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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LAISSEZ FAIRE They did not attempt to investigate the conditions which tend to render the wages fund steady for a time, and preclude the increase of the labourers’ wages during that period. The labourers were poorly paid, not because the wages fund was invariable, but because the introduction of machinery was restricting it at the time; this was precisely the view taken by the labourers, though they gave it less cumbrous and more forcible expression. While economists denounced the ineptitude of all efforts on the part of labourers to raise the rates of wages, they were equally scornful of all philanthropic proposals for ameliorating the condition of the poor. All poverty was said to be due to the increase of population at a more rapid rate than the increase of the means of subsistence; and it seemed to follow that any charity, which gave the opportunity for more rapid multiplication, would increase the evil it professed to relieve. This was the position of the followers of Malthus, and his mode of statement gave some excuse for the exaggeration; he based his doctrine on a very careful inductive argument. He cites instances from every age, from every climate, and from every soil, to show that there is everywhere a tendency for population to increase faster than the means of sub- sistence ; and he draws from it the inevitable conclusion that the anxiety which politicians displayed, to provide conditions for the growth of population as an element in national power, was quite illusory. The difficulty lay, not in the birth-rate, but in the raising of children to be efficient men and women; a low rate of infant mortality seemed to him to be on the whole the best guarantee for a sound and well nourished population. FEA of The conditions of society, at the time when Malthus procuring wrote, were such as to render the truth of his principle subsistence. . . . obvious when once it was stated. On the one side there was the greatest difficulty in procuring additional means of sub- sistence; the war imposed hindrances to the purchase of supplies from abroad; and though agriculturists were busy in ploughing up waste ground and taking in a larger area for the cultivation of wheat, they were finding that the task of adding to the regular produce became harder and harder. 74.2

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