[ 86 ] The Great Transformation
sity of abolishing the unconditional right of the poor to relief impose
itself upon the consciousness of the community. The complicated eco-
nomics of Speenhamland transcended the comprehension of even the
most expert observers of the time; but the conclusion appeared only
the more compelling that aid-in-wages must be inherently vicious,
since it miraculously injured even those who received it.
The pitfalls of the market system were not readily apparent. To re-
alize this clearly we must distinguish between the various vicissitudes
to which the laboring people were exposed in England since the com-
ing of the machine: first, those of the Speenhamland period, 1795 to
1834; second, the hardships caused by the Poor Law Reform, in the de-
cade following 1834; third, the deleterious effects of a competitive la-
bor market after 1834, until in the 1870s the recognition of the trade
unions offered sufficient protection. Chronologically, Speenhamland
antedated market economy; the decade of the Poor Law Reform Act
was a transition to that economy. The last period—overlapping the
former—was that of market economy proper.
The three periods differed sharply. Speenhamland was designed to
prevent the proletarianization of the common people, or at least to
slow it down. The outcome was merely the pauperization of the
masses, who almost lost their human shape in the process.
The Poor Law Reform of 1834 did away with this obstruction of the
labor market: the "right to live" was abolished. The scientific cruelty of
that Act was so shocking to public sentiment in the 1830s and 1840s
that the vehement contemporary protests blurred the picture in the
eyes of posterity. Many of the most needy poor, it was true, were left to
their fate as outdoor relief was withdrawn, and among those who
suffered most bitterly were the "deserving poor" who were too proud
to enter the workhouse which had become an abode of shame. Never
perhaps in all modern history has a more ruthless act of social reform
been perpetrated; it crushed multitudes of lives while merely pre-
tending to provide a criterion of genuine destitution in the workhouse
test. Psychological torture was coolly advocated and smoothly put
into practice by mild philanthropists as a means of oiling the wheels
of the labor mill. Yet the bulk of the complaints were really due to the
abruptness with which an institution of old standing was uprooted
and a radical transformation rushed into effect. Disraeli denounced
this "inconceivable revolution" in the lives of the people. However, if
Speenhamland, 1795 [ 87 ]
money incomes alone had counted, the condition of the people would
soon have been deemed improved.
The problems of the third period went incomparably deeper. The
bureaucratic atrocities committed against the poor during the decade
following 1834 by the new centralized Poor Law authorities were
merely sporadic and as nothing compared to the all-round effects of
that most potent of all modern institutions, the labor market. It was
similar in scope to the threat Speenhamland offered, with the signifi-
cant difference that not the absence but the presence of a competitive
labor market was now the source of danger. If Speenhamland had pre-
vented the emergence of a working class, now the laboring poor were
being formed into such a class by the pressure of an unfeeling mecha-
nism. If under Speenhamland the people had been taken care of as
none too precious beasts deserved to be, now they were expected to
take care of themselves, with all the odds against them. If Speenham-
land meant the snug misery of degradation, now the laboring man was
homeless in society. If Speenhamland had overworked the values of
neighborhood, family, and rural surroundings, now man was de-
tached from home and kin, torn from his roots and all meaningful en-
vironment. In short, if Speenhamland meant the rot of immobility,
now the peril was that of death through exposure.
Not until 1834 was a competitive labor market established in En-
gland; hence industrial capitalism as a social system cannot be said to
have existed before that date. Yet almost simultaneously the self-
protection of society set in: factory laws and social legislation, and a
political and industrial working-class movement sprang into being. It
was in this attempt to stave off the entirely new dangers of the market
mechanism that protective action conflicted fatally with the self-
regulation of the system. It is no exaggeration to say that the social his-
tory of the nineteenth century was determined by the logic of the mar-
ket system proper after it was released by the Poor Law Reform Act of
1834. The starting point of this dynamic was the Speenhamland Law.
If we suggest that the study of Speenhamland is the study of the
birth of nineteenth-century civilization, it is not its economic and so-
cial effect that we have exclusively in mind, nor even the determining
influence of these effects upon modern political history, but the fact
that, mostly unknown to the present generation, our social conscious-
ness was cast in its mold. The figure of the pauper, almost forgotten
[ 88 ] The Great Transformation
since, dominated a discussion the imprint of which was as powerful as
that of the most spectacular events in history. If the French Revolution
was indebted to the thought of Voltaire and Diderot, Quesnay and
Rousseau, the Poor Law discussion formed the minds of Bentham
and Burke, Godwin and Malthus, Ricardo and Marx, Robert Owen
and John Stuart Mill, Darwin and Spencer, who shared with the
French Revolution the spiritual parentage of nineteenth-century civi-
lization. It was in the decades following Speenhamland and the Poor
Law Reform that the mind of man turned toward his own community
with a new anguish of concern: the revolution which the justices of
Berkshire had vainly attempted to stem and which the Poor Law Re-
form eventually freed shifted the vision of men toward their own col-
lective being as if they had overlooked its presence before. A world was
uncovered the very existence of which had not been suspected, that of
the laws governing a complex society. Although the emergence of soci-
ety in this new and distinctive sense happened in the economic field,
its reference was universal.
The form in which the nascent reality came to our consciousness
was political economy. Its amazing regularities and stunning contra-
dictions had to be fitted into the scheme of philosophy and theology
in order to be assimilated to human meanings. The stubborn facts and
the inexorable brute laws that appeared to abolish our freedom had in
one way or another to be reconciled to freedom. This was the main-
spring of the metaphysical forces that secretly sustained the positivists
and utilitarians. Unbounded hope and limitless despair looking to-
ward regions of human possibilities yet unexplored were the mind's
ambivalent response to these awful limitations. Hope—the vision of
perfectibility—was distilled out of the nightmare of population and
wage laws, and was embodied in a concept of progress so inspiring that
it appeared to justify the vast and painful dislocations to come. De-
spair was to prove an even more powerful agent of transformation.
Man was forced to resign himself to secular perdition: he was
doomed either to stop the procreation of his race or to condemn him-
self wittingly to liquidation through war and pestilence, hunger and
vice. Poverty was nature surviving in society; that the limitedness of
food and the unlimitedness of men had come to an issue just when the
promise of a boundless increase of wealth burst in upon us made the
irony only the more bitter.
Thus was the discovery of society integrated with man's spiritual
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