Perkin Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society

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through John Francis Bray and Bronterre O’Brien, on Marx and all later

socialists is beyond question.

Yet this is not to say that this motley collection of

‘social cranks’ invented the ideal and foisted it on the working class. At best they

formulated it in striking form and ‘spoke to their condition.’ But the working

class were not only ready to accept the message: some at least were already in

possession of it. The first ‘Co-operative and Economic Society’ and the first

propaganda organ of the co-operative movement, The Economist—both names

are significant—were started as early as 1821, and the London Co-operative

Society was set up in 1824, contemporary with Thompson’s first book, and

before the publication of all the rest of the group, ‘to restore the whole produce

of labour to the labourer.’

It is true that they were influenced by Owen, but if

ever there was a case of a leader being chosen by his followers, this was it.

Practically the whole working-class co-operative movement began either without

his knowledge or against his opposition, and it was only in 1829 after the failure

of his American experiment and the manifest success of theirs that he was

reluctantly persuaded to lead them.

By then the working-class ideal was well established. It was used to justify

universal manhood suffrage: a speaker in Manchester in 1826 declared that ‘the

purpose of parliamentary reform was to secure to the labourer the fruits of his

own labour,’ and the argument became a standard one with working-class

Radicals.

Francis Place, commenting in 1831 on the National Union of the

Working Classes (an offshoot of the original Owenite British Association for

Promoting Co-operative Knowledge of 1829), remarked:

The ‘Union’ had great influence over a considerable portion of the working

class, more especially in the great manufacturing counties. During the time

the Reform Bills were before the Parliament this was particularly the case.

The attention of the whole people was then drawn to the subject, and the

working people were quite as much excited as any class whatever. The

Colquhoun, Treatise on…British Empire, pp. 29–47; his tables were used by Robert

Owen and John Gray, and repeated by John Wade in The Extraordinary Black Book

(1831), p. 216; cf. Foxwell, in Menger, op. cit., pp. xlii–xliii, and Briggs, ‘Language of

Class’, loc. cit., pp. 49–50, 51n.

Cf. Beer, op. cit., I. 183–4; for a bibliography of their works see Menger, op. cit.,

Appendix.

Hodgskin, op. cit., pp. 108–9.

W.Thompson, Labor Rewarded, by ‘One of the Idle Classes’ (1827), p. 30; and Appeal

of One Half of the Human Race, p. 199.

Cf. Foxwell, in Menger, op. cit., pp. lxv-lxxi; A.Plummer, ‘The Place of

Bronterre O’Brien in the Working-Class Movement’, Ec.H.R., 1929, II. 61f.

Beer, op. cit., I. 185.

Cf. Wallas, Place, pp. 269–72.

194 STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS

consequence of this excitement was a general persuasion that the whole

produce of the labourers’ and workmen’s hands should remain with them.

The ideal captured the working-class press, joining forces with the Painites—the

Carliles, Hetheringtons and Cleaves— who had kept alive the old Jacobin

tradition of political democracy, and transformed the merely political Rights of

Man into the social revolutionary Rights of Labour. Joshua Hobson announced in

the first number of his unstamped Voice of the West Riding in 1833:

It is intended to publish a Weekly Penny Paper, to be called the ‘Voice of

the West Riding’, advocating the Rights of Man against the ‘exclusives’,

and the Rights of Labour against the ‘Competatives’ and the ‘Political

Economists’, and especially to vindicate the Working Classes from the

calumnies and misrepresentations of our parasitical scribes who figure in

the Provincial Newspapers.

Wherever it succeeded, it transformed the working-class movement from an

ameliorative one which accepted the basic structure of the new class society into

a revolutionary one which rejected it altogether. As a disillusioned bricklayer put

it at a trade union conference in 1839,

Trade unions are for botching up the old system; Chartists are for a new

one. Trade unions are for making the best of a bad bargain; Chartists are for

a fresh one; and everyone must admit that trade unions partake of the

tampering spirit of monopoly.

There were many ways in which outright rejection of the system could show

itself—too many for the unity of the working class. There was the frontal attack,

via political agitation for Reform, aimed at proletarian control of government, or,

if that failed, violent revolution as advocated by the physical-force Chartists.

There was the undermining operation of syndicalist trade unionism, culminating

in a revolutionary general strike— William Benbow’s ‘national holiday’ or

‘sacred month’—as in Owen’s Grand National Consolidated Trade Union of

1834. And there was the attractively non-violent method of simply opting out of

the competitive system, by setting up proletarian cells or islands within it based

on the ideal of labour instead of that of capital. Even these, however, could take

various forms, the basic choice lying between millennial co-operative

Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicle, 28 October 1826; Briggs, ‘Language of Class’,

loc. cit., p. 66.

Wallas, Place, p. 266n.

Voice of the West Riding, No. 1, 8 June 1833.

E.R.Wickham, church and People in an Industrial City (1957), p. 102.

STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS 195

communities on the Owenite model and nostalgic individualist colonies of

independent peasants on the lines of O’Connor’s Chartist Land Plan.

The fragmentation of the ideal, in practice as well as theory, was its

fundamental weakness. Moreover, an apparently unequivocal decision for

outright rejection had a habit not merely of failing—which rejectionist

experiments did with dismaying regularity—but of evolving by imperceptible

degrees into acceptance of the system. This happened in different ways, as we

shall see in Chapter IX, to syndicalist trade unionism, the co-operative

movement, and even to physical-force Chartism. Meanwhile, the working-class

ideal, for all its greater plausibility, was extremely vulnerable to seduction by the

other two ideals, the more surprisingly by the remarkable revival of the

aristocratic ideal which took place in the 1820’s.

THE REVIVAL OF THE ARISTOCRATIC IDEAL

The aristocratic ideal never quite died. At its weakest, in the agitation for the

abolition of the poor laws between Waterloo and the Queen’s Trial, an etiolated

sense of responsibility for the lower orders managed to survive amongst the

aristocracy. The Lords’ Committee on the Poor Laws of 1817 was ‘decidedly of

the opinion, that the general system of these laws, interwoven as it is with the

habits of the people, ought…to be essentially maintained.’

Even at this low ebb,

schemes for the state-aided welfare of the poor, like John Christian Curwen’s

‘National Benefit Society’ or Robert Owen’s Plan for Villages of Co-operation,

could still get a serious hearing in Parliament, though they were seen chiefly as

cheap alternatives to poor relief, and even so had little chance of breaking

through the prevailing belief of the Government in laissez-faire.

Paternal discipline, on the other hand, survived in despotic strength in its home

territories, the English countryside and London ‘Society’. A Tory paternalist in

1824 advocated English landlordism as a cure for Ireland’s woes:

None but those who have been familiarized with English farmers and

cottagers can conceive the degree of awe which actuates them in regard to

their landlords…. The English landlord’s influence does not slumber. We

have ourselves seen farmers deprived of their farms for frequent

drunkenness—for leading immoral lives—for being bad cultivators;—and

we have seen a farmer compelled to marry a girl whom he had seduced….

P.P., 1818, V, 400, S.C. of H. of L. on the Poor Laws, 1817, p. 7.

J.C.Curwen, Sketch of a Plan for Bettering the Condition of the Labouring Population

(1817), and Parliamentary Debates, XXXIV. 871; R.Owen, Report to the County of Lanark

of a Plan for Relieving Public Distress (1820), and P.P., 1823, VI, S.C. on Mr. Owen’s

Plan.

196 STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS

This operates in the most powerful manner, in preventing vice and crime;

and in giving the best tone to what may be called the rustic world.

Francis Place complained in 1831 of the difficulty of working with ‘gentlemen’

Reformers who feared ‘being looked upon as ungenteel’ or of ‘being

discountenanced by Holland House people and Brooks’ Club people’ and would

sacrifice the public cause so as ‘not to lose caste with their fashionable friends

and acquaintances.’

The countryside and the West End were not the whole of England, however,

and in other spheres the ruling class were not merely yielding ground to the new

entrepreneurial ideal, but actually making the pace in accepting its principles.

During the 1820’s Tory Governments brought in increasing doses of free trade

(Huskisson and Peel’s reduction of the customs duties, 1823 onwards, and

especially the sliding—and lower— scale of corn duties, 1828), free trade in

labour (repeal of the Combination Acts and of the laws forbidding the emigration

of artisans, 1824–5), and free trade in religion (repeal of the laws against

Dissenters and Roman Catholics, 1828–9). The protectionist High Tories were

alarmed. As early as 1826 Blackwood’s was complaining that ‘Our policy has

been greatly changed— some of our most important laws and systems have been

changed—some of the leading relations and regulations of society have been

changed,’ and that the defenders of the old system had had ‘to oppose both the

Ministry and the Opposition, a united Parliament, a united Press, and to a very

great extent, public opinion.’ ‘What is the great object of the new system?’ it

asked in 1827, ‘To carry competition to the highest point. And it hounded

Canning, Huskisson, Peel, and even Wellington, for selling out to ‘the Faction’

of Whigs and Political Economists, in terms of which the following is a fair

sample: ‘Saying nothing of the others, Mr. Peel’s public life has been one

continuing course of despicable, grovelling, mercenary faithlessness to principles

and party….’

The very shrillness of the tone betrays the nostalgic protectionists

as defenders of a lost cause.

Yet there was at the same time and in the same group a remarkable revival of

the paternal aristocratic ideal. Malthus has usually been considered the main

champion of the leisured, unproductive landed class, and this amongst the

classical economists he certainly was. He was himself aware of it: ‘It is

somewhat singular that Mr. Ricardo, a considerable receiver of rents, should

have so much underrated their importance; while I, who never received, nor

expect to receive any, shall probably be accused of overrating their importance.’

For Malthus, the unproductive landlord was not only a useful but the most

necessary member of society. Not only was rent ‘an exact measure of the relief

‘Y.Y.Y.’ [Robinson], ‘The Instruction of the Irish Peasantry’, Blackwood’s, 1824, XV.

502.

Wallas, Place, pp. 260–2.

STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS 197

from labour in the production of food granted to [man] by a most kind

Providence,’ which ‘will always afford a fund for the enjoyments and leisure of

the society, sufficient to leaven and animate the whole mass,’ and ‘the reward of

present valour and wisdom, as well as of past strength and cunning’, ‘a boon

most important to the happiness of mankind’. It also supplied the demand which

made the landlord the lynchpin of society, the initiator of the economic cycle, the

unproductive consumer without whom the productive classes could not continue

to produce more than they consumed: ‘In the ordinary state of society, the master

producers and capitalists, though they may have the power, have not the will, to

consume to the necessary extent. And with regard to their workmen, it must be

allowed that, if they possessed the will, they have not the power.’ It followed,

therefore, that ‘it is absolutely necessary that a country with great powers of

production should possess a body of unproductive consumers.’

On this Ricardo drily remarked: ‘A body of unproductive labourers are just as

necessary and as useful with a view to future production, as a fire, which should

consume in the manufacturers warehouse the goods which those unproductive

labourers would otherwise consume.’

Malthus’s Principles and Ricardo’s Notes

on it constitute a dialogue between the aristocratic and entrepreneurial ideals

unique in candour and sincerity, which nevertheless breaks off time after time in

mutual incomprehension—symbolically, it may be said, since this was the

normal relationship between the two ideals.

Yet it was not Malthus who fathered the revival of the aristocratic ideal. On

the contrary, he was one of the chief objects of the revivalists’ wrath. For Malthus

was the champion of the ideal at its most irresponsible, the apologist of power

without responsibility, who armed it—and the entrepreneurial ideal— with what

his opponents considered the most diabolical instrument ever invented for

disciplining the lower orders and grinding the faces of the poor. The ‘principle of

population’—‘the constant tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the

nourishment prepared for it’

—was used to mock every attempt to improve the

condition of the working class, from the poor laws to Owen’s ‘parallelograms’.

The fact that the principle formed, along with Ricardo’s theory of rent which was

based on it through the law of diminishing returns, one of the twin pillars of the

classical school of economics has masked the extent to which it was a product of

‘the abdication on the part of the governors’. In its original form it was intended

to counteract entrepreneurial criticism of ‘idleness’. Francis Place, the first neo-

Malthusian, pointed out, ‘Mr. Malthus denies to the unemployed poor man the

‘Christopher North’ (John Wilson et al.], Preface to Blackwood’s, 1826, XIX. xviii–xix;

[Robinson], ‘The Surplus Population of the United Kingdom’, ‘The Faction’, and

‘Political Economy, No. IV, ibid., 1827, XXI. 379, XXII. 403–31, and 1830, XXVII. 41.

Malthus, Principles (1820), p. 238n,; Ricardo bought estates worth  275,000 in

Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Kent— Ricardo, op.

cit. (ed. Sraffa), X. 95–9.

198 STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS

right to eat, but he allows the right to the unemployed rich man.’

Nassau Senior,

who found the principle ‘made the stalking horse of negligence and injustice, the

favourite objection to every project for rendering the resources of the country

more productive,’ later wrote in the report of a Royal Commission:

the general proposition that such is the influence of the principle of

population, that no increase in the supply of provisions can permanently

benefit the labouring class, we believe to be absolutely false. That

proposition owed its origin to some expressions of Mr. Malthus, not

sufficiently qualified by him, and repeated in a still more unqualified form

by many of his followers. It owed its currency to the relief which it

afforded to the indolence and selfishness of the superior classes. But it is

contradicted by the evidence of all experience.

The revivalists of the aristocratic ideal were reacting as much against the

betrayers of paternalism as against the new entrepreneurial ideal. They not only

bracketed for common enmity Malthus and the other economists, but singled him

out for special attack. Michael Thomas Sadler, the acknowledged leader of the

High Tory paternalists, made his name by his attacks on Malthus. A Leeds linen

merchant, and thus a notable ‘social crank’, he had the leadership of the revivalists

thrust upon him the moment he entered Parliament in 1829.

To the principle of

population he opposed his own ‘law of population’, that ‘the prolificness of

human beings…varies inversely as their number’ [i.e. density], and to Malthus’s

purely hypothetical ratios he opposed massive empirical statistics drawn from all

over the world to show that human fertility fell as population density,

urbanization and comfort increased.

It was ‘disproved’ by Macaulay in the

Edinburgh Review by the dishonest manipulation of his statistics,

and laughed

at or ignored by the economists. Nevertheless, in spite of being couched in

theological terms of God’s providence and ‘the ample provision Nature has made

for all creatures,’ Sadler’s ‘law’ was essentially the belief accepted by modern

Malthus, Principles, pp. 229, 237–9, 463, 471.

Ricardo, op. cit., II. 421n.

Malthus, Essay on Population (Everyman, 1951), I. 5.

Wallas, Place, p. 165.

N.W.Senior, Two Lectures on Population (1829), Appendix (Correspondence with

Malthus), p. 89; Extracts from the Reports of the Commissioners on…Handloom Weavers

(ed. R.Currie, 1841), p. 12.

[Samuel O’Sullivan], ‘Review of the last Session of Parliament’, Blackwood’s, 1829,

XXVI. 234–7.

M.T.Sadler, The Law of Population (1830); for Malthus’s ratios, see Essay on

Population (ed. cit.), I. 10–11.

[R.B.Seeley], Memoirs of M.T.Sadler (1842), pp. 630–4.

STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS 199

economists that economic growth and higher living standards are the main

prerequisite of population control.

‘Mr. Sadler alleged that the only efficient

checks to population were, ease and comfort, increasing to luxury.’ It led to a

conclusion diametrically opposed to Malthus’s: ‘If you really apprehend an

overflow of this kind, the best way to check it, is to improve the condition of the

people.’

To be fair to the economists, it must be admitted that Malthus favoured high

wages—though he clearly doubted the working class’s capacity for ‘moral

restraint’ by which alone they could keep their numbers small enough to obtain

them—while Ricardo believed that ‘the natural price of labour…essentially

depends on the habits and customs of the people,’ and that ‘a taste for comforts

and enjoyments’ should be encouraged as the best ‘security against a

superabundant population.’

But that their position was poles apart from Sadler’s

can be seen from their attitude to the poor laws: their pernicious tendency, says

Ricardo, ‘has been fully developed by the able hand of Mr. Malthus; and every

friend to the poor must ardently wish for their abolition.’

Sadler, by contrast,

argued ‘the absolute necessity of such a provision, as regards the labouring

classes of England,’ and of their extension to Ireland: ‘The institution of the Poor

Law of England encourages the demand for, and increases the value of labour, as

well as abates distress; in Ireland, in consequence of the want of such a law,

labour is discouraged, and distress increased.’

To Malthus’s ‘Selfish System’, therefore, Sadler opposed his ‘Paternal System’.

It was not merely that the rich ought to be charitable towards the poor out of

prudence and benevolence. Protection and maintenance were the right of the

poor and a duty of the rich implicit in the privilege of property: ‘a real and

indisputable right, that, after the institutions of the country have sanctioned the

monopoly of property, the poor shall have some reserved claims to the

necessaries of life.’

This was the revival of the aristocratic ideal in all its pristine

purity. Blackwood’s commented on his first session in Parliament:

The Economists for the first time heard their fallibility called in question,

and felt their ascendancy in danger…. These sages of the Satanic school in

politics encountered an adversary by whom their favourite measures were

opposed, and their most familiar axioms disputed;…Sadler has done this.

Cf. W.A.Lewis, Theory of Economic Growth (1955), pp. 313–15, 434–5; and cf. recent

studies by animal behaviourists, who have found a psychological reluctance to breed in

overcrowded conditions amongst laboratory mice and amongst species of kangaroo on

islands off Western Australia.

Seeley, op. cit., p. 182; contrast Malthus, Principles, p. 472.

Ricardo, op. cit., I. 96–7, 100.

Ibid., I. 106.

Sadler in H. of C., 3 June 1830; Seeley, op. cit., p. 203.

200 STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS

Be he right or wrong, he is the man whose warning voice called the

attention of the honourable House…to the first principles of the

Economists; who bid them turn their eyes from the capitalist to the

labourer; and who had the spirit and the feeling to ask them…whether that

could be a good system…under the influence of which capital must

increase at the expense of humanity; where what is called wealth only

serves to oppress and to paralyse industry; and national prosperity is made

to …proceed upon its course amidst the sweat, and the blood, and the

groans of its victims.

Sadler was the key figure in the revival of the aristocratic ideal. His part in its

most successful manifestation, the campaign for factory reform, and his post-

mortem influence through his disciples, Richard Oastler and John Wood, on the

attack on the New Poor Law of 1834, make him the chief link between the ideal

of the old society and all later attempts to unite the upper and the working classes

in common opposition to the capitalist middle class. As the youngest son of a

large yeoman or small country gentleman, apprenticed to a linen merchant in one

of the largest of the northern industrial towns, and as an Anglican brought up

under the influence of the Tory Wesleyans, he was specially fitted for the role.

But he was the channel rather than the originating spring of the revival. He

belonged to a widespread current of social thought which was flowing strongly

in the 1820’s before it carried him to the top, provided him through the patronage

of the Duke of Newcastle with a pocket borough seat in Parliament, and chose

him as its leader. That current of thought, signally defeated by the Reform Act

(which overthrew Sadler himself), by the New Poor Law, and by the triumph of

free trade, and then dissipated in the romantic feudalism of Disraeli, Lord John

Manners and ‘Young England’, has suffered the neglect and misunderstanding of

most lost causes. Yet in the 1820’s it produced, quite apart from Sadler’s

contribution, a counter-attack on aristocratic ‘abdication’ and the entrepreneurial

ideal which not only rejected outright the whole canon of classical economics

but anticipated in great measure both Keynesian economics and the social

outlook of the Welfare State.

This current of thought can best be traced in the High Tory Blackwood’s

Edinburgh Review, the most widely read journal of the day, which claimed a

larger circulation than the Quarterly Review, and sold more than twice as many

copies as the Edinburgh Review or any other Opposition journal.

It was by no

means confined to it, however. The Quarterly Review, for example, rallied to the

defence of the poor laws as early as 1823, when Blackwood’s was still describing

them as ‘indefensible’ and ‘an irremediable calamity’;

while the New Monthly

Ibid., pp. 167, 208.

[O’Sullivan], ‘Review of the last Session of Parliament’, Blackwood’s, 1829. XXVI,

235.

STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS 201

Magazine in 1821 published a highly intelligent refutation by Simon Gray of

Say’s law—that demand must always be equal to production and that over-

production, under-consumption and general gluts are impossible—which went

beyond Malthus in its anticipation of Keynes.

Blackwood’s, nevertheless, was the main channel, and has the advantage of

affording a fairly continuous view of the course of the current. Not all the

contributors can be identified, but the most important, apart from the editor,

‘Christopher North’, who was John Wilson, Professor of Moral Philosophy at

Edinburgh University, were John Galt, ex-customs official, merchant and now a

novelist and playwright, William Stevenson, a Treasury official, W.Johnstone,

probably an Irish journalist living in London, and, by far the most brilliant and

original, David Robinson, a London political writer whose Toryism was too

reactionary even for the Quarterly Review.

The revival began as a merely

defensive reaction against the attacks of the entrepreneurial ideal. Blackwood’s

brief welcome for Ricardo in 1817 soon turned to criticism. In 1818 it upbraided

him for asserting that ‘the interest of the landlords is always opposed to that of

every other class of the community,’ though at this stage it was willing to admit

that the error was without malice: ‘it is the great and leading defect of one of the

ablest critical works that has ever appeared in this, or…in any other country or

age, that it has a strong, not an intentional, tendency to make mankind unhappy

and discontented with their situation….’

By 1819 it was attacking Ricardo’s

doctrine that ‘whenever wages rise, the rate of profits must fall’ as ‘a theory

which teaches, that by the nature of human society, there is a constant and

irremediable contrariety of interest between its members, and that a general

amelioration, in which all should participate alike, is impossible.’

By 1824 the doctrine of rent and the consequent opposition of interest were

‘revolting to the best feelings of our nature’; ‘If this inference can be fairly

drawn from the doctrine, we should not hesitate to pronounce that doctrine as

false as it is mournful and mischievous.’

By 1825 the economists were satirized

as ‘the Statesmen of Cockaigne’ whose ‘State-Medicine’, ‘the divine science of

For comparative circulations see Blackwood’s, 1820–21, VIII. 80–1, and 1826, XIX,

Preface.

Q.R., 1823, XXVIII. 349. ‘A considerable reaction has taken place in public opinion on

the subject of the poor laws; and…hazardous schemes for their abolition have given way

to proposals of a more sober kind for their severe and strict administration….’; contrast

Blackwood’s, 1823, XIV. 83, on ‘this wiseacre of the Quarterly Review’.

S.Gray, ‘To M.Say on Some Fundamental Principles in Statistics, and the Causes of the

Present Stagnation of Commerce’, New Monthly Magazine, 1821, I. 90–7, II. 366–76; the

New Monthly even anticipated Sadler’s ‘law of population’, in an anonymous letter ‘On

the Theories of Godwin and Malthus’, 1821, I. 195– 205: experience shows that, where

the population is already dense, further increase will be slow, and that ‘It is population that

advances arithmetically, while produce, in quality and quantity, advances geometrically.’

202 STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS

Political Economy and the divine Liberal System’, was contrary to the facts of

experience, and who were responsible for setting the classes against each other:

our political economists carefully filled the labourers with the conviction

that their employers were their tyrants and natural enemies; and of course

no sooner were the [combination] laws repealed than the two classes

became bitter enemies—the servants became the despots of the masters.

And before 1830 the Government and its ‘omniscient and infallible guides, the

Economists and Philosophers’ had produced ‘a gigantic increase to the permanent

distress of the majority of your population.’

More significant, however, than their rejection of Ricardian economics were

their own alternative theories of economy and society. The first anticipated

Keynesian analysis of the causes and remedies of depression far more than did

Malthus, to whom Keynes gave too much credit.

Whereas Malthus was merely

concerned with the effective demand of the rich, and expressly denied any

significance to that of the working class—‘no power of consumption on the part

of the labouring class can ever… alone furnish an encouragement to the

employment of capital’

—the contributors to Blackwood’s made the effective

demand of both the cornerstone of their theory. Henry Lascelles, one of the few

writers named, opposed the reduction of patronage, on the grounds that ‘every

man discharged from the public service is a new member added to the number of

the needy, and that every diminution of salary subtracts so much from the

expenditure among the tradesmen where the placeman is located…’, that ‘profits

are derived from prodigality, and that labour, to be lucrative, must be in

request.’

Other contributors equally opposed the abolition of the poor laws, on

the grounds that poor rates, like wages, were spent wholly on consumption: ‘they

are expended in promoting the business of the agriculturist, manufacturer, and

trader’:

F.W.Fetter, ‘The Economic Articles in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, and

their Authors, 1817–53’, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 1960, VII. 85f. and

213f.; A.L.Strout, A Bibliography of Articles in Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817– 25

(Lubbock, Texas, 1959), pp. 121, 133; I owe these references to Prof. Walter

E.Houghton of Wellesley College, Mass., editor of The Wellesley Index to

Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900 (1966).

Blackwood’s, 1817, I. 175–8; 1818, IV, 59.

‘On the Influence of Wages on the Rate of Profits’, ibid., 1819, V. 171–2; this

anonymous article is remarkable for an early use and definition of the term

national income, p. 171: ‘The Aggregate annual produce of the land and labour of a

nation constitutes what may be termed the national income.’

[W.Stevenson], ‘The Political Economist, No. II’, Blackwood’s, 1824, XV. 653–4.

STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS 203