University of Virginia Library

I. The Manufactures

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.[1] 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 pro. cess 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,[2] 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[3] 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.[4] 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.