Britain's Industrial Revolution (1780-1850)

Distribution of Male and Female Factory Employment in Britain by Age, 1833

Source: "Report from Dr. James Mitchell to the Central Board of Commissioners, respecting the Returns made from the Factories, and the Results obtained

from them." British Parliamentary Papers, 1834 (167) XIX.; y-axis shows percentage of total employment within each sex that is in that five-year age category.

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Wages of Factory Workers in Britain, 1833

Source: "Report from Dr. James Mitchell to the Central Board of Commissioners, respecting the Returns made from the Factories, and the Results obtained

from them." British Parliamentary Papers, 1834 (167) XIX.

Source: http://delong.typepad.com/teaching_spring_2006/

3 Summary of Britain's Industrial Revolution (1780-1850)

[adapted irresponsibly, and somewhat wildly, from www.sparknotes.com/history/european/1848/section1.html]

Although Western Europe had long had the basic trappings of capitalism (private property, wealth accumulation, contracts), the Industrial Revolution fueled the creation of a truly modern capitalist system. Widespread credit, business corporations, investments and large-scale stock markets all become common. Britain led the way in this transformation. By the 1780s, the British Industrial Revolution, which had been developing for several decades, began to further accelerate. Manufacturing, business, and the number of wage laborers skyrocketed, starting a trend that would continue into the first half of the 19th century. Meanwhile, technology changed: hand tools were replaced by steam- or electricity-driven machines. The economic transformation brought about the British industrial revolution was accompanied by a social transformation as well. Population boomed, and demographics shifted. Because industrial resources like coal and iron were in Central and Northern England, a shift in population from Southern England northward took place. Northern cities like Manchester grew tremendously. These changes in social and demographic realities created vast pressure for political change as well. The first act to protect workers went into affect in 1802 (though in practice it did very little). Pressure to redress the lack of representation for the new industrial cities and the newly wealthy industrial manufacturers also began to build. Meanwhile, industrialists developed an ideology called Laissez Faire based on Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) and continued by David Ricardo and Robert Malthus. Based on this, the discipline known as "economics" developed, largely to give the manufacturers a basis for arguing for little or no regulation of industry. Instead of government interference, these economists argued that a free market, in which everyone followed their own self- interest, would maximize the nation's utility. Britain, with its head start in manufacturing, its many world markets, and its dominant navy, would dominate industry for most of the 19th century. Towards the end of that century, the United States and Germany would begin to challenge Britain's industrial power. Among the Western European countries, Britain was the ideal incubator for the Industrial Revolution because an "Agricultural Revolution" preceded it. After the 16 88 "Glorious Revolution", the British kings lost power and the aristocratic landholders gained power. The landholders tried to rationalize their landholdings and started the Enclosure Movement to bring more and more of their own land under tighter control, a process that went on throughout the 1700s. This policy had two main effects: it increased the productivity of the land, and transformed the people who used to work land into an unemployed, labor class of poor in need of work. Thus, the first factories had a ready labor- supply in Britain that was not available in other nations. Important inventions like the "Spinning Jenny" to produce yarn began to be made in 1760s, and soon the British textile industry was booming, aided by Eli Whitney's invention of the "Cotton Gin" in America, which pro vided a ready source of cotton. The Industrial Revolution represented a shift in influence away from the traditional power-holders in England. Aristocratic rule was no longer supreme, for "upstart" manufacturers were now often more wealthy and more important to the nation's overall well being than the landed gentry. They also employed a far greater percentage of the national economy. However, the aristocratic landholders did not entirely lose out: they maintained some power, and only grudgingly gave it up to business interests. Often, the aristocracy, trying to take power away from the manufacturers, would ally with the working class. As both sides, aristocrats and manufacturers, competed for the support of the workers, reforms in Britain gradually took place through Parliamentary deal- making without the need for a bloody revolution. In its impact on human societies, the industrial revolution was probably the most important change in its era, more important, perhaps, than any events in the last few thousand years. The Industrial Revolution allowed increasing urbanization and greatly increased the overall wealth and production power of humanity, although not everyone always shared in the benefits of industrialization equally. Though industrialization was most prominent in Europe, its transformative powers must be seen as a theme through the period of 1815-1848. Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution went hand-in-hand with the Western European countries' liberal traditions. Many of the same principles underlying the French Revolution were being developed via the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Industrializing nations developed middle classes who began to wield political clout. Further, the Industrial Revolution would give Western Europe the economic system and technology to dominate much of the world in the colonial period towards the end of the 19th century. The countries that did not transition to industrial systems very quickly got left behind, and often ended up as satellites to the major powers. It would be some time before some workers developed a counter-ideology of their own. Yet as manufacturing brought hundreds of thousands of workers into the cities, they started thinking about organizing to protect their own political interests. By 1825, the workers in the industrializing nations would become a social and political force of their own.

4 The Enclosure Movement of 1760-1820 and the

Irony of the New Legal Emphasis On Personal Property Rights

By Clifford S. Hill

Published 2005 Kregel Publications

384 pages

ISBN 0825460727

5 REACTIONS TO THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

The Sadler Committee Report (1832)

Excerpts from the Original Electronic Text at the web site of the Victorian Web In 1832 Michael Sadler secured a parliamentary investigation of conditions in the textile

factories and he sat as chairman on the committee. The evidence printed here is taken from the large body published in the committee's report and is representative rather than exceptional. It

will be observed that the questions are frequently leading; this reflects Sadler's knowledge of the sort of information that the committee was to hear and his purpose of bringing it out. This report stands out as one of three great reports on the life of the industrial class--the two others being that of the Ashley Commission on the mines and Chadwick's report on sanitary problems. The immediate effect of the investigation and the report was the passage of the Act of 1833 limiting

hours of employment for women and children. Mr. Matthew Crabtree, called in; and Examined. What age are

you? --Twenty-two. What is your occupation? --A blanket manufacturer. Have you ever been employed in a factory? --Yes. At what age did you first go to work in one? --Eight. How long did you continue in that occupation? --Four years. Will you state the hours of labour at the period when you first went to the factory, in ordinary times? --From 6 in the morning to 8 at night. Fourteen hours? --Yes. With what intervals for refreshment and rest? --An hour at noon. When trade was brisk what were your hours? --From 5 in the morning to 9 in the evening. Sixteen hours? --Yes. With what intervals at dinner? --An hour. How far did you live from the mill? --About two miles. Was there any time allowed for you to get your breakfast in the mill? --No. Did you take it before you left your home? --Generally.

During those long hours of labour could you be punctual; how did you awake? --I seldom did awake spontaneously; I was most generally awoke or lifted out of bed, sometimes asleep, by my parents. Were you always in time? --No. What was the consequence if you had been too late? --I was most commonly beaten. Severely? --Very severely, I thought. In those mills is chastisement towards the latter part of the day going on perpetually? --Perpetually. So that you can hardly be in a mill without hearing constant crying? --Never an hour, I believe. Do you think that if the overlooker were naturally a humane person it would still be found necessary for him to beat the children, in order to keep up their attention and vigilance at the termination of those extraordinary days of labour? --Yes; the machine turns off a regular quantity of cardings, and of course, they must keep as regularly to their work the whole of the day; they must keep with the machine, and therefore however humane the slubber may be, as he must keep up with the machine or be found fault with, he spurs the children to keep up also by various means but that which he commonly resorts to is to strap them when they become drowsy. At the time when you were beaten for not keeping up with your work, were you anxious to have done it if

you possibly could? --Yes; the dread of being beaten if we could not keep up with our work was a sufficient impulse to keep us to it if we could. When you got home at night after this labour, did you feel much fatigued? --Very much so. Had you any time to be with your parents, and to receive instruction from them? --No. What did you do? --All that we did when we got home was to get the little bit of supper that was provided for us and go to bed immediately. If the supper had not been ready directly, we should have gone to sleep while it was preparing. Did you not, as a child, feel it a very grievous hardship to be roused so soon in the morning? --I did. Were the rest of the children similarly circumstanced? --Yes, all of them; but they were not all of them so far from their work as I was. And if you had been too late you were under the apprehension of being cruelly beaten? --I generally was beaten when I happened to be too late; and when I got up in the morning the apprehension of that was so great, that I used to run, and cry all the way as I went to the mill.

Michael Sadler on the Need for Factory Reform, 1832

After the failure of the 1831 Bill, the factory reformers turned to Michael Thomas Sadler (1780-1835). Sadler, a Leeds linen merchant, was a High Tory and devout Anglican. Sadler was a severe critic of the liberal economics that he believed provided support for laissez faire and opposition to factory reform. Previously a Tory representative from the boroughs of Newark and Aldborough, he was the prospective Conservative candidate for Leeds in 1832 when he gave this speech on factory reform on 16 March 1832. He was defeated at Leeds by opponents of factory reform. Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Michael Thomas Sadler, M.P., F.R.S., &c., 1842, 337-379; in J. T. Ward, ed., The Factory System, Vol. .II, Birth and Growth (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), pp. 99-102.

The bill which I now implore the House to sanction with its authority, has for its object the liberation of children and other young persons employed in the mills and factories of the United Kingdom, from that over-exertion and long confinement, which common sense, as well as experience, has shown to be utterly inconsistent with the improvement of their minds, the preservation of their morals, and the maintenance of their health; -in a word, to rescue them from a state of suffering and degradation, which it is conceived that the children of the industrious classes in hardly any other country have ever endured. ... the boasted freedom of our labourers in many pursuits will, on a just view of their condition, be found little more than a name. Those who argue the question upon mere abstract principles seem, in my apprehension, too much to forget the conditions of society: the unequal division of property or rather its total monopoly by the few, leaving the many nothing but what they can obtain by their daily labour; which very labour cannot become available for the purposes of daily subsistence without the consent of\ those who own the property of the community ... the employer and the employed do not meet on equal terms in the market of labour; on the contrary, the latter, whatever his age and call him as free as you please, is often almost entirely at the mercy of the former-he would be wholly so were it not for the operation of the Poor Laws, which are palpable interference with the market of labour, and condemned as such by their opponents ... In a word, wealth, still more than knowledge, is power; and power, liable to abuse wherever vested, is least of all free from tyrannical exercise, when it owes its existence to a sordid source. Hence have all laws, human or divine, attempted to protect the labourer from the injustice and cruelty which are too often practised upon him ...Our ancestors could not have supposed it possible-posterity will not believe it true-it will be placed among the historic doubts of some future antiquary-that a generation of Englishmen could exist, or had existed, that would labour lisping infancy, of a few summers old, regardless alike of its smiles or tears, and unmoved by its unresisting weakness, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, and through the weary night also, till, in the dewy morn of existence, the bud of youth faded, and fell ere it was unfolded. Oh, cursed lust of gold! Oh, the guilt which England is contracting in the kindling eye of Heaven, when nothing but exultations are heard about the perfection of her machinery, the march of her manufactures, and the rapid increase of her wealth and prosperity! ...

7 ... Sir, children are beaten with thongs, prepared for the purpose. Yes, the females of this country, no matter whether children or grown- up-I hardly know which is the more disgusting outrage-are beaten upon the face, arms, and bosom-beaten in your free market of labour, as you term it, like slaves. These are the instruments. [Here the honourable member exhibited some black, heavy, leathern thongs, one of them fixed in a sort of handle, the smack of which, when struck upon the table, resounded through the House.] They are quite equal to breaking an arm, but the bones of the young are, as I have before said, pliant. The marks, however, of the thong are long visible, and the poor wretch is flogged before its companions-flogged, I say, like a dog, by the tyrant overlooker. We speak with execration of the cart-whip of the West Indies, but let us see this night an equal feeling rise against the factory thong of England ... Sir, I should wish to propose an additional clause to this bill, enacting that the overseer who dares to lay the lash on the almost naked body of the child shall be sentenced to the tread-wheel for a month, and it would be but right if the master who knowingly tolerates the infliction of this cruelty on abused infancy, this insult upon parental feeling, this disgrace upon the national character, should bear him company, though he roll to tile house of correction in his chariot ... The great increase of debauchery of another kind, it would be absurd to deny; I never did hear it denied, that many of the mills, at least those in which night-working is pursued, are, in this respect, little better than brothels . . .The principal features of this bill for regulating the labour of children and other young persons in mills and factories, are these:-First, to prohibit the labour of infants therein under tile age of nine years; to limit the actual work, from nine to eighteen years of age, to ten hours daily, exclusive of the time allowed for meals and refreshment, with an abatement of two hours on the Saturday, as a necessary preparation for the Sabbath; and to forbid all night-work under the age of twenty-one.…... I compare not the English child with the African child; but I ask this House, and his Majesty's Government, whether it would not be right and becoming to consider the English child as favourably as the African adult? You have limited the labour of the robust negro to nine hours; but when I propose that the labour of the young white slave

shall not exceed ten, the proposition is deemed extravagant ... ………………Another objection of some of the opposing mill owners I will briefly notice. They cannot consent, forsooth, to an abridgement of the long and slavish hours of infant labour because of the Corn Laws. Why, these individuals-some or them not originally, perhaps, of the most opulent class of the community have, during the operation of these laws, rapidly amassed enormous fortunes; yet, during the whole period, they could seldom afford either to increase the wages or diminish the toil of these little labourers, to whom, however forgetful they may be of the fact, many of them owe every farthing they possess: they have generally done the reverse. And they talk of Corn Laws as their apology! This is too bad. Can

any man be fool enough to suppose that, were the Corn Laws abolished tomorrow, and every grain we consume grown and ground in foreign parts, such individuals would cease to 'grind the forces of the poor?' ... I wish I could bring a group of these little ones to [the] bar [of the House of Commons]-I am sure their silent appearance would plead more forcibly in their behalf than the loudest eloquence. I shall not soon forget their affecting presence on a recent occasion, when many thousands of the people of the North were assembled in their cause,-when in the intervals of those loud and general acclamations which rent the air, while their great and unrivalled champion, Richard Oastler (whose name is now lisped by thousands of these infants, and will be transmitted to posterity with undiminished gratitude and affection); -when this friend of the factory children was pleading their cause as he alone can plead it, the repeated cheers of a number of shrill voices were heard, which sounded like echoes to our own; and on looking around, we saw several groups of little children, amidst the crowd, who raised their voices in the fervour of hope and exultation, while they heard their sufferings commiserated, and, as they believed, about to be redressed ...

8 Contemporareous Notice of the Scale of the Social and Ecomonic Change

Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, "Rehabilitating the Industrial Revolution," Economic History Review new ser. 45, pp.23-50 http://www.jstor.org/view/00130117/di011838/01p0208u/0

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Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776)

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David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817)

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Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)

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Karl Marx’s and Fredrich Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

16 Hilton, Boyd. The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785-1865. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Thesis: In the first half of the nineteenth century, the English upper and middle classes were influenced by their evangelicalism to regard natural and economic disasters as acts of God designed to sanctify sufferers and drive people to seek refuge in Christ’s atonement. So, it was believed, such providentially-directed suffering was not to be ameliorated by government action. However, from mid century, religion permeated the culture less, and the doctrine of the incarnation was emphasized; Christ was seen more and more as being already at-one-ment with men, as their ally, and so helping the sufferer was seen, more and more, to be the Christian thing to do.

Part One: Religious and Economic Thought (1) 1. Evangelicalism in the Age of Atonement (3) For purposes of his study, Hilton defines evangelicalism as “the third and fourth generations of the

revival begun by Wesley,” and he considers its influence on “the haute bourgeoisie that dominated British politics from 1784 to the 1840s” (p. 7). Evangelicals were split into ‘moderate’ and ‘extreme’ camps (p. 10). Moderate evangelicals were exemplified in the respectable “Clapham” sect. Extreme evangelicals were distinguished by being “pentecostal, pre-millenarian, adventist, and revivalist” (p. 10). According to Hilton, “enthusiasm for the Cross, rather than the mere repression of one’s own depravity, was the secret of moderate evangelical religion” (p. 12). For moderates, natural and economic disasters might be means of God’s severe mercy, moving men--who would otherwise not be aware of their spiritual peril--to seek refuge in Christ. Moderates tended to think of Providence as not so much interventionist as law-like in its governance, and so believed that government too should eschew interventionism, in favor of allowing natural laws of cause and effect to do their good work. Unlike extremists, moderate evangelicals were thus positioned theologically to embrace science. Varied approaches to integrating scientific and theological beliefs are illustrated in geology, where what has been termed ‘scriptural geologists’ interpreted geology per their views of Genesis, while ‘geological hermeneutists’ interpreted Genesis per their views of geology (p. 23). 2. The Rage of Christian Economics 1800-1840 (36) Thomas Chalmers was an evangelical thinker of enormous standing. Miller advocated ‘Free-trade, the essence of which consists in leaving this mechanism to its own spontaneous evolutions,’ so as to reveal ‘a striking testimony to the superior intelligence of Him who is the author both of human nature and of human society’ (p. 68). Characteristically, according to Hilton, free trade, as endorsed by evangelicals, was “that” version which “may be characterized, as static, (or cyclical,) nationalist, retributive, and purgative, employing competition as a means to education, rather than to growth” (p. 69).

Part Two: The Content of Evangelical Social Thought (71) 3. Poverty and Passionate Flesh (73) Malthus’s 1803 Essay on the Principle of Population was a great shock to “sensitive minds, nurtured during the rationalist optimism of the enlightenment” (p. 73). Chalmers led evangelicals who embraced a sort of Malthusian perspective. In particular, Chalmers believed that the cataclysms forecast by Malthus must occur ‘so long as the sensual predominates over the reflective part of the constitution,...so long as there is generally a low and groveling taste among the people, instead of an aspiring tendency towards something more in the way of comfort, and cleanliness, and elegance’ (p. 81). Of course, the evangelicals believed that the masses could live according to right reason only by being transformed by Christ. Moderate evangelicals, such as Chalmer, opposed state aid for the poor, believing that this undermined the divine order which prescribed private charity as a spiritual test of the wealthy, more than as a relief of the spiritually-productive sufferings of the poor. Thus, Wilberforce did not agitate for poor relief, but “regularly alienated one-quarter of his income as a bachelor” (p. 101).

17 4. Profit and Prophecy: Evangelical Attitudes to Business (115) Chalmers provides an example of how evangelicals could desire “Free Trade but not economic growth” (p. 121). As Hilton explains, Chalmers believed that God had appointed limits not just in land and population, but also by ordaining the business cycle. As the business cycle was natural, trade limits could be removed; the providential business cycle could be relied upon to prevent matters from getting out of hand. 5. The Mind of Economic Man (163) Hilton maintains that “most Christian economists were less concerned with factual observation than with the psychological premises of human behavior” (p. 163). As George Grote enthused, “We ascertain” the “general Law of Population by an immediate appeal to the fundamental conditions of human existence, without the necessity of recurring to an examination of particular countries and states of society’ (p. 168). 6. The Politics of Atonement (203) “Ultimately, Whigs, Radicals, and Leaguers owed less to Christian morality than to the secular culture of the day, to political economy, science, and pseudo-science, and the passion for improvement. It was only the liberal Tories largely (though not entirely insulated from that culture whose instincts for Free Trade developed in a context of piety and pessimism” (p. 248). Illustrating the posture of Liberal Toryism is Peel’s peroration on 16 February 1846 advocating repeal of the corn laws on the grounds that thereafter it would be clear that famines were a chastening Providence of God, and not a consequence of bad public policy on the part of the government. However, Hilton notes, the scale of the Irish potato famine, “helped to discredit providence theory” (p. 250).

Part Three: After the Age of Atonement (253) 7. ‘Incarnate and Incorporate’: The Lord of Limit (255) In 1855-1856, Parliament endorsed the concept of limited liability, a sign that the old “evangelical or retributive version of free trade ideology” was “rapidly losing ground” (p. 255). From the mid nineteenth century, a Broad Church theological consensus was developing which de-emphasized Christ’s atonement in favor of emphasizing his incarnation--his loving, actual, sacrificial identification with humankind. R.W. Dale insisted that a principle which ‘lies deeper than the Atonement” is “God’s eternal thought and purpose that the race should be one with Christ” (p. 297). Hilton sees this kinder, gentler theology as being paralleled in economics inasmuch s “in 1856...it was enacted [with the passage of limited liability] that in the future the blood of bankrupts should be sprinkled only, and not spilt” (p. 297). 8. Institutional Social Thought in its intellectual Context (298) “Like ‘evangelical economists,’ incarnationalists assumed the existence of individual conscience,” but they maintained that, “‘Conscience is the organ in the individual personality of the impulse towards collective life in the region of action’” (pp. 321-322). However, in practice, the incarnationalists did not promote collectivism; rather, they advocated laissez-faire policies predicated upon sentimental religion which emphasized, “Godly rule by reward and not by punishment” (p. 322). 9. Gladstonian Liberalism: The Last Days of Atonement (340) Prime Minister Gladstone (1868-74, 1880-85, 1886, 1892-94) exemplified the sea-change in theology as he self-consciously abandoned the ‘damnatory clauses’ in evangelical theology. No longer looking at this life as a vale of tears refining one for eternity, Gladstone was more optimistic. He began to view the passage of time as necessarily a march of progress, and “the natural theologian in Gladstone stopped looking for evidence of God’s omnipotence in the workings of the machine, and found it instead in the moral improvement of society” (p. 343). The cosmic optimist, however, was short-lived. In the 1880s, the second law of thermodynamics was interpreted as implying that there could be “no durable happiness on earth,” and government must intervene to protect against the vicissitudes of life.

18 Pope Leo XIII on Labor, Capital and the New Economies (1891)

Pope Leo XIII carried a personal hipflask of Mariani wine to fortify himself in time of need, and

awarded a Vatican gold medal to its originator, Corsican-born pharmacist and businessman Angelo

Mariani. For his part, Mariani, had a keen eye for the benefits of celebrity-endorsement.

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Thomas Carlyle: from Signs of the Times: The "Mechanical Age"(1829)

Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster. The sailor furls his sail, and lays down his oar; and bids a strong, unwearied servant, on vaporous wings, bear him through the waters. Men have crossed oceans by steam; the Birmingham Fire-king has visited the fabulous East; and the genius of the Cape, were there any Cameons now to sing it, has again been alarmed, and with far stranger thunders than Gamas. There is no end to machinery. Even the horse is stripped of his harness, and finds a fleet firehorse yoked in his stead. Nay, we have an artist that hatches chickens by steam; the very brood-hen is to be superseded! For all earthly, and for some unearthly purposes, we have machines and mechanic

furtherances; for mincing our cabbages; for casting us into magnetic sleep. We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highway; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils. What wonderful accessions have thus been made, and are still making, to the physical power of mankind; how much better fed, clothed, lodged and, in all outward respects, accommodated men now are, or might be, by a given quantity of labour, is a grateful reflection which forces itself on every one. What changes, too, this addition of power is introducing into the Social System; how wealth has more and more increased, and at the same time gathered itself more and more into masses, strangely altering the old relations, and increasing the distance between the rich and the poor, will be a question for Political Economists, and a much more complex and important one than any they have yet engaged with. But leaving these matters for the present, let us observe how the mechanical genius of our time has diffused itself into quite other provinces. Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also. Here too nothing follows its spontaneous course, nothing is left to be accomplished by old natural methods. Everything has its cunningly devised implements, its preestablished apparatus; it is not done by hand, but by machinery. Thus we have machines for Education: Lancastrian machines; Hamiltonian machines; monitors, maps, and emblems. Instruction, that mysterious communing of Wisdom with Ignorance, is no longer an indefinable tentative process, requiring a study of individual aptitudes, and a perpetual variation of means and methods, to attain the same end; but a secure, universal, straightforward business, to be conducted in the gross, by proper mechanism, with such intellect as comes to hand. Then, we have Religious machines, of all imaginable varieties; the Bible-Society, professing a far higher and heavenly structure, is found, on inquiry, to be altogether an earthly contrivance: supported by collection of moneys, by fomenting of vanities, by puffing, intrigue and chicane; a machine for converting the Heathen. It is the same in all other departments. Has any man, or any society of men, a truth to speak, a piece of spiritual work to do; they can nowise proceed at once and with the mere natural organs, but must first call a public meeting, appoint committees, issue prospectuses, eat a public dinner; in a word, construct or borrow machinery, wherewith to speak it and do it. Without machinery they were hopeless, helpless; a colony of Hindoo weavers squatting in the heart of Lancashire. Mark, too, how every machine must have its moving power, in some of the great currents of society; every little sect among us, Unitarians, Utilitarians, Anabaptists, Phrenologists, must have its Periodical, its monthly or quarterly Magazine;-hanging out, like its windmill, into the popularis aura, to grind meal for the society.

23 With individuals, in like manner, natural strength avails little. No individual now hopes to accomplish the poorest enterprise single-handed and without mechanical aids; he must make interest with some existing corporation, and till his field with their oxen. In these days, more emphatically than ever, 'to live, signifies to unite with a party, or to make one.' Philosophy, Science, Art, Literature, all depend on machinery. No Newton, by silent meditation, now discovers the system of the world from the falling of an apple; but some quite other than Newton stands in his Museum, his Scientific Institution, and behind whole batteries of retorts, digesters, and galvanic piles imperatively 'interrogates Nature,'-who, however, shows no haste to answer. In defect of Raphaels, and Angelos, and Mozarts, we have Royal Academies of Painting, Sculpture, Music; whereby the languishing spirit of Art may be strengthened, as by the more generous diet of a Public Kitchen. Literature, too, has its Patemoster-row mechanism, its Trade-dinners, its Editorial conclaves, and huge subterranean, puffing bellows; so that books are not only printed, but in a great measure, written and sold, by machinery. National culture, spiritual benefit of all sorts, is under the same management. No Queen Christina, in these times, needs to send for her Descartes; no King Frederick for his Voltaire, and painfully nourish him with pensions and flattery: any sovereign of taste, who wishes to enlighten his people, has only to impose a new tax, and with the proceeds establish Philosophic Institutes. Hence the Royal and Imperial Societies, the Biblioth6ques, Glypoth~ques, Technoth6ques, which front us in all capital cities; like so many well-finished hives, to which it is expected the stray agencies of Wisdom will swarm of their own accord, and hive and make honey. In like manner, among ourselves, when it is thought that religion is declining, we have only to vote half-a-million's worth of bricks and mortar, and build new churches. In Ireland it seems they have gone still farther, having actually established a 'Penny-a-week Purgatory- Society'! Thus does the Genius of Mechanism stand by to help us in all difficulties and emergencies, and with his iron back bears all our burdens. These things, which we state lightly enough here, are yet of deep import, and indicate a mighty change in our whole manner of existence. For the same habit regulates not our modes of action alone, but our modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions, - for Mechanism of one sort or other, do they hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character. We may trace this tendency in all the great manifestations of our time; in its intellectual aspect, the studies it most favours and its manner of conducting them; in its practical aspects, its politics, arts, religion, morals; in the whole sources, and throughout the whole currents, of its spiritual, no less than its material activity. Consider, for example, the state of Science generally, in Europe, at this period. It is admitted, on all sides, that the Metaphysical and Moral Sciences are falling into decay, while the Physical are engrossing, every day, more respect and attention. In most of the European nations there is now no such thing as a Science of Mind; only more or less advancement in the general science, or the special sciences, of matter. The French were the first to desert Metaphysics; and though they have lately affected to revive their school, it has yet no signs of vitality. The land of Malebranche, Pascal, Descartres and F6nelon, has now only its Cousins and Villemains; while, in the department of Physics, it reckons far other names. Among ourselves, the Philosophy of Mind, after a rickety infancy, which never reached the vigour of manhood, fell suddenly into decay, languished and finally died out, with its last amiable cultivator, Professor Stewart. In no nation but Germany has any decisive effort been made in psychological science; not to speak of any decisive result. The science of the age, in short, is physical, chemical, physiological; in all shapes mechanical. Our favourite Mathematics, the highly prized exponent of all these other sciences, has also become more and understood mechanically, cannot be investigated and understood at all. We advert the more particularly to these intellectual propensities, as to prominent symptoms of our age, because Opinion is at all times doubly related to Action, first as cause, then as effect and the speculative tendency of any age will therefore give us, on the whole, the best indications of its practical tendency. Nowhere, for example, is the deep, almost exclusive faith we have in Mechanism more visible than in the Politics of this time. Civil government does by its nature include much that is mechanical, and must be treated accordingly. We term it indeed, in ordinary language, the Machine of Society, and talk of it as the grand working wheel from which all private machines must derive, or to which they must adapt, their movements. Considered merely as a metaphor, all this is well enough; but here, as in so many other cases, the 'foam hardens itself into a shell,' and the shadow we have wantonly evoked stands terrible before us and will not depart at our bidding. Government includes much also that is not mechanical, and cannot be treated mechanically; of which latter truth, as appears to us, the political speculations and exertions of our time are taking less and less cognisance.

24 Nay, in the very outset, we might note the mighty interest taken in mere political arrangements, as itself the sign of a mechanical age. The whole discontent of Europe takes this direction. The deep, strong cry of all civilised nations,-a cry which, every one now sees, must and will be answered, is: Give us a reform of Government! A good structure of legislation, a proper check upon the executive, a wise arrangement of the judiciary, is all that is wanting for human happiness. The Philosopher of this age is not a Socrates, a Plato, a Hooker, or Taylor, who inculcates on men the necessity and infinite worth of moral goodness, the great truth that our happiness depends on the mind which is within us, and not on the circumstances which are without us; but a Smith, a De Lolme, a Bentham, who chiefly inculcates the reverse of this,-that our happiness depends entirely on external circumstances; nay, that the strength and dignity of the mind within us is itself the creature and consequence of these. Were the laws, the government, in good order, all were well with us; the rest would care for itself! Dissentients from this opinion, expressed or implied, are now rarely to be met with; widely and angrily as men differ in its application, the principle is admitted by all. Equally mechanical, and of equal simplicity, are the methods proposed by both parties for completing or securing this all-sufficient perfection of arrangement. It is no longer the moral, religious, spiritual condition of the people that is our concern, but their physical, practical, economical condition, as regulated by public laws. Thus is the Body-politic more than ever worshipped and tendered; but the Soul-politic less than ever. Love of country, in any high or generous sense, in any other than an almost animal sense, or mere habit, has little importance attached to it in such reforms, or in the opposition shown them. Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter. To both parties it is emphatically a machine: to the discontented, a 'taxing-machine'; to the contented, a 'machine for securing property.' Its duties and its faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable. Thus it is by the mere condition of the machine, by preserving it untouched, or else by reconstructing it, and oiling it anew, that man's salvation as a social being is to be ensured and indefinitely promoted. Contrive the fabric of law aright, and without farther effort on your part, that divine spirit of Freedom, which all hearts venerate and long for, will of herself come to inhabit it; and under her healing wings every noxious influence will wither, every good and salutary one more and more expand. Nay, so devoted are we to this principle, and at the same time so curiously mechanical, that a new trade, specially grounded on it, has arisen among us, under the name of "Codification," or codemaking in the abstract; whereby any people, for a reasonable consideration, may be accommodated with a patent code;-more easily than curious individuals with patent breeches, for the people does not need to be measured first. *** To us who live in the midst of all this, and see continually the faith, hope and practice of every one founded on Mechanism of one kind or other, it is apt to seem quite natural, and as if it could never have been otherwise. Nevertheless, if we recollect or reflect a little, we shall find both that it has been, and might again Loss, for any visible, finite object; but always for some invisible and infinite one. The Crusades took their rise in Religion; their visible object was, commercially speaking, worth nothing. It was the boundless Invisible world that was laid bare in the imaginations of those men; and in its burning light, the visible shrunk as a scroll. Not mechanical, nor produced by mechanical means, was this vast movement. No dining at Freemasons' Tavem, with the other long train of modem machinery; no cunning reconciliation of 'vested interests,' was required here: only the passionate voice of one man, the rapt soul looking through the eyes of one man; and rugged, steel-clad Europe trembled beneath his words, and followed him whither he listed. In later ages it was still the same. The Refon-nation had an invisible, mystic and ideal aim; the result was indeed to be embodied in external things; but its spirit, its worth, was internal, invisible, infinite. Our English Revolution too originated in Religion. Men did battle, in those old days, not for Purse-sake, but for Conscience-sake. Nay, in our own days, it is no way different. The French Revolution itself had something higher in it than cheap bread and a Habeas-corpus act. Here too was an Idea; a Dynamic, not a Mechanic force. It was a struggle, though a blind and at last an insane one, for the infinite, divine nature of Right, of Freedom, of Country. Thus does man, in every age, vindicate, consciously or unconsciously, his celestial birthright. Thus does Nature hold on her wondrous, unquestionable course; and all our systems and theories are but so many froth-eddies or sand-banks, which from time to time she casts up, and washes away. When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle-up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.

25 Nay, even with regard to Government itself, can it be necessary to remind any one that Freedom, without which indeed all spiritual life is impossible, depends on infinitely more complex influences than either the extension or the curtailment of the 'democratic interest'? Who is there that, 'taking the high priori road,' shall point out what these influences are; what deep, subtle, inextricably entangled influences they have been and may be? For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer: it is the noble People that makes the noble Government; rather than conversely. On the whole, Institutions are much; but they are not all. The freest and highest spirits of the world have often been found under strange outward circumstances: Saint Paul and his brother Apostles were politically slaves; Epictetus was personally one. Again, forget the influences of Chivalry and Religion, and ask: What countries produced Columbus and Las Casas? Or, descending from virtue and heroism to mere energy and spiritual talent: Cortes, Pizarro, Alba, Ximenes? The Spaniards of the sixteenth century were indisputably the noblest nation of Europe: yet they had the Inquisition and Philip 11. They have the same government at this day; and are the lowest nation. The Dutch too have retained their old constitution; but no Siege of Leyden, no William the Silent, not even an Egmont or De Witt any longer appears among them. With ourselves also, where much has changed, effect has nowise followed cause as it should have done: two centuries ago, the Commons Speaker addressed Queen Elizabeth on bended knees, happy that the virago's foot did not even smite him; yet the people were then govemed, not by a Castlereagh, but by a Burghley; they had their Shakespeare and Philip Sidney, where we have our Sheridan Knowles and Beau Brummel. These and the like facts are so familiar, the truths which they preach so obvious, and have in all past times been so universally believed and acted on, that we should almost feel ashamed for repeating them; were il not that, on every hand, the memory of them seems to have passed away, or at best died into a faint tradition, of no value as a practical principle. To judge by the loud clamour of our Constitution-builders, Statists, Economists, directors, creators, reformers of Public Societies; in a word, all manner of Mechanists, from the Cartwright up to the Codemaker; and by the nearly total silence of all Preachers and Teachers who should give a voice to Poetry, Religion and Morality, we might fancy either that man's Dynamical nature was, to all spiritual intents, extinct, or else so perfected that nothing more was to be made of it by the old means~ and henceforth only in his Mechanical contrivances did any hope exist for him. To define the limits of these two departments of man's activity, which work into one another, and by means of one another, so intricately and inseparably, were by its nature an impossible attempt. Their relative importance, even to the wisest mind, will vary in different times, according to the special wants and dispositions of those times. Meanwhile, it seems clear enough that only in the right coordination of the two, and the vigorous forwarding of both, does our true line of action lie. Undue cultivation of the inward or Dynamical province leads to idle, visionary, impracticable course, and, especially in rude eras, to Superstition and Fanaticism, with their long train of baleful and well-known evils. Undue cultivation of the outward, again, though less immediately prejudicial, and even for the time productive of many palpable benefits, must, in the long-run, by destroying Moral Force, which is the parent of all other Force, prove not less certainly, and perhaps still more hopelessly, pernicious. This, we take it, is the grand characteristic of our age. By our skill in Mechanism, it has come to pass, that in the management of external things we excel all other ages; while in whatever respects the pure moral nature, in true dignity of soul and character, we are perhaps inferior to most civilised ages.

Source:

This text is part of the Internet Modern History Sourcebook. The Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted texts for introductory level classes in modern European and World history. Unless otherwise indicated the specific electronic form of the document is copyright. Permission is granted for electronic copying, distribution in print form for educational purposes and personal use. If you do reduplicate the document, indicate the source. No permission is granted for commercial use of the Sourcebook. © Paul Halsall, July 1998 halsall@murray.fordham.edu

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Postscript: Robert F. Kennedy on the Limited

Meaning of the Gross National Product (1968)

Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product ... if we should judge America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our

natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans. Robert Kennedy, Address, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, March 18, 1968