The Age of Elegance (51 page)

the society of the well-to-do, vitiated that of the industrial town. A man who worked with his hands, being increasingly prevented by the cost of machinery from becoming more than a wage-earner, was looked down on by those who enjoyed the increase wrought by the machines he tended. Hereditary skill counted for less and less as mechanical power took the place of craft. Phrases like the "lower orders," the "swinish multitude," "the rabble," became habitual to men and women who felt themselves to be a different species from the poor toilers whose grandfathers and fathers had been the equals of their own. The filthier the workers' surroundings, the more deadening and brutalising their conditions of labour, the more savage and pagan they grew and the more a race apart—a different and potentially hostile nation within the body politic. "Their conduct on a Sunday," a witness reported of juvenile cotton workers, "is such that females as well as men insult their well-behaved superiors in the street, and that to a degree that well-behaved, discreet gentlemen, even if they meet the factory people, will, if possible, go on the other side of the street to avoid them."
¹

This breach within the nation was allowed to develop and widen because the ruling class had been taught by the economists that the pursuit of self-interest was the key to national well-being. To buy at the cheapest and sell at the dearest was the commandment which in economic matters was taking the place of the original ten. Any restriction on what was called "free" bargaining was repugnant to progressive, or as it was then called, "enlightened," opinion. An Act of 1802, which confined—at least in theory—the hours of poor-law apprentices in water-driven cotton-mills to twelve hours a day, was not re-enacted to cover the steam-power factories which by the end of the war had almost completely taken their place. A Bill to make it do so, introduced in the year of Waterloo by a humane spinner, Sir Robert Peel—father of the statesman—was allowed to drop. Kindly employers, whose hearts were touched by the sufferings of children in their mills and in those of their harsher competitors, and who sought restrictive legislation to render humanity compatible with solvency, were able to do little against such a

¹
Evidence of George Gould, fustian merchant,
cit.
Hammond,
Town Labourer
, 162;
Bamford, I,
iio-ii
. See
idem,
106-9, 251;
Woodward,
6, 40.

combination of solemn belief and self-interest. The nation which had repudiated the Slave Trade now accepted as inevitable a new and still more paying form of slavery.

The miracle of mechanical production had impressed sensitive contemporaries with such awe that they had temporarily lost their critical faculty. "It is impossible," wrote a visitor to Glasgow in 1
8
10, "to see without astonishment those endless flakes of cotton, as light as snow and as white, ever pouring from the carding machine, then seized by the teeth of innumerable wheels and cylinders and stretched into threads, flowing like a rapid stream and lost in a tourbillon of spindles. The eye of a child or of a woman watches over the blind mechanism, directing the motions of her whirling battalion." The sight of gangs of maimed and exhausted children trailing daily into the factories and mines that supported England's new industrial wealth caused kindly and cultured men no astonishment, only a defeatist fatalism. In the great cotton manufactory at Lanark, employing 2500 hands, mostly children who had started work at the age of seven or eight, the hours were from
6
a.m
. till
7
p.m
., followed by evening school from
8
p.m
. to 10
p.m
. Some of the children's homes were close to the factory, but others, whose parents lived a mile away, had the additional advantage of a healthy night and early morning walk; they could be distinguished, visitors were told, by their brighter colour.
¹
The long hours—in some places they were as many as fifteen a day for, six days a week—were regarded as essential to enable manufacturers to compete against undercutting and secure the markets without which their employees might be thrown out of work and starve. Viewed in this sense, the labour that crippled children's limbs, rotted their lungs and stunted their minds, could be defended as a blessing, a means of preserving them from famine. Some supporters of the system went further, seeing in the children's ceaseless activity an inspiring spectacle. "They seemed," wrote one employer, "to be always cheerful and alert, taking pleasure in the light play of their muscles—enjoying the mobility natural to their age.
...
It was delightful to observe the nimbleness with which they pierced the broken ends as the mule-

¹
On which Simond, who visited the factory in
1810,
commented, "Eleven hours of confinement and labour, with the schooling
13
hours, is undoubtedly too much for children. I think the laws should interfere between avarice and nature." Simond, I,
278.
See also Farington, I,
134,
for a description of one of Arkwright's model factories where the children worked
13
hours a day, with
40
minutes off for dinner, to earn
3s. 6d.
a week for boys and
2s. 3d.
for girls, with chapel and Sunday school thrown in. "The whole plan appe
ars to be such as to do Mr. Ark
wright great credit."

carriage began to recede from the fixed roller-beam, and to see them at leisure, after a few seconds' exercise of their tiny fingers, to amuse themselves in any attitude they chose till the stretching and winding-on were once more completed. The work of these livery elves seemed to resemble a sport in which habit gave them a pleasing dexterity."
¹
"The mathematicians," wrote a young officer of Wellington's army, "from the dry bones of their diagrams, and the chemists from the soot of their furnaces bring with them dispositions which make them indifferent to the cause of humanity."

This determinist philosophy—the precursor of Marxism—accorded perfectly with the requirements of landowners and manufacturers who, needing ever larger sums for their competitive and showy society or for the enlargement of their businesses, accepted the undernourishment and degrading surroundings of their fellow countrymen as an inevitable dispensation of Providence. It received its highest expression in the works of a clergyman named Malthus who contended that population automatically outran subsistence, nature's ruthless but beneficent law being to preserve
the economy of the world by eli
minating surplus mouths and hands by starvation. "We are bound injustice and honour," he wrote, "formally to disclaim the
right of
the
poor to support. To this end I should propose a regulation to be made declaring that no child born from any marriage taking place after the expiration of a year from the date of the law should ever be entitled to parish assistance.
...
A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society does not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food and in fact has no business to be where he is. At nature's mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him."

It was a proof of the extent to which educated and humane Englishmen were bewildered by the immense rise in the population —since 1750 it had almost doubled—and alarmed by the revolutionary events around them, that they accepted, and even with a kind of melancholy enthusiasm, this monstrous doctrine from a professor of the Christian Church—himself a most kindly and reasonable man.
²
If a natural law of increase made vice and misery inevitable for millions, there seemed no need for the ruling and possessing classes

¹
Andrew Ure,
The Philosophy of Manufactures,
1835.
See Gomm,
311-12.
SeeBamford, I, ill; Peel, I,
259-62;
Woodward,
11.
2
In a later work he considerably modified his own doctrine
.

to reproach themselves for the increase of vice and misery which attended their own enrichment or to waste money trying to remedy it. It was like the fall of the leaves in autumn.

In this matter the poets were wiser than men of state and business. Writers of all schools of thought united in protest at Malthus's conclusions. Southey, the poet-laureate and an arch-Tory, denounced it as "a technical sophism and a physical assumption as false in phil
osophy as detestable in morals
' and Coleridge, in his rambling but prescient talk—delivered as from some lofty height from which he descried, invisible to all eyes but his, the course of human folly and frailty for a century ahead—remarked that if society disclaimed all responsibility for the starving, the latter would reply that in that case they had no duties towards it and might take by force what was denied by humanity. Such arguments, however, made little impression on anxious ratepayers forced to alleviate the growing pauperism caused by the wage-policy of manufacturers and farmers.

In the international sphere Britain's rulers had resisted the revolutionary claim that the strong possessed a natural right to ignore the mutual obligations of law. Yet in the economic sphere the same rulers, despite unavailing protests by the poor and in defiance of their country's historical tradition, accepted the revolutionary thesis that men had a right to enrich themselves without regard to social obligations and the continuing claims of the community. In England the legatee of the supremacy of natural right—the untrammelled liberty of superior energy and brain—was not the soldier of fortune, but the thrusting, broad-shouldered condottiere of commerce and finance. They, too, like Napoleon, regarded the world as their oyster and ravaged and exploited as they conquered. Like him, they made themselves rich and their country strong and glorious, but they uprooted and rendered millions wretched in the process. And to them was left, in accordance with the revolutionary doctrine that the pursuit of private gain must automatically enrich the community, the almost unfettered control of the ordinary Englishman's home, surroundings, food, health, and conditions of labour. Henceforward nothing was safe from the exploiters; a year or two after Waterloo, speculators started to seek for coal in the Thames valley below Oxford.

Such a theory of society made for a new kind of mind. Commerce was growing stricter, stingier. Charles Lamb, a clerk of the
London trading company that had conquered India, wrote of "this mercantile city and its gripple merchants," and related how his employers, like the Bank of England, had cut down the old saints' days' holidays almost to nothing—"the cold piety of the age lacks the fervour to recall them." No longer, he told his correspondents, could he pass their letters through the Company's bag; the Directors, "rascals who think nothing of sponging upon their employers for their venison and turtle and burgundy five days in a week to the tune of five thousand pounds in a year, now find out that the profits of trade will not allow the innocent communications of thought between their underlings and their friends in distant provinces to proceed untaxed." So, too, in deference to the new outlook—cold, calculated, remorseless—his fellow clerk, Tommy Bye, coming into the office a little hazy one morning after an evening's debauch, found himself summarily dismissed after twenty-seven years' service. "Clerk's blood, damn 'em! my brain, guts, skin, flesh, bone, carcase, soul, time is all theirs," Lamb wrote, half in jest, but also in earnest, "the Royal Exchange, Gresham's Folly, hath me body and spirit!" The apostles of Mammon were warming to their business, shutting up growing numbers of their fellows in factory and counting-house away from the fresh air and sunlight.

It was not only in the towns that man suffered on a cross of economic necessity. The British revolution, unlike that of France, did not arise from the corruption and inefficiency of an outworn society but from the country's very vigour and success. To overcome the opposition of the less well-educated peasantry and the wasteful overcropping of the soil under the old communal system of open farming,
¹
and to apply the new methods of stock breeding and root-cultivation on a nation-wide scale, the land-owning class, having boldly invested enormous sums to increase agricultural production, had used its monopoly of political power to secure private acts of Parliament redistributing the arable fields and commons. With population rising by at least fifteen per cent in every decade, and

¹
"The Goths and Vandals of open-field farmers must die out before any complete change takes place." Arthur Young,
cit.
Ernie,
199-200.
"A great portion of the unstinted common lands remain nearly as nature left them, appearing in the present state of civilisation and science as filthy blotches on the face of the country, especially when seen under threatening clouds of famine." William Marshall,
The Appropriation and Inclosure of Commonable and Intermixed Lands
(1801).

grain imports stopped by the war, increased corn-growing had become both an urgent national priority and a means of vast private profits. Between 1796 and 1815 more than eighteen hundred enclosure Bills were passed, four hundred more than in the previous forty years. In no other way could the supply of home-grown food —and none other was available—have kept pace with the population.

The social, as opposed to the economic, consequences of this agrarian revolution were, however, disastrous. Growing numbers of husbandmen who had enjoyed a small but vital stake in the land— a strip or two in the parish arable fields, pasture on the common for a few ragged cattle, pigs and geese, the right to gather manure and fuel—found themselves deprived of them. Unable to face the initial costs of legislation, fencing and drainage involved in enclosure, they were forced to sell their compensatory allotments to their richer neighbours. Those who possessed only squatters' rights on the manorial commons or waste received no compensation at all. Men with an hereditary talent for dealing with soil and beasts were requited with payment in a medium in whose use they had neither skill nor experience. As often as not, they spent it in the alehouse. Henceforward they and their children had no resource but that of the wages they earned. They ceased to be peasants and became proletarians, without security and therefore without liberty.

The rich welcomed the changed status of the rural poor because it made them easier to discipline. "The land," wrote a Scottish agriculturist, "is divided into a limited number of great farms, and the tenants, men of capital and intelligence, are enabled to give the best effect to the virtues of the soil, and the great body of the people live quietly under them as farm servants and hired labourers, having no care but to do their own work and receive their wages." The more profitable farming became and the more eager the rich to buy, the greater became the temptation of the poor to sell. Every year the amount of land in well-to-do hands increased. It was leased from them at high rents by a new race of tenant farmers who, operating under almost ideal conditions, with expanding markets, rising war prices, and cheap and abundant labour, could afford to operate on a far bigger scale than their fathers. Capital was found to drain, improve and compost the soil, experiment in new root and grass crops, and raise the herds and flocks of fine cattle, pigs and sheep that were the wonder of the world.