[
294 ] Notes on Sources
Doherty's trade unions gave rise to large-scale unrest; this was the beginning of
the Owenite movement which led to the biggest strikes and lockouts England had
yet experienced.
From the employers' angle, therefore, three strong arguments militated, in the
long run, against Speenhamland: its deleterious effect on the productivity of la-
bor; its tendency to create cost differentials as between the various parts of the
country; its encouragement of "stagnant pools of labour" (Webb) in the country-
side, thus propping up the urban workers' monopoly of labor. None of these con-
ditions would carry much weight with the individual employer, or even with a lo-
cal group of employers. They might easily be swayed by the advantages of low
labor cost, not only in ensuring profits, but also in assisting them to compete with
manufacturers of other towns. Entrepreneurs as a class would, however, take a
very different view, when, in the course of time, it appeared that what benefited
the isolated employer or groups of employers formed a danger to them collec-
tively. Actually, it was the spreading of the allowance system to Northern indus-
trial towns in the early thirties, even though in an attentuated form, that consoli-
dated opinion against Speenhamland, and carried a reform on a national scale.
The evidence points to an urban policy more or less consciously directed to-
ward the building up of an industrial reserve army in the towns, mainly in order
to cope with the sharp fluctuations of the economic activity. There was not, in this
respect, much difference between town and countryside. Just as the village au-
thorities preferred high rates to high wages, the urban authorities also were loth
to remove the nonresident pauper to his place of settlement. There was a sort of
competition between rural and urban employers for the share in the reserve army.
Only in the severe and prolonged depression of the mid-i840s did it become im-
practicable to bolster up the reserve of labor at the cost of the rates. Even then rural
and urban employers behaved in a similar fashion: large scale removal of the poor
from the industrial towns set in, and was paralleled by the "clearance of the vil-
lage" on the part of the landowners, in both cases with the aim of diminishing the
number of resident poor (cf. Redford, p. in).
5.
Primary of town against countryside.
Speenhamland, according to our assumption, was a protective move of the ru-
ral community in the face of the threat represented by a rising urban wage level.
This involves primacy of town against countryside in respect to the trade cycle. In
at least one instance—that of the depression of 1837-45—this can be shown to
have been the case. A careful statistical investigation made in 1847 revealed that
the depression started from the industrial towns of the Northwest, then spread to
the agricultural counties, where recovery set in distinctly later than in the indus-
trial towns. The figures revealed that "the pressure which had fallen first upon the
manufacturing districts was removed last from the agricultural districts." The
manufacturing districts were represented in the investigation by Lancashire and
the West Riding of Yorkshire with a population of 201,000 (in 584 Poor Law
unions), while the agricultural districts were made up of Northumberland, Nor-