Capitalism and the Historians by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 1954-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART II

4

The Standard of Life of the Workers in England, 1790–1830

T. S. ASHTON

I

What happened to the standard of life of the British working classes in the late decades of the eighteenth and the early decades of the nineteenth centuries? Was the introduction of the factory system beneficial or harmful in its effect on the workers? These, though related, are distinct questions. For it is possible that employment in factories conduced to an increase of real wages but that the tendency was more than offset by other influences, such as the rapid increase of population, the immigration of Irishmen, the destruction of wealth by long years of warfare, ill-devised tariffs, and misconceived measures for the relief of distress. Both questions have a bearing on some political and economic disputes of our own day, and this makes it difficult to consider them with complete objectivity. An American scholar (so it is said) once produced a book entitled An Impartial History of the Civil War: From the Southern Point of View.1 If I seek to emulate his impartiality, I ought also to strive to equal his candor. Let me confess, therefore, at the start that I am of those who believe that, all in all, conditions of labor were becoming better, at least after 1820, and that the spread of the factory played a not inconsiderable part in the improvement.

There is, it must be admitted, weighty opinion to the contrary. Most of the economists who lived through the period of rapid economic changes took a somewhat gloomy view of the effect of these changes on the workers. “The increasing wealth of the nation,” wrote Thomas Malthus in 1798, “has had little or no tendency to better the conditions of the labouring poor. They have not, I believe, a greater command of the necessaries and conveniences of life; and a much greater proportion of them, than at the period of the Revolution, is employed in manufactories and crowded together in close and unwholesome rooms.”2 A couple of generations later J. R. McCulloch declared that “there seems, on the whole, little room for doubting that the factory system operates unfavourably on the bulk of those engaged in it.”3 And, in 1848, John Stuart Mill wrote words that, if they gave some glimmer of hope, were nevertheless highly critical of the society from which the technological changes had sprung. “Hitherto,” he said, “it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater proportion to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish.”4 Alongside the economists was a miscellany of poets, philosophers, and demagogues; parsons, deists, and infidels; conservatives, radicals, and revolutionaries—men differing widely one from another

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