CHAPTER IX
THE ENGLISH LABOR PARTY[ToC]
I
We come now to the land of the industrial revolution—that colossal upheaval which changed the face of society, as the vast continental uplifts of past geological epochs changed the face of the earth. And just as the continents were centuries in settling themselves to their new conditions, so human society is now slowly adjusting itself to the conditions wrought by this violent change. One of the evidences of this gradual readjustment is Socialism. For to Socialism machine industry is a condition precedent. In this sense England has produced modern Socialism.
There is no blacker picture than the England of 1780 to 1840, and no drearier contrast than the quaint villages and their household industries of the earlier period and the "spreading of the hideous town," after Arkwright and Hargreaves and Watt. These inhuman conditions are faithfully and dispassionately revealed in the reports of the various Royal Commissions of Inquiry: statistical mines where Marx and Engels found abundant material for their philosophy of gloom. And from these dull and depressing government folios Charles Kingsley drew his indignant invectives, and Carlyle his trenchant indictments against a society that would imprison its eight-year-old children, its mothers, and its grandmothers in dingy factories fourteen hours a day for the sake of profits, and then release them at night only to find lodgings in the most miserable hovels and rickety tenements. It is almost surprising to one familiar with the details of this gruesome record that a social revolution did not follow immediately in the wake of the industrial revolution.
There were riots at first, and machines were smashed. But the hand of the worker was impotent against the arm of steel. The workman soon resigned himself to his fate and his misery. The poor laws did not help, they only multiplied the burdens upon the state without taking the load from the poor. The laborer was too helpless to help himself, and the state and society were apathetic. The rapid expansion of industry found an ample outlet in the growing commerce to every corner of the world. England was making money. She was gradually shifting control from the traditional landowner to the new factory owner. The landed gentry had inherited a fine sense of patriarchal responsibility. The factory owner had no traditions. He was a parvenu. His interests were machinery and ships, not politics and humanity. He acquiesced in the poor laws as the easiest way out of a miserable mess; he let private charity take its feeble and intermittent course, paying his rates and giving his donations with self-satisfied sanctity.
All this time labor was abundant. The markets of the world were hungry for the goods of English mills. Then came suddenly the Chartist Movement.[1] The flame of discontent spread and a revolution seemed impending. This first great outbreak of English labor was a political movement, fed by economic causes. The repeal of the corn laws and the passage of the factory acts modified economic conditions and mollified labor for the time. The repeal of the corn laws brought cheaper food; the factory acts brought better conditions of labor.
Meanwhile individualism was evolving an economic creed. The Manchester doctrine was the logical outcome of England's insular position and her driving individualistic manufactures. But it was laissez-faire in industrialism, not in unionism. The laboring men were now beginning to organize, and Cobden himself proposed the act that made unionism ineffective as a political force. However, indirectly, free trade stimulated labor, because it brought great prosperity, made work abundant, and employers sanguine. Unions now rapidly multiplied, but they were local, isolated. Their federation into a great national body came later.