C H A P T E R N I N E
Pauperism and Utopia
T
he problem of poverty centered around two closely related sub-
jects: pauperism and political economy Though we will deal
with their impact on modern consciousness separately, they formed
part of one indivisible whole: the discovery of society
Up to the time of Speenhamland no satisfactory answer could be
found to the question of where the poor came from. It was, however,
generally agreed among eighteenth-century thinkers that pauperism
and progress were inseparable. The greatest number of poor is not to
be found in barren countries or amid barbarous nations, but in those
which are the most fertile and the most civilized, wrote John M'Far-
lane in 1782. Giammaria Ortes, the Italian economist, pronounced it
an axiom that the wealth of a nation corresponds with its population;
and its misery corresponds with its wealth (1774). And even Adam
Smith in his cautious manner declared that it is not in the richest
countries that the wages of labor are highest. M'Farlane was not, there-
fore, venturing an unusual view when he expressed his belief that, as
England had now approached the meridian of her greatness, the
"number of poor will continue to increase."*
Again, for an Englishman to forecast commercial stagnation was
merely to echo a widely held opinion. If the rise in exports during the
half-century preceding 1782 was striking, the ups and downs of trade
were even more so. Trade was just starting to recover from a slump
which had reduced export figures to the level of almost half a century
before. To contemporaries the great expansion of trade and apparent
growth of national prosperity which followed upon the Seven Years'
War merely signified that England too had had her chance after Portu-
gal, Spain, Holland, and France. Her steep rise was now a matter of the
* M'Farlane, J.,
Enquiries Concerning the Poor, 1782. Cf. also Postlethwayt's editorial
remark in the Universal Dictionary of 1757 on the Dutch Poor Law of October 7,1531.
[108]
[110] The Great Transformation
bodied idlers. From this time onward, opinions about pauperism be-
gan to reflect philosophical outlook, very much as theological ques-
tions had before. Views on the poor mirrored more and more views on
existence as a whole. Hence the variety and seeming confusion in these
views, but also their paramount interest to the historian of our civili-
zation.
The Quakers, these pioneers in the exploring of the possibilities of
modern existence, were the first to recognize that involuntary unem-
ployment must be the outcome of some defect in the organization of
labor. With their strong faith in businesslike methods they applied to
the poor among themselves that principle of collective self-help which
they occasionally practised as conscientious objectors when wishing
to avoid supporting the authorities by paying for their keep in prison.
Lawson, a zealous Quaker, published an
Appeal to the Parliament Con-
cerning the Poor That There Be no Beggar in England as a "Platforme,"
in which he suggested the establishment of Labour Exchanges in the
modern sense of a public employment agency. This was in 1660; an
"Office of Addresses and Encounters" had been proposed ten years be-
fore by Henry Robinson. But the Restoration Government favored
more pedestrian methods; the tendency of the Act of Settlement in
1662 was directly contrary to any rational system of labor exchanges,
which would have created a wider market for labor; settlement—a
term used for the first time in the Act—bound labor to the parish.
After the Glorious Revolution, Quaker philosophy produced in
John Bellers a veritable prognosticator of the trend of social ideas of
the distant future. It was out of the atmosphere of the Meetings of
Sufferings, in which statistics were now often used to give scientific
precision to religious policies of relief, that, in 1696, his suggestion for
the establishment of "Colleges of Industry" was born, in which the in-
voluntary leisure of the poor could be turned to good account. Not the
principles of a labor exchange, but the very different ones of exchange
of labor underlay this scheme. The former was associated with the
conventional idea of finding an employer for the unemployed; the lat-
ter implied no less than that laborers need no employer as long as they
can exchange their products directly. "The labour of the poor being
the mines of the rich," as Bellers said, why should they not be able to
support themselves by exploiting those riches for their own benefit,
leaving even something over? All that was needed was to organize
them in a "College" or corporation, where they could pool their