more and more loudly expressed. Along with an increasing belief in the
extension of the state's administrative capacities has gone an
increasing disinclination to leave men's moral and cultural activities
to the political organization. The ideal of the _Kulturstaat_ is now
sufficiently discredited. Men are coming more and more to recognize the
part played in life by non-political organizations and to insist on the
importance of preserving the independence and freedom from state control
of such associations as churches. The loyalty of individuals to their
associations, churches or trade unions, has been conflicting with their
loyalty to the state, and men are not prepared to admit that in all such
cases of conflict loyalty to the state ought to be paramount.
Curiously enough, the central doctrine of the later idealistic school,
the personality of the state, lent a force to the criticism of the
doctrine of state absolutism. If the state can be described as a person,
may not also a church and a trade union? We have begun to learn from
Gierke, interpreted and reinforced to us by Maitland, that what is sauce
for the state goose is also sauce for the corporation gander, and that
associations within the state may claim from the state a greater
independence and a recognition of their intrinsic worth because they, as
it, embody in some sense a real will over and above the wills of their
members. This doctrine of corporate personality is of great interest and
complexity, and has not yet been satisfactorily worked out. But I shall
not discuss it now because it will not help us far towards a solution of
the problem of what are the proper relations between associations and
the state, be they personalities or not.
Recent writers have mainly attempted to solve the problem by the
principle of differentiation of function. This will certainly help us in
considering the relation of church and state. For we can say that the
task of the political organization is to maintain the conditions of the
good life, leaving the work of developing the meaning of the good life,
the fostering and inculcation of ideals, to voluntary associations. The
state will then maintain a certain minimum of moral behaviour, while the
more delicate and freer work of inspiration is left to individuals and
voluntary associations. This will not always provide a clean-cut and
sufficient differentiation. The state must make up its own mind what is
essential to the maintenance of the good life, the voluntary
associations may hold that what the state ordains is flatly evil, as the
state may hold that what a voluntary association teaches is subversive
of all that makes a common ordered life possible, and both must be true
to the facts as they see them. When such conflict arises, as it has
arisen lately, if the only answer we can give at present is the old
answer given by Dr. Johnson, 'The state had a right to martyr the Early
Christians, and they had a right to be martyred,' yet at least we are
farther on if each side honestly recognizes the importance of the work
that the other has to do.
When we come to the problem raised by the present position and claims of
Trade Unions, differentiation of functions is less satisfactory. Let us
first look at the problem as it confronts us to-day. There was a time
when the state was doubtful whether it should allow trade unions to
exist. The Political Economy prevalent in the earlier part of the
nineteenth century taught that trade unions were either unnecessary or
useless--unnecessary in so far as economic relations, if unhindered by
regulations from the state or from combinations, were regarded by
economic optimism as themselves producing satisfactory social
conditions; useless where Political Economy had substituted for optimism
a belief in 'iron laws' whose results no combination or government
regulation could affect. We now see that economic relations, just
because they are possible between men who have no common purpose, need
regulation inspired by a common purpose, and can be affected by such
regulation. The growth of governmental interference with industry and of
trade unionism are part of the same movement to control the working of
economic relations with a view to maintaining the conditions of the good
life. Trade unions have grown and are still steadily growing in size and
importance. For a large portion of the nation loyalty to a trade union
has become the most obvious form of collective loyalty or general will.
This has been accompanied by an inevitable decrease in what we may call
territorial loyalty. The result of the increase in means of
communication and the growth of large towns has been that men's common
interests as members of the same trade or as employees in the same
workshop are coming to mean more and to constitute a greater common bond
between men than their common interests as dwellers in the same
locality. The trade union has often a more live and real general will
than the Parliamentary constituency. Men's aspirations and ideals for
their common life are being expressed more truly through trade union
organizations than through Parliament. The growth in the prestige of
organized labour is therefore coincident with a decay in the prestige of
Parliament. Parliament, however, based on a local sub-division of the
nation, is at present the only political organization of the nation.
Trade union organization, as a political organization, has no
constitutional authority, and all the general will which it represents
can find no regular national expression. The result is that it either
uses the territorial organization by getting men who really represent
their Trade Union elected as members for Parliamentary local
constituencies, to the detriment of both the territorial and the trade
union organization, or acts as an _imperium in imperio_ by making
demands on and issuing ultimata to Parliament. We seem to be approaching
a crisis where the trade unions are asking whether they will allow the
state to exist.
This is obviously an unsatisfactory state of affairs. What is the cure
for it? Differentiation of functions, as I have said, will not help us
here. Some writers have maintained that vocational organization should
concern itself with industrial or economic matters, the state, as we
know it, with political matters. But can we possibly distinguish between
industrial and political matters? If the aim of politics is to regulate
men's actions in the light of men's common interests, the action of a
trade union is in its essence political. Its differentiation from
government is that it is concerned with the common interests of a few
rather than the common interests of all. The difference between a trade
union and a parliamentary constituency is that the sub-division of the
general common interest which each represents rests on a different basis
of division. The whole community might as well be organized by vocations
as it now is by localities. There would seem to be certain advantages in
both principles of differentiation, and one obvious practical solution
of our present difficulties is that the supreme organ of government
should in its two chambers represent the nation as organized on both
principles, vocational and territorial.
We seem to have come now to the discussion of political machinery, but,
as in our discussion of the League of Nations, we can see that our
attitude to such questions of machinery will vary as we regard the
force-bearing organization with its national and territorial basis as
the primary fact in the community, to be distinguished sharply from all
other organizations, or regard the possession of organized force as the
expression of men's settled and permanent will to maintain their common
interests and safeguard the conditions of the good life. If we
consistently follow out Green's dictum that will, not force, is the
basis of the state, we shall be anxious that the political organization
to which we render obedience shall follow the actual ramifications of
common interests and of men's willingness to co-operate, and shall
recognize that the national state with its territorial basis represents
only one form of such ramification.
The view that political action is not confined to constitutional and
governmental channels will not imply that we must give up the
distinction between society and the state. For, on the one hand, trade
unions have only arisen because of the special need for a _common_
safeguarding of common interests produced by economic relations.
Economic relations need to be controlled by, but cannot be superseded
by, politics. On the other hand, as we have seen, the work of such
associations as churches is different in kind from the work done by
political organizations. The inculcation and development of moral ideals
and the safeguarding of the conditions of the good life are
complementary functions. Each is impossible without the other. But that
does not make them identical, however closely interfused they may be.
If, then, we accept the political theory of idealism as a theory of
society, we must recognize in social life the distinction between
ethical, economic, and political relations, and the task before
Political Theory is to define the relations between politics and
economic activities on the one side and ethical activities on the other,
and that in a society which is not confined within the bounds of a
single nation state. The intricate ramifications of vast economic
undertakings and the common aspirations and ideals of humanity are but
signs of a solidarity of mankind that political philosophy must
recognize in all the problems it has to face.
FOR REFERENCE
Green, _Principles of Political Obligation_.
Bosanquet, _Philosophical Theory of the State_.
Barker, _Political Thought in England from Spencer to to-day_.
Hobhouse, _The Metaphysical Theory of the State_.
Figgis, _Churches in the Modern State_.
Cole, _Labour in the Commonwealth_.
Cole, _Self Government in Industry_.
Delisle Burns, _The Morality of Nations_.
VII
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT[20]
C.R. FAY
I. THE INDUSTRIAL SCENE, 1842
1. Let us hover in fancy over the industrial scene in 1842, and
photograph a stage of the economic conflict which the people of England
were waging then with the forces which held them in thrall.
Our photograph shows us great white lines, continuous or destined to
become continuous; they are numerous in Durham and Lancashire, and the
newest lead up to and away from London. These white lines are the new
railroads of England, and the myriad ant-heaps along them are the
navvies. In the year 1848 their numbers had risen to 188,000.[21]
What is a navvy and how does he live? The navvy is an inland navigator
who used to dig dykes and canals and now constructs railroads. In the
forties the navvies are getting 5_s._ a day, and for tunnelling and
blasting even more, but they are a rowdy crowd, and many of them are
Irish. Said the Sheriff substitute of Renfrewshire in 1827: 'If an
extensive drain, or canal, or road were to make that could be done by
piecework, I should not feel in the least surprised to find that of 100
men employed at it, 90 were Irish.'[22] In 1842 they are building
railroads, and when they and the Highlanders are on the same job, it is
necessary to segregate them in order to avoid a breach of the peace. The
Irish sleep in huts and get higher pay than the natives who are lodged
in the neighbouring cottages. The English navvy too keeps out the
Irishman if he can. On a track in Northamptonshire, 'There is only one
Irishman on the work, for they would not allow any other Irishman.'[23]
In the South of England wages are lower and the navvies are less expert.
In South Devon 'very few North countrymen; they are men who have worked
down the line of the Great Western; that have followed it from one
portion to another'.[24] The riff-raff from the villages cannot work
stroke for stroke with the navvy. 'In tilting the waggons they could,
but in the barrow runs it requires practice and experience.'[25]
The high wages of the navvy are offset by the disadvantages of his
employment. He is lucky if he gets the whole of his earnings in cash. In
the Trent Valley they are paid once a month, 'but every fortnight they
receive what is called "sub" that is subsistence money, and between the
times of subsistence money and times of the monthly payment, they may
have tickets by applying to the time-keeper, or whoever is the person to
give them out, for goods; and those tickets are directed to a certain
person; they cannot go to any other shop.'[26]
The huts in which they live are little better than pigsties, and
especially bad for regular navvies, who take their families about with
them. In South Devon, 'man, woman, and child all sleep exposed to one
another.'[27] On a section of the London and Birmingham Railway fever
and small-pox broke out. 'I have seen', says an eye-witness, 'the men
walking about with the small-pox upon them as thick as possible and no
hospitals to go to.'[28] The country people, the witness continues, make
money by letting rooms double. When one lot came out, another lot went
in.
Such is the navvy's life at work and at rest.
2. If we can suppose that our camera is capable of distinguishing
centres of industrial activity, then our picture will give us 'vital'
patches, which stand out against a background of deadness. This deadness
is rural England.
What is the condition of the rural counties of Wessex? 'Everywhere the
cottages are old, and frequently in a state of decay.' 'Ignorance of the
commonest things, needle-work, cooking, and other matters of domestic
economy, is ... nearly universally prevalent.'[29] To make both ends
meet the wife has abandoned her now useless spinning-wheel and hired
herself out to hoe turnips or pick stones.
On the little farms inside the factory districts of Lancashire and
Yorkshire, on which the country hand-loom weavers eke out a miserable
livelihood by cultivating patches of grass land, there is distress more
acute than ever was known in a Dorset village. But in Northumberland, by
exception, there is a decent country life. 'What I saw of the northern
peasantry impressed me very strongly in their favour; they are very
intelligent, sober, and courteous in their manners.... The education in
Northumberland is very good; the people are intelligent and cute, alive
to the advantages of knowledge, and eager to acquire it; it is a rare
thing to find a grown-up labourer who cannot read and write and who is
not capable of keeping his own accounts.'[30] The same sort of thing was
said of Northumberland in 1869: 'If all England had been like
Northumberland, this commission ought never to have been issued.' The
Commissioner found that though the labourers worked harder and longer
than in the South they were not working against starvation. They were
enjoying a rough plenty, which included fresh milk. The rest of the
family earned sufficient to leave the married woman in her home and no
children under twelve were employed in field labour.[31]
Here then in Northumberland there is a decent country life, but
elsewhere there is an atmosphere of deadness; and it is this deadness of
the countryside which explains the horror that new comers to industrial
regions frequently expressed at the prospect of a forcible return to the
parish of their origin.
'I was told,' says a visitor to Lancashire in 1842, 'that there had been
several instances of death by sheer starvation. On asking why
application had not been made to the commissioner of the parish for
relief, I was informed that they were persons from agricultural
districts who, having committed an act of vagrancy, would be sent to
their parishes, and that they had rather endure anything in the hope of
some manufacturing revival, than return to the condition of farm
labourers from which they had emerged. This was a fact perfectly new to
me, and at the first blush, truly incredible, but I asked the neighbours
in two of the instances quoted ... and they not only confirmed the
story, but seemed to consider any appearance of scepticism a mark of
prejudice or ignorance.'[32]
3. Though there is little peasant life in England, there is life of a
feverish desperate order for many who live in country places. These
people are not farm workers nor yet are they craftsmen who supply the
industrial needs of the village. They are feeders to the towns, engaged
in what is misnamed 'domestic industry'. The life they lead is a sordid
replica of an all too sordid original.
Cobbett in a tirade against the Lords of the Loom[33] idealized the
old-time union of agriculture and manufacture. The men should work in
the fields, while the women and children stayed at home at their
spinning wheels, making homespun for the family garments. But the
picture was a vanishing one even in his day. Domestic industry does not
mean this. The rural distress revealed in the Hand-loom Weavers
Commission is the distress of specialized hand-workers, male and female,
who are clinging desperately to the worst-paid branch of a dying trade.
The worsted industry of East Anglia is perishing, defeated by the
resources of Yorkshire, of which the power-loom is only one. The cloth
trade in the Valley of Stroud (Gloucester) is a shadow of its former
self. It has lost the power of recovering from a depression. The next
period of slackness that comes along may bankrupt the business and rob a
village of specialized hand-workers of their main employment.
In Devonshire, the serge trade, which used to give employment to looms
in almost every town and village, has become so unremunerative that it
has passed into the hands of the wives and daughters of mechanics and
agricultural labourers. In Oxfordshire in 1834, we are told by the Poor
Law Commissions of that year, glove and lace making were vanishing
occupations. In the neighbourhood of Banbury 'some make lace and gloves
in the villages. Formerly spinning was the work for women in the
villages, now there is scarcely any done.'[34]
Since 1834 the process of disintegration had proceeded apace.
We must not, however, convey the impression that domestic industry in
1842 had all but vanished from the countryside. In its ancient
strongholds it still endures, but it is in an unhealthy condition, and
the towns are sucking its life-blood away.
To illustrate this, let us describe the course of a boom in domestic
industry and study how the trade boom of 1833-7 reached through to the
country silk weavers in Essex and other places all around London. The
terms which we usually apply to the cultivation of land are apposite.
The town workers represent the intensive margin of cultivation, the
country workers the extensive margin. First of all the Spitalfield
weavers, who have been short of work, have more work given to them. The
weavers' wives also get work, and their boys and girls who never were on
a loom before are now put to the trade. Fresh hands are introduced. From
the Metropolis the demand for labour pushes outwards over the country.
Recourse is had to 'inferior soils'. Old weavers in the villages get
work, together with their wives and families. Even farm labourers are
impressed. Blemishes for which at other times deductions would be
claimed are now over-looked. Carts are sent round to the villages and
hamlets with work for the weavers, so that time may not be lost in going
to the warehouses to take back or carry home work. Then comes the ebb:
'the immediate effect is that all the less skilful workmen, the
dissolute and disorderly, are denied work; the third and fourth looms,
those worked by the sons and daughters of the weavers, are all thrown
out of use'. The intensiveness of cultivation has been reduced in the
towns, the least remunerative no longer pays.
The ebb of the tide, which reduces the quantity of employment in the
towns, leaves the country districts high and dry. 'At such times the
country towns and villages to which work is liberally sent, when there
is a demand for goods, suffer still more. A staff or skeleton only is
kept in pay, and that chiefly with a view to operations when a demand
returns.'[35] A skeleton--well said.
Occasional cultivation is bad for land, and worse for human beings. The
ribbon-weaving villages north of Coventry are a disorderly eruption from
the town. Coventry itself has the better-paid 'engine weaving'; the
rural districts have the 'single hand trade'. The country workers, say
the Commissioners, 'retain most of their original barbarism with an
accession of vice'. The yokels who went out to the French wars innocent
boys returned confirmed rogues. Bastardy is greater than ever, despite
the new Poor Law. 'It may surprise the denouncers of the factory system
to find all the vices and miseries which they attribute to it,
flourishing so rankly in the midst of a population not only without the
walls of a factory, but also beyond the contamination of a large
town.'[36] It may have surprised such people, but it does not surprise
us who are surveying the industrial scene and beginning to apprehend the
rottenness of that worm-eaten structure which under the misnomer of
domestic industry marks the half-way house to full capitalism.
4. Let us now journey to the factory districts of Lancashire and the
West Riding of Yorkshire where town lies close upon town, and the tall
chimneys envelop in smoke the cottages in which hand-loom weavers work
and the children of hand-loom weavers sleep. Let us suppose that we have
found our position by Leeds. We should like to follow the track of the
new railroads, for we have in our pocket a small green book:
'Bradshaw's Railway Time Tables and Assistant to
Railway Travelling'.
'10th Mo. 19th, 1839. Price Sixpence.'
Bradshaw tells us that we can get from Littleborough to Manchester in 11
hours--via Rochdale, Heywood, and Millshill--but it is not clear how we
are to get to Littleborough. So we follow an alternative route, the
canal. It is a fashionable method of transit for mineral traffic and
paupers. Mr. Muggeridge, the emigration agent, tells us how he
transported the southern paupers in 1836. 'The journey from London to
Manchester was made by boat or waggon, the agents assisting the
emigrants on their journey.'[37] When we got up our geography for the
tour out of Thomas Dugdale's 'England and Wales' this is what we read at
every turn: 'Keighley: in the deep valley of the Aire, its prosperity
had been much increased by the Leeds and Liverpool Canal which passes
within two miles.' 'Skipton: in a rough mountainous district. The trade
has been greatly facilitated by the proximity of the town to the Leeds
and Liverpool Canal.' So the Leeds and Liverpool canal shall be our
guide.
We leave Bradford, Halifax, and the worsted districts to the left of us,
and passing by Shipley, approach the cotton district near the Lancashire
border. 'The township of Shipley is the western-most locality of the
Leeds clothing districts; it runs like a tongue into the worsted
district. In like manner the worsted district blends with the cotton
district at Steeton, Silsden, and Addingham.' We are passing, the
Commissioner tells us, from high wages to low. 'The cloth weavers of
Shipley work for wages little, if any, higher than those of the worsted
weavers; while the worsted weavers north-west of Keighley are reduced
down to the cotton standard.'[38]
At Keighley we bend sharply south and soon reach Colne in Lancashire.
Dr. Cook Taylor describes the conditions there in the early part of
1842:
'I visited eighty-eight dwellings, selected at hazard. They were
destitute of furniture save old boxes for tables or stalls, or
even large stones for chairs; the beds are composed of straw and
shavings. The food was oatmeal and water for breakfast, flour and
water, with a little skimmed milk for dinner, oatmeal and water
again for a second supply.' He actually saw children in the
markets grubbing for the rubbish of roots. And yet, 'all the
places and persons I visited were scrupulously clean. Children
were in rags, but they were not in filth. In no single instance
was I asked for relief.... I never before saw poverty which
inspired respect, and misery which demanded involuntary homage.'