"Habitation versus Improvement" [ 39 ]
ism." Yet such a view seems to miss the point altogether. Why should
the ultimate victory of a trend be taken as a proof of the ineffectiveness
of the efforts to slow down its progress? And why should the purpose
of these measures not be seen precisely in that which they achieved,
i.e., in the slowing down of the rate of change? That which is ineffec-
tual in stopping a line of development altogether is not, on that ac-
count, altogether ineffectual. The rate of change is often of no less im-
portance than the direction of the change itself; but while the latter
frequently does not depend upon our volition, it is the rate at which we
allow change to take place which well may depend upon us.
A belief in spontaneous progress must make us blind to the role of
government in economic life. This role consists often in altering the
rate of change, speeding it up or slowing it down as the case may be; if
we believe that rate to be unalterable—or even worse, if we deem it a
sacrilege to interfere with it—then, of course, no room is left for
intervention. Enclosures offer an example. In retrospect nothing
could be clearer than the Western European trend of economic prog-
ress which aimed at eliminating an artificially maintained uniformity
of agricultural technique, intermixed strips, and the primitive institu-
tion of the common. As to England, it is certain that the development
of the woollen industry was an asset to the country, leading, as it did,
to the establishment of the cotton industry—that vehicle of the In-
dustrial Revolution. Furthermore, it is clear that the increase of do-
mestic weaving depended upon the increase of a home supply of wool.
These facts suffice to identify the change from arable land to pasture
and the accompanying enclosure movement as the trend of economic
progress. Yet, but for the consistently maintained policy of the Tudor
and early Stuart statesmen, the rate of that progress might have been
ruinous, and have turned the process itself into a degenerative instead
of a constructive event. For upon this rate, mainly, depended whether
the dispossessed could adjust themselves to changed conditions with-
out fatally damaging their substance, human and economic, physical
and moral; whether they would find new employment in the fields of
opportunity indirectly connected with the change; and whether the
effects of increased imports induced by increased exports would en-
able those who lost their employment through the change to find new
sources of sustenance.
The answer depended in every case on the relative rates of change
and adjustment. The usual "long-run" considerations of economic
[ 40 ] The Great Transformation
theory are inadmissible; they would prejudge the issue by assuming
that the event took place under a market system. However natural it
may appear to us to make that assumption, it is unjustified: such a sys-
tem is an institutional structure which, as we all too easily forget, has
been present at no time except our own, and even then it was only par-
tially present. Yet apart from this assumption "long-run" considera-
tions are meaningless. If the immediate effect of a change is deleteri-
ous, then, until proof to the contrary, the final effect is deleterious. If
conversion of arable land to pasture involves the destruction of a
definite number of houses, the scrapping of a definite amount of em-
ployment, and the diminution of the supplies of locally available food
provisions, then these effects must be regarded as final, until evidence
to the contrary is produced. This does not exclude the consideration of
the possible effects of increased exports on the income of the landown-
ers; of the possible chances of employment created by an eventual in-
crease in the local wool supply; or of the uses to which the landowners
might put their increased incomes, whether in the way of further in-
vestments or of luxury expenditure. The time-rate of change com-
pared with the time-rate of adjustment will decide what is to be re-
garded as the net effect of the change. But in no case can we assume the
functioning of market laws unless a self-regulating market is shown to
exist. Only in the institutional setting of market economy are market
laws relevant; it was not the statesmen of Tudor England who strayed
from the facts, but the modern economists, whose strictures upon
them implied the prior existence of a market system.
England withstood without grave damage the calamity of the en-
closures only because the Tudors and the early Stuarts used the power
of the Crown to slow down the process of economic improvement un-
til it became socially bearable—employing the power of the central
government to relieve the victims of the transformation, and at-
tempting to canalize the process of change so as to make its course less
devastating. Their chancelleries and courts of prerogative were any-
thing but conservative in outlook; they represented the scientific spirit
of the new statecraft, favoring the immigration of foreign craftsmen,
eagerly implanting new techniques, adopting statistical methods and
precise habits of reporting, flouting custom and tradition, opposing
prescriptive rights, curtailing ecclesiastical prerogatives, ignoring
Common Law. If innovation makes the revolutionary, they were the
revolutionaries of the age. Their commitment was to the welfare of the
"Habitation versus Improvement" [41 ]
commonalty, glorified in the power and grandeur of the sovereign; yet
the future belonged to constitutionalism and Parliament. The govern-
ment of the Crown gave place to government by a class—the class
which led in industrial and commercial progress. The great principle
of constitutionalism became wedded to the political revolution that
dispossessed the Crown, which by that time had shed almost all its cre-
ative faculties, while its protective function was no longer vital to a
country that had weathered the storm of transition. The financial pol-
icy of the Crown now restricted the power of the country unduly, and
began to constrain its trade; in order to maintain its prerogatives the
Crown abused them more and more, and thereby harmed the re-
sources of the nation. Its brilliant administration of labor and indus-
try, its circumspect control of the enclosure movement, remained its
last achievement. But it was the more easily forgotten as the capitalists
and employers of the rising middle class were the chief victims of its
protective activities. Not till another two centuries had passed did En-
gland enjoy again a social administration as effective and well ordered
as that which the Commonwealth destroyed. Admittedly, an adminis-
tration of this paternalistic kind was now less needed. But in one re-
spect the break wrought infinite harm, for it helped to obliterate from
the memory of the nation the horrors of the enclosure period and the
achievements of government in overcoming the peril of depopula-
tion. Perhaps this helps to explain why the real nature of the crisis was
not realized when, some 150 years later, a similar catastrophe in the
shape of the Industrial Revolution threatened the life and well-being
of the country.
This time also the event was peculiar to England; this time also sea-
borne trade was the source of a movement which affected the country
as a whole; and this time again it was improvement on the grandest
scale which wrought unprecedented havoc with the habitation of the
common people. Before the process had advanced very far, the la-
boring people had been crowded together in new places of desolation,
the so-called industrial towns of England; the country folk had been
dehumanized into slum dwellers; the family was on the road to perdi-
tion; and large parts of the country were rapidly disappearing under
the slack and scrap heaps vomited forth from the "satanic mills." Writ-
ers of all views and parties, conservatives and liberals, capitalists and
socialists, invariably referred to social conditions under the Industrial
Revolution as a veritable abyss of human degradation.
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