normal influence, but as well the irresistible war-time magic of patriotism, in directing the course of events into channels formed by their own interpretations and their own interests. The underlying, traditional conception of class relations, and the brutal and coercive spirit in which that conception was interpreted and enforced during the revolutionary wars and the reaction,-for this conception and for the manner of its enforcement alike, the agrarian more largely than the industrial employers were responsible.

This underlying, traditional conception of class relations had for centuries placed a premium upon servility among the workers. Individuals who evidenced initiative and assertiveness were discountenanced. Survival was made difficult for all except those who, with docility, adapted themselves to conditions of inferiority. A few individuals, to be sure, among the lower classes, found it possible to rise, but only at the expense of deserting their own class and becoming champions if not members of the dominant groups. Through successive generations, those who dared assert their independence within their class were repressed or eliminated, and only those who adapted themselves to the artificially created conditions of inferiority were allowed to survive, unless, perchance, in the various perverted forms of the criminal classes, seeking by different methods the same ends as the aristocracy—and chiefly the privilege of living without labor. The ruling classes attempted, unconsciously no doubt, to cheat nature of her prerogative in determining the hereditary traits of the people. The revenge of nature found expression in the driving of these hereditary traits which the rulers sought to eliminate into various channels essentially hostile to the social order recognized by the rulers. Those who sought to utilize nature as an aid in preying upon the people found nature raising up a class to prey. upon them. Their policy of artificial selection, going back to the times of conquest and feudal disorder, and persistently applied for many centuries, resulted at length in the breeding of masses of people substantially inferior in hereditary traits as well as in social environment. The blight of inferiority thus created survived, and made the problem of social well-being not only environmental but also hereditary, not only a matter of the laborer's liberation from the shackles of a social order artificially weighted against him, but also the freeing of the spirit of the worker from inherited inertia and servility.

4. New conditions adverse to working-class well-being

These were the handicaps that hung heavily at the necks of the workers who fled not without hope of betterment into the newly developing industrial centers. But the hope of betterment itself became a dangerous incentive, because it moved increasing numbers to seek for similar opportunities, till the industrial workers, pressed upon by ever-augmented multitudes of their fellowworkers from the rural regions and the older, oftentimes declining industries, found themselves ultimately ensnared again in the net from which they had momentarily escaped.

The extremely degraded character and the well-nigh inexhaustible numbers of the population whence came the industrial workers are the two outstanding facts explanatory of the failure of these workers to secure for themselves any considerable share of the immense increase of wealth attending the introduction of the new system of industry. But notwithstanding the obvious advantages of that system,-advantages which, in spite of the barriers of the settlement acts, were sufficient to attract vast numbers from the farms and the craftsmen's shops,—the strains and stresses and maladjustments in the new industries were far from favorable to the workers. These strains and stresses and maladjustments were in large part, to be sure, the results of a too rapid influx of workers fleeing from pauperism and economic hapelessness; and they were aggravated by a veritable orgy of wealth-getting by industrial employers at a time when social and governmental restraints were being broken down, save in so far as these restraints promoted the domination and exploitation of the workers; but they were in part, no doubt, inevitable accompaniments of a period of novel and rapid transition. Probably most of the noxious growths that sprang up in the industrial soil were exotics which prudent husbandry could have excluded; but some were indigenous and could have been uprooted only with difficulty even under favorable circumstances.

Among the latter was congestion of population. Unwholesome conditions in respect to housing, sanitation, and health had indeed been the rule rather than the exception among the common people, in town and country alike. London, to be sure, had made considerable progress since the early years of the Stuart Restoration, due in part to the terrible stimulus of simultaneous fire and plague. As for the towns in general, their streets were narrow, crooked, and congested, their houses were crowded, dingy and dank, and their arrangements for lighting, cleaning and sewerage were primitive. The conditions of rural housing have already been described. 44

It is true, of course, that the occupants of the wretched rural hovels, and in a measure the inhabitants of the earlier and smaller towns, had readier access to the invigorating air and sunshine of the open country; but in other respects, the state of housing was almost incredible. With this in mind, one's sensibilities are not so likely to be disturbed by descriptions of conditions * See above, pp. 236, 237.

resulting from the concentration of population in the industrial towns-as when a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society told his fellowmembers in 1787 that he "had too frequently had opportunities of seeing a man with his wife and three or four children all residing in one small room, in which they dress their victuals, eat, work, and sleep.” The problems of housing and public health growing out of the influx of population seem early to have engaged the attention of certain public-spirited citizens of Manchester, and our knowledge of conditions there is relatively adequate as compared with other centers. As early as 1790, a local physician of note, Dr. Ferriar, described clearly the evils of over-crowding, and pointed out some of the more obvious remedies. In a paper addressed in 1790 to a committee for regulating the police,-a paper substantially repeated at a public meeting in 1796,-he stated that cellars were being used extensively as dwellings, the cellars commonly consisting of two rooms. The front room was used as a kitchen, the back room as living quarters. In this living room there was but a single small window, on a level with the ground, and near the roof of the cellar. “It is often patched with boards, and in its best state is so much covered with mud as to admit very little either of air or light. In this cell, the beds of the whole family, sometimes consisting of seven or eight, are placed. The floor of this room is often unpaved: the beds are fixed on the damp earth. But the floor, even when paved, is always damp. In such places, where a candle is required even at noonday, to examine a patient, I have seen the sick without bedsteads, lying on rags; they can seldom afford straw." Some he found living in houses located in blind alleys, in a situation "which excludes them from light and air. Consumption, distortion and idiocy are common in such resorts.” In some districts, conditions were such as to

maintain a continuous epidemic of fevers. “I have known nine patients confined in fevers at the same time,

and crammed into three small, dirty rooms, without the regular attendance of any friend, or of a nurse.' The problem was complicated, he added, by the natural difficulty of newcomers in adjusting themselves to a new environment. "Persons newly arrived from the country are most liable to suffer from these causes, and . there arises a double injury to the town, from the loss of their labor, and the expense of supporting them in their illness.” The good doctor was not without sympathy for the immediate victims, but, like his contemporaries generally, he seems to have been little moved by a sense of injustice. Such conditions were regarded in the first instance as merely furnishing occasions for a virtuous benevolence; and in so far as attempts were made to remove the causes rather than merely to relieve the resultant suffering, the moving forces were those suggested by Dr. Ferriar,-loss of the labor of the victims, and the expense of supporting them,—and in addition, the fear that the plague spots would spread without respect for persons or classes.45

The acuteness of the housing problem in Manchester, Birmingham, and other industrial towns was largely a result of the coming in of the new types of workers, whose labor in factories and shops was dissociated from their homes. In the factories themselves, and in the living quarters connected with the more remotely situated factories, the congested and unwholesome conditions

^ Thomas Henry, F.R.S., in Memoirs, Manchester Lit. and Phil. Soc., III, 162, n. (general discussion of the problems of city growth, 159-173); Ferriar, Medical Histories and Reflections, II, 213-227, III, 76, 77, and passim; Aikin, Description of the Country Round Manchester, 192-196; Reports, Soc. for Bettering the Condition of the Poor, I, 98-115, II, 158-164; Creighton, History of Epidemics, II, 148-151; Brockbank, Sketches of the Staff of the Manchester Infirmary, 131, ff.