Perkin Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

And to the higher ranks generally there was no doubt about the revolutionary

character of ‘this nuisance of mere plebeian insolence and profligacy which has

been gaining strength for the last two or three years.’ As a Scottish Tory saw it,

The Unions became general throughout the manufacturing districts of

Scotland—They were divided into classes systematically—A regular

communication was kept up among them—Committees and Sub-

committees were appointed for the purpose of forming plans, and digesting

the means of carrying them into effect.

The higher classes tried to relieve the distress, but failed:

The views of the reformers became desperate. Their conduct and

deportment towards their superiors was totally altered. They had become

indifferent and even insolent. Equality of rights and of property was the

end at which they aimed, and the particular mode of partition and

allotment was already aimed at. As these objectives could not be

accomplished without force of arms, it was resolved to have recourse to

that alternative.

The result was the abortive Glasgow rising of 5 April 1820 and the first Scottish

treason trials since 1794.

The only other risings were the ‘Pentrich Revolution’

of Jeremy Brandreth and the poor Derbyshire framework knitters misled by

Oliver the Spy in 1817, and the Cato Street Conspiracy by Arthur Thistlewood

and the Spenceans—the only group which really aimed at a division of property

—in 1820.

The significance of the working-class Reform movement in these five years

was not the threat of revolution, which was confined to a few cranks and

extremists. On the contrary, it was, as Cobbett was never tired of explaining, the

direct opposite: for the first time working-class protest, instead of exploding into

riots and mob-violence—as indeed still happened in these years amongst the less

sophisticated framework knitters and agricultural labourers—was organized on a

national scale for a non-violent purpose. A resolution passed at the mass meeting

at Hunslet Moor near Leeds a month before Peterloo puts both aristocratic

abdication and the national non-violent reaction of the working class in a

nutshell:

Speech at Liverpool, January 1820, Blackwood’s, 1820, VII. 13–15.

Passages in the Life of a Radical (1893 ed.), chaps. i, iii-vi, xii, xxiii, xxv.

Pellew, op. cit., esp. III. 82.

‘The Warder, No. I’, Blackwood’s, 1819–20, VI. 208.

174 THE BIRTH OF CLASS

That as our legislators have, in innumerable instances, manifested a cruel

and criminal indifference to our truly distressed situation, and treated our

petitions with contempt, we therefore make this solemn appeal to our

oppressed fellow countrymen, praying them to join us in a National Union,

the object of which is to obtain an overwhelming majority of the male

population, to present such a petition as can scarcely fail to have the

desired effect, and to adopt such other constitutional measures as may be

deemed most expedient to procure for us the redress of our manifold

grievances.

There were other attempts at working-class organization, especially in the

industrial field, of which the most notable were the ‘Philanthropic Society’ or

‘General Union of Trades’ organized by the Manchester Spinners’ Union in

1818, and the London shipwright John Gast’s ‘Philanthropic Hercules’ of 1819,

both of which quickly disappeared.

One abortive attempt, of immense

significance for the future, was Robert Owen’s first tentative appeal to the

working classes to adopt his new social system which the higher classes had

rejected—a turning point in the career of the father of socialism, mass trade

unionism and the co-operative movement which was signalized by the distance

between the titles of two of his works, published in 1818 and 1819 respectively:

‘Two Memorials on Behalf of the Working Classes’ and ‘An Address to the

Working Classes’.

At that moment, however, the emancipated working class were

too obsessed with politics to listen to his messianic message.

After the Peterloo Massacre’ of 1819 the working-class Reform movement

also subsided, or was diverted by the agitation over the Royal Divorce Bill, to the

importance of which in uniting Reformers of all classes we shall return.

Nevertheless, it had completed its task of creating a separate working-class

consciousness. As a perspicacious opponent of the movement put it in 1820,

Never in any age or country was there so firm an alliance betwixt the

higher and lower orders as there existed in Great Britain, until it was fatally

disturbed of late years by…the spirit of turbulence and faction;…the cord

has been snapped by the revolt of the labouring classes from their natural

protectors and best friends….

It was between 1815 and 1820 that the working class was born.

‘Thoughts on the Proceedings of the Special Commission’, Blackwood’s, 1820, VII.

561–5.

Cf. R.J.White, Waterloo to Peterloo (1957), chap. xiv and pp. 189–90.

P.P., 1819–20, IV, Papers relating to the Internal State of the Country, November 1819,

No. 8, p. 9.

G.D.H.Cole, Attempts at General Union (1953), pp. 7–12.

THE BIRTH OF CLASS 175

The birth of the middle class was less traumatic but no less real. During the

Wars patriotism had combined with commercial prosperity to keep the middle

ranks loyal and quiescent. As the first editor of the Manchester Guardian was to

write of the northern manufacturers during wartime,

they did not interest themselves about the internal policy of their country,

or if they meddled at all, saved themselves the trouble of inquiry by a

general determination to ‘support the government’.

Their political activity was confined to petitioning as an old society interest for

the redress of specific grievances, such as the income tax of 1799 or the Orders

in Council of 1807–12. It was the post-war depression with its sharpening of the

competition for income and, above all, the provocative use of the landlords’

political power to defend rent at the expense of profits and wages, which opened

the eyes of the middle ranks and turned them into a class. The Corn Law of 1815

was for them what the repeal of paternal industrial legislation and the attack on

the poor laws was for the lower orders: practical proof that the ruling aristocracy,

in spite of its philosophy, governed only in its own interest. The Prime Minister

might declare that ‘it has been well said in a foreign country, when it was asked

what should be done to make commerce prosper, the answer was laissez-faire’

and that in adversity ‘the great interests of the country, the agricultural, the

manufacturing, and the commercial interests …must stand or fall together’;

but

when adversity arrived, it seemed, laissez-faire meant full support for agriculture

while leaving industry and commerce to sink. ‘Perish commerce, let the landed

interests live,’ was how ‘A Manchester Manufacturer’ saw Government policy in

1819.

Irresponsible use of aristocratic power, then, provoked the middle class into

existence. Old society methods failed. Protest meetings and mass petitions—54,

000 signatures from Manchester, 24,000 from Leeds—failed to halt the Corn

Law.

The old society compact by which the landed interest ruled on behalf of

all the rest was therefore broken, and the middle class must assert its own power

through its own representatives. The landed and commercial interests, demanded

‘A Manchester Manufacturer’, must be ‘put upon an equal footing in Parliament’

through ‘a better representation of commercial and artisan towns and districts.’

Still more significantly, the middle class became ready for the first time to

listen to a group of thoroughly emancipated and disillusioned intellectuals who

up to now had been more often laughed at than read: the Benthamites. In their

My italics.

‘The Warder, No. IV’, Blackwood’s, 1819–20, VI. 455.

[J.E.Taylo], Notes and Observations…on the Papers relative to the Internal State of the

Country recently presented to Parliament (1820), p. 202; D.Read, Press and People,

1790–1850 (1961), p. 41.

176 THE BIRTH OF CLASS

appropriately more dignified way, Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy

(1817) and James Mill’s Essay on Government (1820) did for the middle class

what Cobbett’s Address did for the working class: they gave expression to the

emergent fact of class antagonism. In the first Ricardo armed the new-found anti-

landlordism of the middle class with economic logic. His theory of rent, that ‘the

whole surplus produce of the soil, after deducting from it only such moderate

profits as are sufficient to encourage accumulation, must finally rest with the

landlord’, made the landlord a parasite exploiting the other two classes, more

especially the profit-making class, and the community as a whole: ‘The dealings

between the landlord and the public are not like dealings in trade, whereby both

the seller and buyer may equally be said to gain, but the loss is wholly on one

side, and the gain wholly on the other….’

Small wonder that Ricardo, on

entering Parliament in 1819, was, to his own surprise, immediately seized upon

as the spokesman of the middle class.

James Mill, without whose persuasion and encouragement Ricardo would not

have written the Principles, was still more explicit in his denunciation of the

landed ruling class. His Essay on Government, written for the Encyclopaedia

Britannica but reprinted in 1820 for a much wider audience, is nothing less than

a diatribe against government by an aristocracy. Not only will an hereditary

aristocracy, deprived by its wealth of the strongest motives for intellectual

labour, be defective in the mental powers required for government, but they will

have an interest in exploiting the rest of the community:

they will take from the rest of the community as much as they please of the

objects of desire. They will thus defeat the very end for which Government

was instituted. The unfitness, therefore, of an Aristocracy to be entrusted

with the powers of Government, rests on demonstration.

Direct democracy on the Athenian model being impossible, ‘in the Representative.

System alone the securities for good government are to be found.’ And the

infallible safeguard in such a system, based on universal suffrage, against the

tyranny of the many was ‘the wisdom of the middle rank. It is enough that the

great majority of the people never cease to be guided by that rank; and we may,

Hansard, 1819, XXIII. 1249, and 1820, I. 1119; W.R.Brock, Lord Liverpool and

Liberal Toryism, 1820–27 (1941), pp. 41, 43.

‘A Manchester Manufacturer’, National Good, or, the Utility of the Landed and

Commercial Interests being United (1819), p. 7; Read, op. cit., p. 43.

Ibid., p. 42.

Ibid., p. 43.

Ricardo, op. cit., I. 335, 336; cf. Notes on Malthus, ibid., II. 157, n. 88: ‘… profits are

the fund from which all rent is derived. There is no rent which at one time did not constitute

profits.’

THE BIRTH OF CLASS 177

with some confidence, challenge the adversaries of the people to produce a

single instance to the contrary in the history of the world.’

This blatant attempt

to substitute middle-class for aristocratic political leadership of society was

exactly what increasing numbers of the middle class now wanted to hear. Though

few went so far with Mill as universal suffrage, from this point onwards the

curbing of the political power of the aristocracy by the combined force of the

newly emancipated middle and working classes was only a matter of time and

opportunity. In this awakening to consciousness not only of their conflict of

economic and political interest with the aristocracy but of their potential strength

the same five years saw the birth of the middle class.

The union of the middle and working classes against the aristocracy was

hastened and anticipated by two events which together marked the end of the

period of birth, Peterloo and the Queen’s Trial. The ‘Manchester Massacre’

hastened it by throwing into glaring contrast the provocative use of force by the

ruling class and the manifest lack of revolutionary intent on the part of the

working class. From that moment, while the separatist working-class Reform

movement subsided, a union of middle and working-class Reformers, under the

paradoxical patronage of Whig aristocrats still operating in the context of old

society interest politics, became an increasing possibility.

The Royal Divorce Bill, although—or perhaps because—it diverted popular

attention away from Reform, actually anticipated the successful alliance of the

Great Reform crisis. As a critical Tory put it,

Upon the radical question I conceive the Queen’s trial to have been

productive of the most important consequences. Had it been possible to

devise a plan to bring all the various ranks and classes of the discontented

into simultaneous action against the state and monarchy, it was the

agitation of that most inexpedient measure.

And a patrician Whig was moved by it to embrace Reform for the first time:

I have never been satisfied [as to the necessity of Reform] until the

conduct of the House of Commons relative to the Queen. On this question

one half of the higher ranks were on one side, while on the other side were

the other half of the higher ranks and the whole of the middle and lower

classes of society, and yet notwithstanding this extraordinary

preponderance of public opinion in one scale, the members of parliament

threw themselves into the other scale at the request of Ministers with as

little hesitation as if they were voting upon the most trivial and

Essay on Government (ed. Sir E.Barker, 1937), pp. 12, 33, 73.

Henry Lascelles, ‘On the Present State of Public Affairs at Home’, Blackwood’s,

1821, X. 335–6.

178 THE BIRTH OF CLASS

uninteresting question. These considerations have persuaded me that public

opinion has not its due weight in the House of Commons, and that

therefore some measures ought to be taken to give the people a more

adequate representation.

Loss of confidence and division of the aristocracy in the face of the united

middle and working classes—this was to be the formula for the passing of the

Reform Bill. Meanwhile, in 1820–21 it was a sufficient proof that the dependent

middle ranks and lower orders had been emancipated, and that the years between

Waterloo and the Queen’s Trial saw the birth of class.

Lord Milton (later 3rd Earl Fitzwilliam) to Sir G.Cayley, 11 March 1831;

F.M.L.Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (1963), pp. 280–1.

THE BIRTH OF CLASS 179

VII

The Struggle between the Ideals

THE new class society did not, like Pallas Athene, spring into existence full-

grown and fully armed. It had a great deal of growing up to do before it became

the viable class society of mid-Victorian England. In 1820 the classes were still

very immature and scarcely knew their own strength and limits. Contemporaries

often talked of the higher, middle and lower or working classes each in the

plural, and this was more than a hangover from the pluralistic ranks and orders

of the old society. It reflected the vagueness of the social facts, the existence of

numerous layers and sections within the three major classes which only time and

the experience of class conflict would hammer into something like compact

entities.

Nevertheless, it was from the beginning one of the functions of class

consciousness to draw a sharp line between each class and the next by means of

the conflict taking place across it. The hotter the firing, the better the troops knew

where the front line was, and the less they cared about internal divisions—

though there would always be those who neither knew nor cared which side they

were on, and others whose hearts were on the other side. What kept the armies

together was the competition for income between rent, profits and wages, and in

the secular deflation which lasted from the post-war slump of 1815– 1820 down

to the late 1840’s the competition for income was extremely sharp. Whatever

happened to them in real terms— and this, as we saw in Chapter V, is still the

subject of much dispute amongst historians—rents, profits and wages between

1815 and 1848 were all under severe pressure, and the general trend of all three

in terms of current values was downward.

The great conflicts of the age were all

at bottom struggles for income: the struggle over the corn laws classically so, and

even Parliamentary Reform was, in large part, a struggle for the control of

government spending and taxation, which weighed far more heavily on some

incomes than on others. Certainly, the industrial conflicts of this seminal period

of trade unionism were obviously so, while Chartism was basically, in the words

of J.R.Stephens, ‘a knife and fork question’.

Yet income alone, though a necessary, was never a sufficient motivation for

class antagonism, or class would be as old as rent, profits and wages. What was

also required was a conscious image of the class in its relation to rival classes,

and of the ideal society in which it would find its rightful place. The troops, or at

least a considerable portion of them, had to have some notion of the army as a

whole and its position relative to the enemy, and of the objective at which they were

aiming. Moreover, since morale was half the battle, the image had to be flattering

to one’s own side and demoralizing to one’s opponents: it had to be an ideal

image of the representative member of one’s own class as the lynchpin of society,

the only role-bearer who fully justified his place, the ideal citizen whom the rest

should emulate, and of the ideal society as one in which this ideal citizen would

be suitably honoured and rewarded.

The class ideal thus sublimated the crude material self-interest of the

competition for income, sanctified the role of class members by the contribution

they made to society and its well-being, and so justified the class and its claim to

a special place and special treatment within the social framework. It had a

twofold function: first, to act as a catalyst in the formation and growth of class, a

‘seed’ around which the class could crystallize and coagulate, a magnetic pole

radiating lines of force throughout the beneficiaries of the common source of

income and orienting them towards itself; second, to operate as an instrument of

propaganda or psychological warfare vis-à-vis the other classes, to undermine

their confidence in their own ideal, and try to win them over to one’s own. In

other words, it was a means of educating both the class itself to class-

consciousness, and the rest of society to accept it at its own valuation.

The class which was most successful in this educational and moral struggle, in

uniting its own members and imposing its ideal upon others, would win the day

and have most influence in determining the actual society in which all had to live

and in approximating it more or less closely to its own ideal. The primary conflict

in the newly born class society of the early nineteenth century was a struggle for

the minds and hearts of men. It was a struggle between the ideals.

Perhaps the most significant effect of the sublimation of the competition for

income into a struggle between ideals was that it allowed men to embrace ideals

other than that which sprang from their own source of income. If this had not

been so the old society in which the aristocratic ideals of the leisured gentlemen

and of the open aristocracy based on property and patronage were universally

accepted, could never have existed, while in the new society victory would

automatically have gone to the biggest battalion, the working class, which it

manifestly did not. Further, it helps to explain one of the most puzzling

phenomena of class conflict, the large proportion of leaders and spokesmen who

led or spoke for classes other than their own. These ‘social cranks’, as they may

be called—men like Professor Malthus, the premier apologist of the landed class,

Ricardo their landed opponent, James Mill the civil-servant spokesman of the

Cf. Rostow, British Economy, p. 8; Deane and Cole, op. cit., p. 23; F.M.L. Thompson,

op. cit., pp. 231–5.

G.D.H.Cole, Chartist Portaits (1965), p. 74.

STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS 181

capitalist class, and Robert Owen, William Thompson and Feargus O’Connor,

the respectively capitalist, landowning and gentleman-journalist champions of

the working class—played a part out of all proportion to their rarity in the class

conflict of their day. Indeed, it might almost be said that only the social crank

could be sufficiently disinterested to possess the fervour and evoke the

passionate response of charismatic leadership. Certainly, no landowner, capitalist

or workman could have made the outrageous claims for their class which

Malthus, James Mill and Feargus O’Connor did for those which they

adopted. Finally, since as we shall see there was in the professional middle class

a whole ready-made class of potential social cranks, it helps to explain the very

special role of professional men in the class conflicts of the new society.

Not that the leaders and spokesmen invented the ideals and imposed them on

their followers. For one thing, they were at least as much chosen by the class as

the class by them: they ‘spoke to their condition’, and when they did not were

rejected. For another, the ideals of all the major classes had their origins deep in

the old society, and welled up to the surface when the old ground was broken up.

There was in each enough nostalgia for certain aspects of the old social structure

to ease the transition to the new. In other words, the new class ideals were a

transmutation of older elements in the heat generated by class conflict. As such

they were not the novel creation of any one man or small band of leaders, but the

spontaneous response of large social groups to the release of deep and long

suppressed yearnings which had been latent in the old society.

THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL

The ideal citizen for the bulk of the middle class was, naturally, the capitalist,

and the ideal society a class society based on capital and competition. Yet these

terms were used in a more specific sense than today, and they were much more

disruptive of the old society than at first sight appears. The capitalist of the ideal

was the active owner-manager of the Industrial Revolution, not the passive or

remotely controlling financier of later corporate capitalism. So much was he the

typical business man of the age that neither Adam Smith nor the Ricardians

thought it necessary to distinguish him from any other kind of capitalist, and it

was left to the Continentals like J.B.Say to differentiate between the

entrepreneur and the rentier. Capital likewise was active property, as remote—at

least until the capitalist’s retirement—from the passive investment of the

fundholder or (in theory) of the landowner as a work-horse from a hunter.

Competition was not the bloodless competition between material products and

between abstract corporations of the modern ‘free enterprise’ economy: it was

individual competition, the competition of flesh-and-blood men for wealth,

power and social status. For these reasons it may, with judicious anachronism, be

called not just the capitalist but the entrepreneurial ideal.

182 STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS

The entrepreneur, according to the ideal, was the lynchpin of society.

Although labour was the source of all wealth, it was capital which called it forth

and set it in operation. The entrepreneur was the impressario, the creative force,

the initiator of the economic cycle. He it was who conceived the end, found the

means, bore the burden of risk, and paid out the other factors of production. All

this he did for the meagre return of a profit fixed by competition, unable ever to

rise more than momentarily above the common rate, and subject to a long-term

natural tendency to fall as, with the increasing cost and difficulty of producing

food, wages and rent trenched in upon it.

The worker, although indispensable

and deserving of the highest wages which society could afford, took no thought

for the morrow and had nothing to do but to perform at the entrepreneur’s

bidding a full day’s work for a wage fixed by competition at the level of

customary subsistence.

The landlord, on the other hand, was a mere parasite, a

member of the ‘unproductive class’, whose rent was an unearned income

equivalent to the whole surplus produce after the subsistence wages and the

common rate of profit had been paid.

If the worker was the horse and the

landlord the non-paying passenger, the entrepreneur was driver, conductor,

pathfinder, caterer and provider of provender all rolled into one.

Capital, it followed, was the mainspring of the economic machine: ‘that fund

by whose extent the extent of the productive industry of the country must always

be regulated.’ The national capital—the total fund for the employment of labour

in the hands of the entrepreneurs—was the real wealth and strength of the

country. It could never be too large: ‘there is no amount of capital which may

not be employed in a country, because demand is only limited by production.’

Derived entirely from the capitalist’s self-denying abstention from consumption,

savings were automatically invested in further production, raising wages and, via

the demand for food, the landlord’s rent. Capital could easily be diminished, by

the selfishness or fecklessness of the other two classes: by the landed rulers who

imposed heavy taxes on profits or transferred a portion to themselves by means of

corn laws, or by the working class who might under-breed, and so raise wages at

the expense of profits, or over-breed beyond the capacity of capital to employ

them, and so hasten the ‘stationary state’ of mass poverty.

Capital was the chief

benefactor of society, the parent of all progress, the only bulwark between

prosperity and the poverty of countries such as Ireland, with ‘labourers unfed for

want of employment, and land unproductive for want of labour…. The

connecting link is capital, and that link is wanting.’

Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, in Works and Correspondence

(ed. Sraffa), I. 110–27; cf. J.S.Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1904 ed.), p. 416.

Ricardo, op. cit., I. 162; and cf. I. 94, 100–1.

Ibid., I. 270, 335.

Ibid., 151–2, 290.

STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS 183