Perkin Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society

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accommodated within the entrepreneurial ideal, partly because it was the

forgotten middle class, which left itself out of its own versions of the class

structure, but mainly because until then most professional men were still paid by

fees, returned their incomes for tax purposes under Schedule D (profits) like any

business man, and lived and worked amongst urban business men who differed

very little from themselves in basic outlook and way of life. As we saw in

Chapter VIII, it was chiefly in the salaried civil servants from the 1830’s

onwards that the professional ideal began to diverge from the entrepreneurial.

The mid-Victorian age, however, was the key period for the emergence and

consolidation of the leading professions, and for the crystallization of the

professional ideal as a separate entity, increasingly critical of the entrepreneurial.

Between 1841 and 1881 professional occupations trebled in number, compared

with a two-thirds increase in general population, and came to constitute a

substantial element in the middle class.

Although the professions and public

services (omitting the police and armed forces) constituted only about 3.8 per

cent of the male occupied population in 1867, they equalled about a sixth of non-

manual occupations, and if they had all paid tax (which they did not) would have

constituted over half the taxpaying class.

More important, the leading

professions were rising in public recognition and status, and more clearly

distinguishing themselves and their systems of remuneration from business men

and the profit motive. Beginning with the British Medical Association in 1856 a

new and much larger wave of professional institutions came into existence for

doctors, dentists, mechanical, mining and electrical engineers, naval architects,

accountants, surveyors, chemists, teachers and others, expressly to exclude

quacks and charlatans who put profit before professional service. Beginning with

the Medical Registration Act, 1858, State regulation to ensure professional

standards by the exclusion of the free market was introduced for doctors, dentists,

pharmacists, ships’ masters and mine managers, while the civil service was

forged into a profession by the reforms of 1855 and 1870. It is also interesting to

note that the salaried professions, education, religion, journalism, and central and

local government, were expanding faster than the fee-charging, medicine and law.

Professional men, as we have seen, were freer than most to choose sides in the

socio-economic struggle, and no doubt many of them took their conscious

political outlook from their families, friends and clients, but their increasing

professionalism led many of them increasingly to differentiate themselves from

the business class and to play an important part in criticizing the entrepreneurial

policy of laissez-faire and replacing it by collectivism. The divergence of the

professional and entrepreneurial ideals foreshadowed in the previous generation

actually took place in the mid-Victorian age.

W.J.Reader, Professional Men (1966), p. 211.

354 ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY: IDEAL AND REALITY

More significant even than this defection of their chief ally, however, was the

undermining of the entrepreneurial class from within by the emergence of a new

class of big business men who no longer fitted the simple model of the

entrepreneur. This was a logical consequence of the continuing rise in the scale of

organization, the first effect of which had been to create the industrial owner-

manager. Now a further turn of the spiral was creating enterprises which were

too large to be owned and managed by a single entrepreneur or partnership,

except by elaborate schemes of delegation. Giant family businesses did indeed

survive, but their owners could no longer supervise them daily at shop-floor

level. They were forced to act through professional managers, and to become

themselves remote controllers of finance and general policy. The more normal

device was the joint-stock company which, after its phenomenal success with the

railways and the legalization of limited liability under the Companies Acts of

1856–62, spread rapidly throughout large-scale industry. The number of

registered companies (excluding railways and other chartered or parliamentary

companies) carrying on business grew from under 1,000 in 1844 to nearly 3,000

in 1868 and over 10,000 in 1887.

Only a minority were in manufacturing

industry, but they were nevertheless in process of becoming the normal form for

the largest enterprises, and they naturally dominated the large-scale industries

and services, notably railways, shipping, telegraphs, banking, insurance, mining,

gas and water.

Whether joint-stock company or giant family business, the large-scale

enterprise changed the outlook of the controlling business man. For one thing, it

became much more difficult to give up business and retire to the land. As early

as the 1820’s William Crawshay, senior, of Cyfarthfa found it nearly impossible

to withdraw his three-fifths share from the  ½ million ironworks without ruining

the business.

When the joint-stock company solved this problem by creating

transferable shares, it still kept the giant concern in being to be controlled by

someone, who might by degrees come to own only a minority of the shares, but

still wielded the whole power of its capital. Such wealth and power were

attractive, and more large owners or directors were drawn to stay in business and

to become still larger, wealthier and more powerful. Hence the old cycle of

business life, by which the successful moved out to the land, to be replaced by

I.e. c. 375,000 professional compared with 2,053,000 non-manual workers and 700,000

taxpayers with over  150 (or 420,000 on Stamp’s estimate)—C.Booth, ‘Occupations of

the People of the United Kingdom’, Stat.J., 1886, XLIX. 363–6; Baxter, op. cit., p. 36;

Stamp, op. cit., p. 449.

Cf. Perkin, loc. cit., p. 128.

B.C.Hunt, The Development of the Business Corporation in England, 1800–67

(Cambridge, Mass., 1936), pp. 88, 157; Clapham, Economic History, III. 201.

J.P.Addis, The Crawshay Dynasty: a Study in Industrial Organization and

Development, 1765–1867 (Cardiff, 1957), pp. 38,

ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY: IDEAL AND REALITY 355

newcomers from below, was in an increasing number of cases broken, a

development which helps to explain the declining social mobility of the

Victorian age. It was not that the big business men could no longer afford to

emulate the landlords. On the contrary, they could buy out the average squire

many times over, and they often did buy estates, or country seats without estates,

without, however, giving up business.

The result was the rise of a whole new class of permanent big business men,

as rich and as powerful as many of the great landowners themselves. During the

Industrial Revolution there had been a few individuals, such as the Arkwrights

and the Peels, who vied in wealth with the aristocracy. But it was in the mid-

Victorian period when, as we have seen, man-made capital at length came

decisively to outweigh land in value, that big business as a class finally

outstripped the landed class in wealth and numbers. Compared with the 2,500

great landowners in 1873 with rentals of over  3,000 (excluding London

property and other income) there were in 1850 under 2,000 business men with

profits under Schedule D of  3,000. By 1880 there were over 5,000. And if 866

of the landlords had over  10,000 and 76 over  50,000, the corresponding

figures for business men had risen from 338 to 987 and from 26 to 77

respectively.

Thus it was in the mid-Victorian age that the business aristocracy of modern

times came into existence. Most of them might not acquire their peerages until

after 1880, when the first peerages for continuing industrialists were created, but

it was in the previous generation that they emerged to great wealth and began to

mingle and intermarry with the landed aristocracy. Great Bankers like Samuel

Loyd Jones (Lord Overstone, 1860) and George Carr Glyn (Lord Wolverton,

1869), great brewers like Henry Allsopp (Lord Hindlip, 1880), Arthur Guinness

(Lord Ardilaun, 1880) and Michael Bass (Lord Burton, 1886), great ironmasters

like Ivor Guest (Lord Wimborne, 1880), armaments manufacturers like William

Armstrong (Lord Armstrong of Cragside, 1887), machinery manufacturers like

Samuel Cunliffe-Lister (Lord Masham, 1891), railway contractors like Thomas

Brassey (whose son became Lord Brassey, 1886), and even great retailers like

W.H.Smith (whose widow became Baroness Hambleden, 1891) were then

acquiring the wealth, the political connections and, without giving up business,

the country seats and estates, which their titles belatedly recognized. Some, like

Sir John Guest, Lord Wimborne’s father, who married a daughter of the Earl of

Lindsey, or John Marshall, the Leeds flax spinner, who married two sons and a

daughter into the Monteagle family, were already intermarrying with the

aristocracy. A few, like the banker, G.J.Goschen (Lord Goschen, 1900) and the

newsagent W.H.Smith, became Cabinet ministers.

Most frequented London in

the Season where they were more sought after than most of the gentry and many

of the landed aristocrats themselves.

Bateman, op cit., p. 491; Levi, op cit., p. 58.

356 ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY: IDEAL AND REALITY

At what point the traditional tendency of business men to buy up estates prior

to retiring and founding a family shaded into the new tendency to buy with the

intention of remaining in business it is impossible to say. It was the railways of

course which made it possible to live on estates distant from the business, and so

to postpone the decision to retire. John Marshall, who bought extensively in

Cumberland, Lancashire and the North Riding, followed the old entrepreneurial

tradition of settling most of his sons on country estates. Lord Overstone invested

 1,670,000 in 30,000 acres of land, but left still more,  2,118,804, in stocks,

shares, and personal property. Lord Wolverton purchased only 712 acres in

Middlesex and Dorset, though they were worth  2,126 a year, but left nearly  2

million at his death.

Beatrice Webb’s father, Richard Potter the railway magnate,

with nine daughters and no sons, merely leased one country house near his

Gloucester timberyards, bought another near his Barrow timberyards, plus an old

manor house in Monmouthshire for holidays, and rented a furnished house in

London for the Season.

The transition can best be seen in the railway men. George Hudson, in his

meteoric career from York draper to ‘railway king’ and then to the exile of

bankruptcy, bought a ‘grand estate’ and the house at Albert Gate to which the

whole of London society came to prostrate themselves at his feet, and he was on

familiar terms with the Prince Consort. Lord Wolverton, the banker and

chairman of the London and North Western Railway, had only 712 acres but he

and his son, the Liberal Chief Whip, were thoroughly at home in the highest

political circles. Richard Potter, chairman of the Great Western, president of the

Canadian Grand Trunk, and a director of the Dutch-Rhenish railways, with next

to no land, was on familiar terms with Napoleon III, who let him use his private

cabinet to draw up an army contract. Sir Edward Watkin, chairman of the Great

Central, the Metropolitan, and the South Eastern railways, and a later President of

the Canadian Grand Trunk, with a small estate in Cheshire, negotiated with both

French and British governments to build the Channel Tunnel. Such men

belonged to a new international world of big business, and negotiated as equals

with prime ministers and emperors.

They also perfectly illustrate the rise in scale and status from the individual

entrepreneur to the corporate capitalist. The self-made man like Hudson was a

rarity at this level. Wolverton’s father was a banker, Lord Mayor of London, and

a baronet, but scarcely on the plane inhabited by his son. Both Potter’s and

Watkin’s fathers were self-made cotton merchants, M.P.s, pillars of the Anti-

Corn Law League, and leaders of Manchester society, but they could scarcely

compare with the international standing of their sons.

D.N.B. and standard biographies.

F.M.L.Thompson, op. cit., pp. 39, 61, 120.

B.Webb, My Apprenticeship (1950), pp. 34–5.

ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY: IDEAL AND REALITY 357

Men of such wealth, power and prestige might still emulate the aristocracy,

but they had no reason to feel jealous, socially inferior, or morally superior. The

main principles of the entrepreneurial ideal, active capital and open competition,

they viewed with an increasingly ambivalent or critical eye. At their level the

distinction between earned income from capital and unearned income from land,

still so clear to old-fashioned entrepreneurs like John Bright or Joseph

Chamberlain, made little sense, and limitation of competition by price

agreements, amalgamations and mergers was their major interest. They had no

sympathy with Cobden and Bright’s attempts at land reform, even in the mild

form of ‘free trade in land’, still less for Chamberlain’s talk of ‘what ransom will

property pay for the security it enjoys?’

To them an attack on one form of

property was an attack on all.

In fact the threat to passive property mounted by the left wing of the Liberal

Party, however innocuous it looks at this distance, was enough to frighten some

of them into the arms of the Conservatives. Long before the geological shift in the

structure of British politics centred around the Liberal split of 1886, which took

so many business men as well as landowners into the Tory Party,

it is possible,

beneath the overwhelming Liberalism of the mid-Victorian business class,

detect anticipatory traces of the drift. One such trace was the defection of Lord

Overstone, who was supporting Tory candidates by 1865, another that of Richard

Potter, who deserted the Liberalism of his Mancunian forebears, a third the

swing of the biggest railway company, the L.N.W.R., from Liberalism under

Lord Wolverton to Conservatism under Sir Richard Moon, a fourth the

progressive alienation from as early as the 1850’s of the drink interest by the

vociferous temperance Liberals.

The Liberals of course retained a majority of

all categories of business M.P.s except the brewers down to 1885, but the Tory

share steadily rose, and when the main break came in 1886 it was the typically

corporate interests, finance, railways, shipping and transport, which first gave a

majority to the Tories, and the more typically entrepreneurial categories, cotton,

coal, metals, engineering, and the merchants, which still remained marginally

more loyal to the Liberals.

The remoter origins of the modern social structure of

politics and particularly the equation of big business and Conservatism, can be

traced to the mid-Victorian age.

On their side the aristocracy were more willing to meet the big business men

halfway than they had been to meet the smaller and provincial entrepreneurs.

R.S.Lambert, The Railway King, 1800–71 (1934), esp. chap. ix; F.M.L. Thompson, op.

cit., p. 61; B.Webb, My Apprenticeship, pp. 3–4; C.Hamilton Ellis, British Railway

History, 1830–1947 (1954–59), I. 307–8, II. chap. iii; cf. the careers of Thomas Brassey,

Sir John Aird, Lord Cowdray and Sir John Norton-Griffiths in R.K.Middlemas, The

Master Builders (1963).

Cf. Morley, Cobden, p. 561; Garvin, Chamberlain, I. 548.

Ensor, op. cit., Trans. R.H.S., 1949, XXXI. 17f.

358 ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY: IDEAL AND REALITY

The greater landlords drew an increasing proportion of their incomes from mines,

docks, canals, railways, and urban property. Although this did not make them

industrialists—in practically no case did they draw a majority of their, income

from such sources, and they preferred to lease their mines and other industrial

undertakings rather than exploit them directly

—they at least understood

industrialism and could see the benefit of meeting and coming to terms with its

new large-scale impresarios. The process of absorption occurred in the dining

rooms and ballrooms of country houses and London in the Season, on the

hunting field and the parade grounds of the Volunteers, in Church, for

Nonconformist business men at this level began to join the Church of England,

and at the public schools, for they began to send their sons to Eton, Harrow,

Winchester and Rugby.

The seeds of many of the aristocratic directorships of

late Victorian England—in 1896 167 noblemen, a quarter of the peerage, were

directors of companies

—were no doubt sown on the playing fields of mid-

Victorian public schools.

The best index of the process, however, was the distribution of county offices,

notably the Commission of the Peace. It can best be illustrated in so aristocratic a

county as Cheshire, with its own industries and excellent railway connections

with the nearby cities of Liverpool and Manchester supplying a steady inflow of

business men with country seats. The noble landlords who dominated county

politics knew and understood the benefits of business: the Marquess of

Westminster drew a large part of his vast income from London property and had

a private railway station built to serve Eaton Hall, Lord Egerton of Tatton had

Manchester property, railway interests and was to become chairman of the Ship

Canal, Lord Newton of Lyme had coal mines across the Mersey, and Lord

Tollemache’s model farms and cottages were built on the profits of his brewery.

Between the 1840’s and the 1880’s they presided, as Lords-Lieutenant and

county magnates, over ‘the most important revolution in county society, the

merging of the landed and business interests.’ At the beginning there were

already a few business men amongst the Justices of the Peace on the northern

fringe: a Birkenhead shipbuilder, a file manufacturer, a brewer and two bankers

from Warrington, and several well-known cotton spinners in the Hyde division.

By the end the Bench included all the great resident industrialists: Sir Edwin

Cf. H.J.Hanham, Elections and Party Management in the Age of Disraeli and Gladstone

(1959), p. 74; Vincent, op. cit., pp. 10, 39.

Vincent, op. cit., pp. 8, 97–100; B.Webb, My Apprenticeship; p. 7; Hanham, op. cit., p.

87.

J.A.Thomas, The House of Commons, 1832–1901 (Cardiff, 1939), pp. 4–5, 14–15.

F.M.L.Thompson, op. cit., pp. 264–5.

Cf. Erickson, op. cit., pp. 11, 33–4; J.M.Lee, Social Leaders and Public Persons: a

Study of County Government in Cheshire since 1888 (Oxford, 1963), pp. 32–3, 35–6.

F.M.L.Thompson, op. cit., p. 307.

ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY: IDEAL AND REALITY 359

Watkin the railway magnate, Sir John Brunner the Northwich chemical,

manufacturer, John Laird and David Maclver the Birkenhead shipbuilders,

Thomas Brocklebank the Liverpool shipowner, Colonel Brocklehurst the

Macclesfield silk manufacturer, and a host of others. In 1886 the Daresbury

division Bench was Very similar in composition to the boards of directors of the

two principal Warrington companies, Greenall’s Brewery and Parr’s Bank’,

while in the Wirrall division a third of the magistrates travelled daily to work in

Birkenhead and Liverpool.

This silent revolution in county government in the

forty years before the democratic reform of the 1888 County Councils Act

registered the quiet absorption into county society of the new aristocracy of

business.

The revolution was at once the apotheosis of entrepreneurial society and the

advent of its demise. From one point of view it celebrated the fulfilment of the

entrepreneur’s ambition, to be accepted at his own valuation as the natural leader

of society and the equal of the landed aristocrats. But from another it marked his

transformation into something different, the harbinger of the plutocracy of big

business men and great landowners in late Victorian and Edwardian England, in

which the old virile, ascetic and radical ideal of active capital was submerged in

the still older, supine, hedonistic and conservative ideal of passive property. In a

word, the entrepreneurial ideal had triumphed only to throw in its lot with the

seemingly defeated aristocratic. This belated capitulation, which was from the

first in the logic of the entrepreneurial position with its ambivalent emulation of

the landed aristocracy, goes far to explain why Britain, the first to experience the

Industrial Revolution, should remain the most traditional and aristocratic of

industrialized societies. Both the long-term causes and the long-term effects of

industrialism found their key in the peculiar nature and structure of English

society, in the dynamic stability derived from the resourcefulness and flexibility

of an open aristocracy which, when at last it failed to absorb the rising men as

individuals, ended by absorbing them as a class. In so doing it robbed the

entrepreneurial ideal, already under attack from outside, of its inner principle of

self-justification, the belief in the moral superiority of active capital to passive

property. To the incipient decline of the entrepreneurial ideal, therefore, we must

finally turn.

THE DECLINE OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL

The incipient moral decline of the entrepreneurial ideal was double-sided.

Externally, it was a decline in the degree of almost automatic respect hitherto

accorded to it by other classes. Internally, and more significantly, it was a decline

Lee, op. cit., pp. 22, 29–38.

360 ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY: IDEAL AND REALITY

in the degree of faith and self-confidence in which it was held by the business

men themselves.

The most explicit evidence of the external decline is to be found in social and

economic legislation. For A.V.Dicey, still the chief guide to legislative opinion

in the nineteenth century, the 1860’s marked the turning point between

individualism and collectivism.

But these terms are too crude and over-

simplified to express the change fully. As we saw in Chapter VIII, there were

two distinct versions of individualism, corresponding to the distinction between

the natural and the artificial harmony of interests broadly associated with Adam

Smith and Bentham respectively. The second, Benthamite, version could easily

spill over into what the Victorians called collectivism. Was a professional police

force, for example, which intervened to protect the liberty of the individual, an

individualist or collectivist instrument? If the former, what were the factory,

mines, sanitary, and food and drugs inspectors who intervened to protect

children, young persons, women, adult men in dangerous trades, and finally the

whole community from exploitation, negligence, injury and death by maiming

and poisoning? At this point individualism overlapped with collectivism.

The ambiguities of collectivism were more complex still, for the word was

used by the Victorians, in relation to State intervention, in at least seven senses. It

meant, first, the kind of State intervention which overlapped individualism,

essentially an extension of the police function, to protect individuals from the

illegal acts of others, as in the regulation of factories, mines, public health,

common lodging houses, and food and drugs. This readily spilled over into the

second, the enforcement of minimum standards of private provision, as in factory

education or general housing legislation. Thirdly, it meant State aid to

individuals or bodies making private provision, as in the education grants from

1833. Fourthly, it meant State provision, in whole or in part, for particular

groups, such as aged paupers, lunatics, orphan children, or the sick poor, for all of

whom special arrangements were made by the 1860’s. Fifthly, it meant State

provision for all willing to accept it, as in the Public Libraries Act, 1851, the

Education Act, 1870, or the Act of 1885 admitting non-paupers to poor-law

hospitals. Sixthly, it could mean compulsory State provision, whether or not the

individual wanted it, as in the National Insurance Act, 1911, discussed though not

achieved in the Victorian age.

Finally, it could mean the State ownership, in

whole or in part, of the means of production, distribution and exchange, mooted

for the railways by Gladstone’s Act of 1844, and much discussed in relation to

land by the early 1880’s.

Dicey, indeed, used collectivism in two further senses, derived from

contemporary discussion. For him, ‘trade unionism, which means collective

bargaining, and involves practical restrictions on individual freedom of contract,’

Dicey, op. cit., p. 64, where he pinpoints the change to 1865, though elsewhere, pp. 63

and 217, he gives it as 1870.

ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY: IDEAL AND REALITY 361

was ‘a step in the direction of collectivism’, while, still odder to our ears, the

joint-stock company, as a collectivity engaged in corporate trade, had ‘fostered

the growth of collectivist ideas.’

In a sense he was right. As a committed

individualist, he recognized in both a threat to the entrepreneurial ideal.

Amid so much ambiguity, it is not surprising that Dicey traced the beginnings

of collectivism back to the education grants of 1833, at the very start of his

‘period of Benthamism or Individualism’. Yet he put his finger right on the mark

when he chose the 1860’s as the turning point in legislation. For the transition

which took place in and around that decade was crucial for entrepreneurial

society and its ideal. It was not a transition from crude, wholesale individualism

to crude, wholesale collectivism. Indeed, in some respects it might be better

regarded as a transition within individualism, from the negative Smithian to the

positive Benthamite variety, and, certainly, it coincided with the ‘individualist’

reaction against Chadwickian centralization and bureaucracy.

For it amounted to

a major change in the attitude of the State to the free market, from the

assumption that the market could be safely left to the hidden hand of self-interest

and competition, save in very exceptional cases where the bargainers were

particularly vulnerable to exploitation, to the assumption that, although the

market should still be free, the strong could not be expected not to exploit the

weak unless the State laid down some very firm rules of conduct for all

bargainers. This, in turn, implied a major change in the attitude towards the

entrepreneur, from the assumption that he could, unless proved otherwise, be

trusted to pursue the common good by pursuing his own self-interest, to the

assumption that, unless the temptation to exploit the weak and the community at

large were removed, he would pursue his own self-interest to the detriment of the

common good. In brief, the game was still free and the State was still the referee,

but the rules, which had been few and applied only to proven dirty players, were

tightened up, increased in number, and applied universally.

Until the 1860’s, for example, the textile millowners could and did justifiably

complain that they were singled out amongst employers for special mistrust and

regulation, and the Factory Law Amendment Association confidently looked

forward to repeal of the legislation.

In the 1860’s, on the contrary, the Factory Acts

were extended, first in 1860 and 1861 to bleach and dye works and lace

factories, then in 1864, after the revelation by the Children’s Employment

Commission of the appalling conditions in the metal trades, the potteries, the

brickfields, lucifer match making and other industries, to ‘any place in which

Cf. Canon W.L.Blackley, ‘National Insurance: a Cheap, Practical and Popular Means of

Abolishing Poor Rates’, The 19th Century, 1878, IV. 834f.

Dicey, op. cit., pp. 241, 248.

Cf. R.M.Gutchen, ‘Local Improvements and Centralization in 19th-century England’,

Hist.J., 1961, IV. 85f.; R.Lambert, ‘Central and Local Relations in Mid-Victorian

England: the Local Government Act Office, 1858–71’, Victorian Studies, 1962, VI. 121f.

362 ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY: IDEAL AND REALITY

persons work for hire’ in six trades, and, finally, in 1867 by the Factory Act to

most industrial processes where fifty or more persons were employed, and by the

Workshops Act to ‘any room or place whatever’ controlled by an employer in

which women, children or young persons engaged in handicraft, with or without

wages. By 1871 when the workshops were transferred from Local Authority to

Home Office inspection, the factory inspectors had legal access to 110,000

workplaces, or practically all non-domestic industrial establishments, and even

dwelling-houses where children and young persons were employed on

handicrafts were to be brought under the law in 1878.

In little more than a

decade the presumption of the law had shifted from trusting the industrialist to

protect his workers unless he proved unworthy of the trust, to suspecting him of

exploitation unless he was inspected by the State.

In the case of the chemical manufacturers, the State intervened not merely to

protect the public from injury but to teach the entrepreneur his own business,

how to make a profit out of a source of loss. The alkali inspectors under the 1863

Act forced the chemical producers to turn waste hydrochloric acid gas, poured

out over the surrounding countryside and population at the rate of 13,000 tons a

year, into saleable hypochlorite and commercial bleach. Even then, in a classic

example of ‘feedback’ on the part of the Chief Inspector, Robert Angus Smith,

and of the survival of central inspection against the vociferous forces of

decentralization, it took twenty years, a Royal Commission, and two more Acts

to get all the manufacturers to pursue their own self-interest. Powerful property

owners like Lord Stanley of Alderley and the Lancashire and Cheshire

Association for Controlling the Escape of Noxious Vapours and Fluids were

behind the legislation, but it is significant that it was in the 1860’s that the

protection of the public at large began to take precedence over the freedom of the

industrialist.

It was in the 1860’s, too, that the public at large was first protected from

wholesale fraud and poisoning by the adulteration of food. The campaign against

adulteration, started by Fredrick Accum and practically laughed out of court in

the 1820’s,

was revived in the 1850’s by Thomas Wakley, the Radical doctor-

M.P. and editor of the Lancet, with remarkable effect. Dr. Arthur Hassall’s

revelations in the Lancet of the poisonous compounds in thirty of the commonest

foods daily sold by supposedly respectable business firms did perhaps more than

anything else to undermine public confidence in the common honesty of the

average tradesman.

The Quarterly Review commented:

Clapham, Economic History, II. 412.

Ibid., II. 415–17.

R.M.MacLeod, ‘The Alkali Acts Administration, 1863–84’, Victorian Studies, 1965, IX.

92.

ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY: IDEAL AND REALITY 363