by Karl Polanyi
It might seem somewhat artificial to try and distinguish between the motives seeing that a rise in wages would be expected to attract a larger supply of labor. In some cases, however, there is proof positive which of the two concerns was uppermost in the farmer’s mind.
First there is ample evidence that even in case of the resident poor the farmers were hostile to any form of outside employment which made the laborer less available for occasional agricultural employment. One of the witnesses of the 1834 Report accused the resident poor of going “herring and mackerel fishing and earning as much as one pound a week while their families are left to the care of the parish. On return they are sent to gaol [jail] but they do not mind as long as they are out again for the well paid work.…” (p. 33). That is, the same witness complains, why “farmers are frequently unable to find a sufficient number of labourers for their Spring and October work” (Henry Stuart’s Report, App. A, Pt. I, p. 334A).
Secondly, there was the crucial question of allotments. Farmers were unanimous that nothing would keep a man and his family as surely off the rates as a plot of his own. Yet not even the burden of the rates would induce them to agree to any form of allotment which might make the resident poor less dependent on occasional farmwork.
The point deserves attention. By 1833 the farming community was stolidly in favor of retaining Speenhamland. To quote some passages from the Poor Law Commissioners Report, the allowance system meant “cheap labour, expeditious harvests” (Power). “Without the allowance system the farmers could not possibly continue to cultivate the soil” (Cowell). “The farmers like that their men should be paid from the poor-book” (J. Mann). “The great farmers in particular, I do not think want them (the rates) reduced. Whilst the rates are as they are, they can always get what hands they want extra, and as soon as it’s raining they can turn them all on to the parish again …” (a farmers’ witness). Vestry persons are “averse to any measure that would render the labourer independent of parish assistance which, by keeping him to its confines, retains him always at their command when wanted for urgent work.” They declare that “high wages and free labourers would overwhelm them” (Pringle). Stolidly they opposed all proposals to invest the poor with allotments which would make them independent. Plots which would save them from destitution and keep them in decency and self-respect would also make them independent and remove them from the ranks of the reserve army needed by the agricultural industry. Majendie, an advocate of allotments recommended plots of a quarter acre, anything above that he thought hopeless, since “the occupiers are afraid of making labourers independent.” Power, another friend of allotments, confirmed this. “The farmers object very generally, he said, to the introduction of the allotments. They are jealous of such deductions from their holdings; they have to go farther for their manure; and they object to the increased independence of their labourers.” Okeden proposed allotments of one-sixteenth of an acre, for, he said, “this would almost exactly use up as much spare time as the wheel and the distaff, the shuttle and the knitting needles” used up when they were in full activity in every industrial cottage family!
This leaves but scant room for doubt about the true function of the allowance system from the point of view of the farming community, which was to ensure an agricultural reserve of resident poor available at any time. Incidentally, Speenhamland in this way created the semblance of a rural surplus population, where in reality there was none.
4. The allowance system in the industrial towns.
Speenhamland was primarily designed as a measure of alleviation of rural distress. This did not mean restriction to villages since market towns, too, belonged to the countryside. By the early 1830s in the typical Speenhamland area most towns had introduced the allowance system proper. The county of Hereford, for instance, which was classed from the point of view of surplus population as “good,” showed six out of six towns owning up to Speenhamland methods (four “definitely,” four “probably”), while the “bad” Sussex showed out of twelve reporting towns three without and nine with Speenhamland methods, in the strict sense of the term.
The position in the industrial towns of the North and Northwest was of course, very different. Up to 1834 the number of dependent poor was considerably smaller in the industrial towns than in the countryside, where even before 1795 the nearness of manufactures tended to increase the number of paupers greatly. In 1789 the Rev. John Howlett was arguing convincingly against “the popular error that the proportion of poor in large cities and populous manufacturing towns is higher than in mere parishes, whereas the fact is just the contrary” (Annals of Agriculture, v, XI, p. 6, 1789).
What the position in the new industrial towns was, is unfortunately not exactly known. The Poor Law Commissioners appeared disturbed about the allegedly imminent danger of the spreading of Speenhamland methods to the manufacturing towns. It was recognized that the “Northern counties are least infected by it,” yet it was still asserted that “even in the towns it exists in a very formidable degree.” The facts hardly bear this out. True, in Manchester or Oldham relief was occasionally given to persons in health and full employment. In Preston at ratepayers meetings, so Henderson wrote, a pauper was vocal who had “thrown himself on the parish his wages having been reduced from one pound to 18 shillings weekly.” The township of Salford, Padiham, and Ulverston also were classed as practising the method of aid-in-wages “regularly”; similarly Wigan, in so far as weavers and spinners were concerned. In Nottingham stockings were sold under prime cost “with a profit” to the manufacturer obviously owing to subsidies to wages paid from the rates. And Henderson, reporting on Preston, was already seeing in his mind’s eye this nefarious system “creeping in and enlisting private interests in its defence.” According to the Poor Law Commissioners’ Report the system prevailed less in the towns, merely “because the manufacturing capitalists form a small proportion of the rate-payers and consequently have less influence in the vestries than the farmers in the country places.”
However this may have been in the short run, it seems probable that in the long run there were several reasons militating against a general acceptance of the allowance system on the part of industrial employers.
One was the inefficiency of pauper labor. The cotton industry was mainly run on piece work or task work, as it was called. Now, even in agriculture “the degraded and inefficient pensions of the parish” worked so badly that “4 or 5 of them amounted to one in task work” (Select Committee on Labourers’ Wages, H. of C. 4, VI, 1824, p. 4). The Poor Law Commissioners’ Report remarked that piece work might allow the use of Speenhamland methods without necessarily destroying the “the efficiency of the manufacturing labourer”; the manufacturer might thus “really obtain cheap labour.” The implication was that the low wages of the agricultural laborer need not mean cheap labor since the inefficiency of the laborer may outweigh the low price of his labor for the employer.
Another factor which tended to turn the entrepreneur against the Speenhamland system was the danger of competitors who might be producing at a considerably lower wage-cost as a result of aid-in-wages. This threat left the farmer unmoved who was selling in an unrestricted market, but might have greatly disturbed the urban factory owner. The P. L. C. Report argued that “a Macclesfield manufacturer may find himself undersold and ruined in consequence of the maladministration of the Poor Law in Essex.” William Cunningham saw the importance of the 1834 Act mainly in its “nationalizing” effect upon the administration of the Poor Law, thus removing a serious obstacle from the path of the development of national markets.
A third objection to Speenhamland, and the one which may have carried the greatest weight with capitalist circles, was its tendency to withhold the “vast, inert mass of redundant labour” (Redford) from the urban labor market. By the end of the 1820s the demand for labor on the part of urban manufacturers was great; Doherty’s trade unions gave rise to large-scale unrest; this was the beginning of the Owenite movement which le
d to the biggest strikes and lockouts England had yet experienced.
From the employers’ angle, therefore, three strong arguments militated, in the long run, against Speenhamland: its deleterious effect on the productivity of labor; its tendency to create cost differentials as between the various parts of the country; its encouragement of “stagnant pools of labour” (Webb) in the countryside, thus propping up the urban workers’ monopoly of labor. None of these conditions would carry much weight with the individual employer, or even with a local group of employers. They might easily be swayed by the advantages of low labor cost, not only in ensuring profits, but also in assisting them to compete with manufacturers of other towns. Entrepreneurs as a class would, however, take a very different view, when, in the course of time, it appeared that what benefited the isolated employer or groups of employers formed a danger to them collectively. Actually, it was the spreading of the allowance system to Northern industrial towns in the early thirties, even though in an attentuated form, that consolidated opinion against Speenhamland, and carried a reform on a national scale.
The evidence points to an urban policy more or less consciously directed toward the building up of an industrial reserve army in the towns, mainly in order to cope with the sharp fluctuations of the economic activity. There was not, in this respect, much difference between town and countryside. Just as the village authorities preferred high rates to high wages, the urban authorities also were loth to remove the nonresident pauper to his place of settlement. There was a sort of competition between rural and urban employers for the share in the reserve army. Only in the severe and prolonged depression of the mid-1840s did it become impracticable to bolster up the reserve of labor at the cost of the rates. Even then rural and urban employers behaved in a similar fashion: large scale removal of the poor from the industrial towns set in, and was paralleled by the “clearance of the village” on the part of the landowners, in both cases with the aim of diminishing the number of resident poor (cf. Redford, p. 111).
5. Primary of town against countryside.
Speenhamland, according to our assumption, was a protective move of the rural community in the face of the threat represented by a rising urban wage level. This involves primacy of town against countryside in respect to the trade cycle. In at least one instance—that of the depression of 1837–45—this can be shown to have been the case. A careful statistical investigation made in 1847 revealed that the depression started from the industrial towns of the Northwest, then spread to the agricultural counties, where recovery set in distinctly later than in the industrial towns. The figures revealed that “the pressure which had fallen first upon the manufacturing districts was removed last from the agricultural districts.” The manufacturing districts were represented in the investigation by Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire with a population of 201,000 (in 584 Poor Law unions), while the agricultural districts were made up of Northumberland, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Bucks, Herts, Berks, Wilts, and Devon, with a population of 208,000 (similarly, in 584 Poor Law Unions). In the manufacturing districts the improvement started in 1842 with a slowing down of the increase in pauperism from 29.37 percent to 16.72 percent followed by a positive decrease, in 1843, of 29.80 percent, in 1844 of 15.26 percent and, in 1845, of a further 12.24 percent. In striking contrast to this development, improvement in the agricultural districts began only in 1845 with a decrease of 9.08 percent. In each case the proportion of Poor Law expenditure to the head of the population was calculated, the latter having been computed for each county and year separately (J. T. Danson, “Condition of the People of the U.K., 1839–1847,” Journ. of Stat. Soc., Vol. XI, p. 101, 1848).
6. Depopulation and overpopulation of the countryside.
England was the only country in Europe with a uniform administration of labor in town and country. Statutes like those of 1563 or 1662 were enforced in rural and urban parishes alike and the J. P.s administered the law equally throughout the country. This was due both to the early industrialization of the countryside and to the subsequent industrialization of urban sites. Consequently there was no administrative chasm between the organization of labor in town and country as there was on the Continent. This again explains the peculiar ease with which labor appeared to flow from village to town and back again. Two of the most calamitous features of Continental demography were thus avoided—namely, the sudden depopulation of the countryside owing to migration from village to town, as well as the irreversibility of this process of migration which thus involved the uprooting of such persons who had taken up work in town. Landflucht was the name for this cataclysmic depletion of the countryside which had been the terror of the agricultural community in Central Europe ever since the second half of the nineteenth century. Instead, we find, in England, something like an oscillation of the population between urban and rural employment. It was almost as if a large part of the population had been in a state of suspension, a circumstance which made the movement of internal migration very difficult, if not impossible, to follow. Remember, moreover, the configuration of the country with its ubiquitous ports which made long-distance migration so to speak unnecessary, and the easy adjustment of the administration of the Poor Law to the requirements of the national labor organization becomes understandable. The rural parish often paid outdoor relief to nonresident paupers who had taken up employment in some not too distant town, sending round relief money to their place of abode; manufacturing towns, on the other hand, frequently paid out poor relief to resident poor who had no settlement in the town. Only exceptionally were mass removals carried into effect by the urban authorities as in 1841–43. Of the 12,628 poor persons at that occasion removed from nineteen manufacturing towns of the North only 1 percent, had their settlement in the nine agricultural districts, according to Redford. (If the nine “typical agricultural districts” selected by Danson in 1848 are substituted to Redford’s counties, the result varies but slightly, i.e., from 1 percent to 1.3 percent.) There was but very little long-distance migration, as Redford has shown, and a large part of the reserve army of labor was kept at the employers’ disposal by means of liberal relief methods in village and in manufacturing town. No wonder that there was simultaneous “overpopulation” both in town and country, while actually at times of peak demand Lancashire manufacturers had to import Irish workers in large numbers and farmers were emphatic that they would be unable to carry on at harvest time if any of the village paupers were induced to emigrate.
Some Contemporary Books on Pauperism and the Old Poor Law
Acland, Compulsory Savings Plans (1786).
Anonymous, Considerations on Several Proposals Lately Made for the Better Maintenance of the Poor. With an Appendix (2nd ed., 1752).
Anonymous, A New Plan for the Better Maintenance of the Poor of England (1784).
An Address to the Public, from the Philanthropic Society, instituted in 1788 for the Prevention of Crimes and the Reform of the Criminal Poor (1788).
Applegarth, Rob., A Plea for the Poor (1790).
Belsham, Will, Remarks on the Bill for the Better Support and Maintenance of the Poor (1797).
Bentham, J., Pauper Management Improved (1802).
———, Observation on the Restrictive and Prohibitory Commercial System (1821).
———, Observations on the Poor Bill, Introduced by the Right Honourable William Pitt; written February 1797.
Burke, E., Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (1795).
Cowe, James, Religious and Philanthropic Trusts (1797).
Crumple, Samuel, M.D., An Essay on the Best Means of Providing Employment for the People (1793).
Defoe, Daniel, Giving Alms No Charity, and Employing the Poor a Grievance to the Nation (1704).
Dyer, George, A Dissertation on the Theory and Practice of Benevolence (1795).
———, The Complaints of the Poor People of England (1792).
Eden, On the Poor (1797), 3 vols.
Gilbert, Thomas, Plan for the Better Relief
and Employment of the Poor (1781).
Godwin, William, Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr. Parr’s Spiritual Sermon, Preached at Christ Church April 15, 1800 (London, 1801).
Hampshire, State of the Poor (1795).
Hampshire Magistrate (E. Poulter), Comments on the Poor Bill (1797).
Howlett, Rev. J., Examination of Mr. Pitt’s Speech (1796).