The social philosophy of Carlyle and Ruskin

Foreword

The following chapters have been written not only as an interpretation on important sides of two great and related literary personalities of the Victorian Era, but also as a contribution, however slight, to the history of social thought in England during a critical period. The writer would fain hope that the challenging message of these prophets, delivered in a time of profound transformations in the structure of society, might not be without inspiration and guidance for our own day, a day even more disturbed than theirs, more fraught with unrest and uncertainty, when men everywhere are listening for authentic voices that shall speak counsels worthy to be followed. For the social philosophy of Carlyle and Ruskin is not a matter of academic interest for a few leisured scholars and book-lovers alone. It is rather a trumpet-call to workers, old and young, workers alike with hand and with brain, — to put forth their utmost efforts, in the midst of the present confusion, for the purpose of effecting an ordered revolution of our industrial system, so that civilization in reality may become what for generations at least it has not been, — "the humanization of man in society.**

The text of Carlyle used throughout the volume is the text of the Copyright Edition^ published in England by Chapman and Hall, and sold in America by Scribner*s. The text of Ruskin is that of the Library vi FOREWORD

Edition^ edited by Cook and Wedderburn, and published by Longmans, Green* & Co.

For much helpful criticism, the author wishes to record here his thanks to his long-time friend and college classmate. Dr. John Gowdy, President of the Anglo-Chinese College, Foochow, China.

F. W. R.

Madison, Wisconsin, December, 1920,

Contents

PAGE

Foreword ] v

The New Age i

Chapter I

"On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster. . . . Coal and iron, so long unregardful neighbors, are wedded together; Birmingham and Wolverhampton, and the hundred Stygian forges, with their fire-throats and never-resting sledge-hammers, rose into day." — Carlyle.

No discussion of the social philosophy of Carlyle and Ruskin can be understood without some account, however brief and incomplete, of the transformation in modern life known as the industrial revolution. The message of these great Victorians to their contemporaries, their denunciations of present evils as well as their prophetic vision of a better order, were set forth against a background of social change that took shape before their eyes. And they were not only witnesses of this mighty drama of contending industrial forces; they could also well remember times, in their youth or early manhood, when the English landscape was yet unsullied by factorysmoke, and when many an English cottager lived amidst beauty and peace and contentment and had not yet been infected by the fever of a modern manufacturing town. An account of these movements, therefore, even though it is more than a twice-told tale, must be placed before the reader, as an indispensable setting to the social philosophy which he is invited to consider. But it is a story fascinating in itself, fairly epical in its sweep and consequence, and one which the student of latter-day problems cannot know too well. The stream of events upon which it is borne along, moreover, flows onward from the beginning more unbrokenly in England than in any other country; for here all the older conditions existed in their fulness, and here the newer life first came into being in its power.

The man of to-day cannot easily picture that older world in which his ancestors lived less than two centuries ago. Measured as history measures them, changes have been so recent and so revolutionary that the England of the first Georges seems less removed from the times of the Pharaohs than from the England of the present, at least in nearly everything that is concerned with the daily activities of man. Commerce, manufacture, agriculture, travel, domestic economy, one and all, were carried on very much as they had been carried on centuries before. The world was bigger, cities were larger and more numerous, and the fruits of civilization were vastly more distributed, it is true, in the eighteenth century than in any previous age; and with these changes there were corresponding changes also in the external fashions and habits of life. But the business of the home, the field, and the market-place was not essentially different from what it had been when the heedful Penelope sat in her hall at Ithaca weaving the great web, or when Jacob drove shrewd bargains with his uncle Laban on the plains of Padan-Aram. In 1760 — to take a convenient date — the old communal system of agriculture in England was in full swing. Land around a manor, or lord's house, was broken up into innumerable small strips, cultivated, fallow, and waste. The yeoman farmers of those days, some of them tenants, some of them freeholders (of whom there were about 180,000) tilled their scattered allotments, pastured their cattle, sheep, and swine on a common pasture, and lived in small clustered cottages. Most of their implements were wooden and therefore inadequate, and their methods of farming were almost hopelessly antiquated; for they did not rotate their crops nor fertilize, and they systematically allowed one-third of their arable land to lie fallow each year. Intervening between one community and another, moreover, there were likely to be immense tracts of undrained fen, waste moorland, or forest, which the enterprise or necessity of man had not yet reclaimed from their primeval state. Thus in these rural centers, lapped in a surrounding stillness of which we to-day can scarcely dream, these sturdy peasant proprietors lived from generation to generation, remote and slow no doubt, but, from all accounts not like Goldsmith's villagers, for they were neither unfriended nor melancholy. England in their times was an agricultural nation. Her lawmakers were her landlords and much of her physical and moral strength was in her yeomen.

The fields were not alone the source of livelihood. Otherwise these agricultural communities could not have been self-sufficient. Every farmer's cottage was his factory, where the family, old and young, not only made their own candles and leather, but spun and wove their own cloth from the wool of their own sheep. At least this was the custom in the beginning and for most peasants, although in some parts ot England from Tudor times onward it was expanded into what has since been known as the "domestic system" of manufacture. "Every family spun from its own flock the wool with which it was clothed," says Wordsworth, speaking of the dalesmen of Westmoreland; "a weaver was here and there found among them; and the rest of their wants was supplied by the produce of the yarn, which they carded and spun in their own houses and carried to market, either under their arms, or more frequently on packhorses, a small train taking their way weekly down the valley or over the mountains to the most commodious towns." ^ It was the existence of these "commodious" towns, which were not self-sufficient, as were the earlier rural communities, that had brought about a development in "domestic" manufacture, only suggested in the passage just quoted from Wordsworth. Since the townspeople did not make their own cloth, they purchased it from the farmers, who therefore found it more and more to their profit to devote a larger share of their time to

1 Guide to the Lakes, 60.

spinning and weaving than to farming, at least so long as farming went on in the old way. Spinning and weaving, moreover, might go on at any season and would furnish employment for the entire family instead of for a part only. "A family of four adult persons, with two children as winders,** said Dr. Gaskell, in a book published in 1833, "earned at the end of the last and at the commencement of the present century, 4/. per week, when working ten hours per day."^

Thus there grew up entire communities of rural cloth-makers, some of them, like those of Yorkshire, where woollens were made, dating back to the days of the Tudors; others, like those of Lancashire, the home of cotton manufacture, probably not extending much back of the eighteenth century. In the prosperous expansion of this industry, we can trace the beginnings of capitalistic enterprise and division of labor. A hand-loom weaver would become the owner of four or five looms, which he worked with the assistance of journeymen and apprentices. His yarn would be spun in the neighboring cottages, whose families would thus be dependent upon him for their employment. If the master weaver were a maker of cotton cloth he would take the product of his looms thrice a week to the market at Manchester, offering his goods for sale, soliciting orders, and returning with a quantity of raw material for his spinners. "There was not a village within thirty miles of Manchester, on the Cheshire and Derbyshire side," says Chapman, in his History

^ Manufacturing Population of England, 34.

of the Cotton Manufacture^ "in which cotton manufacturing was not being carried on." ^ Defoe, in his Tour of Great Britain (\'jTf)^ has left us a vivid picture of these vanished communities of workers, in his description of the woollen industry in the parish of Halifax, Yorkshire, and of the great cloth-market at Leeds, where the weavers marketed their goods. "The nearer we came to Halifax," he says, "we found the houses thicker, and the villages greater, in every bottom; and not only so, but the sides of the hill, which were very steep every way, were spread with houses; for the land being divided into small enclosures, from two acres to six or seven each, seldom more, every three or four pieces of land had an house belonging to them. In short, after we had mounted the third hill, we found the country one continued village, though every way mountainous, hardly an house standing out of a speakingdistance from another; and as the day cleared up, we could see at every house a tenter, and on alniost every tenter a piece of cloth. Kersey, or shalloon; which are the three articles of this country *s labor. . . . Then, as every clothier (/. ^., weaver) must necessarily keep one horse, at least, to fetch home his wool and his provisions from the market, to carry his yarn to the spinners, his manufacture to the fulling-mill, and, when finished, to the market to be sold, and the like; so every one generally keeps a cow or two for his family. . . . Though we met few people without doors, yet within we saw the houses full of lusty fellows, some at the dye-vat,

^Manufacturing Population of England, 37.

some at the loom, others dressing the cloths; the women and children carding, or spinning; all employed from the youngest to the oldest; scarce anything above four years old, but its hands were sufficient for its own support. Not a beggar to be seen, nor an idle person, except here and there in an almshouse, built for those that are antient, and past working. The people in general live long; they enjoy a good air; and under such circumstances hard labour is naturally attended with the blessing of health, if not riches."

"The cloth-market held in cloth-hall at Leeds," continues Defoe, "is chiefly to be admired, as a prodigy of its kind, and perhaps not to be equalled in the world. The market for. serges at Exeter is indeed a wonderful thing, and the money returned very great; but it is there only once a week, whereas here it is every Tuesday and Saturday. The Clothiers (/. e.^ weavers) come early in the morning with their cloth; and, as few bring more than one piece, the market-days being so frequent, they go into the inns and public-houses with it, and there set it down. At about six o*clock in the summer, and about seven in the winter, the clothiers being all come by that time, the market bell at the old chapel by the bridge rings; upon which it would surprise a stranger, to see in how few minutes, without hurry, noise, or the least disorder, the whole market is filled, all the benches covered with cloth, as close to one another as the pieces can lie longways, each proprietor standing behind his own piece, who form a mercantile regiment, as it were, drawn up in a double line; in as great order as a military one. As soon as the bell has ceased ringing, the factors and buyers of all sorts enter the hall, and walk up and down between the rows, as their occasions direct. Most of them have papers with patterns sealed on them, in their hands; the colours of which they watch, by holding them to the cloths they think they agree to. When they have pitched upon their cloth, they lean over to the clothier, and, by a whisper, in the fewest words imaginable, the price is stated; one asks, the other bids, and they agree or disagree in a moment. . . . The buyers generally walk up and down twice on each side of the rows, and in little more than half an hour all the business is done. In less than half an hour you will perceive the cloth begin to move off, the clothier taking it upon his shoulder to carry to the merchant's house. At about half an hour after eight the market bell rings again, upon which the buyers immediately disappear, and the cloth which remains unsold is carried back to the inn. Thus you see lo or 20,000/. worth of cloth, and sometimes much more, bought and sold in little more than an hour, the laws of the market being the most strictly observed that I ever saw in any market in England." ^

Other accounts of these "golden times of manufacture," as Dr. Gaskell called them, it would be possible to give from various extant sources. For example, one of Ruskin's correspondents in the days of Fors Clavigera pictures the idyllic past that he knew at Wakefield before the advent of machinery

1 Defoe, Tour oj Great Britain, III, 155-6 and 13 1-2.

and the factory-system; and his picture sharply contrasts the brightness of the old times with the blackness of the new. "There was no railway then/' he saySj "only the Doncaster coach careering over the Bridge with a brave sound of horn; fields and farmsteads stood where the Kirkgate station is; where the twenty black throats of the foundry belch out flame and soot, there were only strawberry grounds and blossoming pear-orchards, among which the throstles and blackbirds were shouting for gladness. ... On the chapel side there was the soft green English landscape, with woods and spires and halls, and the brown sails of boats silently moving among the flowery banks; on the town side there were picturesque traffic and life; the thundering weir, the wide still water beyond, the big dark-red granaries, with balconies and archways to the water, and the lofty white mills grinding out their cheering music. But there were no worse shapes than honest, dusty millers' men, and browned boatmen, decent people. I can remember how clean the pavement used to look there, and at Doncaster. Both towns are incredibly dirty now. . . . Market day used to be a great event for us all. I wish that you could have seen the handsome farmers' wives ranged round the church walls, with their baskets of apricots and cream cheese, before reform came. . . . You might have seen, too, the pretty cottagers' daughters, with their bunches of lavender and baskets of fruit, or heaps of cowslips and primroses for the wine and vinegar Wakefield housewives prided themselves upon. On certain days they stood to be hired as lo CARLYLE AND RUSKIN

maid-servants, and were prized in the country round as neat, clean, modest-spoken girls. I do not know where they are gone now, — I suppose to the factories. . . . Tradespeople were different, too, in old Wakefield. They expected to live with us all their lives; they had high notions of honor as tradesmen, and they and their customers respected each other. They prided themselves on the 'wear' of their goods. If they had passed upon the housewives a piece of sized calico or shoddy flannel, they would have heard of it for years after. Now the richer ladies go to Leeds or Manchester to make purchases; the town tradesmen are soured and jealous. They put up big plate-glass fronts, and send out flaming bills; but one does not know where to get a piece of sound calico or stout linen, well spun and well woven." ^

The more characteristic aspects of this attractive picture were no doubt reproduced in hundreds of towns all over the country. England had a foreign trade then, as she had had in the days of Chaucer, but commerce and manufacturing in the modern sense were unknown. Her people lived and worked under the old, old theory that each community was to be self-sustaining. Relations therefore were far less international than national, and even more parochial than national. Villages and towns lived largely unto themselves, shut out from the rest of the world, most of their inhabitants never seeing beyond the horizon that circled their ancestral homes. For in those days there were few roads, and those few were almost hopelessly bad. According to Adam Smith, it took

1 Ruskin, Works, XXVIII, 380-2.

THE NEW AGE ii

a broad-wheeled wagon, attended by two men and drawn by eight horses, about six weeks to carry and bring back between London and Edinburgh four tons weight of goods. ^ It took a coach longer to go the same distance than it now takes a liner to go from Liverpool to New York. In the summer season a journey by coach from London to Manchester occupied two days. Travel, therefore, was infrequent and only for the well-to-do. Traders went from community to community on horseback, or afoot, and bartered their goods on market days or at periodical fairs, as did the voluble Bob Jakin in Mill on the Floss, The beginnings of capitalistic enterprise at this period there were, as we have seen, but the captain of industry who systematically exploited his labor, purchasing it in the cheapest market, and who developed his industry in the British spirit of individualism had not yet come. Nor had the wage-earner, nor the factory-system. It was not an ideal world, far from it; and there were communities, such as the weavers of coarse cloth at Oldham, Lancashire, among whom conditions were wretched. But take it all in all, the world of those days was a world of contented toilers, for the most part independent and prosperous, owning their own wheels and looms, and on Sundays regularly attending the village church, because like Job "they feared God, and eschewed evil;" — a world, be it said, which furnished the quiet background in so much of Wordsworth's poetry and to v^rhich Carlyle and Ruskin and Morris reverted so often a half century and more afterward.

1 Wealth of Nations, I, 20.

Then as if by magic came the flying shuttle, the spinning-jenny, and the power-loom, followed rapidly by the application of steam to all the uses of industry through new and marvelous machinery. Then came also a revolution in travel and transportation by means of canals, Macadam*s turnpikes, railroads, and steamships. By a kind of simultaneous collaboration of wonder-working forces, a new world sprang into being, and the old world vanished like ghost at cock-crow.^ "The spinning-wheel and the hand-loom were silenced, and manufactures were transferred from scattered villages and quiet homesteads to factories and cities filled with noise. Villages became towns, towns became cities, and factories started up on barren heath and deserted waste." Within fifty years English industry changed from medieval or semi-medieval to modern conditions. A new order of population was created. Commerce and manufacture went forward by leaps and bounds. And by the middle of the nineteenth century England became the wealthiest nation in the world, and her people found themselves in the midst of a gigantic industrial

^ It is interesting to note the close sequence of dates respecting the principal inventions and improvements: the fly-shuttle by John Kay, 1733; the spinning-jenny by Hargraves, 1764; the water-frame by Arkwright, 1769; the "mule" by Crompton, 1779; Watt's steam-engine, first used to run spinning machines, 1785; Cartwright's power-loom, 1785; smelting iron by coal, 17401750; application of steam to blast furnaces, 1788; Davy's safety lamp, 1815; Duke of Bridgewater's canal, 1759; improvement of roads and bridge-building under Telford and Macadam, 1815-1830; first railroad, Stockton to Darlington, 1825; Fulton's Clermont, from New York to Albany, 1807; the Comet, first passenger steamer in Europe, launched on Clyde, 1812; Great Western, built by Cunard Company, the first steamship to cross the Atlantic, 1838.

system, with its myriad interests and its multitudinous problems.

A few figures may assist the reader's imagination to grasp the magnitude of these changes. The population of England and Wales in 1750 is estimated to have been 6,517,035; by 1821 it had nearly doubled. The increase in the population of England and Wales from 1770 to 1 801 was 27^^%; from 1801 to 1831 it was 56-3/5%.^ The manufacturing towns expanded enormously. From 1801 to 1831, the population of Glasgow increased 161%, Manchester, 151%, Liverpool, 138%, Birmingham, 90%.^ "The population of Lancashire, which is the great center of the cotton trade,'' says Dr. Gaskell, "in 1700, was 166,200; in 1750, 297,400; in 1801, 672,731; in 181 1, 828,309; in 1821, 1,052,859; in 1831, 1,335,800."^ In 1700 the agricultural population was double that of the manufacturing population; by 1830 the situation was reversed. In 18 13 there were 2,400 power looms in use in Great Britain; in 1835 there were 116,801.^ In 1760 in the cotton trade 3,000,000 pounds of cotton were manufactured; in 1833, 303,656,837 pounds were produced.^ "One spinner," says Dr. Gaskell, writing in 1836, "produces as much in one day now as would have required a year's time to produce a century ago." ^ In 1787 there were 41 cotton mills in Lancashire alone; a half century later, there were 157,

^ Porter, The Progress of the Nation^ 13.

2 Gaskell, Manufacturing Population of England, 220.

^ Chapman, Lancashire Cotton Industry, 28.

^Gaskell, Artisans and Machinery, 329.

^Gaskell, Artisans and Machinery, 329.

with operatives estimated at 1 37,000. ^ Perhaps nothing shows more impressively, the effect of the new order of things than the growth in the importation of raw cotton: in 181 5 it amounted to 82 miUion pounds; in 1835 it was 318 million pounds; in 1851,659 million pounds.^ "The Briarean arms of the steam-engine" reached into every industry and "British science and British skill" made England, in the popular phrase of the Victorian era, the workshop of the world. The soldiers of Napoleon who marched to Moscow wore clothing made of cloth from English looms, and manufactured goods from English factories were carried by British merchantmen to the ends of the earth. It is little wonder that many a contemporary writer should hail the new inventions as a special dispensation of providence to British genius, and should describe the new times in language that sounds ludicrously extravagant to-day, even to American ears. The transformations wrought upon society were indeed more revolutionary, both actually and potentially, than any which the world had hitherto seen. The new distributions of property, the rapid accumulations of private fortunes, the widespread application of machinery and the consequent enormous multiplication of the conveniences and luxuries of life, the disappearance of some classes and the emergence of others, together with the deeper changes in the habits and thoughts of a whole people, — all these were circumstances sufficient to awaken the attention of thoughtful men to the fact that a new

1 Podmore, Life of Owen^ I, 40.

2 Slater, The Making of Modern England^ laS.

order of life had come into being, bringing with it new conditions and new problems such as were destined to make rough sailing for the ship of state in the years ahead.

For the source of England's wealth was likewise the source of her most troublesome problems and her darkest conditions, the factory system. In the early days of machinery, before the application of steam to manufacturing and when the power-loom was operated by the force of water, factories sprang up in the country districts wherever a stream afforded sufficient power to turn the wheels. A little later, as soon as it was demonstrated that the power-loom could be profitably run by steam, factories were transferred to towns, where more workers lived or could live and where goods could be marketed more readily and more cheaply. It was not long before these factory towns presented an appearance with which the world of to-day is only too familiar, — myriads of rickety tenement buildings, housing a vast and crowded population of operatives with their families, — acres of factories, most of them hastily constructed and badly ventilated, and thrusting into the sky a forest of chimneys from which there poured a never-ceasing cloud of smoke that blackened the country for miles around. The population in these industrial centers grew rapidly on its own account, but it was augmented from two classes outside, the rural cloth-workers of the old order who were being thrown out of employment because of the introduction of new machinery, and the small farmers who were forced to leave their farms in consequence of the movement in agriculture known as enclosures.* How different was this new army of workers from the old ! Instead of an independent people, living mostly in the country, owning their own cottages and tools, and tilling their own small farms or gardens, there grew up a vast aggregation of dependent city toilers, — men, women, and children, — tenanting rented houses, working in factories not their own, and operating machinery that required less and less skill and more and more merely monotonous "tending." The day of the wage-earner had come. The day of the exploiting captain of industry had come also. Sprung in most cases from the ranks of operatives, knowing little or nothing of what went on beyond the four walls of his factory, frequently illiterate, usually brutal and debased, the typical factory-owner of the first quarter or so of the nineteenth century was industrious and shrewd enough to accumulate a

^The old system of farming, described in the previous pages, was found to be wasteful and backward in the extreme. In the eighteenth century a few progressive landlords, like the Marquis of Rockingham, the Duke of Bedford, Lord Townshend, and even George III himself, began experimenting in new crops, new methods of rotation, drainage, etc. They soon demonstrated the great value of these improvements. But it was found that the new farming could not proceed without the overthrow of the old. Hence, by act of parliament or by coercive act of landlord, there went on from 1760 to 1843 a readjustment known as enclosures. The small parcels of disconnected open land and the " commons" were re-apportioned into larger groups of enclosed lands, held by fewer farmers under longer leases, or independently. The movement which, considered in its broad aspects, is accurately described by Arthur Young as "not merely beneficial to the individual" but "of the most extensive national advantage," {J Six Months Tour through the North of England, I, 258) was accompanied with great distress to hundreds of the small, unprogressive farmers, who were now compelled to become either dependent farm-laborers or to join the rising army of the proletariat in the factory towns.

fortune rapidly, whereby he could live in newlybuilt mansions furnished with all the tawdry accessories that money could buy. His position and his wealth gave him vast power, often exercised under the grossest forms of tyranny over the hordes of workers dependent upon him; so that he amply deserved the contemptuous nickname with which Carlyle dubbed him, — Plugson of Undershot, the modern buccaneer.^

The condition of the wage-earners operating under Plugson and his fellow masters has been the theme of novelists, prophets, reformers, and utopia-builders the world over. It would be difficult indeed to find in the annals of history a more dismal or distressing page than the one upon which is written the story of the early factory workers. The factories themselves, equipped with unprotected machinery and enclosing a damp over-heated atmosphere, were in the majority of cases wholly unfit for their swarming populations. They were of course unsanitary and uninspected, and the air in them was filled with floating particles of cotton "fluff.** Far the greater number of operatives were women and children, since adult male labor was not needed to tend the machines. Child-labor was not only better adapted to the needs of the work; it was cheaper. In the earlier period before the apprentice system was abandoned, pauper children were re-

1 The attitude of the mill-owner towards his operatives is well suggested in the remarks of a manufacturer who sold cloth to Francis Place, the famous Charing Cross tailor and radical reformer. "Damn their eyes," said he to Place, "what need you care about them? How could I sell you goods so cheap if I cared anything about them?" "I showed him the door," says Place, " and never purchased any of his goods afterwards." (Wallas, Life of Francis Place, 141.)

cruited from the workhouses and foundling hospitals of London and other large cities, and were literally sold into slavery to the mill-owners, whose brutal overseers were wont to treat them in ways too shocking to describe.^ Matters were scarcely improved when apprentice-children were withheld, or when conditions under which they were allowed by the magistrates to work were restricted, and "free" children were employed; for the reason that parents, in their ignorance and poverty, seemed glad enough to have the meager wages of the household eked out by the pittance which their children might earn. Probably the most vivid — one should perhaps say lurid — account of these early factory "hands" ever written is that by Frederkk Engels, life-long friend and co-worker of Karl Marx, in his book called The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 18/14. Describing child-labor, he refers to the parliamentary Factories' Inquiry Commission of 1833 in these words: "The report of the Central Commission relates that the manufacturers began to employ children rarely of five years, often of six, very often of seven, usually of eight to nine years; that the working-day often lasted fourteen to sixteen hours, exclusive of meals and intervals; that the manufacturers permitted overlookers to flog and maltreat children, and often took an active part in so doing them-