This new age, which reaches down to the present time, and of which the end is not yet, was an age of reconstruction. It represented an attempt, unconscious for the most part, to reinstate in a changed form the principles which underlay the old apprenticeship system. It is true that throughout the whole period indentured apprenticeship was in process of gradual decay, and is now become almost a negligible factor in the industrial world; but it is no less true that from its ruins was slowly rising an organization destined to prove a fitting and even a superior substitute. The final stage of development lies still in the future; the adjustments required to meet the complex needs of modern industry are innumerable; and we are only beginning to see the outlines of a new apprenticeship system towards which we have been drifting for nearly a century. To tell in detail the history of these long years of slow progress would be foreign to the purpose of this book; but certain characteristics, which mark the process of change, are sufficiently germane to the discussions of to-day to justify consideration.
In the first place, the forces which repeatedly faced and beat down the resistance of those who stood for unregulated industry were not the forces of economic analysis; few forces that make for great changes are the product of such unimpassioned reason. Factory and kindred legislation were throughout the triumph of sentiment, and not the victory of logic. During the course of the nineteenth century men became slowly more sensitive to the fact of suffering, less tolerant of its continued existence. The Liberal essayist was historically correct when he said contemptuously that humanity was a modern invention. In earlier days little heed was paid to the physical well-being of the individual journeyman or apprentice. If the gilds forbade the carrying on of a craft by night, it was because the dim gloom of ancient illuminants meant bad work, and not because protracted toil made unhealthy workmen. When the State concerned itself with hours of employment, it was to prescribe a minimum, and not to fix a maximum; to keep a man busy, and therefore out of mischief, was deemed more important than to allow him leisure for thought or recreation.
In this new sentiment of humanity lay the motive power which drove Parliament on to spasmodic acts of factory legislation. The sentiment was at once a source of weakness and a source of strength. It was a source of weakness because sentiment is essentially local in its sphere of influence. It does not search out the objects on which its favours are lavished; they must be brought by others to its very doors and repeatedly thrust over the threshold till entrance is forced. It lacks the breadth, the insight, and the calm of that imaginative reason which is now slowly taking its place. In the case of suffering, for example, it troubles itself not at all about the more remote causes of suffering or the more remote sufferer, but surges round some particular sufferer or some particular grievance, existing here and now.[34] Sentiment, at any rate the British type of sentiment, is not touched by abstractions; visions of humanity in the throes of travail leave it unmoved; appeals to the ultimate principles of justice fail to produce even a throb of sympathetic interest; it is only the concrete—the oppressed child or the widowed mother—that lets loose the flood. For the more profound solution of social problems such sentiment is useless, but for the attack of specific evils, especially where the opposition is well organized, it displays amazing stubbornness and resource. Its strength lies in its unreason; argument is of no avail; here are certain cases of suffering it will not tolerate; a remedy must be found and Parliament must find it; there will be no peace until something is done.
It was in this way that regulation of child labour began, and indeed has continued down to the present time. The result is patchy, and the removal of evils partial and unsystematic. There has been, for example, no serious attempt made to set up a minimum standard of conditions under which alone children shall be employed; least of all has the State endeavoured to formulate a new apprenticeship system, adapted to the needs of modern industry. Much indeed has been done in both directions; but much more remains for the future to carry through before we can hope to read in the efficiency of the race the sign-mark of our success. The first characteristic, then, of the age of reconstruction is to be found in the predominating influence of sentiment.
The second characteristic is seen in the triumph of the idealist over the combined forces of the doctrinaire and the practical man. Every proposal for regulating child labour was fought on the same lines; there were the same arguments and the same replies. The individualist urged that State interference was in itself an evil, that, though the consequences might be delayed and the immediate effect even beneficial, you might rest assured that in the long-run your sin would find you out. The wealthy citizen declared that if boys might not climb his chimneys, his chimneys must go unswept; the manufacturer predicted certain ruin to his trade if he were forbidden to use children as seemed best to him; while all united in urging that if the children were not at work they would be doing something worse, and pointed out the obvious cruelty of depriving half-starved parents of the scanty earnings of their half-starved offspring.
To all these and similar objections the idealist, with his clearer vision of the reality of things, and firm in his faith that the prosperity of a people could never be the final outcome of allowing an obvious wrong, made response. He sympathized with the individualist for the dreary pessimism of a creed which could see the future alone coloured with hope if heralded by the sobs of suffering children. The wealthy citizen he bade roughly burn his house and build another sooner than sacrifice the lives of boys to the needs of his chimneys. While as for the manufacturer, he told him, as Mr. Justice Grose had told him earlier, that, if his engines needed children as fuel, his was a trade the country was best rid of. To those employers who pleaded the small wages of the parents he suggested the grim and crude and obvious remedy of paying those parents more. And the idealist, with the sentiment of the British public to back him, won the day.
But if sentiment gave the idealist his victory, it was the future that brought him a full justification. His sin after many years is yet seeking him; the wealthy citizen found other and innocent means of cleansing his chimneys; the manufacturer placidly adapted himself to the new conditions, and his trade flourished exceedingly; the wages of parents rose rapidly, and what small measure of health and happiness that has come to the children of the poor during the last century has come to them through the defeat and the defiance of the individualist.
A hundred years have rolled by, and yet to all new regulation the same old objections are raised by the individualist. But his day is gone, and with his day he also is going. A few, indeed, are left, interesting survivals of the early Victorian age. But for the great majority of the population regulation has no fears; they welcome and invite it. And, further, not only are they willing to forbid unsatisfactory conditions of employment, they are also ready to spend public money to secure a proper environment and a suitable training for children. What they will not tolerate is the continued existence of unnecessary suffering; and they are coming more and more to realize that a vast mass of the suffering of to-day is unnecessary. Principles, even though openly professed, will not look suffering in the face and pass on.[35] Humanity is no longer a modern invention, it has become the guiding spirit of the age.
Thus we can face the morning of the twentieth century in a spirit of hope. We may look for more consistent support and less strenuous opposition than in the past. We may in consequence think out and introduce schemes of a more far-reaching character. Empirical patching will give place to reconstruction on a large scale. In other words, the sentiment of the nineteenth century, wayward and uncertain in its method of action, and at its best troubling itself about a remedy for actual suffering, will be superseded by the imaginative reason of the twentieth, which looks rather to prevention than to cure.