Antecedents and Consequences [ 101 ]
paid no rates. Politically, the squire's pull with the village poor was
strengthened by Speenhamland while that of the rural middle class
was weakened.
The craziest aspect of the system was its economics proper. The
question "Who paid for Speenhamland?" was practically unanswer-
able. Directly, the main burden fell, of course, on the ratepayers. But
the farmers were partly compensated by the low wages they had to pay
their laborers—a direct result of the Speenhamland system. More-
over, the farmer was frequently remitted a part of his rates, if he was
willing to employ a villager who would otherwise fall on the rates. The
consequent overcrowding of the farmer's kitchen and yard with un-
necessary hands, some of them not too keen performers, had to be set
down on the debit side. The labor of those who were actually on the
rates was to be had even more cheaply. They had often to work as
"roundsmen" at alternating places, being paid only their food, or be-
ing put up for auction in the village "pound," for a few pence a day.
How much this kind of indentured labor was worth is another ques-
tion. To top it all, aids-in-rent were sometimes allowed to the poor,
while the unscrupulous proprietor of the cottages made money by
rack-renting the unsanitary habitations; the village authorities were
likely to close an eye as long as the rates for the hovels continued to be
turned in. That such a tangle of interests would undermine any sense
of financial responsibility and encourage every kind of petty corrup-
tion is evident.
Still, in a broader sense, Speenhamland paid. It was started as aid-
in-wages, ostensibly benefiting the employees, but actually using pub-
lic means to subsidize the employers. For the main effect of the allow-
ance system was to depress wages below the subsistence level. In the
thoroughly pauperized areas, farmers did not care to employ agricul-
tural laborers who still owned a scrap of land, "because none with
property was eligible for parish relief and the standard wage was so low
that, without relief of some sort, it was insufficient for a married man."
Consequently, in some areas only those people who were on the rates
had a chance of employment; those who tried to keep off the rates and
earn a living by their own exertions were hardly able to secure a job. Yet
in the country at large the great majority must have been of the latter
sort and on each of them employers as a class made an extra profit
since they benefited from the lowness of wages, without having to
make up for it from the rates. In the long run, a system as uneconomi-
[102] The Great Transformation
cal as that was bound to affect the productivity of labor and to depress
standard wages, and ultimately even the "scale" set by the magistrates
for the benefit of the poor. By the 1820s the scale of bread was actually
being whittled down in various counties, and the wretched incomes of
the poor were reduced even further. Between 1815 and 1830 the Speen-
hamland scale, which was fairly equal all over the country, was re-
duced by almost one-third (this fall also was practically universal).
Clapham doubts whether the total burden of the rates was as severe as
the rather sudden outburst of complaints would have made one be-
lieve. Rightly. For although the rise in the rates was spectacular and in
some regions must have been felt as a calamity, it seems most probable
that it was not so much the burden itself as rather the economic effect
of aid-in-wages on the productivity of labor that was at the root of the
trouble. Southern England, which was most sorely hit, paid out in
poor rates not quite 3.3 percent, of its income—a very tolerable charge,
Clapham thought, in view of the fact that a considerable part of this
sum "ought to have gone to the poor in wages." Actually, total rates
were falling steadily in the 1830s, and their relative burden must have
decreased even more quickly in view of the growing national welfare.
In 1818 the sums actually spent on the relief of the poor totalled nearly
eight million pounds; they fell almost continuously until they were
less than six million in 1826, while national income was rising rapidly.
And yet the criticism of Speenhamland became more and more vio-
lent owing to the fact, so it appears, that the dehumanization of the
masses began to paralyse national life, and notably to constrain the en-
ergies of industry itself.
Speenhamland precipitated a social catastrophe. We have become ac-
customed to discount the lurid presentations of early capitalism as
"sob-stuff." For this there is no justification. The picture drawn by
Harriet Martineau, the perfervid apostle of Poor Law Reform, coin-
cides with that of the Chartist propagandists who were leading the
outcry against the Poor Law Reform. The facts set out in the famous
Report of the Commission on the Poor Law (1834), advocating the im-
mediate repeal of the Speenhamland Law, could have served as the
material for Dickens's campaign against the Commission's policy.
Neither Charles Kingsley nor Friedrich Engels, neither Blake nor Car-
lyle, was mistaken in believing that the very image of man had been
defiled by some terrible catastrophe. And more impressive even than
Antecedents and Consequences [103]
the outbursts of pain and anger that came from poets and philanthro-
pists was the icy silence with which Malthus and Ricardo passed over
the scenes out of which their philosophy of secular perdition was
born.
Undoubtedly, the social dislocation caused by the machine and the
circumstances under which man was now condemned to serve it had
many results that were unavoidable. England's rural civilization was
lacking in those urban surroundings out of which the later industrial
towns of the Continent grew.* There was in the new towns no settled
urban middle class, no such nucleus of artisans and craftsmen, of re-
spectable petty bourgeois and townspeople as could have served as an
assimilating medium for the crude laborer who—attracted by high
wages or chased from the land by tricky enclosers—was drudging in
the early mills. The industrial town of the Midlands and the North-
west was a cultural wasteland; its slums merely reflected its lack of tra-
dition and civic self-respect. Dumped into this bleak slough of misery,
the immigrant peasant, or even the former yeoman or copyholder, was
soon transformed into a nondescript animal of the mire. It was not
that he was paid too little, or even that he labored too long—though
both happened often to excess—but that he was now existing under
physical conditions which denied the human shape of life. Negroes of
the African forest who found themselves caged, panting for air in the
hull of a slave-trader might have felt as these people felt. Yet all this was
not irremediable. As long as a man had a status to hold on to, a pattern
set by his kin or fellows, he could fight for it, and regain his soul. But in
the case of the laborer this could happen only in one way: by his consti-
tuting himself the member of a new class. Unless he was able to make
a living by his own labor, he was not a worker but a pauper. To reduce
him artificially to such a condition was the supreme abomination of
Speenhamland. This act of an ambiguous humanitarianism prevented
laborers from developing into an economic class and thus deprived
them of the only means of staving off the fate to which they were
doomed in the economic mill.
Speenhamland was an unfailing instrument of popular demoral-
ization. If a human society is a self-acting machine for maintaining
the standards on which it is built, Speenhamland was an automaton
for demolishing the standards on which any kind of society could be
* Professor Usher puts the date of the beginning of general urbanization at about
1795-
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