part of England to a deplorable condition. The Mrs. Jellybys of the
philanthropic world were busy ministering to the wants of Borioboola
Gha by means of tracts and blankets, neither of which were of the
slightest use to those for whom they were intended. But Borioboola Gha
was an earthly paradise compared with civilized England. There was
not a savage in the islands of the Pacific who was not better fed,
happier, healthier, and more contented than the majority of the workers
in the industrial parts of England. Children, it was discovered, were
transferred in large numbers to the north, where they were housed in
pent-up buildings adjoining the factories, and kept to long hours of
labor. The work was carried on day and night without intermission; so
that the beds were said never to become cold, inasmuch as one batch
of children rested while another batch went to the looms, only half
the requisite number of beds being provided for all. Epidemic fevers
were rife in consequence. Medical inspectors reported the rapid spread
of malformation of the bones, curvature of the spine, heart diseases,
rupture, stunted growth, asthma, and premature old age among children
and young persons: the said children and young persons being worked by
manufacturers without any kind of restraint. Manufacturing profits in
Lancashire were being at the same time reckoned at hundreds and even
thousands per cent. The most terrible condition of things existed in
the mines, where children of both sexes worked together, half naked,
often for sixteen hours a day. In the fetid passages, children of
seven, six, and even four years of age, were found at work. Women were
employed underground, many of them even while pregnant, at the most
exhausting labor. After a child was born, its mother was at work again
in less than a week, in an atmosphere charged with sulphuric acid. In
some places women stood all day knee-deep in water and subject to an
intense heat. One woman when examined avowed that she was wet through
all day long, and had drawn coal carts till her skin came off. Women
and young children of six years old drew coal along the passages of
the mines, crawling on all fours with a girdle passing round their
waists, harnessed by a chain between their legs to the cart. A
sub-commissioner in Scotland reported that he “found a little girl,
six years of age, carrying half a cwt., and making regularly fourteen
long journeys a day. The height ascended and the distance along the
road exceeded in each journey the height of St. Paul’s Cathedral.”
“I have repeatedly worked,” said one girl seventeen years of age,
“for twenty-four hours.” The ferocity of the men was worse than that
of wild beasts; and children were often maimed and sometimes killed
with impunity. Drunkenness was naturally general. Short lives and
brutal ones were the rule. The men, it was said, “die off like rotten
sheep; and each generation is commonly extinct soon after fifty.”
Such was a large part of industrial England under the unrestrained
rule of the capitalist. There can be no doubt that far greater misery
prevailed than in the Southern States during the era of slavery. The
slave was property--often valuable property; and it did not pay his
owner to ill-treat him to such a degree as to render him useless as a
wealth-producer. But if the “free” Englishman were injured or killed,
thousands could be had to fill his place for nothing.
Had this state of things continued we should have returned to a state
of nature with a vengeance. Of man thus depicted we may say with
Tennyson:
“Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music match’d with him.”
It was evident that capitalist monopoly must be restrained, reluctant
as English statesmen brought up under the commercial system were to
interfere. The zenith of _laisser faire_ was at the close of the last
century; but a great fabric often looks most imposing shortly before
it begins to collapse. The first piece of labor legislation was the
Morals and Health Act of 1802, which interfered with the accommodation
provided to children by the employers, to which reference has been
made. The Cotton Mills Act was passed in 1819, partly owing to the
exertions of Robert Owen. It limited the age at which children
might work in factories; and it limited the time of their labor to
seventy-two hours per week. Seventy-two hours for a child of nine who
ought to have been playing in the green fields! And even that was a
vast improvement on the previous state of things. Saturday labor was
next shortened by an Act passed by the Radical politician, Sir John
Cam Hobhouse, in 1825. Workmen, Radicals, Tories and Philanthropists
then joined in an agitation under Mr. Richard Oastler, a Conservative
member of Parliament, to secure a Ten Hours’ Bill. Hobhouse tried by
a Bill introduced in 1831 to reduce the time in textile industries;
but he was beaten by the northern manufacturers. However, Althorp, the
Whig leader, who had helped to defeat Hobhouse, was obliged himself
to introduce a measure by which night work was prohibited to young
persons, and the hours of work were reduced to sixty-nine a week.
Cotton-mill owners were at the same time disqualified for acting as
justices in cases of infringement of the law. This measure is regarded
by Dr. E. Von Plener in his useful manual as the first real Factory
Act. Mr. Thomas Sadler, who had succeeded Oastler as leader in the
cause of the factory operatives, brought in a Bill in 1832 limiting the
hours of labor for persons under eighteen; but it was met by a storm of
opposition from manufacturing members and withdrawn.
To Sadler succeeded that excellent man, who has perhaps done more for
the working-classes than any other public man of our time, Lord Ashley,
better known as Lord Shaftesbury. And here let me pause to point out
that it was the Radicals and a large section of the Tories who took
the side of the operatives against the Whigs, official Conservatives
and manufacturing class. The latter class is sometimes regarded as
Liberal. I think the truth is, that it captured and held for some
time the Liberal fort, and made Liberalism identical with its policy
and interests. If the men of this class had the cynical candor of
Mr. Jay Gould, they might have imitated his reply when examined by a
legislative committee: “What are your politics, Mr. Gould?” “Well,
in a Republican district I am Republican, in a Democratic district
I am a Democrat; but I am always an Erie Railroad man.” One of Lord
Ashley’s strong opponents was Sir Robert Peel, the son of a Lancashire
capitalist; but the most bitter and persistent was Mr. John Bright.
Lord Ashley introduced a Ten Hours’ Bill which included adults. Lord
Althorp refused to legislate for adults, but himself passed an Act in
1833 prohibiting night work to those under eighteen; fixing forty-eight
hours per week as the maximum for children, and sixty-nine for young
persons; also providing for daily attendance at school, and certain
holidays in the year. As this Act repealed that of 1831, manufacturers
were again eligible to sit as justices in factory cases; and although
numerous infractions were reported by inspectors, the offenders in many
cases got off scot free. In 1840 Lord Ashley brought to the notice of
Parliament the condition of young people employed in mines; and through
his activity was passed the first Mining Act, prohibiting underground
work by women and by boys under ten. Peel then passed a consolidating
Factory Act in 1844. Lord Ashley proposed to restrict to ten per day
the working hours for young persons; but Peel defeated the proposal by
threatening to resign if it were carried. By the Act of 1844 the labor
of children was limited to six and a half hours per day; and they had
to attend school three hours daily during the first five days of the
week. The next year, 1845, Lord Ashley secured the passage of a Bill
forbidding night work to women. In 1847 Mr. Fielden introduced a Bill
limiting the time of labor for all women and young persons to eleven
hours per day, and after May, 1848, to ten hours. Peel and the factory
owners opposed; but the Bill was carried. The Act of 1850 further
reduced the legal working day for women and young persons; and an Act
of 1853 prohibited the employment of children before 6 A.M. or after 6
P.M. In 1860 bleaching and dyeing works were subjected to the factory
laws. Further legislation on this branch of industry took place in
1870. A Mines Act was passed in 1860, and made more stringent in 1862
with reference to safety and ventilation. Acts with reference to the
lace industry were passed in the years 1861-64, to bakehouses in 1863,
chimney-sweeping and pottery works in 1864. The Workshops Regulation
Act, relating to small trades and handicrafts, was passed in 1867, and
a consolidating Factory and Workshops Act in 1871. The Act now in force
is the Factory and Workshops Act, 1878, modified in respect of certain
industries by the Act of 1883. Further Acts relative to the regulations
of mines were passed in 1872 and 1887.
This brief and imperfect survey of the legislation which has destroyed
the _régime_ of _laisser faire_ is sufficient for my purpose to
prove: (1) That with private property in the necessary instruments of
production, individual liberty as understood by the eighteenth century
reformers must be more and more restricted, _i. e._, that in our
existing economic condition individualism is impossible and absurd.
(2) That even hostile or indifferent politicians have been compelled
to recognize this. (3) That unrestrained capitalism tends as surely to
cruelty and oppression as did feudalism or chattel slavery. (4) That
the remedy has been, as a matter of fact, of a Socialistic character,
involving collective checking of individual greed and the paring of
slices off the profits of capital in the interests of the working
community. These four propositions can scarcely be contested.
The immense development of English industry under the conditions
previously set forth was due in great degree to the fact that England
had secured an immense foreign market in which she had for a long time
no formidable rival. Most of the wars in which England was engaged
during the eighteenth century are quite unintelligible until it is
understood that they were commercial wars intended to secure commercial
supremacy for England. The overthrow of the Stuart monarchy was
directly associated with the rise to supreme power of the rich middle
class, especially the London merchants. The revolution of 1688 marks
the definite advent to political power of this class, which found
the Whig party the great instrument for effecting its designs. The
contrast between the old Tory squire who stood for Church and King,
and the new commercial magnate who stood by the Whigs and the House
of Hanover, is well drawn by Sir Walter Scott in “Rob Roy.” The Banks
of England and Scotland and the National Debt are among the blessings
conferred on their descendants by the new mercantile rulers. They also
began the era of corruption in politics which is always connected
closely with predominance of capitalists in the State, as we see in
France, the United States and the British Colonies. “The desire of
the moneyed classes,” says Mr. Lecky,[52] “to acquire political power
at the expense of the country gentlemen was the first and one of the
chief causes of that political corruption which soon overspread the
whole system of parliamentary government.” What remained of the old
aristocracy often found it convenient to form alliances with the new
plutocracy; and it was this combination which governed England during
the eighteenth century, and which specially determined her foreign
policy. That policy was directed towards the securing of foreign
markets and the extension of English trade. Napoleon’s sneer at the
“nation of shopkeepers” was not undeserved. The conquest of Canada, the
conquest of India under Clive and Warren Hastings--the latter an agent
of a great capitalist body, who illustrated well in his Indian career
the methods of his class--the Colonial policy, the base destruction of
Irish manufactures in the interest of English capitalists, were all
part of the same scheme. The policy was successfully consummated in
the war waged by Pitt against the French Revolution. That revolution
was itself brought about mainly by poverty. Not only was the French
peasantry beggared; but some of the new machinery which had been
brought from England had thrown many persons out of work. It was mainly
unemployed workmen who stormed and captured the Bastille.[53] The chief
counterblast to the Revolution was prepared by Pitt. What were his
motives? The Austrian and Prussian monarchs, the emigrant nobles, the
imbecile English king and the Tory English bishops may perhaps have
seriously believed that England was fighting for altar and throne. But
Pitt was under no such delusion. While he derived from his illustrious
father a real pride in England, his divinities were rather the ledger
and the cash-box. He was no bigot: even while an undergraduate at
Cambridge he was a close student of Adam Smith; he started in public
life as a reformer, and his refusal to bow to the ignorant prejudices
of George III cost him office in 1801. It has been abundantly proved
that at first he felt no violent antipathy to the Revolution. A long
period elapsed before he was brought to join the monarchical alliance.
But he was essentially the great capitalist statesman, the political
successor of Walpole, the political predecessor of Peel. He saw that
French conquest might threaten seriously the English social fabric, and
that if England’s chief rival were struck down, the English commercial
class might gain control of the world’s commerce. To secure that end he
skilfully welded together all the moneyed interests, the contractors,
landlords, financiers and shopkeepers; and he tried to persuade the
simpler portion of the country that he was fighting for the sacred
cause of religion and morality. Those who resisted him he flung into
prison or transported beyond the seas. When the long war was brought to
an end, the working-classes were in a wretched condition; although in
those days also there were sophistical politicians who tried to prove
that never had the people so much reason to be contented. When, in
1823, the Lancashire weavers petitioned Parliament to look into their
grievances, an honorable member, who had presumably dined well if
not wisely, had the audacity to declare that the weavers were better
off than the capitalists--an observation not dissimilar to those we
have heard in more recent times. As a matter of fact, the landlords,
through protection and high rents--the capitalists, through enormous
profits, were enriched “beyond the dreams of avarice.” But the time
had come for a conflict between these two classes: the conflict which
is known as the Free Trade controversy. Protection was no longer
needed by the manufacturers, who had supremacy in the world-market,
unlimited access to raw material, and a long start of the rest of the
world in the development of machinery and in industrial organization.
The landlord class, on the other hand, was absolutely dependent on
Protection, because the economic isolation of England by means of
import duties maintained the high prices of food which were the source
of the high agricultural rents. Capitalist interests, on the contrary,
were bound up with the interaction between England and the rest of the
world; and the time had come when the barriers which had prevented that
interaction must be pulled down. The triumph of Free Trade therefore
signifies economically the decay of the old landlord class pure and
simple, and the victory of capitalism. The capitalist class was
originally no fonder of Free Trade than the landlords. It destroyed in
its own interest the woollen manufacture in Ireland; and it would have
throttled the trade of the Colonies had it not been for the successful
resistance of Massachusetts and Virginia. It was Protectionist so long
as it suited its purpose to be so. But when cheap raw material was
needed for its looms, and cheap bread for its workers: when it feared
no foreign competitor, and had established itself securely in India, in
North America, in the Pacific; then it demanded Free Trade. “Nothing in
the history of political imposture,” says Mr. Lecky, “is more curious
than the success with which, during the Anti-Corn Law agitation, the
notion was disseminated that on questions of Protection and Free Trade
the manufacturing classes have been peculiarly liberal and enlightened,
and the landed classes peculiarly selfish and ignorant. It is indeed
true that when in the present century the pressure of population
on subsistence had made a change in the Corn Laws inevitable, the
manufacturing classes placed themselves at the head of a Free Trade
movement from which they must necessarily have derived the chief
benefit, while the entire risk and sacrifice were thrown upon others.
But it is no less true that there is scarcely a manufacture in England
which has not been defended in the spirit of the narrowest and most
jealous monopoly; and the growing ascendancy of the commercial classes
after the Revolution is nowhere more apparent than in the multiplied
restrictions of the English Commercial Code.”[54]
Cheap raw material having been secured by the English manufacturer
through a series of enactments extending over a generation; and
machinery having been so developed as to enormously increase
production, England sent her textile and metal products all over the
world; and her manufacturers supported exactly that policy which
enabled them to secure markets for their goods or raw produce to work
up in their mills. Cobdenism was in the ascendant; and the State was
more and more regarded from the commercial point of view. The so-called
“Manchester school” was in the main a peace party, because war weakens
that confidence on which commerce is based. But this attachment to
peace principles did not prevent Cobden himself from declaring for a
powerful navy as an instrument of commercial insurance. Nor did it
prevent Manchester from supporting Palmerston’s nefarious Chinese
policy in 1857, or the equally nefarious aggression in Egypt in 1882:
both being regarded as helpful to Manchester trade. In behalf of this
extension of English trade to new markets war has been made on China,
Egypt, the Soudan, Burmah, and Thibet. Germany follows England with
cautious tread. Adventurers like Emin, Stanley, and Bartelott are
employed to “open up” Africa to the gentle influences of civilization
by the agency of rum and revolver, under the pretence of putting down
the slave trade. France, not to be behind, exploits Tonquin in the
interests of Paris speculators. An unscrupulous government in Italy
attempts to divert the attention of the country from domestic reforms
to expeditions in Africa in the interests of moneyed people in Europe.
Perhaps the greatest move is yet to come: the move on the vast market
of China. For this England, America, France, and Germany will compete.
Tentative steps are already being taken. By her absorption of Burmah
and her operations in Thibet, England is approaching nearer to China.
By her acquisition of Tonquin, France has been brought into actual
contact with China. America will probably, by a judicious reduction
of her tariff, compete with England all over the Pacific, and will
send her goods from the Atlantic ports through the Panama or Nicaragua
Canal of the near future. In short, the machinery for the wholesale
exploitation of Asia and Africa is in rapid progress. The whole globe
will soon be the private property of the capitalist class.
The appropriation of the planet has been powerfully aided by the
developments of transport and communication in our time: indeed, it
would have been impossible without them. The mere application of
machinery to production could not have produced the economic results
of to-day but for the shrinkage of the globe caused by railways and
telegraphs. For it is through these inventions that the capitalist
class has become cosmopolitan, has broken up old habits, destroyed
local associations, spared nothing either beautiful or venerable
where profit was concerned. It has assimilated the conditions of life
in various lands, and has brought about a general uniformity which
accounts for much of the ennui felt in modern life.
As England was the first country to develop machine industry, so
was she the first to develop railways and to form a powerful steam
mercantile marine. Through the latter agency she has now in her
hands about sixty-four per cent of the carrying trade of the world.
Within sixty years about 350,000 miles of railway have been built
throughout the globe. Atlantic and Pacific are united by several
lines of steel; while the locomotive has penetrated remote regions
of Africa inhabited by barbarous tribes, and wastes of central Asia
where it confronts the relics of the dead and buried civilizations.
This immense power, the greatest in the modern world, is mainly in
the hands of monopolist corporations, among whom there is the same
necessary tendency to aggregation, only far more marked, as is found
in productive industries. The first small lines built to connect towns
not far off have been added to others bit by bit; as from the original
Stockton and Darlington Railway, less than twenty miles long, we get
the great and wealthy North Eastern Railway of to-day. In America a
single corporation controls as much as 7,000 miles of rail: and the
end of the century will perhaps see the great Siberian Pacific in
actual existence. As in railways, so in steam vessels. Huge fleets
like the Cunard, the Orient, the Messageries Maritimes, are owned by
cosmopolitan capital, and sustain the traffic and commerce, not of a
country, not even of a continent, but of the whole world. Such is the
immense revolution in the methods of distribution effected in our time
by the operation of capitalism.
We must now consider what the term “capitalist” is coming to signify.
Had the term been used half a century ago it would have connoted a
class, unscrupulous perhaps in the main, with low aims, little culture,
and less fine sympathy or imagination. It was nevertheless a socially
useful class, which at that time performed real service. It is a
leading thought in modern philosophy that in its process of development
each institution tends to cancel itself. Its special function is born
out of social necessities: its progress is determined by attractions
or repulsions which arise in society, producing a certain effect which
tends to negate the original function. Thus early society among the
Aryan peoples of Europe develops a leader in war or council who grows,
by processes which in England, _e. g._, can be clearly traced, into a
king with genuine functions, a leader of the people in war like William
I, or a powerful civil ruler and statesman like Henry I. The fact that
such men were brutal or wicked is of little account: the important
fact about them is, that in a barbarous chaotic society they performed
some indispensable services. But the very putting forth of the kingly
power arouses antagonism; then produces armed resistance by a combined
group; and finally leads to overthrow either by the destruction of the
king or by depriving him of all real power and reducing him to a mere
ornamental puppet. The very power originally believed to be beneficent
becomes tyrannical: it needs to be checked more and more, until finally
it practically ceases to exist, and the curious paradox is seen of a
monarch who does not rule. History proves abundantly that men do not
rise and overthrow wicked and corrupt rulers merely because they are
wicked and corrupt. It is part of the terrible irony of history that
a Louis XV dies in his bed, while a William the Silent or a Lincoln
falls a victim to the assassin. What men do not long tolerate is either
obstructiveness or uselessness.
Now, if we apply these ideas to the evolution of the capitalist,
what is it we see? The capitalist was originally an _entrepreneur_,
a manager who worked hard at his business, and who received what
economists have called the “wages of superintendence.” So long as
the capitalist occupied that position, he might be restrained and
controlled in various ways; but he could not be got rid of. His “wages
of superintendence” were certainly often exorbitant; but he performed
real functions; and society, as yet unprepared to take those functions
upon itself, could not afford to discharge him. Yet, like the King, he
had to be restrained by the legislation already referred to; for his
power involved much suffering to his fellows. But now the capitalist is
fast becoming absolutely useless. Finding it easier and more rational
to combine with others of his class in a large undertaking, he has
now abdicated his position of overseer, has put in a salaried manager
to perform his work for him, and has become a mere rent or interest
receiver. The rent or interest he receives is paid for the use of a
monopoly which not he, but a whole multitude of people, created by
their joint efforts.