Antecedents and Consequences [ 95 ]
ping the tea habit for the sake of relieving pauperism.* True, many
writers complained of the unsettling effects of enclosures; a number of
others insisted on the damage done to rural employment by the ups
and downs of manufactures. Yet on the whole, the impression prevails
that pauperism was regarded as a phenomenon sui generis, a social
disease which was caused by a variety of reasons, most of which be-
came active only through the failure of the Poor Law to apply the
right remedy.
The true answer almost certainly was that the aggravation of pau-
perism and the higher rates were due to an increase in what we would
today call invisible unemployment. Such a fact would not be obvious
at a time when even employment was, as a rule, invisible, as it necessar-
ily was up to a point under cottage industry. Still there remain these
questions: How to account for this increase in the number of the un-
employed and underemployed? And why did the signs of imminent
changes in industry escape the notice even of observant contempo-
raries?
The explanations lies primarily in the excessive fluctuations of
trade in early times which tended to cover up the absolute increase in
trade. While the latter accounted for the rise in employment, the fluc-
tuations accounted for the much bigger rise in unemployment. But
while the increase in the general level of employment was slow, the in-
crease in unemployment and underemployment would tend to be
fast. Thus the building up of what Friedrich Engels called the indus-
trial reserve army outweighted by much the creation of the industrial
army proper.
This had the important consequence that the connection between
unemployment and the rise of total trade could be easily overlooked.
While it was often remarked that the rise in unemployment was due to
the great fluctuations in trade, it escaped notice that these fluctuations
formed part of an underlying process of even greater amplitude,
namely, a general growth of commerce increasingly based on manu-
factures. For the contemporaries there seemed to be no connection
between the mainly urban manufactories and the great increase of the
poor in the countryside.
The increase in the aggregate of trade naturally swelled the volume
of employment while territorial division of labor combined with
* Martineau, H., The Hamlet, 1833.
[ 96 ] The Great Transformation
sharp fluctuations of trade was responsible for the severe dislocation
of both village and town occupations, which resulted in the rapid
growth of unemployment. The distant rumor of large wages made the
poor dissatisfied with those which agriculture could afford, and it
created a dislike for that labor as poorly recompensed. The industrial
regions of that age resembled a new country, like another America, at-
tracting immigrants by the thousand. Migration is usually accompa-
nied by a very considerable remigration. That such a reflux toward the
village must have taken place seems to find support also in the fact that
no absolute decrease of the rural population was noted. Thus a cumu-
lative unsettling of the population was proceeding as different groups
were drawn for varying periods into the sphere of commercial and
manufactural employment, and then left to drift back to their original
rural habitat.
Much of the social damage done to England's countryside sprang
at first from the dislocating effects of trade directly upon the country-
side itself. The Revolution in Agriculture definitely antedated the
Industrial Revolution. Both enclosures of the common and consolida-
tions into compact holdings, which accompanied the new great ad-
vance in agricultural methods, had a powerfully unsettling effect. The
war on cottages, the absorption of cottage gardens and grounds, the
confiscation of rights in the common deprived cottage industry of its
two mainstays: family earnings and agricultural background. As long
as domestic industry was supplemented by the facilities and amenities
of a garden plot, a scrap of land, or grazing rights, the dependence of
the laborer on money earnings was not absolute; the potato plot or
"stubbing geese," a cow or even an ass in the common made all the
difference; and family earnings acted as a kind of unemployment in-
surance. The rationalization of agriculture inevitably uprooted the la-
borer and undermined his social security.
On the urban scene the effects of the new scourge of fluctuating
employment were, of course, manifest. Industry was generally re-
garded as a blind-alley occupation. "Workmen who are to-day fully
employed may be to-morrow in the streets begging for bread . . . ,"
wrote David Davies and added: "Uncertainty of labour conditions is
the most vicious result of these new innovations." "When a Town em-
ployed in a Manufactory is deprived of it, the inhabitants are as it were
struck with a palsy, and become instantly a rent-charge upon the Par-
ish; but the mischief does not die with that generation...." For in the
Antecedents and Consequences [ 97 ]
meantime division of labor wreaks its vengeance: the unemployed ar-
tisan returns in vain to his village for "the weaver can turn his hand to
nothing." The fatal irreversibility of urbanization hinged upon this
simple fact which Adam Smith foresaw when he described the indus-
trial worker as intellectually the inferior of the poorest tiller of the soil,
for the latter can usually take himself to any job. Still, up to the time
Adam Smith published his Wealth of Nations, pauperism was not in-
creasing alarmingly.
In the next two decades the picture suddenly changed. In his
Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, which Burke submitted to Pitt in
1795, the author admitted that in spite of the general progress there
had been a "last bad cycle of twenty years." Indeed, in the decade fol-
lowing upon the Seven Years' War (1763), unemployment increased
noticeably, as the rise in outdoor relief showed. It happened for the
first time that a boom in trade was remarked to have been accompa-
nied by signs of growing distress of the poor. This apparent contradic-
tion was destined to become to the next generation of Western hu-
manity the most perplexing of all the recurrent phenomena in social
life. The specter of overpopulation was beginning to haunt people's
minds. Joseph Townsend warned in his Dissertation on the Poor Laws:
"Speculation apart, it is a fact, that in England, we have more than we
can feed, and many more than we can profitably employ under the
present system of law." Adam Smith, in 1776, had been reflecting the
mood of quiet progress. Townsend, writing only ten years later, was al-
ready conscious of a groundswell.
However, many things had to happen before (only five years later)
a man as removed from politics, as successful, and as matter-of-fact as
the Scotch bridge-builder, Telford, could burst out in the bitter com-
plaint that little change is to be expected from the ordinary course of
government, and that revolution was the only hope. A single copy of
Paine's Rights of Man mailed by Telford to his home village caused a
riot to break out there. Paris was catalyzing the European fermen-
tation.
In Canning's conviction the Poor Law saved England from a revo-
lution. He was primarily thinking of the 1790s and the French Wars.
The new outburst of enclosures further depressed the standards of the
poor in the countryside. J. H. Clapham, a defender of these enclosures,
conceded that the "coincidence of the area in which wages were most
systematically augmented from the rates with the area of maximum
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