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and to argue that Virtue is its own reward.’
2
This was the pure Kantian
categorical imperative, but scarcely practicable within the existing systems of
morality. Hence the insistence on moral regeneration as the prerequisite of any
society based on the ideal of labour: Owen’s ‘New Moral World’ and his Society
for Promoting National Regeneration, or the ‘Educational Chartism’ and
‘Teetotal Chartism’ of the moral-force Chartists. In all three class ethics there
was naturally a gap between principles and practice, but in none was it so wide
as in the working-class ideal.
The struggle between the moralities was as much a part of the class conflict of
the period as Parliamentary Reform or the campaign against the Corn Laws. As
with them, too, it was somewhat confused by the ambivalent roles of a section of
the traditional ruling class and of competing groups of the forgotten middle
class, the professional men who championed one or other of the major classes.
But the story is still further confused by its entanglement with what may be
called the Moral Revolution, that profound change in the national character
which accompanied the Industrial Revolution. Between 1780 and 1850 the
English ceased to be one of the most aggressive, brutal, rowdy, outspoken,
riotous, cruel and bloodthirsty nations in the world and became one of the most
inhibited, polite, orderly, tender-minded, prudish and hypocritical. The
transformation diminished cruelty to animals, criminals, lunatics, and children
(in that order); suppressed many cruel sports and games, such as bull-baiting and
cock-fighting, as well as innocent amusements, including many fairs and wakes;
rid the penal code of about two hundred capital offences, abolished
transportation, and cleaned up the prisons; turned Sunday into a day of prayer for
some and mortification for all; ‘bowdlerized’ Shakespeare, Gibbon and other
‘obscene’ classics, inhibited every kind of literature save that suitable for family
reading, and almost gave the death-blow to the English stage; and generally
removed from the language, except in official publications and medical literature,
all words calculated to ‘bring a blush to the cheek of the young person.’
The rise of Victorianism, as it is usually called, is usually attributed to the
influence of Hannah More, Wilberforce, and the Evangelicals.
1
It would be
tempting to connect it with the struggle between the class moralities by claiming
the Clapham Sect for the middle class, to which indeed most of them belonged:
Wilberforce alone excepted, as the son of a Hull merchant reared as a landed
gentleman, and a typical ‘social crank’ like Bentham or Owen, they were
practically all business men and clergymen.
2
But this would be misleading, on
four counts. In the first place it falls into the common trap of building far too
much on the influence of a comparatively small group of individuals, who in any
1
Life of R.Owen, by Himself (1920 ed.), pp. 122–3.
2
R.Carlile, The Republican, 1819, I. 272; cf. W.Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political
Justice (1796), I. 179; P.B.Shelley, Plan of a Treatise on Morals, in Prose Works (ed.
R.H.Shepherd, 1906), II. 201–4; Henriques, op. cit., p. 238.
TRIUMPH OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL 231