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true that the influence of the machine reaches far beyond the physical fact, and that it exercises an overlordship over the habits and lives of all. But this overlordship is partial and incomplete. The lives and habits of the great majority are still more immediately affected by the older craft which directly affects their work than by the influence of the newer and more brilliant technique.

24. The Comprehensiveness of the Revolution"

BY J. H. CLAPHAM

No region of Europe remained altogether unaffected by that long series of economic developments which has changed the face and profoundly affected the structure of modern society. It was no mere industrial revolution; its story is not a list of inventions or a biography of inventors. Nor is it simply the story of capital and capitalistic production. Side by side with mechanical invention, the rising power of capital, the extension of economic freedom, and the expansion of international trade went an astonishing growth in population and a partial introduction of the methods and results of exact science into economic affairs. The distinctive mark of economic history during this period is to be found, not in any change or group of changes, but rather in the coincidence of many types of change and the rapidity with which some of these types developed. Everywhere there was movement, but the causes of the movement were infinitely varied.

The whole eighteenth century had been an age of steady industrial development and of great commercial activity. Intercourse among the nations was more frequent and more free than ever before. The more or less scientific and comparative study of natural resources was now no new thing. Imitation of superior foreign methods in agriculture, commerce, and the arts, was keenly pursued. There was an accelerating accumulation of capital. Banking, the necessary prerequisite to investment and the organ of highly developed commerce, had made conspicuous progress.

Trade was cutting its own channels, wherever Government would permit. In the more advanced countries it had refused, long before the middle of the eighteenth century, to confine itself to fairs and markets, after the medieval fashion. It had become an everyday matter, had ceased to be a thing of times and seasons.

A widespread care for the improvement of internal means of

Adapted from chap. xxiii, "Economic Change," in A Cambridge Modern History, X, 727-739 (1907).

communication, combined with an ever-growing international trade, had quickened the pulse of economic life. In Holland, Italy, and even bankrupt France, the work went on. In Great Britain the task. of improving river navigation, reconstructing roads, and cutting navigable canals was in full swing in the seventies. Because of excess of tolls elsewhere, Britain alone was able to make full use of the work of the road and canal builders.

England exemplified the close connection which must always exist between improvement in the means of transport, the concentration of population, and a progressive agriculture. Where the cultivator works only to supply his own needs he rarely escapes from the crushing compulsion of traditional methods. The demand of the town and roads are essential if there is to be rapid movement on the land. In England the growth of London, to which most of the new roads led, furnished a main driving force. Decline in common field husbandry was associated in Great Britain with free and rational methods and with spontaneous agricultural progress.

The familiar series of revolutionary inventions towards the close of the century fell upon prepared soil. In all the western nations there existed some mining and manufacturing on a large scale, and many trades in which the hand-workers were to a considerable extent dependent on the capitalist employer. Large and small industrial enterprises were everywhere encouraged by the governments. The progress in organization along industrial lines was due mainly to the fact that industrial establishments worked for export and so were brought under the influence of a commercial system already organized on capitalistic lines.

A right instinct has selected the invention of spinning machinery and the perfection of the steam-engine as the chief industrial events of the later eighteenth century. The first led to the reorganization of what had long been the greatest group of industries; the second furnished motive power for both new and old mechanical processes. But they were only the most important links in a long chain of improvements which freer industry, increasing skill and capital, expanding commerce, and a more scientific handling of technical problems, introduced into various branches of manufacture. In almost all branches of industry England evolved and applied fresh methods of production. Of great significance for the general progress of manufacturing was the increased production of raw iron. Of even greater significance was the establishment, during the first forty years of the nineteenth century, of mechanical engineering as the organized capitalistic industry, upon which all other industries were beginning to depend.

The cotton trade occupies an unique position in the general movement. It was young; in the eighteenth century its various parts had been but imperfectly organized; and, consequently, it was adaptable. The wool-working trades on the contrary were old, highly organized, and in certain districts most conservative. It is in no way surprising therefore that machinery and steam were more slowly introduced in them than in the cotton trade. Wool and flax and cotton spinning on the wheel died as the machine gained ground. Cotton, an exotic, had never been spun extensively outside the actual manufacturing districts. As a result the work passed much more quickly than that of spinning wool into the mills.

In fact few trades remained untouched by the general advance in technique and the movement towards a more capitalistic organization. To the steady improvement of manufacturing processes were added the new and expensive motor power, better and more complex machines, and the new knowledge of the natural sciences. Trades ancillary to those of spinning and weaving, such as calicoprinting, bleaching, and dyeing, were refashioned. Machinery and chemistry began to influence the ancient and conservative crafts of tanning and leather-working. In pottery-making, in printing, in brewing, in glass-making, and in a score of other industries, methods were revised and the scale of operations for the individual firm extended. The power-driven machine took hold even of simple crafts like carpentry and shoemaking. In coal-mining the combined effects of the new power, the new needs, and the new knowledge were conspicuous. It was in the mines that steam had first been used for pumping. Yet all these things were but small beginnings compared with the developments of the later nineteenth century.

The system of transportation consequent upon the changes mentioned was not developed until well in the nineteenth century. Turnpikes tended to become more numerous and to be better laid and better graded. Work on harbors and estuaries and docks was undertaken concurrently with that on roads. Canals were constructed. The Napoleonic wars witnessed the beginnings, the peace the utilization of steam transport both on land and sea. It was in the year of Waterloo that a steamer first made the passage from London to Glasgow. Yet progress was slow. In fact the second quarter of the nineteenth century was not really an age of steam navigation. On land a more real and rapid revolution occurred; but it remained incomplete in the early forties. The railway found the reform of the old means of transport still unfinished. The electric telegraph, which has joined with the railway to create the modern market, had hardly passed the experimental stage; and the short-sighted critics

who could treat the railway as a mere nuisance or a novel luxury had but recently been silenced.

25. The Significance of the Revolution®

BY GRANT ROBERTSON

The New England must be sought in Lancashire and the West Riding, in the coal-pits of Durham, Northumberland, and South Wales, in the Black Country and the Potteries. The industrial town partly creates, is partly created by, the industrial area. The division of labor, the concentration of population, followed inevitably the localization and distribution of the raw material of manufactures. Men and women, more and more penned into the towns, are dependent for their earnings, not on the sun and the rain, the soil and the seasons of the home land, but on the brains of engineers, on the commercial capacity of capitalists, on imports from East and West, on the bowels of the earth, and on specialized skill and mechanical powers. Three things they must have or perish-the raw material of their trade, food, and expanding markets. Every year the application of machinery and motor power stimulated enterprise on a large scale, and increased the profits of scientific organization. Every new invention facilitated the rate at which the total output could be increased, while it demanded a corresponding organization for distribution, exchange, and consumption. The object of the manufacturer was to create and control markets and make their consumptive capacity as elastic as his capacity to produce. England as "a workshop for the world" involved a world ready to absorb the products of the workshop, and the crux of the problem did not lie in the certainties of production, but in the potentialities of exchange and consumption. Hence the new economic data necessitated the rewriting of old and the writing of new chapters to the theory of Political Economy, and the school of Ricardo is born out of the school of Adam Smith. The centre of political gravity slowly shifts with a shifting of the centre of economic gravity. The political and economic interests of a vast class of industrial workers and consumers, divorced from the land and linked with the capitalist and manufacturing entrepreneur, became more and more opposed to the interests of the landowner.

By 1785 in our agricultural economy the results had cut sharply into the quick. Farming on a large scale, the increasing application

Adapted from England under the Hanoverians, 328-346 (1912).

of agricultural science, the consolidation of estates, and the enclosures, had combined to dislocate, and in some cases extinguish altogether, the yeoman and the cottager of the old order. By 1800 there was a marked diminution of the number of the small landowners and a steady disappearance of the village community as a coöperative organization for the cultivation of the soil. Of this revolution the evolution of the "free-hand," the landless laborer working for wages, was a direct consequence. A new landed interest was in process of creation. Its chief function was to provide more and more food; its chief object to reap the profits of its combined duty and interest. Goldsmith's Deserted Village written in 1770, and the Corn Law of 1773, conveniently mark a point of departure. The legislature, controlled by the landed classes, tried to make England self-sufficient. As population increased the margin of cultivation was forced down and prices went up. The need for increased supplies could, under the law of diminishing returns, be met only by increased cost of production. The rise in rent kept pace with the rise in prices to the landlord's gain; but the problem of pauperism, rooted in low wages and high prices, yearly became more formidable. The result was the formulation of new fundamental problems of government. Can agricultural science, aided by Legislation, procure the necessary supply of food from home resources? In the national economy which is the more important, agriculture or manufactures? Which is socially the more beneficial, cheap food or a lower margin of cultivation and higher rents? Is the landed interest or the industrial interest to have the deciding voice in politics?

The new industrial interest was coming to rest upon a new social economy. Since 1750 there had been a vast increase of capital. The political expansion of the empire, the new markets across the seas, and the development of colonial possessions precede the Industrial Revolution. Because of the freedom of England from invasion, the country was spared the periodic devastation of fixed capital, and the hindrances to accumulation that invasion brought with it. The character of our citizens and the conditions of the epoch combined to focus the energies of the race on the creation of wealth, and the openings for profitable investments in agriculture, industry, and commerce put a premium on saving. We can broadly measure the increase in wealth by the fact that the financing of the agricultural and industrial revolution, and of the colossal eighteenth century wars, was accomplished from British resources alone.

The "capitalist" in the strict economic sense was no new apparition. Nor was industry working on a capitalistic basis new. What

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