Lecture VII: The Growth of Collectivism

Lecture VII.With the passing of the Reform Act began the reign of liberalism, and the utilitarianism of common sense acquired, in appearance at least, despotic power, but this appearance was to a certain extent delusive. At the moment of the Benthamite triumph there were to be found thinkers who, while insisting on the need for thorough-going reforms, denied the moral authority of individualism and denounced the dogma of laissez faire.

This vital difference between two opposed schools of thought had more than a merely speculative interest. It determined men’s way of looking at by far the most pressing social problem of the day. The fifteen years from 1830 to 1845, which may well be termed the era of the Reform Act, were among the most critical in the history of England. The time was out of joint. The misery and discontent of city artisans and village labourers were past dispute. No Act of Parliament could remove at a stroke the wretchedness and pauperism created by the old poor law. The true cure contained in the new poor law of 1834, with its drastic severity, its curtailment of outdoor relief, and its detested Bastilles, increased for the moment the sufferings of the poorest amongst the poor, and excited intense popular resentment. The wages earned by labourers in the country were miserably low. The horrors connected with factory life were patent. Widespread was the discontent of the whole body of wage-earners. It is recorded in a series of state trials for sedition, for conspiracy, or for treason, extending from 1832 to 1843. There was rick-burning by labourers in the country, there were acts of violence by trade unionists in the towns. The demand for the People’s Charter was the sign of a social condition which portended revolution. To us who know that several points of the People’s Charter have passed into law without causing social or political disturbance, the thought may occur that Chartism loomed too large in the eyes of contemporaries. But the men of 1832 understood the time in which they lived. The cry for the Charter told of bitter class hatreds and of widespread dissatisfaction with the whole constitution of society. Men who have known England only during the years of prosperity and of general goodwill which have followed the repeal of the corn laws, can hardly realise the urgency with which the “state of England question” thrust itself upon the attention of the public between 1832 and 1840. It was a terrible question enough; it was nothing else than the inquiry, how, if at all, was it possible to alleviate the miseries and remove the discontent of the working classes?

The reply of utilitarian Liberals was in substance clear. The policy of wisdom was, they insisted, to make the nation, as the Reform Act was intended to do, master of its own destiny. Hence, it was argued, would follow the removal of every definite abuse and the repeal of every unjust law, and especially of any law which pressed unfairly and hardly upon the poor. This being done, law, it was assumed rather than stated, could do no more; for the ultimate cure of social diseases we must trust to general good-will, and above all to individual energy and self-help.

Nowhere is this doctrine better expressed than in the refutation by Sydney Smith of the argument familiar to the toryism of 1830, that the Reform Bill would bring no benefit to the hewer of wood and drawer of water.

“What good,” says Sydney Smith in 1830, “to the hewer of wood and the drawer of water? How is he benefited, if Old Sarum is abolished, and Birmingham members created? But if you ask this question of Reform, you must ask it of a great number of other great measures. How is he benefited by Catholic Emancipation, by the repeal of the Corporation and Test Act, by the Revolution of 1688, by any great political change, by a good government? In the first place, if many are benefited, and the lower orders are not injured, this alone is reason enough for the change. But the hewer of wood and the drawer of water are benefited by Reform. Reform will produce economy and investigation; there will be fewer jobs, and a less lavish expenditure; wars will not be persevered in for years after the people are tired of them; taxes will be taken off the poor and laid upon the rich; demotic habits will be more common in a country where the rich are forced to court the poor for political power; cruel and oppressive punishments (such as those for night-poaching) will be abolished. If you steal a pheasant you will be punished as you ought to be, but not sent away from your wife and children for seven years. Tobacco will be 2d. per lb. cheaper. Candles will fall in price. These last results of an improved government will be felt. We do not pretend to abolish poverty, or to prevent wretchedness; but if peace, economy, and justice are the results of Reform, a number of small benefits, or rather of benefits which appear small to us, but not to them, will accrue to millions of the people; and the connection between the existence of John Russell, and the reduced price of bread and cheese, will be as clear as it has been the object of his honest, wise, and useful life to make it.

“Don’t be led away by such nonsense; all things are dearer under a bad government, and cheaper under a good one. The real question they ask you is, What difference can any change of government make to you? They want to keep the bees from buzzing and stinging, in order that they may rob the hive in peace.”

Every one of these predictions has been fulfilled almost to the letter.

Turn now for illustrations of the protest against the dominant individualism of the day to the language of three men of genius who agreed in nothing but in their common distrust of laissez faire, and in their conviction that some great exertion of the authority of the State was needed for the cure of the diseases which afflicted the commonwealth.

“Moral evils,” writes Southey (1829), “are of [man’s] own making; and undoubtedly the greater part of them may be prevented, though it is only in Paraguay (the most imperfect of Utopias) that any attempt at prevention has been carried into effect.”

And this prevention was, in Southey’s judgment, to be effected by the moral authority of the Church and the action of the State.

“This neglect,” writes Dr. Arnold (1838), namely, to provide a proper position in the State for the manufacturing population, “is encouraged by one of the falsest maxims which ever pandered to human selfishness under the name of political wisdom—I mean the maxim that civil society ought to leave its members alone, each to look after their several interests, provided they do not employ direct fraud or force against their neighbour. That is, knowing full well that these are not equal in natural powers,—and that still less have they ever within historical memory started with equal artificial advantages; knowing, also, that power of every sort has a tendency to increase itself, we stand by and let this most unequal race take its own course, forgetting that the very name of society implies that it shall not be a mere race, but that its object is to provide for the common good of all, by restraining the power of the strong and protecting the helplessness of the weak.”

“That the arrangements,” writes Carlyle in 1839, of good and ill success in this perplexed scramble of a world, which a blind goddess was always thought to preside over, are in fact the work of a seeing goddess or god, and require only not to be meddled with: what stretch of heroic faculty or inspiration of genius was needed to teach one that? To button your pockets and stand still is no complex recipe. Laissez faire, laissez passer! Whatever goes on, ought it not to go on. . . . Such at bottom seems to be the chief social principle, if principle it have, which the Poor Law Amendment Act has the merit of courageously asserting, in opposition to many things. A chief social principle which this present writer, for one, will by no manner of means believe in, but pronounce at all fit times to be false, heretical, and damnable, if ever aught was.”

Between 1830 and 1840 the issue between individualists and collectivists was fairly joined. Can the systematic extension of individual freedom and the removal of every kind of oppression so stimulate individual energy and self-help as to cure (in so far as they are curable by legislation) the evils which bring ruin on a commonwealth?

To this inquiry the enlightened opinion of 1832, which for some thirty or forty years, if not for more, governed the action of Parliament, gave, in spite of protests from a small body of thinkers backed more or less by the sympathy of the working classes, an unhesitating and affirmative answer. To the same inquiry English legislative opinion has from about 1870 onwards given a doubtful, if not a negative, reply.

My purpose in this lecture is to explain a revolution of social or political belief which forms a remarkable phenomenon in the annals of opinion. This explanation in reality is nothing else than an attempted analysis of the conditions or causes which have favoured the growth of collectivism, or, if the matter be looked at from the other side, have undermined the authority of Benthamite liberalism.

A current explanation lies ready to hand. Under the Parliamentary Reform Acts 1867-1884 the constitution of England has been transformed into a democracy, and this revolution, it is argued, completely explains the increasing influence of socialism. The many must always be the poor, and the poor are by nature socialists. Where you have democracy there you will find socialism.

This reasoning, as already pointed out, is essentially fallacious. Democracy cannot be identified with any one kind of legislative opinion. The government of England is far less democratic than is the government of the United States, but the legislation of Congress is less socialistic than the legislation of the Imperial Parliament. Nor in England are laws tending towards socialism due to the political downfall of the wealthy classes. Under a democratic constitution they retain much substantial power—they determine in many ways the policy of the country. The rich have but feebly resisted, even if they have not furthered, collectivist legislation. The advance of democracy cannot afford the main explanation of the predominance of legislative collectivism.

The true explanation is to be found, not in the changed form of the constitution, but in conditions of which the advance of democracy is indeed one, but whereof the most important had been in operation before the Reform Act of 1867 came into force.

These conditions, which constantly co-operated, may be conveniently brought under the following heads: Tory Philanthropy and the Factory Movement—the Changed Attitude after 1848 of the Working Classes — the Modification of Economic Beliefs—the Characteristics of Modern Commerce—the Introduction of Household Suffrage.