[178] The Great Transformation
tical offshoot of Owenism. That its impetus was lost—or, rather, was
maintained only in the peripheric sphere of the consumers' move-
ment—was the greatest single defeat of spiritual forces in the history
of industrial England. Yet a people, which after the moral debasement
of the Speenhamland period, still possessed the resilience required for
a creative effort so imaginative and sustained, must have disposed of
almost boundless intellectual and emotional vigor.
To Owenism with its claim to man as a whole there still clung some-
thing of that medieval inheritance of corporative life which found ex-
pression in the Builders' Guild and in the rural scene of its social ideal,
the Villages of Cooperation. Although it was the fount of modern so-
cialism, its proposals were not based on the property issue, which is
the legal aspect only of capitalism. In hitting on the new phenomenon
of industry, as Saint-Simon had done, it recognized the challenge of
the machine. But the characteristic trait in Owenism was that it in-
sisted on the social approach: it refused to accept the division of society
into an economic and political sphere, and, in effect, rejected political
action on that account. The acceptance of a separate economic sphere
would have implied the recognition of the principle of gain and profit
as the organizing force in society. This Owen refused to do. His genius
recognized that the incorporation of the machine was possible only in
a new society. For him the industrial aspect of things was in no way re-
stricted to the economic (this would have implied a marketing view of
society which he rejected). New Lanark had taught him that in a work-
er's life wages was only one among many factors such as natural and
home surroundings, quality and prices of commodities, stability of
employment, and security of tenure. (The factories of New Lanark like
some other firms before them kept their employees on the payroll even
when there was no work for them to do.) But much more than that was
comprised in the adjustment. The education of children and adults,
provision for entertainment, dance, and music, and the general as-
sumption of high moral and personal standards of old and young
created the atmosphere in which a new status was attained by the in-
dustrial population as a whole. Thousands of persons from all over
Europe (and even America) visited New Lanark as if it were a reserva-
tion of the future in which had been accomplished the impossible feat
of running a successful factory business with a human population. Yet
Owen's firm paid considerably lower wages than those current in some
Market and Man [179]
neighboring towns. The profits of New Lanark sprang mainly from
the high productivity of labor on shorter hours, due to excellent orga-
nization and rested men, advantages which outweighed the increase
in real wages involved in the generous provisions for a decent life. But
the latter alone explain the sentiments of all but adulation with which
his workers clung to Owen. Out of experiences such as these he ex-
tracted the social, that is, wider-than-economic approach to the prob-
lem of industry.
It was another tribute to his insight that in spite of this compre-
hensive outlook he grasped the incisive nature of the concrete physical
facts dominating the laborer's existence. His religious sense revolted
against the practical transcendentalism of a Hannah More and her
Cheap Repository Tracts. One of them commended the example of a
Lancashire colliery girl. She was taken down the pit, at the age of nine,
to act as drawer with her brother, who was two years younger.* "She
cheerfully followed him [her father] down into the coal-pit, burying
herself in the bowels of the earth, and there at a tender age, without ex-
cusing herself on account of her sex, she joined in the same work with
the miners, a race of men rough indeed, but highly useful to the com-
munity." The father was killed by an accident down the pit in the sight
of his children. She then applied for employment as a servant, but
there was a prejudice against her because she had been a collier, and
her application failed. Fortunately, by that comforting dispensation
by which afflictions are turned into blessings, her bearing and patience
attracted notice, inquiries were made at the colliery, and she received
such a glowing character that she was taken into employment. "This
story," the tract concluded, "may teach the poor that they can seldom
be in any condition of life so low as to prevent their rising to some de-
gree of independence if they choose to exert themselves, and there can
be no situation whatever so mean as to forbid the practice of many no-
ble virtues." The sisters More preferred to work among starving labor-
ers, but refused so much as to be interested in their physical sufferings.
They were inclined to solve the physical problem of industrialism by
simply conferring status and function on the workers out of the pleni-
tude of their magnanimity. Hannah More insisted that her heroine's
father was a highly useful member of the community; the rank of his
daughter was recognized by the acknowledgments of her employers.
* More, H., The Lancashire Colliery Girl, May, 1795; cf. Hammond, J. L. and B., The
Town Labourer, 1917, p. 230.
[180] The Great Transformation
Hannah More believed that no more was needed for a functioning so-
ciety.* Robert Owen turned away from a Christianity which re-
nounced the task of mastering the world of man, and preferred to extol
the imaginary status and function of Hannah More's wretched hero-
ine, instead of facing the awful revelation that transcended the New
Testament, of man's condition in a complex society. Nobody can
doubt the sincerity which inspired Hannah More's conviction that the
more readily the poor acquiesced in their condition of degradation,
the more easily they would turn to the heavenly solaces on which alone
she relied both for their salvation and for the smooth functioning of a
market society in which she firmly believed. But these empty husks of
Christianity on which the inner life of the most generous of the upper
classes was vegetating contrasted but poorly with the creative faith of
that religion of industry in the spirit of which the common people of
England were endeavouring to redeem society. However, capitalism
had still a future in store.
The Chartist Movement appealed to a set of impulses so different that
its emergence after the practical failure of Owenism and its premature
initiatives might have been almost predicted. It was a purely political
effort which made a bid for influence on government through consti-
tutional channels; its attempt to put pressure on the government was
on the traditional lines of the Reform Movement which had secured
the vote to the middle classes. The Six Points of the Charter demanded
an effective popular suffrage. The uncompromising rigidity with
which such an extension of the vote was rejected by the Reformed Par-
liament for a third of a century, the use of force in view of the mass
support that was manifest for the Charter, the abhorrence in which the
liberals of the 1840s held the idea of popular government all prove that
the concept of democracy was foreign to the English middle classes.
Only when the working class had accepted the principles of a capitalist
economy and the trade unions had made the smooth running of in-
dustry their chief concern did the middle classes concede the vote to
the better situated workers; that is, long after the Chartist Movement
had subsided and it had become certain that the workers would not try
to use the franchise in the service of any ideas of their own. From the
* Cf. Drucker, P. E, The End of Economic Man, 1939, p. 93, on the English Evangeli-
cals; and The Future of Industrial Man, 1942, pp. 21 and 194, on status and function.
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