[CHAPTER VII]
PARLIAMENTARY REFORM AND THE ENFRANCHISEMENT OF THE PEOPLE
The Industrial Revolution
The industrial revolution of the eighteenth century changed the face of England and brought to the manufacturing class wealth and prominence. The population of Lancashire was not more than 300,000 in 1760, the West Riding of Yorkshire about 360,000, and the total population of England 6,000,000. The inventions of Arkwright, Hargreaves, Crompton, Watt, and Cartwright revolutionised the cotton trade in the last twenty years of the eighteenth century, and increased enormously the production of woollen goods. England ceased to be mainly a nation of farmers and merchants; domestic manufacture gave way to the factory system; the labouring people, unable to make a living in the country, gathered into the towns. The long series of Enclosure Acts—1760-1843—turned seven million acres of common land into private property, and with this change in agrarian conditions and the growth of population England ceased to be a corn-exporting country, and became dependent on foreign nations for its food supply.
While these industrial and agrarian changes meant a striking increase in wealth and population, they were accompanied by untold misery to the common people.
"Instead of the small master working in his own home with his one or two apprentices and journeymen, the rich capitalist-employer with his army of factory hands grew up. Many of these masters were rough, illiterate and hard, though shrewd and far-seeing in business. The workmen were forced to work for long hours in dark, dirty and unwholesome workshops. The State did nothing to protect them; the masters only thought of their profits; the national conscience was dead, and unjust laws prevented them combining together in trade unions to help themselves. Women and children were made to work as long and as hard as the men. A regular system grew up of transporting pauper and destitute children to weary factory work. There was no care for their health. There were few churches and chapels, though the Methodists often did something to prevent the people from falling back into heathendom. The workmen were ignorant, brutal, poor and oppressed. There were no schools and plenty of public houses. In hard times distress was widespread, and the workmen naturally listened to agitators and fanatics, or took to violent means of avenging their wrongs, for they had no constitutional means of redress. Even the masters had no votes, as the new towns sent no members to Parliament. The transfer of the balance of population and wealth from the south and east to the north and Midlands made Parliamentary reform necessary."[[76]]
With this transfer of the balance of economic power came a good deal of rivalry between the manufacturers and the landed gentry, the latter becoming more and more Tory, the former more and more Radical. As all political power, in the main, was in the landowner's hands, men anxious to take part in politics eagerly bought up the small estates, and the old yeoman class disappeared, except in out-of-the-way places. These yeomen and small landowners had been the backbone of the Parliamentary Party in the days of the Stuarts, but they were left hopelessly behind in an age of mechanical inventions and agrarian changes, and were in most cases glad to sell out and invest their property in other ways.
The story of the misery of rural depopulation in the first half of the sixteenth century repeats itself at the close of the eighteenth.
"A single farmer held as one farm the lands that once formed fourteen farms, bringing up respectably fourteen families. The capitalist farmer came in like the capitalist employer. His gangs of poor and ignorant labourers were the counterpart of the swarm of factory hands. The business of farming was worked more scientifically, with better tools and greater success; but after the middle of the eighteenth century the condition of the agricultural labourer got no better, and now the great mass of the rural population were mere labourers.... Pauperism became more and more a pressing evil, especially after 1782, when Gilbert's Act abolished the workhouse test (which compelled all who received relief from the rates to go into the half-imprisonment of a poor-house), and the system of poor law doles in aid of wages was encouraged by the high prices at the end of the century. In 1803 one-seventh of the people was in receipt of poor law relief."[[77]]