Great Britain during and after the Napoleonic wars
p align="left"> The Luddite riots centred in the Nottingham ho-siery area, where the introduction of new production methods into a semi-domestic industry had cut prices to a point at which the hand stocking knitters found it almost impossible to make a living. Machine wrecking took place also in many other towns. Every method of repression, including military violence, was used by the government to suppress the Luddite riots.

In 1819 huge meetings were held all over the North and Midlands, demanding Parliamentary Reform and the repeal of the Corn Laws. One such meeting was held at St. Peter's Fields, Manchester, on August 16th, when 80,000 people assembled to hear a well-known radical speaker Hunt. When Hunt began to speak he was arrested and the yeomanry suddenly charged into the crowd, hacking blindly with their sabres in all di-rections.

In a few minutes eleven people were killed and about 400, including over 100 women, were wounded. The brutality of this attack on a peaceful crowd, and the callousness with which it was defended by the government, made the necessity for Reform clearer than ever to the industrial workers, and at the same time convinced many of the middle class that Reform was the only alternative to a policy of repression that would lead unevitably to civil war. From this time Parliamentary Reform began to be "respectable" and to appear prominently on the programme of the Whigs. But the immediate result of the "Peterloo Massacre" was a tightening of the repression. Hunt and other radicals were arrested and imprisoned. Some of them were forced to seek a temporary refuge in America.

In November 1819, the "Six Acts" were passed by Parliament. These Acts made organized legal agitation for Reform more difficult. They gave the local author-ities powers to prevent meetings of more than fifty persons and to search private houses where they sus-pected arms were hidden. They forbade any kind of processions with bands or banners. They made pub-lishers of "blasphemous and seditious libels" liable to imprisonment or transportation and placed a tax on all newspapers and pamphlets. The object of this was to make radical papers too dear for most part of the popu-lation.

The "Six Acts" of 1819 were followed by a tempo-rary diminution of Radical agitation. For this they were perhaps less responsible than the revival of industry that began in 1820 and continued up to the boom year of 1826. Such a revival was inevitable once the effects of the war had passed, because British industry really had a world monopoly at this time. Manufacturers liked to talk about foreign competition but actually no other country had any considerable large-scale industry or any surplus of manufactured goods for export. France and the United States were just beginning to develop a cotton textile industry, but even by 1833 their com-bined output was only two-thirds of that of Britain. In mining and the iron and steel industries British su-premacy was equally marked.

Exports increased from Ј48,000,000 in 1820 to Ј56,000,000 in 1825 and imports from Ј32,000,000 to Ј44,000,000. But this was only one side of the expan-sion. The same period was marked by the steady de-cline of the British small-scale and domestic industry before the competition of the factories. The decline of domestic industries was uneven, taking place in the cotton before the linen and woolen industries, in spin-ning before weaving and in East Anglia and the West Country before the North and Midlands. It was not completed before the 1840's, and was the cause of the most widespread and prolonged suffering. But it di-vided the working classes into sections with different interests and wrongs, and forced those who were the worst sufferers into futile and objectively reactionary forms of protest.

3. The Reform Bill

By 1830 Britain had been struck by a severe eco-nomic crisis. Factories were closing down, unemploy-ment increased rapidly, and the wages of workers fell. The revolution which took place in Paris in July and in Belgium in August helped to increase the tensions of the atmosphere.

Economic distress quickly led to a demand for Parliamentary Reform. The agitation for Reform was more widespread and dangerous than ever before, though Reform meant quite different things to differ-ent classes.

The character of Parliament, the classes which dominated it, the methods by which elections were carried out, its unrepresentative nature and the ac-companying system of sinecures and jobbery in the first decades of the 19th century differed in no funda-mental respect from that prevailing a century before. A few sinecures had been abolished and corruption was forced by the growth of criticism to be a little more discreet, but these gains were more than out-weighed by two changes for the worse.

The growth of population since 1760, and the changed distribution of that population, had made the members of Parliament even less representative. Great new towns had sprung up which returned no mem-bers: these included Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Sheffield. Many of the old boroughs had remained small or had even declined in population.

The members did not represent the bulk of the inhabitants of the places for which they sat. At the same time the industrial areas were almost disfran-chised as compared with the rural areas and small but old market towns dominated by local gentry. And, sec-ond, the class of 40 shilling freeholders in whom the county franchise was vested had been almost swept out of existence by the enclosures. The class of yeo-men disappeared, the electors were mainly the land-owners.

The Reform Bill had really two sides. One regu-larized the franchise, giving the vote to tenant farm-ers in the counties (and thereby increasing the influ-ence of the landowners in these constituencies) and to the town middle class. In a number of boroughs the right to vote was actually taken from a large number of people who previously exercised it. About this side of the Bill the working class was naturally unenthusiastic, but it was carefully kept in the background while a furious campaign was worked up against the rotten boroughs.

The most popular part of the Bill was that which swept away the rotten boroughs and transferred their members to the industrial towns and the counties. Fif-ty-six boroughs lost both their members and thirty more lost one. Forty-two new constituencies were cre-ated in London and other large towns and sixty-five new members were given to the counties.

Most of the workers believed that once the old system of graft and borough-mongering was swept away they could count on an immediate improvement in their conditions. Hence the enthusiasm aroused by the Reform Bill and hence their speedy and complete disillusionment afterwards.

The Bill passed into law on June 7th, 1832. It in-creased the electorate only from 220,000 to 670,000 in a population of 14,000,000, but its other consequences can hardly be exaggerated.

First, by placing political power in the hands of the industrial capitalists and their middle class follow-ers it created a mass basis for the Liberal Party which dominated politics throughout the middle of the 19th century. From this time some of the towns of the industrial North began to send Radical members to Par-liament, and a definite political group began to form to the left of the liberals, sometimes cooperating with them, but frequently taking an independent political line. There was always a group of members which sup-ported the demands of the Chartists in the House of Commons.

In the fifty-five years between 1830 and 1885 there were nine Whig and Liberal governments that held office for a total of roughly forty-one years: in the same period six Tory governments had only fourteen years of office.

Second, the Reform Bill altered the political bal-ance between the House of Commons, the House of Lords and the Crown. The Commons gained at the expense of the Lords because they were now able to claim to be the representatives of the people against a clique of aristocrats. The abolition of the rotten bor-oughs also robbed the peers of much of their power to control the composition of the Lower House. For the same reason the Crown lost the last of its means of direct interference in Parliamentary politics. From this time the influence of the Crown, though often consid-erable, had to be exercised secretly, through its pri-vate contacts with politicians.

The third consequence of passing of the Reform Bill was unintended and indirect. The workers who had done most of the fighting soon realized that they had been excluded from all the benefits, and the Poor Law Act of 1834 convinced them that the Government was indifferent to their needs. It is not accidental that the years immediately after 1832 were marked by a disgust-ed turning away of the masses from parliamentary politics to revolutionary Trade Unionism, or that they proceeded to build up in the Chartist Movement the first independent political party of the working class.

4. The Poor Law of 1834

By the 19th century, Britain had become an in-dustrial nation. The population of the country increased, as well as the number of poor people. For a generation the hand weavers and petty craftsmen had fought desperately to escape the factories. Year by year their incomes had fallen till a man could not hope to earn more than five or six shillings for a full working week. Even with the help of the existing Poor Law grants that was not enough to make ends meet. The weavers, as well as the unemployed and casually unemployed farm labourers starved.

According to the Poor Law remaining in force, people who could not help being poor could be given money or go to a workhouse run by a parish. In the early 19th century most of the parishes were too poor to take care of the ever-increasing amount of the poor. The British society faced a serious social problem. Some-thing was to be done, and in 1834 the old Poor Law was amended.

The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 stated that no one fit to work was to receive money at home. Par-ishes were grouped into "unions", and each union had to have a workhouse, and pay for it out of the rates. The principle of the new Poor Law was simple: every person in need of relief must receive it inside a work-house. Workhouses had been places mainly for the re-ception of the aged, the disabled, of children and of all those too helpless and too defenceless to avoid being put there. In 1834 they became the only alternative to starvation for the poor.

The condition of a pauper in a workhouse was to be "less eligible" than that of the least prosperous workers outside. In the sinister language of the Poor Law Commission of 1834, the able-bodied inmate must be "subjected to such courses of labour and discipline as will repel the indolent and vicious". At a time when millions of people were on the verge of starvation, this object could only be achieved by making the work-house the home of meanness and cruelty. Families were divided, food was poor and scanty and the tasks im-posed were hard and boring, oakum picking and stone breaking being among the most common.

The administration of the Act was deliberately removed as far as possible from popular control by the appointment of three Commissioners who became the most detested men in England. People dreaded the workhouse and tried to protest. In some places work-houses were stormed and burnt after fierce clashes between people and troops. In many of the northern towns it was ten years or more before a workhouse was built. The mass agitation, however, died about 1840 and the Poor Law was put in force both in the rural and industrial areas.

5. The Corn Laws

The object of the Corn Laws of 1815 was to keep the price of wheat at the famine level it had reached during the Napoleonic Wars, when supplies from Po-land and France were prevented from reaching En-gland. All wheat imports were forbidden when the price fell below 50 s. the quarter.

From the beginning the Corn Laws were hated by everyone except the landowners and farmers, and even the latter found that in practice the fluctuation in wheat prices was ruinously violent and that the market was often manipulated so as to rob them of the profit they might have expected to make.

Attempts in 1828 and 1842 to improve the Corn Laws by introducing a sliding scale were not success-ful. Opposition to the Corn Laws, coupled with demands for Parliamentary Reform, were widespread, but died down after 1820 to be revived again by the coming of industrial depression of 1837. This time it was an agitation not so much of the mass of the people as of the industrial bourgeoisie anxious to reduce la-bour costs.

In 1838 the Anti-Corn Law League was formed. League leaders such as Richard Cobden and John Bright expected the repeal of tariffs on imported food to advance the welfare of manufacturers and workers alike, while promoting international trade and peace among nations. The League's agitation produced a con-siderable effect on the workers. Unprecedented in scale and lavishly financed this agitation had all the advan-tages that the railways and cheap newspapers could give. Whenever Cobden or Bright spoke their words were widely reported in dozens of papers and the League orators were able to move swiftly and easily all over the country.

In the light of this continued pressure, combined with the plain fact that the growth of population was making it impossible for England to feed herself, the hesitating steps were taken towards Free Trade after 1841.

The first of these steps was dictated by the con-fused finance. Many tariffs and duties were swept away and replaced by an income tax which was both sim-pler and more productive, and in the long run less burdensome upon industry. The effect of these tariffs disappearance was to leave the Corn Laws as an iso-lated anomaly, increasingly conspicuous and increa-singly difficult to defend.

Sir Robert Peel, who was Prime Minister then, ma-de a thorough study of the situation and realized that the belief common among landowners that vast stores of wheat were lying in the Baltic granaries ready to be poured into England was a pure fantasy. He knew that the surplus of corn for export in any country was still small and that the most the repeal of the Corn Laws would do would be to prevent an otherwise inevitable rise in prices which might have had revolutionary con-sequences. He managed to force through the repeal against the will of the majority of his own supporters in June 1846.

6. The Railway Age

The 18th century was a boom time for building roads. At the beginning of the century it took over three days to make the journey from London to Ex-eter or Manchester. By the end of the century the same journey took about 24 hours by coach. That became possible thanks to the network of new roads built by privately owned Turnpike Trusts. Until the begin-ning of the 19th century, however, British roads were still poor. They were badly rutted and became practi-cally impassable in wet weather. Around the turn of the century engineers Tho-mas Telford and John McAd-am devised methods of building uniform, smooth, and durable roadbeds on which heavy goods could be carried in carts and wagons without destroying the roads. But still barges remained best for transporting heavy goods, and towards the end of the 18th century engineers constructed a system of canals that linked the larger rivers.

Water transport was rather slow, greater speeds were demanded. The idea of railway emerged as a result of the development of steam locomotives, but building locomotives and rail systems was so expen-sive that railroads were not widely used in Britain until the 1830's.

The first practical locomotive was constructed in England in 1804 by Richard Trevithick. It had smooth wheels operating on smooth metal rails. At first the railway was looked on mainly as a means of carrying goods, but it was soon discovered that the steam en-gine was capable of far higher speeds than had been imagined and that it could carry passengers more quick-ly and more cheaply than the stage coach.

After the successful trials of the Trevithick loco-motive, a number of moderately successful locomo-tives were built in England, primarily for use in mining. In 1823 the Stockton-Darlington Railway was opened. In 1829 the much more important line con-necting Manchester and Liverpool came into existence. It was not until 1829 that a locomotive was devel-oped for use in a railway carrying both passengers and cargo. In that year The Rocket, a locomotive de-signed by the British engineer George Stephenson, won a competition sponsored by the Liverpool and Manches-ter Railroad.

The Rocket pulled a load of three times its own weight at a speed of 20 km/hr and hauled a coach filled with passengers at 39 km/hr. This performance stimu-lated the building of other locomotives and the exten-sion of railroad lines. Investors saw railroads as a prof-it-making venture and poured vast amounts of capital into building rail systems throughout the nation.

A regular fever of railway building, accompanied by a speculation boom and much gambling in stocks and land values, set in. In the years 1834-1836 about Ј10,000,000 was raised for railway construction. First in the industrial areas, then on the main routes radiat-ing from London and then on the minor branches, thou-sands of miles of track were laid down.

Much of the capital expended on these works brought in no immediate profit, and in 1845 there was a severe crisis extending to many branches of industry and affecting a number of the banks. This crisis soon passed, being rather the result of speculative optimism than of any real instability of the railway companies, and was followed by the new outburst of building.

The railway building marked the beginning of a tremendous increase in all branches of heavy indus-try, especially in such key industries as coal mining and iron. The output of pig iron was 678,000 tons in 1830; in 1852 it was 2,701,000 tons. Coal output rose from 10,000,000 tons in 1800 to 100,000,000 tons in 1865.

Britain was the first country to create a railway system. It also started to build railways in countries all over the world, which proved to be a very profitable business. Railroads played an especially important role in the colonial and semi-colonial countries that had not a sufficiently dense population or money enough to build for themselves. Such railroads were usually not only built by British contractors but financed by loans raised in London.

The immediate internal effect of the railway boom was to create a large demand for labour, both directly for railway construction and indirectly in the coal min-ing, iron and steel and other industries. In the second place, the railways made it much easier for workers to get from place to place, to leave the villages and find a factory town where work was to be had.

In 1801, 20 per cent of Britain's people lived in towns. By the end of the 19th century, it was 75 per cent. London especially was like a great octopus with its tentacles reaching out into the surrounding coun-try. Life in the slums of big cities was grim. Although the population as a whole was going up, more children died in the cities than anywhere else. But rail travel made it easier for the better-off to get to work. So suburbs grew up on the edge of towns, with better and bigger houses, trees and gardens.

7. Factory Legislation

In the earliest stages of the Industrial Revolution, when machinery was crude, soon obsolete and worked by the uncertain and irregular power of water, facto-ry owners were determined to get the fullest possible use out of this machinery in the shortest possible time. Hours of work rose to sixteen and even eighteen a day. In this way the greatest output could be obtained with the least outlay of capital.

When the facts about factory conditions became generally known they shocked the most part of the early nineteenth century Englishmen, and agitation for the prohibition of some of the worst abuses was started.

As early as 1800-1815, in the years during which he managed the New Lanark mills, Robert Owen had shown that output was not in direct proportion to the number of hours worked, and that it was possible to work a 10 1/2 hour day, to do without the labour of very young children, and yet to make substantial profits. With the development of faster, more accurate, more powerful, and more costly machines and with the sub-stitution of steam power for water power, the advan-tages from a very long working day became less. It was always the water power mills where hours and conditions were the worst and whose owners put up the most stubborn opposition to any kind of change.

More capital was sunk in machinery, and the rela-tion between the capital so used and the capital used for the payment of wages gradually changed. The amount of actual manual labour needed to produce a given article decreased, and at the same time the speed at which the new machinery would work became in-creasingly greater than the speed at which men could work for a day lasting for sixteen or eighteen hours. It became less economical to work the machine at part speed over a long day than at full speed over a shorter one.

The first legislation, passed in 1802, was a very mild act to prevent some of the worst abuses connect-ed with the employment of pauper children. It was followed by the Cotton Factories Regulation Act of 1819 which forbade the employment of children under nine in cotton factories and limited the hours of those between nine and sixteen to 13 1/2. As no machinery was ever provided for the enforcement of this Act it remained a dead letter.

It was not till 1833, after the passing of the Re-form Bill and under pressure of the workers that an effective Act was passed. This prohibited the employ-ment of children under nine except in silk factories, limited the hours of older children and provided a number of inspectors to see that these restrictions were carried out.

Factory Legislation was a necessary part of that deve-lopment which included the displacement of water po-wer by steam, the wholescale use of machinery to manu-facture not only consumption articles but the means of production themselves and the transfer of the decisive point in production from the small to the large unit.

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