Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 735
Indeed the lot of the poor in England was cruel hard a hundred years ago. Working-class families lived — except those who died — on 15 to 30 shillings a week. A budget for a family of four shows five-pence a day for each for food, a little over two cents a meal.... A woman going out to work got 12s. 6d. a week; a capable general servant, board and £1 a month. Houses in the city slums, so said a foreign visitor, were the “most horrible dwellings ever yet beheld.” The filth among which the poor were obliged to live caused the courts and yards to swarm with flies. Food became putrid almost at once. The country was little better.... Cottages were damp and dark; fever brooded over undrained hamlets; drinking water was polluted; whole counties were underfed.... In certain trades (straw-plaiting) children began work at four years of age; in glove-making plenty of them at five.... Children worked twelve and thirteen hours a day in factories.... Submerged beneath all were the paupers. They were 6 per cent. of the population in England in 1849. Their Workhouse was a cruel thing ... tyranny, squalor, and maybe semi-starvation ... in places the paupers fought like animals for gristly bones.
Death brought what relief it could. One out of every four children born alive was dead within a year. The average age for death was well under forty.
On the surface, above all this, moved the upper class — the lords and ladies, the high society, the scholars and gentlemen, the arts and letters of a great age. Nor could any one of them, with all the pity in the world, relieve at a stroke the distress of their time any more than we can now.
Even in happy America the lot of labour was hard. In the factories of early New England long hours and poor working conditions sapped the vitality of the workers. The wages, though higher than those of Europe, were miserably low compared to our standards of to-day. Across the South lay the dark shadow of slavery. In the early days this lack of human liberty was often mitigated by the kindly paternalism of master towards servant. But with the rise of commercialism this changed to the impersonal, often brutal exploitation of the slaves’ energy. Much of the liberty of that period was restricted to the privileged few. True, it no longer existed as the sole right of the aristocracy, but the benefits of the new order seeped very slowly down to the class that had not been born to fortune. Those without such fortunes who did achieve the benefit of economic liberty, did so at the price of danger, hardship and privation on the frontiers of the new land.
Spencer Walpole, History of England.
Details from G. M. Young, Early Victorian England, 1830-65. 1934.
Poor Law of 1834.
THE MARCH OF PROGRESS
THUS WE MUST never make the mistake of under-estimating the real social progress that has been made within a century both in America and in Europe. The pace has been slow, the betterment all too little. But slow as it was, more progress was made in this period than in any period in history.
All people in all ages seem to think of their own generation as moving fast. It is doubtful if even the Chinese knew they were virtually standing still. Old people have always shaken their heads at the rapid pace of life, predicting disaster. There may well have been a time when the coming of the windmill and the wheelbarrow seemed as startling as the first flight of the aeroplane. Old people shook their heads over the stage coaches, and their stage-coach children shook theirs over the railway train. Each generation feels that it lives in a fast-moving world. But looking at it in retrospect, we see that the world has moved on in centuries of little change, till here and there some great catastrophe swept over it.
However, at the close of the eighteenth century changes began to come faster, and as they gained momentum, the pace grew faster still. Reforms which in other times would have taken a century were accomplished in a few years. Changes in methods of production were introduced almost overnight by means of new inventions. And as each new invention led to other inventions, the changes came faster and faster, bringing with them changes in ideas and making new reforms both possible and necessary — possible because of the new way of life and the new points of view; necessary because of the appalling conditions of working and living which had come with the machine.
A learned man of ancient Greece landing in London about A.D. 1700 would have found much to interest but little to astonish him. There would have been hardly any mechanism or contrivance which he could not understand. Even gunpowder would not have been altogether strange. It was only an improvement on the “Greek Fire,” familiar in war four centuries before Christ. Printing would have been comprehensible at sight. But land him in London after the coming of electric light and the telephone (say 1880) and he would dissolve into a very torrent of eager inquiry. Land him to-day among the “movies” with the radio in his ears, and inquiry would die upon his lips.
It is important to realize this vast change in our mechanical world. All our ideals of social control, all our applications of Liberty are conditioned by it. As a result of these changes, the hours of labour have been greatly shortened, from a day of twelve or more to one of eight hours. The conditions of labour have been infinitely improved, and the increase of community welfare — playgrounds, parks and libraries shared in common — marks a new world. Ignorance is vanishing. All people, or nearly all civilized people, can read and write ... if only to plan one another’s destruction. We owe at least something to this past century in which Liberty had hoped to enlighten the world. For although the high promises of a century ago have not been fulfilled a long upward path has been ascended. To appreciate this we have only to look back at the milestones of human history since the conscious ideal of liberty emerged in the life and purpose of mankind.
C. D. Wright, Industrial Evolution and the United States. 1895.
LIBERTY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
THE IDEAL OF human liberty and the struggle for freedom did not begin with our modern world of democracy and progress. But in other and earlier times liberty centred round a different thought. We must distinguish here between national liberty ... the right of a group of people, a tribe, a nation, to be let alone to manage their own affairs in their own way ... and individual liberty ... the right of the individual man to be let alone ... which is quite another matter.
We think, for example, of the liberty of the ancient Greeks. We recall Lord Byron’s moving stanzas deploring the sad fate of the Greece of his day, held under the despotism of the Turks; a tyranny now renewed, vastly more brutal, and calling forth the same passionate challenge.
“The mountains look on Marathon,
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream’d that Greece might still be free;
For, standing on the Persian’s grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.”
But the Greeks in reality were a long way from the individual liberty and equality which we have to-day. The Greeks never thought of “aliens” as equal to themselves. In Athens, as in other Greek city-states, aliens had no political rights; still less had slaves. Yet Athens in a population estimated at something over 300,000 had 160,000 members of citizen families, 90,000 aliens and something over 80,000 slaves. Nor had the Greeks any conception of a general equality as between man and man as the proper basis of society. It seemed, even to Aristotle, that there had to be a lower class of workers, that slavery was a national order. Without a “working-class,” it was argued, there could not be an upper class of “gentlemen” devoted to a life of leisure, art and culture. Without these there could be no society, no continuity of national life — or rather these were society — national life — all that mattered. The Greeks disdained alike manual labour and trade and, to their own detriment, all practical application of brilliant mathematical thought. Engineering slept while gentlemen debated philosophy.
This theory of humanity, accepting a fortunate upper class as standing on the shoulders of those below, is older than history, dies hard, and is not yet dead. In our American world, in the United States and Canada, the rough and tumble of pioneer life, the rush and clatter of rising settlements, kept tending to shake all the people together like beans in a bag. The “squire” shook down into a squatter. The immigrant boy shook up into a captain of industry. Classes, or membership in them, only formed to break again. “Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations,” became a sort of American family motto, as well established as noblesse oblige, or the dum spiro, spero of the feudal lords. Money doesn’t make a “class” but only a seat in one; lose it and you’re out.
But in older countries, and notably in England till yesterday, the theory of classes, handed on down from the Greek thought, has proved at one and the same time a basis for society and a brake, if not a barrier, to the movement of progress. It is doubtful if Europe could have survived without the “classes” of feudal society. It is doubtful, to many people, whether Europe, or any other civilized country, can permanently survive with a society based on class — whether class by birth, or class by wealth, or class entrenched by force. Not that we must level down; but we must level up.
The notion of what is called a “class-less society” is one on which all of us interested in human welfare should deeply ponder. Only a little time ago to most plain, practical people it seemed the dream of a visionary; but now, to many, it is the necessary condition that can alone guarantee national existence. Whether this means that there will be no more gentlemen or that everybody will be a gentleman, is another matter.
It was a peculiar consequence of the Greek point of view, as thus described, that the individual as such was of no account as beside the state. We ourselves indeed, in our modern free democracies, think nothing so high, so noble as when the individual sacrifices his life for his country — the last supreme sacrifice. But the Greek point of view was something quite different. It meant that the individual had no rights that could not be sacrificed, by others, for the general welfare. We may pretend to such a view, but on real contact we shrink from it; the killing off of deformed children, putting idiots “out of the way,” knocking old people on the head fills us with instinctive horror. Even the painless killing of people hopelessly suffering before an inevitable death leaves us perplexed. The sanctity of human life “beats us out.” To the Greek there was no problem in such things as these, and least of all to the Spartans, with whom the citizen’s life was cast in an iron mould of authority.
What the Greeks really cherished was the liberty, the independence of their own little city-state — the “polis” — a word which has left its mark upon our language with politics, metropolis, and the distinction of “polite” people from rustics. This meant in most cases a city, such as Athens or Sparta with the adjacent villages and countryside, or an island, one of those “Isles of Greece” that dot the blue waters of the Ægean in what then seemed the centre of the world. In Greece and in its outer colonies there were in all over one hundred city-states. So far did the Greeks carry this idea of independence by isolation that when any group of them migrated to make new settlements, such as those like Syracuse in Sicily and those on the Italian coast, they thought of these settlements at once as free and independent states. The new settlers carried with them their affection for their parent state, their household gods and sacred fires, their written scrolls and remembered knowledge ... but all authority of their parent state over them fell away as their galleys went over the horizon.
Many of the early settlers in America thought of their new homes in the same way. This dream of the independent little state, injuring no man and going its way in peace, has been one of the ideals of European peoples. But the isolation and weakness of these small states has often spelled disaster. This was one of the causes of the downfall of Greece. The great empires of Macedon and Rome drove over the civilization of the Ægean, and did not relinquish their hold until conquests by barbarians, and later by the Turk, destroyed national and individual liberty alike. Such isolation again has at the present hour brought ruin upon what seem the happy independence of Scandinavia, and the sturdy self-reliance of Holland.
Warde Fowler, The City-State.
F. J. Turner, The Frontier in American History. 1920.
R. H. Murray, Political Science from Plato to the Present. 1926.
THE SHADOW OF THE DARK AND MIDDLE AGES
THE ROMAN EMPIRE disintegrated under the flood of barbarian conquest. What had been the orderly Roman Province of Gaul was swept to ruin and anarchy by the invasion of Germans, Norsemen, Huns and Saracens. “The strangers,” says a chronicle, “sacked the towns and villages and laid waste the fields; they burnt down the churches.” “The whole country,” says another, “is laid waste as far as the Loire; where once were prosperous towns, wild animals now roam.” Out of this wreck rose the feudal system as salvation. Little groups of survivors from this carnage and destruction gathered together in fortified places, under leaders strong enough to command and save. The weak gladly commended themselves to the protection of the strong. Henceforth no one held his possessions except as a vassal under the protection of a lord. Throughout this whole order ran the new mystery of the Christian faith, explaining obedience as itself divine, and humility as the path to Heaven.
The feudal system with its complicated arrangements has so long been the bane of the schoolroom, the target for schoolroom wit as the Fuddle System, and the playground of merry parody mocking it across the centuries, that it is hard for us to see it in its true light. In reality it came as the salvation of Europe from anarchy, and sustained it for nearly a thousand years. The essential point was that it offered a fixed setting for social life — answering to some extent our age-long prayer “Give peace in our time, O Lord.” For under its organization the lord and the priest, the vassal and the liegeman and the serf, lived in a settled order in which each had his allotted place. There was no question of equality, or of equal rights, but every man had a status or lot of his own, descending from father to son. What seems to most of us in America to-day the grossest social injustice was accepted as a matter of course by those who lived under it. The Barons of the Magna Carta did not think of the vassals and the freemen and the serfs and the slaves beneath them as equal to themselves. In fact they were sure they were not. Each man had his own station and the services and privileges that went with it. He was expected, as the rubric of the Church of England still declares it, to do his duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call him. When it was said that each man had the right under an accusation to be tried by his peers, it meant that he had the right to be tried by people as high or as low as he himself was.
We would do well not to condemn too easily nor too entirely this creed and code of the Middle Ages. In our own day, and above all in America, the idea of natural rights and the ideal of individual liberty have been so widespread and so deeply rooted in the pioneer settlement of our continent that they seem matters of common sense and common justice, needing no verification. Any other order of society excites our indignation.
But we must not too easily dismiss this mediæval conception of duty and obedience without trying to get from it the element of good which it contains. We shall see that the mere assertion of our rights, each for himself, the exaction of the uttermost farthing of our claim, will get us nowhere without an eager willingness towards duty, an acceptance of sacrifice as a part of life. True liberty ... liberty for all ... implies a sacrifice for each one of us of some of his rights in order that other people may have their rights too. During times of war the people of all nations willingly sacrifice their individual rights for the common good. But this spirit, this forgetfulness of self, is needed in the life of peace as well. The more we base our thoughts and stake our future on individual liberty the more must it be enlarged and ennobled by individual sacrifice. What we give thus, we do not lose, or, if it is lost for ourselves, it is given to humanity.
Funck Brentano, The Middle Ages. 1922. Cites Chronicles of Richer and Amboise.
W. C. Sellar, 1066 and all That. 1931.
Rev. George O’Brien, Mediæval Economic Teaching.
NATIONAL STATES
THE ORDER OF the Middle Ages lasted till about the close of the fourteen hundreds. The same generation that saw the discovery of a New World witnessed, without knowing it, the passing of an old. Feudalism, with its distinctive social order, was swept away by the great changes — social, mechanical and intellectual — which passed over Europe as between A.D. 1300 and 1500. Perhaps the most far-reaching was the change in the art of war. All through the Middle Ages the defence beat the attack. A feudal baron in a castle on a rock, with water from deep wells and a store of food, could defy a king for a year; indeed he could defy the whole world. Dover castle, the most complete example of a mediæval fortress in England, covered thirty-four acres. In 1216 it defied all attempts of the French to take it.
That was why no king in England till the close of the Middle Ages was ever more than the most powerful of the barons. Then came gunpowder. The cannon bound with iron hoops that served at the battle of Crécy in 1346, heralded a new world. A king with a train of artillery could presently batter down a castle. In Germany the castle of Friesach was blown open in two days (1414). In England, during the Wars of the Roses, Bamborough Castle was taken by the Earl of Warwick in a week (1469). Feudalism as government was all over. Royal armies replaced feudal contingents. The king came into his own as the head of a new national state. This is the meaning of the new monarchy created in England by Edward IV. and Henry VII. This is the France of Louis XI. and the United Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella. In days of increasing commerce and expanding discovery, of rising cities and growing seaports, the king and the national state served a historic purpose, as obvious as the bygone service of feudalism.
