by Roy Porter
There was never a shortage of schemers touting solutions. One much-canvassed, though long-term, answer was, as we have seen, to recondition minds, train up the lower classes in habits of industry, piety, thrift and frugality. Improving tracts, charity schools, sermons and the like aimed to build character and teach the laws of labour. But that would take time. Hence a nostrum which increasingly found favour was to attach strings to hand-outs; notably, relief should mean loss of liberty. The deus ex machina was to be the workhouse, ‘a mill to grind rogues honest, and idle men industrious’, in Jeremy Bentham's adage (see chapter 18). There the poor would earn their keep (thus sparing the ratepayers), and be taught discipline and skills – several birds would be killed with one utilitarian stone.
Locke, almost inevitably, was an early advocate. Prepared for the Board of Trade, his An Essay on the Poor Law (1697) briskly diagnosed the causes of poverty and unemployment, which were neither ‘scarcity of provisions nor want of employment’, but ‘the relaxation of discipline and the corruption of manners’ – Locke the policymaker invariably sounds harsher than Locke the philosopher. Hence the first step towards ‘setting the poor on work ought to be a restraint of their debauchery by a strict execution of the laws against it’.81 Guardians of the poor were to create boot camp working schools and require master craftsmen and farmers to employ ex-pupils as apprentices. ‘Begging drones’ – the able-bodied idle – should be dragooned into service at sea, and orphaned children placed in workhouses and made to labour up to fourteen hours a day, from the age of three for boys and five for girls, sustained by a ‘watery gruel’.82
The philanthropic Quakers John Bellers and Thomas Firmin, contemporaries of Locke, held that, along with workhouses, the training-up of children in habits of industry and putting them to work would also solve the indigence problem.83 In his Proposals for Raising a College of Industry of All Useful Trades and Husbandry (1696), Bellers declared, in standard mercantilist fashion, that ‘there cannot be too many labourers in a nation’, and proposed a colony of some 300 producers, run on a joint stock basis – ‘a Community something like the example of primitive Christianity, that lived in common’.84
Workhouses were first tried from 1697 in Bristol; hundreds more were set up during the next few decades. From some quarters the institution received the most lavish, if sinister, praise; in The Fleece (1757), John Dyer saluted the happy workhouse as a solution for society's flotsam and jetsam:
Ho, ye poor, who seek,
Among the dwellings of the diligent,
For sustenance unearn'd; who stroll abroad
From house to house, with mischievous intent,
Feigning misfortune: Ho, ye lame, ye blind;
Ye languid limbs, with real want oppress'd,
Who tread the rough highways, and mountains wild,
Through storms, and rains, and bitterness of heart;
Ye children of affliction, be compell'd
To happiness.85
When they failed to deliver the promised goods, however, revised schemes had to be advanced for making workhouses more disciplined and cost-effective. Jeremy Bentham recommended the establishing of a compulsory and universal system, the National Charity Company, a private concern licensed by the State with a view to rounding up beggars and paupers and sequestering them in workhouses. The company would possess the authority to sweep the idle off the streets – they would be ‘compelled to come in’.86 In particular it was to target the young, who would be trained in habits of industry: ‘not a particle of time,’ wrote Bentham, ‘shall remain necessarily unem-ploy'd’ (see chapter 18). Administrative minutiae were specified to make the workhouse cost-efficient: waste of money and time would be avoided by ‘moral bookkeeping’. Like the Panopticon,87 the National Charity Company would be operated by a privatized farming-out system – for Bentham was convinced that state jobs bred jobbery, whereas competitive tendering made for efficiency.
Confronted with pauperism, some hardliners concluded that capitalism itself was producing poverty – and that this might be inevitable and even advantageous. ‘Poverty,’ asserted the utilitarian Scot Patrick Colquhoun, along Mandevillian lines, is ‘a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society’.88 No poverty, no incentive to labour, no industry. Certainly, attention increasingly focused upon the balance – or, rather, the newly feared disequilibrium – between wealth and the population rate.
Previously, populousness had always been praised. ‘The increase of hands and the right employing of them,’ wrote Locke, ‘is the great art of government’;89 Sir William Petty held that ‘people are the chiefest, most fundamental and precious commodity’; while Nicholas Barbon declared people ‘the riches and strength of the country’.90 Mercantilism had welcomed the proliferation of industrious hands. By late in the eighteenth century, however, the perceived danger was overpopulation, as the Revd Joseph Townsend argued in his A Dissertation on the Poor Laws (1786), a work which anticipates Malthus.91 Well-meaning attempts at social improvement must founder, the Anglican rationalist explained, because of man's inordinate procreative drives. Interventions to relieve poverty invariably made bad worse: ‘It seems to be a law of nature, that the poor should be to a certain degree improvident, that there may always be some to fulfil the most servile, the most sordid, and the most ignoble offices in the community.’ The only recourse was to ‘leave one appetite to regulate another’ – and stomach the consequences.92
Townsend thus endorsed the conviction of late Enlightenment political economists that Nature, or the market, must determine success and failure, wealth and poverty. Such were matters not for state regulation but for individual responsibility.93 Similar views were fleshed out in Thomas Robert Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Populations (1798).94 In an age deferring to scientific facts and figures, his forte lay in iron laws of Nature numerically expressed.95 Food supplies crept up arithmetically: 2, 4, 6, etc.; human population leapt geometrically: 2, 4, 16, and so forth. The implication of this simple arithmetic was, as Mr Micawber would have spotted, misery, that is, the positive checks of famine, war and pestilence – unless, as later editions of the Essay stressed, the poor pre-empted Nature by employing the salutary preventive check of moral restraint: abstinence and delayed marriage would mitigate misery.
The Malthusian trap was a smart card to play. No one, the clergyman claimed, could be a truer friend of humanity, none more liberal or eager for improvement; it was hardly his fault if Nature's niggardliness frustrated these goals, and there was not room for all at ‘Nature's mighty feast’.96 There was no arguing with numbers, asserted the enlightened pessimist whom Thomas Love Peacock would label ‘Mr Fax’.97
One certain way to keep people off the parish, and a putative long-term means therefore of keeping down the numbers of the poor, was to abolish relief entirely. This modest proposal, advocated by Townsend and mulled over by Malthus, held that relief, far from alleviating poverty, stoked it, because it took away motives for prudence. Remove the safety net and people would provide for themselves. ‘Hunger will tame the fiercest animals,’ asserted the realist Townsend: ‘it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjection.’ This audacious stroke, however – let natural sanctions apply and all will find its own level – was never tried. Flattering themselves on their humanity, Georgian statesmen shrank from it; anyway, relief was a useful bait: the hand that fed would not be bitten, and the Poor Laws served major social regulatory functions.98
Enlightened attitudes towards the masses were profoundly ambiguous, though in general the poor were regarded as more of a nuisance than a threat – despite disturbances and riots, the élite did not seriously believe the third estate was going to rise in arms. However, as will be seen, that fear flared with good reason in the 1790s.99 Humanitarianism thus continued to parade itself, but when Blake asked
Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land
Babes reduc'd to misery
Fed with a cold and u
surous hand?100
no one answered his charge.
The drive to reform popular culture through implanting bourgeois rationality doubtless reveals the limits of élite sympathies and, in a sense, validates ‘cultural imperialism’ accusations.101 But to see trumpeted Enlightenment programmes as nothing other than attempts at social control is rather trite. What is historically distinctive is that the Moderns approached and tackled the people problem and problem people through models of improvement. Just as there was a new optimism that children were educable and mental illness curable, so the rogue too might be made honest and the harlot turned into a good housekeeper.102
The wider politics of this Kulturkampf have been hotly contested. Some historians, notably Robert Muchembled in his analysis of ‘acculturation’ in France, have argued that Church and State systematically set about curbing popular culture, so as to strengthen central authority. His views have been criticized, however, for exaggerating both the conspiratorial nature of élite cultural cleansing and its efficacy.103 From a somewhat different tack, others have stressed how the new shibboleth of rationality served the élite more through cultural hegemony: science undermined the magical basis of popular culture, rooted in the soil, while the old ‘moral economy’ was assailed by a new individualistic, competitive political economy, supposedly grounded on the laws of Nature.104 In these ‘coercive’ and ‘hegemonic’ readings alike, popular culture is portrayed as mastered from above through policing or propaganda. In England, however, it makes sense to stress seduction no less than suppression. Modernizing outlooks triumphed less through imposition than infiltration, via supply and demand mechanisms exploiting opportunities in the commercial exchange of print capitalism. Better communications and the spread of newspapers, magazines and instructional books made country folk au fait with metropolitan culture and attuned them to its fashions.105 The hidden persuaders of the market were another plank in the enlightened platform.
17
THE PURSUIT OF WEALTH
[T]he desire of bettering our condition, a desire which… comes with us from the womb, and never leaves us till we go into the grave.
ADAM SMITH1
Britain prospered under the House of Hanover, a consumer society emerged, and enlightened discourse set about fostering and rationalizing, while also questioning, such controversial developments. Among the earliest and most prolific of the economic boosters was Daniel Defoe. A Dissenter educated at the Newington Green Academy – one noted for its ‘laboratory’ including an ‘air pump’ – Defoe was a classic transitional figure, straddling the old world of distrustful Puritan asceticism and the new one of reason, desire and abundance.2 Learned in demonology and the supernatural – witness his Political History of the Devil and System of Magick (both published in 1726) – he was responsible for the century's most celebrated ghost story, True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs Veal (1706) as well as a History of Apparitions (1727).3 Yet he tended to have modern political jobbery in mind when he spoke of the Devil, and he also has the ring of the true modern: man ‘is a Charte Blanche’, he wrote in Lockean idiom, ‘and the soul is plac'd in him like a piece of clean paper, upon which the precepts of life are to be written by his instructors’.4 Works like Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–7) puffed the nation's enterprise, commerce and industry.
A perennial moralizer, fretful about waste, greed, vanity and pride, Defoe dignified wealth accumulation with middle-class values. Trade was ‘certainly the most Noble, most Instructive, and Improving of any way of Life’, he declared, since it encouraged personal prudence and was responsible for ‘enlivening the whole Frame’ of society.5 Economic dealings were amenable to scientific inquiry and rational calculation: ‘Nothing obeys the Course of Nature more exactly than Trade, Causes and Consequences follow as directly as Day and Night.’6 For this happy fact, the Lord was to be praised, and Defoe hymned ‘the Harmony of the Creation, and the Beauty and Concern of Providence, in preparing the World for Trade’.7
In mainstream mercantilist fashion, Defoe believed that the great hope for Britain's future lay in the expansion of foreign commerce, particularly with the colonies, whose potential had barely as yet been exploited. Trade would not just make Britain rich, it would do God's work, ‘civilizing the Nations where we and other Europeans are already settled; bringing the naked Savages to Clothe, and instructing barbarous Nations how to live’.8
Modern commercial society was endlessly talked up in the early Enlightenment: ‘Trade is the Principal… Requisite to aggrandize a Nation,’ claimed de Mandeville;9 the Spectator waxed lyrical about its benefits;10 while Henry Fielding marvelled at how commerce had ‘indeed given a new Face to the whole Nation… and hath almost totally changed the Manners, Customs and Habits of the People’.11 For almost the first (and last) time, the trading classes got a good press. Merchants, beamed Addison, ‘knit Mankind together in a mutual Intercourse of good Offices, distribute the Gifts of Nature, find Work for the Poor, add Wealth to the Rich, and Magnificence to the Great’.12 But if this market society was to flourish, it evidently needed credible analyses of and apologetics for economic activity.
In endorsing the market, modern opinion brought to a head a remarkable series of transformations in attitudes towards work and wealth. Each in its own way, Greek philosophy and Christian theology had condemned the love of lucre. The churches had deemed gold vulgar, greed evil, profit without labour usurious. Prices and wage rates had been widely regulated, out of a godly distrust of excess and in the belief that there truly existed a just price, inscribed within a divinely ordained system of distributive justice intelligible to scholastics and magistrates. Since profiteering from necessities was particularly unethical, it had been made an object of legislation above all, the grain trade was regulated so that none should starve, or riot.13 These beliefs were complemented in the popular mind by the ancient piety that, everyone being the son of Adam, all were entitled to some access to God's soil, at least in the form of common land and grazing rights, an expression of what E. P. Thompson has called ‘customs in common’.14
The Christian duty to conduct personal economic dealings in an orderly manner had been mirrored in the commonwealth at large. ‘Mercantilism’ was the economic outlook which dominated the Stuart century and beyond, aptly reaching its apogee in the writings of Sir James Steuart, before being shot down by Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776).15 Mercantilism (called by Smith ‘the modern system’) took good housekeeping as its model, projecting individual prudence on to the nation. Advocates like Sir Thomas Mun, a director of the East India Company and author of England's Treasure by Forraign Trade (1664), measured national economic well-being principally in terms of a favourable balance of trade generated by export surpluses. Associating wealth with money or gold and silver, mercantilism's advocates approved the hoarding of reserves. Everything conducive to wealth or bullion accumulation and a favourable trade balance was the proper object of government regulation, notably the promotion of exports, the limitation of imports and the management of key monopolies.
Enlightened thinking was to mount a sustained attack on such policies for being unscientific and hence futile. Hume's essay ‘Of the Balance of Trade’ (1787), addressed to those who have ‘a strong jealousy with regard to the balance of trade, and a fear, that all their gold and silver may be leaving them’, argued that a nation never need be apprehensive of losing its money if it preserved its people and its industry, because there existed an automatic economic mechanism which ‘must for ever, in all neighbouring countries, preserve money nearly all proportionable to the art and industry of each nation’.16 The doctrines of mercantilism were thus short-sighted: how they had become established was then explained by Adam Smith.
Overseas expansion, above all the discovery of the New World, according to Smith, had transformed the commercial regions of Europe into ‘the manufacturers for the numerous and thriving cultivators of America, and th
e carriers, and in some respects the manufacturers too, for almost all the different nations of Asia, Africa, and America’. These profitable distribution circuits bred the illusion that wealth creation was essentially a matter of controlling currency and trade – in other words, traffic management. The true source of wealth had thereby been masked. ‘It cannot be very difficult,’ Smith remarked, with his usual deadpan wit, ‘to determine who have been the contrivers of this whole mercantile system; not the consumers, we may believe, whose interest has been entirely neglected.’17 In place of regulation, labour and consumption - that is, at bottom, desire - were to be set at the heart of the new thinking.
Mercantilism's faith in interference, critics increasingly argued, was superficial, opportunistic and often sinister. Failing to fathom the systemic mechanisms of wealth, money, trade and exchange, regulation had made bad worse, especially when that ‘insidious and crafty animal, vulgarly called a statesman or politician’ was pulling the strings. What was instead needed was a well-informed grasp of the macro-economics of cash transfers, the relations between wealth and bullion, money and commodities, the short and the long term. Economic policy must be grounded in empirical realities not rulers' wish lists, and certainly not the machinations of monopolists.18
A profound revaluation was simultaneously under way in the understanding of economic activity itself. The old ‘moral economy’ was coming under fire from a new ‘political economy’19 which laid claim to a superior rationale, a scientific grasp of wealth creation and the satisfaction of wants – a purported analysis of actualities rather than aspirations, what really happened and not what the likes of Clarendon or Colbert decreed. Flashpoints in these debates included the deregulation of grain markets and the enclosure question – total privatization of property replacing usufruct.20