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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750 LAISSEZ FAIRE A.D. 1776 —1850, were unsuited to the wants of the new era. Apprenticeship had offered a system of training, not only in the skill of a craft, but for the duties of life in a particular calling and a by pro- definite social status. There was need to substitute some means of © System, which should be adapted for the wider prospects «ducation, which were opening up, and which should treat each child as a unit in the State. It was possible for the manufacturers to urge that the discontent, and still more the violence, of the operatives was due to their ignorance, and that education was the means which would enable them to act not from short-sighted passion, but from an enlightened self-interest. The education of the poor thus came to be undertaken on a large scale, partly out of charity’ and partly as a work to which the governing classes applied themselves in mere self-defence. The philanthropists could not count, however, on the interested support of manufacturers, when they turned their attention to the conditions under which the great staple industries of the country were carried on; and the best scientific opinion of the day was inclined to condemn any interference by the State, as useless when it was not mis- chievous. Economic experts were on the whole opposed to the protective legislation which was brought forward in the interests of women and children. They had foretold the ruin 1 Godwin had been one of the most effective advocates of the diffusion of education, from the desire of letting the poor see where their true interest lay (Political Justice, 1. 44). The earliest efforts of Government were deli- berately confined to supplementing voluntary agency, and any other course appeared to them injurious. “In humbly suggesting what is fit to be done for promoting universal education, your Committee do not hesitate to state that two different plans are advisable, adapted to the opposite circamstances of the town and country districts. Wherever the efforts of individuals can support the requisite number of schools, it would be unnecessary and injurious to interpose any parliamentary assistance. But your Committee have clearly ascertained, that in many places private subscriptions could be raised to meet the yearly expenses of a school, while the original cost of the undertaking, occasioned chiefly by the erection and purchase of the schoel-house, prevents it from being attempted. Your Committee conceive that a sum of money might be well employed in supplying this first want, leaving the charity of individuals to furnish the annual provision requisite for continuing the school” (Third Report of Select Committee on the Education of the Lower Orders, in Reports, 1818, iv. 59). In accordance with these views Lord Althorp succeeded in 1833 in obtaining some grants to defray the first cost of elementary schools. The work of adult education which was being vigorously carried on in Mechanics’ Institutes, though begun somewhat earlier, received a new impulse at this time.

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