J Line 14, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
Past and Future 
By Jason 
II is the intention of Land tS; Water to revieio from week 
to week the present eiianges in national life, some of whieh 
are obvious but othe/s not so apparent, and endeavottr to 
discern the outlines of the future State towards which the 
changes are tending. The writer, who will be known as 
" Jason," has been for months a close student of these 
problems, and has also been brought .into direct contact 
with many, social questions. In the present article he 
revieios the past and recalls several facts which are much 
too generally overlooked by those who contrast the present 
with the social conditions of a centnry ago. 
THE character of Britain in the nineteenth century 
was determined dliring the war with France ; the 
character of Britain in the twentietli century will be 
determined by the war with Germany. If then we 
wish to understand what this new Britain is going to be like, 
we must begin by grasping one or two important truths 
about the effect of events which happened a century ago on 
the structure and spirit of our society. For the reconstruction 
which is before us will be largely guided by a revolt, and we 
shall find a clue to its leading ideas in examining the system 
of which our age is becoming passionately impatient. 
A man who was alive at the end of the struggle with 
Napoleon, had he been a man of real insight, like Cobbett who 
knew the world of agriculture, or John Fieldcn who knew the 
world of industry, would have noted two main legacies from 
the generation which passed through the struggle. The first 
legacy was a fall in the standard of life and freedom for the 
mass of the nation on a scale without precedent in British 
history. The second legacy was a philosophy that sought 
to find an explanation for this state of things that would 
reassure the human mind as to the future of civilisation. In 
this article the social changes of that period will be summarised 
briefly and the theory by which these changes were explained 
will be analysed and discussed. 
Economic Independence 
A considerable class of workpepple before the revolutions 
of this period, the one agrarian and the other industrial, 
■enjoyed a certam degree of economic independence. In the 
village the basis of this independence was of course the 
])ossession of common rights. The landless man was almost 
unknown, for though there were many labourers who did not 
own or rent a strip in the common fields, there were few that 
did not pasture an animal on the common waste. In the 
unenclosed village, that is to sav, the labourer Was not merely 
a wage earner receiving so much money for his labour and buy- 
ing his food at a shop. He received wages as a labourer but 
in part he maintained himself as a producer ; the village 
common supplied him with firing, with pasture and some- 
times with food. Generally, too, his earnings were supple- 
menterl by a domestic industry which gave employment to his 
wife and children. , 
Industry was begining to assume its modern capitalist 
character before the French Revolution, but at the time of 
that Revolution the ordinary workman was a domestic pro- 
ducer. Many of these producers, it is true, did not own the 
material on which they worked, and they were dependent 
both for their material and for thi; marketing of their finished 
goods on the clothiers who employed them. But there were a 
large number of cottage manufacturers who bought their 
own material, worked it up and sold their finished article, to 
the merchant at the Cloth HaU. The important woollen 
industry of Yorkshire, for example, was of t}iis type. 
Generally speaking the domestic" 'workers had gardens, and 
even when they becajiie dcpc^iul'eiit upon their employers 
lliey had much more relative freedom than the typical 
domestic worker of to-day who; belongs to a sweated trade, 
bamuel Bam ford has left on record ap Account (if his uncle's 
lilc as a Lancashire weaver, and F'elkiri has drawn an alluring 
picture ot the stocking makers of Nottingham (the men who were 
a terwards known as Luddites) " eacli had a garden, a ban el 
of home brewed ale, a week-day suit of clothes and one for 
bundays, and plenty of leisure," seldom wording more than 
t iree days a week. Mweover music was cultivated by 
them. ■ ■ ' ^.^ -1 . '^ . ■. ■ ■ ■ ■' 
The two revolutions, the aijraHan revolutioii^ a$fe6ci£(tbci 
witl. the enclosures and capitalist farming, and the industrial 
I evolution associated with the rapid development of what the 
I'lcncli call la gtande in$uslrie,"' destroyed :this worid. 
-u the end of the war wjth .Napolepu ccrtaih 'fcatiires of the 
new civdisation were already aDoarent. "For our pliiposts W is 
chiefly important to note that the agrarian revolution increased 
immensely the food production of the country but depressed 
the condition of the agricultural labourer, and the industrial 
revolution increased immensely the economic power and re- 
sources of the country but depressed the conditions of the 
industrial worker. Judged by statistics of corn production "5 
the country was much more prosperous in 1815 or 1830 than 
in 1780 ; the figures of the cotton industry would show an even 
more striking advance. For example, between 1870 and 1833 
the imports of cotton wool rose from three million lbs. to 300 
miUions. People talked of progress and the march of mind as if 
they were the commonplaces of discussion, and men like 
Thomas Love Peacock who (questioned this optimism were 
regarded as eccentrics. , 
But in the same period the working classes had suffered 
a terrible decline. This decline showed itself in our rural 
civilisation in the appalling figures of the poor rate, the bar- 
barous laws against poaching, the growth of crime and of 
savage punishment. It culminated in 1830 in a rising in most 
of the southern counties, which terrified the Government and 
the magistrates and was suppressed with great cruelty. In our 
industrial civilisation it showed itself in the sudden creation 
of a great proletariat living in squalor and wretchedness with 
a steadily falling standard of life. In January 1817 Brougham 
made a speech in the House of Commons reviewing the state of 
the country, in which he said that the average weaver's 
wages had fallen to 4s. 3Jd. a week and labour had become so 
cheap that it was not worth the manufacturers' while to 
extend the power loom. 
The misery of the times found expression in the disturbances 
of'1811, commonly called the I.uddite riots in Nottingham, 
Lancashire and Yorkshire and the march of the Blanketters 
in 1817. It was the punishment of the Luddite disturb- 
ances that provoked Byron's famous declaration in the 
House of Lords, that in all the course of his travels amongst 
the victims of the Ottoman Empire he had never seen such 
squalor and destitution as he had seen since his return to 
England. If we read Chadwick's report on the industrial slums, 
Sadler's reports of the factory children, and Cobbett's pictures 
of the village paupers, we have some idea of the degradation 
of the times. And about that degradation we have to 
remember an important truth. In times of crisis there is a 
great deal ' of poverty and suffering incidental to 
temporary disorganization. 
The misery, associated with the early years of the nineteenth 
century was partly due to violent fluctuations of trade, to 
speculation in the new South African markets, to political 
measures such as the Orders in Counsel and Napoleon s Berlin 
decree, in short to the special conditions created by the great 
war. But over and over all these we have to note a permanent 
loss of strength and power in the working-class population, 
and the worst feature of the new system was lasting, the gi- 
gantic system of child labour of which Oastler could say 
without exaggeration that it was more inhuman than the slave 
-^ system in force in the plantations of Jamaica. 
This then is one great fact that meets us on the threshold 
of the nineteenth century, the association of great industrial 
expansion with a momentous decline in the condition of the 
working classes. The other fact is not less important ; it is 
the rise of a philosophy which explained this state of things, 
reconciled this age to the prospect of its permanence and 
created a spirit of fatalism which clung to all economic 
speculation during most of last century. Curiously enough 
this philosophy reassured the age not by supposing the 
degradation of the time to be a mere passing accident, but by 
accepting it as a permanent condition of progress. 
The imagination of the age was captured and governed by 
the spectacle of a new power in the world — the power of capital. 
Capital in industry was not new in itself, but the difference 
in degree between the scale on which capital was employed 
before and after the rise of machinery was so great as to amount 
to a difference in kind. The industrial revolution gave an 
immense field to this power and contemporaries came to regard 
■ all industry as its creation. The capitalist was the omni- 
potent benefactor who provided employment, and men and 
women and children were part of his machinery. For the 
ideal of economic power determined the status of the work- 
})eople. The difference between the civilised and uncivihsed 
country was the difference between a country in which men 
had savings to invest and invested them in industrial plant 
and in the country in which there was no wealth for invest- 
ment, or no disposition to invest it in reproductive undertak- 
ing.' The security of property and the unquestioned authority 
of capital were the conditions of progress. Nothing was to be 
done to frighten or alienate this power, and as the capitalist 
