In these successive stages of manufacture it was the spinning that was

apt to interpose the greatest obstacle, as it took the most time. From

time immemorial spinning had been done, as explained, on some form of

the spinning-wheel, and by women. One weaver continuously at work

could easily use up the product of five or six spinners. In the

domestic industry the weaving was of course carried on in the

dwelling-house by the father of the family with the grown sons or

journeymen, while the spinning was done for the most part by the women

and younger children of the family. As it could hardly be expected

that there would always be as large a proportion as six of the latter

class to one of the former, outside help must be obtained and much

delay often submitted to. Many a small master who had agreed to weave

up the raw material sent him by the master clothier within a given

time, or a cloth weaver who had planned to complete a piece by next

market day, was obliged to leave his loom and search through the

neighborhood for some disengaged laborer's wife or other person who

would spin the weft for which he was waiting. One of the very few

inventions of the early part of the century intensified this

difficulty. Kay's drop box and flying shuttle, invented in 1738, made

it possible for a man to sit still and by pulling two cords

alternately throw the shuttle to and fro. One man could therefore

weave broadcloth instead of its requiring two as before, and

consequently weaving was more rapid, while no corresponding change had

been introduced into the process of spinning.

[Illustration: Spinning-Jenny. (Byrn, _Invention in the Nineteenth

Century_. Published by the Scientific American Company.)]

Indeed, this particular difficulty was so clearly recognized that the

Royal Society offered a prize for the invention of a machine that

would spin several threads at the same time.

[Illustration: Arkwright's First Spinning-machine. (Ure: _History of

the Cotton Manufacture_.)]

No one claimed this reward, but the spirit of invention was

nevertheless awake, and experiments in more than one mechanical device

were being made about the middle of the century. The first to be

brought to actual completion was Hargreaves' spinning-jenny, invented

in 1764. According to the traditional story James Hargreaves, a small

master weaver living near Blackburn, on coming suddenly into the house

caused his wife, who was spinning with the old high wheel, to spring

up with a start and overset the wheel, which still continued whirling,

but horizontally, and with its spindle in a vertical position. He was

at once struck with the idea of using one wheel to cause a number of

spindles to revolve by means of a continuous band, and by the device

of substituting for the human hand a pair of bars which could be

successively separated and closed, and which could be brought closer

to or removed from the spindles on wheels, to spin several threads at

the same time. On the basis of this idea and with the help of a

neighboring mechanic he constructed a machine by which a man could

spin eight threads at the same time. In honor of his wife he named it

the "Spinning-jenny." The secret of this device soon came out and

jennies spinning twenty or thirty or more threads at a time came into

use here and there through the old spinning districts. At the same

time a much more effective method was being brought to perfection by

Richard Arkwright, who followed out some old experiments of Wyatt of

Northampton. According to this plan the carded material was carried

through successive pairs of rollers, each pair running more rapidly

than the previous pair, thus stretching it out, while it was spun

after leaving the last pair by flyers adapted from the old low or

treadle spinning-wheel. Arkwright's first patent was taken out in

1769, and from that time forward he invented, patented, and

manufactured a series of machines which made possible the spinning of

a number of threads at the same time very much more rapidly than even

the spinning-jenny. Great numbers of Arkwright's spinning-machines

were manufactured and sold by him and his partners. He made others for

use in cotton mills carried on by himself with various partners in

different parts of the country. His patent was eventually set aside as

having been unfairly obtained, and the machines were soon generally

manufactured and used. Improvements followed. An ingenious weaver

named Samuel Crompton, perceiving that the roller spinning was more

rapid but that the jennies would spin the finer thread, combined the

two devices into one machine, known from its hybrid origin as the

"mule." This was invented in 1779, and as it was not patented it soon

came into general use. These inventions in spinning reacted on the

earlier processes and led to a rapid development of carding and

combing machines. A carding cylinder had been invented by Paul as far

back as 1748, and now came into general use, while several

wool-combing machines were invented in 1792 and 1793.

[Illustration: Sir Richard Arkwright. (Portrait by Wright.)]

So far all these inventions had been in the earlier textile processes.

Use for the spun thread was found in giving fuller employment to the

old hand looms, in the stocking manufacture, and for export; but no

corresponding improvement had taken place in weaving. From 1784 onward

a clergyman from the south of England, Dr. Edward Cartwright, was

gradually bringing to perfection a power loom which by the beginning

of the nineteenth century began to come into general use. The value

put upon Cartwright's invention may be judged from the fact that

Parliament voted him a gift of £10,000 in 1809. Arkwright had already

won a large fortune by his invention, and in 1786 was knighted in

recognition of his services to the national industry.

[Illustration: Rev. Edmund Cartwright. (Portrait by Robert Fulton.)]

While Cartwright was experimenting on the power loom, an invention was

made far from England which was in reality an essential part of the

improvement in the manufacture of cotton goods. This was the American

cotton gin, for the removal of the seeds from the fibre of the boll,

invented by Eli Whitney in 1792. Cotton had been introduced into the

Southern states during the Revolutionary war. Its cultivation and

export now became profitable, and a source of supply became available

at the very time that the inventions for its manufacture were being

perfected.

Spinning-jennies could be used in the household of the weaver; but the

later spinning-machines were so large and cumbrous that they could not

be used in a dwelling-house, and required so much power and rapidity

of motion that human strength was scarcely available. Horse power was

used to some extent, but water power was soon applied and special

buildings came to be put up along streams where water power was

available. The next stage was the application of steam power. Although

the possibility of using steam for the production of force had long

been familiar, and indeed used to some extent in the pumping out of

mines, it did not become available for general uses until the

improvements of James Watt, patented in 1769 and succeeding years. In

partnership with a man named Boulton, Watt began the manufacture of

steam-engines in 1781. In 1785 the first steam-engine was used for

power in a cotton mill. After that time the use of steam became more

and more general and by the end of the century steam power was

evidently superseding water power.

*57. The Factory System.*--But other things were needed to make this new

machinery available. It was much too expensive for the old cottage

weavers to buy and use. Capital had, therefore, to be brought into

manufacturing which had been previously used in trade or other

employments. Capital was in reality abundant relatively to existing

opportunities for investment, and the early machine spinners and

weavers drew into partnership moneyed men from the towns who had

previously no connection with manufacturing. Again, the new industry

required bodies of laborers working regular hours under the control of

their employers and in the buildings where the machines were placed

and the power provided. Such groups of laborers or "mill hands"

were gradually collected where the new kind of manufacturing was going

on. Thus factories, in the modern sense, came into existence--a new

phenomenon in the world.

[Illustration: Mule-spinning in 1835.]

[Illustration: Power-loom Weaving in 1835. (Baines: _History of Cotton

Manufacture_.)]

These changes in manufacturing and in the organization of labor came

about earliest in the manufacture of cotton goods, but the new

machinery and its resulting changes were soon introduced into the

woollen manufacture, then other textile lines, and ultimately into

still other branches of manufacturing, such as the production of

metal, wooden, and leather goods, and, indeed, into nearly all forms

of production. Manufacturing since the last decades of the eighteenth

century is therefore usually described as being done by the "factory

system," as contrasted with the domestic system and the gild system of

earlier times.

The introduction of the factory system involved many changes: the

adoption of machinery and artificial power, the use of a vastly

greater amount of capital, and the collection of scattered laborers

into great strictly regulated establishments. It was, comparatively

speaking, sudden, all its main features having been developed within

the period between 1760 and 1800; and it resulted in the raising of

many new and difficult social problems. For these reasons the term

"Industrial Revolution," so generally applied to it, is not an

exaggerated nor an unsuitable term. Almost all other forms of economic

occupation have subsequently taken on the main characteristics of the

factory system, in utilizing improved machinery, in the extensive

scale on which they are administered, in the use of large capital, and

in the organization of employees in large bodies. The industrial

revolution may therefore be regarded as the chief characteristic

distinguishing this period and the times since from all earlier ages.

[Illustration: A Canal and Factory Town in 1827.]

*58. Iron, Coal, and Transportation.*--A vast increase in the production

of iron and coal was going on concurrently with the rise of the

factory system. The smelting of iron ore was one of the oldest

industries of England, but it was a declining rather than an advancing

industry. This was due to the exhaustion of the woods and forests that

provided fuel, or to their retention for the future needs of

ship-building and for pleasure parks. In 1760, however, Mr. Roebuck

introduced at the Carron iron-works a new kind of blast furnace by

which iron ore could be smelted with coal as fuel. In 1790 the

steam-engine was introduced to cause the blast. Production had already

begun to advance before the latter date, and it now increased by

thousands of tons a year till far into the present century.

Improvements were introduced in puddling, rolling, and other processes

of the manufacture of iron at about the same time. The production of

coal increased more than proportionately. New devices in mining were

introduced, such as steam pumps, the custom of supporting the roofs

of the veins with timber instead of pillars of coal, and Sir Humphry

Davy's safety lamp of 1815. The smelting of iron and the use of the

steam-engine made such a demand for coal that capital was applied in

large quantities to its production, and more than ten million tons a

year were mined before the century closed.

[Illustration: "The Rocket" Locomotive, 1825. (Smiles: _Life of George

Stephenson_.)]

Some slight improvements in roads and canals had been made and others

projected during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; but

in the last quarter of the century the work of Telford, Macadam, and

other engineers, and of the private turnpike companies or public

authorities who engaged them, covered England with good roads. The

first canal was that from Worsley to Manchester, built by Brindley

for the duke of Bridgewater in 1761. Within a few years a system of

canals had been constructed which gave ready transportation for goods

through all parts of the country. The continuance of this development

of transportation and its fundamental modification by the introduction

of railways and steamboats has been one of the most striking

characteristics of the nineteenth century.

*59. The Revival of Enclosures.*--The changes which the latter half of

the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth brought

were as profound in the occupation and use of the land as they were in

the production and transportation of manufactured goods. An

agricultural revolution was in progress as truly as was the

industrial.

The improvements in the methods of farming already referred to as

showing themselves earlier in the century became much more extensive.

The raising of turnips and other root crops spread from experimental

to ordinary farms so that a fallow year with no crop at all in the

ground came to be almost unknown. Clover and artificial grasses for

hay came to be raised generally, so that the supply of forage for the

winter was abundant. New breeds of sheep and cattle were obtained by

careful crossing and plentiful feeding, so that the average size was

almost doubled, while the meat, and in some cases the wool, was

improved in quality in even greater proportion. The names of such men

as Jethro Tull, who introduced the "drill husbandry," Bakewell, the

great improver of the breeds of cattle, and Arthur Young, the greatest

agricultural observer and writer of the century, have become almost as

familiar as those of Crompton, Arkwright, Watt, and other pioneers of

the factory system. The general improvement in agricultural methods

was due, not so much to new discoveries or inventions, as it was to

the large amount of capital which was introduced into their practice.

Expensive schemes of draining, marling, and other forms of fertilizing

were carried out, long and careful investigations were entered upon,

and managers of large farms were trained in special processes by

landlords and farmers who had the command of large sums of money; and

with the high prices prevalent they were abundantly remunerated for

the outlay. Great numbers of "gentlemen farmers," such as Lord

Townshend, the duke of Bedford, and George III himself, who wrote

articles for the agricultural papers signed "Farmer George," were

leaders in this agricultural progress. In 1793 a government Board of

Agriculture was established, and through the whole latter part of the

century numerous societies for the encouragement of scientific tillage

and breeding were organized.

In the early years of the eighteenth century there had been signs of a

revival of the old process of enclosures, which had been suspended for

more than a hundred years. This was brought about by private acts of

Parliament. An act would be passed by Parliament giving legal

authority to the inhabitants of some parish to throw together the

scattered strips, and to redivide these and the common meadows and

pastures in such a way that each person with any claim on the land

should receive a proportionate share, and should have it separated

from all others and entirely in his own control. It was the usual

procedure for the lord of the manor, the rector of the parish, and

other large landholders and persons of influence to agree on the

general conditions of enclosure and draw up a bill appointing

commissioners, and providing for survey, compensation, redistribution,

and other requirements. They then submitted this bill to Parliament,

where, unless there was some special reason to the contrary, it was

passed. Its provisions were then carried out, and although legal and

parliamentary fees and the expenses of survey and enclosure were

large, yet as a result each inhabitant who had been able to make out a

legal claim to any of the land of the parish received either some

money compensation or a stretch of enclosed land. Such private

enclosure acts increased slowly in number till about the middle of the

century, when the increase became much more rapid.

The number of enclosure acts passed by Parliament and the approximate

extent of land enclosed under their provisions were as follows:--

1700-1759 244 Enclosure Bills 337,877 Acres

1760-1769 385 " " 704,550 "

1770-1779 660 " " 1,207,800 "

1780-1789 246 " " 450,180 "

1790-1799 469 " " 858,270 "

1800-1809 847 " " 1,550,010 "

1810-1819 853 " " 1,560,990 "

1820-1829 205 " " 375,150 "

1830-1839 136 " " 248,880 "

1840-1849 66 " " 394,747 "

In 1756, 1758, and 1773 general acts were passed encouraging the

enclosure for common use of open pastures and arable fields, but not

enclosing or dividing them permanently, and not providing for any

separate ownership.

In 1801 an act was passed to make simpler and easier the passage of

private bills for enclosure; and in 1836 another to make possible,

with the consent of two-thirds of the persons interested, the

enclosing of certain kinds of common fields even without appealing to

Parliament in each particular case. Finally, in 1845, the general

Enclosure Act of that year carried the policy of 1836 further and

appointed a body of Enclosure Commissioners, to determine on the

expediency of any proposed enclosure and to attend to carrying it out

if approved. Six years afterward, however, an amendment was passed

making it necessary that even after an enclosure had been approved by

the Commissioners it should go to Parliament for final decision.

By measures such as these the greater part of the lands which had

remained unenclosed to modern times were transformed into enclosed

fields for separate cultivation or pasture. This process of enclosure

was intended to make possible, and no doubt did bring about, much

improved agriculture. It exerted incidentally a profound effect on the

rural population. Many persons had habitually used the common pastures

and open fields for pasture purposes, when they had in reality no

legal claim whatever to such use. A poor man whose cow, donkey, or

flock of geese had picked up a precarious livelihood on land of

undistinguished ownership now found the land all enclosed and his

immemorial privileges withdrawn without compensation. Naturally there

was much dissatisfaction. A popular piece of doggerel declared that:--

"The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common;

But leaves the greater villain loose

Who steals the common from the goose."

Again, a small holder was frequently given compensation in the form of

money instead of allotting to him a piece of land which was considered

by the commissioners too small for effective use. The money was soon

spent, whereas his former claim on the land had lasted because it

could not readily be alienated.

A more important effect, however, was the introduction on these

enclosed lands of a kind of agriculture which the small landholder was

ill fitted to follow. Improved cultivation, a careful rotation of

crops, better fertilizers, drainage, farm stock, and labor were the

characteristics of the new farming, and these were ordinarily

practicable only to the man who had some capital, knowledge, and

enterprise. Therefore, coincidently with the enclosures began a

process by which the smaller tenants began to give up their holdings

to men who could pay more rent for them by consolidating them into

larger farms. The freeholders also who owned small farms from time to

time sold them to neighboring landowners when difficulties forced them

or high prices furnished inducements.

*60. Decay of Domestic Manufacture.*--This process would have been a

much slower one but for the contemporaneous changes that were going on

in manufacturing. As has been seen, many small farmers in the rural

districts made part of their livelihood by weaving or other domestic

manufacture, or, as more properly described, the domestic

manufacturers frequently eked out their resources by carrying on some

farming. But the invention of machinery for spinning not only created

a new industry, but destroyed the old. Cotton thread could be produced

vastly more cheaply by machinery. In 1786 a certain quantity of a

certain grade of spun yarn was worth 38 shillings; ten years later, in

1796, it was worth only 19 shillings; in 1806 it was worth but 7

shillings 2 pence, and so on down till, in 1832, it was worth but 3

shillings. Part of this reduction in price was due to the decrease in

the cost of raw cotton, but far the most of it to the cheapening of

spinning.

It was the same a few years later with weaving. Hand-loom weavers in

Bolton, who received 25 shillings a week as wages in 1800, received

only 19 shillings and 6 pence in 1810, 9 shillings in 1820, and 5

shillings 6 pence in 1830. Hand work in other lines of manufacture

showed the same results. Against such reductions in wages resistance

was hopeless. Hand work evidently could not compete with machine work.

No amount of skill or industry or determination could enable the hand

workers to make their living in the same way as of old. As a matter of

fact, a long, sad, desperate struggle was kept up by a whole

generation of hand laborers, especially by the hand-loom weavers, but

the result was inevitable.

The rural domestic manufacturers were, as a matter of fact, devoting

themselves to two inferior forms of industry. As far as they were

handicraftsmen, they were competing with a vastly cheaper and better

form of manufacture; as far as they were farmers, they were doing the

same thing with regard to agriculture. Under these circumstances some

of them gave up their holdings of land and drifted away to the towns

to keep up the struggle a little longer as hand-loom weavers, and then

to become laborers in the factories; others gave up their looms and

devoted themselves entirely to farming for a while, but eventually

sold their holdings or gave up their leases, and dropped into the

class of agricultural laborers. The result was the same in either

case. The small farms were consolidated, the class of yeomanry or

small farmers died out, and household manufacture gave place to that

of the factory. Before the end of the century the average size of

English farms was computed at three hundred acres, and soon afterward

domestic spinning and weaving were almost unknown.

There was considerable shifting of population. Certain parts of the

country which had been quite thickly populated with small farmers or

domestic manufacturers now lost the greater part of their occupants by

migration to the newer manufacturing districts or to America. As in

the sixteenth century, some villages disappeared entirely. Goldsmith

in the _Deserted Village_ described changes that really occurred,

however opposed to the facts may have been his description of the

earlier idyllic life whose destruction he deplored.

The existence of unenclosed commons and common fields had been

accompanied by very poor farming, very thriftless and shiftless

habits. The improvement of agriculture, the application of capital to

that occupation, the disappearance of the domestic system of industry,

and other changes made the enclosure of common land and the

accompanying changes inevitable. None the less it was a relatively

sudden and complete interference with the established character of

rural life, and not only was the process accompanied with much

suffering, but the form which took its place was marked by some

serious disadvantages. This form was brought about through the rapid

culmination of old familiar tendencies. The classes connected with the

land came to be quite clearly distinguished into three groups: the

landlords, the tenant farmers, and the farm laborers. The landlord

class was a comparatively small body of nobility and gentry, a few

thousand persons, who owned by far the greater portion of the land of

the country. Their estates were for the most part divided up into

farms, to the keeping of which in productive condition they

contributed the greater part of the expense, to the administration of

which trained stewards applied themselves, and in the improvement of

which their owners often took a keen and enlightened interest. They

received high rents, possessed unlimited local influence, and were the

favored governing class of the country. The class of farmers were men

of some capital, and frequently of intelligence and enterprise, though

rarely of education, who held on lease from the landlords farms of

some one, two, or three or more hundred acres, paying relatively large

rents, and yet by the excellence of their farming making for

themselves a liberal income. The farm laborers were the residuum of

the changes which have been traced in the history of landholding; a

large class living for the most part miserably in cottages grouped in

villages, holding no land, and receiving day wages for working on the

farms just described.

Notwithstanding the improvements in agriculture and the increase in

the extent of cultivated land, England ceased within the eighteenth

century to be a self-supporting country in food products. The form

which the "corn laws" had taken in 1689 had been as follows: the

raising of wheat was encouraged by prohibiting its importation and

paying a bounty of about eightpence a bushel for its exportation so

long as the prevailing price was less than six shillings a bushel.

When it was between six shillings and six shillings eightpence a

bushel its importation was forbidden, but there was no bounty paid for

exportation. Between the last price and ten shillings a bushel it

could be imported by paying a duty of a shilling a bushel. Above the

last price it could be imported free. Nevertheless, during the latter

half of the eighteenth century it became evident that there was no

longer a sufficient amount of wheat raised for the needs of the

English people. Between 1770 and 1790 exports and imports about

balanced one another, but after the latter year the imports always

exceeded the exports.

This was of course due to the great increase of population and to its

employment in the field of manufactures. The population in England in

1700 was about five millions, in 1750 about six millions and a half,

in 1800 about nine millions, and in 1850 about eighteen millions. That

is to say, its progress was slow during the first half of the

eighteenth century, more rapid during the latter half, and vastly more

rapid during the nineteenth century.

*61. The Laissez-faire Theory.*--A scarcely less complete change than

that which had occurred in manufactures, in agriculture, and in social

life as based upon these, was that which was in progress at the same

time in the realm of ideas, especially as applied to questions of

economic and social life. The complete acceptance of the view that it

was a natural and desirable part of the work of government to regulate

the economic life of the people had persisted well past the middle of

the eighteenth century. But very different tendencies of thought arose

in the latter part of the century. One of these was the prevailing

desire for greater liberty. The word liberty was defined differently

by different men, but for all alike it meant a resistance to

oppression, a revulsion against interference with personal freedom of

action, a disinclination to be controlled any more than absolutely

necessary, a belief that men had a right to be left free to do as they

chose, so far as such freedom was practicable.

As applied to economic interests this liberty meant freedom for each

person to make his living in the way he might see fit, and without any

external restriction. Adam Smith says: "The patrimony of a poor man

lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands; and to hinder him

from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks

proper, without injury to his neighbor, is a plain violation of this

most sacred property. It is a manifest encroachment upon the just

liberty both of the workman and of those who might be disposed to

employ him. As it hinders the one from working at what he thinks

proper, so it hinders the other from employing whom they think

proper." Government regulation, therefore, in as far as it restricted

men's freedom of action in working, employing, buying, selling, etc.,

was an interference with their natural liberty.

A second influence in the same direction was the prevalent belief that

most of the evils that existed in society were due to the mistakes of

civilization, that if men could get back to a "state of nature" and

start again, things might be much better. It was felt that there was

too much artificiality, too much interference with natural

development. Arthur Young condemned the prevailing policy of

government, "because it consists of prohibiting the natural course of

things. All restrictive forcible measures in domestic policy are bad."

Regulation was unwise because it forced men's actions into artificial

lines when it would have been much better to let them follow natural

lines. Therefore it was felt not only that men had a right to carry on

their economic affairs as they chose, but that it was wise to allow

them to do so, because interference or regulation had been tried and

found wanting. It had produced evil rather than good.

A third and by far the most important intellectual influence which

tended toward the destruction of the system of regulation was the

development of a consistent body of economic teaching, which claimed

to have discovered natural laws showing the futility and injuriousness

of any such attempts. Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_ was published

in 1776, the year of the invention of Crompton's mule, and in the

decade when enclosures were more rapid than at any other time, except

in the middle years of the Napoleonic wars. This was, therefore, one

of the earliest, as it was far the most influential, of a series of

books which represent the changes in ideas correlative to the changes

in actual life already described. It has been described as having for

its main object "to demonstrate that the most effectual plan for

advancing a people to greatness is to maintain that order of things

which nature has pointed out, by allowing every man, as long as he

observes the rules of justice, to pursue his own interests in his own

way, and to bring both his industry and his capital into the freest

competition with those of his fellow-citizens." But the most distinct

influence exercised by the writings of Adam Smith and his successors

was not so much in pointing out that it was unjust or unwise to

interfere with men's natural liberty in the pursuit of their

interests, as in showing, as it was believed, that there were natural

laws which made all interference incapable of reaching the ends it

aimed at. A series of works were published in the latter years of the

eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth century by Malthus,

Ricardo, Macculloch, James Mill, and others, in which principles were

enunciated and laws formulated which were believed to explain why all

interference with free competition was useless or worse. Not only was

the whole subject of economic relations clarified, much that had been

regarded as wise brought into doubt, and much that had been only

doubted shown to be absurd, but the attainment of many objects

previously sought for was, apparently, shown to be impossible, and to

lie outside of the realm of human control.

It was pointed out, for instance, that because of the limited amount

of capital in existence at any one time, "a demand for commodities is

not a demand for labor;" and therefore a law like that which required

burial in a woollen shroud did not give added occupation to the

people, but only diverted them from one occupation to another. Ricardo

developed a law of wages to the effect that they always tend to the

amount "necessary to enable the laborer to subsist, and to perpetuate

his race without either increase or diminution," and that any

artificial raising or lowering of wages is impossible, or else causes

an increase or diminution in their number which, through competition,

soon brings back the old rate. Rent was also explained by Ricardo as

arising from the differences of quality between different pieces of

land, and as measured by the difference in the productivity of the

land under consideration and that of the poorest land under

cultivation at the time; and therefore being in its amount independent

of direct human control. The Malthusian law of population showed that

population tended to increase in a geometrical ratio, subsistence for

the population, on the other hand, only in an arithmetical ratio, and

that poverty was, therefore, the natural and inevitable result in old

countries of a pressure of population on subsistence. The sanction of

science was thus given alike to the desires of the lovers of freedom

and to the regrets of those who deplored man's departure from the

state of nature.

All these intellectual tendencies and reasonings of the later

eighteenth century, therefore, combined to discredit the minute

regulation of economic society, which had been the traditional policy

of the immediately preceding centuries. The movement of thought was

definitely opposed to the continuance or extension of the supervision

of the government over matters of labor, wages, hours, industry,

commerce, agriculture, or other phenomena of production, distribution,

exchange, or consumption. This set of opinions is known as the

_laissez-faire_ theory of the functions of government, the view that

the duties of government should be reduced to the smallest possible

number, and that it should keep out of the economic sphere altogether.

Adam Smith would have restricted the functions of government to three:

to protect the nation from the attacks of other nations, to protect

each person in the nation from the injustice or violence of other

individuals, and to carry on certain educational or similar

institutions which were of general utility, but not to any one's

private interest. Many of his successors would have cut off the last

duty altogether.

*62. Cessation of Government Regulation*--These theoretical opinions

came to be more and more widely held, more and more influential over

the most thoughtful of English statesmen and other men of prominence,

until within the first half of the nineteenth century it may be said

that their acceptance was general and their influence dominant. They

fell in with the actual tendencies of the times, and as a result of

the natural breaking down of old conditions, the rise of new, and the

general acceptance of this attitude of _laissez-faire_, a rapid and

general decay of the system of government regulation took place.

The old regulation had never been so complete in reality as it was on

the statute book, and much of it had died out of itself. Some of the

provisions of the Statute of Apprentices were persistently

disregarded, and when appeals were made for its application to farm

work in the latter part of the eighteenth century Parliament refused

to enforce it, as they did in the case of discharged soldiers in 1726

and of certain dyers in 1777. The assize of bread was very irregularly

enforced, and that of other victuals had been given up altogether.

Many commercial companies were growing up without regulation by

government, and in the world of finance the hand of government was

very light. The new manufactures and the new agriculture grew up to a

large extent apart from government control or influence; while the

forms to which the old regulation did apply were dying out. In the new

factory industry practically the whole body of the employees were

without the qualifications required by the Statute of Apprentices, as

well as many of the hand-loom weavers who were drawn into the industry

by the abundance and cheapness of machine-spun thread. In the early

years of the nineteenth century a strenuous effort was made by the

older weavers to have the law enforced against them. The whole matter

was investigated by Parliament, but instead of enforcing the old law

they modified it by acts passed in 1803 and 1809, so as to allow of

greater liberty. The old prohibition of using fulling mills passed in

1553 was also repealed in 1809. The Statute of Apprentices after being

weakened piecemeal as just mentioned, and by a further amendment

removing the wages clauses in 1813, and after being referred to by

Lord Mansfield as "against the natural rights and contrary to the

common law rights of the land," was finally removed from the statute

book in 1814. Even the "Combination Acts," which had forbidden

laborers to unite to settle wages and hours, were repealed in 1824.

Similar changes took place in other fields than those of the relations

between employers and employees. The leading characteristics of

legislation on questions of commerce, manufactures, and agriculture

during the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first half

of the nineteenth consist in the fact that it almost wholly tended

toward freedom from government control. The proportions in which the

influence of the natural breaking down of an outgrown system, of the

new conditions which were arising, and of pure theory were combined

cannot of course be distinguished. All were present. Besides this

there is always a large number of persons in the community who would

be primarily benefited by a change, and who therefore take the

initiative or exercise a special pressure in favor of it.

The Navigation Acts began to go to pieces in 1796, when the old rule

restricting importations from America, Asia, and Africa to British

vessels was withdrawn in favor of the United States; in 1811 the same

permission to send goods to England in other than British vessels was

given to Brazil, and in 1822 to the Spanish-American countries. The

whole subject was investigated by a Parliamentary Commission in 1820,

at the request of the London Chamber of Commerce, and a policy of

withdrawal from control determined upon. In 1823 a measure was passed

by which the crown was empowered to form reciprocity treaties with any

other country so far as shipping was concerned, and agreements were

immediately entered into with Prussia, Denmark, Hamburg, Sweden, and

within the next twenty years with most other important countries. The

old laws of 1660 were repealed in 1826, and a freer system

substituted, while in 1849 the Navigation Acts were abolished

altogether. In the meantime the monopoly of the old regulated

companies was being withdrawn, the India trade being thrown open in

1813 and given up entirely by the Company in 1833. Gradually the

commerce of England and of all the English colonies was opened equally

to the vessels of all nations.

A beginning of removal of the import and export duties, which had been

laid for the purpose of encouraging or discouraging or otherwise

influencing certain lines of production or trade, was made in a

commercial treaty entered into by Pitt with France in 1786. The work

was seriously taken up again in 1824 and 1825 by Mr. Huskisson, and in

1842 by Sir Robert Peel. In 1845 the duty was removed from four

hundred and thirty articles, partly raw materials, partly

manufactures. But the most serious struggle in the movement for free

trade was that for the repeal of the corn laws. A new law had been

passed at the close of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, by which the

importation of wheat was forbidden so long as the prevailing price was

not above ten shillings a bushel. This was in pursuance of the old

traditional policy of encouraging the production of grain in order

that England might be at least partially self-supporting, and was

further justified on the ground that the landowners paid the great

bulk of the taxes, which they could not do if the price of grain were

allowed to be brought down by foreign competition. Nevertheless an

active propaganda for the abolition of this law was begun by the

formation of the "Anti-Corn Law League," in 1839. Richard Cobden

became the president and the most famous representative of this

society, which carried on an active agitation for some years. The

chief interest in the abolition of the law would necessarily be taken

by the manufacturing employers, the wages of whose employees could

thus be made lower and more constant, but there were abundant other

arguments against the laws, and their abandonment was entirely in

conformity with the spirit of the age. At the close of 1845,

therefore, Peel proposed their repeal, the matter was brought up in

Parliament in the early months of 1846, and a sliding scale was

adopted by which a slight temporary protection should continue until

1849, when any protective tariff on wheat was to cease altogether,

though a nominal duty of about one and a half pence a bushel was still

to be collected. This is known as the "adoption of free trade."

It remains to be noted in this connection that "free trade in land"

was an expression often used during the same period, and consisted in

an effort marked by a long series of acts of Parliament and

regulations of the courts to simplify the title to land, the processes

of buying and selling it, and in other ways making its use and

disposal as simple and uncontrolled by external regulation as was

commerce or any form of industry.

Thus the structure of regulation of industry, which had been built up

in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or which had survived from

the Middle Ages, was now torn down; the use of the powers of

government to make men carry on their economic life in a certain way,

to buy and sell, labor and hire, manufacture and cultivate, export and

import, only in such ways as were thought to be best for the nation,

seemed to be entirely abandoned. The _laissez-faire_ view of

government was to all appearances becoming entirely dominant.

*63. Individualism.*--But the prevailing tendencies of thought and the

economic teaching of the period were not merely negative and opposed

to government regulation; they contained a positive element also. If

there was to be no external control, what incentive would actuate men

in their industrial existence? What force would hold economic society

together? The answer was a plain one. Enlightened self-interest was

the incentive, universal free competition was the force. James

Anderson, in his _Political Economy_, published in 1801, says,

"Private interest is the great source of public good, which, though

operating unseen, never ceases one moment to act with unabating power,

if it be not perverted by the futile regulations of some short-sighted

politician." Again, Malthus, in his _Essay on Population_, in 1817,

says: "By making the passion of self-love beyond comparison stronger

than the passion of benevolence, the more ignorant are led to pursue

the general happiness, an end which they would have totally failed to

attain if the moving principle of their conduct had been benevolence.

Benevolence, indeed, as the great and constant source of action, would

require the most perfect knowledge of causes and effects, and

therefore can only be the attribute of the Deity. In a being so

short-sighted as man it would lead to the grossest errors, and soon

transform the fair and cultivated soil of human society into a dreary

scene of want and confusion."

In other words, a natural and sufficient economic force was always

tending to act and to produce the best results, except in as far as it

was interfered with by external regulation. If a man wishes to earn

wages, to receive payment, he must observe what work another man wants

done, or what goods another man desires, and offer to do that work or

furnish those goods, so that the other man may be willing to

remunerate him. In this way both obtain what they want, and if all

others are similarly occupied all wants will be satisfied so far as

practicable. But men must be entirely free to act as they think best,

to choose what and when and how they will produce. The best results

will be obtained where the greatest freedom exists, where men may

compete with one another freed from all trammels, at liberty to pay or

ask such wages, to demand or offer such prices, to accept or reject

such goods, as they wish or can agree upon. If everybody else is

equally free the man who offers the best to his neighbor will be

preferred. Effort will thus be stimulated, self-reliance encouraged,

production increased, improvement attained, and economy guaranteed.

Nor should there be any special favor or encouragement given by

government or by any other bodies to any special individuals or

classes of persons or kinds of industry, for in this way capital and

labor will be diverted from the direction which they would naturally

take, and the self-reliance and energy of such favored persons

diminished.

Therefore complete individualism, universal freedom of competition,

was the ideal of the age, as far as there is ever any universal ideal.

There certainly was a general belief among the greater number of the

intelligent and influential classes, that when each person was freely

seeking his own best interest he was doing the best for himself and

for all. Economic society was conceived of as a number of freely

competing units held in equilibrium by the force of competition, much

as the material universe is held together by the attraction of

gravitation. Any hindrance to this freedom of the individual to

compete freely with all others, any artificial support or

encouragement that gives him an advantage over others, is against his

own real interest and that of society.

This ideal was necessarily as much opposed to voluntary combinations,

and to restrictions imposed by custom or agreement, as it was to

government regulation. Individualism is much more than a mere

_laissez-faire_ policy of government. It believes that every man

should remain and be allowed to remain free, unrestricted, undirected,

unassisted, so that he may be in a position at any time to direct his

labor, ability, capital, enterprise, in any direction that may seem to

him most desirable, and may be induced to put forth his best efforts

to attain success. The arguments on which it was based were drawn from

the domain of men's natural right to economic as to other freedom;

from experience, by which it was believed that all regulation had

proved to be injurious; and from economic doctrine, which was believed

to have discovered natural laws that proved the necessary result of

interference to be evil, or at best futile.

The changes of the time were favorable to this ideal. Men had never

been so free from external control by government or any other power.

The completion of the process of enclosure left every agriculturist at

liberty to plant and raise what he chose, and when and how he chose.

The reform of the poor law in 1834 abolished the act of settlement of

1662, by which the authorities of each parish had the power to remove

to the place from which they came any laborers who entered it, and so

far as the law was concerned, farm laborers were now free to come and

go where they chose to seek for work. In the new factories, systems of

transportation, and other large establishments that were taking the

places of small ones, employees were at liberty to leave their

engagements at any time they chose, to go to another employer or

another occupation; and the employer had the same liberty of

discharging at a moment's notice. Manufacturers were at liberty to

make anything they chose, and hire laborers in whatever proportion

they chose. And just as early modern regulation had been given up, so

the few fragments of mediæval restrictive institutions that had

survived the intervening centuries were now rapidly abandoned in the

stress of competitive society. Later forms of restriction, such as

trade unions and trusts, had not yet grown up. Actual conditions and

the theoretical statement of what was desirable approximated to one

another more nearly than they usually have in the world's history.

*64. Social Conditions at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century.*--Yet

somehow the results were disappointing. More and better manufactured

goods were produced and foreign goods sold, and at vastly lower

prices. The same result would probably have been true in agriculture

had not the corn laws long prevented this consummation, and instead

distributed the surplus to paupers and the holders of government bonds

through the medium of taxes. There was no doubt of English wealth and

progress. England held the primacy of the world in commerce, in

manufactures, in agriculture. Her rapid increase in wealth had enabled

her to bear the burden, not only of her own part in the Napoleonic

wars, but of much of the expense of the armament of the continental

countries. Population also was increasing more rapidly than ever

before. She stood before the world as the most prominent and

successful modern nation in all material respects. Yet a closer

examination into her internal condition shows much that was deeply

unsatisfactory. The period of transition from the domestic to the

factory system of industry and from the older to the new farming

conditions was one of almost unrelieved misery to great masses of

those who were wedded to the old ways, who had neither the capital,

the enterprise, nor the physical nor mental adaptability to attach

themselves to the new. The hand-loom weavers kept up a hopeless

struggle in the garrets and cellars of the factory towns, while their

wages were sinking lower and lower till finally the whole generation

died out. The small farmers who lost the support of spinning and other

by-industries succumbed in the competition with the larger producers.

The cottagers whose commons were lost to them by enclosures frequently

failed to find a niche for themselves in their own part of the

country, and became paupers or vagabonds. Many of the same sad

incidents which marked the sixteenth century were characteristic of

this period of analogous change, when ultimate improvement was being

bought at the price of much immediate misery.

[Illustration: Carding, Drawing, and Roving in 1835. (Baines: _History

of Cotton Manufacture_.)]

Even among those who were supposed to have reaped the advantages of

the changes of the time many unpleasant phenomena appeared. The farm

laborers were not worse, perhaps were better off on the average, in

the matter of wages, than those of the previous generation, but they

were more completely separated from the land than they had ever been

before, more completely deprived of those wholesome influences which

come from the use of even a small portion of land, and of the

incitement to thrift that comes from the possibility of rising. Few

classes of people have ever been more utterly without enjoyment or

prospects than the modern English farm laborers. And one class, the

yeomen, somewhat higher in position and certainly in opportunities,

had disappeared entirely, recruited into the class of mere laborers.

In the early factories, women and children were employed more

extensively and more persistently than in earlier forms of industry.

Their labor was in greater demand than that of men. In 1839, of 31,632

employees in worsted mills, 18,416, or considerably more than half,

were under eighteen years of age, and of the 13,216 adults, 10,192

were women, leaving only 3024 adult men among more than 30,000

laborers. In 1832, in a certain flax spinning mill near Leeds, where

about 1200 employees were engaged, 829 were below eighteen, only 390

above; and in the flax spinning industry generally, in 1835, only

about one-third were adults, and only about one-third of these were

men. In the still earlier years of the factory system the proportion

of women and children was even greater, though reliable general

statistics are not available. The cheaper wages, the easier control,

and the smaller size of women and children, now that actual physical

power was not required, made them more desirable to employers, and in

many families the men clung to hand work while the women and children

went into the factories.

The early mills were small, hot, damp, dusty, and unhealthy. They were

not more so perhaps than the cottages where domestic industry had been

carried on; but now the hours were more regular, continuous, and

prolonged in which men, women, and children were subjected to such

labor. All had to conform alike to the regular hours, and these were

in the early days excessive. Twelve, thirteen, and even fourteen hours

a day were not unusual. Regular hours of work, when they are moderate

in length, and a systematized life, when it is not all labor, are

probably wholesome, physically and morally; but when the summons to

cease from work and that to begin it again are separated by such a

short interval, the factory bell or whistle represents mere tyranny.

Wages were sometimes higher than under the old conditions, but they

were even more irregular. Greater ups and downs occurred. Periods of

very active production and of restriction of production alternated

more decidedly than before, and introduced more irregularity into

industry for both employers and employees. The town laborer engaged in

a large establishment was, like the rural laborer on a large farm,

completely separated from the land, from capital, from any active

connection with the administration of industry, from any probable

opportunity of rising out of the laboring class. His prospects were,

therefore, as limited as his position was laborious and precarious.

The rapid growth of the manufacturing towns, especially in the north,

drawing the scattered population of other parts of the country into

their narrow limits, caused a general breakdown in the old

arrangements for providing water, drainage, and fresh air; and made

rents high, and consequently living in crowded rooms necessary. The

factory towns in the early part of the century were filthy, crowded,

and demoralizing, compared alike with their earlier and their present

condition.

[Illustration: Cotton Factories in Manchester. (Baines: _History of

Cotton Manufacture_.)]

In the higher grades of economic society the advantages of the recent

changes were more distinct, the disadvantages less so. The rise of

capital and business enterprise into greater importance, and the

extension of the field of competition, gave greater opportunity to

employing farmers, merchants, and manufacturers, as well as to the

capitalists pure and simple. But even for them the keenness of

competition and the exigencies of providing for the varying

conditions of distant markets made the struggle for success a harder

one, and many failed in it.

In many ways therefore it might seem that the great material advances

which had been made, the removal of artificial restrictions, the

increase of liberty of action, the extension of the field of

competition, the more enlightened opinions on economic and social

relations, had failed to increase human happiness appreciably; indeed,

for a time had made the condition of the mass of the people worse

instead of better.

It will not, therefore, be unexpected if some other lines of economic

and social development, especially those which have become more and

more prominent during the later progress of the nineteenth century,

prove to be quite different in direction from those that have been

studied in this chapter.

*65. BIBLIOGRAPHY*

Toynbee, Arnold: _The Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century

in England_.

Lecky, W. E. H.: _History of England in the Eighteenth Century_, Vol.

VI, Chap. 23.

Baines, E.: _History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain_.

Cooke-Taylor, R. W.: _The Modern Factory System_.

Levi, L.: _History of British Commerce and of the Economic Progress of

the British Nation_.

Prothero, R. E.: _The Pioneers and Progress of English Farming_.

Rogers, J. E. T.: _Industrial and Commercial History_.

Smith, Adam: _An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of

Nations_.

CHAPTER IX

THE EXTENSION OF GOVERNMENT CONTROL

Factory Laws, The Modification Of Land Ownership, Sanitary

Regulations, And New Public Services

*66. National Affairs from 1830 to 1900.*--The English government in the

year 1830 might be described as a complete aristocracy. The king had

practically no powers apart from his ministers, and they were merely

the representatives of the majority in Parliament. Parliament

consisted of the House of Lords and the House of Commons. The first of

these Houses was made up for the most part of an hereditary

aristocracy. The bishops and newly created peers, the only element

which did not come in by inheritance, were appointed by the king and

usually from the families of those who already possessed inherited

titles. The House of Commons had originally been made up of two

members from each county, and two from each important town. But the

list of represented towns was still practically the same as it had

been in the fifteenth century, while intervening economic and other

changes had, as has been seen, made the most complete alteration in

the distribution of population. Great manufacturing towns had grown up

as a result of changes in commerce and of the industrial revolution,

and these had no representation in Parliament separate from the

counties in which they lay. On the other hand, towns once of

respectable size had dwindled until they had only a few dozen

inhabitants, and in some cases had reverted to open farming country;

but these, or the landlords who owned the land on which they had been

built, still retained their two representatives in Parliament. The

county representatives were voted for by all "forty shilling

freeholders," that is, landowners whose farms would rent for forty

shillings a year. But the whole tendency of English landholding, as

has been seen, had been to decrease the number of landowners in the

country, so that the actual number of voters was only a very small

proportion of the rural population.

Such great irregularities of representation had thus grown up that the

selection of more than a majority of the members of the House of

Commons was in the hands of a very small number of men, many of them

already members of the House of Lords, and all members of the

aristocracy.

Just as Parliament represented only the higher classes, so officers in

the army and to a somewhat less extent the navy, the officials of the

established church, the magistrates in the counties, the ambassadors

abroad, and the cabinet ministers at home, the holders of influential

positions in the Universities and endowed institutions generally, were

as a regular thing members of the small class of the landed or

mercantile aristocracy of England. Perhaps one hundred thousand out of

the fourteen millions of the people of England were the veritable

governing classes. They alone had any control of the national and

local government, or of the most important political and social

institutions.

The "Reform of Parliament," which meant some degree of equalization of

the representation of districts, an extension of the franchise, and

the abolition of some of the irregularities in elections, had been

proposed from time to time, but had awakened little interest until it

was advocated by the Radicals under the influence of the French

Revolution, along with some much more far-reaching propositions.

Between the years 1820 and 1830, however, a moderate reform of

Parliament had been advocated by the leaders of the Whig party. In

1830 this party rather unexpectedly obtained a majority in Parliament,

for the first time for a long while, and the ministry immediately

introduced a reform bill. It proposed to take away the right of

separate representation from fifty-six towns, and to reduce the number

of representatives from two to one in thirty-one others; to transfer

these representatives to the more populous towns and counties; to

extend the franchise to a somewhat larger number and to equalize it;

and finally to introduce lists of voters, to keep the polls open for

only two days, and to correct a number of such minor abuses. There was

a bitter contest in Parliament and in the country at large on the

proposed change, and the measure was only carried after it had been

rejected by one House of Commons, passed by a new House elected as a

test of the question, then defeated by the House of Lords, and only

passed by them when submitted a second time with the threat by the

ministry of requiring the king to create enough new peers to pass it,

if the existing members refused to do so. Its passage was finally

secured in 1832. It was carried by pressure from below through all its

stages. The king signed it reluctantly because it had been sent to him

by Parliament, the House of Lords passed it under threats from the

ministry, who based their power on the House of Commons. This body in

turn had to be reconstructed by a new election before it would agree

to it, and there is no doubt that the voters as well as Parliament

itself were much influenced by the cry of "the Bill, the whole Bill,

and nothing but the Bill," raised by mobs, associations, and meetings,

consisting largely of the masses of the people who possessed no votes

at all. In the last resort, therefore, it was a victory won by the

masses, and, little as they profited by it immediately, it proved to

be the turning point, the first step from aristocracy toward

democracy.

In 1867 a second Reform Bill was passed, mainly on the lines of the

first, but giving what amounted to almost universal suffrage to the

inhabitants of the town constituencies, which included the great body

of the workingmen. Finally, in 1884 and 1885, the third Reform Bill

was passed which extended the right of voting to agricultural laborers

as well, and did much toward equalizing the size of the districts

represented by each member of the House of Commons. Other reforms have

been adopted during the same period, and Parliament has thus come to

represent the whole population instead of merely the aristocracy. But

there have been even greater changes in local government. By laws

passed in 1835 and 1882 the cities and boroughs have been given a form

of government in which the power is in the hands of all the taxpayers.

In 1888 an act was passed through Parliament forming County Councils,

elected by universal suffrage and taking over many of the powers

formerly exercised by the magistrates and large landholders. In 1894

this was followed by a Parish Council Bill creating even more

distinctly local bodies, by which the people in each locality, elected

by universal suffrage, including that of women, may take charge of

almost all their local concerns under the general legislation of

Parliament.

Corresponding to these changes in general and local government the

power of the old ruling classes has been diminished in all directions,

until it has become little more than that degree of prominence and

natural leadership which the national sentiment or their economic and

intellectual advantages give to them. It may be said that England, so

far as its government goes, has come nearer to complete democracy than

any other modern country.

In the rapidity of movement, the activity, the energy, the variety of

interests, the thousand lines of economic, political, intellectual,

literary, artistic, philanthropic, or religious life which

characterize the closing years of the nineteenth century, it seems

impossible to choose a few facts to typify or describe the period, as

is customary for earlier times.

Little can be done except to point out the main lines of political

movement, as has been done in this paragraph, or of economic and

social development, as will be done in the remaining paragraphs of

this and the next chapter. The great mass of recent occurrences and

present conditions are as yet rather the human atmosphere in which we

are living, the problem which we are engaged in solving, than a proper

subject for historical description and analysis.

[Illustration: Distribution of Population in England and Wales 1891.

Engraved By Bormay & Co., N.Y.]

*67. The Beginning of Factory Legislation.*--One of the greatest

difficulties with which the early mill owners had to contend was the

insufficient supply of labor for their factories. Since these had to

be run by water power, they were placed along the rapid streams in the

remote parts of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire, and Nottinghamshire,

which were sparsely populated, and where such inhabitants as there

were had a strong objection to working in factories. However abundant

population might be in some other parts of England, in the northwest

where the new manufacturing was growing up, and especially in the

hilly rural districts, there were but few persons available to perform

the work which must be done by human hands in connection with the mill

machinery. There was, however, in existence a source of supply of

laborers which could furnish almost unlimited numbers and at the

lowest possible cost. The parish poorhouses or workhouses of the large

cities were overcrowded with children. The authorities always had

difficulty in finding occupation for them when they came to an age

when they could earn their own living, and any plan of putting them to

work would be received with welcome. This source of supply was early

discovered and utilized by the manufacturers, and it soon became

customary for them to take as apprentices large numbers of the

poorhouse children. They signed indentures with the overseers of the

poor by which they agreed to give board, clothing, and instruction for

a certain number of years to the children who were thus bound to them.

In return they put them to work in the factories. Children from seven

years of age upward were engaged by hundreds from London and the other

large cities, and set to work in the cotton spinning factories of the

north. Since there were no other facilities for boarding them,

"apprentice houses" were built for them in the vicinity of the

factories, where they were placed under the care of superintendents or

matrons. The conditions of life among these pauper children were, as

might be expected, very hard. They were remotely situated, apart from

the observation of the community, left to the burdens of unrelieved

labor and the harshness of small masters or foremen. Their hours of

labor were excessive. When the demands of trade were active they were

often arranged in two shifts, each shift working twelve hours, one in

the day and another in the night, so that it was a common saying in

the north that "their beds never got cold," one set climbing into bed

as the other got out. When there was no night work the day work was

the longer. They were driven at their work and often abused. Their

food was of the coarsest description, and they were frequently

required to eat it while at their work, snatching a bite as they could

while the machinery was still in motion. Much of the time which

should have been devoted to rest was spent in cleaning the machinery,

and there seems to have been absolutely no effort made to give them

any education or opportunity for recreation.

The sad life of these little waifs, overworked, underfed, neglected,

abused, in the factories and barracks in the remote glens of Yorkshire

and Lancashire, came eventually to the notice of the outside world.

Correspondence describing their condition began to appear in the

newspapers, a Manchester Board of Health made a presentment in 1796

calling attention to the unsanitary conditions in the cotton factories

where they worked, contagious fevers were reported to be especially

frequent in the apprentice houses, and in 1802 Sir Robert Peel,

himself an employer of nearly a thousand such children, brought the

matter to the attention of Parliament. An immediate and universal

desire was expressed to abolish the abuses of the system, and as a

result the "Health and Morals Act to regulate the Labor of Sound

Children in Cotton Factories" was passed in the same year. It

prohibited the binding out for factory labor of children younger than

nine years, restricted the hours of labor to twelve actual working

hours a day, and forbade night labor. It required the walls of the

factories to be properly whitewashed and the buildings to be

sufficiently ventilated, insisted that the apprentices should be

furnished with at least one new suit of clothes a year, and provided

that they should attend religious service and be instructed in the

fundamental English branches. This was the first of the "Factory

Acts," for, although its application was so restricted, applying only

to cotton factories, and for the most part only to bound children, the

subsequent steps in the formation of the great code of factory

legislation were for a long while simply a development of the same

principle, that factory labor involved conditions which it was

desirable for government to regulate.

At the time of the passage of this law the introduction of steam power

was already causing a transfer of the bulk of factory industry from

the rural districts to which the need for water power had confined it

to the towns where every other requisite for carrying on manufacturing

was more easily obtainable. Here the children of families resident in

the town could be obtained, and the practice of using apprentice

children was largely given up. Many of the same evils, however,

continued to exist here. The practice of beginning to work while

extremely young, long hours, night work, unhealthy surroundings,

proved to be as common among these children to whom the law did not

apply as they had been among the apprentice children. These evils

attracted the attention of several persons of philanthropic feeling.

Robert Owen, especially, a successful manufacturer who had introduced

many reforms in his own mills, collected a large body of evidence as

to the excessive labor and early age of employees in the factories

even where no apprentice labor was engaged. He tried to awaken an

interest in the matter by the publication of a pamphlet on the

injurious consequences of the factory system, and to influence various

members of Parliament to favor the passage of a law intended to

improve the condition of laboring children and young people. In 1815

Sir Robert Peel again brought the matter up in Parliament. A committee

was appointed to investigate the question, and a legislative agitation

was thus begun which was destained to last for many years and to

produce a series of laws which have gradually taken most of the

conditions of employment in large establishments under the control of

the government. In debates in Parliament, in testimony before

government commissions of investigation, in petitions, pamphlets, and

newspapers, the conditions of factory labor were described and

discussed. Successive laws to modify these conditions were introduced

into Parliament, debated at great length, amended, postponed,

reintroduced, and in some cases passed, in others defeated.

*68. Arguments for and against Factory Legislation.*--The need for

regulation which was claimed to exist arose from the long hours of

work which were customary, from the very early age at which many

children were sent to be employed in the factories, and from various

incidents of manufacturing which were considered injurious, or as

involving unnecessary hardship. The actual working hours in the

factories in the early part of the century were from twelve and a half

to fourteen a day. That is to say, factories usually started work in

the morning at 6 o'clock and continued till 12, when a period from a

half-hour to an hour was allowed for dinner, then the work began again

and continued till 7.30 or 8.30 in the evening. It was customary to

eat breakfast after reaching the mill, but this was done while

attending the machinery, there being no general stoppage for the

purpose. Some mills ran even longer hours, opening at 5 A.M. and not

closing till 9 P.M. In some exceptional cases the hours were only 12;

from 6 to 12 and from 1 to 7. The inducements to long hours were very

great. The profits were large, the demand for goods was constantly

growing, the introduction of gas made it possible to light the

factories, and the use of artificial power, either water or steam,

seemed to make the labor much less severe than when the power had been

provided by human muscles. Few or no holidays were regarded, except

Sunday, so that work went on in an unending strain of protracted,

exhausting labor, prolonged for much of the year far into the night.

To these long hours all the hands alike conformed, the children

commencing and stopping work at the same time as the grown men and

women. Moreover, the children often began work while extremely young.

There was a great deal of work in the factories which they could do

just as well, in some cases even better, than adults. They were

therefore commonly sent into the mills by their parents at about the

age of eight years, frequently at seven or even six. As has been

before stated, more than half of the employees in many factories were

below eighteen years, and of these a considerable number were mere

children. Thirdly, there were certain other evils of factory labor

that attracted attention and were considered by the reformers to be

remediable. Many accidents occurred because the moving machinery was

unprotected, the temperature in the cotton mills had to be kept high,

and ventilation and cleanliness were often entirely neglected. The

habit of keeping the machinery in motion while meals were being eaten

was a hardship, and in many ways the employees were practically at the

mercy of the proprietors of the factories so long as there was no form

of oversight or of united action to prevent harshness or unfairness.

In the discussions in Parliament and outside there were of course many

contradictory statements concerning the facts of the case, and much

denial of general and special charges. The advocates of factory laws

drew an extremely sombre picture of the evils of the factory system.

The opponents of such legislation, on the other hand, declared that

their statements were exaggerated or untrue, and that the condition of

the factory laborer was not worse than that of other workingmen, or

harder than that of the domestic worker and his family had been in

earlier times.

But apart from these recriminations and contradictions, there were

certain general arguments used in the debates which can be grouped

into three classes on each side. For the regulating laws there was in

the first place the purely sentimental argument, repulsion against the

hard, unrelieved labor, the abuse, the lack of opportunity for

enjoyment or recreation of the children of the factory districts; the

feeling that in wealthy, humane, Christian England, it was unendurable

that women and little children should work longer hours, be condemned

to greater hardships, and more completely cut off from the enjoyments

of life than were the slaves of tropical countries. This is the

argument of Mrs. Browning's _Cry of the Children_:--

"Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,

Ere the sorrow comes with years?

They are leaning their young heads against their mothers.

And that cannot stop their tears.

The young lambs are bleating in the meadows;

The young birds are chirping in the nest;

The young fawns are playing with the shadows;

The young flowers are blowing toward the west;

But the young, young children, O my brothers!

They are weeping bitterly.

They are weeping in the play-time of the others

In the country of the free.

* * * * *

'For oh!' say the children, 'we are weary,

And we cannot run or leap:

If we cared for any meadows, it were merely

To drop down in them and sleep.'

* * * * *

They look up with their pale and sunken faces,

And their look is dread to see,

For they mind you of their angels in high places,

With eyes turned on Deity.

'How long,' they say, 'how long, O cruel nation,

Will you stand, to move the world on a child's heart

Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation

And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?'"

Secondly, it was argued that the long hours for the children cut them

off from all intellectual and moral training, that they were in no

condition after such protracted labor to profit by any opportunities

of education that should be supplied, that with the diminished

influence of the home, and the demoralizing effects that were supposed

to result from factory labor, ignorance and vice alike would continue

to be its certain accompaniments, unless the age at which regular work

was begun should be limited, and the number of hours of labor of young

persons restricted. Thirdly, it was claimed that there was danger of

the physical degeneracy of the factory population. Certain diseases,

especially of the joints and limbs, were discovered to be very

prevalent in the factory districts. Children who began work so early

in life and were subjected to such long hours of labor did not grow so

rapidly, nor reach their full stature, nor retain their vigor so late

in life, as did the population outside of the factories. Therefore,

for the very physical preservation of the race, it was declared to be

necessary to regulate the conditions of factory labor.

On the other hand, apart from denials as to the facts of the case,

there were several distinct arguments used against the adoption of

factory laws. In the first place, in the interests of the

manufacturers, such laws were opposed as an unjust interference with

their business, an unnecessary and burdensome obstacle to their

success, and a threat of ruin to a class who by giving employment to

so many laborers and furnishing so much of the material for commerce

were of the greatest advantage to the country. Secondly, from a

somewhat broader point of view, it was declared that if such laws were

adopted England would no longer be able to compete with other

countries and would lose her preëminence in manufactures. The factory

system was being introduced into France, Belgium, the United States,

and other countries, and in none of these was there any legal

restriction on the hours of labor or the age of the employees. If

English manufacturers were forced to reduce the length of the day in

which production was carried on, they could not produce as cheaply as

these other countries, and English exports would decrease. This would

reduce the national prosperity and be especially hard on the working

classes themselves, as many would necessarily be thrown out of work.

Thirdly, as a matter of principle it was argued that the policy of

government regulation had been tried and found wanting, that after

centuries of existence it had been deliberately given up, and should

not be reintroduced. Laws restricting hours would interfere with the

freedom of labor, with the freedom of capital, with the freedom of

contract. If the employer and the employee were both satisfied with

the conditions of their labor, why should the government interfere?

The reason also why such regulation had failed in the past and must

again, if tried now, was evident. It was an effort to alter the action

of the natural laws which controlled employment, wages, profits, and

other economic matters, and was bad in theory, and would therefore

necessarily be injurious in practice. These and some other less

general arguments were used over and over again in the various forms

of the discussion through almost half a century. The laws that were

passed were carried because the majority in Parliament were either not

convinced by these reasonings or else determined that, come what

might, the evils and abuses connected with factory labor should be

abolished. As a matter of fact, the factory laws were carried by the

rank and file of the voting members of Parliament, not only against

the protests of the manufacturers especially interested, but in spite

of the warnings of those who spoke in the name of established

teaching, and frequently against the opposition of the political

leaders of both parties. The greatest number of those who voted for

them were influenced principally by their sympathies and feelings, and

yielded to the appeals of certain philanthropic advocates, the most

devoted and influential of whom was Lord Ashley, afterward earl of

Shaftesbury, who devoted many years to investigation and agitation on

the subject both inside and out of Parliament.

*69. Factory Legislation to 1847.*--The actual course of factory

legislation was as follows. The bill originally introduced in 1815,

after having been subjected to a series of discussions, amendments,

and postponements, was passed in June, 1819, being the second "Factory

Act." It applied only to cotton mills, and was in the main merely an

extension of the act of 1802 to the protection of children who were

not pauper apprentices. It forbade the employment of any child under

nine years of age, and prohibited the employment of those between nine

and sixteen more than twelve hours a day, or at night. In addition to

the twelve hours of actual labor, at least a half-hour must be allowed

for breakfast and an hour for dinner. Other minor acts amending or

extending this were passed from time to time, till in 1833, after two

successive commissions had made investigations and reports on the

subject, an important law was passed. It applied practically to all

textile mills, not merely to those for the spinning of cotton. The

prohibition of employment of all below nine years was continued,

children between nine and thirteen were to work only eight hours per

day, and young persons between thirteen and eighteen only twelve

hours, and none of these at night. Two whole and eight half holidays

were required to be given within the year, and each child must have a

surgeon's certificate of fitness for labor. There were also clauses

for the education of the children and the cleanliness of the

factories. But the most important clause of this statute was the

provision of a corps of four inspectors with assistants who were sworn

to their duties, salaried, and provided with extensive powers of

making rules for the execution of the act, of enforcing it, and

prosecuting for its violation. The earlier laws had not been

efficiently carried out. Under this act numerous prosecutions and

convictions took place, and factory regulation began to become a

reality. The inspectors calculated during their first year of service

that there were about 56,000 children between nine and thirteen, and

about 108,000 young persons between thirteen and eighteen, in the

factories under their supervision.

The decade lying between 1840 and 1850 was one of specially great

activity in social and economic agitation. Chartism, the abolition of

the corn laws, the formation of trade unions, mining acts, and further

extensions of the factory acts were all alike under discussion, and

they all created the most intense antagonism between parties and

classes. In 1844 the law commonly known as the "Children's Half-time

Act" was passed. It contained a large number of general provisions for

the fencing of dangerous machinery, for its stoppage while being

cleaned, for the report of accidents to inspectors and district

surgeons, for the public prosecution for damages of the factory owner

when he should seem to be responsible for an accident, and for the

enforcement of the act. Its most distinctive clause, however, was that

which restricted the labor of children to a half-day, or the whole of

alternate days, and required their attendance at school for the other

half of their time. All women were placed by this act in the same

category as young persons between thirteen and eighteen, so far as the

restriction of hours of labor to twelve per day and the prohibition

of night work extended.

The next statute to be passed was an extension of this regulation,

though it contained the provision which had long been the most

bitterly contested of any during the whole factory law agitation. This

was the "Ten-hour Act" of 1847. From an early period in the century

there had been a strong agitation in favor of restricting by law the

hours of young persons, and from somewhat later, of women, to ten

hours per day, and this proposition had been repeatedly introduced and

defeated in Parliament. It was now carried. By this time the more

usual length of the working day even when unrestricted had been

reduced to twelve hours, and in some trades to eleven. It was now made

by law half-time for children, and ten hours for young persons and

women, or as rearranged by another law passed three years afterward,

ten and a half hours for five days of the week and a half-day on

Saturday. The number of persons to whom the Ten-hour Act applied was

estimated at something over 360,000. That is, including the children,

at least three-fourths of all persons employed in textile industries

had their hours and some other conditions of labor directly regulated

by law. Moreover, the work of men employed in the same factories was

so dependent on that of the women and the children, that many of these

restrictions applied practically to them also.

Further minor changes in hours and other details were made from time

to time, but there was no later contest on the principle of factory

legislation. The evil results which had been feared had not shown

themselves, and many of its strongest opponents had either already, or

did eventually, acknowledge the beneficial results of the laws.

*70. The Extension of Factory Legislation.*--By the successive acts of

1819, 1833, 1844, and 1847, a normal length of working day and

regulated conditions generally had been established by government for

the factories employing women and children. The next development was

an extension of the regulation of hours and conditions of labor from

factories proper to other allied fields. Already in 1842 a law had

been passed regulating labor in mines. This act was passed in response

to the needs shown by the report of a commission which had been

appointed in 1840. They made a thorough investigation of the obscure

conditions of labor underground, and reported a condition of affairs

which was heart-sickening. Children began their life in the coal

mines at five, six, or seven years of age. Girls and women worked

like boys and men, they were less than half clothed, and worked

alongside of men who were stark naked. There were from twelve to

fourteen working hours in the twenty-four, and these were often at

night. Little girls of six or eight years of age made ten to twelve

trips a day up steep ladders to the surface, carrying half a hundred

weight of coal in wooden buckets on their backs at each journey. Young

women appeared before the commissioners, when summoned from their

work, dressed merely in a pair of trousers, dripping wet from the

water of the mine, and already weary with the labor of a day scarcely

more than begun. A common form of labor consisted of drawing on hands

and knees over the inequalities of a passageway not more than two feet

or twenty-eight inches high a car or tub filled with three or four

hundred weight of coal, attached by a chain and hook to a leather band

around the waist. The mere recital of the testimony taken precluded

all discussion as to the desirability of reform, and a law was

immediately passed, almost without dissent, which prohibited for the

future all work underground by females or by boys under thirteen years

of age. Inspectors were appointed, and by subsequent acts a whole code

of regulation of mines as regards age, hours, lighting, ventilation,

safety, licensing of engineers, and in other respects has been

created.

[Illustration: Children's Labor in Coal Mines. _Report of Children's

Employment Commission of 1842._]

[Illustration: Women's Labor in Coal Mines. (_Report of Children's

Employment Commission, 1842._)]

In 1846 a bill was passed applying to calico printing works

regulations similar to the factory laws proper. In 1860, 1861, and

1863 similar laws were passed for bleaching and dyeing for lace works,

and for bakeries. In 1864 another so-called factory act was passed

applying to at least six other industries, none of which had any

connection with textile factories. Three years later, in 1867, two

acts for factories and workshops respectively took a large number of

additional industries under their care; and finally, in 1878, the

"Factory and Workshop Consolidation Act" repealed all the former

special laws and substituted a veritable factory code containing a

vast number of provisions for the regulation of industrial

establishments. This law covered more than fifty printed pages of the

statute book. Its principle provisions were as follows: The limit of

prohibited labor was raised from nine to ten years, children in the

terms of the statute being those between ten and fourteen, and "young

persons" those between fourteen and eighteen years of age. For all

such the day's work must begin either at six or seven, and close at

the same hour respectively in the evening, two hours being allowed for

meal-times. All Saturdays and eight other days in the year must be

half-holidays, while the whole of Christmas Day and Good Friday, or

two alternative days, must be allowed as holidays. Children could work

for only one-half of each day or on the whole of alternate days, and

must attend school on the days or parts of days on which they did not

work. There were minute provisions governing sanitary conditions,

safety from machinery and in dangerous occupations, meal-times,

medical certificates of fitness for employment, and reports of

accidents. Finally there were the necessary body of provisions for

administration, enforcement, penalties, and exceptions.

Since 1878 there have been a number of extensions of the principle of

factory legislation, the most important of which are the following. In

1891 and 1895, amending acts were passed bringing laundries and docks

within the provisions of the law, making further rules against

overcrowding and other unsanitary conditions, increasing the age of

prohibited labor to eleven years, and making a beginning of the

regulation of "outworkers" or those engaged by "sweaters." "Sweating"

is manufacturing carried on by contractors or subcontractors on a

small scale, who usually have the work done in their own homes or in

single hired rooms by members of their families, or by poorly paid

employees who by one chance or another are not in a free and

independent relation to them. Many abuses exist in these "sweatshops."

The law so far is scarcely more than tentative, but in these

successive acts provisions have been made by which all manufacturers

or contractors must keep lists of outworkers engaged by them, and

submit these to the factory inspectors for supervision.

In 1892 a "Shop-hours Act" was passed prohibiting the employment of

any person under eighteen years of age more than seventy-four hours in

any week in any retail or wholesale store, shop, eating-house, market,

warehouse, or other similar establishment; and in 1893 the "Railway

Regulation Act" gave power to the Board of Trade to require railway

companies to provide reasonable and satisfactory schedules of hours

for all their employees. In 1894 a bill for a compulsory eight-hour

day for miners was introduced, but was withdrawn before being

submitted to a vote. In 1899 a bill was passed requiring the provision

of a sufficient number of seats for all female assistants in retail

stores. In 1900 a government bill was presented to Parliament carrying

legislation somewhat farther on the lines of the acts of 1891 and

1893, but it did not reach its later stages before the adjournment.

*71. Employers' Liability Acts.*--Closely allied to the problems

involved in the factory laws is the question of the liability of

employers to make compensation for personal injuries suffered by

workmen in their service. With the increasing use of machinery and of

steam power for manufacturing and transportation, and in the general

absence of precaution, accidents to workmen became much more

numerous. Statistics do not exist for earlier periods, but in 1899

serious or petty accidents to the number of 70,760 were reported from

such establishments. By Common Law, in the case of negligence on the

part of the proprietor or servant of an establishment, damages for

accident could be sued for and obtained by a workman, not guilty of

contributory negligence, as by any other person, except in one case.

If the accident was the result of the negligence of a fellow-employee,

no compensation for injuries would be allowed by the courts; the

theory being that in the implied contract between employer and

employee, the latter agreed to accept the risks of the business, at

least so far as these arose from the carelessness of his

fellow-employees.

In the large establishments of modern times, however, vast numbers of

men were fellow-employees in the eyes of the law, and the doctrine of

"common employment," as it was called, prevented the recovery of

damages in so many cases as to attract widespread attention. From 1865

forward this provision of the law was frequently complained of by

leaders of the workingmen and others, and as constantly upheld by the

courts.

In 1876 a committee of the House of Commons on the relations of master

and servant took evidence on this matter and recommended in its report

that the common law be amended in this respect. Accordingly in 1880 an

Employers' Liability Act was passed which abolished the doctrine of

"common employment" as to much of its application, and made it

possible for the employee to obtain compensation for accidental injury

in the great majority of cases.

In 1893 a bill was introduced in Parliament by the ministry of the

time to abolish all deductions from the responsibility of employers,

except that of contributory negligence on the part of workmen, but it

was not passed. In 1897, however, the "Workmen's Compensation Act" was

passed, changing the basis of the law entirely. By this Act it was

provided that in case of accident to a workman causing death or

incapacitating him for a period of more than two weeks, compensation

in proportion to the wages he formerly earned should be paid by the

employer as a matter of course, unless "serious and wilful misconduct"

on the part of the workman could be shown to have existed. The

liability of employers becomes, therefore, a matter of insurance of

workmen against accidents arising out of their employment, imposed by

the law upon employers. It is no longer damages for negligence, but a

form of compulsory insurance. In other words, since 1897 a legal, if

only an implied part of the contract between employer and employee in

all forms of modern industry in which accidents are likely to occur is

that the employer insures the employee against the dangers of his

work.

*72. Preservation of Remaining Open Lands.*--Turning from the field of

manufacturing labor to that of agriculture and landholding it will be

found that there has been some legislation for the protection of the

agricultural laborer analogous to the factory laws. The Royal

Commission of 1840-1844 on trades then unprotected by law included a

report on the condition of rural child labor, but no law followed

until 1873, when the "Agricultural Children's Act" was passed, but

proved to be ineffective. The evils of "agricultural gangs," which

were bodies of poor laborers, mostly children, engaged by a contractor

and taken from place to place to be hired out to farmers, were

reported on by a commission in 1862, and partly overcome by the

"Agricultural Gangs Act" of 1867. There is, however, but little

systematic government oversight of the farm-laboring class.

Government regulation in the field of landholding has taken a somewhat

different form. The movement of enclosing which had been in progress

from the middle of the eighteenth century was brought to an end, and a

reversal of tendency took place, by which the use and occupation of

the land was more controlled by the government in the interest of the

masses of the rural population. By the middle of the century the

process of enclosing was practically complete. There had been some

3954 private enclosure acts passed, and under their provisions or

those of the Enclosure Commissioners more than seven million acres had

been changed from mediæval to modern condition. But now a reaction set

in. Along with the open field farming lands it was perceived that open

commons, village greens, gentlemen's parks, and the old national

forest lands were being enclosed, and frequently for building or

railroad, not for agricultural uses, to the serious detriment of the

health and of the enjoyment of the people, and to the destruction of

the beauty of the country. The dread of interference by the government

with matters that might be left to private settlement was also passing

away. In 1865 the House of Commons appointed a commission to

investigate the question of open spaces near the city of London, and

the next year on their recommendation passed a law by which the

Enclosure Commissioners were empowered to make regulations for the use

of all commons within fifteen miles of London as public parks, except

so far as the legal rights of the lords of the manors in which the

commons lay should prevent. A contest had already arisen between many

of these lords of manors having the control of open commons, whose

interest it was to enclose and sell them, and other persons having

vague rights of pasturage and other use of them, whose interest it

was to preserve them as open spaces. To aid the latter in their legal

resistance to proposed enclosures, the "Commons Preservation Society"

was formed in 1865. As a result a number of the contests were decided

in the year 1866 in favor of those who opposed enclosures.

The first case to attract attention was that of Wimbledon Common, just

west of London. Earl Spencer, the lord of the manor of Wimbledon, had

offered to give up his rights on the common to the inhabitants of the

vicinity in return for a nominal rent and certain privileges; and had

proposed that a third of the common should be sold, and the money

obtained for it used to fence, drain, beautify, and keep up the

remainder. The neighboring inhabitants, however, preferred the

spacious common as it stood, and when a bill to carry out Lord

Spencer's proposal had been introduced into Parliament, they contended

that they had legal rights on the common which he could not disregard,

and that they objected to its enclosure. The parliamentary committee

practically decided in their favor, and the proposition was dropped.

An important decision in a similar case was made by the courts in

1870. Berkhamstead Common, an open stretch some three miles long and

half a mile wide, lying near the town of Berkhamstead, twenty-five

miles north of London, had been used for pasturing animals, cutting

turf, digging gravel, gathering furze, and as a place of general

recreation and enjoyment by the people of the two manors in which it

lay, from time immemorial. In 1866 Lord Brownlow, the lord of these

two manors, began making enclosures upon it, erecting two iron fences

across it so as to enclose 434 acres and to separate the remainder

into two entirely distinct parts. The legal advisers of Lord Brownlow

declared that the inhabitants had no rights which would prevent him

from enclosing parts of the common, although to satisfy them he

offered to give to them the entire control over one part of it. The

Commons Preservation Society, however, advised the inhabitants

differently, and encouraged them to make a legal contest. One of their

number, Augustus Smith, a wealthy and obstinate man, a member of

Parliament, and a possessor of rights on the common both as a

freeholder and a copyholder, was induced to take action in his own

name and as a representative of other claimants of common rights. He

engaged in London a force of one hundred and twenty laborers, sent

them down at night by train, and before morning had broken down Lord

Brownlow's two miles of iron fences, on which he had spent some £5000,

and piled their sections neatly up on another part of the common. Two

lawsuits followed: one by Lord Brownlow against Mr. Smith for

trespass, the other a cross suit in the Chancery Court by Mr. Smith to

ascertain the commoner's rights, and prevent the enclosure of the

common. After a long trial the decision was given in Mr. Smith's

favor, and not only was Berkhamstead Common thus preserved as an open

space, but a precedent set for the future decision of other similar

cases. Within the years between 1866 and 1874 dispute after dispute

analogous to this arose, and decision after decision was given

declaring the illegality of enclosures by a lord of a manor where

there were claims of commoners which they still asserted and valued

and which could be used as an obstacle to enclosure. Hampstead Heath,

Ashdown Forest, Malvern Hills, Plumstead, Tooting, Wandsworth,

Coulston, Dartford, and a great many other commons, village greens,

roadside wastes, and other open spaces were saved from enclosure, and

some places were partly opened up again, as a result either of

lawsuits, of parliamentary action, or of voluntary agreements and

purchase.

Perhaps the most conspicuous instance was that of Epping Forest. This

common consisted of an open tract about thirteen miles long and one

mile wide, containing in 1870 about three thousand acres of open

common land. Enclosure was being actively carried on by some nineteen

lords of manors, and some three thousand acres had been enclosed by

rather high-handed means within the preceding twenty years. Among the

various landowners who claimed rights of common upon a part of the

Forest was, however, the City of London, and in 1871 this body began

suit against the various lords of manors under the claim that it

possessed pasture rights, not only in the manor of Ilford, in which

its property of two hundred acres was situated, but, since the

district was a royal forest, over the whole of it. The City asked that

the lords of manors should be prevented from enclosing any more of it,

and required to throw open again what they had enclosed during the

last twenty years. After a long and expensive legal battle and a

concurrent investigation by a committee of Parliament, both extending

over three years, a decision was given in favor of the City of London

and other commoners, and the lords of manors were forced to give back

about three thousand acres. The whole was made permanently into a

public park. The old forest rights of the crown proved to be favorable

to the commoners, and thus obtained at least one tardy justification

to set against their long and dark record in the past.

In 1871, in one of the cases which had been appealed, the Lord

Chancellor laid down a principle indicating a reaction in the judicial

attitude on the subject, when he declared that no enclosure should be

made except when there was a manifest advantage in it; as contrasted

with the policy of enclosing unless there was some strong reason

against it, as had formerly been approved. In 1876 Parliament passed

a law amending the acts of 1801 and 1845, and directing the Enclosure

Commissioners to reverse their rule of action in the same direction.

That is to say, they were not to approve any enclosure unless it could

be shown to be to the manifest advantage of the neighborhood, as well

as to the interest of the parties directly concerned. Finally, in

1893, by the Commons Law Amendment Act, it was required that every

proposed enclosure of any kind should first be advertised and

opportunity given for objection, then submitted to the Board of

Agriculture for its approval, and this approval should only be given

when such an enclosure was for the general benefit of the public. No

desire of a lord of a manor to enclose ground for his private park or

game preserve, or to use it for building ground, would now be allowed

to succeed. The interest of the community at large has been placed

above the private advantage and even liberty of action of landholders.

The authorities do not merely see that justice is done between lord

and commoners on the manor, but that both alike shall be restrained

from doing what is not to the public advantage. Indeed, Parliament

went one step further, and by an order passed in 1893 set a precedent

for taking a common entirely out of the hands of the lord of the

manor, and putting it in the hands of a board to keep it for public

uses. Thus not only had the enclosing movement diminished for lack of

open farming land to enclose, but public opinion and law between 1864

and 1893 interposed to preserve such remaining open land as had not

been already divided. Whatever land remained that was not in

individual ownership and occupancy was to be retained under control

for the community at large.

*73. Allotments.*--But this change of attitude was not merely negative.

There were many instances of government interposition for the

encouragement of agriculture and for the modification of the relations

between landlord and tenant. In 1875, 1882, and 1900 the "Agricultural

Holdings Acts" were passed, by which, when improvements are made by

the tenant during the period in which he holds the land, compensation

must be given by the landlord to the tenant when the latter retires.

No agreement between the landlord and tenant by which the latter gives

up this right is valid. This policy of controlling the conditions of

landholding with the object of enforcing justice to the tenant has

been carried to very great lengths in the Irish Land Bills and the

Scotch Crofters' Acts, but the conditions that called for such

legislation in those countries have not existed in England itself.

There has been, however, much effort in England to bring at least some

land again into the use of the masses of the rural population. In

1819, as part of the administration of the poor law, Parliament passed

an act facilitating the leasing out by the authorities of common land

belonging to the parishes to the poor, in small "allotments," as they

were called, by the cultivation of which they might partially support

themselves. Allotments are small pieces of land, usually from an

eighth of an acre to an acre in size, rented out for cultivation to

poor or working-class families. In 1831 parish authorities were

empowered to buy or enclose land up to as much as five acres for this

purpose. Subsequently the formation of allotments began to be

advocated, not only as part of the system of supporting paupers, but

for its own sake, in order that rural laborers might have some land in

their own occupation to work on during their spare times, as their

forefathers had during earlier ages. To encourage this plan of giving

the mass of the people again an interest in the land the "Allotments

and Small Holdings Association" was formed in 1885. Laws which were

passed in 1882 and 1887 made it the duty of the authorities of

parishes, when there seemed to be a demand for allotments, to provide

all the land that was needed for the purpose, giving them, if needed,

and under certain restrictions, the right of compulsory purchase of

any particular piece of land which they should feel to be desirable.

This was to be divided up and rented out in allotments from one

quarter of an acre to an acre in size. By laws passed in 1890 and 1894

this plan of making it the bounden duty of the local government to

provide sufficient allotments for the demand, and giving them power to

purchase land even without the consent of its owners, was carried

still further and put in the hands of the parish council. The growth

in numbers of such allotments was very rapid and has not yet ceased.

The approximate numbers at several periods are as follows:--

1873 246,398

1888 357,795

1890 455,005

1895 579,133

In addition to those formed and granted out by the public local

authorities, many large landowners, railroad companies, and others

have made allotments to their tenants or employees. Large tracts of

land subdivided into such small patches are now a common sight in

England, simulating in appearance the old open fields of the Middle

Ages and early modern times.

*74. Small Holdings.*--Closely connected with the extension of

allotments is the movement for the creation of "small holdings," or

the reintroduction of small farming. One form of this is that by which

the local authorities in 1892 were empowered to buy land for the

purpose of renting it out in small holdings of not more than fifteen

acres each to persons who would themselves cultivate it.

A still further and much more important development in the same

direction is the effort to introduce "peasant proprietorship," or the

ownership of small amounts of farming land by persons who would

otherwise necessarily be mere laborers on other men's land. There has

been an old dispute as to the relative advantages of a system of large

farms, rented by men who have some considerable capital, knowledge,

and enterprise, as in England; and of a system of small farms, owned

and worked by men who are mere peasants, as in France. The older

economists generally advocated the former system as better in itself,

and also pointed out that a policy of withdrawal by government from

any regulation was tending to make it universal. Others have been more

impressed with the good effects of the ownership of land on the mental

and moral character of the population, and with the desirability of

the existence of a series of steps by which a thrifty and ambitious

workingman could rise to a higher position, even in the country. There

has, therefore, since the middle of the century, been a widespread

agitation in favor of the creation of smaller farms, of giving

assistance in their purchase, and of thus introducing a more mixed

system of rural land occupancy, and bringing back something of the

earlier English yeoman farming.

This movement obtained recognition by Parliament in the Small Holdings

Act of 1892, already referred to. This law made it the duty of each

county council, when there seemed to be any sufficient demand for

small farms from one to fifty acres in size, to acquire in any way

possible, though not by compulsory purchase, suitable land, to adapt

it for farming purposes by fencing, making roads, and, if necessary,

erecting suitable buildings; and then to dispose of it by sale, or, as

a matter of exception, as before stated, on lease, to such parties as

will themselves cultivate it. The terms of sale were to be

advantageous to the purchaser. He must pay at least as much as a fifth

of the price down, but one quarter of it might be left on perpetual

ground-rent, and the remainder, slightly more than one-half, might be

repaid in half-yearly instalments during any period less than fifty

years. The county council was also given power to loan money to

tenants of small holdings to buy from their landlords, where they

could arrange terms of purchase but had not the necessary means.

Through the intervention of government, therefore, the strict division

of those connected with the land into landlords, tenant farmers, and

farm laborers has been to a considerable extent altered, and it is

generally possible for a laborer to obtain a small piece of land as an

allotment, or, if more ambitious and able, a small farm, on

comparatively easy terms. In landholding and agriculture, as in

manufacturing and trade, government has thus stepped in to prevent

what would have been the effect of mere free competition, and to bring

about a distribution and use of the land which have seemed more

desirable.

*75. Government Sanitary Control.*--In the field of buying and selling

the hand of government has been most felt in provisions for the health

of the consumer of various articles. Laws against adulteration have

been passed, and a code of supervision, registry, and enforcement

constructed. Similarly in broader sanitary lines, by the "Housing of

the Working Classes Act" of 1890, when it is brought to the attention

of the local authorities that any street or district is in such a

condition that its houses or alleys are unfit for human habitation,

or that the narrowness, want of light or air, or bad drainage makes

the district dangerous to the health of the inhabitants or their

neighbors, and that these conditions cannot be readily remedied except

by an entire rearrangement of the district, then it becomes the duty

of the local authorities to take the matter in hand. They are bound to

draw up and, on approval by the proper superior authorities, to carry

out a plan for widening the streets and approaches to them, providing

proper sanitary arrangements, tearing down the old houses, and

building new ones in sufficient number and suitable character to

provide dwelling accommodation for as many persons of the working

class as were displaced by the changes. Private rights or claims are

not allowed to stand in the way of any such public action in favor of

the general health and well-being, as the local authorities are

clothed by the law with the right of purchase of the land and

buildings of the locality at a valuation, even against the wishes of

the owners, though they must obtain parliamentary confirmation of such

a compulsory purchase. Several acts have been passed to provide for

the public acquisition or building of workingmen's dwellings. In 1899

the "Small Dwellings Acquisition Act" gave power to any local

authority to loan four-fifths of the cost of purchase of a small

house, to be repaid by the borrower by instalments within thirty

years.

Laws for the stamping out of cattle disease have been passed on the

same principle. In 1878, 1886, 1890, 1893, and 1896 successive acts

were passed which have given to the Board of Agriculture the right to

cause the slaughter of any cattle or swine which have become infected

or been subjected to contagious diseases; Parliament has also set

apart a sufficient sum of money and appointed a large corps of

inspectors to carry out the law. Official analysts of fertilizers and

food-stuffs for cattle have also since 1893 been regularly appointed

by the government in each county. Adulteration has been taken under

control by the "Sale of Food and Drugs Act" of 1875, with its later

amendments and extensions, especially that of 1899.

*76. Industries Carried on by Government.*--In addition to the

regulation in these various respects of industries carried on by

private persons, and intervention for the protection of the public

health, the government has extended its functions very considerably by

taking up certain new duties or services, which it carries out itself

instead of leaving to private hands.

The post-office is such an old and well-established branch of the

government's activity as not in itself to be included among newly

adopted functions, but its administration has been extended since the

middle of the century over at least four new fields of duty: the

telegraph, the telephone, the parcels post, and the post-office

savings-bank.