The Industrial Revolution

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1027928145

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-159926

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Cunningham, William http://d-nb.info/gnd/128907487

Title:: The Industrial Revolution

Place of publication:: Cambridge

Publisher:: The University Press

Year of publication:: 1922

Scope:: xxii S., S. 404-886

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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566 PARLIAMENTARY COLBERTISM the standard of comfort was low, and the labourer was generally speaking in a position to satisfy his requirements hat Shey without strenuous exertion’, Under these circumstances we OU . . ford to can hardly be surprised at the repeated charges of idleness be idle : . . s which are brought against the poor; this was a constant complaint on the part of the employers? and was pub forward by many writers as the real cause of lack of employment and poverty®. On this assumption, that idleness was the only cause of sauperism (apart from sickness and old age), it was obvious jhat additional opportunities of employment would have iittle effect on those who were unwilling to work at all. It may perhaps be said that the hard tone, which popular opinion associates with the dismal science, first shows itself at a period, when philanthropic measures were denounced on economic grounds, as either useless¢ or baneful, and when lispute, a worthy object of our commiseration and assistance” (Essays om Husbandry, 205). 1 The rural labourer could count on regular employment, since agricultural industry was not liable to such violent fluctuations as manufacturing (A. Young, Farmer's Letters, 21), especially in trades for which the materials eame from abroad. The employees of the capitalist farmer were, however * free hands,” to juote Sir James Steuart’s phrase, as distinguished from peasants whose interest bound them to the soil. 3 Compare Temple, Vindication of Commerce (1758), p. 18. Also Essay on Trade and Commerce, Brit. Mus. 1139. i. 4 (1770), p. 15: “The manufacturing population do not labour above four days a week unless provisions happen to be very dear.” ‘When provisions are cheap they wont work above half the week but sot or idle away half their time.” Richardson, Causes of Decline (1750), p. 6. Even when the men were industrious, the conditions of domestic industry in the West Riding were such that the men lost about a third of their time. Annals of dgriculture, xxviL. 511. 8 Locke (Report of Board of Trade [1697] in Account of Society for the Promotion of Industry in Lindsey, p. 108 [Brit. Mus. 103. 1. 56). Defoe is perhaps the writer who lays most stress on the faults of the poor: “I make no Difficulty,” he says, ¢ to promise on a short Summons to produce above & Thousand Families in England, within my particular knowledge, who go in Rags and their Children wanting Bread, whose Fathers can earn their fifteen to twenty-five shillings per week but will not work, who may have Work enough but are too idle to seek after it, and bardly vouchsafe to earn anything but bare Subsistence and Spending Money for themselves.” Giving Alms no Chanity, in Genuine Works, m. 448. Eden (1. 244) stated the opinion, that a large proportion of paupers, besides the regular tramps, were merely lazy, and that the complaint of want of work was a mere pretence. The high prices of the dear years had not inoculated the English with the frugality which the Dutch displayed. 4 # Suppose now a workhouse for the employment of poor children sets them to spinning of worsted. For every skein of worsted these poor children spin there A.D. 1689 —1776.

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