J. M. Robertson

INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION

At all times within the historic period trade and industry have reacted profoundly on social life; and as we near the modern period in our own history the connection becomes more and more decisively determinant. In the oldest culture-history at all known to us, as we have seen, the commercial factor affects everything else; and at no time in European annals do we fail to note some special scene or area in which trade furnishes to politicians special problems. Thus the culture-history of Italy, as we have also seen, is in past epochs inseparably bound up with her commercial history. But as regards the north of Europe, it is in the modern period that we begin specially to recognise trade as playing a leading part in politics, national and international. The Mediterranean tradition is first seen powerfully at work in the history of the Hansa towns: then comes the great development of Flanders, then that of Holland, then that of England, which gained so much from the influx of Flemish and Dutch Protestant refugees in the reign of Philip II, but which was checked in its commercial growth, under Elizabeth and James alike, by their policy of granting monopolies to favourites.

Sir Josiah Child puts "the latter end of Elizabeth's reign" as the time when England began to be "anything in trade" (New Discourse of Trade, 4th ed. p. 73). Cp. Prof. Busch on English trade under Henry VII, England unter den Tudors, i, 71-85, with Schanz, Englische Handelspolitik, i, 328, where it is stated that in the latter part of the sixteenth century there were 3,000 merchants engaged in the sea trade. This seems extremely doubtful when we note that the whole foreign trade of London was stated in Parliament in 1604 to be in the hands of some 200 citizens (Journals of the House of Commons, May 21, 1604), and the total customs of London amounted to £110,000 a year, as against £17,000 from all the rest of the kingdom. As Hume notes (ch. 45, note), a remonstrance from the Trinity House in 1602 declared that since 1588 the shipping and number of seamen in England had decayed about a third. (Cit. from Anglesey's Happy Future State of England, p. 128.) This again, however, seems doubtful.

Broadly put, the fact appears to be that after a considerable development of woollen manufacture in the towns during the Wars of the Roses (above, p. 393), when sheep-rearing must have been precarious and wool would be imported, there was a general return to pasturage under the Tudor peace, the towns falling away, with their manufactures. Attempts were made under Henry VIII and Edward VI to develop the English mining industries by means of German workmen and overseers, but apparently with no great success (Ehrenberg, Hamburg und England im Zeit. der KÖn. Elisabeth, 1896, pp. 4-6). It was after the persecution of Protestants in the Netherlands under Charles V had driven many tradesmen to England for refuge that manufacturing industry notably revived; and in 1564-65 we find the year's exports of England reckoned at £68,190 for wool and £896,079 for cloths and other woollen wares; the whole of the rest of the export trade amounting only to £133,665 (Brit. Mus. Lansdowne MS. 10, fol. 121-22, cited by Ehrenberg, p. 8; cp. Cunningham, Industry and Commerce, ii, 82-83; Gibbins, Industrial Hist. of England, 3rd. ed. pp. 132-33.) After the fall of Antwerp, again, much of the commerce of that city fell to the share of England, some of her commercial and artisan population following it (Froude, Hist. of England, ed. 1872, xii, 1-2).

In the same period the commercial life of north Germany, which had hitherto been far more widely developed than that of England (Ehrenberg, pp. 1-11), was thrown back on the one hand by the opening of the new ocean route to the East Indies, which upset the trans-European trade from the Mediterranean, and on the other by the new strifes between the princes and the cities (id. pp. 34-49); and here again English trade came to the front.

The "Merchant Adventurers," ready enough to accept monopolies for their own incorporations, were free-traders as against other monopolists;[1207] and not till all such abuses were abolished could England compete with Holland. And though they were never legally annulled even under the Commonwealth, "as men paid no regard to the prerogative whence the charters of those companies were derived, the monopoly was gradually invaded, and commerce increased by the increase of liberty."[1208] France at times promised to rival both Holland and England; but she at length definitely fell behind England in the race, as Flanders fell behind Holland, by reason of political misdirection. In the middle and latter part of the seventeenth century, all the northern States had their eyes fastened on the shining example of Holland;[1209] and commerce, which as an occasion of warfare had since the rise of Christianity been superseded by religion, begins to give the cue for animosities of peoples, rulers, and classes. The last great religious war—if we except the strifes of Russia and Turkey, which are quasi-religious—was the Thirty Years' War. Its very atrocity doubtless went far to discredit the religious motive,[1210] and it ranks as the worst war of the modern world. Commerce, however, for centuries supplied new motives for war to men whose ideas of economics were still at the theological stage.[1211] The eternal principle of strife, of human attraction and repulsion, plays through the phenomena of commerce as through those of creed. The profoundly insane lust for gold and silver, which had so largely determined the history of the Roman Empire, definitely shaped that of Spain; and Spain's example fired the northern nations with whom she came in contact.

The direct search for gold as plunder developed into the pursuit of it as price; and wealthier States than Spain were raised by the more roundabout method which Spain disdained.

Holland in the seventeenth century presented to the European world, as we have seen, the new and striking spectacle of a dense population thriving on a soil which could not possibly be made to feed them. "Trade" became the watchword of French statesmanship; and Colbert pressed it against a froward nobility;[1212] while in England a generation later it had acquired the deeper rooting that goes with the voluntary activity and self-seeking of a numerous class; and already the gentry freely devoted their younger sons to the pursuits which those of France contemned.[1213]

The turn seems to have been taken in the most natural way, after Parliament was able to force on James I a stoppage of the practice of granting monopolies. At his accession, the King had sought popularity by calling in and scrutinising the many monopolies granted by Elizabeth, which constituted the main grievance of the time.[1214] Soon, however, he conformed to the old usage, which had in some measure the support of Bacon;[1215] and in 1621 it was declared that he had multiplied monopolies twentyfold.[1216] The most careful historian of the period reports that though they were continually being abused,[1217] they were granted on no corrupt motives, but in sheer mistaken zeal for the spread of commerce.[1218] It would be more plausible to say that when interests either of purse or of patronage lay in a certain direction, those concerned were very easily satisfied that the interests of commerce pointed the same way. At length, after much dispute, the Lords passed, in 1624,[1219] a Monopoly Bill previously passed by the Commons in 1621;[1220] and though some of the chief monopolies were left standing, either as involving patents for inventions or as being vested in corporations,[1221] mere private trade monopolies were for the future prevented.

It was a triumph of the trading class over the upper, nothing more. As for the corporations, they were as avid of monopolies as the courtiers had ever been; and independent traders hampered by monopolist corporations were only too ready to become monopolist corporations themselves.[1222] Under Charles I, for instance, there was set up a chartered company with a monopoly of soap-making, of which every manufacturer could become a member—a kind of chartered "trust," born out of due time—the price paid to the crown for the privilege being £10,000 and a royalty of £8 on every ton of soap made. For this payment the monopolists received full powers of coercion and the punitive aid of the Star Chamber. After a few years, in consideration of a higher payment, the King revoked the first patent and established a new corporation. Similar monopolies were granted to starch-makers and other producers; the Long Parliament pursuing the same policy, "till monopolies became as common as they had been under James or Elizabeth."[1223]

Part of the result was that about 1635 "there were more merchants to be found upon the exchange worth each one thousand pounds and upwards than there were in the former days, before the year 1600, to be found worth one hundred pounds each."[1224] The upper classes, as capitalists and even as traders, were not now likely to remain aloof. But all the while there was no betterment of the lot of the poor. "That our poor in England," writes Child after the Restoration, "have always been in a most sad and wretched condition ... is confessed and lamented by all men."[1225] Child's theory of the effect of usury laws in the matter is pure fallacy; but his estimate of men's fortunes is probably more accurate than the statement of the Venetian ambassador in the reign of Mary, that "there were many merchants in London with £50,000 or £60,000 each."[1226] Howell, in 1619,[1227] expresses a belief that "our four-and-twenty aldermen may buy a hundred of the richest men in Amsterdam." Yet, though it was also confessed that among the Dutch, and even in Hamburg and Paris, the poor were intelligently provided for,[1228] no such necessity was practically recognised in England,[1229] either by Puritan or by Cavalier, though before the Rebellion the administration of Charles had not been apathetic;[1230] and a century later there were the same conditions of popular misery and vice, with a new plague of drunkenness added.[1231] By that time, too, the corporation monopolies were strangling trade just as the private monopolies had formerly done;[1232] while France, which in the latter part of the seventeenth century gave such a stimulus to English and Dutch industry by the suicidal Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, had recovered both population and trade,[1233] and was on a commercial footing which, well developed, might have given her the victory over England in the race for empire.

Everywhere in the seventeenth century, however, the new development meant new strife. Protestant England and Holland, Catholic France and Protestant Holland, flew at each other's throats in quarrels of trade and tariffs; and for the monopoly of the trade in cloves, Dutch and Spanish and English battled as furiously as for constraint and freedom of conscience. The primitively selfish and mistaken notion men had formed of commercial economy was on a level with the religious impulse as it had subsisted from the beginning of Christendom; and even as each Christian sect had felt it necessary to throttle the rest, each nation felt that its prosperity depended on the others' impoverishment. To spite the Dutch, the Cromwellian party in 1651 passed the Navigation Act, prohibiting all imports of foreign goods save in English ships or those of the nations producing them. In practice it was a total failure, the effect being to injure the English rather than the Dutch trade; but the Dutch themselves, who were fanatical for their own Asiatic monopoly trade, believed it would injure them, and went to war accordingly.

Even among expert merchants there was no true economic science, only a certain empirical knowledge, reduced to rule of thumb. Hence the traders were for ever tending to strangle trade, and the ablest administrators fell into the snare. Everywhere they tended to be possessed by the gross fallacy that they could somehow sell without buying,[1234] and so heap up gold and silver; and to secure at least a balance in bullion was considered an absolute necessity. This was the most serious error of the policy of Colbert, who secured a balance of social gain to France by stimulating and protecting shipping and new industries,[1235] but failed to learn the lesson that foreign commerce in the end must consist in an exchange of goods. Thus, though he resisted the ruinous methods of Louis XIV,[1236] he lent himself to the theory which, next to the hope of making the Netherlands a province of France and so an arm of French naval strength, stimulated the policy of war. By repeatedly raising his tariffs he forced the Dutch to raise theirs; whereupon France went to war. Had he known that the Dutch could not sell to France without buying thence, and vice versa, he would have rested content with establishing his new industries.

Of course the rival nations were equally self-seeking. Prohibitive tariffs were necessarily lowest with the most specifically commercial State, the Dutch; and the free trade doctrine began early to be heard in England.

But whether rulers leant in the direction of free trade or strove to heap up import duties as did France, they went to war for monopolies and for imposts. Holland had as determinedly sought the ruin of Antwerp as England did that of Holland. And as the race-principle embroiled nations on the score of trade, so the class-principle set up new feuds of class in all the nations concerned. The new trading class fought for its own hand as the trade gilds of the Middle Ages had done; and the fact of its connections with the gentry did not prevent animosity between gentry and traders or investors in the mass. Thus were the old issues complicated, for good or for ill.

If at this stage we seek to discover the manner of life of the working class in England, we shall find it hard to reach a confident conception. Many phrases in Shakespeare remind us that as towns grew there grew with them a nondescript semi-industrial class, untrained for any regular industry and unable to subsist without industry of some sort. In the latter part of the seventeenth century we seem to see a process of elimination at work by which the organisms capable of enduring toil are selected from a mass to which such toil was too irksome. In 1668 Sir Josiah Child writes that the English poor in a cheap year "will not work above two days in a week; their humour being such that they will ... just work so much and no more as may maintain them in that mean condition to which they have been accustomed." That, accordingly, a high price for bread was a good thing, as forcing the poor to industry, became the standing doctrine of such publicists as Petty.[1237] In the next generation, Mandeville puts as indisputable the statement that "the poor" will not work any more than they need to maintain bare existence. When, late in the eighteenth century, we find Adam Smith, with French testimony to support him, denying that the pinch of poverty makes for industry, we are left in doubt as to whether the improvement came by a positive dying out of the lazy types through the new plague of alcoholism, or through the gradual exemplary force of a higher standard of comfort as seen among the more industrious. Probably both influences were at work. But it was at best in a grimy under-world of degeneracy and hunger, squalor and riot, that there were laid the roots of the new mechanical industries which were to make England the chief mill and counter of Europe.[1238] And when we find one of the acutest observers of the next generation arguing that a large body of the needy poor is the right and necessary basis of industry and public wealth,[1239] we realise that the new life was to be as hard for the toilers as that of any earlier age.

Conclusion

It is in the reign of the last of the Stuarts, whose sex made her perforce rely on ministers to rule for her, and whose unenlightened zeal[1240] thus missed the disaster which similar qualities had brought upon two of her predecessors—it is in the reign of Anne, swayed by favourites to an extent that might have made monarchy ridiculous[1241] if monarchists had gone by reason and not by superstition—that there begins recognisably the era of government by parliamentary leaders, representing at once, in varying degrees, monarch and people; and it is at this point that we begin the biographical studies[1242] to which the foregoing pages offer an introduction. But under new conditions and phases we are to meet for the most part repetitions and developments of the forces already recognised as at work from time immemorial. Thus early have we seen in action, on the field of English history, most of those primary forces of strife whose play makes the warp of politics, ancient and modern; and the distinct emergence, withal, of that spirit which, rare and transient in ancient times, seems destined to inherit the later earth—the spirit of science, which slowly transmutes politics from an animal to an intellectual process, raising it from the stage of mere passional life to the stage of constructive art, and from the social relation of rule and subjection towards the relation of mutuality and corporate intelligence. Politics, we formally say, is the process of the clash of wills, sympathies, interests, striving for social adjustment in the sphere of legislation and government. The earlier phases are crude and animalistic, and involve much resort to physical strife. The later phases are gradually humanised and intelligised, till at length the science of the past process builds up a new phase of consciousness, which evolves a conscious progressive art. That is to say, the conscious progressive art develops in course of time: it had not really arisen in any valid form at the period to which we have brought our bird's-eye view. It had transiently arisen in the ancient world, as in Solon and, far less effectually, in the Gracchi; but the conditions were too evil for its growth, and the course of things political was downward, the animal instincts overriding science, till even when there was compulsory peace the spirit of science could no more blossom. In English politics, soon after the beginning of the eighteenth century, the conditions brought about civil peace under a new dynasty, which it was the function of the statesmanship of the dynasty to maintain. At the same time the spirit of science had entered on a new life. It remains to trace, under successive statesmen and in the doctrine of successive politicians, the fluctuations of English progress towards the great Utopia, the state of reconciliation of all the lower social antipathies and interests, and of free scope for the inevitable but haply bloodless strifes of ideals, which must needs clash so far as we can foresee human affairs. The progress, we shall see, is only in our own day beginning to be conscious or calculated: it has truly been, so far as most of the actors are concerned, by unpath'd waters to undream'd shores. The hope is that the very recognition of the past course of the voyage will establish a new art and a new science of social navigation.

To make a new aspiration pass for a law of progress merely because it is new would, of course, be only a fresh dressing of old error. There is no security that the scientific form will make any ideal more viable than another; every ideal, after all, has stood for what social science there was among its devotees. The hope of a moral transformation of the world is a state of mind so often seen arising in human history that some distrust of it is almost a foregone condition of reflection on any new ideal for thoughtful men. A dream of deliverance pervades the earliest purposive literature of the Hebrews; a fabled salvation in the past is made the ground for trust in one to come. Wherever the sense of present hardship and suffering outweighs the energetic spirit of life in the ancient world, the young men are found seeing visions, and the old men dreaming dreams; and the thought of "the far serenity of Saturn's days" becomes a foothold for the Virgilian hope of a golden age to come. A hundred times has the hope flowered, and withered again. Confident rebellions, eager revolutions, mark at once its rise and its fall. In our own age the new birth of hope arises in the face of what might have seemed the most definitive frustration; it becomes an ideal of peaceful transformation under the sole spell of social science, with no weapons save those of reason and persuasion. The science of natural forces has widened and varied life without greatly raising it in mass. Yet the new science, we would fain believe, will conquer the heightened task. In the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of that hope lies for the coming age the practical answer to the riddle of existence.

Without such a hope, the study of the past would indeed be desolating to the tired spectator. Followed through cycle after cycle of illusory progress and conscious decline, all nevertheless as full of pulsation, of the pride of life and the passion of suffering, as the human tide that beats to-day on the shores of our own senses, the history of organised mankind, in its trivially long-drawn immensity, grows to be unspeakably disenchanting. Considered as a tale that is told, it seems to speak of nothing but blind impulse, narrow horizons, insane satisfactions in evil achievement, grotesque miscalculation, and vain desire, till it is almost a relief to reflect how little we know of it all, how immeasurable are the crowded distances beyond the reach of our search-light. Alike the known and the unknown, when all is said, figure for us as fruitless, purposeless, meaningless moments in some vast, eternal dream.

Poi di tanto adoprar, di tanti moti
D'ogni celeste, ogni terrena cosa
Girando senza posa,
Per tornar sempre lÀ donde son mosse;
Uso alcuno, alcun frutto,
Indovinar non so.[1243]

The untranslatable cadence of Leopardi has the very pulse of the wearied seeker's spirit. Yet, through all, the fascination of the inquiry holds us, as if in the insistent craving to understand there lay some of the springs of movement towards better days. We brood over the nearer remains, so near and yet so far, till out of the ruins of Rome there rise for us in hosts the serried phantoms of her tremendous drama; till we seem to catch the very rasp of Cato's voice, and the gleam of CÆsar's eye, swaying the tide of things. Still, the sensation yields no sense of fruition; Rome the dead, and Greece the undying, drift from our reach into the desert distance. Beyond their sunlit fragments lies a shoreless and desolate twilight-land, receding towards the making of the world; and there in the shadows we dimly divine the wraiths of a million million forms, thronging a hundred civilisations. The vision of that vanished eternity renews the intolerable burden of the spirit baffled of all solution. For assuredly, in the remotest vistas of all, men and women desired and loved, and reared their young, and toiled unspeakably, and wept for their happier dead; and the evening and the morning, then as now, wove their sad and splendid pageantries with the slow serenity of cosmic change. Great empires waxed to the power of wreaking infinite slaughter, through the infinite labour of harmless animal souls; and seas of blood alternately cemented and sapped their brutal foundations; and all that remains of them is a tradition of a tradition of their destruction, and the shards of their uttermost decay. Not an echo of them lives, save where perchance some poet with struggling tongue murmurs his dream of them into tremulous form; or when music with its more mysterious spell gathers from out the inscrutable vibration of things strange semblances of memories, that come to us as an ancient and lost experience re-won, grey with time and weary with pilgrimage. But to what end, of knowledge or of feeling, if the future is not therefore to be changed?

Save for such a conception and such a purpose, the civilisations of to-day could have no rational hope to survive in perpetuity any more than those of the past. The fullest command of physical science, however great be the resulting power of wealth-production, means no solution of the social problem, which must breed its own science. The new ground for hope is that the great discipline of physical science has brought with it the twofold conception of the reign of law in all things and the sequence of power upon comprehension, even to the controlling of the turbulent sea of human life. With the science of universal evolution has come the faith in unending betterment. And this, when all is said, is the vital difference between ancient and modern politics: that for the ancients the fact of eternal mutation was a law of defeat and decay, while for us it is a law of renewal. If but the faith be wedded to the science, there can be no predictable limit to its fruits, however long be the harvesting.