demand for workmen has raised the wages of servants for country work; has made them very scarce and shortened their hours of labor.” The influence of manufacturing was felt even in remoter places, as in the region of Elgin, to the north, where “the price of labor has, in the course of the last fifteen years [since about 1780] risen to nearly double what it was before that period; and this may be accounted for, in a great measure, by the emigration of numbers of both sexes, in that class, to the manufacturing parts of the kingdom.” The same writer reports that in 1794 wages, after having increased a hundred per cent in fifteen years, were, "without victuals, in winter, 6d. to 8d. and in summer 10d. a day." Characteristic of the attitude of the employers of farm labor was the complaint from Clydesdale that “the gains of manufacturing labor, and the show and appearance of greater ease and comfort, among those engaged in it, seduced the peasantry from their residence in the country and the labor of the fields to towns and manufacturing vil

lages.” 40

Although contemporaneous records and comments, even those written from the point of view of the employers of farm labor, are in general accord as to the superior economic well-being of the industrial workers as compared with farm laborers, yet there are occasional statements which seem to qualify the conclusion. These are to the effect that the rapid rise in poor rates was attributable to manufacturing. Such an assertion is made, for instance, by John Holt, the Board of Agricul

o Roger, General View, Angus or Forfar, 23, 24; Sinclair, General View, Northern Counties, 109, 110, 112, 130-132, and Appendix, 33, 41-45 (the second reference to the Appendix being to a passage entitled "Hints as to the means of preventing emigration from the Highlands of Scotland, by the establishment of manufactures there,” particularly cotton manufacturing as in England); Ure, General View, Dumbarton, 89; Donaldson, General View, Elgin or Moray, 23, 24; Naismith, General View, Clydesdale, 74, ff.

ture's Lancashire correspondent, who has already been quoted as saying that manufacturing had led to an "influx of wealth amongst the laboring class,” and had forced farmers and landlords to pay what he deemed excessive

wages.41

It should be remembered that the incidence of the poor-law tax was being hotly debated at the time. The difficulty of rating property other than land and houses resulted in personal property and stock in trade being largely exempt; and the manufacturers, so the landlords urged, profited unduly as a result. Another grievance against the industrial employers was based on the acts of settlement, which made the laborer's home_parish responsible for his support under the poor laws, unless he could secure settlement elsewhere; and it was claimed that the industrial parishes, in need of labor, were allowing laborers to come, but were refusing settlement, and whenever they seemed likely to become dependent upon the rates, were sending them back to the parishes whence they came. It is apparent that if the farm workers, dispossessed by enclosures or broken by the hard and pauperizing conditions of rural labor, could have gained settlement in the towns without the consent of the town authorities, thereby making the industrial parishes responsible for their support,-it is apparent that in such a case the employers of farm labor would have been able to escape even more largely from the results of enclosures and pauper labor, and that the newly rising industrial centers would have been overwhelmed with responsibility for veritable floods of dispossessed and broken rural workers no longer needed by their rural masters.

The poor law and the acts of settlement had long been clumsy and yet on the whole effective instruments wielded by the aristocracy and gentry for the purpose of

" See above, pp. 253, 254, and Holt, General View, Lancashire, 210, 213 (ed. 1795).

42

keeping the rural population in subjection and for utilizing it for their own purposes; and now these instruments were being turned against them, so agrarian employers began to feel, by the newly rising industrial masters of labor. Their resentment found expression in the charge, frequently repeated but wholly untenable in so far as it was applied to the newer industries of the period before the French wars, that manufacturing was responsible for the increase of poor rates. 12

A keen contemporary observer, John Howlett, called attention to this "popular error.” He declared that the proportion of paupers in the industrial regions was much less than in the agricultural regions. The overwhelming evidence of the greater prosperity of the industrial workers seems alone sufficient to justify such a conclusion, but Howlett's judgment was based not alone upon · this reasonable inference but upon what he describes as "surveys of a sufficient number of places of every description, from almost every part of England and Wales." On the basis of this evidence, he concluded that even in the older manufacturing towns, where industry was often static or even in a declining condition, pauperism was less extensive and poor rates were lower than in the ordinary agricultural parish. He estimated that in the chief manufacturing towns, the poor rates amounted to about £1 to every six inhabitants; in smaller towns, of not more than 10,000 inhabitants, the rate was estimated at £1 to three and a half inhabitants; and in country parishes, £1 to two and three-fifths inhabitants. He found the rate lowest in Sheffield, Manchester, and Birmingham. In connection with the question of

a

Cannan, History of Local Rates, 71-101; Ruggles, History of the Poor, I, Preface, xv, 55; W. Young, Observations Preliminary to a Proposed Amendment of the Poor Laws, 30-32; Wedge, General View, Warwickshire, 24. A passage presenting the point of view of industrial parishes is to be found in (Rose), Observations on the Act for the Relief and Encouragement of Friendly Societies, 14.

paupers returned by industrial towns to rural parishes, he added significantly that “the expenses for the poor in the country parishes in the immediate vicinity of these towns are not so high ... (as in ordinary rural parishes] for this very obvious reason, that the flourishing state of their manufactures has considerably advanced the price of agricultural labor, and rendered it more adequate to the necessities of the laborer.” The sums paid for the support of the poor increased rapidly, it is true, in the industrial counties such as Lancashire as well as in the older agricultural districts, but on account of the more rapid increase in population, the per capita increase was smaller. Furthermore, in spite of the acts of settlement by which the laborers' home parishes were in many cases held responsible for their support, the burden of poor rates in the industrial centers was greatly increased by the influx of workers fleeing from intolerable conditions in the country, who, from age or ignorance of industry or other causes were incapable of adjusting themselves to the new environment.43

A complete survey of the laboring population of England on the eve of the advent of the modern industrial system would necessitate the study of various factors not primarily economic, many of which adversely affected the workers, -as the penal code, the prison laws and practices, the game laws, the administration of the poor laws and settlement acts, and the system of apprenticing the children of paupers. These are beyond the scope and purpose of the present study. But our brief survey has sufficed to reveal conditions of pauperism, helplessness, and degradation from which the older economic society seemed to offer no way of escape. To multitudes long hopeless, the new system of production offered promise

" Howlett, in Annals of Agriculture, XI, 6, 7, XVIII, 574-581 ; Hasbach, English Agricultural Laborer, 140, 141; Troughton, History of Liverpool, 145-147; Langford, Century of Birmingham Life, I, 444, ff.

,

of deliverance. From the expropriated farms and commons of the cottagers and yeomen, from the shops and homes of petty manufacturers finding economic independence and often even subsistence no longer possible, from the hovels of the Scotch Highlands, the mountains of Wales, and the undulating fruitful plains of Ireland, plains fruitful of human poverty even more than of the bounties of nature,-all roads led to the mill valleys, cities, factories and mines of the industrial regions as to the promised land. Historical veracity demands the blotting out of the idyllic pictures that have been painted of working-class conditions in agriculture and the older industries preceding the great economic change; it necessitates a modification of the judgment that the status of the workers in the new industrial centers was inherently, inevitably inferior.

During the earlier stages of industrialization, the new industries indubitably ameliorated rather than rendered harsher the conditions of life for the workers. Furthermore, certain considerations frequently overlooked must be taken into account in forming a just conclusion concerning the later effects of industrialism. The conditions prevailing in the new industrial centers were more readily observable than were the conditions of the obscure and widely scattered workers who furnished recruits for the new industries. The stimulus for criticism was less powerful earlier than when the clash of interests between the landed aristocracy and the industrialists led adherents of the former to attack the labor policies of the latter group. The economic policies of the government and of employers, and the economic wellbeing of the workers, were profoundly affected by the quarter-century of wars, which created economic vicissitudes bearing most heavily upon the workers, and which inevitably enabled the dominant groups and the more powerful individuals to utilize not only their natural,