The Effects of Civilisation on the People in European States

Front matter

THE

EFFECTS OF CIVILISATION ON THE PEOPLE

IN

Original Preface

ORIGINAL PREFACE.

It may appear to many, that a man who has been enployed during his whole life in the study and practice of medicine, cannot be a fit person to write on a subject of a political nature. To such people the following considerations are submitted:—

That the Essay treats on the Effects of Civilisation on the mass of the people.

That the principal effect of civilisation is the reduction of the mass of the people in civilised societies to their present condition.

Of this condition—i. e., the mariner in which the people live—who has more opportunities of acquiring the knowledge, than a physician? He is admitted into the dwellings of all ranks of people, and into the innermost parts of them; he sees them by their fireside, at their tables, and in their beds; he sees them at work, and at their recreations; he sees them in health, in sickness, and in the article of death; he is frequently made acquainted with their hopes and their fears, their successes and their disappointments, as these have often a relation to their diseases; and, possessing their confidence, they also frequently unbosom themselves to him on matters not connected with the state of their healths. The physician, therefore, is put in possession of more facts with respect to the condition of the people than any other person; and it is only from the collection of such facts that we can arrive at the knowledge of the causes of them—for the investigation of which, his education peculiarly fits him.

For all these reasons, it seems a physician is the most proper person to treat on the subject of the following discourse.

Tavistock, April 30, 1805.

Section I

THE

EFFECTS OF CIVILISATION

ON THE

MASS OF THE PEOPLE.

SECTION I.

DEFINITION OF CIVILISATION.

We understand by civilisation that manner of living in societies of men, which is opposite to that of those who are called savages; such as are the natives of North America, &c.

It consists in the study and knowledge of the sciences, and in the production and enjoyment of the conveniences, elegancies, and luxuries of life.

It does not seem to arise from any particular constitution of governments, or to be attributable to the administration of them, but to flow from the natural propensities of mankind.

Section II

SECTION II.

DIVISION OF THE PEOPLE INTO TWO ORDERS.

If a native of North America were to come to some European nation, he would probably, after having informed himself of the different states and conditions of the people in this society, be most struck with the great profusion and splendour of some among them, and the penury and obscurity of all the others; and, in this, it would appear to him, that this civilised people differed most from those of his own country, where the condition of all is the same. He would naturally, therefore, divide the people, whose situation he had so observed, into two orders, viz. the rich and the poor. We shall make the same division; and, as the different conditions of the people are among the greatest effects of civilisation, shall inquire into the situation of each of these orders separately.

We often hear of inquiries into the state of nations being made in legislative assemblies; but such inquiries are of a very confined nature. If made by a minister of state, nothing is understood further than the financial state of a kingdom, the supplies and expenditure: if by a secretary at War, the state of the army is the object of inquiry: if by a merchant, the state of trade and commerce. But it seems that there is a subject of much more importance than any of these to a nation, that never enters into the thoughts of any one to make inquiries about; namely, the state and condition of the great mass of the people: how they are fed; how they are clothed; what kind of houses they live in; how they are supplied with fuel; how they are instructed; in short, what advantages, corporeal, mental, and even spiritual, they enjoy or are deprived of. To know these particulars with regard to the poor, that is, the great mass of the people, is truly to know the state of a nation.

The people in a civilised state may be divided into many different orders; but, for the purpose of investigating the manner in which they enjoy or are deprived of the requisites to support the health of their bodies and minds, they need only be divided into two classes, viz., the rich and the poor, as we have before done: for, people in the same circumstances as to property enjoy the same advantages in those respects, whether the means of placing them in those circumstances are derived from landed estates, benefices of the church, the practice of the law, or any other profession or trade.

Section III

SECTION III.

THAT THE POOR ARE NOT SUFFICIENTLY SUPPLIED WITH THE NECESSARIES OF LIFE.

We will begin with the poor, they being by far the greater number of the people in most civilised countries; and, therefore, whatever regards them should be deemed of the greater importance.

And, first, as to their food. The food of man is of a mixed nature, partly animal, partly vegetable. A certain proportion of the former is necessary to the health, strength, and growth of the human species, and without it those things cannot be obtained. The appetites and the organs he is furnished with by nature plainly indicate this.

It would be difficult to discover whether the poor have a sufficiency of animal and vegetable food, by any other method than by considering the quantity of each sort which their nature requires, and their means of obtaining that quantity; or, in other words, what their earnings are, and what quantity of food such earnings could procure.

The number of husbandmen in most states is greater probably than that of any class of artificers. To begin, therefore, with them. The average wages of a labourer appear to have been about eight shillings a-week, previous to the few late years, more or less, according to the price of provisions in different nations. We will suppose that this labourer has a wife and three children. The wife, if she keeps the house clean, free from vermin, washes, makes and mends the husband's and children's clothes, dresses their victuals, &c., will not, or ought not to have any time to add anything to the earnings of the husband. But we will suppose that she does, to the amount of two shillings per week; which makes their income ten shillings a-week.

Whether ten shillings a-week will furnish a proper quantity of flesh-meat, bread, flour, milk, butter, cheese, and clothes, bedding, fuel, soap, candles, salt, &c., I will leave to the reader to form his own conjectures on; for calculations made in this matter must be in a great measure arbitrary, and of course unsatisfactory. I shall only observe, that Judge Hale, above a century ago, after having made a more diligent inquiry than any body else seems to have done, judged ten shillings a-week as little as a family could be supported on in England at that time, at the price things then were.

But I think a general argument may be ad , that will throw great light on this matter, and but too clearly show that that sum is inadequate, and that it was so at the time mentioned; and that the poor are not in fact furnished with the requisite quantity of the necessaries of life. This argument is of the presumptive kind, but that is the only sort the nature of the subject will admit of.

If we consider the economy of nature, with regard to animal and vegetable life, we may observe that, in order, probably, to keep up the different species of living creatures and plants, the seed produced of both kinds is very abundant; for instance, the spawn of a carp or a salmon shall amount to eighty or a hundred thousand; insomuch that any one species of fish would in a few ages fill the ocean, if all that were brought into life were brought to maturity. In the same manner, the offspring of any one species of land animal would fill, some in a longer, others in a shorter time, the whole earth, if proper and sufficient sustenance were provided for them. The same may be said of any vegetable, if the ground were prepared for the reception of its seed, and the other plants destroyed to make room for it. To illustrate this: if the number of rabbits put into a warren to stock it, be less than the quantity which the ground will maintain, they will increase till they rise to the utmost number that it will maintain; but if the number which it at first was stocked with be greater than it will carry, they will gradually sink down to that number. Again, if you plant a piece of ground with young trees much thicker than they ought to be, so many will die away after some years, that they will be reduced to that number which ought in the first instance to have been planted; the stronger plants, after a long contest, destroying the weaker. So that the increase in the number of animals of any particular species does not depend so much on the number of their young brought into existence, as on the degree of the support and sustenance they receive, after being brought into life, to preserve them and bring them to maturity. Hence, we certainly conclude, if the number of individuals of any species of animals do not increase in proportion to the number brought into life, that it is owing to the offspring of them not being properly sustained.

These facts obtain, with regard to the human race, in as full a manner as in the brute species, or in the class of vegetables.

We find that the inhabitants in few of the states of Europe have doubled in five hundred years. Hence there is a presumption that the people have not been well fed, or have wanted some other thing necessary to their subsistence; for, where their subsistence is better, we see they actually increase much the faster.

In America, the land is not engrossed by a few, in the manner it is in Europe. It is easy there for a man to procure ground sufficient to produce what nature requires for the preservation and health of his offspring: the consequence is, that the inhabitants increase much faster than they do in Europe; some states doubling every fourteen years, others every twenty years. This happy effect may in part be owing to their being exempted from the many destructive employments to which most Europeans are subjected; but, whichever of those ways it be, it is still to be ascribed to their not being arrived at the state of extreme civilisation.

We do not suppose that even this, the greatest increase that happens in America, is the greatest possible; or that it is so great as would actually be, if the people and their offspring were well supplied with everything nature requires, since in America, on account of the great labour in clearing the ground for cultivation, the quantity tilled by the first planters may frequently be too scanty. But if any European state, consisting of ten millions, were to increase in the proportion they do in America, viz., to double in twenty years, they would increase ten millions in every twenty years; that is, five hundred thousand a-year. Hence, therefore, in such a case, this number fall a sacrifice every year to the want of proper or sufficient food and other necessaries, the unwholesomeness of their employments, or to some other cause equally attributable to extreme civilisation. A sad reflection this! It is nevertheless strictly true, or very near the truth: a loss greater than the most destructive wars have ever occasioned.

Another fact strengthens this argument. When the Equitable Insurance Office, at Blackfriars Bridge, was first established, the premiums taken were according to a ratio proposed by Dr. Price, who formed it from the accounts of the annual deaths, taken from the bills of mortality kept in different cities of Europe. These deaths were about one in twenty-two, annually, of all the people, taken indiscriminately. Proceeding thus, the profits of the Society were so great, that in a few years they realised their enormous capital; upon which, their premiums were lowered. Their profits being still very great, they returned, in a very honourable manner, part of the premiums that had been received from the insured, which they continue to do, at certain periods, with still greater liberality. The Society, notwithstanding, continued to increase greatly in riches. The cause of this phenomenon, therefore, was a matter of inquiry; on which it was found that they had adapted their premiums to the deaths of the rich and poor taken together; and it soon occurred that none but the rich were insured. Their extraordinary profit, therefore, must arise from the circumstance of their being fewer deaths annually among the rich than among the poor, in proportion to the numbers of both,

It is not possible to calculate what this great disproportion is between the deaths of the rich and the poor, as that cannot be done without the knowledge of the exact profits of the Company; but it seems probable that the deaths of the poor are to those of the rich as two to one, in proportion to the numbers of each.

This greater mortality among the poor can only be owing to the difference in the manner in which they are supplied with the necessaries of life.

I will add one other relation of a fact, from which the inference is obvious.

There are, at the cotton-mills belonging to Mr. Dale, of Lanark, in Scotland, three thousand chil

these children are said to be treated in a proper manner, in most respects; the consequence is, that during a term of twelve years, viz., from 1785 to 1797, only fourteen have died.

This mortality is chiefly observable among children, of whom more than one half die before they are two years and a half old. Children, as well as the young of all animals, bear want and hardships worse than adult persons, and full-grown brute animals. Infants, though their deaths be really occasioned by the above-mentioned causes, have nearly the same symptoms that occur in many chronic diseases; to which their deaths are frequently attributed.

The diseases which are the chief agents in this great mortality among infants, are fevers and the disorders of the stomach and bowels. The latter are so frequent among infants, that physicians, when called to them, almost always consider these as the seat of the complaint. The weaknesses or disorder of the bowels seem chiefly to be occasioned by the poor, watery, meagre, vegetable diet of the children and of their mothers. The latter, from the use of this diet, have their milk poor, and not sufficiently animalised. To produce good milk, the woman should be well fed, with a full proportion of animal food; perhaps some quantity of good beer; live in good houses; good air; be employed in wholesome and pleasant exercises; and void of care. The children, after they are weaned, should have a sufficiency of well-prepared vegetable and animal food, such as new milk, and broths of fresh meat: for want of these, the state of their bowels is induced, which proves so destructive to our race. With regard to the fevers of children, there are many of them generated by the circumstances of their condition; almost all of them are exasperated by it. It has frequently happened to me, and to all other physicians, that, after being called to a child of a man of fortune, ill of this disease, whom I have found in a large lofty room, well ventilated, clean, and sweet; bed soft, undisturbed by noise, anxiously attended by people relieving each other; furnished with everything the cellars, the kitchen, the garden, the druggist, can furnish; in short, everything the four quarters of the world can supply: after, I say, being with such a patient, we are frequently entreated to visit the child or children of a poor man, in the same illness; several of them generally lying in the same bed; heated by and heating each other, in a small room, corrupted by the exhalations of the whole family; disturbed by one another's cries; their wakefulness and restlessness, the effects of the disorder, increased by the vermin and hard beds, covered by filthy clothes; having nothing proper to use from the cellar, the kitchen, the garden, or apothecary's shop; no attendants but the poor mother, worn out by watchings, anxiety, &c.; the father from home, obliged to leave it to get their daily bread. That these things happen unavoidably in almost all cases, in poor families, all medical people must bear testimony; and also to the ill effects of them on the sufferers—I have said unavoidably, which is true; for, though single instances, by charitable assistance, may in some things be relieved, it is impossible that in general the poor can be better supplied; unless you alter the condition of the whole, by giving them good houses, containing more and better rooms; better furniture, better linen, better supplies—in short, making their condition nearer to the first described; that is, wholly altering the condition of that whole order of people.

It is remarkable, that poor living does not lessen the fertility of women, though it deprives them of the means of bringing up their children. Adam Smith says, that it is not uncommon, in the Highlands of Scotland, for a woman to bear twenty children, and not to rear one of them. He adds, that officers of great experience have assured him, that, so far from recruiting their regiment, they have never been able to supply it with fifes and drums, from all the soldiers' children that were born in it.

This slow increase of the people may be supposed by some to be not wholly attributable to the difficulties attending the rearing of the children of the poor, and consequent mortality; and that it might be in part owing to these difficulties being foreseen and dreaded, by the more prudent part of the poor; and their being, from that consideration, prevented from marrying. This, no doubt, may happen sometimes; but prudence is not the virtue of the youthful, especially when opposed by a passion the strongest and most difficult to be checked that human nature is subject to. We are not warranted by any direct facts to ascribe much to this cause. When the masters of sheep-flocks are short of keep, from backward springs, poor land, or other causes; when the milk of the ewes is in small quantities, and a great loss of lambs follows; do they impute the slow increase of their flock to the ewes not taking the ram? The other cause of the slow increase of the people is more obvious. We see half of the children born, die before they are two years and a half old; and a very great part of the remainder drop off before they are seven. We have, therefore, no occasion to look for other causes. The Earl of Lauderdale, in a very ingenious discourse, lately published, on Wealth, quotes a passage from a letter of the Marquis of 2:

"On a soin de les marier d'aussi bonne heure que les grands seigneurs, le pays n'en est pas plus peuplé, car presque tons les enfans meurent: les femmes n'y ont presque pas de lait."

But if three-fourths or two-thirds of this deficiency in the increase of the people be chargeable on the mortality complained of, we have still enough to lament. And it may be added, that if this forbearance of the poor, in the indulgence of their strongest desires, actually takes place, it strongly evinces the reality and magnitude of the evils they see around them.

What renders this matter still more grievous is, that there are many more sufferers than those who die, from the same causes: many who have struggled with the difficulties, and escaped with their lives, have suffered greatly in the conflict, and continue ever after to suffer, from the injury their constitution received. As a proof of this, what rickety, squalid, dwarfed, distorted objects, do we see in the manufacturing towns of Europe! This will further appear from the consideration of the employments of the poor.

Section IV

SECTION IV.

THE EMPLOYMENTS OF THE POOR INJURIOUS TO HEALTH.

The employments of manufacturers are all injurious to the health, of the body, and the improvement of the mind. These pernicious effects arise from—

1st. The sedentary nature of them, by which the necessary action and exercise of the body are prevented.

2dly. From the forced and unnatural postures of the body required in many trades, by which the functions of the body necessary to life and health are impeded.

3dly. From these being carried on in confined, unwholesome atmospheres, rendered nauseous and putrid from the filth of the rooms, and from the exhalations of their own bodies; as well as from the effluvia of the substances they work on, as oils, sizes, mercury, lead, paint; damps and noxious air in mines, &c., all add hurtful qualities to the air. Under the same head may be placed the excessive heat in glass-houses, smelting-houses, foundries, &c.

From one or other of these disadvantages there is scarcely any trade exempt, and hardly any individual of any trade that is not more or less affected by them. The sedentary kind appears to be least prejudicial; but what a number of pale, languid, dropsical objects there are among women who make bone-lace, those are witnesses to, who have seen the many thousands of such in those places where it is manufactured.

The infinite number of trades into which these noxious employments branch out, may be seen in the back streets of great cities and manufacturing towns, as also may the many wretched objects there produced by them.

This general account will render it evident, to persons of reflection, what great devastations are made by the manufactures on the human species; it is therefore needless to enumerate the particular diseases they occasion. I cannot help, however, observing, that there is a great multiplicity of trades in which mercury is made use of: in some of these the workmen's lives are measured with great exactness; after suffering excruciating torments, they die, with great punctuality, in a year and a half.

Nor can I forget mentioning the poor chimney-boy, who, after suffering inconceivable hardships, dies frequently, at length, of a disease attended with the most acute of all pains—the cancer.

Section V

SECTION V.

THEIR MINDS UNCULTIVATED.

However ill-furnished the poor are in most civilised countries, in respect to sustenance, clothing, &c., they are still more neglected with regard to their minds; they indeed are excluded from all kind of improvement of their mental faculties. It is even by many supposed that all such knowledge would be prejudical to them; that is, as they are to be worked as irrational animals, there is no reason why their rational faculties should be cultivated. And, indeed, if this their situation were necessarily such, and were unavoidable, and if it were not such through our injustice and cruelty to them, our fellow-creatures, and were such as could admit of no alteration or amendment, it would in that case, perhaps, be better that they should be brought up in ignorance, as they are; since they would, by any degree of knowledge, see more clearly, and feel more acutely, what they suffer, and the want of the comforts and happiness of which they are deprived. If they remain for ever the mere carriers of wood and water, they cannot certainly be kept too ignorant. But these poor wretches, I think, have a right, before they give up all the advantages of rational creatures, to expect a better reason for it, than that those things always were so. They have a right to expect that so great a difference in their lot and condition should not be made, unless indicated by nature itself, and made evident by its having refused them the faculties and powers for the acquisition of knowledge.

There are two methods of acquiring knowledge: the one, by thinking or meditation—that is, by the operations of our own minds within themselves; the other, by informing ourselves of the knowledge already acquired by others, which is done by books or living masters. Both of these methods the commonalty are debarred from. One should have thought the former might have been allowed them: that is not, however, the case; for to do that requires leisure, which is refused the poor man. Leisure, in a poor man, is thought quite a different thing from what it is to a rich man, and goes by a different name. In the poor, it is called idleness, the cause of all mischief. If it is so, why is it so? Because they have been, by this cruel system, deprived of opportunities of acquiring such rudiments as would qualify them for further attainments; that is to say, they are not to have leisure, because they have never had any to fit them to improve by such leisure. Most part of the manufacturing trades just occupy the mind so as to exclude all other ideas on which it might operate.

In the progress of the division of labour, the employment "of the far greater part of those live by labour—that is, the great body of the people—comes to be confined to a very few simple operations; frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention, in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for human nature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and, consequently, of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of life.

"It is otherwise in the barbarous societies, as they are called, of hunters, shepherds, or even of husbandmen in that rude state of husbandry which precedes the improvement of manufactures and the extension of foreign commerce. In such societies the varied occupations of every man oblige every man to exert his capacity, and to invent expedients for removing difficulties which are continually occurring. Invention is kept alive, and the mind is not suffered to fall into that drowsy stupidity which, in a civilised society, seems to benumb the understanding of almost all the inferior ranks of the people."—Adam Smith, vol. iii., p. 183.

Section VI

SECTION VI.

THEIR MORAL AND SPIRITUAL INSTRUCTION NEGLECTED.

We have seen how manufactures tend to the utter exclusion of all rational improvement of the mind. We may further observe, that they generally tend to the prevention of moral and spiritual improvement. To speak, first, as to the latter; though, perhaps, it might be deemed presumptuous in me to say anything on that subject.

The proof of the Christian system is founded on historical facts; from thence are drawn the principal motives of credibility, as they are called. We give credit to facts recorded in history, when they are related by an historian of credit; when other historians agree with him; and from the concurrence of other circumstances. But what idea has a totally ignorant man of the weight of the concurrence of historians, or the coincidence of facts? or what knowledge of history at all? Certainly none. Hence, being deprived of the belief, he of course is deprived of all the other advantages of religion.

With respect to morals: Civilisation has a two-fold effect on the morals of the people; first, by depriving them of their original share of things, and reducing them to a state of both comparative and absolute poverty, it subjects them to more and much stronger temptations. Secondly, by their extreme ignorance, and little sense of religion in consequence of it, they are deprived of the strongest motives to resist them. Thus, all their temptations rendered stronger, their powers of resistance weaker, they could not be expected to be different from what we find them.

Section VII

SECTION VII.

CONDITION OF THE POOR NOT HAPPY.

Authors and preachers frequently inculcate to the poor, in their writings and sermons, contentment and submission to the dispensations of Providence—such they pretend their hardships and depressed state to be; thus attributing the works of man to the beneficent Creator. They assert that the measure of happiness is much the same in all conditions, and nearly equal. Not to mention that such doctrine as this would suit every kind of oppression and tyranny, I believe it contrary to fact, and that from considerations drawn from the constitution of the human frame. I shall say nothing as to the destitute condition of their minds, which must deprive them of every consolation from thence. The sensations and feelings of their bodies must subject them to correspondent ones of the mind, and rob them of such satisfaction as it is asserted they do enjoy.

Physicans know that there is a great degree of sympathy existing between the body and the mind; that they mutually affect each other; that the stomach is the principal medium of their reciprocal feelings; that when the sensations of this organ are comfortable, the mind is in an easy and pleasant state. A poor watery vegetable diet has the effect of exciting contrary feelings in the stomach, which are communicated to the mind: hence, it is depressed and anxious; hence, poor men generally have recourse to tobacco, which, being of a narcotic nature, deadens the sensations, and relieves the uneasiness both of the stomach, and of the mind depending on it; for which reason we see they would rather go without their food than their tobacco. Numbers of them fly to the use of spirituous liquors, which is the remedy precisely adapted to their case; and it is to be wondered at that drunkenness is not more frequent among them than it is. But besides the uneasiness occasioned by those sensations, can they see with indifference their offspring perishing for the want of such things as they perceive around them, but which they cannot reach? Can they see without pain the luxurious abundance of the rich, and compare it with their own pinching poverty? To write or preach in this manner is adding insult to oppression.