THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
The Industrial Revolution is a phrase invented by Arnold Toynbee, and
now generally used to indicate those economic changes which turned
England from an agricultural into an industrial community. The period
during which these changes took place cannot from the nature of things
be definitely fixed; but usually it is taken to extend from about the
middle of the eighteenth century to the close of the reign of George
III. Two points, however, must be remembered: first, that there was a
commercial as well as an agricultural and an industrial stage of
development; and secondly, that this period contains merely the central
and crucial years of a process of specialization and expansion which
occupied centuries of English economic history. There was also before
the agricultural stage a pastoral stage; but that lies beyond the scope
of English history, because both the English people and the Celts they
conquered had passed out of the pastoral stage before recorded English
history begins. Each of these stages corresponds to a different social
organization: the pastoral stage was patriarchal, the agricultural
stage was feudal, the commercial stage was plutocratic, and the
industrial stage leads towards democracy. The stages, of course,
overlap one another, and every national community to-day is partly
pastoral, partly agricultural, partly commercial, and partly
industrial. We can only call a nation any one of these things in the
sense that they denote its dominant characteristic.
This evolution has been the result of man's increasing control over
nature. In the pastoral stage he takes of the produce of nature,
providing little or nothing himself. In the agricultural stage he
manipulates the soil and subdues it, he harnesses the wind and the
streams to grind his corn, and to water his land; Providence may have
placed all things under his feet, but he takes long to discover their
use and the means to use them. In the commercial and industrial stages
he employs the wind and water, steam and electricity, for transport,
communications, and manufactures. But he can only develop this mastery
by the interdependent processes of specialization, co-operation, and
expansion. A lonely shepherd can live on his flocks without help; a
single family can provide for its own agricultural subsistence, and the
normal holding of the primitive English family, the "hide" as it was
called, was really a share in all the means of livelihood, corn-land,
pasture-land, rights of common and of cutting wood. This family
independence long survived, and home-brewing, home-baking, home-
washing, are not even now extinct. Each family in the primitive village
did everything for itself. When its needs and standard of comfort grew,
increased facilities beyond the reach of the individual household were
provided by the lord of the manor, as, for instance, a mill, a
bakehouse, a wine-press. Indeed, the possession of these things may
have helped him into the lordship of the manor. Certainly, some of them
are mentioned in early Anglo-Saxon days among the qualifications for
thegnhood, and when the lord possessed these things, he claimed a
monopoly; his tenants were bound to grind their corn at his mill, and
so forth. But there were things he did not care to do, and a villager
here and there began to specialize in such trades as the blacksmith's,
carpenter's, and mason's. This specialization involved co-operation and
the expansion of household economy into village economy. Others must do
the blacksmith's sowing and reaping, while he did the shoeing for the
whole village.
Thus village industries grew up, and in unprogressive countries, such
as India, where, owing to distance and lack of communications, villages
were isolated and self-sufficing, this village economy became
stereotyped, and the village trades hereditary. But in western Europe,
as order was slowly evolved after the chaos of the Dark Ages,
communications and trade-routes were opened up; and whole villages
began to specialize in certain industries, leaving other commodities to
be produced by other communities. For the exchange of these commodities
markets and fairs were established at various convenient centres; and
this in turn led to the specialization of traders and merchants, who
did not make, but only arranged for the barter of, manufactures.
Through the development of local industries and markets, villages grew
into towns, and towns expanded with the extent of the area they
supplied. A town which supplied a nation with cutlery, for instance,
was necessarily bigger than a town which only supplied a county. This
expansion of markets meant that towns and cities were more and more
specializing in some one or more industries, leaving the great majority
of their needs to be supplied from elsewhere; and the whole process was
based on the growing complexity of civilization, on the multiplying
number of implements required to do the work of the world.
The comparatively simple organization of feudal society broke down
under the stress of these changes; a middle class, consisting of
neither lords nor villeins, was needed to cope with industry and
commerce. Handworkers also were required, so that from the middle of
the fourteenth century we find a regular flight from the land to the
towns in progress. Another great change took place. No one had been
rich according to modern notions in the early Middle Ages, and no one
had been destitute; there was no need of a Poor Law. But with the
expansion of the sphere of men's operations, the differences between
the poor and the rich began to increase. There is little to choose
between a slow runner and a swift when the race covers only ten yards;
there is more when it covers a hundred, and a great deal when it covers
a mile. So, too, when operations are limited to the village market,
ability has a limited scope, and the able financier does not grow so
very much richer than his neighbour. But when his market comprises a
nation, his means for acquiring wealth are extended; the rich become
richer, and the poor, comparatively at any rate, poorer. Hence, when in
the fourteenth and following centuries the national market expands into
a world market, we find growing up side by side capitalism and
destitution; and the reason why there are so many millionaires and so
much destitution to-day, compared with earlier times, is that the world
is now one market, and the range of operations is only limited by the
globe.
The control of the world's supplies tends to get into the hands of a
few big producers or operators instead of being in the hands of a vast
number of small ones; and this has come about through ever-expanding
markets and ever-increasing specialization. Even whole nations
specialize more or less; some produce the corn-supply of the world,
some its coal, some its oil, and some do its carrying trade. It is now
a question whether there should not be some limits to this process, and
it is asked whether a nation or empire should not be self-supporting,
irrespective of the economic advantages of expansion and
specialization, and of the fact that the more self-supporting it is,
the less trade can it do with others; for it cannot export unless it
imports, and if each nation makes everything it wants itself it will
neither sell to, nor buy from, other nations.
There have been two periods in English history during which these
general tendencies have been especially marked. One was at the close of
the Middle Ages, and the other during the reign of George III. The
break-up of the manorial system, the growth of a body of mobile labour,
and of capital seeking investment, the discovery of new worlds and new
markets, heralded the advent of the middle class and of the commercial
age. Custom, which had regulated most things in the Middle Ages, gave
way to competition, which defied all regulation; and England became a
nation of privateers, despoiling the church, Spain, Ireland, and often
the commonwealth itself. Scores of acts against fraudulent
manufacturers and against inclosures were passed in vain, because they
ran counter to economic conditions. The products of the new factories,
like Jack of Newbury's kerseys, could not equal in quality the older
home-made article, because the home-made article was produced under
non-economic conditions. Spinsters today knit better garments than
those turned out in bulk, because neither time nor money is any
consideration with them; they knit for occupation, not for a living,
and they can afford to devote more labour to their produce than they
could possibly do if they depended upon it for subsistence. The case
was the same with the home-products of earlier times, and compared with
them the newer factory-product was shoddy; because, if the manufacturer
was to earn a living from his industry he must produce a certain
quantity within a limited time. These by-products of the home were
enabled to hold their own against the factory products until the
development of machinery in the eighteenth century; and until that time
the factory system, although factories existed on a rudimentary scale,
did not fully develop. So far as it did develop, it meant an increase
in the efficiency and in the total wealth of the nation, but a decrease
in the prosperity of thousands of individual households.
The effect of inclosures was very similar. The old system of the
villagers cultivating in turn strips of land in open fields was
undoubtedly unsound, if the amount of wealth produced is the sole
criterion; but it produced enough for the individual village-community,
and the increased production accruing from inclosures went to swell the
total wealth of the nation and of those who manipulated it at the cost
of the tillers of the soil. The cost to the community was potential
rather than actual; common lands which are now worth millions were
appropriated by landlords in defiance of the law. This illegality was
remedied in 1549, not by stopping the inclosures but by making them
legal, provided that "sufficient" commons were left; if the incloser
considered his leavings enough, the gainsaying of the tenants was to be
ignored, or punished as treason or felony in case of persistence.
England, however, was still fairly big for its three or four millions
of souls, and an Act of Queen Elizabeth provided that every new cottage
built should stand in four acres of its own. This anticipation of the
demand for three acres and a cow did something to check excessive
specialization; for the tenants of these cottages added a little
cultivation on their own account to their occupations as hired
labourers or village artisans. In the seventeenth century the land-
hunger of the landlords was generally sated by schemes for draining and
embanking; and vast tracts of fen and marsh, such as Hatfield Chase and
Bedford Level, were thus brought under cultivation.
Commerce rather than industrialism or agriculture is the distinctive
feature of English economy during the seventeenth and first half of the
eighteenth century. By means of newly developed trade-routes, the East
and the West were tapped for such products as tobacco, tea, coffee,
cocoa, sugar, rum, spices, oranges, lemons, raisins, currants, silks,
cotton, rice, and others with which England had previously somehow or
other dispensed; and the principal bone of contention was the carrying
trade of the world. Shipbuilding was the most famous English industry;
and when Peter the Great visited England, he spent most of his time in
the Deptford yards. For some of these imports England paid by her
services as carrier; and so far as India was concerned it was a case of
robbery rather than exchange. But exports were more and more required
to pay for the ever-increasing imports. It is impossible to state
categorically either that the imports provoked the exports or the
exports the imports; for the supply creates the demand as much as the
demand creates the supply. There can have been no conscious demand for
tobacco in England before any Englishman had smoked a pipe; and when an
English merchant in Elizabeth's reign took a thousand kerseys to
Bokhara, he did so without waiting for an order. Both exports and
imports, however, can only develop together; the dimensions to which
English commerce had attained by Walpole's time involved exports as
well as imports; and the exports could not have been provided without
developing English industries.
In particular, England had to export to the colonies because the
colonies had by the Navigation Acts to export to England; and Walpole's
abolition or reduction of duties on colonial produce illustrated and
encouraged the growth of this trade. In return for colonial tobacco,
rice, cotton, sugar, England sent chiefly woollen and afterwards cotton
manufactures. These woollens had long been manufactured on the domestic
system in the sheep-rearing districts of England, particularly
Yorkshire; many a cottage with its four acres for farming had also its
spinning-wheel, and many a village its loom; and the cloth when
finished was conveyed by pack-horses or waggons to the markets and
fairs to be sold for export or home consumption. But between 1764 and
1779 a series of inventions by Arkwright, Hargreaves, and Crompton,
transformed the simple spinning-wheel into an elaborate machine capable
of doing the work of many spinners; and once more an advance in
national productivity was made at the expense of the individual workers
who took to breaking the machines to stop their loss of work.
Similar changes followed in cotton-spinning and other industries, and
the result was to alter the whole economic structure of England. The
cottager could not afford the new and expensive machinery, and his
spinning-wheels and hand-looms were hopelessly beaten in the
competition. Huge factories were required for the new inventions, where
the workers were all huddled together instead of working in their
scattered homes; and large populations grew up around these new and
artificial manufacturing centres. Their locality was, however,
determined by natural causes; at first water-power was the best
available force to drive the new machines, and consequently towns
sprang up along the banks of rivers. But Watt's application of steam-
power to machinery soon supplanted water; and for steam-power coal and
iron were the greatest necessities. Factories therefore tended to
congregate where coal and iron were found; and the need for these
materials created the coal and iron industries. Moreover, the pack-
horse, the waggon, and the old unmetalled roads soon proved inadequate
for the new requirements of transport. For a time canals became the
favourite substitute, and many were constructed. Then Macadam invented
his method of making roads; finally, Stephenson developed the steam
locomotive, and the railway system came into existence.
Closely connected with these changes was a renewal of the inclosure
movement. The introduction of turnips and other roots, and the
development of the rotation of crops increased the value of the soil
and revived the stimulus to inclosure; and hundreds of inclosure acts
were hurriedly passed by a parliament which contained no
representatives of those who suffered from the process. It was assisted
by the further specialization consequent upon the industrial
revolution; while the agricultural labourer gave up spinning under the
stress of factory competition, the spinner deserted his cottage and
four acres in the country, to seek a dwelling near the factory which
employed him; and the Elizabethan Act, insisting upon the allocation of
four acres to each new cottage built, was repealed. But for that
repeal, factory slums would be garden cities, unless the incubus of
this provision had stopped the factory development. The final result of
the inclosure movement upon the country was to deprive the public of
most of its commons and open spaces, to deprive the agricultural
labourer of all right in the soil he tilled, and to rob him of that
magic of property which, in Arthur Young's phrase, turned sand into
gold.
The inevitable adjustment of the population to these altered economic
conditions entirely changed its distribution. Hitherto the progressive
and predominant parts of England had been the south and east;
conservatism found its refuge in the north and west, which rebelled
against the Tudors and fought for Charles I. The south and east had
been the manufacturing centres because iron was smelted with wood and
not with coal. Now that coal was substituted for wood, the
juxtaposition of coal and iron mines in the north attracted thither the
industries of the nation, while the special features of its climate
made South Lancashire the home of cotton-spinning. The balance of
population and political power followed. To-day southern England, apart
from London and some other ports, hardly does more than subsist, and
its occupations are largely parasitic. The work and the wealth and the
trade which support the empire and its burdens have their origin and
being in the north.
The population not only shifted, but rapidly increased. The uprooting
of peasants from their little plots of land which acted in medieval
England and acts to-day in France as a check upon breeding, and their
herding in crowded tenements, weakened both moral and prudential
restraints in the towns; while in the country the well-meant but ill-
considered action of the justices of the peace in supplementing the
beggarly wages of the labourers by grants out of the rates proportioned
to the number of each man's children produced a similar effect. The
result was an increase in the population welcome to patriots who hoped
for hordes of soldiers and sailors to fight Napoleon, but startling to
economists like Malthus, who inferred therefrom a natural law
constraining population to outrun the earth's increase. Malthus did not
foresee the needs of the empire, nor realize that the rapid growth in
the population of his day was largely due to the absence from the
proletariate of a standard of comfort and decency. Without the
Industrial Revolution Great Britain would not have been able to people
the lands she had marked for her own.
This increase and shifting of the people put the finishing touch to the
incongruities of the old political system, in which vast centres of
population teeming with life and throbbing with industry were
unrepresented, while members sat in parliament for boroughs so decayed
that nothing was left of them but a green mound, a park, or a ruined
wall. The struggle with the French Revolution and then with Napoleon
gave the vested interests a respite from their doom; and for seventeen
years after its close the Tories sat, clothed in the departing glories
of the war, upon the safety-valve of constitutional reform. Then in
1832, after one general election fought on this issue, and after
further resistance by the House of Lords on behalf of the liberties of
borough-proprietors and faggot-voters, the threat to create peers
induced a number to abstain sufficient to ensure the passing of the
first Reform Bill. It was a moderate measure to have brought the
country to the verge of political revolution; roughly, it disfranchised
a number of poor voters, but enfranchised the mass of the middle and
lower middle-class. Absolutely rotten boroughs were abolished, but a
large number of very small ones were retained, and the representation
of the new towns was somewhat grudging and restricted. A more drastic
measure, giving the vote to most of the town artisans was--being
introduced by a Tory minister, Disraeli, in 1867--passed by the House
of Lords without difficulty. The last alteration of the franchise,
giving the vote to agricultural labourers was--being introduced by
Gladstone in 1884--only passed by the House of Lords at the second time
of asking and after an agitation.
Political emancipation was but one of the results of the Industrial
Revolution; commercial expansion was another. England had now
definitely and decisively specialized in certain industries; she could
only do so by relying upon external sources for her supply of other
wants. The more her new industries gave her to export, the more she
required to import from customers upon whose wealth her own prosperity
depended. In particular, England became dependent upon foreign
producers for her food supplies. During the war the foreign supply of
corn was so hampered that it was as dear to import as to grow at home;
but after the peace the price began to fall, and the farmers and
landlords, whose rents depended ultimately upon the price of corn,
demanded protection corresponding to that which extensive tariffs on
imported articles gave to the manufacturers. The manufacturers, on the
other hand, wanted cheap food for their workpeople in order to be able
to pay them low wages. As a compromise, the Corn Laws of 1814 and 1828
provided a sliding scale of duties which rose as prices fell, and fell
as prices rose, a preference being given to colonial wheat.
The Reform Act of 1832, however, and the rapid increase of
manufactures, transferred the balance of power in parliament from the
landed to the manufacturing classes; factory hands were persuaded that
the repeal of the duties would largely increase the value of their
wages; and the failure of the potato-crop in Ireland in 1845-46
rendered an increase of imported food-stuffs imperative. Sir Robert
Peel accordingly carried a measure in 1846 providing for the gradual
abolition of the corn-duties, saving only a registration duty of one
shilling, which was removed some twenty years later. This repeal of the
Corn Laws did not appreciably affect the price of corn, the great
reduction of which was subsequently effected by the vast expansion of
corn-growing areas in the colonies and abroad. But it enormously
increased the supply at once, and gradually gave England the full
benefit of growing areas and declining prices. It is obvious that the
retention of the duty, which had been fixed at 24_s_. 8_d_. in 1828
when the price was 62_s_. or less a quarter, would have prevented
prices falling as they subsequently did below the value of the duty;
and it is no less certain that it would have impeded the development of
corn-growing districts in the colonies and abroad, and of British
imports from, and exports to, them.
The enormous increase in the import of corn helped, in fact, to double
British exports within ten years. This was the result of the general
freeing of trade, of which the repeal of the Corn Laws was only a part.
In the third quarter of the eighteenth century there were hundreds of
Acts, covering thousands of pages, on the statute-book, imposing an
infinity of chaotic duties on every kind of import; they made the
customs costly to collect and easy to evade; and the industry they
stimulated most was smuggling. The younger Pitt, influenced by Adam
Smith, whose _Wealth of Nations_ appeared in 1776, reduced and
simplified these duties; but 443 Acts still survived when in 1825
Huskisson and other enlightened statesmen secured their consolidation
and reduction to eleven. This Tariff Reform, as its supporters called
it, was a step towards Free Trade. Peel gradually adopted its
principles, induced partly by the failure of his efforts to use
existing duties for purposes of retaliation; and between 1841 and 1846
he abolished the duties on 605 articles and reduced them on 1035 more,
imposing a direct income-tax to replace the indirect taxes thus
repealed. The process was completed by Gladstone, and what is called
Free Trade was established as the fundamental principle of English
financial policy.
This does not mean that no duties are imposed on exports or imports; it
simply means that such duties as are levied are imposed for the sake of
revenue, and to protect neither the consumer from the export of
commodities he desires to purchase, nor the manufacturer from the
import of those he wishes to make. The great interests connected with
land and manufactures had ceased to hang together, and fell separately.
Protection of manufactured goods did not long survive the successful
attack which manufacturers had levelled against the protected produce
of the landlords and the farmers. The repeal of the Navigation Acts
rounded off the system; British shipping, indeed, needed no protection,
but the admission of colonial goods free of duty and the removal of the
embargo on their trade with foreign countries may not have compensated
the colonies for the loss of their preference in the British market.
The whole trend of affairs, however, both conscious and unconscious,
was to make the world one vast hive of industry, instead of an infinite
number of self-sufficient, separate hives; the village market had
expanded into the provincial market, the provincial into the national,
the national into the imperial, and the imperial into the world market.
We have not by any means exhausted the results of the Industrial
Revolution, and most of our social problems may be traced directly or
indirectly to this source. Its most general effect was to emphasize and
exaggerate the tendency towards specialization. Not only have most
workers now but one kind of work; that work becomes a smaller and
smaller part of increasingly complex industrial processes; and
concentration thereon makes it more and more difficult for the worker
to turn to other labour, if his employment fails. The specialist's lack
of all-round capacity is natural and notorious. Hence most serious
results follow the slightest dislocation of national economy. This
specialization has also important psychological effects. A farmer, with
his varied outdoor occupations, feels little craving for relief and
relaxation. The factory hand, with his attention riveted for hours at a
stretch on the wearisome iteration of machinery, requires recreation
and distraction: naturally he is a prey to unwholesome stimulants, such
as drink, betting, or the yellow press. The more educated and morally
restrained, however, seek intellectual stimulus, and the modern popular
demand for culture arises largely from the need of something to relieve
the grey monotony of industrial labour.
So, too, the problems of poverty, local government, and sanitation have
been created or intensified by the Industrial Revolution. It made
capitalists of the few and wage-earners of the many; and the tendency
of wages towards a minimum and of hours of labour towards a maximum has
only been counteracted by painful organization among the workers, and
later on by legislation extorted by their votes. Neither the
Evangelical nor the Oxford movement proved any prophylactic against the
immorality of commercial and industrial creeds. While those two
religious movements were at their height, new centres of industrial
population were allowed to grow up without the least regard for health
or decency. Under the influence of _laissez-faire_ philosophy, each
wretched slum-dweller was supposed to be capable, after his ten or
twelve hours in the factory, of looking after his own and his
children's education, his main-drainage, his risks from infection, and
the purity of his food and his water-supply. The old system of local
government was utterly inadequate and ill adapted to the new
conditions; and the social and physical environment of the working
classes was a disgrace to civilization pending the reconstruction of
society, still incomplete, which the Industrial Revolution imposed upon
the country in the nineteenth century.