The English Utilitarians, Volume I.

The country-gentlemen formed the bulk of the law-making body, and the laws gave the first point of assault of the Utilitarian movement. One explanation is suggested by a phrase attributed to Sir Josiah Child.[8] The laws, he said, were a heap of nonsense, compiled by a few ignorant country-gentlemen, who hardly knew how to make good laws for the government of their own families, much less for the regulation of companies and foreign commerce.

He meant that the parliamentary legislation of the century was the work of amateurs, not of specialists; of an assembly of men more interested in immediate questions of policy or personal intrigue than in general principles, and not of such a centralised body as would set a value upon symmetry and scientific precision. The country-gentleman had strong prejudices and enough common sense to recognise his own ignorance. The product of a traditional order, he clung to traditions, and regarded the old maxims as sacred because no obvious reason could be assigned for them. He was suspicious of abstract theories, and it did not even occur to him that any such process as codification or radical alteration of the laws was conceivable. For the law itself he had the profound veneration which is expressed by Blackstone. It represented the 'wisdom of our ancestors'; the system of first principles, on which the whole order of things reposed, and which must be regarded as an embodiment of right reason. The common law was a tradition, not made by express legislation, but somehow existing apart from any definite embodiment, and revealed to certain learned hierophants. Any changes, required by the growth of new social conditions, had to be made under pretence of applying the old rules supposed to be already in existence. Thus grew up the system of 'judge-made law,' which was to become a special object of the denunciations of Bentham. Child had noticed the incompetence of the country-gentlemen to understand the regulation of commercial affairs. The gap was being filled up, without express legislation, by judicial interpretations of Mansfield and his fellows. This, indeed, marks a characteristic of the whole system. 'Our constitution,' says Professor Dicey,[9] 'is a judge-made constitution, and it bears on its face all the features, good and bad, of judge-made law.' The law of landed property, meanwhile, was of vital and immediate interest to the country-gentleman. But, feeling his own incompetence, he had called in the aid of the expert. The law had been developed in medi?val times, and bore in all its details the marks of the long series of struggles between king and nobles and parliaments. One result had been the elaborate series of legal fictions worked out in the conflict between private interests and public policy, by which lawyers had been able to adapt the rules fitted for an ancient state of society to another in which the very fundamental conceptions were altered. A mysterious system had thus grown up, which deterred any but the most resolute students. Of Fearne's essay upon 'Contingent remainders'(published in 1772) it was said that no work 'in any branch of science could afford a more beautiful instance of analysis.' Fearne had shown the acuteness of 'a Newton or a Pascal.' Other critics dispute this proposition; but in any case the law was so perplexing that it could only be fully understood by one who united antiquarian knowledge to the subtlety of a great logician. The 'vast and intricate machine,' as Blackstone calls it, 'of a voluminous family settlement' required for its explanation the dialectical skill of an accomplished schoolman. The poor country-gentleman could not understand the terms on which he held his own estate without calling in an expert equal to such a task. The man who has acquired skill so essential to his employer's interests is not likely to undervalue it or to be over anxious to simplify the labyrinth in which he shone as a competent guide.

The lawyers who played so important a part by their familiarity with the mysteries of commercial law and landed property, naturally enjoyed the respect of their clients, and were rewarded by adoption into the class. The English barrister aspired to success by himself taking part in politics and legislation. The only path to the highest positions really open to a man of ability, not connected by blood with the great families, was the path which led to the woolsack or to the judge's bench. A great merchant might be the father or father-in-law of peers; a successful soldier or sailor might himself become a peer, but generally he began life as a member of the ruling classes, and his promotion was affected by parliamentary influence. But a successful lawyer might fight his way from a humble position to the House of Lords. Thurlow, son of a country-gentleman; Dunning, son of a country attorney; Ellenborough, son of a bishop and descendant of a long line of North-country 'statesmen'; Kenyon, son of a farmer; Eldon, son of a Newcastle coal merchant, represent the average career of a successful barrister. Some of them rose to be men of political importance, and Thurlow and Eldon had the advantage of keeping George III's conscience-an unruly faculty which had an unfortunately strong influence upon affairs. The leaders of the legal profession, therefore, and those who hoped to be leaders, shared the prejudices, took a part in the struggles, and were rewarded by the honours of the dominant class.

The criminal law became a main topic of reformers. There, as elsewhere, we have a striking example of traditional modes of thought surviving with singular persistence. The rough classification of crimes into felony and misdemeanour, and the strange technical rules about 'benefit of clergy' dating back to the struggles of Henry II. and Becket, remained like ultimate categories of thought. When the growth of social conditions led to new temptations or the appearance of a new criminal class, and particular varieties of crime became conspicuous, the only remedy was to declare that some offence should be 'felony without benefit of clergy,' and therefore punishable by death. By unsystematic and spasmodic legislation the criminal law became so savage as to shock every man of common humanity. It was tempered by the growth of technical rules, which gave many chances of escape to the criminal; and by practical revolt against its excesses, which led to the remission of the great majority of capital sentences.[10] The legislators were clumsy, not intentionally cruel; and the laws, though sanguinary in reality, were more sanguinary in theory than in practice. Nothing, on the other hand, is more conspicuous than the spirit of fair play to the criminal, which struck foreign observers.[11] It was deeply rooted in the whole system. The English judge was not an official agent of an inquisitorial system, but an impartial arbitrator between the prisoner and the prosecutor. In political cases especially a marked change was brought about by the revolution of 1688. If our ancestors talked some nonsense about trial by jury, the system certainly insured that the persons accused of libel or sedition should have a fair trial, and very often something more. Judges of the Jeffreys type had become inconceivable, though impartiality might disappear in cases where the prejudices of juries were actively aroused. Englishmen might fairly boast of their immunity from the arbitrary methods of continental rulers; and their unhesitating confidence in the fairness of the system became so ingrained as to be taken as a matter of course, and scarcely received due credit from later critics of the system.

The country-gentleman, again, was not only the legislator but a most important figure in the judicial and administrative system. As justice of the peace, he was the representative of law and order to his country neighbours. The preface of 1785 to the fifteenth edition of Burn's Justice of the Peace, published originally in 1755, mentions that in the interval between these dates, some three hundred statutes had been passed affecting the duties of justices, while half as many had been repealed or modified. The justice was of course, as a rule, a superficial lawyer, and had to be prompted by his clerk, the two representing on a small scale the general relation between the lawyers and the ruling class. Burn tells the justice for his comfort that the judges will take a lenient view of any errors into which his ignorance may have led him. The discharge of such duties by an independent gentleman was thought to be so desirable and so creditable to him that his want of efficiency must be regarded with consideration. Nor, though the justices have been a favourite butt for satirists, does it appear that the system worked badly. When it became necessary to appoint paid magistrates in London, and the pay, according to the prevalent system, was provided by fees, the new officials became known as 'trading justices,' and their salaries, as Fielding tells us, were some of the 'dirtiest money upon earth.' The justices might perhaps be hard upon a poacher (as, indeed, the game laws became one of the great scandals of the system), or liable to be misled by a shrewd attorney; but they were on the whole regarded as the natural and creditable representatives of legal authority in the country.

The justices, again, discharged functions which would elsewhere belong to an administrative hierarchy, Gneist observes that the power of the justices of the peace represents the centre of gravity of the whole administrative system.[12] Their duties had become so multifarious and perplexed that Burn could only arrange them under alphabetical heads. Gneist works out a systematic account, filling many pages of elaborate detail, and showing how large a part they played in the whole social structure. An intense jealousy of central power was one correlative characteristic. Blackstone remarks in his more liberal humour that the number of new offices held at pleasure had greatly extended the influence of the crown. This refers to the custom-house officers, excise officers, stamp distributors and postmasters. But if the tax-gatherer represented the state, he represented also part of the patronage at the disposal of politicians. A voter was often in search of the place of a 'tidewaiter'; and, as we know, the greatest poet of the day could only be rewarded by making him an exciseman. Any extension of a system which multiplied public offices was regarded with suspicion. Walpole, the strongest minister of the century, had been forced to an ignominious retreat when he proposed to extend the excise. The cry arose that he meant to enslave the country and extend the influence of the crown over all the corporations in England. The country-gentleman had little reason to fear that government would diminish his importance by tampering with his functions. The justices of the peace were called upon to take a great and increasing share in the administration of the poor-law. They were concerned in all manner of financial details; they regulated such police as existed; they looked after the old laws by which the trades were still restricted; and, in theory at least, could fix the rate of wages. Parliament did not override, but only gave the necessary sanction to their activity. If we looked through the journals of the House of Commons during the American War, for example, we should get the impression that the whole business of the legislature was to arrange administrative details. If a waste was to be enclosed, a canal or a highroad to be constructed, there was no public department to be consulted. The gentry of the neighbourhood joined to obtain a private act of parliament which gave the necessary powers to the persons interested. No general enclosure act could be passed, though often suggested. It would imply a central commission, which would only, as was suggested, give rise to jobbery and take power out of the natural hands. Parliament was omnipotent; it could regulate the affairs of the empire or of a parish; alter the most essential laws or act as a court of justice; settle the crown or arrange for a divorce or for the alteration of a private estate. But it objected to delegate authority even to a subordinate body, which might tend to become independent. Thus, if it was the central power and source of all legal authority, it might also be regarded as a kind of federal league, representing the wills of a number of partially independent persons. The gentry could meet there and obtain the sanction of their allies for any measure required in their own little sphere of influence. But they had an instinctive aversion to the formation of any organised body representing the state. The neighbourhood which wanted a road got powers to make it, and would concur in giving powers to others. But if the state were to be intrusted to make roads, ministers would have more places to give, and roads might be made which they did not want. The English roads had long been infamous, but neither was money wasted, as in France, on roads where there was no traffic.[13] Thus we have the combination of an absolute centralisation of legislative power with an utter absence of administrative centralisation. The units meeting in parliament formed a supreme assembly; but they did not sink their own individuality. They only met to distribute the various functions among themselves.

The English parish with its squire, its parson, its lawyer and its labouring population was a miniature of the British Constitution in general. The squire's eldest son could succeed to his position; a second son might become a general or an admiral; a third would take the family living; a fourth, perhaps, seek his fortune at the bar. This implies a conception of other political conditions which curiously illustrate some contemporary conceptions.

NOTES: [8] See Dictionary of National Biography.

[9] The Law of the Constitution, p. 209.

[10] See Sir J. F. Stephen's History of the Criminal Law (1883), i. 470. He quotes Blackstone's famous statement that there were 160 felonies without benefit of clergy, and shows that this gives a very uncertain measure of the severity of the law. A single act making larceny in general punishable by death would be more severe than fifty separate acts, making fifty different varieties of larceny punishable by death. He adds, however, that the scheme of punishment was 'severe to the highest degree, and destitute of every sort of principle or system.' The number of executions in the early part of this century varied apparently from a fifth to a ninth of the capital sentences passed. See Table in Porter's Progress of the Nation (1851), p. 635.

[11] See the references to Cottu's report of 1822 in Stephen's History, i. 429, 439, 451. Cottu's book was translated by Blanco White.

[12] Gneist's Self-Government (1871), p. 194. It is characteristic that J. S. Mill, in his Representative Government, remarks that the 'Quarter Sessions' are formed in the 'most anomalous' way; that they represent the old feudal principle, and are at variance with the fundamental principles of representative government (Rep. Gov. (1867), p. 113). The mainspring of the old system had become a simple anomaly to the new radicalism.

[13] See Arthur Young, passim. There was, however, an improvement even in the first half of the century. See Cunningham's Growth of English Industry, etc. (Modern Times), p. 378.

The history of England during the eighteenth century shows a curious contrast between the political stagnancy and the great industrial activity. The great constitutional questions seemed to be settled; and the statesmen, occupied mainly in sharing power and place, took a very shortsighted view (not for the first time in history) of the great problems that were beginning to present themselves. The British empire in the East was not won by a towering ambition so much as forced upon a reluctant commercial company by the necessities of its position.

The English race became dominant in America; but the political connection was broken off mainly because English statesmen could only regard it from the shopkeeping point of view. When a new world began to arise at the Antipodes, our rulers saw an opportunity not for planting new offshoots of European civilisation, but for ridding themselves of the social rubbish no longer accepted in America. With purblind energy, and eyes doggedly fixed upon the ground at their feet, the race had somehow pressed forwards to illustrate the old doctrine that a man never goes so far as when he does not know whither he is going. While thinking of earning an honest penny by extending the trade, our 'monied-men' were laying the foundation of vast structures to be developed by their descendants.

Politicians, again, had little to do with the great 'industrial revolution' which marked the last half of the century. The main facts are now a familiar topic of economic historians; nor need I speak of them in detail. Though agriculture was still the main industry, and the landowners almost monopolised political power, an ever growing proportion of the people was being collected in towns; the artisans were congregating in large factories; and the great cloud of coal-smoke, which has never dwindled, was already beginning to darken our skies. The change corresponds to the difference between a fully developed organism possessed of a central brain, with an elaborate nervous system, and some lower form in which the vital processes are still carried on by a number of separate ganglia. The concentration of the population in the great industrial centres implied the improvement of the means of commerce; new organisation of industry provided with a corresponding apparatus of machinery; and the systematic exploitation of the stored-up forces of nature. Each set of changes was at once cause and effect, and each was carried on separately, although in relation to the other. Brindley, Arkwright, and Watt may be taken as typical representatives of the three operations. Canals, spinning-jennies, and steam-engines were changing the whole social order.

The development of means of communication had been slow till the last half of the century. The roads had been little changed since they had been first laid down as part of the great network which bound the Roman empire together. Turnpike acts, sanctioning the construction of new roads, became numerous. Palmer's application of the stage-coaches to the carriage of the mails marked an epoch in 1784; and De Quincey's prose poem, 'The Mail-coach,' shows how the unprecedented speed of Palmer's coaches, then spreading the news of the first battles in the Peninsula, had caused them to tyrannise over the opium-eater's dreams. They were discharging at once a political and an industrial function. Meanwhile the Bridgewater canal, constructed between 1759 and 1761, was the first link in a great network which, by the time of the French revolution, connected the seaports and the great centres of industry. The great inventions of machinery were simultaneously enabling manufacturers to take advantage of the new means of communication. The cotton manufacture sprang up soon after 1780 with enormous rapidity. Aided by the application of steam (first applied to a cotton mill in 1785) it passed the woollen trade, the traditional favourite of legislators, and became the most important branch of British trade. The iron trade had made a corresponding start. While the steam-engine, on which Watt had made the first great improvement in 1765, was transforming the manufacturing system, and preparing the advent of the steamship and railroad, Great Britain had become the leading manufacturing and commercial country in the world. The agricultural interest was losing its pre-eminence; and huge towns with vast aggregations of artisan population were beginning to spring up with unprecedented rapidity. The change was an illustration upon a gigantic scale of the doctrines expounded in the Wealth of Nations. Division of labour was being applied to things more important than pin-making, involving a redistribution of functions not as between men covered by the same roof, but between whole classes of society; between the makers of new means of communication and the manufacturers of every kind of material. The whole industrial community might be regarded as one great organism. Yet the organisation was formed by a multitude of independent agencies without any concerted plan. It was thus a vast illustration of the doctrine that each man by pursuing his own interests promoted the interests of the whole, and that government interference was simply a hindrance. The progress of improvement, says Adam Smith, depends upon 'the uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition,' which often succeeds in spite of the errors of government, as nature often overcomes the blunders of doctors. It is, as he infers, 'the highest impertinence and presumption for kings and ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of private people' by sumptuary laws and taxes upon imports.[31] To the English manufacturer or engineer government appeared as a necessary evil. It allowed the engineer to make roads and canals, after a troublesome and expensive process of application. It granted patents to the manufacturer, but the patents were a source of perpetual worry and litigation. The Chancellor of the Exchequer might look with complacency upon the development of a new branch of trade; but it was because he was lying in wait to come down upon it with a new tax or system of duties.

The men who were the chief instruments of the process were 'self-made'; they were the typical examples of Mr. Smiles's virtue of self-help; they owed nothing to government or to the universities which passed for the organs of national culture. The leading engineers began as ordinary mechanics. John Metcalf (1717-1810), otherwise 'blind Jack of Knaresborough,' was a son of poor parents. He had lost his sight by smallpox at the age of six, and, in spite of his misfortune, became a daring rider, wrestler, soldier, and carrier, and made many roads in the north of England, executing surveys and constructing the works himself. James Brindley (1716-1772), son of a midland collier, barely able to read or write, working out plans by processes which he could not explain, and lying in bed till they took shape in his brain, a rough mechanic, labouring for trifling weekly wages, created the canals which mainly enabled Manchester and Liverpool to make an unprecedented leap in prosperity. The two great engineers, Thomas Telford (1757-1834), famous for the Caledonian canal and the Menai bridge; and John Rennie (1761-1821), drainer of Lincolnshire fens, and builder of Waterloo bridge and the Plymouth breakwater, rose from the ranks. Telford inherited and displayed in a different direction the energies of Eskdale borderers, whose achievements in the days of cattle-stealing were to be made famous by Scott: Rennie was the son of an East Lothian farmer. Both of them learned their trade by actual employment as mechanics. The inventors of machinery belonged mainly to the lower middle classes. Kay was a small manufacturer; Hargreaves a hand-loom weaver; Crompton the son of a small farmer; and Arkwright a country barber. Watt, son of a Greenock carpenter, came from the sturdy Scottish stock, ultimately of covenanting ancestry, from which so many eminent men have sprung.

The new social class, in which such men were the leaders, held corresponding principles. They owed whatever success they won to their own right hands. They were sturdy workers, with eyes fixed upon success in life, and success generally of course measured by a money criterion. Many of them showed intellectual tastes, and took an honourable view of their social functions. Watt showed his ability in scientific inquiries outside of the purely industrial application; Josiah Wedgwood, in whose early days the Staffordshire potters had led a kind of gipsy life, settling down here and there to carry on their trade, had not only founded a great industry, but was a man of artistic taste, a patron of art, and a lover of science. Telford, the Eskdale shepherd, was a man of literary taste, and was especially friendly with the typical man of letters, Southey. Others, of course, were of a lower type. Arkwright combined the talents of an inventor with those of a man of business. He was a man, says Baines (the historian of the cotton trade), who was sure to come out of an enterprise with profit, whatever the result to his partners. He made a great fortune, and founded a county family. Others rose in the same direction. The Peels, for example, represented a line of yeomen. One Peel founded a cotton business; his son became a baronet and an influential member of parliament; and his grandson went to Oxford, and became the great leader of the Conservative party, although like Walpole, he owed his power to a kind of knowledge in which his adopted class were generally deficient.

The class which owed its growing importance to the achievements of such men was naturally imbued with their spirit. Its growth meant the development of a class which under the old order had been strictly subordinate to the ruling class, and naturally regarded it with a mingled feeling of respect and jealousy. The British merchant felt his superiority in business to the average country-gentleman; he got no direct share of the pensions and sinecures which so profoundly affected the working of the political machinery, and yet his highest ambition was to rise to be himself a member of the class, and to found a family which might flourish in the upper atmosphere. The industrial classes were inclined to favour political progress within limits. They were dissenters because the church was essentially part of the aristocracy; and they were readiest to denounce the abuses from which they did not profit. The agitators who supported Wilkes, solid aldermen and rich merchants, represented the view which was popular in London and other great cities. They were the backbone of the Whig party when it began to demand a serious reform. Their radicalism, however, was not thoroughly democratic. Many of them aspired to become members of the ruling class, and a shopkeeper does not quarrel too thoroughly with his customers. The politics of individuals were of course determined by accidents. Some of them might retain the sympathy of the class from which they sprang, and others might adopt an even extreme version of the opinions of the class to which they desired to rise. But, in any case, the divergence of interest between the capitalists and the labourers was already making itself felt. The self-made man, it is said, is generally the hardest master. He approves of the stringent system of competition, of which he is himself a product. It clearly enables the best man to win, for is he not himself the best man? The class which was the great seat of movement had naturally to meet all the prejudices which are roused by change. The farmers near London, as Adam Smith tells us,[32] petitioned against an extension of turnpike roads, which would enable more distant farmers to compete in their market. But the farmers were not the only prejudiced persons. All the great inventors of machinery, Kay and Arkwright and Watt, had constantly to struggle against the old workmen who were displaced by their inventions. Although, therefore, the class might be Whiggish, it did not share the strongest revolutionary passions. The genuine revolutionists were rather the men who destroyed the manufacturer's machines, and were learning to regard him as a natural enemy. The manufacturer had his own reasons for supporting government. Our foreign policy during the century was in the long run chiefly determined by the interests of our trade, however much the trade might at times be hampered by ill-conceived regulations. It is remarkable that Adam Smith[33] argues that, although the capitalist is acuter that the country-gentleman, his acuteness is chiefly displayed by knowing his own interests better. Those interests, he thinks, do not coincide so much as the interests of the country-gentleman with the general interests of the country. Consequently the country-gentleman, though less intelligent, is more likely to favour a national and liberal policy. The merchant, in fact, was not a free-trader because he had read Adam Smith or consciously adopted Smith's principles, but because or in so far as particular restrictions interfered with him. Arthur Young complains bitterly of the manufacturers who supported the prohibition to export English wool, and so protected their own class at the expense of agriculturists. Wedgwood, though a good liberal and a supporter of Pitt's French treaty in 1786, joined in protesting against the proposal for free-trade with Ireland. The Irish, he thought, might rival his potteries. Thus, though as a matter of fact the growing class of manufacturers and merchants were inclined in the main to liberal principles, it was less from adhesion to any general doctrine than from the fact that the existing restrictions and prejudices generally conflicted with their plain interests.

Another characteristic is remarkable. Though the growth of manufactures and commerce meant the growth of great towns, it did not mean the growth of municipal institutions. On the contrary, as I shall presently have to notice, the municipalities were sinking to their lowest ebb. Manufactures, in the first instance, spread along the streams into country districts: and to the great manufacturer, working for his own hand, his neighbours were competitors as much as allies. The great towns, however, which were growing up, showed the general tendencies of the class. They were centres not only of manufacturing but of intellectual progress. The population of Birmingham, containing the famous Soho works of Boulton and Watt, had increased between 1740 and 1780 from 24,000 to 74,000 inhabitants. Watt's partner Boulton started the 'Lunar Society' at Birmingham.[34] Its most prominent member was Erasmus Darwin, famous then for poetry which is chiefly remembered by the parody in the Anti-Jacobin; and now more famous as the advocate of a theory of evolution eclipsed by the teaching of his more famous grandson, and, in any case, a man of remarkable intellectual power. Among those who joined in the proceedings was Edgeworth, who in 1768 was speculating upon moving carriages by steam, and Thomas Day, whose Sandford and Merton helped to spread in England the educational theories of Rousseau. Priestley, who settled at Birmingham in 1780, became a member, and was helped in his investigations by Watt's counsels and Wedgwood's pecuniary help. Among occasional visitors were Smeaton, Sir Joseph Banks, Solander, and Herschel of scientific celebrity; while the literary magnate, Dr. Parr, who lived between Warwick and Birmingham, occasionally joined the circle. Wedgwood, though too far off to be a member, was intimate with Darwin and associated in various enterprises with Boulton. Wedgwood's congenial partner, Thomas Bentley (1731-1780), had been in business at Manchester and at Liverpool. He had taken part in founding the Warrington 'Academy,' the dissenting seminary (afterwards moved to Manchester) of which Priestley was tutor (1761-1767), and had lectured upon art at the academy founded at Liverpool in 1773. Another member of the academy was William Roscoe (1753-1831), whose literary taste was shown by his lives of Lorenzo de Medici and Leo X., and who distinguished himself by opposing the slave-trade, then the infamy of his native town. Allied with him in this movement were William Rathbone and James Currie (1756-1805) the biographer of Burns, a friend of Darwin and an intelligent physician. At Manchester Thomas Perceval (1740-1804) founded the 'Literary and Philosophical Society' in 1780. He was a pupil of the Warrington Academy, which he afterwards joined on removing to Manchester, and he formed the scheme afterwards realised by Owens College. He was an early advocate of sanitary measures and factory legislation, and a man of scientific reputation. Other members of the society were: John Ferriar (1761-1815), best known by his Illustrations of Sterne, but also a man of literary and scientific reputation; the great chemist, John Dalton (1766-1844), who contributed many papers to its transactions; and, for a short time, the Socialist Robert Owen, then a rising manufacturer. At Norwich, then important as a manufacturing centre, was a similar circle. William Taylor, an eminent Unitarian divine, who died at the Warrington Academy in 1761, had lived at Norwich. One of his daughters married David Martineau and became the mother of Harriet Martineau, who has described the Norwich of her early years. John Taylor, grandson of William, was father of Mrs. Austin, wife of the jurist. He was a man of literary tastes, and his wife was known as the Madame Roland of Norwich. Mrs. Opie (1765-1853) was daughter of James Alderson, a physician of Norwich, and passed most of her life there. William Taylor (1761-1836), another Norwich manufacturer, was among the earliest English students of German literature. Norwich had afterwards the unique distinction of being the home of a provincial school of artists. John Crome (1788-1821), son of a poor weaver, and John Sell Cotman (1782-1842) were its leaders; they formed a kind of provincial academy, and exhibited pictures which have been more appreciated since their death. At Bristol, towards the end of the century, were similar indications of intellectual activity. Coleridge and Southey found there a society ready to listen to their early lectures, and both admired Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808), a physician, a chemist, a student of German, an imitator of Darwin in poetry, and an assailant of Pitt in pamphlets. He had married one of Edgeworth's daughters. With the help and advice of Wedgwood and Watt, he founded the 'Pneumatic Institute' at Clifton in 1798, and obtained the help of Humphry Davy, who there made some of his first discoveries. Davy was soon transported to the Royal Institution, founded at the suggestion of Count Rumford in 1799, which represented the growth of a popular interest in the scientific discoveries.

The general tone of these little societies represents, of course, the tendency of the upper stratum of the industrial classes. In their own eyes they naturally represented the progressive element of society. They were Whigs-for 'radicalism' was not yet invented-but Whigs of the left wing; accepting the aristocratic precedency, but looking askance at the aristocratic prejudices. They were rationalists, too, in principle, but again within limits: openly avowing the doctrines which in the Established church had still to be sheltered by ostensible conformity to the traditional dogmas. Many of them professed the Unitarianism to which the old dissenting bodies inclined. 'Unitarianism,' said shrewd old Erasmus Darwin, 'is a feather-bed for a dying Christian.' But at present such men as Priestley and Price were only so far on the road to a thorough rationalism as to denounce the corruptions of Christianity, as they denounced abuses in politics, without anticipating a revolutionary change in church and state. Priestley, for example, combined 'materialism' and 'determinism' with Christianity and a belief in miracles, and controverted Horsley upon one side and Paine on the other.

NOTES: [31] Wealth of Nations, bk. ii. ch. iii.

[32] Wealth of Nations, bk. i. ch. xi. § 1.

[33] Ibid. bk. i. ch. xi. conclusion.

[34] Smiles's Watt and Boulton, p. 292.

Perhaps the gravest of all the problems which were to occupy the coming generation was the problem of pauperism. The view taken by the Utilitarians was highly characteristic and important. I will try to indicate the general position of intelligent observers at the end of the century by referring to the remarkable book of Sir Frederick Morton Eden.

Its purport is explained by the title: 'The State of the Poor; or, an History of the Labouring Classes of England from the Norman Conquest to the present period; in which are particularly considered their domestic economy, with respect to diet, dress, fuel, and habitation; and the various plans which have from time to time been proposed and adopted for the relief of the poor' (3 vols. 4to, 1797). Eden[74] (1766-1809) was a man of good family and nephew of the first Lord Auckland, who negotiated Pitt's commercial treaty. He graduated as B.A. from Christ Church, Oxford, in 1787; married in 1792, and at his death (14th Nov. 1809) was chairman of the Globe Insurance Company. He wrote various pamphlets upon economical topics; contributed letters signed 'Philanglus' to Cobbett's Porcupine, the anti-jacobin paper of the day; and is described by Bentham[75] as a 'declared disciple' and a 'highly valued friend.' He may be reckoned, therefore, as a Utilitarian, though politically he was a Conservative. He seems to have been a man of literary tastes as well as a man of business, and his book is a clear and able statement of the points at issue.

Eden's attention had been drawn to the subject by the distress which followed the outbreak of the revolutionary war. He employed an agent who travelled through the country for a year with a set of queries drawn up after the model of those prepared by Sinclair for his Statistical Account of Scotland. He thus anticipated the remarkable investigation made in our own time by Mr. Charles Booth. Eden made personal inquiries and studied the literature of the subject. He had a precursor in Richard Burn (1709-1785), whose History of the Poor-laws appeared in 1764, and a competitor in John Ruggles, whose History of the Poor first appeared in Arthur Young's Annals, and was published as a book in 1793 (second edition, 1797). Eden's work eclipsed Ruggles's. It has a permanent value as a collection of facts; and was a sign of the growing sense of the importance of accurate statistical research. The historian of the social condition of the people should be grateful to one who broke ground at a time when the difficulty of obtaining a sound base for social inquiries began to make itself generally felt. The value of the book for historical purposes lies beyond my sphere. His first volume, I may say, gives a history of legislation from the earliest period; and contains also a valuable account of the voluminous literature which had grown up during the two preceding centuries. The other two summarise the reports which he had received. I will only say enough to indicate certain critical points. Eden's book unfortunately was to mark, not a solution of the difficulty but, the emergence of a series of problems which were to increase in complexity and ominous significance through the next generation.

The general history of the poor-law is sufficiently familiar.[76] The medi?val statutes take us to a period at which the labourer was still regarded as a serf; and a man who had left his village was treated like a fugitive slave. A long series of statutes regulated the treatment of the 'vagabond.' The vagabond, however, had become differentiated from the pauper. The decay of the ancient order of society and its corresponding institutions had led to a new set of problems; and the famous statute of Elizabeth (1601) had laid down the main lines of the system which is still in operation.

When the labourer was regarded as in a servile condition, he might be supported from the motives which lead an owner to support his slaves, or by the charitable energies organised by ecclesiastical institutions. He had now ceased to be a serf, and the institutions which helped the poor man or maintained the beggar were wrecked. The Elizabethan statute gave him, therefore, a legal claim to be supported, and, on the other hand, directed that he should be made to work for his living. The assumption is still that every man is a member of a little social circle. He belongs to his parish, and it is his fellow-parishioners who are bound to support him. So long as this corresponded to facts, the system could work satisfactorily. With the spread of commerce, and the growth of a less settled population, difficulties necessarily arose. The pauper and the vagabond represent a kind of social extravasation; the 'masterless man' who has strayed from his legitimate place or has become a superfluity in his own circle. The vagabond could be flogged, sent to prison, or if necessary hanged, but it was more difficult to settle what to do with a man who was not a criminal, but simply a product in excess of demand. All manner of solutions had been suggested by philanthropists and partly adopted by the legislature. One point which especially concerns us is the awkwardness or absence of an appropriate administrative machinery.

The parish, the unit on which the pauper had claims, meant the persons upon whom the poor-rate was assessed. These were mainly farmers and small tradesmen who formed the rather vague body called the vestry. 'Overseers' were appointed by the ratepayers themselves; they were not paid, and the disagreeable office was taken in turn for short periods. The most obvious motive with the average ratepayer was of course to keep down the rates and to get the burthen of the poor as much as possible out of his own parish. Each parish had at least an interest in economy. But the economical interest also produced flagrant evils.

In the first place, there was the war between parishes. The law of settlement-which was to decide to what parish a pauper belonged-originated in an act of 1662. Eden observes that the short clause in this short act had brought more profit to the lawyers than 'any other point in the English jurisprudence.'[77] It is said that the expense of such a litigation before the act of 1834 averaged from ￡300,000 to ￡350,000 a year.[78] Each parish naturally endeavoured to shift the burthen upon its neighbours; and was protected by laws which enabled it to resist the immigration of labourers or actually to expel them when likely to become chargeable. This law is denounced by Adam Smith[79] as a 'violation of natural liberty and justice.' It was often harder, he declared, for a poor man to cross the artificial boundaries of his parish than to cross a mountain ridge or an arm of the sea. There was, he declared, hardly a poor man in England over forty who had not been at some time 'cruelly oppressed' by the working of this law. Eden thinks that Smith had exaggerated the evil: but a law which operated by preventing a free circulation of labour, and made it hard for a poor man to seek the best price for his only saleable commodity, was, so far, opposed to the fundamental principles common to Smith and Eden. The law, too, might be used oppressively by the niggardly and narrow-minded. The overseer, as Burn complained,[80] was often a petty tyrant: his aim was to depopulate his parish; to prevent the poor from obtaining a settlement; to make the workhouse a terror by placing it under the management of a bully; and by all kinds of chicanery to keep down the rates at whatever cost to the comfort and morality of the poor. This explains the view taken by Arthur Young, and generally accepted at the period, that the poor-law meant depopulation. Workhouses had been started in the seventeenth century[81] with the amiable intention of providing the industrious poor with work. Children might be trained to industry and the pauper might be made self-supporting. Workhouses were expected that is, to provide not only work but wages. Defoe, in his Giving Alms no Charity, pointed out the obvious objections to the workhouse considered as an institution capable of competing with the ordinary industries. Workhouses, in fact, soon ceased to be profitable. Their value, however, in supplying a test for destitution was recognised; and by an act of 1722, parishes were allowed to set up workhouses, separately or in combination, and to strike off the lists of the poor those who refused to enter them. This was the germ of the later 'workhouse test.'[82] When grievances arose, the invariable plan, as Nicholls observes,[83] was to increase the power of the justices. Their discretion was regarded 'as a certain cure for every shortcoming of the law and every evil arising out of it.' The great report of 1834 traces this tendency[84] to a clause in an act passed in the reign of William III., which was intended to allow the justices to check the extravagance of parish officers. They were empowered to strike off persons improperly relieved. This incidental regulation, widened by subsequent interpretations, allowed the magistrates to order relief, and thereby introduced an incredible amount of demoralisation.

The course was natural enough, and indeed apparently inevitable. The justices of the peace represented the only authority which could be called in to regulate abuses arising from the incapacity and narrow local interests of the multitudinous vestries. The schemes of improvement generally involved some plan for a larger area. If a hundred or a county were taken for the unit, the devices which depopulated a parish would no longer be applicable.[85] The only scheme actually carried was embodied in 'Gilbert's act' (1782), obtained by Thomas Gilbert (1720-1798), an agent of the duke of Bridgewater, and an active advocate of poor-law reform in the House of Commons. This scheme was intended as a temporary expedient during the distress caused by the American War; and a larger and more permanent scheme which it was to introduce failed to become law. It enabled parishes to combine if they chose to provide common workhouses, and to appoint 'guardians.' The justices, as usual, received more powers in order to suppress the harsh dealing of the old parochial authorities. The guardians, it was assumed, could always find 'work,' and they were to relieve the able-bodied without applying the workhouse test. The act, readily adopted, thus became a landmark in the growth of laxity.[86]

At the end of the century a rapid development of pauperism had taken place. The expense, as Eden had to complain, had doubled in twenty years. This took place simultaneously with the great development of manufactures. It is not perhaps surprising, though it may be melancholy, that increase of wealth shall be accompanied by increase of pauperism. Where there are many rich men, there will be a better field for thieves and beggars. A life of dependence becomes easier though it need not necessarily be adopted. Whatever may have been the relation of the two phenomena, the social revolution made the old social arrangements more inadequate. Great aggregations of workmen were formed in towns, which were still only villages in a legal sense. Fluctuations of trade, due to war or speculation, brought distress to the improvident; and the old assumption that every man had a proper place in a small circle, where his neighbours knew all about him, was further than ever from being verified. One painful result was already beginning to show itself. Neglected children in great towns had already excited compassion. Thomas Coram (1668?-1751) had been shocked by the sight of dying children exposed in the streets of London, and succeeded in establishing the Foundling Hospital (founded in 1742). In 1762, Jonas Hanway (1712-1786) obtained a law for boarding out children born within the bills of mortality. The demand for children's labour, produced by the factories, seemed naturally enough to offer a better chance for extending such charities. Unfortunately among the people who took advantage of it were parish officials, eager to get children off their hands, and manufacturers concerned only to make money out of childish labour. Hence arose the shameful system for which remedies (as I shall have to notice) had to be sought in a later generation.

Meanwhile the outbreak of the revolutionary war had made the question urgent. When Manchester trade suffered, as Eden tells us in his reports, many workmen enlisted in the army, and left their children to be supported by the parish. Bad seasons followed in 1794 and 1795, and there was great distress in the agricultural districts. The governing classes became alarmed. In December 1795 Whitbread introduced a bill providing that the justices of the peace should fix a minimum rate of wages. Upon a motion for the second reading, Pitt made the famous speech (12th December) including the often-quoted statement that when a man had a family, relief should be 'a matter of right and honour, instead of a ground of opprobrium and contempt.'[87] Pitt had in the same speech shown his reading of Adam Smith by dwelling upon the general objections to state interference with wages, and had argued that more was to be gained by removing the restrictions upon the free movement of labour. He undertook to produce a comprehensive measure; and an elaborate bill of 130 clauses was prepared in 1796.[88] The rates were to be used to supplement inadequate wages; 'schools of industry' were to be formed for the support of superabundant children; loans might be made to the poor for the purchase of a cow;[89] and the possession of property was not to disqualify for the receiving relief. In short, the bill seems to have been a model of misapplied benevolence. The details were keenly criticised by Bentham, and the bill never came to the birth. Other topics were pressing enough at this time to account for the failure of a measure so vast in its scope. Meanwhile something had to be done. On 6th May 1795 the Berkshire magistrates had passed certain resolutions called from their place of meeting, the 'Speenhamland Act of Parliament.' They provided that the rate of wages of a labourer should be increased in proportion to the price of corn and to the number of his family-a rule which, as Eden observes, tended to discourage economy of food in times of scarcity. They also sanctioned the disastrous principle of paying part of the wages out of rates. An act passed in 1796 repealed the old restrictions upon out-door relief; and thus, during the hard times that were to follow, the poor-laws were adapted to produce the state of things in which, as Cobbett says (in 1821) 'every labourer who has children is now regularly and constantly a pauper.'[90] The result represents a curious compromise. The landowners, whether from benevolence or fear of revolution, desired to meet the terrible distress of the times. Unfortunately their spasmodic interference was guided by no fixed principles, and acted upon a class of institutions not organised upon any definite system. The general effect seems to have been that the ratepayers, no longer allowed to 'depopulate,' sought to turn the compulsory stream of charity partly into their own pockets. If they were forced to support paupers, they could contrive to save the payment of wages. They could use the labour of the rate-supported pauper instead of employing independent workmen. The evils thus produced led before long to most important discussions.[91] The ordinary view of the poor-law was inverted. The prominent evil was the reckless increase of a degraded population instead of the restriction of population. Eden's own view is sufficiently indicative of the light in which the facts showed themselves to intelligent economists. As a disciple of Adam Smith, he accepts the rather vague doctrine of his master about the 'balance' between labour and capital. If labour exceeds capital, he says, the labourer must starve 'in spite of all political regulations.'[92] He therefore looks with disfavour upon the whole poor-law system. It is too deeply rooted to be abolished, but he thinks that the amount to be raised should not be permitted to exceed the sum levied on an average of previous years. The only certain result of Pitt's measure would be a vast expenditure upon a doubtful experiment: and one main purpose of his publication was to point out the objections to the plan. He desires what seemed at that time to be almost hopeless, a national system of education; but his main doctrine is the wisdom of reliance upon individual effort. The truth of the maxim 'pas trop gouverner,' he says,[93] has never been better illustrated than by the contrast between friendly societies and the poor-laws. Friendly societies had been known, though they were still on a humble scale, from the beginning of the century, and had tended to diminish pauperism in spite of the poor-laws. Eden gives many accounts of them. They seem to have suggested a scheme proposed by the worthy Francis Maseres[94] (1731-1824) in 1772 for the establishment of life annuities. A bill to give effect to this scheme passed the House of Commons in 1773 with the support of Burke and Savile, but was thrown out in the House of Lords. In 1786 John Acland (died 1796), a Devonshire clergyman and justice of the peace, proposed a scheme for uniting the whole nation into a kind of friendly society for the support of the poor when out of work and in old age. It was criticised by John Howlett (1731-1804), a clergyman who wrote much upon the poor-laws. He attributes the growth of pauperism to the rise of prices, and calculates that out of an increased expenditure of ￡700,000, ￡219,000 had been raised by the rich, and the remainder 'squeezed out of the flesh, blood, and bones of the poor,' An act for establishing Acland's crude scheme failed next year in parliament.[95] The merit of the societies, according to Eden, was their tendency to stimulate self-help; and how to preserve that merit, while making them compulsory, was a difficult problem. I have said enough to mark a critical and characteristic change of opinion. One source of evil pointed out by contemporaries had been the absence of any central power which could regulate and systematise the action of the petty local bodies. The very possibility of such organisation, however, seems to have been simply inconceivable. When the local bodies became lavish instead of over-frugal, the one remedy suggested was to abolish the system altogether.

NOTES: [74] See Dictionary of National Biography.

[75] Works, i. 255.

[76] See Sir G. Nicholls's History of the Poor-law, 1854. A new edition, with life by H. G. Willink, appeared in 1898.

[77] History, i. 175.

[78] M'Culloch's note to Wealth of Nations, p. 65. M'Culloch in his appendix makes some sensible remarks upon the absence of any properly constituted parochial 'tribunal.'

[79] Wealth of Nations, bk. i. ch. x.

[80] See passage quoted in Eden's History, i. 347.

[81] Thomas Firmin (1632-1677), a philanthropist, whose Socinianism did not exclude him from the friendship of such liberal bishops as Tillotson and Fowler, started a workhouse in 1676.

[82] Nicholls (1898), ii. 14.

[83] Ibid. (1898), ii. 123.

[84] Report, p. 67.

[85] William Hay, for example, carried resolutions in the House of Commons in 1735, but failed to carry a bill which had this object. See Eden's History, i. 396. Cooper in 1763 proposed to make the hundred the unit.-Nicholls's History, i. 58. Fielding proposes a similar change in London. Dean Tucker speaks of the evil of the limited area in his Manifold Causes of the Increase of the Poor (1760).

[86] Nicholls, ii. 88.

[87] Parl. Hist. xxxii. 710.

[88] A full abstract is given in Edens History, iii. ccclxiii. etc.

[89] Bentham observes (Works, viii. 448) that the cow will require the three acres to keep it.

[90] Cobbett's Political Works, vi. 64

[91] I need only note here that the first edition of Malthus's Essay appeared in 1798, the year after Eden's publication.

[92] Eden's History, i. 583.

[93] Ibid. i. 587.

[94] Maseres, an excellent Whig, a good mathematician, and a respected lawyer, is perhaps best known at present from his portrait in Charles Lamb's Old Benchers.

[95] It maybe noticed as an anticipation of modern schemes that in 1792 Paine proposed a system of 'old age pensions,' for which the necessary funds were to be easily obtained when universal peace had abolished all military charges. See State Trials, xxv. 175.