ends mercantilism had imposed on trade and production, checked the acquisition of wealth without helping towards its fairer distribution. Socialism as such was not opposed to free trade in the limited sense of freedom of import and export.

The socialistic solution had no actual chance of success in Great Britain in the nineteenth century, but two other methods of dealing with the problem, both of Moralists. them influenced by socialistic ideas, were brought

into operation. The moralists repudiated the political basis of socialism, but in the name of decency they demanded decent conditions for the worker. They challenged the accepted interpretation of the Laissez Faire doctrine on the ground that, as a matter of fact, the great majority of individuals were not free to pursue their own interest; a freedom which pure individualism assumed. The workers, especially women and children, could not bargain on an equality with employers, and therefore the State was warranted in extending protection to them, though the men might be left to look after themselves. It was not till parliament itself had become democratic that legislation could be charged with touching freedom of contract so far as adult male workers were concerned. And by this time individualism was deriving fresh support from the application to industrialism of the ideas of evolution and of the struggle for existence, generated by the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. Thus the philanthropists were able to introduce a doctrine of limited State intervention, without admitting that they were running counter to a correctly interpreted individualism. At the same time, they in fact challenged the doctrine that the individual inevitably follows the course most to his own interest when left to himself, by urging that the manufacturers were blind to their own interests in their pursuit of cheap production by means of cheap labour, which was more than compensated by the resulting inefficiency. Until the application of compulsion, the employers who were enlightened enough to see profit for themselves in well-paid

labour and expenditure on the labourer's welfare, were exceedingly rare.

Combination.

Doctrines, then, of State control made practical way only to a very limited degree. After all, the most effective solution of the problem was found in combination, which limits individual action without State intervention. The question was one of bargain between capital and labour. The individual worker attempting to make a bargain stood at a hopeless disadvantage; he had to take the employer's terms or starve, since the employer would have no difficulty in replacing him; whereas if the principle of collective bargaining could be enforced, employers would have to accept the men's terms or close their works. Then, in the last resort, the question would be which could hold out longest, the employer without a trade or the labourers without wages. With intelligence on both sides, the last resort would not often be reached. But collective bargaining could only be arrived at by the voluntary association of the working-men in organised unions which could act collectively, and in which the individual subordinated his immediate personal interests to those of the whole body. The worker would be subjected to the control, not of the State but of the association. He would resign his freedom of action, but he would do so voluntarily, whereas under State control he would have no choice in the matter. The voluntary association came within the scope of Laissez Faire, but only so long as it was strictly voluntary. The principle of combination, however, had a hard battle to fight, partly because it appeared antagonistic to the interests of the ruling class, partly because it was suspected ultimately of a political motive.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Population.

THE immensity of the change which passed over the face of the country during this which we have called the industrial period of English history, may be measured by many and diverse methods. We may open this chapter, however, with a few comparisons of the numbers and distribution of the population at different stages during the last two centuries. Exact figures are not available before the census of 1801, until which date the average Briton had a firm conviction that he would be stripped bare of his last rag of liberty if the government found out how many of him there were in the country; besides which, he had an uneasy feeling that the numbering of the people was not consistent with sound Protestant doctrine. But in 1801 a census was actually taken, and showed a population of slightly over nine millions for England and Wales. Expert calculations, based on parish registers, lead to the conclusion that there were about six millions in 1750, and about five millions in 1700, though these figures cannot be accepted with confidence. It seems, however, tolerably certain that the population in the first half of the eighteenth century increased approximately twenty per cent., and in the second half approximately fifty per cent., while during the whole century it had not doubled. During the nineteenth century the population approximately quadrupled, or at any rate, more than trebled itself. The first thirty years of the nineteenth century added more than the whole of the eighteenth. And the acceleration in the increase of population appears to have set in in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

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Redistribution of Population.

Now, it was also during this period that the great redistribution of population set in. In 1700 and in 1900, Middlesex and Surrey head the list of counties arranged in order of density; but Gloucester and Warwick and Worcester alone appear among the next ten on both lists. Lancashire, Stafford, the West Riding of Yorkshire, and Durham, had all forced their way into the first twelve by 1750. Notts, Cheshire, and Kent had come in in 1800. The population, in short, was shifting from the agricultural to the manufacturing districts. According to other estimates, however, this movement is somewhat antedated, and was more directly the outcome of the development of machinery, steam-power, and coal-mining. In 1700 it was estimated that only one-fifth of the population was urban. By the end of the eighteenth century, the urban population can hardly have been less than one-third, and at the present day it is more than two-thirds of the whole.

The change in the distribution of the population may be further illustrated by noting that if we take together the northern and north-midland counties which to-day contain one-half of the population of England, we find that in 1700 they probably contained less than a quarter. And it was mainly during the last quarter of the eighteenth century that the centre of gravity was decisively shifted. In fine, a rapidly multiplying population, accumulating in the north instead of in the hitherto more populous south, and massing portentously in towns after a fashion of which London had hitherto been the sole example these were the prominent characteristics of the change wrought by the industrial revolution. Our statisticians to-day are alarmed, and not without reason, at the signs which point to an approaching decrease of the population. A hundred years ago the prospect which appalled the prophets was that of a population increasing at a speed which could not be matched by the food supply.

The characteristic feature of English industrial life in the first half of the eighteenth century was the combination of

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agricultural employment with domestic industries. bulk of the population lived not in towns, but in the country, and either supplemented work in the fields combined by weaving, spinning, and kindred occupations, Employments. or lived mainly by these latter occupations, supplemented by work in the fields. Near the great clothing centres, the tendency was for the domestic industries to predominate as the actual means of livelihood. In the districts more remote from those centres, the domestic work was more and more a by-employment. But everywhere the principle was the same. Nearly every household was occupied both with some sort of agricultural work and with some sort of manufacturing industry. And manufacture still meant the same thing as handiwork, 'making by hand,' its literal AngloSaxon equivalent.

The industrial revolution, which was in full progress during the last thirty years of the eighteenth century, divorced the agricultural from the manufacturing occupations, Changing and practically made an end of domestic in- Terminology. dustries as concomitants of rural employment. At the same time, it divided the making of things into the two departments generally distinguished without regard to philology as manufacture and handiwork, the former term being commonly appropriated to the making of things not by hand but by machinery. Along with this change in the meaning of the term manufacture, is to be noted a change in the meaning of the term factory. Hitherto, in the language of commerce, a factory had generally meant a station or depôt established for trading purposes, such as the East India Company's factories at Surat, Madras, and Hugli. Now a factory

becomes an aggregate of machinery and buildings for the purposes of manufacture.

All these changes, in the terminology as well as in the material conditions of industrial life, are to be attributed to the development of machinery, and the accompanying or subsequent development of the means of communication and of transport. In the first half of the eighteenth century,