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

is new is, first, the capitalist entrepreneur, primarily a manufacturer, not a moneyed man engaged in commerce; secondly, the growth of a class of capitalist entrepreneurs; thirdly, the gradual domination of industry by that class; and, fourthly, the type of industrial organization that he creates and the scale on which he applies it. To Adam Smith a "manufacturer" was still a workman, working with his own hands in his own home or workshop, with his own tools. The manufacturer of the Industrial Revolution is the modern master who provides capital, owns his mill or factory, together with the machinery and tools provided for his "hands," pays these "hands" wages, and creates and maintains a market.

With the new capitalist is born the new industrial proletariat, that ever-increasing army of men and women who are wage-earners and are a new stratum in the economic world. The Revolution that dissolved the link between the peasant and the soil forged the bond that chained the wage-earner to the town. Swollen by the dislocated peasantry, by their own power to reproduce themselves in obedience to the increasing demand of capital and science for human hands. and bodies, they have come to stay and to create another England. The slow establishment of a reserve of labor that can be called into the working line when trade requires it, and be thrust back when it is slack, the problems of unemployment and the unemployable, are not the least of the formidable enigmas forced on humanity by the wage-earner and the Industrial Revolution.

Any picture grouping the features in clear-cut symmetry would be false to the facts. In different trades, in different areas, under varying conditions and degrees of pressure, an amazing diversity, not uniformity, is the prevailing note of the economic phenomena. The old order did not perish at a blow. The new was not introduced complete by a few remarkable inventions and a group of organizers. The peasant was not universally divorced from industry nor the industrial population from the soil. But in the stream of tendencies and the competition between the old and the new every year saw one more stone in the ancient fabric dislodged, one more stone in the new fabric cemented.

The face of the country was being altered. The new roads and the canals are made not for the traveler on pleasure bent, but to bring the places where men produce into communication with the centres of exchange. Mark, too, how the roads and canals more and more lead to and from the urban workshops, to and from the sea. From the sea the bulk of the raw material must come to the sea

much of the finished product will go. Commerce, like war, is an affair of positions to start with. England was quick to take advantage of its strategic commercial position. The trend of population is at first to the strategic and focal centres of a distributing, exchanging, bartering, and carrying trade. Then comes the revelation of internal resources. Geological formation underpins geographical configuration. From 1770 onwards a student with a geological map and some knowledge of the economic data of the new trades might predict a priori where the new industrial centres must be. In the whole island so bitten and fretted is the coast line that it is impossible to place a pin-point anywhere on the map which is more than sixty miles from salt water. What this means for imports and exports needs no exposition. By 1801 imports and exports are an absolute necessity of bare existence.

The country town is either transformed by industry or it slips into subordination to the new towns. These are not places which men and women inhabit through choice, but to live in, to produce, to exchange, to breed in, and to die. They are stamped with the feudalism of industry, a feudalism seated among factory chimneys, warehouses, the roar and glare of blast furnaces, the undying throb of machinery drowning the tramp of the wearied feet of men and women born tired and condemned to toil. Over the new towns are hung the banners and scutcheon of the industrial lords. Within there is the dull monotony of brick and stone, sweat and grime and smoke, unceasing noise, the stress of competition whose cessation means ruin.

The new urban race living under new conditions is a new people. Its pleasures, hopes, fears, needs will be different, alike from those of the old cities, the old mercantilism, the old agriculture. It will create a new type of character, frame new values, hammer out from the dirt and roar of the teeming hives ideals of life and government bound to clash fiercely with the ideals inherited from a different past. It will ask for new creeds; it will demand a new economics; it will need and make a new literature. The rearrangement of the elements of society, and the regrading of classes, will bury deeper and deeper each day the legal framework of the old order. The problems of national physique, motherhood, childhood, education, pauperism, citizenship, happiness are old; but restated in the terms of a growing industrial democracy they become new, and with every decade more complex, urgent, and formidable.

C. LABOR AND THE REVOLUTION

26. Labor's Willing Slaves'

BY EDWIN ARNOLD

Look at common modern existence as we see it, and note to what rich elaboration and large degrees of comfort it has come. I invite you briefly to contemplate the material side of an artisan's existence in your own Birmingham. Let alone the greatness of being an Englishman, and the supreme safety and liberty of his daily life, what king of old records ever fared so royally? What magician of fairy tales ever owned so many slaves to bring him treasures and pleasures at a wish? Observe his dinner-board. Without being luxurious, the whole globe has played him servingman to spread it. Russia gave the hemp, or India, or South Carolina the cotton, for that cloth which his wife lays upon it. The Eastern islands placed there those condiments and spices which were once the secret relishes of the wealthy. Australian downs sent him frozen mutton or canned beef, the prairies of America meal for his biscuit and pudding; and if he will eat fruit, the orchards of Tasmania and the palm woods of the West Indies proffer delicious gifts, while the orange groves of Florida and of the Hesperides cheapen for his use those "golden apples" which dragons used to guard. His coffee comes from where the jeweled humming-birds hang in the bowers of Brazil, or purple butterflies flutter amid the Javan mangroves. Great clipper ships, racing by night and day under clouds of canvas, convey to him his tea from China or Assam, or from the green Singhalese hills. The sugar which sweetens it was crushed from canes that waved by the Nile or the Orinoco; and the plating of the spoon with which he stirs it was dug for him from Mexican or Nevadan mines. The currants in his dumpling are a tribute from classic Greece, and his tinned salmon or kippered herring are taken from the seas and rivers of Canada or Norway. He may partake, if he will, of rice that ripened under the hot skies of Patna or Rangoon; of cocoa, that "food of the gods," plucked under the burning blue of the Equator. For his rasher of bacon, the hogexpress runs daily with 10,000 grunting victims into Chicago; Dutch or Brittany hens have laid him his eggs, and Danish cows grazed the daisies of Elsinore to produce his cheese and butter. If he drinks beer, it is odds that Belgium and Bavaria have contributed to it the barley and the hops; and when he has finished eating, it will be the

Adapted from an address delivered at the Birmingham and Midland Institute, October 10, 1893.