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or making goods of defective quality and size. This is chiefly noticeable as showing that the old industrial system was beginning to work badly; even before the introduction of machinery gave it its death-blow, the statutes which had reference to keeping up the quality of goods were becoming inoperative.

But they let us see what the system had been, or at least what was the design of the system, and therefore what were the economic principles that underlay it. There was, however, another side of its working which is most interesting and important. Not only was there provision for the quality of goods, and for the skill of those who wrought at any particular craft, but an earnest attempt was made to secure that those who had acquired skill to do their work, should be paid for their work at such a rate, that they should be able to live by their work. This was the ground of the whole scheme in accordance with which the authorities met to assess the rate of wages in accordance with the plenty or scarcity of the times. To us it seems purely utopian and wholly impracticable, but we must remember that it was maintained with fair success for more than two centuries, and indeed until the conditions of industry which it assumed and in accordance with which it was framed were overthrown. But on the other hand we need not overestimate its advantages: for those who found a footing in the industrial system it answered on the whole, but that system did not expand so as to afford scope for all those who desired employment. There was a considerable population of tramps and vagrants who were not absorbed in the industry of the country, and these had but little chance of rising out of their miserable lot, while the laws of settlement were a serious grievance to many industrious and skilful men.

It is unnecessary to trace the misery which followed the gradual break-down of this system in its various parts,--the overstocking with apprentices in some trades, the miserable condition of the apprentices themselves, the horrible oppressions in many crafts; not that we would for a moment underrate them, but because we regard them as the incidents of a necessary transition, though not perhaps as necessary incidents of that transition. Parliament tried hard to break the severity of the change;1 the guardians did their utmost to relieve the poor by allowances when they were no longer able to live on their wages. This endeavour was not successful and cannot have been wise, but it serves to show that our forefathers were neither wholly blind nor utterly callous to the misery around them. The introduction of machinery was an economic gain which they did not venture to prohibit, and which they would have done most foolishly to prevent: but when it was allowed at all, it necessarily overthrew the old industrial system. Not the skill of the labourer, but the enterprise and power of organisation of the capitalist had now come to be the prime condition of industrial success: the laws which provided for the training of the craftsman were useless; those which limited the employer in regard to the kind of labour he employed seemed to hamper him unnecessarily and thus the whole code for apprentices and for the regulation of crafts was inconsistent with the new shape which our industrial life had assumed.

The revolution of industrial conditions too rendered the satisfactory assessment of wages an impossibility. This has been already shown with regard to rural wages :

1 40 Geo. III. c. 90. 43 Geo. III. c. 151 for the cotton trade. For the woollen trade 35 Geo. III. c. 124.

the old rate of payment for agricultural labour was inadequate, because the agricultural labourer was now solely dependent on his earnings from this source: and in the new manufacturing trades a similar difficulty was felt. Machinery had destroyed the value of the weaver's skill; his work was no better done than that of a mere child, and he could not claim a different rate of pay for doing a very similar task. And thus the effort to regulate the rate of return which a skilled labourer should procure for the exercise of his craft could be no longer maintained.1

This then was the result of our English experience at the beginning of the present century. We had discarded all the economic principles to which the royalists and nationalists—as we may call them-had pinned their faith. We had learned that it was unnecessary either in connexion with the home market or with foreign trade to direct the course of capital, and that it was impossible to continue to regulate the quality of goods, the rates of pay, or the conditions of labour, without impairing the rapidity of industrial development.

1 Since this section was written Mr. Thorold Rogers has published in his Six Centuries of Work and Wages a very different interpretation of these labour laws. "From 1563 to 1824 a conspiracy, concocted by the law and carried out by parties interested in its success, was entered into to cheat the English workman of his wages" (ii. 398). The depressed condition of labour during the end of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century can be amply accounted for by Mr. Tooke's maxim as to the effect of a rise of prices on wages, while the misery during the industrial revolution can be as easily explained, without the gratuitous supposition that parliament deliberately endeavoured to oppress wage-earners. The preambles of the Acts and the speeches in parliament can only be reconciled with this supposition by assuming that the leading statesmen for generations were barefaced hypocrites whom no one exposed; while it is incompatible with testimony as to liberal assessment of wages given by Arthur Young and with the passing of some of the measures noted in § 28 below.

CHAPTER IV.

ECONOMIC PRINCIPLES-STRICTLY SO CALLED.

1. Laisser faire.

24. In the last paragraphs we have seen how the course of events had refuted the economic principles which had been in vogue for about two centuries: the revolt of the colonies and the growth of the factory system rendered them practically impossible, rather than absurd and in commencing a review of the present century we find ourselves surrounded by quite a new order of ideas.

Both royalists and nationalists had regarded power as the main object in view, and had given a favourable consideration to wealth in so far as, and in whatever way it might promote power; they had tried to guide the individual pursuit of gain into three directions in which it might support the national power: but the attempt to do so was becoming discredited, and a new school of thinkers arose which maintained that wealth should be pursued as a good independently of the effect it might have on the power of the country. This school would not have said. perhaps that wealth is good in itself and should be pursued for its own sake, but they would have said that wealth gives us a command over any sort of good we desire and is a necessary condition for all kinds of welfare, and that if we can only secure wealth all other benefits are brought within our reach. They would thus

have argued that national wealth should be sought for in whatever ways it could be acquired most rapidly, and that so far as economic legislation was concerned it should be taken as the end in view, and not constantly treated as subordinate to other considerations. In countless ways there must be an enormous difference, according as we pursue power, and are merely interested in wealth so far as we see that it leads to power, or as we are aiming at wealth as an end, and regard it not indeed as an absolute end, but as a mediate end that subserves any one of innumerable benefits and that is a necessary condition for each of them. Those who take this view will treat the pursuit of wealth in a different spirit from others who look on it as a mere means to one particular end— national power, and legislate for it in this sole reference. In fact we may say that hitherto we have had to examine moral or political principles with regard to industrial affairs, and that we are now, for the first time, coming in contact with economic principles, strictly so called.

2

Provisionally adopting this view of wealth as a necessary condition of human wellbeing, and one on which human wellbeing will (in sound political conditions) certainly follow, and this seems to be the view of such different men as Mr. Cobden1 and Mr. Hyndman, among others,—we are likely to conclude that the more rapidly wealth can be procured the better, and that any restrictions which hinder the rapid accumulation of wealth, tend to defer the acquiring of good of all kinds by the nation. Parliament was acting on this view when it refused to check the introduction of machinery, and swept away the remnants of the old industrial system.

1 See Malet's Preface to Cobden's Political Writings, p. v. Hyndman. Historical Basis of Socialism in England (Preface).

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