by Will Durant
If their island was small, the seas that stormed or caressed its shores called them to far-reaching adventures; a thousand liquid roads invited men who could pitch and roll and always stand erect. A hundred distant lands were waiting, with products and markets, to help transform England from agriculture to industry, commerce, and worldwide finance. Innumerable quirks of shoreline offered inlets to oceans seeking peace, and safe harbors to vessels from all the world. In the island itself there were a dozen navigable rivers, and a hundred canals leading to one or another of those streams. No Englishman was more than seventy-five miles from waters that would take him to the sea.
Britain rose to the geographic challenge by making and bearing the Industrial Revolution.*She built merchant ships of a size never before known, some of them huge “East-Indiamen” for half-a-year voyages to India and China. She loved the sea possessively as an extension of England, and fought to the verge of exhaustion for control of that altera patria against the Spanish, then the Dutch, now the French. She cut new paths through the water to and around continents, to the resources and markets of Africa, India, the Far East, Australia, the South Pacific, and the two Americas, alien or revolted, but eager for trade. Only the Northwest Passage defied these insatiably seeking Britons, and sent them home shivering but unbowed.
Those merchant fleets, however, and the roving Navy that protected them, had to be built with mostly imported lumber; those colonies and customers had to be requited for their raw materials, their silver and gold, their spices, victuals, and exotic fruits, with the products of British industry; that flourishing commerce had to be cargoed and financed by the Industrial Revolution. Gradually England, especially middle and northern, and Scotland, especially southern, reorganized their economic life by drawing more and more of their population from the fields and villages into towns and factories, and from the slow crafts of home or guild into confined collections of disciplined men, women, and children, tending and paced by machinery, and producing manufactured goods for the world.
Enclosures helped the transition. As far back as the twelfth century, clever Englishmen had reckoned that they could use land more profitably in large tracts than in small. They bought up individual farms and the “commons”—those common fields and woods where peasants had traditionally grazed their cattle and cut their fuel; they worked their extended properties with hired “hands” under an overseer. In the fifteenth century they decided that they could glean more profit by raising livestock, or, still better, pasturing sheep, than by plowing the earth; for now they needed fewer human beings, and found ready markets for carcasses and wool in chilly, meat-loving Britain, and abroad. More and more peasant proprietors sold or lost their farms and drifted to the towns; the sturdy yeomanry slowly disappeared, taking with it some strength and pride from the English character. By 1800 there were 15 million souls in Britain, and 19 million sheep; the sheep, said a wit, are devouring the men. To this day, traveling in the middle and northern counties of England, one is struck by the scarcity of farms and tillage, and the number of green and fenced enclosures where the only visible inhabitants are sheep idly transforming grass into wool, and rewarding with their end products a grateful soil.
We must not exaggerate; throughout this period (except for the nearstarvation crisis brought on in 1811 by Napoleon’s Continental Blockade) English agriculture, increasingly capitalistic and mechanized, succeeded in feeding England without foreign aid.2 So confident were the growers that they persuaded Parliament to pass “Corn Laws” checking, by severe tariff duties, the import of competing grain. (“Corn” then meant any grain; in England it usually denoted wheat; in Scotland, oats.) Even so, by 1790, the townward migration of displaced peasants, aided by impoverished immigrants from Scotland and Ireland, provided the labor force that made industrialization possible.
Industry was still mostly in homes and craft shops, but most of it was locally determined and consumed; it was not organized for wholesale production that could supply diverse markets spreading across frontiers. The home or shop worker was at the mercy of the middlemen who sold him material and bought his product; his payment was determined by supply and demand and the hungriest of his competitors; usually his wife and children had to work with him, from dawn to dark,3 to keep the wolf from the door. Some more efficient way had to be found to finance and organize industry if it was to meet the needs of multiplying townsfolk, or fill the holds of merchantmen seeking foreign goods or gold.
Inspired by Adam Smith but forgetful of his cautions, English industry was geared to private enterprise, spurred by the profit motive, and largely free from governmental regulation. It obtained capital from its own unspent earnings, from prosperous merchants, from landlords gathering agricultural revenues and urban rents, and from bankers who knew how to make money breed by hugging it, and who lent money at lower rates of interest than their French compeers. So individuals and associations provided funds for entrepreneurs who proposed to unite the products of farm and field with the service of machines and the labor and skills of men, women, and children on a larger scale and to greater gains than England had ever known. The providers of capital kept watch on its use, and gave its name to the economic system that was about to transform the Western world.
It was a risky game. An investment might be ruined by bad management, price or market fluctuations, style changes, overproduction for underpaid consumers, or some new invention cornered by a competitor. The fear of loss sharpened the greed of gain. The cost of labor had to be kept minimal; rewards must be offered for inventions; machines must as far as possible replace men. Iron must be mined or imported to make machines, ironclads, bridges, guns. Coal (luckily abundant in England) must be mined to fuel smelters, purify ores, and toughen iron into steel. As many machines as possible must be tied to one strong source of power; that source might be wind, or water, or animals walking a treadmill or turning a screw; but the best power plant would be a steam engine like those that James Watt had set up in Matthew Boulton’s plant near Birmingham (1774). Given enough capital and careful organization, any number of machines could be operated by one or a few engines; and to each machine could be attached a man, or a woman, or a child, who would tend it from twelve to fourteen hours a day for a subsistence wage. The factory system took form.
Soon a thousand smokestacks belched their fumes over rising industrial centers—Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh. In the Britain of 1750 there had been two cities with fifty thousand inhabitants; in 1801 there were eight; in 1851 there would be twenty-nine. Roads were paved to ease the transit of materials, fuels, and products to factories, markets, and ports. Stagecoaches were built to withstand eight passengers and ten miles an hour.4 About 1808 Thomas Telford, about 1811 John McAdam (both Scottish engineers) devised new road surfaces essentially like the macadamized highways of today. In 1801 George Trevithick built the first steam locomotive to draw a passenger car on rails. In 1813 George Stephenson built a better one; in 1825 he opened the first regular steam railway service—between Stockton and Darlington. In 1801 a small steamboat began to operate on a Scottish canal; in 1807 the Boulton and Watt factory constructed a passenger steamboat on a model offered by Robert Fulton, who ran his Clermont from New York to Albany in August of that year. Meanwhile London, Harwich, Newcastle, Bristol, Liverpool, Glasgow were developing ports and facilities for ocean commerce; and Nelson, at Abukir and Trafalgar, was winning for England the command of the sea.
In 1801 the government took the first scientific census of Great Britain (England, Wales, and Scotland), to the dismay of citizens who resented the invasion of privacy as a prelude to regimentation.5 The recorded total showed 10,942,646 souls (the United States then had some 6,000,000). By 1811 this had grown to 12,552,144.6 Probably the rise reflected an increase in the food supply, an improvement in medical service, and a consequent decline in infantile and senile mortality. London had grown to 1,009,546 inhabitants in 1811, but the largest and most significant expansion h
ad been in the industrial north and west. In 1811 the number of British families engaged in farming or herding was recorded as 895,998; in trade or manufactures, 1,128,049; 519,168 in other occupations.7 The government had depressed agriculture by sanctioning enclosures; it had encouraged industry by favoring free enterprise and a protective tariff, and by forbidding labor unions to agitate for better wages (1800). It had favored commerce by improving roads and canals, and by building an invincible British Navy. Merchants, manufacturers, and financiers had acquired great wealth, and some had earned or bought seats in Parliament.
The economic picture of Britain in 1800 showed, at the top, an aristocracy still, but decreasingly, masters of the economy through ownership of the land; cooperating with them was a Parliament overwhelmingly noble or genteel; swelling below and around them was a ruthless and enterprising bourgeoisie of merchants and manufacturers displaying their new riches and bad manners, and clamoring for more political power; below these the professions, from the most learned physician to the most courageous or virulent journalist; below them all a peasantry progressively dispossessed and dependent upon relief, and sunless miners stripping or gutting the earth, and “navvies” engaged in movable gangs to level roads and dig canals, and a labor pool of hungry, disorganized, demoralized factory workers writing their tragedy in polluted skies.
II. AT THE BOTTOM
If now we review again the condition of the factory workers in the Britain of 1800, we must not exaggerate their prominence in the total picture of the time. Presumably there were many more pleasant scenes in “Merrie England.” Factory labor itself was not then the main feature of British industry; most industrial production was still carried on in rural or urban homes at individual looms or lathes, or by craftsmen in their independent shops. The factory system was for the most part confined to the processing of cotton, linen, or wool. Even as so limited, its role in the panorama of the age is one of the saddest episodes in English history.
The factories themselves were rooted in slums and shrouded in their own effluvia of bilge and fumes. Their interiors were generally dusty and dirty, ill-ventilated, and ill-lit—till 1805, when, here and there, gaslighting was installed. The machines were geared to a speed that required their human attendants to keep eyes alert and hands busy through the twelve or fourteen hours of the working day; like some latter-day inventions the machine saved labor and spent men. An hour was allowed for luncheon; thereafter the toil continued, in most cases till eight o’clock.8 The labor force was replenished at need from a human reservoir continually replenished by displaced peasants or careless wombs.
Between deliveries women were preferred to men as factory workers, and children were preferred to women, as requiring less pay. In 1816, of 10,000 employees in forty-one Scottish mills, 3,146 were men, 6,854 were women, 4,581 were under eighteen.9 Still cheaper, and widely favored, was the labor of orphaned or destitute children sent to the factories by the Poor Relief administrators. The Factory Act of 1802 tried to establish some minimal standard for the use of such “apprentices,” forbidding their employment for more than twelve hours a day; but Parliament refused to pay the commissioners appointed to enforce the act.10 Generally, child labor continued in British mills till 1842.11
In 1800 the average wage of a London adult male worker was eighteen shillings per week (about 23.00 in the United States in 1960); in the country it was about one-third less.12 By and large, the wages of a family were determined by the amount needed to maintain the strength needed for work; but this was predicated on the wife and child joining the factory force.13 Employers argued that wages had to be kept low to get the workers to come to work; some laborers took weekends of two or three days, and when they returned they might be still drowsy with alcohol in their blood.14 Only hunger would bring them back to the machines.
There were certain mitigations. Some employers paid the rent and fuel expenses of their employees. Commodity prices were low—approximately a third of their average in the Great Britain of 1960.15 Wages generally rose and fell with prices, until 1793, when war began with France; then all classes suffered in their incomes, but as the workers had been kept down to a subsistence wage they suffered most.
They lived in towns where air was poisonous, in ghettos that nurtured disease, in crowded homes—sometimes damp cellars—where sunlight was a rare intruder, lighting was dim, cleanliness was a mirage, domestic strife rasped tired nerves, privacy was impossible, and the only refuge for the woman was piety, and, for the man, the pub. Drunkenness was hebdomadal. Houses took water from wells and public pumps; when these ran short the women carried water from the nearest river or canal, which, as like as not, was polluted by industrial, domestic, or human waste.16 Sanitation was primitive, sewers were rare: “I am convinced,” wrote Thorold Rogers in 1890 (when he was professor of political economy in Oxford), “that at no period of English history for which authentic records exist, was the condition of manual labor worse than in the forty years from 1782 to 1821, the period in which manufacturers accumulated fortunes rapidly, and in which the rent [receipts] of agricultural land was doubled.”17 This condition lasted till the 1840s. Carlyle, who grew up in Scotland and England between 1795 and 1840, summed up the condition of the British factory worker in that period by concluding that Britons had been better off when they were medieval serfs. Industrial progress had left the proletaire so slight a share in the growing wealth that he was reverting to barbarism in manners, dress, amusements, and speech. “Civilization works its miracles,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville on visiting Manchester; “civilized man is turned back almost into a savage.”18 Honor to Manchester and her fellow cities for the immense advances they have made since those bitter days.
The Poor Law, first enacted in 1601, often thereafter reformed, offered some help for the destitute. It was administered by parish officials who usually gathered the recipients into workhouses. It was financed by a specific tax on householders, who complained that their payments were wasted on ne’er-do-wells, encouraging reckless fertility; they submitted to the impost as insurance against social disorder. In many districts, after 1795, the rate of relief was adjusted to supplement wages deemed inadequate to subsistence; some employers took advantage of this to keep wages low.
Despite such middling mercies the discontent of the workers reached a danger point as the nineteenth century began. Forbidden, till 1824, to organize for better pay, they secretly organized; forbidden to strike, they struck; defeated, they struck again.19 Reformers like Robert Owen warned Parliament that unless factory conditions improved, costly violence would increase. Discontent was checked by the renewal of hostilities with France (1803); it increased as the war dragged on, and came to open revolt in 1811. It was led not by factory employees but by lace and stocking weavers operating “frames” in homes and small shops in or near Nottingham. These men and women could still recall the open-air life on the farms, and perhaps they idealized it in contrast with confined work at their looms. They resented their subjection to the “hosier” who leased them the frames, sold them raw material, and bought their product at rates determined by him and the suppliers of his stock or capital. Moreover, they feared that even their present jobs would soon be lost to the spreading factories and their multiple, powerdriven looms. In their mounting fury they resolved to smash, wherever they could, the machines that symbolized their serfdom.
An obscure and perhaps mythical individual named Ned or King Ludd organized the angry weavers, and drew up plans for their raids. In the fall of 1811 separate bands of “Luddites” invaded one district after another and destroyed all the textile frames they found. The movement spread from Nottinghamshire to Lancashire, Derbyshire, and Leicestershire, and continued through 1812. The machine-wreckers abstained from injuring persons except in the case of an employer who ordered his men to fire upon them; the strikers sought him out and killed him. Half of England shivered with fright, remembering the French Revolution. “At this moment,” wrote Robert Southey, “nothing bu
t the Army preserves us from that most dreadful of all calamities, an insurrection of the poor against the rich; and how long the Army can be depended upon is a question which I scarcely dare to ask myself…. The country is mined beneath our feet.”20 William Cobbett, a lusty liberal journalist, defended the raiders in the House of Commons; the poet Byron delivered a fervent address in their favor in the House of Lords. The Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, put through Parliament some severe legislation, and sent a regiment to suppress the revolt. The leaders were rounded up, and were summarily condemned in a mass trial at York (1813); some were deported, some were hanged. The machines multiplied. No legislative relief came to adult British labor till 1824.
III. THE DISMAL SCIENCE
The economists gave little comfort to the workers. Thomas Malthus, in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), explained that it is useless to raise wages, for this would lead to larger families, increasing the pressure of population upon the food supply, and would soon restore the poverty that must forever result from the natural inequality of men.21 In a revised but impenitent form (1803) of his famous essay Malthus laid down his own “iron law of wages”: “The wages of labour will always be regulated by the proportion of the [labor] supply to the demand.”22 In Principles of Political Economy (1820) he warned that thrift might be carried to excess, since it would reduce investment and production; he defended “rents” (the returns from property investments) as “the reward of present valour and wisdom, as well as of past strength or cunning;”23 and he agreed with Voltaire that the luxuries of the rich have the good effect of providing employment for skilled artisans. In a liberal moment he recommended public works as a mitigation of unemployment in periods of reduced production.