The Function of Socialization in Social Evolution
Chapter 10: The Impersonal Stage of Socialization
Ernest W. Burgess
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By the impersonalization of industry are meant two closely related things. Not only are impersonal relations substituted for personal relations, but the whole personality no longer functions in industry. The worker takes a place in an impersonal system, the entrepreneur follows out an impersonal policy. In both manufacturing and agriculture, the evolution of the new system centered about the control of capital. Capital was required for the manufacturer to instal machinery, to purchase the raw materials, and to pay the workman before the goods were marketed. In the same way capital was essential to the farmer in introducing the new ex-pensive agricultural methods. But the fundamental change involved in the transformation was psychic, and in its twofold aspect was to determine, not only the industrial, but also the political and social evolution.
The process of impersonalization is not confined to production; it makes its way into all parts of economic and social life. Sombart indicates the extent to which capitalism changed personal ties into impersonal relations. "An `impersonalization' [Versachlichung] always occurs where the efficiency of a system of man-made arrangements displaces direct individual or co-operative human effort. We observe a parallel phenomenon in technique where the impersonalization consists in the transfer from vital human labor to a system of lifeless bodies, i.e., mechanical or chemical action. Military leadership becomes impersonal when the battle is no longer decided by the initiative of the general, but by the intelligent observance of all the accumulated experience of the past and by the utilization of scientific methods of strategy and tactics, of artillery and commissariat, and so forth. A retail store becomes impersonal when the single head of the firm, who is in personal relations with the clerks and the customers, is supplanted by a board of directors who control thousands of employees. This latter is accomplished by means of a system of organization to which every individual is subordinated. In such a store the concrete business transaction is
( 138) no longer a personal understanding between buyer and seller, but rather an automatic process operating according to certain definite standards. The collective labor contract makes the wage relation impersonal and so on. . . . [The] impersonalization of credit, is the characteristic mark of modern national economy." [1]
The tendencies to impersonalization are not merely economic, nor national alone, but social and world-wide. Economic value is .no longer determined immediately in any particular case by the clash or concord of the interests of two persons, or by custom, but is settled in a quite impersonal way by a quotation from the board of trade. Life in the city illustrates in scores of ways the growth of impersonal relations. The enormous aggregations of population, the minute subdivision of labor, the many transient relations of persons, make impossible the effective functioning of personal ties. It is not to the character of the milk-dealer that you look, but to the impersonal certificate of inspection; not the morals of the packing magnates that you scrutinize, but the government inspector's stamp. The growing use of money and credit as a medium of ex-change brings into the power of the individual a whole sum of services whose impersonal nature scarcely gives a hint of their genetic connection with the give-and-take of the old personal industrial and social order. The growth and specialization of the professions and of expert knowledge in specific departments of thought and action have created the great impersonal function of an "authority." The rise of the newspaper with its anonymous editorial "we" and its detached statement of the news is but another force making for the impersonal character of this age. The modern social group, the public, is held together chiefly by ties of impersonal interest, although the influence of a striking personality is not entirely eliminated. The phenomena of fashions and fads indicate at once their impersonal rôle and the futility of individual protest and resistance. Public opinion, pervasive, intangible, quite impersonal, a part of the spiritual breath of each of us, yet hardly more our own than the atmosphere which we inhale and exhale again, is a phenomenon of modern times. And even our great national elections where the individual adds but one vote to six or seven million votes cannot but give the reflective person a feeling of the utter impotence of personal participation and the impersonality of democracy.
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The transition from the personal relations of the guild and the manor to the impersonal relations of the factory and the estate was at first gradual and then abrupt. In manufacturing, the domestic system was the transitional industrial form between the guild and the modern factory system. As early as the middle of the fourteenth century, master-manufacturers, in order to escape the restrictions of guild and municipality, left the towns and organized industrial communities in the country for the production of goods. In domestic industry are found in germ practically all the elements of the factory system except machinery. We observe[2] large aggregations of workmen, the beginnings of the subdivision of labor, the growing importance of capital, the tendency toward large-scale production, manufacture, not alone for the local, but also for the national market, and finally, the domination of the master-manufacturer over all the processes of production and distribution. Yet even under the domestic arrangement, as in the modified guild system of the towns, the personal relations of master and men still survived. In a similar way, upon the breakdown of the manorial system, the personal relations of the squire and his tenants were but substituted for those of lord and serf,[3] even retaining a vestige of their old force after they were, in fact, actually superseded by the impersonal relations of landowner and hired laborers. We shall first state the external changes in the transition from the semi-mediaeval to the capitalist production, both in manufacture and in agriculture, and then attempt to analyze the reconstruction of the ways of thinking and action involved.
The success of the national Mercantilistic policy, due in great part to England's strategic position, secured for her manufacturers a world-wide market. The consequent pressure of demand stimulated invention and led to the introduction of labor-saving machinery into industry.. The extent of the change in the character of employment incident to the transition from the domestic to the factory system indicates the revolution in the habits and attitudes of mind of manufacturer and laborer. "In 1740 industry was domes-tic. Spinning and weaving were done at home in the cottages. The man worked the loom, working what hours he pleased; his wife and children spent their spare time spinning yarn. Spinning, in
( 140) fact, was a Ely-industry, practiced as a subsidiary employment when it was too dark to labor in the fields. There were practically no factories and no manufacturers in the modern sense."[4] Even in Manchester the merchant gave out the raw material to the weaver and paid him for the processes of carding, rolling, spinning, and weaving.[5] "In 1815 how complete is the contrast. We have the master and the mill. Men have become `hands' working regular hours. Women and children also have taken their places beside the machinery that is fast superseding all the old methods."[6] While the village weaver and his family, deprived of their by-employments, were becoming factory workers, the small freeholder and small farmer of the country were being depressed into landless laborers.
In England the beginnings of capitalistic agriculture preceded, but its expansion was stimulated by the results of the introduction of machinery into industry. At the opening of the eighteenth century three-fifths of the cultivated land of England was still tilled on the open-field system described above with its management of co-partners and its holdings of a sum of scattered strips. The village community had remained an isolated, practically self-sufficing[7] economic unit. Although its inhabitants were no longer serfs, but freeholders, copyholders, and leaseholders, both for life and for short periods, the method of farming remained practically un-changed. From an economic standpoint the defects of the village system are obvious. "Unless the whole body of farmers agreed together, no individual could move hand or foot. It would be financial ruin for any member of the community to grow turnips or clover for the benefit of his neighbors. No winter crop could be grown so long as the arable fields were subjected to common rights of pasture. The land was wasted in innumerable footpaths and balks. The strips were too narrow to admit of cross-harrowing or cross-ploughing. Farmers spent their whole day in visiting the different parcels of which their holdings were composed, and their expenses in reaping and carting were immensely increased by the
( 141) remoteness of the different strips. . . . Litigation was perpetual when it was so easy for men to plough up the common balks or headlands, remove their neighbors' landmarks, or poach their land by a turn of the plough, or filch their crops when reaping. . . No individual owner could improve his own live-stock when all the half-starved, diseased cattle and sheep of the village were crowded together on the same commons." [8]
These defects of the common-field system were emphasized by the experiments and success of the advocates of the new agriculture. The theoretical experiments of Tull on the basis of his European experience, the practical success of Lord Townshend in agricultural improvement stimulated the interests of the large land-lords. The new agriculture became a hobby with the landowners. The enormous growth of manufacturing consequent upon the utilization of machinery created a sudden increase in the demand for agricultural products. The increase in the price of foodstuffs[9] made agriculture, and especially improved cultivation, immensely profitable. It was the large landowner who appreciated the value of inclosures, and who took the lead in securing the re-distribution of land, frequently "with little regard to the interests of the smaller tenants and freeholders, who, in fact, suffered greatly." [10] Even if the reallotment were just, the parliamentary and legal expenses involved, .and the fencing of the individual farms[11] placed a severe handicap upon the small farmers and yeomen which finally led to their extinction. The relative rapidity of the enclosures affords us a statistical basis for reckoning the emergence of capitalistic farming. Only 334,974 acres were in-closed from 1710 to 1760,[12] while from 1760 to 1805 the number increased to over 7,000,000.[13]
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The advance of capitalism in agriculture was marked by the emergence of the capitalist farmer and "the extinction of the commoner, the small freeholder, the small farmer, and even the yeoman."[14] Wealthy landlords found it of advantage to consolidate the small farms of one hundred acres and under into large farms of three hundred acres and over. Cunningham states the outcome of this policy as follows : "As the usual calculation appears to have been that at least five pounds an acre was the requisite capital in order to work the land, the large farmers were men who could start in life with 1,500 or 2,000 pounds; and thus we find signs of a middle class in the country, who were capitalists and employers of labor, but who did not themselves own land, and did not engage in the actual work of the farms with their own hands. These men . . . were . . . able to afford better seed, better implements, and to work the land on better principles, and hence they were able to pay a larger rent than the small farmers who stuck to the old-fashioned methods.” [15] At a disadvantage economically, the small freeholder, small farmer, and tenant disappeared, and agriculture was now carried on by capitalist landlords, capitalist farmers, and landless laborers. "The improvements in agriculture, the inclosures, the consolidation of small into large farms, and the appearance of the capitalist farmer are, then, the chief signs of the Agricultural Revolution. They form an almost exact parallel to the inventions of machinery, the bringing together of workers in factories, the consolidation of small by-occupations into larger and more definite trades, and the appearance of the capitalist millowner in the realm of manufacturing industry." [16]
The entrepreneur, both in agriculture and in industry, as a psychic type, was a differentiation of this period. The Industrial Revolution was only in an auxiliary way brought about by the commercial leaders of the period. The dynamic agents of the change were men of ability and energy who emerged from the working class and pushed their way to the front. Gaskell, in Artisans and Machinery,[17] indicates the psychic incapacity of the old type of
( 143) business man to adjust himself to the situation. "Few of the men who entered the [cotton] trade rich were successful. They trusted too much to others—too little to themselves ; whilst on the contrary the men who prospered were raised by their own efforts—commencing in a very humble way, generally from exercising some handicraft, as clockmaking, hatting, etc., and pushing their advance by a series of unceasing exertions, having a very limited capital to begin with, or even none at all, saving their own labor." A survey of the leaders in the growing industries will show the truth of this statement. The general prosperity of the first half of the eighteenth century had permitted a growing difference of fortune in the working class. Arkwright, the inventor of the water-frame, who triumphed over all but insurmountable obstacles in the establishment of the factory system, was a village barber.[18] Wilkinson, "the first of the great iron-masters," was a son[19] of a foreman at Blackbarrow. Josiah Wedgwood, the great pottery-maker, whose success depended as much upon his painstaking attention to detail as upon his striking inventions, started his career in apprenticeship to his brother.[20] Crawshay, the "Iron King" of the south, was a Yorkshire lad and apprentice of a London ironmonger. His rise seems due[21] to the fact that his master pitted his wits against women buyers of flat-irons. While many men of inherited wealth entered the growing manufacturing activities, the lives of the aforementioned self-made men represent the type of independent, inventive, and aggressive individuals who comprised not only a large proportion of the big industrial magnates, but also practically the whole corps of the active managers and undertakers of industry. The most repulsive aspect of the new mental attitude of employers of labor is found in the small textile manufacturers, who, with comparatively little capital, were not only hard pressed by the machinery and the superior power of the big millowner, but were engaged in fierce competition with each other. These men, according to Cunningham, were "of a specially coarse type, who were particularly inclined to tyrannize over a class but slightly beneath them, yet completely in their power." [22]
( 145) In agriculture, the large farmer would generally be selected from the more successful of the tenant farmers and his continued success would depend upon his ability further to depress the wages of the laborer to the margin of subsistence.
While the new economic attitude is to be found in its sharpest outline in this emerging class of self-made men, it is not absent from the landowners and men who have inherited or accumulated money in trade. Capital naturally flowed to the promising fields of manufacture and agriculture, and the impulse for gain became the ruling force in the lives of many men. The desire of the lord of the manor for sustenance, and the ambition of the artisan for standing in his class gave way to an irresistible striving for profit and endeavor to rise out of the class. The conditions for success in the competitive struggle, namely, the narrow and material character of aim, the organizing and executive ability required to get the most work out of the "hand," qualities of intense application, of inventiveness, and of progressiveness to make and to take advantage of mechanical and systematic improvements, of prevision to forecast the course of the market, of wariness to outwit and outgeneral competitors, made for the appearance of a new type of man in the industrial world. The "economic" man was not altogether an abstraction at that time. There were and still are thousands of men who carry on their business according to the implications of that idea. The essential error lay in generalizing the concept. While it is true that the quest for livelihood is incited by the strongest of human motives and has always directly or indirectly shaped the conduct of the great majority of men, the desire for gain and enlightened self-interest is a late human achievement and is still confined to a small fraction of the population.
The change which exalted a portion of the working class into the capitalist undertaker and resulted in the development of the mental attitude known as individualistic had as far-reaching a psychic effect upon the depressed worker. The break-up of home industry and the modified guild arrangements involved the sundering of the personal ties between master-merchant and weaver, between master and apprentice. In the craft guilds and in the domestic manufactories a warm personal attachment and close dependence of the workman upon the employer constituted a strong social bond. " ‘Masters and men,’ Toynbee reports an employer as saying,
( 145) " ‘were, in general, so joined together in sentiment, and, if I may be permitted to use the term, in love to each other, that they did not wish to be separated if they could help it.' " [23] The change of attitude involved in the transition to the factory system is thus stated by an employer : " `It is as impossible to effect a union between the high and low classes of society as to mix oil and water; there is no reciprocity of feeling between them. . . . There can be no union between employer and employed, because it is the interest of the employer to get as much as he can, done for the smallest sum possible.' " [24] In the rural districts the change was as marked. " `The farmer,' says Cobbett, 'used to sit at the oak table along with his men, say grace to them, and cut up the meat and the pudding. He might take a cup of strong beer to himself, when they had none; but that was pretty nearly all the difference in the manner of living.'" [25] The agrarian revolution changed all this. "The laborer ceased to be a member of the farmer's household, and, to use Cobbett's words, was thrust out of the farm-house into a hovel. Exceeding bitter was the laborer's cry. `The farmers,' said one, `take no more notice of us than if we were dumb beasts ; they let us eat our crust by the ditch-side.'" [26]
The introduction of the machine and of system not only changed the relations of man to man but revolutionized the relation of the man to his work [27] The restriction of human labor to a monotonous mechanical process involving the repetition of a few muscular movements signified the divorce of personality from labor. "The position of the worker in the modern factory came to be that of assisting the machine rather than that of supplying the energy to the hand or machine tool." [28] The sense of control over work, so marked in the guild arrangement, was superseded by the dominance of the machine over labor. The machine and system set the pace; the slow worker was speeded up to the time-rate of the faster; more work was got out of the individual than under the
( 146) spur of the personal relations of the manor and the guild. The bent of the individual was not utilized; the slight necessary skill was too easily acquired to become of value as a personal asset; the flagging attention was sustained by no personal interest in the product fashioned by the machine.
The impulse to live up to the customary standards of life of the group in which the individual finds himself now became subordinate to the requirements of a bare subsistence. Economic necessity forced the parents to place children scarcely out of babyhood in the factory. The artisan and the home-worker, alike victims of an industrial change to which they could not adapt themselves, put off as long as possible the moral as well as social reproach of "factory girl" upon their daughters.[29] But starvation wages finally forced the workman to send his wife and children to the factory.[30] The attitude of the workman changed with changed conditions. Indolent parents lived in idleness off the wages of their offspring; early marriage and large families became the economically wise policy.[31] No stronger evidence of the impersonal character of the economic attitude of this period can be given than the fact that "with a bankrupt's effects, a gang of these children had been put up to sale, and advertised publicly as part of the property."[32]
If the moral sense of workman as of entrepreneur appears to have become dulled in the struggle for existence, the very character of the mechanical process must of necessity have influenced the attitude and the thinking of the proletarian. . While the uncertainty of climatic conditions in relation to agriculture tended to make the peasant superstitious and susceptible to confidence in unseen powers ;while the control of the artisan over the processes of manufacture made for self-reliance and the abandonment of superstition, the rôle
( 147) of the workman as an accessory to a mechanical process, together with a quite total lack of control over conditions of employment and rewards of labor, tended to destroy both self-confidence and, at the same time, faith in divine providence. There was little opening in the monotonous life of the factory workman to perceive the working of an "invisible hand," and every occasion to refer his miserable condition to the unfair advantage of the millowner. The smouldering discontent of the workman was not to be extinguished as easily as that of his peasant ancestor. The labor movement of the fourteenth century was not group-conscious, and lacked definite aims ; the labor movement of the nineteenth century has become conscious of its ends, purposive and ideational. The hopes of the work-man soon centered about the development of a few simple ideas. After futile riots, the workman gave up the instinctive direct action and controlled his course by ideas of indirect action. The basic idea was association, to make up in numbers for the weakness of the individual. Various forms of this conception served as rallying-cries at different times and for different classes of workmen. The idea of associations to fight the capitalist in the labor market led to the organization of labor unions; the idea of association for government intervention led to Chartism and the present Labor party; the idea of working-class reconstruction of the industrial order through state control is the program of the Socialists. Certain of these incipient programs originated in the working class, but many of them, at least in their effective form, came from without. It is necessary, therefore, to give an account of these wider social influences as well as to disclose the significance of the ascendancy of the capitalist in modem society.
Three great general forces, those of religion, of patriotism, and of science, are now to be considered before we can estimate the rôle in social change of the psychic attitude of entrepreneur and workman. The participation of the workingman in religious sentiment, in national feeling, and in education had a directing and moderating influence on his efforts for economic betterment. 1. The Puritan movement had been largely a middle-class phenomenon and displayed in an accentuated way the "mores" of the economically aspiring yeoman and artisan ;[33] the Methodist awakening was almost entirely confined to the working class, and,
( 148) with a retention of the Puritan attitude toward amusements and extravagance, introduced into religion a warmth of social feeling so necessary to cement the union of laborers in their economic struggle. The training of new leaders and the mental awakening among the laborers cannot be ignored among the forces that made for the social efficiency of labor unions and labor movements. A short review of the origin and early development of Methodism is sufficient to make clear the foregoing points.
John Wesley, like Wycliffe, was an Oxford man and sought his followers among the working classes. The real significance of the Methodist movement lay in the fact that it denoted the active participation of the "fourth estate"in religious life. Rogers has indicated quite conclusively the economic conditions which made possible Wesley's work. "The movement which the brothers Wesley began and carried out was chiefly among the laboring classes. . . . I am strongly convinced that Wesley, who labored with so much success and effected so powerful an organization in the eighteenth century, would have wasted his labor in the seventeenth. During the first half of the eighteenth century, and indeed further on, prices were far lower than in the previous century, wages rose slightly. . . . There was, therefore, in the comparative plenty of the time an opening for a religious movement among the poor, and Wesley was equal to the occasion."[34] Before Wesley's time, the peasant and laborer were content with attendance at the parish church. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the Church of England was in one of its lowest spiritual stages. While the pluralities and non-residence of the higher clergy were a scandal among the upper classes, the social degradation of the country parson and his subserviency to the gentry earned him the contempt of the laborer.[35] At any rate, a large proportion of the upper and middle strata of the working people left the church for the chapel. The influence of the Methodist revival was not confined to the sect which bears Wesley's name, but was diffused and radiated in the evangelical movement. Wilberforce, whose Practical View went through five editions in half a year, though a high churchman, was animated by the social spirit of the movement.[36] The fact that two millions
( 149) of tracts from the pen of Hannah More were circulated[37] in one year throughout England indicates the extent of the new religious propaganda throughout the working class. With a narrower, but more vital appeal, Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge radiated[38] the revivified religious enthusiasm which they had experienced. Statistics show that the full force of the evangelical movement was not confined to denominations which originated at this time, but greatly increased the membership of the nonconformist sects. Comprising, it is estimated, only one-twentieth of the English people in 1700, the Dissenters numbered fully one-fifth of the population in 1800,[39] and in 1900 apparently one-half [40] The statistics of registration of places of worship indicate the extent of the revival of Nonconformity under the stimulus of the Wesleyan movement. In the ten-year period from 1731 to 1740 the number of new registrations was only 448, while from 1791 to 1800 they increased to 4,394; from 1801 to 1810, to 5,460; and from 1811 to 1820, to 10,161.[41] The old Puritan sects ceased to be petty communities of the upper middle class and secured a substantial body of adherents in the lower middle and upper working classes.
The most active and creative participation of the working class in religious life is exemplified in the Primitive Methodist movement. The work of the Primitive Methodists was among the poorer classes; their leaders were from the workingmen. "With admirable self-devotion they went to work among the poorest and most de-graded of the people in town and village. They had not a college-bred man among them ; their preachers endured the sorest privations without a murmur; the world despised them, and as they heard them preach and sing, called them Ranters; still they grew, sweeping over England and penetrating everywhere. . . . The adherents were nearly all working people—fisher-folk, persons employed in mills, collieries, and mines, or as laborers on the land.
( 150) . . . The ten members of 1808 have grown to 200,000; they have 4,000 chapels and 16,000 local preachers." [42]
The significance of the religious movement among the laborers is not confined to the strictly religious effects which Wesley and his followers had in. mind. Nor is its main economic meaning in the fact that a group of men acquired habits of sobriety and industry which tended to make them less dependent on the parish, or enabled many gradually to rise out of the lowest levels of industrial depression. Mr. Richard Heath shows concretely the wider social and economic meaning of the religious movement of the Primitive Methodists in a particular locality : "The Primitive Methodist United Free Church has a circuit in the neighborhood with eighteen chapels, each managed by its own congregation, and ministered to by local preachers. Two regular ministers superintend the whole circuit. Under this system Oxfordshire laborers have learned something of the art of self-government, and how to submit loyally to men of their own choice. It has taught the leaders how to organize and how to sustain the burden of a great undertaking. Thus they have learned to have faith in the ultimate triumph of a principle; thus they have obtained power to endure in hours of weakness and apparent defeat; and thus they have learned to retain calmness in hours of prosperity." [43] "It is a happy thing that the new movement for union among the laborers [the National Agricultural Union] is under the leadership of Christian men, who in their own religious communities have had some practice in fellowship; for the laborers, feeling their ignorance and in-experience, follow their leaders unreservedly."[44] While I do not mean to maintain that the labor movement was in any sense connected with the doctrinal beliefs of the Methodist communities, I do contend that the opportunity for personal development and leadership which they offered was of importance in the beginnings of the labor movement. Joseph Arch, from his ninth year a poor agricultural laborer in contact with the mental world without only through the Bible and the weekly newspaper, late in life a local preacher, was the founder and promoter[45] of the union movement among the English agricultural laborers. Methodists and Dissent-
( 151) -ing ministers took a prominent part in the early labor movement. Joseph R. Stephens, "celebrated as the advocate of factory legislation and Chartism," [46] was a Methodist preacher. The six Dorset-shire laborers sentenced to seven years' transportation for their activity in labor organization were "simple-minded Methodists, two of them being itinerant preachers." [47] The great procession of protest across London in 1834 was "led by a Dissenting parson on horseback." [48] The extent of the influence of workingmen's participation in the church is shown by the fact that the National Union of the Working Classes was "an organization modelled on the plan of the Methodist connexion." [49] So the religious movement of the working class not only gave a medium for more active moral and mental development, but provided leaders and patterns for an organized economic movement.
2. The nineteenth century witnessed the participation of the working class, not only in the religious life, but also in the patriotic sentiment of the nation. The Napoleonic wars and the threat of invasion gave a strong impetus to English national feeling. "The wild alarm which seized the best-informed, the upper and middle classes, lest. revolutionary doctrine should take hold in England was changed into an alarm which affected all classes, but was most strongly felt among the poorest and least well-informed." [50] "In October, 1804, Napoleon was preparing to invade England, and huge patriotic handbills called upon all Englishmen to arm in defense of their country. In quibs and broadsides against Bonaparte every-thing was said that could excite popular feeling against him. He was a Mahometan who had poisoned his sick at Jaffa, he had incited his hell hounds to execute his vengeance on England by promising to permit anything. `He promised to enrich his soldiers with our property, to glut their lust with our wives and daughters.'The clergy preached on defense, the poets wrote patriotic ballads. Every county had meetings to organize defense. There were fast-days
( 152) solemnly kept, and used by volunteers for drill." [51] One of a child's earliest impressions was the terror associated with the mention of the Corsican. "The momentous struggle against Napoleon monopolized men's attention, and the conversation of our great-grandfathers centered around `Old Boney,' whom they regarded as the very devil. . . . His name was used as a bogey to frighten children." [52] Before the specter of French invasion, the villager and the factory hand became vividly conscious of their membership in the English nation. In the presence of the common danger, though suffering acute misery and pressed by famine,[53] the workingmen inhibited overt expression of class discontent. Thus, nationalism distinctly crossed the limen of the social consciousness and profoundly affected English life.
The war with Napoleon was only one of a number of factors working toward this end. The aggregation of population in the cities, the philanthropic and humanitarian movements of the nineteenth century, the political agitation of labor during the same period, and the spread of knowledge and education among the masses are certain of the components of the plexus of influences, which, taken together, pushed the workman above the threshold of the national social consciousness. An additional paragraph will suffice to indicate the general resultant of this play of forces.
(a) Physical contact in the city furnished the basis for psychic contact. Urban communities presented a flood of stimuli instead of the narrow stream of village life. Even before the "yellow" newspaper captivated the working classes, bulletins and word-of-mouth conveyed tidings and rumors of war. Jingoism is a phenomenon of the city and finds its most unreflective and disinterested support in the Chauvinism of the working class. (b) While this crude patriotic spirit was rising to flood-tide in the lower classes, the middle classes, sickening of warfare, were furnishing leaders of philanthropic and humanitarian movements, which, in a sympathetic, if also sentimental, way included the economically dependent in broad plans of amelioration. The utopian schemes of Owen and others of that ilk, Howard's crusade against vile prison conditions,
( 153) the anti-slavery movement, the agitation against long hours of labor for women and children, the temperance propaganda, all involved, directly or indirectly, the recognition of the workingman and of the responsibility of society for his well-being. (c) The dissatisfaction of the workingmen with existing conditions and their active efforts to call attention to the miseries of their situation were not without meaning for the development of the sense of the organic unity of society. A city riot or a strike fixed the attention of a nation upon a labor maladjustment. The national organization of trade unions promoted an awareness of the extent of the labor problem : the situation was perceived to be no longer local, but nation-wide. The fact that the Chartist movement called for a political program emphasized the appreciation by the working class of the possible function of the state in the promotion of industrial welfare. Then, too, the admittance of the working class to the ballot tended inevitably to stimulate patriotism. (d) The spread of education among the people was the resultant of a most curious combination of motives, ranging from the religious feeling that every boy and girl should be able to read the Bible, to the upper-class notion of the inculcation of obedience to betters, to the middle-class conviction that a knowledge of the remorseless working of the laws of political economy would silence the labor discontent. Whatever the animus of Bell and Graham, Robert Raikes, or Hannah More, the day school, the Sunday school, the novel were but different aspects of the tendency to admit the working class to the crumbs from the table of the accumulated knowledge of the age. Urban life, philanthropy and social reform, participation in political and educational life tended to weld the working classes into the social unity and social consciousness of the nation.
3. The influence of education and science was not confined to its minor part in stimulating patriotism. Its chief significance lies in three facts. In the first place, the advance of knowledge led to the rise of a distinct social class whose control of the activity of other men depended, not upon physical, political, ecclesiastical, or economic coercion nor yet upon the prestige of king or priest or landlord, but upon the "appeal to reason and upon an impersonal, detached attitude toward physical phenomena and, so far as possible, toward society. The elimination of the personal equation in method, the objective character of scientific results, the validity of
( 154) which depends upon the assent of all rational minds, the universality of its conclusions with its assumption of impartiality between races and classes—all worked together for the creation of a new influence in national life comprehending the interests of all and amenable to higher mental processes alone. In the second place, the intimate relation of science and knowledge to practical application in industry could not but cause its value to be appreciated by all classes of society. The divorce of science from metaphysical speculation made possible a wide extension of the frontiers of demonstrable knowledge. The brilliant discoveries in physics in the seventeenth century did not have any immediate economic utility, any more than the electrical experiments of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The movement that exalted science and knowledge to the rank of prime factors in human progress was in large measure the result of the change in the character of industry. Improved agricultural methods inevitably meant the practical use of chemistry; the invention and introduction of machinery made possible applied mechanics and led to the development of the theoretical analysis of frames in the nineteenth century ;[54] while "the rapid development of the steam engine in England during the latter part of the eighteenth century had a marked effect on the progress of the science of heat."[55] In the third place, knowledge and science with their tendency to esoteric exclusiveness came to exercise an almost hypnotic effect upon the thought and conduct of the people. We shall speak here only of social science. Lesser minds were paralyzed and the thinking of , great intellects profoundly influenced by a conception of society, thought through and logically reconstructed by a master-thinker. It is possible, it may be argued, to overestimate the actual influence of scientific thought in everyday life. Yet an analysis of the effects of social theory in practical life will modify the force of this objection. The influence of Hobbes, Locke, and Hume was tremendous; the extent and intensity of the opposition to them are sufficient to indicate this. Adam Smith was not long in converting the Glasgow merchants to free trade ;[56] his Wealth of Nations soon became the
( 155) guidebook of English statesmen.[57] Ricardo brought the members of Parliament, even the country squires, around to his way of thinking, and "reigned without dispute in English Economics from 1817 to 1848."[58] In 1833 Nassau Senior, an authority on political economy, was sought by the Liberal government for his advice in regard to its action against the demonstrations of Owen's immense Trades Union [59] The influence of social science was not confined to the conversion of the upper classes with whose interests classical political economy coincided, but it also exercised control over the opinion and activity of the working classes. This influence was both negative and positive. The immediate effect of classical political economy was to inhibit the activities of trade unions. The leaders of the labor movement came in contact with the theories of the Manchester school, and with the collapse of Chartism resigned themselves to the teachings of the then "dismal" science. J. E. Symes, in Social England, states the change of attitude : "The more intelligent of the working classes were beginning to realize how much they had it in their power to do for themselves by means of their unions and without the aid of Parliament. The need of more thorough and accurate knowledge of economic subjects began to be felt, and some of the unions devoted a portion of their funds to mutual improvement classes and the purchase of books. Their leaders began to denounce strikes, and to point out the need for more education, both general and technical." [60] Then, too, the classical school, although dominating the activities of the trade unions for a generation, stimulated an antagonistic movement, which, while accepting its dogmas, turned them against the system. As Toynbee puts it, Ricardo's book was at once "the great prop of the middle classes and their most terrible menace." [61] Henry George, accepting Malthus' generalization on population and Ricardo's theory of rent, demanded "the confiscation of rent in the interests of population"; [62] Marx deduced from Ricardo's "iron law" of wages and his theory of value[63] the progressive demoralization of the laboring classes and his surplus-value theory.
( 156)
Thus the incisive thinking of the Manchester school not only paralyzed the direct activities of labor, but stimulated and modified the thinking of great minds sympathetic with the oppressed classes. The significance of the situation was that the emergence of the social sciences at once lifted the struggle out of the arena of purely physical struggle into an intellectual contest, so that in the future rational discussion, expert investigation, impersonal judgment came to exert a higher control and tended progressively to subordinate to its dictum mob action, street riots, and strikes. Toynbee, in an address to laboring men, emphasizes this point : "In conclusion, I would entreat workingmen to believe that Political Economy is no longer an instrument for the aggrandizement of the rich and the impoverishment of the poor; that in as far as it is a science at all, it endeavors to explain the laws by which wealth is produced and distributed by men, as they are at present constituted under the existing institutions of society; that, as a theoretical science, it pronounces no judgment on these laws, nor on the conduct of laborers and employers ; but that as a practical science, it does frame precepts, not in the interests of the employers alone, not in the interests of the workmen alone, but in the interests of the whole people."[64]
Thus the three great influences of religion, nationalism, and science exercised a unifying control over the group struggle in England. Keeping these general factors in mind, we shall attempt briefly to show that English history in the nineteenth century was a resultant of class conflict, at first between the aristocracy and the industrial classes, and later between the capitalist and the workingman.
With the Industrial Revolution economic power passed from the hands of the landed gentry into the grasp of the captains of industry. The nature of the increase of population in England gives us a statistical basis for estimating the transfer of power involved. The population of England in 1760 was under 7,000,000; sixty years later it had risen to 12,000,000; today, it is considerably more than twice the latter figure. This increase of population was not uniform. Toynbee[65] has a chart which shows the extraordinary in-crease in the principal towns between 1685 and 1760 and between the latter date and 1881. Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham,
( 157) Leeds, and Sheffield grew from small towns of 4,000 to 7,000 in 1685 to small cities of 20,000 to 40,000 in 1760. In 1901 there were forty-six cities of over 80,000 inhabitants in England.[66]
The shift of population was not only toward the city, but also occupational and geographical. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Gregory King estimates that of five and one-half millions of population over four millions lived in villages and hamlets and constituted the agricultural population ; while at the end of the century Young estimates the rural and agricultural population at nearly one-half the total.[67] The counties north of the Trent, comprising one-third of England's area, contained in 1700 only one-fourth of the population; in 1750, less than one-third,[68] while today they possess over two-fifths.[69] The rise of cities, the predominance of manufacture over agriculture, and the movement of the greatest density of population to the northwest are the social changes capable of resolution into numerical terms, which changed the relative power of English classes. "The `old England,' " says Seignobos, "the England of the south and east, that England which had organized the government and the church was aristocratic and Anglican, and is still; docile under the hands of its nobility and clergy, it has remained the mainstay of the Conservatives. But . . . the new industrial England of the north and west is largely made up of Dissenters. These democratic societies and Dissenters are naturally opposed to a system which excluded them from political power and treats their religion as inferior. It is they who have recruited the opposition parties against the English nobility and the Anglican church. It is the Irish, the Scotch, the Welsh, the English of the north and west, who have formed and who still form the mass of the Liberal and Radical parties. It is they who have brought a democratic evolution upon `old England.’”[70]
This aggregation and shift of population, prophetic as it was of future industrial and political democracy, betokened at the moment merely the economic dominance of the new leaders of enterprise, the
( 158) capitalists and entrepreneurs. At the moment the wielders of this tremendous industrial influence did not seek to transform it into political control. The explanation is obvious. The accession of the capitalist landlord and manufacturer to power coincided with the rise of the classical school of political economy. Then, too, the financial burden of the French Revolution made the standpoint of the individual manufacturer "how I can get more wealth to enlarge my factory and purchase new machinery" identical in fact with the problem of the statesman "how to obtain sufficient revenue to finance the gigantic struggle against Napoleon." The enormous increase of poor-rates proportionate upon the size of the family, which stimulated an unheard-of growth of population, not only furnished men to fight for the king, but provided an abundant supply of cheap hands for the factory-owner and for the farmer. The landlords succeeded practically in prohibiting the importation of corn during the continental struggle, and in extending the prohibition after the war.[71] Moreover, by their influence in Parliament they threw the burden of the extra war taxation upon articles of trade manufacture and general consumption,[72] and even avoided the inheritance tax.[73] The conclusion of the struggle witnessed the landowning and privileged classes still strongly intrenched in political control, the capitalist manufacturers grown powerful by the accumulation[74] of wealth, the working classes depressed to the limits of subsistence under the staggering burden[75] of taxation, of the falling of wages, and of the raising of rents. But the main result of the downfall of Napoleon was to throw the market of Europe and of the world open to the English manufacturer and to make imperative his control of political power in order to advance his commercial and industrial aims.
The rise of the employing class to political power was but a natural consequence of its economic preponderance. The middle class marshaled the workingman under its banners in its fight with the landed aristocracy for admission to the suffrage, but the em-
( 159) -ployer had little intention of assisting his factory hands in their demand for the suffrage. The tightening of the screws of the Mercantilistic policy during the Napoleonic wars and the dominance of the landed interest in the government gave way before the question of the proper representation in Parliament. While the leaders of the masses of the people demanded universal suffrage, the middle classes utilized the force of the democratic pressure[76] to secure in 1832 its own admission to the ballot. The English, like the French bourgeoisie, turned the riots and uprisings of the people to middle-class advantage.
The expectation of the workingman for the boon of universal suffrage at the hands of the middle-class reformers was doomed to disappointment. The Liberal premier officially stated that electoral reform was an accomplished fact, and the Commons endorsed his position by a vote of 500 to 22.[77] As a matter of fact, the politically conscious business men believed implicitly in middle-class control and frankly avowed it. "The sooner,"says Cobden, and Cobden was a progressive, "the power in this country is transferred from the landed aristocracy; which has so misused it, and is placed absolutely—mind, I say absolutely—in the hands of the intelligent middle and industrious classes, the better for the condition and the destinies of this country."[78] Bright was in complete agreement with his fellow-reformer. "Recent progress, he said, was due `to the manly contest of the industrial and commercial against the aristocratic and privileged classes of the country.' “[79] Indeed, the first Reform Bill, so far from extending the suffrage among the working classes, actually reduced[80] the small number of workingmen who in certain boroughs had retained the right to vote. The actual result of the disfranchisement of the rotten boroughs and the redistribution of these seats among the large cities and the counties and the limited extension of the suffrage was to give the middle class for a generation a dominant influence in legislation. So radical was the shift in the balance of power that, despite ten general elections between
( 160) the first and the second Reform Acts, the Conservatives gained control[81] of but one parliament and was in office during this period of thirty-four years but one-fourth of the time.[82] The proof is overwhelming that the first Reform Act secured political preponderance for a class already supreme in the economic field.
The admission of the middle classes to political power was soon felt. The legislation during this period exhibits the class character and interests of the groups framing it. The efforts of Wilberforce and Clarkson had finally secured the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, followed in 1834 by the emancipation of the slaves.[83] But the humanity that the middle class manifested for the negro in the West Indies was not strong enough to overcome self-interest in the consideration of the "white"s laves in English factories. The various Factory Acts[84] were supported and passed by the landlords and farmers over the bitterest opposition of the manufacturers and economists. A mixture of hypocrisy and of reliance upon the Manchester dogmas characterized the utterances of business men. In a petition of the time the manufacturers set forth the "unimpeachable character for humanity and kindness possessed by manufacturers as a class" and denounce[85] "the pernicious tendency of all legislative enactments upon trade and manufacturers." Ricardo "supported the opposition of the manufacturers," [86] John Bright, "the people's friend," denounced the Ten Hours' Bill limiting the duration of labor for women and children" as one of the worst measures ever passed in the shape of an Act of the legislature." [87] When Harriet Martineau was driven, by the evidence collected by the Factory Commissioners in 1833, to admit that "the case of these wretched factory children seems desperate," she goes on to add, "the only hope seems to be that the race will die out in two or three generations." [88] The
( 161) division of classes and the hardness and blindness of the self-interest that secured this legislation are evinced in the statement of Lord Shaftesbury to Professor Rogers that he dared not include the agricultural laborers in the provisions of the act for fear of alienating the support of the landlords and the farmers.[89] No stronger evidence is needed to disclose the impersonal political manifestations of the economic interest than this recital of the class character of the factory legislation.
The manufacturers obtained revenge on the landowners by a successful popular campaign led by Cobden, a self-made manufacturer,[90] and by Bright, a millowner of Rochdale, which crystallized in 1846 in the legislation repealing the Corn Laws. The policy of free trade which had already influenced the British fiscal measures now took possession of the field ; the number of articles which paid duty in 1842 was 1,052; in 1860 only 48.[91] But why has England maintained a free-trade policy contrary to the practice of other countries? The adherence of England to free trade when the business men and the political leaders of other countries were turning their attention toward protection is to be explained in part by the continued prestige of the classical school of political economy, in part by the continued economic and political supremacy of the middle class, but more adequately and more fundamentally by reason of its relation to the objective commercial conditions which actually deter-mined the economic theories and practices of the manufacturer. With the momentum of his big start in machine production, in possession of a world-market for his goods, the English manufacturer was interested, not in the monopoly of the home market, but in the control of a world-market. Little wonder that the great European powers in their attempt at self-protection reared tariff walls to repel the invasion of cheap English goods, and endeavored at the same time to stimulate native industry by an effective control of national demand!
In Traill's Social England the end of the period of middle-class rule is placed to coincide with the death of Palmerston in 1865 ;[92]
( 162) Spencer [93] finds the year 1860 a convenient point for beginning the enumeration of his celebrated catalogue of the "stigmata" of the new Toryism. A less arbitrary date for ending the period would be the Reform Bill of 1867, which admitted the upper class of workingmen in the cities to the franchise, and marked the emergence of the workingman as a factor to be reckoned with in the general elections. Although at that time, as later in 1884, the Conservative and the Liberal parties were both bidding for popular support,[94] it is of importance to note how the interests of the parties determined the provisions of the measures. The moderate Liberals defeated the bill for the extension of the suffrage in 1866.[95] In 1867 the Tories under Disraeli, who "had long felt that an electorate frankly democratic was a welcome alternative to the political ascendancy of the middle classes" [96] took the initiative in pushing through Parliament the second Reform Bill which admitted male householders to the franchise.[97] Whether the Conservatives sought to turn to their own advantage the growing antagonism of capital and labor, or appreciated the appeal that imperialism, for a time at least, would make to the poorer classes, and foresaw that the cities would become Tory strongholds, they, at any rate, attempted[98] to put their party in as advantageous a position as possible in the inevitable extension of the suffrage. In 1884-85 the Liberals under Gladstone carried through a measure which placed the country electorates on an identical basis with the boroughs, a scheme distasteful to the great landlords whose parliamentary representatives could scarcely more than hint of "the unfitness of the agricultural laborer for the vote." [99] The middle-class ascendancy which had continued for a generation was now over. The Reform Bill of 1867 marks the end of the laissez-faire policy in Parliament. The Manchester school conceived the whole industrial system to be a great, impersonal mechanism propelled by the motivating force of self-interest, at its highest point of efficiency
( 162) with a minimum of state interference. Yet to objectify this conception of social and economic organization, it was necessary to control Parliament and to use the state as the agent to remove restrictions. Despite this necessary inconsistency, the reform of the poor system, the reorganization of local and county administration, the repeal of the Corn Laws and of the Navigation Acts, the Commercial Treaty of 1860 with France, were all parts of the legislative program of Liberalism and quite in accord with the teachings of Adam Smith and his followers. But the extension of the franchise to the laborers was the signal for a radical departure from the teachings of political economy.
While the business man was engaged in organizing industry and in directing the civic policy, the wage-earner, united in an external unity by the processes of production, perforce aware of the impotence of the individual to modify the impersonal industrial system upon which he depended for a livelihood, was experimenting with the functional value of various types of associated activity. "The very fact that, in modern society, the individual thus necessarily loses control over his own life, makes him desire to regain collectively what has become individually impossible."[100] Professor Veblen's interesting hypothesis[101] that the relation of the workingman to the machine determines his mental attitude and shapes his thinking in trains of causal sequence, making him susceptible to Socialist propaganda, has, accordingly, little more than the value of a metaphor. It is indeed true that the introduction of machinery has destroyed the old personal foundation of the social and industrial order and reconstructed society and industry on an impersonal basis, and that the ramifications of system have resulted in the standardization of the ends and means of social existence. But the change in the mental attitude of the workingman is not so much the outcome of his monotonous supervision of or by the machine process as the uncertainty and insecurity of his existence. The "wrench" that comes in the feeling and thinking of a man who is out of a "job," whose wages have been "cut," who does not know where his next dinner is coming from, or how the wife and the children are to fare, is abundant explanation for his questioning of the validity of the existing order of things. The increase of wages which the workingman
( 164) gains through his trade union, the harmony of socialist philosophy with the cruder thinking and desires of the depressed worker are sufficient reason for his allegiance to a militant organization and his adhesion to a revolutionary philosophy of life. Living his life in the world of urban contacts and stimuli, it is but natural that he should be more susceptible to new ideas than the farm laborer; liable at any moment to the derangements that come with the slightest disturbances of the impersonal industrial mechanism of which his activities form a part, it is but human that the manual laborer seeks in combination the strength that comes from numbers and co-operation.
The first efforts of the workman were along the course of direct action. The mental attitude of the laborer is to be explained according to the principles of mob psychology. In the remorseless, impersonal fight waged by the machine against human flesh and blood, the wage-earner found himself defeated, and enraged, struck blindly at the instruments of his downfall. The Luddite riots in 1812 and 1816, the Lancashire outbursts of 1826 indicate the intensity of the indignation which vented its force upon the machine : so blinded were the weaver and the artisan by the sensational aspect of the transition that they struck recklessly at the visual manifestation of the change which had taken away their occupation and livelihood. But in the very nature of the case the predominance of the emotional and sensational over the reflective and ideational in the content of consciousness signified that these aggregations could be only transient. Resentment, anger, and prejudice may be sufficient basis for a mob, but a definite principle and a practical program are needed to furnish an organizing element for the development of a stable and efficient labor organization. Chartism, in fact, was a step in the right direction. The aim here was definite enough, but the methods were revolutionary and the leadership was visionary. The agitation which centered around the demand for the People's Charter, with its mammoth demonstration and its passionate appeals to class hatred,[102] was due in large measure to the hypnotic effect which the French Revolution[103] exercised over the leaders of the workingmen. In spite of the revolutionary character of the movement, and the
( 165) incompetence and arrogance[104] of its promoters, Chartism called the national attention to the prevalence of destitution and misery[105] and promoted the development of class-consciousness among the rank and file of the workers. The failure of the movement[106] undoubtedly contributed to divert the activities of workingmen from political agitation.
With the failure of direct action and of political agitation, the influence of Robert Owen and of the middle class tended to turn the efforts of the wage-earners to co-operation and organized self-help. While the aim of Chartism and of the impractical schemes of Owen had been to amass huge, incoherent aggregates of working people, the followers of the New Lanark prophet and philanthropist and the level-headed leaders of the labor movement turned their attention to the achievement of less lofty goals and to the formation of more closely knit societies. The co-operative movement for production and for consumption, and the unions organized by trades are the noteworthy objective results of this change of attitude. The attempt to transform the circumstances of the entire working class was abandoned as hopeless, and workingmen in groups concentrated their efforts upon the more modest and practical task of bettering their own condition, with but little consideration of the general lot of the great mass of labor.
The co-operative movement affords us most interesting evidence of this change of heart and mind. In establishing consumers' and producers' societies, the working class attempted to utilize the weapons of capitalism to its own advantage. The restriction of the full benefits of these societies to the members showed the essentially individualistic character of the organization. It is sufficient to state in passing that this co-operative movement, while failing[107] in association for production, has been successful[108] in associations for consumption, both in retailing and in wholesaling.
The organization of the trade union is to be distinguished from that of the guild system. The Webbs have marshaled evidence to
( 166) demonstrate that the trade union is neither a continuation of the craft guild[l09] nor of the journeyman's club. It was rather an innovation, introduced into the industrial system of the eighteenth century to meet the new conditions[110] which, even before the invention and introduction of machinery, made for the proletarianizing[111] of the artisan and the dissolution of the surviving ties between master and men inherited from the guild organization. The guild[112] existed for the protection of the interests of the master, journeyman, apprentice, and even of the consumer; the trade union, like Hobbes' "Leviathan,"was instituted for the purpose of the self-preservation of the wage-earner. Each individual upon joining the union surrenders his "natural" right of competing with his fellows, and of making individual terms of employment with his employer. Thus it is that the trade union, despite its obvious use of personal and local relations, is organized, fundamentally, upon an impersonal basis. The psychic force that gives the labor union its vitality is the economic incentive, the most impersonal save the aesthetic of all human interests. The maintenance of the standard of living and the question of higher wages becomes an object to be achieved only by the subordination of the individual to the group. Collective bar-gaining denotes the standardization of remuneration and the rejection, in some degree at least, of the principle of the apportionment of reward to the worth of individual service. While the member of the union has a vote in the referendum for a strike, his relinquishment of the ultimate control of his conduct to an organization often involves the surrender of his personal preferences. In mediaeval times, the control of life was in the hands of the guild master and his personality functioned in his work ; in modern times, the personality of the wage-earner does not function in production, and the control of his life in its economic aspect has passed into the keeping of an organization into which his personality is merged.
There are three quite distinct stages in the growth of English trade unionism. These stages are marked off from each other by the three assumptions successively accepted by the unions, namely, "the Doctrine of Vested Interests, the Doctrine of Supply and Demand, and the Doctrine of a Living Wage."[113] The doctrine of
( 167) a vested interest in a trade is only another name for the conservative attitude which distrusts and obstructs innovation and progress, and is best exhibited[114] by the long and unsuccessful opposition of trade unionists to the introduction of machinery. The acceptance after 1840 of the dogmas of supply and demand marks the dominance of middle-class thinking and of economic theory over the minds of the working class. "Bentham, Ricardo and Grote were read only by a few; but the activity of such popular educationalists as Lord Brougham and Charles Knight propagated `useful knowledge' to all the members of the Mechanics' Institutes and the readers of the Penny 'Magazine. The middle-class ideas of `free enterprise' and `unrestricted competition' which were thus diffused received a great impetus from the extraordinary propaganda of the Anti-Corn Law League, and the general progress of Free Trade. Feargus O'Connor and Bronterre O'Brien struggled in vain against the growing dominance of Cobden and Bright as leaders of working-class opinion."[115] After the working class developed leaders of its own, the submission to the middle-class ideas continued. In the sixties, "for the first time in the century, the working-class movement came under the direction, not of middle and upper-class sympathizers like Place, Owen, Roberts, O'Connor, or Duncombe, but of genuine workmen specially trained for the position. . . . They brought to the task, it is true, no consistent economic theory or political philosophy. They subscribed with equal satisfaction to the crude Collectivism of the `International,' and the dogmatic industrial individualism of the English Radicals. . . . They accepted, with perfect good faith, the economic Individualism of their middle-class opponents, and claimed only that freedom to combine which the more enlightened members of that class were willing to concede to them. . . Their understanding of the middle-class point of view, and their appreciation of the practical difficulties of the situation saved them from being mere demagogues." [116] The adherence of the labor leaders to middle-class views is doubtless to be explained in part by one weapon which the doctrine of laissez-faire furnished. "What they demanded was perfect freedom for a workman to substitute collective for individual bargaining, if he imagined such a course to
( 168) be for his own advantage."[117] The acceptance of the dogmas of supply and demand signified the acquiescence of the practical leaders of the labor movement in the only feasible method of realizing class interests tolerated by public opinion at that time. The right of political action was surrendered, the recognition by the public of the worker to a minimum standard of existence was not urged, and labor thus secured the privilege of voluntary association and collective bargaining.
The third stage in the history of labor unionism, characterized by the dominance of the theory of a fair wage, marks the transition from the old to the new unionism, or the repudiation of the dogmas of classical economy and the formulation of a collective philosophy of action. The first successes of the attempts to widen the scope of union membership and of organized action came in the victory of the London match girls in their strike of 1888, and in the next year in the triumphant outcome of the great dock strike, successes[118] due to the decisive intervention of public opinion. These striking contradictions of the principles of political economy tended to turn the attention of the younger element in the unions to the advantage to be derived from the conscious deliberative action of the social body, if the spontaneous aid of public opinion could accomplish so much. The new leaders,[119] under the influence of collectivistic views, denounced the individualist Liberalism of the old leaders, and converted the rank and file to an acceptance of the policy of state interference for the welfare of the working class. Political action now became the practical method of promoting industrial betterment and a living wage was set up as the goal of attainment. Mann and Burns, forsaking the Social Democratic Federation, employed their best efforts to carry out a practical collectivistic program.[120] The influence of the Labor group in Parliament and the growth of municipal ownership and control in British cities was largely due to this change of mental attitude from laissez-faire to collectivism on the part not only of the working class but also of public opinion. The necessary intervention of the government in the great railroad and coal strikes proved the correctness of the insight and the logic of the contenders for the inseparable character of the industrial and the political situation; the far-reaching social reform legislation of
( 169) the Liberal party since 1905 demonstrated the advantage of the active participation of the workingman in political life. By the impersonal means of the ballot, the worker is recovering his lost control over the conditions of life.
The Socialist movement of the nineteenth century in England, like the labor movement, was the outgrowth of a phase of the working-class situation. But while labor unions for two score years before 1885 accepted the orthodox economic theories, socialism set its face against classical economics and finally evolved, through the genius of Marx, the so-called "scientific" interpretation of the social and industrial order. To see in society, reorganized industrially by voluntary association, the means for bringing to pass the social millennium was the vision of Owen and the solution of John Stuart Mill. To perceive in the state, as Hegel perceived, the great agent for human advancement, to forecast workingman control of the government, was the mission of Marx. The government, the "bugaboo" of the British manufacturer and the middle-class economist, was to become the Pillar of Fire by night to the oppressed and exploited workingman. Thus, while labor unionism assumes the existing order of things, Socialism would overturn it; while unions are content with an opportunist program, the followers of Owen and Marx have a comprehensive philosophy of life and action. The circles of participation in the two movements differed radically. The trade unions existed for the sake of the interests of skilled labor; the Socialist in his enthusiasm was "white-hot" for the welfare of the whole working class.
In a certain sense, Socialism was the nucleus, the intensest phase of the social movement of the nineteenth century. Unlike the principles of trade unionism which developed within the working class in the fierce struggle for existence, the theoretical formulation of Socialism came from the intellectual wing of the middle class. Socialism had, in consequence, a more catholic appeal than labor unionism. It called attention to economic and social maladjustments; it furnished a general interpretation and a universal specific for all the social ills. So wide, indeed, was the awakening interest in collectivism, so attractive to many men of diverse interests in widely different classes, that the march of Socialism and collectivism in England was by no solid phalanx, but by detached, scattered and often hostile bands.
( 170)
Utopian Socialism in England centers about the life and program of Robert Owen, the middle-class philanthropist of New Lanark. Owen "despised and rejected political action, and strove to form a new voluntary organization which should supersede, almost instantaneously and in some unexplained way, the whole industrial, political and social administration of the country."[121] That the reorganization of industry on the basis of voluntary association did not materialize in England in the thirties and in the forties is not, necessarily, conclusive evidence against its future applicability. The failure of the various communistic communities is to be attributed as much to the visionary and sentimental type of mind of the middle-class enthusiasts who have comprised the bulk of the membership as to the underlying idea. We noted[122] the success of voluntary co-operation in the consumers' association. This is the type of Socialist program to which Mill[123] looked for future reform. Syndicalism in its constructive phase sets up the same ideal of industrial organization on a voluntary basis, to be realized, however, through aggressive and revolutionary methods.
So-called "scientific" Socialism centers in England about the work of Marx in that country and the organization and activities of the Social Democratic Federation. As early as 1864 the Inter-national Association of Working Men, established in London under the auspices of Marx, declared that "`the subjection of the man of labor to the man of capital lies at the bottom of all servitude, all social misery, and all political dependence.' " [124] "In 1881 the S. D. F. [Social Democratic Federation] was established by H. M. Hyndman. The federation was a purely Socialist party, modeled on those already existing on the Continent and filled with the Marxian spirit. It made no concessions to the `inconsistent opportunism' of the English workers, and for that reason had no influence
( 171) whatever on the bulk of the English proletariat."[125] We cannot but admire the steadfastness with which these proud possessors of the mantle of Marx held to their full theoretical heritage and refused to trim their principles for immediate political success.
Two other definite phases of Socialism in England should receive mention. The Christian Socialist movement of the forties and fifties under the leadership of Kingsley, Hughes, and Maurice', exhibits an attempt of men to find the basis of social betterment in the sense of brotherhood as set forth in the social teachings of Jesus. This movement emphasized the rôle of the feelings in the solution of the social problem ; an organization a generation later laid stress upon the understanding. The Fabian Society, organized in 1883 by an intellectual wing of the middle class, made the attempt both to condition social action upon the scientific study of the social situation and to extend the propaganda of constitutional collectivism among the working class.[126] This mention of the different varieties of Socialism indicates that the theory of collectivism is not confined to any organization, but overflows all classification.
Socialism, as the collectivistic leaven, in all its different phases, has permeated English life. The political aims of labor unions have taken the collectivistic cast. The rank and file of the Liberal party is being converted to a social policy hard to be reconciled with the old individualistic dogmas still dear to many party leaders. In a practical way England has gone far toward state Socialism. Howe's book, The British City, indicates the rapid growth of municipal ownership in cities—an advance accelerated by the participation of workingmen in politics. The great social reforms to the credit of the present Liberal government afford an index to the rapidity of the conversion of this party of individualism to collectivistic pro-grams and policies.
The impersonal character of the Socialist movement is as evident as that of the labor union. The interests of all the members of society are to be conserved without regard to class or adventitious circumstances. The special economic privileges that private property presents for the personal control of the destinies of other men
( 172) are to be abolished. The ownership of all the instruments of production is to be vested in the state, the impersonal representative of all of us. Above all else, the Socialist philosophy of life tends to turn the attention of the individual from the personal to the impersonal explanation of the causes of social misery. According to the new interpretation, not human nature, but the social order is responsible for human waste and wreckage; not the "boss," but the "soul-less" corporation is to blame; not the capitalist, philanthropist that he often is, but the system is at fault.
Thus the circle of impersonalization is complete. Capitalism introduced an impersonal economic order with impersonal ramifications which extend throughout the entire social order. Labor unions have built up an impersonal organization to measure strength with capitalism in the industrial arena. The Social Movement, and especially social science as its highest rational integration, has implanted in the minds of men an objective and detached method of analyzing and interpreting social facts.
In the conclusion of this study of the historical development of the English people from the standpoint of socialization, a résumé of the generalizations discovered may serve as an introduction to the next step in the thesis.
1. Socialization is the participation of wider circles of men in the widening field of social life. Through such a process a conglomeration of petty "democratic" village communities of the type of the German "mark," with its one or two hundred inhabitants, has evolved into the British "democracy" with its forty millions of people.
2. The formation of organized mental attitudes comes about through the integration of opinion and sentiment through the inter-mental activity of the members of the group. This point of view is at variance with an interpretation of human experience as the reflex of environmental changes. The significant difference between animal and human response to stimuli is the intervention in the case of man of the idea, into which may be packed the experience of the race. Reconstructions of attitudes and conversions of character are, therefore, not the immediate outcome of environmental changes. They are mediated by the totality of social influences. For example, the experience of the father, the shrewd love of the mother, mold attitudes conformable with the group situation. We saw that
( 173) Lollardism, Puritanism, and Methodism, were coincident with economic crises and drilled economically valuable habits into groups of individuals struggling for economic status.
3. The development in different groups of the consciousness of concrete values and the struggle for their realization has molded the life of the English people in a distinctive way. The difference in the English and the Russian or the Spanish peoples is not to be explained completely in terms of environment and of ethnic variety. The functional explanation is in terms of the development of mental attitudes in the interaction between the group and the environment. The Spaniard and the Russian are at a loss to appreciate the moral point of view of the Englishman because Spain and Russia had no Reformation and no Puritan movement. They cannot understand the Englishman's insistence on political and personal freedom and his method of orderly constitutional change, because their countries had no Magna Charta with the succeeding seven centuries of political development. They can scarcely comprehend the individualistic point of view of the Englishman, since these countries have yet to experience the Industrial Revolution. It is evident that social valuations determine the evolution of national life and character.
4. The actual process of socialization in England has passed through three stages in which the mental organization was based successively on kinship, on personal, and on impersonal ties. The transition from the hamlet and the tribal groupings, originating in the natural family ties, to the mediaeval village and town with its feudal system held together by the cement of personal relations, to the city and the capitalistic organization with its impersonal clamps and rivets, has involved more than a change from scratching the ground with a digging-stick to the operations of the modern steam gang-plow, or from a tool technique to a machine age. Parallel with this external change and in organic relation of cause and effect with it, there have occurred changes in mental attitudes and shifts in human values. Yet these changes have been grouped about these three types of attitude, which have functioned as the organizing principles in the succeeding types of social organization required for the progressive control over nature. The ability of the person to secure larger control over life-conditions, first, by means of kin ties, then by personal relations, and finally, through impersonal relations, reveals the same process from the individual standpoint.
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Finally, the question may be raised whether the impersonal stage of socialization is the final or highest goal of the process. The study of social development in England in the last fifty years suggests that a new stage, which we may call the social, is being attained. We perceived that the great social movement of the nineteenth century was surcharged with the motional force of this trend, that the social sciences reveal the highest rational expression of this mental change, and that the march of State Socialism in England exemplifies the objectification of the new attitude in concrete, practical action. The social tendencies are multiplying which denote that the impersonal way of looking at things will become permeated by the social outlook and spirit; that the perfected outward co-operation of our present industrial order will become motivated by a perfected inner co-operation; that out of the moral ferment and psychic seething of the thronging thousands in our cities, united in spite of them-selves by the closest and most complex external interdependences, will be evolved a group-consciousness necessary for the solution of our problems and for the control of conditions in the common interest. Such a change in the mental and social organization presupposes and requires a change in the habits of mind of the individual. The requisite transformation can occur only through the socialization of the individual by means of his freest personal participation in the community of thinking, feeling, and action of the group. The process of perfecting the social order makes possible and requires the all-round development of personality.
