10
Aspects of Modern Europe
The Industrial Revolution supervened in England first. Her landless labourers, her rather uncertain harvests, her severance from the Roman tradition at the religious schism, her growth of sea-power and trade, as well as the invention of James Watt, all contributed to this end. The necessary coal was found in places mostly remote from the great centres of English tradition, and industry grew where the civic heritage was weak and the lands, even the common lands of the market towns, had been enclosed by proprietors, who also often replaced the monks of the Middle Ages as landlords without attempting to fulfil their other functions. The growth of our huge industrial agglomerates on private land with an oligarchic government of landowners, and, since 1830, factory owners and their associates, has naturally had as a result the policy of non-interference, so that crowding has been permitted and even encouraged, and the slum, which is now deteriorating the quality of the population, is the inevitable result, bringing in its train practically all the most serious social problems of our day, the stunting of growth and judgement, the craving for excitement and emotion as a substitute for thought, the aesthetic degradation which carries with it the loss of keenness on one's work. To compensate for this we have only got a vast accumulation of profits in the form of mobile capital, so much of which has been blown into space in 1914-18. The accumulation of capital, it should be appreciated, would have been far less had it not been that industrial primacy and the primacy of the carrying trade happened, as above suggested, to be closely associated in one and the same people.
From England the Revolution has spread along the coal belt through northern France and Belgium, Germany, Bohemia, and Poland to Russia, with characteristic modifications from region to region, according to the local circumstances and social heritage of the people affected. But before proceeding to note these differences it is important to realize one general change which has many aspects. In the old village with its law based on the custom of the neighbourhood, each had his or her place unless cast out: one's status was all-important and not easily changed. In England the labourer became landless, drifted to the factories, made a contract for his labour, and so changed the organization of society from an organization based on status to one based on contract. That change is still going on, and the remnants of old ideas of status have struggled hard against such measures as death duties, super-tax, and the rest, which all tend in the direction of making labour, however disguised, the great medium of exchange. This big alteration from status to contract has affected the whole of industrial Europe and has spread thence as a ferment of change far beyond our continent, but in Europe the change has hardly anywhere gone so far as it has in Britain.
In France coal was far less abundant than it was in England, and the struggle for the soil went in favour of the peasantry rather than of the plutocracy as with us. Both these facts, added to those of the sunny climate, have made the Industrial Revolution far more feeble in France. The antiquity and continuity of life in the market towns has led to the persistence of small industries, often with a very long-standing personal link between master and men; hence the difficulty of the impersonality of industrial organization from which we suffer so badly in Britain is less general in France, though they also have the limited company to contend with. The wealth of the country for so many centuries has encouraged high-class—one might say, luxurious—manufacture, and jewellery, porcelain, and silk are characteristic products.
The persistence of special quality lines in the cloth trade is another feature, but on the whole the story of French industry has been one of half-hearted effort only. The Treaty of Versailles puts an enormous amount of iron ore into the French Customs Union, so that France becomes by far the greatest European producer of iron minerals, though her coal supply is deficient. It remains to be seen whether the French people will develop more industrial activity in consequence of this, and also whether they will go in for increased use of the hydro-electric power they have within their territory.
The Flemings have an old-established industrial and commercial tradition much less divorced from peasant life than in our country. Their Walloon neighbours, on the other hand, have entered into industrialism recently, and their country has changed suddenly from a backward rural area to a very busy manufacturing one, using large quantities of imported raw material. The people were cultivators and stock-raisers by long tradition, and they have tried to keep up this activity in some measure, while a protective customs duty on meat keeps up the stock-raising business. Another traditional (in fact racial) feature here is the genius for co-operation, and this works itself out in widespread insurance schemes maintained by the people.
Among the Germans the background of industrial development was very different from that which we have noted in Britain. Where the river valleys leave the hills for the northern plain are old cities of great dignity and fame, and though they were somewhat decadent after the decay of the Hanse, they were strong enough to keep their common lands and their tradition of city government from the Middle Ages. Coal was found along this zone, and it became industrialized, but the new movement had to respect the cities, which grew often on public land. The old city of Nürnberg developed industrial refinements on the basis of craftsmanship, which owed a great deal to the old business of distributing goods from the East brought up from Venice to its mart. There was thus neither on the one hand the same general growth of slums as in Britain, nor on the other the accumulation of immense profits from slum development to be used as liquid capital for speculative purposes. Moreover, the industrial effort in Germany was contemporaneous with the effort to make Germany a real nation-state, and each movement influenced the other. Much thought was given to the question of the national balance-sheet, and industry was made to help agriculture by conversion of waste products into fertilizers. Thus, though Germany was experiencing the same cityward drift of people as Britain, her agriculture remained in a far stronger position than ours, and with that went the probability of better maintenance of the quality of the people. The wasting of resources on war, the distrust created by aggressive intrigues, the loss of territory and minerals, and the loss of health of the people through the blockade, all imply changes in the situation of the German people, the consequences of which it is difficult to foresee.
German industry utilized Polish labour in large quantities, and was much concerned with the westward-flowing Slavonic stream which was said to be altering the character of the German people. On the other hand, a German stream of organization flowed eastward and south-eastward, and the industrial fever made great strides in the latter half of the nineteenth century in Bohemia, in Austria proper, in Upper Silesia, and in Poland. In Bohemia it emphasized the differences between German and Slavonic elements of the people; in Upper Silesia and in Poland the Germans were mainly found in the towns, especially in the leader class, and often difference of language and sentiment between masters and men was a very undesirable feature.
Polish industrial centres were correspondingly notorious for their bad social conditions before the war.