Perkin Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society

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A gun fired into a rookery could not cause a greater commotion than did

the publication of the names of dishonest tradesmen.

A Parliamentary Committee in 1855–56 revealed that the fraud practised on the

public was general and systematic. One medical witness said:

Adulteration is a widespread evil which has invaded every branch of

commerce; everything which can be mixed or adulterated or debased in

any way is debased.

The Committee finally reported:

We cannot avoid the conclusion that adulteration widely prevails. Not only

is the public health thus exposed to danger and pecuniary fraud committed

on the whole community, but the public morality is tainted and the high

commercial character of the country seriously lowered, both at home and

in the eyes of foreign countries.

More damaging than the initial revelations was the resistance of tradesmen to the

reform of proved abuses. The first Adulteration of Foods Act of 1860, a

permissive measure empowering Local Authorities to appoint public analysts,

was completely ineffective. In 1861 a lecturer at the Royal Society of Arts

demonstrated that 87 percent of the bread and 74 per cent of the milk sold in

London were adulterated, and in 1872 Dr. Hassall showed that half the bread he

analysed contained quantities of alum. Public disquiet and parliamentary

agitation at length obtained the Acts of 1872 and 1875, under which public

analysts were appointed everywhere, and adulteration was dramatically reduced.

The long-drawn-out campaign and its ultimate success were a classic

demonstration of professional criticism of entrepreneurial morality and the

failure to enforce even common honesty amongst a large section of business men

without the backing of State inspection.

F.Accum, A Treatise on the Adulteration of Food and Culinary Poisons (1820); cf.

review, ‘Death in the Pot’, Blackwood’s, 1820, VI. 542–54: ‘Mr. Accum puts us

something in mind of an officious blockhead, who, instead of comforting his dying friend,

is continually jogging him on the elbow, with such cheering assurances as the following:

“I am sorry there is no hope, my dear fellow, you must kick the bucket soon….”’

A.H.Hassall, M.D., Food and its Adulteration; comprising the Reports of the Analytical

Sanitary Commission of ‘The Lancet’ for the years 1851 to 1854 inclusive (1855);

Burnett, op. cit., pp. 190–1.

[Andrew Wynter], ‘Food and its Adulteration’, Q.R., 1855, XCVI. 460f.; Burnett, op.

cit., p. 192.

P.P., 1856 (H.C. 379), VIII. 1, S.C. on Adulteration of Food, Third Report; ibid., pp.

192–3.

364 ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY: IDEAL AND REALITY

Even the vaunted financial probity of business men took some hard knocks

during the mid-Victorian age. The expansion of large-scale enterprise and joint-

stock organization increased the opportunities for negligent management,

irresponsible accounting and actual fraud. In these early days of company

promotion, before Parliament, the Board of Trade, and the Stock Exchange had

learned to control the flotation of companies and the issue of shares, public

scandals became frequent, involving fraudulent promotion of companies formed

only to collect money from the public and then to be wound up, the formation by

directors of separate companies to supply land, buildings or materials at

exorbitant prices to the main company or to take its products at cost, the granting

of free shares by the directors to themselves or their friends, the spreading of

false or withholding of true information to affect the price of shares with a view

to profitable dealings on the stock market, the paying of dividends out of capital

—the crime for which George Hudson was exiled in 1854—and so on.

From the

‘railway mania’ of 1846–47 onwards the investing public was compulsorily

educated in a whole new world and vocabulary of ingenious crime, which could

only be perpetrated by business men, and by large, prominent, wealthy or at least

credit-worthy business men at that. The Times in 1860 even noted the appearance

of specialist frauds in the sanctum of Victorian respectability, the great corporate

charities.

Great bankruptcies periodically shook business confidence, like those

of Overend and Gurney’s Bank, the London Joint-Stock Bank, and the civil

engineering contractor Samuel Peto in 1866.

And the banking system as a whole

was subject to frequent failures of confidence: the thirty years following the 1844

Act, which ‘wrote laissez-faire principles into orthodox monetary policy,’ were

‘amongst the most troubled in the history of the banks.’

The Bank Act of 1858

and the general limited liability Act of 1862 owed something to the shocking

bank failures of 1857.

Indeed, the Company Acts of 1856–62 which finally generalized limited

liability were less a mark of confidence in the probity of business men than a

recognition that the shareholder as well as the creditor needed to be protected

from the negligence, mismanagement and fraud of the company director. The

debate which accompanied them was a prolonged discussion of business

morality, unflattering on both sides to the business man. Professional opponents

of limited liability argued, like McCulloch, that ‘trading requires a degree of

unremitting vigilance and attention which it would be visionary to expect from

directors or servants of a joint-stock association.’ Professional supporters like

R.C.Fane, Commissioner in Bank-ruptcy, asked, ‘Why should the law be so

harsh against contributors, and so tender to creditors?’

Mill even made the

suspicion of corporate business men an argument for State enterprise:

Ibid., pp. 203–13.

Clapham, Economic History, II. 136–8, 182–3; R.S.Lambert, op. cit., chaps. xii, xiii.

The Times, 2 January 1860.

ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY: IDEAL AND REALITY 365

The defects…of government management do not seem to be necessarily

much greater, if necessarily greater at all, than those of management by

joint-stock.

Of course, such arguments could be used to support the old-fashioned

entrepreneur, and were so used by McCulloch.

But as companies increased in

number and the typical business man became a company director the old moral

superiority of the entrepreneur faded with him.

The moral superiority of the middle class as a whole came under attack in

these years at its most sensitive point, sexual continence. The moral revolution

on its sexual side, we saw in Chapter VIII, was the attempted imposition on the

upper and lower classes of the traditional puritanism of the middle. What middle-

class moralists set out to suppress were the characteristically patrician and

plebeian vices: kept mistresses on the one side and promiscuity on the other.

Though they naturally failed, they succeeded to some extent in driving them

underground. But what they manifestly failed even to drive underground was the

characteristic vice of the middle-class male and of mid-Victorian England, resort

to prostitutes. Whether or not there were more prostitutes than in earlier periods,

it was generally believed that there were, and estimates for London around 1860

ranged from 8,000 to 80,000. Plausible explanations were found for the supposed

increase, for example by The Times and the Lancet in 1857, in the lateness of

marriage owing to rising expectations of the accustomed middle-class style of

life. Whatever the cause, if any, there was a growing obsession in the 1850’s and

1860’s with ‘the social evil’, as it was universally called, which attracted the

philanthropic concern of such diverse people as Henry Mayhew, Dickens, Lady

Burdett-Coutts, and Gladstone and his wife. From 1857 campaigns were

organized by West End clergymen, ‘to put down the open exhibition of street

prostitution…carried on with a disregard of public decency and to an extent

tolerated in no other capital city of the civilized world.’

Sympathy for the

prostitutes, the attempt to rescue ‘fallen women’ by midnight tea-and-prayer

meetings, the common belief that they were driven to the streets by seduction,

threw into relief the immorality of their middle-class customers.

Even where the customers were not middle-class, but the soldiers and sailors

in the eighteen garrison towns named in the Contagious Diseases Act, 1863–71,

which prescribed compulsory medical examinations for known and registered

Clapham, Economic History, II. 375–6.

Deane, op. cit., p. 184.

Clapham, Economic History, II. 351.

Hunt, op. cit., pp. 130, 132.

Mill, Principles, p. 580.

J.R.McCulloch, ‘Partnerships, Limited and Unlimited Liability’, Encyclopaedia

Britannica (1859 ed.), XVII. 321; Hunt, op. cit., p. 117.

366 ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY: IDEAL AND REALITY

prostitutes, the campaign of Josephine Butler for their repeal highlighted the

‘double standard’ of middle-class sexual morality, which, in striking contrast

with the aristocratic morality of the old society, imposed one code for women

and another and more elastic one for men.

The double standard was in fact

institutionalized by the Matrimonial Causes Act, 1857, which established the

Divorce Court to grant in effect middle-class divorces— cheaper than by Act of

Parliament, but still much too expensive for the working class—on grounds of

adultery alone by the wife but of adultery only if aggravated by cruelty or

desertion by the husband.

The immediate effect of forensic divorce was to

expose the sanctity of the middle-class hearth to the public gaze. The Saturday

Review declared in 1864:

We want a Moral Sewers Commission. To purify the Thames is

something, but to purify The Times would be a greater boon to society….

The unsavoury reports of the Divorce Courts, the disgusting details of

harlotry and vice, the filthy and nauseous annals of the brothel, the prurient

letters of adulterers and adulteresses, the modes in which intrigues may be

carried out, the diaries and meditations of married sinners, these are now

part of our domestic life.

Though few in number, such cases helped to create a new legend of the

unchastity and hypocrisy of the well-to-do middle class.

The moral state of the great towns in a wider and less bigoted sense became a

pressing public question in these years, and it too was unflattering to the middle-

class image. The sanitary inquiries of the 1840’s and 1860’s revealed the moral

as well as the physical degradation of the urban slums, and contributed to a

conscious revival of paternalism which was registered by the resurgence of the

language of paternalism which Asa Briggs has noted.

It took the form of

‘slumming’, or philanthropic visiting of the poor in their homes, and was

encouraged by most of the churches and by such missionary and charitable

bodies as the Metropolitan Visiting and Relief Association (1843) and the

Society for the Relief of Distress (1860).

The philosophy behind the movement

was that of Thomas Chalmers, who in the earlier revival of the aristocratic ideal

in the 1820’s had attempted to introduce the paternalism of the country village to

the slums of Glasgow.

As such it was a practical criticism of the moral neglect

of the urban poor by the urban middle class. This neglect, it was felt, was

C.Pearl, The Girl with the Swansdown Seat (1956), pp. 31, 47–50, 67–71.

E.Moberley Bell, Josephine Butler, (1962).

O.R.McGregor, Divorce in England (1957), pp. 17–29; P.M.Bromley, Family Law

(1957), p. 81.

Briggs, ‘Language of Class’, loc. cit., pp. 69–73.

A.F.Young and E.T.Ashton, British Social Work in the 19th Century (1956) pp. 88–90.

ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY: IDEAL AND REALITY 367

becoming deeper and more critical with the development of the horse bus and

suburban railways, which further segregated the classes into the ghettos of the

central slums and the more salubrious middle-class suburbs. The result was what

Macmillan’s Magazine in 1867 called ‘social disintegration’:

The wall of moral separation between rich and poor appears to have become

broader, higher, more impassable…. Most landowners of moderate means,

or their families, know something of their peasantry; many country

manufacturers know something of their workpeople…. Setting aside the

few persons actually and personally engaged in benevolent labours,…men

and women of moderate means in our large towns lead a life altogether

apart from that of the poor.

The remedy found by increasing numbers of philanthropic individuals in the

1860’s and 1870’s was to go and live amongst the urban poor and play

benevolent squire. The first of the East End ‘settlers’, in 1867, was Edward

Denison, one of the ‘almoners’, or visitors, of the Society for the Relief of

Distress.

There he found Octavia Hill already playing the benevolent landlady.

In 1865 she had begun with Ruskin’s money her management of slums in

Marylebone, where she endeavoured ‘to use the power given her by her position

to bring order into the lives of her tenants.’

Together with others of like mind,

they founded in 1869 the Charity Organization Society.

The Charity Organization Society was the key to the ambivalence of the

movement and to its paradoxical effect on the decline of the entrepreneurial

ideal. In spite of its conscious revival of paternalism and the patronage of Lords

Shaftesbury, Derby and Lichfield, it was not a movement of the landed class

against the urban middle class. It is in fact ironical that at this very time the rural

labourers were at last beginning to emulate their urban cousins and to emancipate

themselves from the discipline as well as the benevolence of the paternal

landlord. In the early 1870’s the seething resentment of the agricultural labourers

at length took institutional form in Joseph Arch’s Union, and if their immediate

gains in wages were short-lived, they began with the help of the railways to vote

against paternalism with their feet, in that great rural exodus which did more to

raise living standards for those who remained behind than all the charity of the

T.Chalmers, The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns (1821); On Charity (ed.

N.Marston, 1900); On Poverty (1912); Young and Ashton, op. cit., pp. 67–78.

Macmillan’s Magazine, 1867, XVI. 28.

Sir Baldwyn Leighton, ed., Work among the London Poor: Letters and Other Writings

of the late Edward Denison (1872).

Octavia Hill, ‘Blank Court; or Landlords and Tenants’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 1871,

XXIV. 456.

C.L.Mowat, The Charity Organisation Society, 1869–1913 (1961), pp.11–18.

368 ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY: IDEAL AND REALITY

squire and his lady. The effective members of the C.O.S. were not rural landlords

but urban business and professional men and their children, like

W.M.Wilkinson, Charles Bosanquet, Dr. Thomas Hawksley, Rev. Henry Solly,

John Ruskin, Edward Denison, son of the Bishop of Salisbury, and Octavia Hill,

grand-daughter of Southwood Smith, the Public Health Commissioner. They

were, moreover, against the indiscriminate benevolence and pecuniary

almsgiving which characterized traditional charity, which they considered ‘a

frightful evil’, ‘among the curses of London’, ‘a silent working pestilence,…an

endowment to the hypocrite and a laughing stock to the cynic’.

If they looked

back at all to the paternalism of the old society, it was to its disciplinary aspect,

and its discrimination between the deserving and the undeserving poor. What

they set out to revive was not the soup and blankets of the squire’s lady, but ‘the

principles of 1834’, the workhouse test and less eligibility, which indeed they

managed to impose on the East End Poor Law Unions in the early 1870’s.

In short, the C.O.S. represented a revival not so much of the aristocratic as of

the entrepreneurial ideal, in its original purity and vigour, with all its insistence

on individual responsibility for poverty and the demand that charity should only

be given in order to set the individual on his feet again. As such it constituted a

rejection of all criticism which laid the blame at the door of entrepreneurial society,

and of all remedies involving State aid or provision of welfare. This remained the

position of the C.O.S. down to and including the share of six of its members, led

by C.S.Loch, Octavia Hill and Helen Bosanquet, in the Royal Commission on

the Poor Laws, 1905–9.

And yet, paradoxically, the C.O.S. and the East End settlers played a key part

in the decline of the entrepreneurial ideal. On the one side, the very

professionalism of the C.O.S., through its invention of caseworkers to examine

the causes and remedies of poverty, uncovered depths of undeserved misery and

want which could not be put down to the sins of the individuals, and could not be

cured by private charity, however well organized. The concern with the facts of

poverty led others, like Charles Booth and Beatrice Potter, to try and measure the

extent of it, and to conclude that to so vast a problem charity was irrelevant. As

Beatrice Webb (as she became) shrewdly noted,

The pioneers of organized charity had made unwittingly an ominous

discovery…. They had let loose the tragic truth that, wherever society is

divided into a minority of ‘Haves’ and a majority of ‘Have Nots’, charity is

twice cursed, it curseth him that gives and him that takes.

Denison, in Leighton, op. cit., p. 103; C.S.Loch, in Charity Organisation Reporter, 1882,

XI. 196, and 13th Annual Report of C.O.S., 1882, p. 20.

Mowat, op. cit., pp. 114–16.

ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY: IDEAL AND REALITY 369

The remedy was not almsgiving or even social service, but social welfare

provided or aided by the State. Charles Booth came to pioneer old age pensions,

Beatrice Webb a Socialist ‘minimum standard of life’,

but less idealistic

politicians were converted to State intervention in precisely those fields where

charity had tried and failed. Chamberlain said in 1883:

I do not often agree with Lord Salisbury, but I did agree with him when he

said that social reform was the great problem of our time and that two of the

most important branches of that reform are the better provision of dwellings

for the working classes…and an improvement in the condition of the

agricultural labourers.

Thus the attempt by the C.O.S. to push individual responsibility and self-help to

its logical extreme merely led to dis-illusionment with private charity and

recourse to the State.

On the other side, first-hand acquaintance with the facts of poverty intensified

the sense of guilt which so often underlay charitable endeavours. Denison set out

to expiate the sin of endowed idleness: ‘as I have both the means, time and

inclination, I should be a thief and a murderer if I withheld what I so evidently

owe.’ Even Loch, the tough-minded secretary of the C.O.S., was motivated by ‘a

vague regret that the lives of others, as he judges them from contrast with his

own, are sunless and sad.’

As a new generation of young social workers came into

close contact with the facts of poverty the sense of guilt and the yearning for

expiation became oppressive. Beatrice Potter, who herself took up benevolent

slum management in 1878, experienced this change, and illustrated it by Arnold

Toynbee’s pathetic address to London working men in 1883:

We—the middle classes, I mean, not merely the very rich—we have

neglected you; instead of justice we have offered you charity, and instead

of sympathy we have offered you hard and unreal advice; but I think we

are changing. If you would only believe it and trust us, I think that many of

us would spend our lives in your service. You have—I say it clearly and

advisedly—you have to forgive us, for we have wronged you; we have

sinned against you grievously— not knowingly always, but, still we have

sinned, and let us confess it; but if you will forgive us—nay, whether you

P.P., 1909 [Cd. 4499], XXXVII. 1, R.C. on Poor Laws and the Relief of Distress, esp.

the Majority Report; cf. S. and B.Webb, English Poor Law Policy (1910), chap. vi.

B.Webb, My Apprenticeship, p. 175.

C.Booth, Pauperism, a Picture, and the Endowment of Old Age, an Argument (1892);

Old Age Pensions and the Aged Poor: a Proposal (1899); S. and B.Webb, Poor Law

History: the Last Hundred Years, II. 546.

S.H.Jeyes, Life and Times of 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1895), IV. 66.

370 ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY: IDEAL AND REALITY

will forgive us or not—we will serve you, we will devote our lives to your

service, and we cannot do more.

This sense of guilt, expressed admittedly more often by the children of the

business middle class than by the business men themselves, brings us to the more

significant aspect of the decline of the entrepreneurial ideal, its declining hold on

the entrepreneurial class itself. Even though every business man did not feel a

sense of sin for the wrongs supposedly done by his class, the old conviction of

moral righteousness and superiority was undermined. Faith in the wholly

unregulated free market declined as year after year the blue books revealed both

the benefits and the lack of threat to profits of government regulation. The

world’s largest calico printer told the Social Science Association in 1864:

The Factory Acts were opposed by many of us as economically un-sound,

and as an unjust interference with the rights of labour and capital. They

have been soundly beneficial.

Even the Economist welcomed the Acts of 1864, and remarked that no one who

knew how the earlier Acts had ‘worked in Lancashire and Yorkshire had any

doubts now of the wisdom of those measures.’

A factory inspector in 1870

contrasted the co-operation he now received from factory owners with their

obstruction of his predecessors, and added:

The whole country is now of one mind,—labour should be moderate,

workrooms and factories should be made healthy, and the young should be

educated.

By 1880 academic economics had capitulated. The Cobden prize essay at Oxford

for that year declared that

We have had too much laissez-faire…. The truth of Free Trade is clouded

over by the laissez-faire fallacy…. We need a great deal more paternal

government—that bugbear of the old economists.

Whether or not that was fair to the old economists, the new economists certainly

were opposed to an unqualified laissezfaire, and had learned from Mill a new

empiricism towards State intervention. Cairnes denied that economic doctrine

Leighton, op. cit., p. 48; Charity Organisation Review, 1892, VIII. 168; Woodroofe, op.

cit., p. 22.

A.Toynbee, ‘Progress and Poverty’: a Criticism of Mr. Henry George, being a lecture…

delivered in St. Andrew’s Hall, London, 18 January 1883 (1883); B. Webb, My

Apprenticeship, pp. 157–8.

ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY: IDEAL AND REALITY 371

could be summed up in laissez-faire. Cliffe Leslie was destroying the abstract

certainties of Ricardo. Jevons struck the new keynote of detachment: ‘We must

learn to judge each case upon its merits.’

But the economists no longer claimed

to speak for the united middle-class ideal as they had once done. They appeared

as detached professional critics of the business man rather than as defenders. That

was the measure of the gap which had widened between the professional and

entrepreneurial ideals. The business men were confused and divided. On the one

side, Chamberlain, the typical entrepreneurial politician of the age, was sounding

‘the death-knell of the laissez-faire system…. The goal towards which the

advance will probably be made at an accelerated pace is that in the direction of

which the legislation of the last quarter of a century has been tending—the

intervention, in other words, of the State on behalf of the weak against the

strong, in the interest of labour against capital, of want and suffering against

luxury and ease.’

On the other, Goschen, the typical political representative of

the new corporate business men, was being successfully urged not to ‘slip down

the inclined plane on which we are all now standing;— to the letting go of all that

has hitherto been understood as sound Liberal Principles.’

The division and confusion extended to the acid test of the entrepreneurial

ideal, the distinction between active capital and passive property. The true

entrepreneur was an owner-manager who maintained his moral superiority to the

landowner by insisting on the latter’s irrelevance to the cycle of production,

distribution and consumption. In the mid-Victorian age the chief vehicle for

entrepreneurial antagonism towards the landed class was the movement for free

trade in land, which aimed by removing the artificial barriers to the free sale of

land, in primogeniture, strict settlement, and entail, not only to assimilate passive

property to active capital but to force land to ‘find its own level’ in the hands of

prosperous, entrepreneurial owner-occupiers, and so painlessly abolish the

landlord class.

It is true that this movement died down after the repeal of the

corn laws, in the face of the apparent indifference of the satiated free traders

which Cobden and Bright so lamented, but it revived again in the 1860’s when in

Edmund Potter, quoted by J.M.Ludlow, and Ll. Jones, The Progress of the Working

Classes, 1832–67 (1867), pp. 109–10.

Economist, 21 May 1864.

P.P., 1871 [c. 348], XIV. 525, Reports of Factory Inspectors: Report of Alexander

Redgrave, p. 9.

A.N.Cumming, On the Value of Political Economy to Mankind (Oxford Cobden Prize

Essay for 1880, Glasgow, 1881), pp. 46–8.

J.E.Cairnes, ‘Political Economy and Laissez Faire’, Essays in Political Economy

(1873), pp. 250–1; T.E.Cliffe Leslie, Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy (1879);

S.Jevons, The State in Relation to Labour (1882), p. 6; Clapham, Economic History, II.

389, 395.

T.H.S.Escott, ed., The Radical Programme (1885), in Garvin, Chamberlain, II. 57.

372 ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY: IDEAL AND REALITY

the last speech before his death Cobden called for ‘a League for free trade in

Land just as we had a League for free trade in Corn.’

From then onwards the

agitation gradually rose to a crescendo, until in 1880 Disraeli could declare that

of the two subjects which most occupied the thought of the country, ‘one was the

government of Ireland, and the other the principles upon which the landed

property of this country should continue to be established.’

Yet free trade in land increasingly divided the business class rather than united

it. If business men like Chamberlain, Jesse Collings, P.A.Taylor, J.W.Barclay,

James Cowan, W.E. Baxter, T.B.Potter and others still supported it with as much

fervour as Cobden and Bright had done, many more were becoming

apprehensive about the effect which an attack on one form of wealth would have

on the other. In the Parliament elected in 1880 business men formed the largest

single group amongst acknowledged land reformers, with 26 out of 62 M.P.s, but

they were vastly outnumbered by the business men who were not so committed,

and by those who by accepting the Conservative whip could be presumed to

oppose it.

It was not so much free trade in land in itself which alienated many business

men, for much of the programme could be accepted by landowners and by a Tory

ex-Lord Chancellor, Lord Cairns, who brought in a partial measure of it in his

preemptive Settled Land Act of 1882. But, as with State intervention, many of

them feared that land reform, once begun, would not know where to stop. Free

trade in land might be the first step towards the unearned increment taxation of

Mill and the trade unionist George Odger’s Land Tenure Reform Association,

the Single Tax of Henry George, and the land nationalization of Alfred Russell

Wallace, from which the next step was short to the nationalization of railways,

mines and other forms of capital, and so to full-blooded socialism.

Since

Gladstone’s Irish policy seemed to many of them to belong, as an interference

with the rights of Irish property, to the same declension, they began to think that

Duke of Argyll to G.J.Goschen, 31 July 1881, A.D.Elliot, Life of Lord Goschen, 1831–

1907 (1911), I. 253; Goschen, ex-merchant banker and director of the Bank of England,

had already refused to join Gladstone’s 1880 Government because of his opposition to

extending the franchise and his suspicion of Chamberlain’s ‘setting class against class; all

against property, which he implies but does not actually say is landed property,’ and he

was to break with the Liberal Party over Home Rule in 1886—ibid., I. 196, 285–9, 290.

The land reform movement bulked much larger in contemporary politics and public

opinion than it does in the histories of Victorian England—cf. F.M.L. Thompson, ‘Land

and Politics in England in the 19th Century’, Trans. R.H.S., 1965, XV. 23f.

Cobden, Speech at Rochdale, 23 November 1864, Speeches on Questions of Public

Policy, (ed. J.Bright and J.E.T.Rogers, 1870), II. 367.

Hansard, 1880, CCLVI. 618–19.

I.e. 43 per cent of known land-reforming M.P.s, compared with the 25 per cent which

business men formed of all M.P.s in 1880—extracted from Dod’s Parliamentary

Companion, 1880.

ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY: IDEAL AND REALITY 373