Chapter Chapter 55 · Problem

In the year 1831, just before the passing of the first Reform Bill

Jeremy Bentham, the great English student of legislative methods and

the most practical political reformer of that day, wrote to a friend:

“The way to be comfortable is to make others comfortable. The way to

make others comfortable is to appear to love them. The way to appear

to love them is to love them in reality.” Jeremy was an honest man. He

said what he believed to be true. His opinions were shared by thousands

of his countrymen. They felt responsible for the happiness of their

less fortunate neighbours and they tried their very best to help them.

And Heaven knows it was time that something be done!

The ideal of “economic freedom” (the “laissez faire” of Turgot) had

been necessary in the old society where mediæval restrictions lamed

all industrial effort. But this “liberty of action” which had been

the highest law of the land had led to a terrible, yea, a frightful

condition. The hours in the factory were limited only by the physical

strength of the workers. As long as a woman could sit before her loom,

without fainting from fatigue, she was supposed to work. Children of

five and six were taken to the cotton mills, to save them from the

dangers of the street and a life of idleness. A law had been passed

which forced the children of paupers to go to work or be punished by

being chained to their machines. In return for their services they got

enough bad food to keep them alive and a sort of pigsty in which they

could rest at night. Often they were so tired that they fell asleep at

their job. To keep them awake a foreman with a whip made the rounds and

beat them on the knuckles when it was necessary to bring them back to

their duties. Of course, under these circumstances thousands of little

children died. This was regrettable and the employers, who after all

were human beings and not without a heart, sincerely wished that they

could abolish “child labour.” But since man was “free” it followed that

children were “free” too. Besides, if Mr. Jones had tried to work his

factory without the use of children of five and six, his rival, Mr.

Stone, would have hired an extra supply of little boys and Jones would

have been forced into bankruptcy. It was therefore impossible for Jones

to do without child labour until such time as an act of Parliament

should forbid it for all employers.

But as Parliament was no longer dominated by the old landed aristocracy

(which had despised the upstart factory-owners with their money bags

and had treated them with open contempt), but was under control of the

representatives from the industrial centres, and as long as the law

did not allow workmen to combine in labour-unions, very little was

accomplished. Of course the intelligent and decent people of that time

were not blind to these terrible conditions. They were just helpless.

Machinery had conquered the world by surprise and it took a great many

years and the efforts of thousands of noble men and women to make the

machine what it ought to be, man’s servant, and not his master.

Curiously enough, the first attack upon the outrageous system of

employment which was then common in all parts of the world, was made

on behalf of the black slaves of Africa and America. Slavery had been

introduced into the American continent by the Spaniards. They had

tried to use the Indians as labourers in the fields and in the mines,

but the Indians, when taken away from a life in the open, had lain

down and died and to save them from extinction a kind-hearted priest

had suggested that negroes be brought from Africa to do the work.

The negroes were strong and could stand rough treatment. Besides,

association with the white man would give them a chance to learn

Christianity and in this way, they would be able to save their souls,

and so from every possible point of view, it would be an excellent

arrangement both for the kindly white man and for his ignorant black

brother. But with the introduction of machinery there had been a

greater demand for cotton and the negroes were forced to work harder

than ever before, and they too, like the Indians, began to die under

the treatment which they received at the hands of the overseers.

Stories of incredible cruelty constantly found their way to Europe and

in all countries men and women began to agitate for the abolition of

slavery. In England, William Wilberforce and Zachary Macaulay, (the

father of the great historian whose history of England you must read if

you want to know how wonderfully interesting a history-book can be,)

organised a society for the suppression of slavery. First of all they

got a law passed which made “slave trading” illegal. And after the year

1840 there was not a single slave in any of the British colonies. The

revolution of 1848 put an end to slavery in the French possessions.

The Portuguese passed a law in the year 1858 which promised all slaves

their liberty in twenty years from date. The Dutch abolished slavery in

1863 and in the same year Tsar Alexander II returned to his serfs that

liberty which had been taken away from them more than two centuries

before.

In the United States of America the question led to grave difficulties

and a prolonged war. Although the Declaration of Independence had laid

down the principle that “all men were created equal,” an exception had

been made for those men and women whose skins were dark and who worked

on the plantations of the southern states. As time went on, the dislike

of the people of the North for the institution of slavery increased and

they made no secret of their feelings. The southerners however claimed

that they could not grow their cotton without slave-labour, and for

almost fifty years a mighty debate raged in both the Congress and the

Senate.

The North remained obdurate and the South would not give in. When

it appeared impossible to reach a compromise, the southern states

threatened to leave the Union. It was a most dangerous point in the

history of the Union. Many things “might” have happened. That they did

not happen was the work of a very great and very good man.

On the sixth of November of the year 1860, Abraham Lincoln, an Illinois

lawyer, and a man who had made his own intellectual fortune, had been

elected president by the Republicans who were very strong in the

anti-slavery states. He knew the evils of human bondage at first hand

and his shrewd common-sense told him that there was no room on the

northern continent for two rival nations. When a number of southern

states seceded and formed the “Confederate States of America,” Lincoln

accepted the challenge. The Northern states were called upon for

volunteers. Hundreds of thousands of young men responded with eager

enthusiasm and there followed four years of bitter civil war. The

South, better prepared and following the brilliant leadership of Lee

and Jackson, repeatedly defeated the armies of the North. Then the

economic strength of New England and the West began to tell. An unknown

officer by the name of Grant arose from obscurity and became the

Charles Martel of the great slave war. Without interruption he hammered

his mighty blows upon the crumbling defences of the South. Early in the

year 1863, President Lincoln issued his “Emancipation Proclamation”

which set all slaves free. In April of the year 1865 Lee surrendered

the last of his brave armies at Appomattox. A few days later, President

Lincoln was murdered by a lunatic. But his work was done. With the

exception of Cuba which was still under Spanish domination, slavery

had come to an end in every part of the civilised world.

But while the black man was enjoying an increasing amount of liberty,

the “free” workmen of Europe did not fare quite so well. Indeed, it

is a matter of surprise to many contemporary writers and observers

that the masses of workmen (the so-called proletariat) did not die out

from sheer misery. They lived in dirty houses situated in miserable

parts of the slums. They ate bad food. They received just enough

schooling to fit them for their tasks. In case of death or an accident,

their families were not provided for. But the brewery and distillery

interests, (who could exercise great influence upon the Legislature,)

encouraged them to forget their woes by offering them unlimited

quantities of whisky and gin at very cheap rates.

The enormous improvement which has taken place since the thirties and

the forties of the last century is not due to the efforts of a single

man. The best brains of two generations devoted themselves to the task

of saving the world from the disastrous results of the all-too-sudden

introduction of machinery. They did not try to destroy the capitalistic

system. This would have been very foolish, for the accumulated wealth

of other people, when intelligently used, may be of very great benefit

to all mankind. But they tried to combat the notion that true equality

can exist between the man who has wealth and owns the factories and can

close their doors at will without the risk of going hungry, and the

labourer who must take whatever job is offered, at whatever wage he

can get, or face the risk of starvation for himself, his wife and his

children.

They endeavoured to introduce a number of laws which regulated the

relations between the factory owners and the factory workers. In this,

the reformers have been increasingly successful in all countries.

To-day, the majority of the labourers are well protected; their

hours are being reduced to the excellent average of eight, and their

children are sent to the schools instead of to the mine pit and to the

carding-room of the cotton mills.

But there were other men who also contemplated the sight of all the

belching smoke-stacks, who heard the rattle of the railroad trains, who

saw the store-houses filled with a surplus of all sorts of materials,

and who wondered to what ultimate goal this tremendous activity

would lead in the years to come. They remembered that the human race

had lived for hundreds of thousands of years without commercial and

industrial competition. Could they change the existing order of things

and do away with a system of rivalry which so often sacrificed human

happiness to profits?

This idea—this vague hope for a better day—was not restricted to

a single country. In England, Robert Owen, the owner of many cotton

mills, established a so-called “socialistic community” which was a

success. But when he died, the prosperity of New Lanark came to an

end and an attempt of Louis Blanc, a French journalist, to establish

“social workshops” all over France fared no better. Indeed, the

increasing number of socialistic writers soon began to see that

little individual communities which remained outside of the regular

industrial life, would never be able to accomplish anything at all. It

was necessary to study the fundamental principles underlying the whole

industrial and capitalistic society before useful remedies could be

suggested.

The practical socialists like Robert Owen and Louis Blanc and François

Fournier were succeeded by theoretical students of socialism like Karl

Marx and Friedrich Engels. Of these two, Marx is the best known. He was

a very brilliant Jew whose family had for a long time lived in Germany.

He had heard of the experiments of Owen and Blanc and he began to

interest himself in questions of labour and wages and unemployment. But

his liberal views made him very unpopular with the police authorities

of Germany, and he was forced to flee to Brussels and then to London,

where he lived a poor and shabby life as the correspondent of the New

York Tribune.

No one, thus far, had paid much attention to his books on economic

subjects. But in the year 1864 he organised the first international

association of working men and three years later, in 1867, he published

the first volume of his well-known treatise called “Capital.” Marx

believed that all history was a long struggle between those who “have”

and those who “don’t have.” The introduction and general use of

machinery had created a new class in society, that of the capitalists

who used their surplus wealth to buy the tools which were then used

by the labourers to produce still more wealth, which was again used

to build more factories and so on, until the end of time. Meanwhile,

according to Marx, the third estate (the bourgeoisie) was growing

richer and richer and the fourth estate (the proletariat) was growing

poorer and poorer, and he predicted that in the end, one man would

possess all the wealth of the world while the others would be his

employees and dependent upon his good will.

To prevent such a state of affairs, Marx advised working men of all

countries to unite and to fight for a number of political and economic

measures which he had enumerated in a Manifesto in the year 1848, the

year of the last great European revolution.

These views of course were very unpopular with the governments of

Europe, many countries, especially Prussia, passed severe laws against

the Socialists and policemen were ordered to break up the Socialist

meetings and to arrest the speakers. But that sort of persecution never

does any good. Martyrs are the best possible advertisements for an

unpopular cause. In Europe the number of socialists steadily increased

and it was soon clear that the Socialists did not contemplate a violent

revolution but were using their increasing power in the different

Parliaments to promote the interests of the labouring classes.

Socialists were even called upon to act as Cabinet Ministers, and they

co-operated with progressive Catholics and Protestants to undo the

damage that had been caused by the Industrial Revolution and to bring

about a fairer division of the many benefits which had followed the

introduction of machinery and the increased production of wealth.