Market and Man [ 181 ]
point of view of the spreading of the market forms of existence this
may have been justified, since it helped to overcome the obstacles pre-
sented by the surviving organic and traditional forms of life among
the laboring people. As to the entirely different task of restoring the
common people, whose lives had been uprooted in the Industrial Rev-
olution, and inducting them into the fold of a common national cul-
ture, it was left undone. Their investment with the vote at a time when
irreparable damage had already been inflicted upon their capacity for
sharing in leadership, could not retrieve the position. The ruling
classes had committed the error of extending the principle of uncom-
promising class rule to a type of civilization which demanded the cul-
tural and educational unity of the commonwealth if it should be safe
from degenerative influences.
The Chartist Movement was political and thus easier to comprehend
than Owenism. Yet it is doubtful whether the emotional intensity, or
even the extent of that movement can be realized without some imagi-
native reference to the times. The years 1789 and 1830 made revolution
a regular institution in Europe; in 1848, the date of the Paris rising was
actually forecast in Berlin and London with a precision more usual in
regard to the opening of a fair than to a social upheaval, and "follow-
up" revolutions broke out promptly in Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, and
some towns of Italy. In London also there was high tension, for every-
body, including the Chartists themselves, expected violent action to
compel Parliament to grant the vote to the people. (Less than 15 per-
cent of adult males were entitled to vote.) Never in all the history of
England was there a comparable concentration of force put in readi-
ness for the defence of law and order as on April 12,1848; hundreds of
thousands of citizens were prepared in the capacity of special con-
stables to turn their arms against the Chartists on that day. The Paris
Revolution came too late to carry a popular movement in England to
victory. By that time the spirit of revolt roused by the Poor Law Re-
form Act as well as by the sufferings of the Hungry Forties was waning;
the wave of rising trade was boosting employment, and capitalism be-
gan to deliver the goods. The Chartists dispersed peacefully. Their case
was not even considered by Parliament until a later time, when their
application was defeated by a five-to-one majority in the House of
Commons. In vain had millions of signatures been collected. In vain
[ 182 ] The Great Transformation
had the Chartists behaved as law-abiding citizens. Their movement
was ridiculed out of existence by the victors. Thus ended the greatest
political effort of the people of England to constitute that country a
popular democracy. A year or two later Chartism was all but forgotten.
The Industrial Revolution reached the Continent half a century later.
There the working class had not been forced off the land by an enclo-
sure movement; rather, the allurements of higher wages and urban life
made the semi-servile agricultural laborer desert the manor and mi-
grate to the town, where he consorted with the traditional lower mid-
dle class, and had a chance of acquiring an urban tone. Far from feel-
ing debased, he felt elevated by his new environment. Doubtless
housing conditions were abominable, alcoholism and prostitution
were rampant among the lower strata of town laborers as late as the be-
ginning of the twentieth century. Yet there was no comparison be-
tween the moral and cultural catastrophe of the English cottager or
copyholder of decent ancestry, who found himself hopelessly sinking
in the social and physical slums of some Northwestern factory neigh-
borhood and the Slovakian or, for that matter, Pomeranian agricul-
tural laborer changing almost overnight from a stable-dwelling peon
into an industrial worker in a modern metropolis. An Irish or Welsh
day laborer or Western Highlander might have had a similar experi-
ence when slouching through the alleys of early Manchester or Liv-
erpool; but the English yeoman's son or the evicted cottager certainly
did not feel his status raised. Not only had the recently emancipated
farm laborer of the Continent a fair chance of rising into the lower
middle class of craftsmen and traders with their ancient cultural tra-
ditions, but even the bourgeoisie, which socially towered above him,
was politically in the same boat, being almost as removed from the
ranks of the actual ruling class as he was himself. Against feudal aris-
tocracy and Roman episcopacy the forces of the rising middle and
working classes were closely allied. The intelligentsia, particularly the
university students, cemented the union between these two classes in
their common attack on absolutism and privilege. In England the
middle classes, whether squires and merchants as in the seventeenth
century, or farmers and tradesmen as in the nineteenth, were strong
enough to vindicate their rights alone, and not even in their near-
revolutionary effort in 1832 did they look to the laborers for support.
Moreover, the English aristocracy unfailingly assimilated the wealthi-
Market and Man [183]
est of the newcomers and broadened the top ranks of the social hier-
archy, while on the Continent the still semifeudal aristocracy did not
intermarry with the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie, and the
absence of the institution of primogeniture hermetically insulated
them from the other classes. Every successful step toward equal rights
and liberties thus benefited. Continental middle and working classes
alike. Since 1830, if not since 1789, it was part of the Continental tradi-
tion that the working class would help to fight the battles of the
bourgeoisie against feudalism, if only—as the saying ran—to be
cheated by the middle class of the fruits of victory. But whether the
working class won or lost, its experience was enhanced, and its aims
raised to a political level. This was what was meant by becoming class
conscious. Marxian ideologies crystallized the outlook of the urban
worker, who had been taught by circumstances to use his industrial
and political strength as a weapon of high policy. While the British
worker developed an incomparable experience in the personal and so-
cial problems of unionism, and left national politics to his "betters,"
the Central European worker became a political socialist, expected to
deal with problems of statecraft, though primarily with those that
concerned his own interests.
If there was a time lag of some half a century between the industrial-
ization of Great Britain and the Continent, there was a much greater
lag in respect to the establishment of national unity. Italy and Ger-
many arrived only during the second half of the nineteenth century at
that stage of unification which England achieved centuries before, and
smaller East European states reached unity even later. In this process
of state-building, the working classes played a vital part, which fur-
ther enhanced their political experience. In the industrial age such a
process could not fail to comprise social policy. Bismarck made a bid
for unification of the Second Reich through the introduction of an ep-
ochal scheme of social legislation. Italian unity was speeded up by the
nationalization of the railways. In the Austro-Hungarian monarchy,
that congeries of races and peoples, the Crown itself repeatedly ap-
pealed to the laboring classes for support in the work of centralization
and imperial unity. In this wider sphere also, through their influence
on legislation, the socialist parties and trade unions found many
openings for serving the interests of the industrial worker.
Economistic preconceptions have blurred the outlines of the
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