Contemporary Socialism

by John Rae

"This lowering of the opinions of the labouring class with respect to the mode in which they should live is perhaps the most serious of all the evils that can befall them.... The example of such individuals or bodies of individuals as submit quietly to have their wages reduced, and who are content if they get only mere necessaries, should never be held up for public imitation. On the contrary, everything should be done to make such apathy be esteemed discreditable. The best interests of society require that the rate of wages should be elevated as high as possible—that a taste for comforts and enjoyments should be widely diffused, and, if possible, interwoven with national habits and prejudices. Very low wages, by rendering it impossible for increased exertions to obtain any considerable increase of advantages, effectually hinder them from being made, and are of all others the most powerful cause of that idleness and apathy that contents itself with what can barely continue animal existence" (p. 415).

And he goes on to refute the idea of Benjamin Franklin, that high wages breed indolent and dissipated habits, and to contend that they not only improve the character and efficiency of the labourer, but are in the end a source of gain, instead of loss, to the employer. But, although the maintenance of a high rate of wages is so great an object of public solicitude, it was an object which it was, in McCulloch's judgment, outside the State's province, simply because it was outside its power, to do anything directly to promote, because while authority could fix a price for labour, it could never compel employers to engage labour at that price; and consequently its interference in such a way would only end in injury to the class it sought to befriend, as well as to the trade of the country in general. Still, McCulloch is far from wishing to repel the State's offices or the offices of public opinion in connection with the business altogether. In the passage just quoted he expressly makes an appeal to public opinion for an active interference in a direction where, he believes, its interference might be useful; and as for the action of the State, he approves, for one thing, of the legalization of trades unions, and, for another, of the special instruction of the public, at the national expense, in the principles on which a high rate of wages depend.

In regard to the Factory Acts, while he would have the hours of labour in the case of grown-up men settled by the parties themselves, because he thought them the only persons competent to settle them satisfactorily, he strongly supported the interference of the Legislature, on grounds of ordinary humanity, to limit the working day of children and women, because "the former are naturally, and the latter have been rendered, through custom and the institutions of society, unable to protect themselves" (p. 426); and he seconded all Lord Shaftesbury's labours down to the Ten Hours Act of 1847, to which he objected on the ground that it involved a practical interference with all adult factory labour. On the other hand, he was in favour of the principle of employers' liability for accidents in mines and workshops, because there seemed no other way of saving the labourers from their own carelessness, except by making the masters responsible for the enforcement of the necessary regulations (p. 307).

But McCulloch's general position on this class of questions is still better exemplified in the view he takes of the State's duty on a matter of great present interest, the housing of the poor. Here he has no hesitation in throwing the principal blame for the bad accommodation of the working-classes of that day, for the underground cellar dwellings of Liverpool and Manchester, the overcrowded lodging-houses of London, and the streets of cottages unsupplied with water or drainage, on "the culpable inattention of the authorities." Mr. Goschen vindicates the legitimacy of Government interference with the housing of the people, on the ground that it is the business of Government to see justice done between man and man. When a man hired a house, Government had a right to see that he got a house, and a house meant a dwelling fit for human habitation. The inspection of houses is, according to this idea, only a case of necessary protection against fraud, like the institution of medical examinations, the assaying of metals, or the testing of drugs; and protection against fraud is admitted everywhere to be the proper business of Government. McCulloch bases his justification of the intervention on much broader grounds. Government needs no other warrant for condemning a house that is unfit for human habitation but the simple fact that the house is unfit for human habitation, and it makes no difference whether the tenant is cheated into taking the bad house, or takes it openly because he prefers it. In fact, the strongest reason, in McCulloch's opinion, for invoking Government interference in the case at all, is precisely the circumstance that so many people actually prefer unwholesome houses from motives of economy.

"Such cottages," he says, "being cheap, are always sure to find occupiers. Nothing, however, can be more obvious than that it is the duty of Government to take measures for the prevention and repair of an abuse of this sort. Its injurious influence is not confined to the occupiers of the houses referred to, though if it were, that would be no good reason for declining to introduce a better system. But the diseases engendered in these unhealthy abodes frequently extend their ravages through all classes of the community, so that the best interests of the middle and higher orders, as well as of the lowest, are involved in this question. And, on the same principle that we adopt measures to guard against the plague, we should endeavour to secure ourselves against typhus, and against the brutalizing influence, over any considerable portion of the population, of a residence amid filth and disease" (p. 308).

The last clause is remarkable. The State is required to protect the people from degrading influences, to prevent them from being brutalized through the avarice or apathy of others, and to prevent them being brutalized through the avarice or apathy of themselves. It is not what many persons would expect, but here we have political economy, and the most "orthodox" political economy, forcing people to go to a dearer market for their houses, in order to satisfy a sentiment of humanity, and imposing on the State a social mission of a broad positive character—the mission of extirpating brutalizing influences. Yet, expected or not, this is really the ordinary tradition of English economists—it is the principle laid down by Smith of obliging the State to secure for the people an unmutilated and undeformed manhood, to provide for them by public means the fundamental conditions of a humane existence.

McCulloch's position comes out more clearly still in the reasons he gives for advocating a compulsory provision for the able-bodied poor, and a national system of popular education. With regard to the impotent poor, he is content with saying that it would be inhumanity to deny them support, and injustice to throw their support exclusively on the benevolent. A poor-rate is sometimes defended on what are professed to be strictly economical grounds, by showing that it is both less mischievous and less expensive than mendicity; but what strikes McCulloch is not so much the wastefulness of private charity in the hands of the benevolent as the injustice of suffering the avaricious to escape their natural obligations. Few, however, have much difficulty in finding one good reason or another for making a public provision for the impotent poor; the crux of the question of public assistance is the case of the able-bodied poor. A provision for the able-bodied poor is practically a recognition in a particular form of "the right to labour," and the right to labour resounds with many revolutionary terrors in our English ears, although it has, as a matter of fact, been practised quietly, and most of the time in one of its most pernicious forms, in every parish of England for nearly three hundred years.

Now on this question McCulloch was a convert. He confessed to the Committee on the State of the Poor in Ireland, in 1830, that he had changed his views on the subject entirely since his previous evidence in 1825. He had formerly been, he said, "too much imbued with mere theory, with the opinions of Malthus and Townsend"; but he had become a firm believer in the necessity and the public advantage of a legal provision for the able-bodied poor, and he strongly recommended the introduction of such a system into Ireland, in the first instance as an instrument of individual relief, but also as an effectual engine of social improvement. He gives the reasons for his conversion partly in his evidence, and partly in a more systematic form in his "Principles of Political Economy." First, Malthus had attributed to the Poor Law itself effects which really sprang from certain bad arrangements that had been engrafted on the English system of relief, but were not essential to it—viz., the allowance system, and the law known as Gilbert's Act, which deprived parishes of the right to refuse relief except in workhouses, and forced them to provide work for paupers, if paupers desired it, at or near their own houses. These two arrangements, in McCulloch's opinion, converted the English provision for the able-bodied poor from what we may term a wise and conditional right of labour into an unwise and dangerous one. In the second place, he had come to see that a legal provision for the poor, instead of having, as was alleged, a necessary tendency to multiply pauperism, had in reality a natural tendency to prevent its growth, because it gave the landlords and influential ratepayers a strong pecuniary as well as moral interest in producing that result. Its effect was thus to establish in every parish a new local stimulus to social improvement, and it was on account of this effect of a Poor Law that McCulloch thought it would be specially beneficial to Ireland, because there was nothing Ireland needed more than just such a local stimulus. In the third place, he had become more and more profoundly impressed with the increasing gravity of the vicissitudes and fluctuations of employment to which English labourers were subject since England became mainly a manufacturing country, and that unhappy feature of manufacturing industry was his principal reason for invoking legislative assistance. A purely agricultural country, he thought, might be able to do without a Poor Law, because agricultural employment was comparatively steady; but in a manufacturing country a Poor Law was indispensable, on account of the long periods of depression or privation which were normal incidents in the life of labour in such a country, and on account of the pernicious effect which these periods of privation would, if unchecked, be certain to exercise upon the character and habits of the labouring classes, through "lowering their estimate of what is required for their comfortable and decent subsistence." ("Political Economy," p. 448.)

"During these periods of extraordinary privation the labourer, if not effectually relieved, would imperceptibly lose that taste for order, decency, and cleanliness which had been gradually formed and accumulated in better times by the insensible operation of habit and example, and no strength of argument, no force of authority, could again instil into the minds of a new generation, growing up under more prosperous circumstances, the sentiments and tastes thus uprooted and destroyed by the cold breath of penury. Every return of temporary distress would therefore vitiate the feelings and lower the sensibilities of the labouring classes" (p. 449).