 
 BisOHOrF, J. Comprehensive View of the Woollen and Worsted 
 
 Manufactures. (1842.) 
 BBAiLsroED, H. N. SheUey, Godwin, and their Circle. (1913.) 
 CoBBBTT, W. Rural Rides. (1821-32.) 
 DouBLBDAY, T. Financial, Monetary, and Statistical History of 
 
 England from 1688. (1847.) 
 Do WELL, S. History of Taxation and Taxes in England. (1884.) 
 Felkin, W. History of the Machine- Wrought Hosiery and Lace 
 
 Manufactures. (1867.) 
 Fox-Bourne, H. R. English Newspapers. (1887.) 
 
 The Romance of Trade. 
 HoBsoN, J. A. The Evolution of Modern Capitalism. (1897.) 
 Jo'^r,™? ^°''' •^- ^- The Commercial Restraints of Ireland. (1799.) 
 lCl^"^"- i,^f °' K<^bert Owen. (1891.) 
 M'Ctri,LooH, J ^^*««-y of British Commerce, 1763-1870. (1872.) 
 
 (1859.)' " ■ '^''•) Select Collection of Tracts on Commerce. 
 Murray, AwoBE wu. 
 
 tions of Englaud^^rtT f *'"' Commercial and Financial Eela- 
 "« and Ireland. (1903.) 
 
BTBLIOGRAPHY 687 
 
 Nicholson, J. S. History of the English Coin Laws. (1904.) 
 
 OwJiN, RoBBRT. Autoloiograph.y. (1857.) 
 
 PoDMOBE, F. Robert Owen. A Biography. (1906.) 
 
 PoBTBB, 6. R. Progresa of the Nation. (1836-43.) 
 
 Progress of the Nation, revised and extended to the end of the 
 
 century by F. W. Hirst. (1912.) 
 
 Pkothbro, R. E. Pioneers and Progress of EngUsh Farming. ( 1888. ) 
 
 Smith, E. Life of CJobbett. 
 
 SnELnfO, A. H. Scottish Industrial and Social History in the 
 Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. (1906.) 
 
 ToYNBBB, Abnold. Lectures on the Industrial Revolution of the 
 Eighteenth Century in England. (The 1884 Edition had a 
 Memoir by Dr Jowett ; the Edition first issued in 1894 includes 
 the substance of several lectures and fragments, and a 
 Reminiscence by Lord Milner.) 
 
 Teaill, H. D., and Makn, J. S. {Sd.). Social England. 
 
 WaUjAS, Graham. Life of Francis Place. 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 Ceeighton, C. History of Epidemics in Britain. (1891.) 
 
 FiBLBBN, J. The Curse of the Factory System. (1836.) 
 
 FowLB, T. W. The Poor Law. (1881.) 
 
 Gaskbll, P. Manufacturing Population of England. (1833.) 
 
 Gbote, Mrs. The Philosophical Radicals. (1866.) 
 
 Haldane, J. W. C. Steamships and Machinery, (1893.) 
 
 Kat, Dr J. P. (afterwards Sir J. Kat-Shuttlbworth). Condition 
 
 of the Working Classes in the Cotton Manufacture. (1832.) 
 Kent, C. The EngUsh Radicab. (1899.) 
 Lindsay, W. S. History of Merchant Shipping. (1874.) 
 PoBRiTT, E. and A. G. The Unreformed House of Commons. 
 Smiles, S. Lives of the Engineers. (1861-2.) 
 Tayloe, W. Cooke. The-Modem Factory System. (1891.) 
 TooKE, T. History of Prices, from 1793. (1837.) 
 Wakefield, E. G. " Swing " Unmasked. (1832.) 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 Here the reader can only be referred to the works named in the 
 text, and other works of the authors named ; to standard sketches hke 
 J. K. Ingram's Bigtory of Political Economy, L. L. Price's Short 
 
588 MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 Edwin Caiman's HMory of Tidies of Pro3^^«>n a„d ^«^»»»*^' 
 I..Ue Stephen's The Bnglish t7«i(aria«» Walter Bagetot s Economc 
 Studies L. T. Hobhouse's Liberalism, and Lord Hugh Cecil s CoMerva- 
 Ham ; and to the BibUographiea named above. An adequate modem 
 work on the Law of Population is still lacking. 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 AsoHROTT, P. F., and Peeston, T. H. The English Poor Law 
 System. 
 
 Beer, M. History of Socialism in England. (1913.) 
 
 Caklyle, T. Chartism. (1839.) 
 
 Carter, T. The Guide to Trade. (1838-42.) 
 
 CoBDBN, Richard. PoUtioal Writings. (1878.) 
 
 Craik, 6. L. History of British Commerce. (1814.) 
 
 Enobls, Fkbdk. Condition of the Working Class in England in 
 1844. (1892.) 
 
 Evans, D. Mobier. The Commercial Crisis, 1847-8. (1848.) 
 
 Gammaob, R. G. The Chartist Movement, 1837-54. (1894.) 
 
 Hall, H. History of the Custom Revenue in England. (1885.) 
 
 HtraomNS, B. L., and Harrison, A. History of Factory Legisla- 
 tion. (1903.) 
 
 Jones, Ernest. Works and Speeches. 
 
 Jones, Lloyd, and Lttdlow, J. M. Progress of the Working Classes, 
 1832-67. (1867.) 
 
 Kane, Sir R. J. Industrial Resources of Lreland. (1844.) 
 
 KiNGSLBY, Charles. Yeast ; Alton Locke. 
 
 LovBTT, Wm. Life and Struggles of. (1876.) 
 
 M'CiTLLooH, J. R. Statistical Account of the British Empire. ( 1837. ) 
 
 Maokay, Thomas. History of the English Poor Law from 1834. 
 (Supplementing Nicholls.) (1899.) 
 
 MoNQMDiBN, A. History of the Free Trade Movement. (1881.) 
 
 nCo^.!' ^- "*^ °* ^'"^^'^ ^"^"i^"- (1881.) 
 
 Pkbntice a %f ^^^""^y °f tlie Poor Law. (1854, 1856.) 
 
 Sttjbbs, Dhan ^'""^y °* *'^« Anti-Corn Law League. (1853.) 
 
 (1899.) ■ "^8^V and the Christian Socialist Movement. 
 Unwin, Mrs FisHBR and Of^ 
 
 Monopoly. (iqU , " Uthers. The Land Hunger: Life Under 
 
 • ^^«I»fl-„„e Of the Game Laws. (1846.) 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 589 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 Arnold, A. History of the Cotton Famine. (1864.) 
 
 Baxter, B. The Panic of 1866. (1866.) 
 
 Baoehot, W. Lombard Street. (1878.) 
 
 BALrotTR, Gbaham. The Educational Systems of Great Britain and 
 
 Ireland. (1903.) 
 BiNHS, H. B., and Others. A Century of Education. (1908.) 
 BoiirwiOK, J. Romance of the Wool Trade. (1887.) 
 Beemneb, D. The Industries of Scotland. (1868.) 
 CoilET, C. D. History of the Taxes on Knowledge. (1899.) 
 EmsoN. T. The Cotton Trade of Great Britain. (1886.) 
 Hertz, G. B. The Old Colonial System. (1905.) 
 James, J. History of the Worsted Manufacture in England. ( 1857. ) 
 Jeans, J. S. Steel, Its History, Manufacture, etc. (1880.) 
 Kerr, John. Scottish Education from Early Times. (1908.) 
 Levi, Leone. Wages and Earnings of the Working Classes. (1867, 
 
 1885.) 
 Lucas, C. P. Historical Geography of the British Colonies. (1887- 
 
 97.) 
 Mayhew, H. London Labour and the London Poor. (1861-2.) 
 NoBTHOOTB, Sir S. H. Twenty Years of Knanoial Policy. 
 Playfair, Sir Lyon. Subjects of Social Welfare. (1893.) 
 Eoberts,B. D. (^d.) Education in the Nineteenth Century. (1901.) 
 TiMMrsrs, S. {Ed. ) Resources and Industrial History of Birmingham 
 
 Hardware District. (1866.) 
 Urb, A. Philosophy of Manufactures. (1861.) 
 Wakefield, E. G. The Art of Colonization. (1849.) 
 Wbbb (Potter), Beatbiob. (Ed.) The Case for the Factory Acts. 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 Arch, Joseph. Story of My Life. (1898.) 
 Bradlatjoh-Bonnbr, H. Life of Charles Bradlaugh. (1895.) 
 Bbassby, T. Work and Wages. (1872.) 
 BuBTON, Theodore E. Financial Crises and Periods of Depression. 
 
 (1902.) 
 Cox, J. C. and H. F. Rise of the Farm Labourer. (1874.) 
 Crompton, H. Industrial Conciliation. (1876.) 
 Davis, J. E. The Labour Laws. (1875.) 
 GiEFEN, Sir R. Progress of the Working Classes. (1884). 
 Essays on Finance. (1880, 1886.) 
 
590 MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 HoLYOAKB, G. T. Sixty Years of an Agitator's life. (1893.) 
 
 HiBtory of Co-operation in England. ( 1877. ) 
 
 HowBLL, Ghobob. Handy Book of the Labour Laws. (1876.) 
 
 The Conflicts of Capital and Labour. (1890.) 
 
 HUMPHBBY, A. W. Robert Applegarth, Trade Unionist, Educa- 
 tionist, and Reformer. (1913.) 
 Jeffbeies, Richabd. Hodge and his Masters. (1880.) 
 Jbssop, ATratrsTTTS. Arcady, for Better, for Worse. (1887.) 
 Jbvons, W. S. Investigations in Currency and Finance. (1894.) 
 JoNBS, B. D. Economic Crises. (1900.) 
 Kbttlb. Sir R. Striltes and Arbitrations. (1866.) 
 Hyndman, H. M. Commercial Crises of the Nineteenth Century. 
 
 (1892.) 
 Levi, Lbonb. History of British Commerce. (1872.) 
 Maubicb, F. D. Social MoraUty. (1869.) 
 Mill, J. S. Autobiography. (1873.) 
 Odobe, Gbobob. life and Labours of. (1877.) 
 PuMSOLL, Samuel. Our Seamen: An Appeal. (1873.) 
 Pollock, Sir F. The Land Laws. (1883.) 
 PoTTEB, B. (Mrs Sidney Webb). The Co-operative Movement 
 
 in Groat Britain. (1892.) 
 Price, L. L. Industrial Peace. (1887.) 
 
 Industrial Conciliation {Statist. Soc. Journal, 1890). 
 
 Rbdfbbit, Percy. The Story of the C.W.S. (Co-operative Wholesale 
 
 Society) from 1863. (1913.) 
 Ridley, W. H. The Agricultural Labourers' Union. (1872.) 
 SoHLOSS, D. F. Methods of Industrial Remuneration. (1892.) 
 SoHtTLZB-GABVEROTTZ, G. von. Social Peace. (1893.) 
 Solly, Hbnby. Working Men's Clubs and Institutes. (1867.) 
 Smith, G. Abmitaqb. The Free Trade Movement and its Results. 
 
 (1898.) 
 Watson, A. The Right Hon. Thos. Burt, A Great Labour Leader. 
 
 (1912.) 
 Yeats, J. Manual of Recent and Existing Commerce. (1872.) 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 Acworth, W. M. The Railways and the Traders. (1891.) 
 
 The Railways of England and Scotland. (1889, 1890.) 
 
 Arlidoe, J. T. The Diseases of Occupations. (1892.) 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 591 
 
 Booth, Charlbs. Life and Labour In London. (1889-1902.) 
 (See footnote, p. 421.) 
 
 ■ Pauperism and the Endowment of Old Age. (1892.) 
 
 Booth, " General " W. Darlsest England. 
 
 Cakpbntbr, Edward. England's Ideal. (1895.) 
 
 CoLLiNGS, Jesse. Land Reform. (1908.) 
 
 CoLLiNSON, William. The Apostle of Free Labour. (1913.) 
 
 Graham, P. A. The Rural Exodus. (1892.) 
 
 Grimshaw, R. The Record of Scientific Progress. (1891.) 
 
 Heath, R. The Agricultural Labourer. (1893.) 
 
 HoBHOFSB, L. T. The Labour Movement. 
 
 HoBSON, J. A. John Ruskin, Social Reformer. (1904.) 
 
 Problems of Poverty. (1891.) 
 
 HowBix, GBOBeB. Trade Unionism, New and Old. (1891.) 
 Hyndman, H, M. Historical Basis of Socialism in England. (1883.) 
 
 The Record of an Adventurous Life. (1913.) 
 
 Jeans, J. S. Waterways and Water Transport. (1890.) 
 
 Trusts, Pools, and Corners. (1894.) 
 
 Kebbbll, T. B. The Agricultural Labourer. (1907.) 
 
 Loch, C. S. Charity Organisation. (1890.) 
 
 Mackail, J. W. Life of Wm. Morris. (1902.) 
 
 Macbosty, H. W. The Trust Movement in British Industry. (1907. ) 
 
 Mallock, W. H. Labour and the Popular Welfare. (1893.) 
 
 Mather, W. Trade Unions and the Hours of Labour. (1892.) 
 
 Mavor, J. Wage Statistics and Wage Theories. (1888.) 
 
 The Scottish Railway Strike. (1891.) 
 
 Montague, T. C. Life of Arnold Toynbee. (1889.) 
 Morris, Wm. A Dream of John Bull, etc. (1889.) 
 Nicholson, J. S. The Effects of Machinery on Wages. (1892.) 
 
 Money and Monetary Problems. (1895.) 
 
 Oliver, Sir T. Dangerous Trades. (1902.) 
 
 Ritchie, D. 6. Darwinism and Politics. (1895.) 
 
 Robertson, J. M. Modern Humanists. (1891.) 
 
 SoHOENHOF, J. The Economy of High Wages. (1893.) 
 
 Sbeley, Sir John. The Expansion of England. (1891.) 
 
 Shaw, G. B. {Ed.) Fabian Essays in Socialism. (1890.) The 
 
 " Fabian Tracts " date from 1884. 
 Smith, H. Llewellyn, and Nash, Vauqhan. The Story of the 
 
 Dockers' Strike. (1889.) 
 Webb, Sidney. Socialism in England. (1890.) 
 The London Programme. (1891.) 
 
592 MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 Wbbb, Sidnby, and Habold Cox. The Eight- Hours' Day. (1891.) 
 Wells, D. G. Recent Economic Changes and their Effects. (1890.) 
 Wblton, T. a. England's Recent Progress . . . Statistics of 
 
 Migration, Mortality, etc., 1881 to 1901. (1913.) 
 Westoott, Bishop. Social Aspects of Christianity. (1887.) 
 Wood, R. A. English Social Movements. (1892.) 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 AoLAND, A. H. !>., and Others. Report of the Land Enquiry Com- 
 mittee. (1913.) 
 Aronson, H, Our Village Homes. (1913.) 
 Ashley, Peeoy. Modern Tariff History. (1904.) 
 Ashley, W. J. The Adjustment of Wages [especially for coal and 
 iron trades of Great Britain and America]. 
 
 The Tariff Problem. (1903.) 
 
 {Ed. ) British Industries. ( 1903. ) 
 
 Balfoub, a. J. Economic Notes on Insular Free Trade. (1903.) 
 Bastable, 0. F. The Commerce of Nations. (1892.) 
 Bevbeidgb, W. H. Unemployment. (1909.) 
 
 BoWLBY, A. L. Wages in the United Kingdom in the Nineteenth 
 Century. (1900.) 
 
 England's Foreign Trade in the Nineteenth Century. (1893.) 
 
 National Progress in Wealth and Trade (since 1882.) 
 
 Beyob, J. Two Centuries of Irish History. 
 Caldboott, a. English Colonisation and Empire. (1891.) 
 Chamberlain, Joseph. Speeches on the Tariff Question. 
 Chapman, J. S. The Lancashire Cotton Industry. (1904.) 
 
 Work and Wages [in continuation of Brassey]. (1904, 1908.) 
 
 OoENEW ALL- Jones, R. J. British Merchant Service. (1898.) 
 
 CtTETLER, W. H. R. Short History of English Agriculture. (1909.) 
 
 DuPBBBiN, Lord. Irish Emigration and Land Tenures. 
 
 Easton, H. T. History and Principles of Banking. (1904.) 
 
 Ellis, Havblock. The Nationalization of Health. (1892.) 
 
 Haqoaed, H. RiDBK. Rural England. (1906.) 
 
 Hall, A. D. A Pilgrimage of British Farming. (1913.) 
 
 Hayes, Carlton. British Social Politics. [Summaries of Acts, 
 
 Speeches, etc., from 1905.] (1913.) 
 Hiest, F. W. See " Porter," above. 
 Hirst, J. W. Monopolies, Trusts, and Kartells. (1905.) 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 593 
 
 HoBSON, J. A. The Industrial System. (1911.) 
 Problem of the Unemployed. (1896.) 
 
 The Social Problem. (1904.) 
 
 The Science of Wealth. (1912.) 
 
 International Trade. 
 
 Gold, Prices, and Wages. (1913.) 
 
 Jbvons, H. S. The Coal Trade. 
 
 JoHirsoN, S. C. History of Emigration to North America, 1763- 
 1912. (1913.) 
 
 KiBKALDT, A. W. Shipping : A History. 
 
 Knoop, Douqlas. Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration. (1905. ) 
 
 Kkopotkin, p. Fields, Factories, and Workshops. (1899.) 
 
 Low, Sidney. The Governance of England. (1904, 1913.) 
 
 MaoDonaid, J. E. The Socialist Movement. (1911.) 
 
 M'MiiiLAir, Mabqakbt. The Child and the State. 
 
 Meyer, H. E. Municipal Ownership in Great Britain. (1906.) 
 
 MuBBAY, AuoE E. History of the Commercial and Financial 
 Relations between England and Ireland. (1903.) 
 
 Pekbis, G. H. Short History of War and Peace. (1911.) 
 
 PlQOU, A. C. Unemployment. (1914.) 
 
 PLtWKETT, Sir H. The New Ireland. 
 
 Peatt, Edwin A. History of Inland Transport and Communica- 
 tion in England. (1912.) 
 
 BoWNTBBE, B. S. Poverty : A Study of Town Life. (1908.) 
 
 Unemployment. (1911.) 
 
 Betting and Gambling. (1905.) 
 
 RowNTEBE, Joseph, and A. Sherwell. The Temperance Problem. 
 (1899.) 
 
 ScHLOSS, D. F. Insurance against Unemployment. (1909.) 
 
 Shaokleton, D. J., and Others. Women in Industry. (1908.) 
 
 Shadwbll, a. Industrial Efficiency : A Comparison of England, 
 Germany, and America. (1906.) 
 
 Snowdbn, Philip. Socialism and Syndicalism. (1913.) 
 
 Webb, S. and B. Industrial Democracy. (1902.) 
 
 Problems of Modern Industry. (1902.) 
 
 Minority Report, Poor Law Commission of 1909. 
 
 The Prevention of Destitution. (1911.) 
 
 Wells, H. G. Anticipations. (1902.) 
 
 Mankind in the Making. ( 1 904. ) 
 
 Williams, Anbitrin. Co-Partnership and Profit-Sharing. (1913.) 
 
 WiLUAMS, W. M. J. The King's Revenue. (1908.) 
 
 3 P 
 
INDEX 
 
 Accidents in industry, 79, 300-1, 
 
 327-30, 497 
 Advertisement, 452, 466 
 Agricultural labourer, the, 71, 
 
 102, 107, 125, 129, 133-47, 
 
 220, 235, 356, 359, 360-1, 397, 
 
 410-3, 486, 528 
 Agricultural Labourers' Union, 
 
 335, 338, 361 
 Agriculture, the old, 20-1, 32 ; 
 
 the new scientific, 8, 21-4, 66 ; 
 
 after the Great War, 64-73, 
 
 124, 263-4 ; after Free Trade, 
 
 and the ooUapse of 1875, 355- 
 
 364 ; value of (1907), 466, 471 ; 
 
 revival (from 1909), 481-6, 
 
 497 ; value of output, 561. 
 Aliens, immigrant, 154, 401, 404, 
 
 406-7 
 Allan, Wm. 332, 336 
 American Civil War, 286 
 American Independence, 12 
 Aniline dyes, 293 
 Anti-Corn Law League, 239, 
 
 248-9, 254, 333 
 Anti-Sweating League, 525 
 Applegarth, R., 332, 336 
 Apprenticeship, 21, 26, 29-30, 
 
 207-8 
 Arbitration and conciliation in 
 
 industry, 342-52, 513-24 
 ArUdge, Dr, 307-8 
 Ashley, W. J., 528, 529 
 Askwith, Sir George, 521 
 Asquith, H. H., 443, 488, 495, 
 
 532 
 " Assistance, beneficiary public," 
 
 cost of, 503 
 
 2 P* 
 
 Attwood, Thomas, 241, 244 
 Australia, 432, 519-20 
 Automobile, the, 478-9 
 
 B 
 
 Bagehot, W., 199 
 Balfour, A. J., 526 
 Bamford, Samuel, 113, 116 
 Bank of England, 9, 61, 117, 
 
 167, 238, 258, 286, 290 
 Barnett, Canon S., 417-9 
 Barrett-Browning, Elizabeth, 213, 
 
 234 
 Bentham, J., 182, 188, 191, 195, 
 
 265, 386 
 Besant, Annie, 424, 430 
 Bicycle, the, and the cycle trade, 
 
 477-8 
 Bkth-rate, 46, 464, 582 
 " Blacklegs," 438-9 
 Blanketeers, the, 115 
 " Blind-alley " employments, 
 
 507 
 Bonny muir, battle of, 121 
 Boot and shoe manufacture, 
 
 400 
 Booth, Charles, 402-7, 410, 421, 
 
 445-6, 488-9 
 Booth, " General" William, 394, 
 
 416 
 Bounties, export, 8, 11 
 Bowley, A. L., 422, 467, 488, 
 
 570 
 Bradlaugh, Chas., 195 
 Bright, John, 198, 216, 249, 252, 
 
 273 
 Broadhurst, Henry, 434 
 Brooklanda agreement, 516 
 595 
 
596 
 
 MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 Brougham, 73, 107, 117 
 Burdett, Sir F., 114 
 Burke, E., 38, 40 
 Bums, John, 425, 428-33, 439 
 Burt, Thomas, 338, 441 
 Buxton, Sydney, 431-2 
 Byron, 59-61, 109 
 
 Caird, Sir James, 359 
 
 Canada : Industrial Disputes 
 Act, 519 
 
 Canals, 98 
 
 Canning, 113, 158 
 
 Capital and income of U.K., 65, 
 358-9, 465, 566-7, 568-72, 582 
 
 Capitalism, the new, 8-10, 14, 
 21, 25, 35, 103-4, 276-8 
 
 Capital punishment, 52-3 
 
 Carlyle, T., 76, 119, 234, 250 
 
 Cartwright, Major, 114 
 
 Casual ward, 225-6 
 
 Cato Street Conspiracy, 120 
 
 Census, the, of 1801, 42-8, 71 ; 
 1811, 64, 71; 1821, 45,64,71, 
 262; 1831, 45, 64-5, 146; 
 1841, 45; 1851, 48, 262-4; 
 1861, 307; 1871, 360; 1881, 
 315, 360, 411, 413; 1891, 360, 
 550-4; 1901, 146, 360, 391, 
 550-4, 556-8 ; 1911, 660-5, 582 
 
 Census of Production, 465-72, 
 481, 483, 560-7 
 
 Chadwick, E., 196, 212, 221 
 
 Chamberlain, Joseph, 427-8, 473 
 
 Charity organization, 418-9 
 
 Chartism, 198, 214, 230, 234-5, 
 239-48, 259-60, 332 
 
 Chemical discoveries and in- 
 dustry, 292-3, 562 
 
 Children Act (1908), 493-4 
 
 Children in Factories, 33, 207-15, 
 268-71, 288, 298-311, 322-5, 
 395, 443 
 
 China trade, 202 
 
 Cholera and other epidemics, 156, 
 204 
 
 Christian Socialists, 336, 425 
 Churches, influence of, 2, 117, 
 
 126-7, 197, 264-6, 317, 336, 
 
 416 
 Churchill, Winston S., 525 
 Cities, growth of, 47, 148-59, 
 
 169, 177, 263, 460-1 
 Cloth and clothing trades, 25-6, 
 
 28, 89, 97, 322, 474-5, 562 
 
 (and see " Sweating System ") 
 Coal Mines (Eight Hours) Act 
 
 (1908), 531 
 Coal Mines (Minimum Wage) 
 
 Act (1912), 529-34 
 Coal mining and trade, 19, 76-9, 
 
 290, 347 
 Cobbett, Wm., S3. 57, 112, 113-4, 
 
 116, 125 
 Cobden, Richard, 249, 252-6, 
 
 273, 282 
 Coercion Acts, 31, 40, 49, 115; 
 
 the "Six Acts," 119 
 Collet, Miss Clara, 402 
 Combination laws, 31, 133, 163- 
 
 164 
 Combinations of capital, 450-7 
 Commons, preservaiion of, 487 
 " Compulsory Arbitration " (see 
 
 Arbitration) 
 Conciliation (see Arbitration) 
 Conservatism, 313-6, 353 
 Consumption, deaths from, 504- 
 
 505 
 Contract, breach of, by work- 
 men, 337, 338 
 Cooper, Thomas, 248 
 Co-operative movenaent, 340-1 ; 
 
 in agriculture, 485 
 Corn Laws, 63-4, 67-8, 72-3, 
 
 122, 133, 204, 205, 216, 254-6. 
 
 257, 260 
 Cottages, rural, 21, 24, 143-4, 
 
 362-3, 502 
 Cotton and the cotton trades, 
 
 14-15, 16-17, 56, 87-97, 104, 
 
 121, 264, 286-8, 474 
 Cotton, Wm., 346 
 " County, Keeping up the," 130 
 Craft Guilds, 27, 536 
 
INDEX 
 
 597 
 
 Cunningham, Dr, 23 
 Cunninghame-Graham, B. B., 429 
 Currency, 61, 366 
 
 D 
 
 Dangerous trades, first rules for, 
 
 322-3, 442-3, 
 Darwin, Erasmus, 66 
 Darwinism, 187-8, 274, 313, 385 
 Davidson, Thomas, 422 
 Death duties instituted, 444, 464, 
 
 488 
 Death-rates, 46, 303, 307, 394, 
 
 396-7, 504-6, 682 
 Debtors, insolvent, released, 59 
 Democracy and Nationality, 275 
 Depression, causes of, 364-85 
 
 (and see Trade Crises) 
 De Quincey, 190 
 Development Commission, 497 
 Dickens, C, 234, 250, 301 
 Diminishing returns, law of, 186-7 
 Disease, industrial, 288, 299, 
 
 302, 307-8, 324-5, 394-9, 442, 
 
 504 
 DisraeK, B., 198, 204, 253, 256, 
 
 317, 353, 358 
 Docks and dockers, 98, 292, 404, 
 
 407, 410-5 
 Doherty, John, 231 
 Dorset labourers, case of the 
 
 (1834), 235-7 
 Dunraven, Lord, and " Sweat- 
 ing" Committee (1888), 402, 
 
 429 
 
 E 
 
 Education, popular, 117, 170, 
 202, 203-4, 264-72, 309-10, 
 319-21, 494, 545 
 Edward VII, 499 
 Eight-hours day, 433, 531 
 Eldon, Lord Chancellor, 168 
 Electric light and power, 290, 
 
 480, 663 
 Electric trams and railways, 481 
 
 Elliott, Ebenezer, 234, 238, 242, 
 
 250 
 Emigration, 85, 107, 160, 169, 
 
 265, 262, 360, 464, 486, 651-2 
 Empire, the, 203-4, 205, 253, 
 
 275, 278-80, 363, 381, 440, 
 
 462-4, 489, 641, 554-5 
 Employers' Liability Acts, 327-30, 
 
 444, 497 
 Enclosures, 20, 22-4, 32, 69-72, 
 
 142 
 Engela, F., 149 
 Engineering trades, 85, 291-2 
 Engineers, Amalgamated Society 
 
 of, 334 
 Exhibition of 1851, 272 
 Exports (see Foreign Trade, etc.) 
 
 Fabian Society, 422-4 
 
 Factory and Workshops Acts : — 
 (1802), 206; (1819), 211; 
 (1825 and 1831), 211 ; 1833, 
 212-3,215; (1844), 216, 268-9 ; 
 (Ten Hours Bill,1848),216,297; 
 (1850), 297-8; (1853), 298; 
 (1856), 301; (Print Works 
 Act, 1845), 304 ; (1860), 304-5 ; 
 (Lace, 1861), 305; (1864), 305- 
 311, 322; (Print and Dye 
 Works, 1870), 305; (1867), 
 323-4, 398; (1871-5-8), 324- 
 325; (1891), 442; (1895), 443; 
 (1901), 443 
 
 Famine in Ireland, 48, 107, 146, 
 204, 256 
 
 Farmers and Farming (see En- 
 closures), 68-73, 102, 103, 129, 
 169, 355-64, 482-6 
 
 Fashion and season trades, 405, 
 507 
 
 Fawcett, H., 200 
 
 Fielden, John, 216, 242, 245 
 
 Flogging in the Army, 56-8 
 
 Food supply, revolution in, 358 
 
 Foreign investments, 167, 369, 
 466, 467, 666, 570-2 
 
598 
 
 MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 Foreign trade, 10, 13-15, 55, 61, 
 78, 85, 101, 104, 122. 159, 176, 
 282, 294, 356, 367-8, 373-6, 
 472-6, 565, 573-5 
 
 Fox, C. J., 38, 54 
 
 Fox, Rev. W. J., 242, 249 
 
 " Free Labour," 437-8 
 
 Free Trade Movement, 122-4, 
 158-9, 161, 203, 204, 248-9, 
 252-60, 280-2, 316 
 
 French Revolution, influence of, 
 2, 49 
 
 Friendly Societies, 341-2 
 
 Frost, John, 243, 246-7 
 
 G 
 
 Game laws, 113, 217, 427 
 Garden cities and suburbs, 502 
 Gas, 74, 480-1 
 George, Henry, 426-7 
 Germany, British trade with, 
 
 473, 475, 574-5 
 Gibson, Milner, 249 
 Giffen, Sir R., 65, 359, 441, 445 
 Gladstone, W. E., 256, 259, 281, 
 
 315, 317, 352, 434, 440 
 Godwin, W., 183, 313 
 Gold discoveries, 282-4, 366 
 Gonner, Prof. E. C. K., 22 
 Grand National Trades Union, 
 
 232-3 
 Greenwood, Frederick, 500 
 Guardians, Boards of, 217-9, 
 
 223 
 
 H 
 
 Half-time system, 215-6, 268, 
 
 302-3, 309 
 Hammond, Mr and Mrs, quoted, 
 
 21, 22, 131, 142 
 Harcourt, Sir Wm., 444, 488 
 Hardie, J. Keir, 425, 448 
 Hardware, 82-3, 322 
 Harney, Julian, 241, 244 
 Harrison, Frederic, 392 
 
 Headlam, Stewart, 430 
 Health Acts, Public, 498-9 (and 
 
 see Disease, Industrial, Slums) 
 Hetherington, Henry, 239-40 
 Hill, Octavia, 498 
 HUl, Rowland, 260 
 Hirst, F. W., 65, 568 
 Hobson, J. A., 186, 409 
 Home industries, first regulation 
 
 of, 322-3 
 Hood, T., 234 
 Homer, Leonard, 268-9, 299 et 
 
 seq. 
 Hosiery, 26, 145, 345-6, 475 
 Houldsworth, Sir W. T., 377 
 Housing of working classes (see 
 
 Slums, Cottages), 157, 498- 
 
 502 
 Hume, D., 198, 216, 237, 239 
 " Hungry Forties," the, 250-2 
 Huskisson, 158-9, 164, 170, 280 
 Hyndman, H. M., 424, 428 
 
 Imports (see Foreign Trade) 
 
 Income, national, and working- 
 class, 467-9, 568-70 
 
 Independent Labour Party, 425, 
 448 
 
 India, 12, 14, 59, 121, 202, 273, 
 366 
 
 Industrial Council, 522 
 
 Inequality of capital and labour, 
 7, 192-3 
 
 Inspection of Factories, Work- 
 shops, and Mines, 79, 212-3, 
 267-8, 288, 295 et seq., 310, 324, 
 331, 397, 406 ; (of ships), 327 
 
 Insurance, national, against sick- 
 ness and unemployment, 492, 
 496-7, 508-9 
 
 " International, The," 336 
 
 Inventions : — 
 
 Kay's fly-shuttle, 16 
 Wyatt's roller-spinning, 16 
 Hargreave's spinning jenny, 
 
INDEX 
 
 599 
 
 Inventions {contd. ) : — 
 Arkwright's water-frame, etc., 
 
 17, 90 
 Crompton's mule, 17, 91 
 Cartwright'a power-loom, 17, 
 
 91-3 
 Savory's steam pump, 17 
 Newoomen's fire-engine, 18 
 Hull's rotary do., 18 
 Watt's steam engine, etc., 18 
 Darby's furnace, 18 
 Huntsman's crucible steel, 18 
 Cort's iron process, 19 
 Threshing-machine, 66 
 Printing and stereotype, 76, 
 
 112 
 Davy lamp, 77 
 Self-acting mule, 91 
 Knitting-frame, 94, 346 
 Lee's lace-frame, 96 
 Cloth colour-printing, 97 
 Telford and Macadam, 98 
 Steam locomotive, from Treve- 
 
 thick to Stephenson, 99, 173 
 First steamships, 99-100 
 The screw propeller, 174 
 Compound engines, 175 
 Wheatstone'selectric telegraph, 
 
 260 
 Ring spinning, 288 
 Weft-stop motion, 288 
 Combing machines, 288 
 Sewing machines, 288 
 Bessemer's converter process, 
 
 291 
 Siemens' open-hearth, 291 
 Snelus (Thomas-Gilchrist) 
 
 basic steel, 291 
 Refrigeration, 292 
 Photographic plates, 293 
 Sewing-machines, 400 
 R. F. Mushet's steel processes, 
 
 476 
 Other cutting-steels, 476 
 Pneumatic tyre, 47'7 
 . Internal combustion engines 
 
 (Lenoir, Otto, Daimler, 
 
 Benz), 478-9 
 Turbine engines, 479 
 
 Inventions {contd. ) : — 
 Electric arc light, 480 
 Gramme dynamo, 480 
 Filament lamps, 480-1 
 Self -binding reaper, etc., 484 
 
 Inventors, the, 5-6, 15-19, 66, 
 74-6, 175 
 
 Ireland and Irish, 47-8, 53, 55, 
 71, 171, 217, 255, 262, 353, 
 413, 444, 472, 485, 502, 549 
 
 Iron and steel trades, 18-19, 
 56, 81-2, 104, 264, 291, 323, 
 472, 475-6, 562 
 
 Jevons, W. S., 199 
 
 Jewish Board of Guardians, 406 
 
 Joint-Stock Companies, 9, 289, 
 
 379 
 Jones, Ernest, 248 
 " Junta," the old trade unionist, 
 
 332-6, 338-9, 433-4 
 
 K 
 
 Kettle, Sir Rupert, 347 
 Kincaid, Sir John, 269, 298 
 Kingsley, Charles, 234, 399, 419 
 Knitting-frame workers, 26, 59- 
 61, 94-7, 345-6 
 
 Labour Commission (1894), 343, 
 
 361-4, 435, 441 
 Labour Department of Board of 
 
 Trade, 441-2, 514-5. 
 Labour differs from land and 
 
 capital, how, 192-3, 351, 383- 
 
 384, 449 
 Labour Exchanges, 507-8 
 Labour M.P.'s, first, 337-8 
 Labour Party, the, 425, 448-9 
 
 559 
 Lace trade, 96, 305, 475 
 
600 
 
 MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 Laisser Faire, 26-8, 73-4, 133, 162, 
 
 165-6, 180-200, 217, 224, 233, 
 
 260, 265, 296, 309, 322, 341, 
 
 377-8, 390, 420, 444, 492, 502, 
 
 537 
 Lancashire Cotton Famine, 286- 
 
 288 
 Lancaster, Joseph, 264 
 Land, income from, 358-9, 481- 
 
 482 
 Land policies, new, 528-9 
 Land Restoration League, 427 
 Laws, G. A. (Shipping Federation), 
 
 436-8 
 Lefevre, Mr Shaw, 358, 442, 
 
 487 
 Levi, Leone, 354, 356-7 
 Liberalism, 314-9, 352-3, 427 
 Linen Trade, 11, 26, 289 
 Lloyd-George, D., 495-6 
 Local Government Board, 218 
 London, 4, 46, 114, 152-6,203,401 
 
 (and see " Sweating System "), 
 
 410-21, 428-35, 444, 446, 460, 
 
 481, 487, 489; 554 
 London County Council, the 
 
 first, 430, 434 
 London Trades Council, 335-6 
 Lovett, Wm., 239-40, 244, 246, 
 
 247 
 Lowry, Robert, 241 
 Luddites, 59, 97, 107, 112, 132 
 
 M 
 
 Macaulay, T. B., 199, 212 
 Macdonald, Alexander, 338, 347 
 MacDonald, J. Ramsay, 425 
 Machine-breaking, 26, 33, 59- 
 
 61, 95, 131, 168, 252 
 Machinery manufacture (see 
 
 Engineering) 
 Machinery, restrictions on ex- 
 port, 84-5 
 Maddison, F., 439 
 Malthus, 38, 43, 73, 86, 111, 
 
 181, 183-90, 195-6, 427, 465 
 Manohestei Ship Canal, 466 
 
 Mann, Tom, 430-3, 436 
 Manning, Cardinal, 432 
 Manufacturers and the tariff, 11, 
 
 83-4, 123, 160 
 Manures, artificial, 355, 484-5 
 Marx, Karl, 151, 179, 190, 336, 
 
 424 
 Massey, Gerald, 211, 234 
 Meals and medicine in schools, 
 
 493-4 
 Mechanics' institutes, 266 
 Mediaeval regulations, remains 
 
 of, 10, 27, 163, 165, 536-6 
 Melbourne, Lord, 132, 202, 235, 
 
 236, 249 
 Merchant Shipping Acts, 326-7 
 Metals, new, 293 
 " Middleman " legend, 403 
 MiU, J. S., 189, 199, 265, 386-9, 
 
 447 
 Milner, Lord, on Sweating, 525, 
 
 527-8 
 Mines, regulation of, 78-9, 204, 
 
 214 
 Monarchy, influence of, 2 
 Money-lenders, 386-9 
 Monmouth (Chartist) Rising, 
 
 246-7 
 Monopoly elements in business, 
 
 451-2 
 Morris, Wm., 419, 422, 425 
 Moat-favoured-nation treaties, 
 
 282 
 Motor-buses, boats, etc., 478-9 
 Mundella, A. J., senr., 337, 346, 
 
 441 
 Mundella, A. J., 347-9 
 Municipal enterprise, 447 
 Municipal reform, 202-3 
 
 N 
 
 Napier, Sir Charles, 246 
 Nash, Vaughan, 431 
 Navigation Acts, 12, 122-3, 159, 
 
 204, 282 
 New Zealand : Arbitration Acts 
 
 619-20 
 
INDEX 
 
 601 
 
 North, the industrial, 47, 77, U7, 
 
 263, 394-6, 553 
 Northcote, Sir S., 280 
 
 O 
 
 Oastler, Biohard, 211 
 O'Brien, Bronterre, 242, 245 
 Occupations and Trade Unionism, 
 
 391-2, 471-2, 556-9 
 O'Connor, Feargus, 241-2, 247, 
 
 248, 259, 260 
 Oil fuel, 479-80 
 Old Age Pensions, 492, 494-5 
 Orange-Tory conspiracy, 236 
 Overend Gumey failure, 290 
 " Over-Production," 370-3, 374-7, 
 
 379 451 
 Owen,' Robert, 86, 118, 182, 209, 
 
 230, 232, 235, 267, 341 
 
 Paine, T., 110, 112 
 
 Paish, Sir George, 570-2 
 
 Palmerston, 67, 256, 298, 300, 
 329 
 
 Pauperism (from 1871), 490-1, 
 494-5 
 
 Peel, Sir Robert, 83, 158, 210, 
 239, 253, 254-8, 280 
 
 Peel, the elder, 206, 208-10 
 
 Penny Postage, 260 
 
 Peterloo Massacre, 118-9 
 
 Photography, 293 
 
 Picketing, 337-8 
 
 Pitt (the younger), 36, 49-54, 65, 
 72 
 
 Place, Francis, 113, 195, 239, 249 
 
 PlimsoU, S., 325-7 
 
 Poor Law, the old, 33-40 ; Gil- 
 bert's Act, 37, 39 ; Speenham- 
 land, 38-9 ; after the Great 
 War, 108, 116-7 ; aUowanoe 
 system analysed, 133-45; Act 
 of 1834 and later developments, 
 216-27; relief since 1871, 
 490-1 
 
 Population and poverty (see 
 
 Birth-rate, Censuses, Malthue), 
 
 183-90, 460, 463-5 
 Positivists, 336 
 Potter, Beatrice (see Mrs S. 
 
 Webb) 
 Potteries, the, 307-9 
 Poverty-line, Charles Booth's, 
 
 489 ; B. S. Rowntree's, 490 
 Press-gang, 56 
 Press, the Radical and Labour, 
 
 112, 120, 203, 216, 231, 242, 
 
 247, 430 
 
 Wheat, 39, 51, 63-4, 67-8, 106, 
 122, 257, 356-9, 483, 486; 
 Coal, 172 ; Cotton and Wool, 
 87 ; Food, etc., in Forties, 
 251; Gold and, 283-4; Index 
 Numbers, 576-8 
 Production of U.K. 1907 (see 
 
 Census of Production) 
 Protectionism, revival of, 381, 
 463, 472-3 
 
 R 
 
 " Radicals," 118, 157 et seq., 239, 
 
 252 
 Raikes and Sunday Schools, 264 
 Railways and tramways, 98-9, (y. 
 
 170, 172-8, 257, 292, 356, 371- ^ 
 
 372, 454-6, 481 
 Rattening outrages in Sheffield, 
 
 337 
 Redgrave, Inspector, 270 
 Reeves, W. Pember, 519 
 Reform Acts, Parliamentary 
 
 (1832), 170-2; (1867), 317; 
 
 (1871 and 1885), 318' 
 Refrigeration and cold storage, 
 
 292 
 Registrar-General, 203, 303, 394, 
 
 396-7, 503 
 Rents, rise and fall of, 32, 65, 
 
 69-70, 73, 107, 356-9 
 " Residuum," the, 351-2, 392 et 
 
 seq., 413-6, 420, 429-35, 445-6 
 
602 
 
 MODERN ENGLAND 
 
 Rioardo, D., 72, 73, 111, 179, 
 
 188-90 
 Koad Board, 497 
 Roads and coaches, 98 
 Rochdale Pioneers, 340 
 " Romantics " and the social 
 
 problem, 109 
 Romilly, Samuel, 62, 116 
 Rowntree, B. S., 490, 507 
 Ruskin, John, 408-9, 426, 498 
 Russell, Lord John, 73, 118, 160, 
 
 170, 239, 243, 256, 259 
 
 Sadler, Michael, 212 
 
 Salt, 80 
 
 Salvation Army, 416 
 
 Seamen, grievances of, 325-7 
 
 Senior, Nassau, 196 
 
 Settlement, law of, 24, 34, 36, 
 
 108, 141 
 Settlements, University and 
 
 Social, 416-20 
 Sewing-machine, a distributive 
 
 agent, 400-1 
 Shaftesbury, Lord, 212, 498 
 Shaw, G. B., 422-4 
 Shelley, P. B., 110 
 Shipping and shipbuilding, 10, 
 
 55, 99-101, 159, 174-6, 291-2, 
 
 294, 325-7, 372-3, 414, 462 
 Shipping Federation and " Free 
 
 Labour," 436-40, 516 
 Shipton, George, 434 
 Shops and stores, 453 
 Silk trade, 96, 160-3, 474-5 
 Sinclair, Sir John, 66, 69 
 Slaves, emancipation of, 202 
 Slave trade, the, 14, 54, 55 
 Sliding scales in coal and iron 
 
 trades, 529-31 
 Slums, 48, 108, 141, 147-57, 456, 
 
 501 
 Smith, Adam, 4, 11, 28, 181-3 
 Smith, George (of Coalville), 399 
 Smith, H. Llewellyn, 410-2, 431, 
 
 441 
 
 Smuggling, 10, 65, 131, 161, 169 
 
 Snowden, Philip, 612-3 
 
 Social betterment, cost of, 503 
 
 Social Democratic Federation, 
 424-5, 441, 448 
 
 Socialism, 112, 240, 276, 422-5, 
 433, 441, 447 
 
 Spa Fields riot, 114 
 
 Speeding-up, 543 
 
 Speenhamland (see Poor Law) 
 
 Spenceans, 113-4 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, 200 
 
 Spinning, weaving, and knitting, 
 88-97 
 
 Spitalfields Act repealed, 160-3 
 
 Squire, the, 126-7 
 
 Statistics, rise and significance of, 
 42-5 
 
 Steam engine (see Inventions) 
 
 Stephens, J. Rayner, 242 
 
 Strikes, in the 'Fifties, 335; 
 great London dock strike 
 (1889), 430-4; HuU dock 
 strike, 435-40 ; (1901-12), 510, 
 512 ; general railway strike 
 (1911), 510; coal strike (1912), 
 510, 531-4; cost of, 512-3; 
 causes of, 524 
 
 " Submerged Tenth " (see 
 " Residuum ") 
 
 " Sweating System," the, 399- 
 409, 442, 524-8 
 
 "Swing "riots (1830), 130-2 
 
 Syndicalism, 234, 339, 533 
 
 T 
 
 Taflt Vale decision, 448 
 Taxation, 50, 53-4, 56, 62-4, 83- 
 
 84, 106, 117, 159, 205, 254, 280-1 
 Taylor, Dr John, 241, 243 
 Thrift, doctrine of, 380 
 Tillett, Ben, 430-1, 436 
 Tin, copper, and lead mines and 
 
 trades, 79-80, 104 
 Tooke, T., 123 
 Tories, Philosophic, 197-8 
 Toulmiii, Sir George, 525 
 Town Planning, 499, 502 
 
INDEX 
 
 603 
 
 Toynbee, Arnold, 24, 40, 147, 
 186, 200, 417, 636 
 
 Toynbee Hall, 417 
 
 Trade Boards Act (1909), 526 
 
 Trade Crises (after the Great 
 War) :— 1816-7, 101-9; 1825, 
 164,166-9; 1837-9,238; 1847,' 
 257-8; 1857, 285-6; 1866, 
 289-90; 1875, 1883, 354-5, 
 364-81; 1890 (Baring crisis), 
 435 
 
 Trade Union benefits, 338-9, 380, 
 392 
 
 Trade Union Congress, 338, 448 
 
 Trade Unionism, 30-1, 95, 163-4, 
 227-37, 238, 332-40, 350, 380, 
 391-2, 415, 433-40, 471, 558- 
 559 
 
 Trials :— Palmer, Muir, 40 ; Hol- 
 croft. Hardy, Tooke, 41 ; Ely 
 labourers (1816), 107; Lud- 
 dites (1817), 115; Derbyshire 
 "insurrection" (1817), 116; 
 reformers, at York, 116 ; 
 "Swing" rioters, 132; of 
 Cobbett, 171 ; Chartists, 198, 
 243-4, 246-7 ; Dorchester, 
 (1834), 235-7 
 
 Truck, 79, 116 
 
 Trusts and combines, 450-4 
 
 U 
 
 Unemployment, 339, 405, 411, 
 
 428, 496-7, 506-9, 579 
 Union-smashing, Trade, 337 
 United States, 12, 238, 273, 
 
 279, 285, 356, 367, 370-1. 
 
 373, 407 
 Urquhart, David, 247 
 Usury, 386-8 
 
 Victoria, Queen, and Prince 
 Albert, 203, 259-61, 272, 317, 
 498 
 
 Village industries, 25 
 Villiers, C. P., 245, 249 
 Vincent, Henry, 239-40, 246, 
 247 
 
 W 
 
 Wage, minimum, 27, 40, 95, 138, 
 
 433, 442, 524-38 
 Wages, course of, 31-2, 92, 96, 106, 
 
 121, 136, 146-7, 162, 182, 
 
 251-2, 284-5, 315, 362, 405, 
 
 414, 445, 467-8, 486, 511, 570, 
 
 577-8, 580-1 
 Wages, economy of high, 143, 
 
 209, 468 
 Wages, magisterial assessment of, 
 
 28r9, 34, 38-40, 160-2, 538 
 Wakley, Thos., 237, 245 
 Walpole, Spencer, 323 
 War and Peace, influence of, 
 
 2, 12-13, 32, 48 et seq., 68, 
 
 106, 253, 257, 272-9, 353-4, 
 
 367-9 
 War, the Great, cost of, 62-4 
 Ward, Sir Joseph, 547 
 Webb, S. and B., 231, 232, 332, 
 
 383, 414, 422 
 Wellington, 56, 58, 259 
 West Indies, 12 
 Whitbread, Samuel, 38 
 Women in industry (see Factory 
 
 Acts), 215, 299, 305-11, 322, 
 
 325, 398-9, 401-7, 442-3, 525, 
 
 561 
 Women's Industrial Council, 525 
 Wool and Woollen Manufactures, 
 
 15, 16, 87-97, 104, 121, 264, 
 
 289, 474, 562 
 Workhouse, the 37, 39, 137, 
 
 217, 219, 221, 226 
 
 Young, Arthur, 23, 
 
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