The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1, Thomas Babington Macaulay [ebook pc reader txt] 📗

were paid. At

present a district where a labouring man earns only seven

shillings a week is thought to be in a state shocking to

humanity. The average is very much higher; and in prosperous

counties, the weekly wages of husbandmen amount to twelve,

fourteen, and even sixteen shillings. The remuneration of workmen

employed in manufactures has always been higher than that of the

tillers of the soil. In the year 1680, a member of the House of

Commons remarked that the high wages paid in this country made it

impossible for our textures to maintain a competition with the

produce of the Indian looms. An English mechanic, he said,

instead of slaving like a native of Bengal for a piece of copper,

exacted a shilling a day.198 Other evidence is extant, which

proves that a shilling a day was the pay to which the English

manufacturer then thought himself entitled, but that he was often

forced to work for less. The common people of that age were not

in the habit of meeting for public discussion, of haranguing, or

of petitioning Parliament. No newspaper pleaded their cause. It

was in rude rhyme that their love and hatred, their exultation

and their distress, found utterance. A great part of their

history is to be learned only from their ballads. One of the most

remarkable of the popular lays chaunted about the streets of

Norwich and Leeds in the time of Charles the Second may still be

read on the original broadside. It is the vehement and bitter cry

of labour against capital. It describes the good old times when

every artisan employed in the woollen manufacture lived as well

as a farmer. But those times were past. Sixpence a day was now

all that could be earned by hard labour at the loom. If the poor

complained that they could not live on such a pittance, they were

told that they were free to take it or leave it. For so miserable

a recompense were the producers of wealth compelled to toil

rising early and lying down late, while the master clothier,

eating, sleeping, and idling, became rich by their exertions. A

shilling a day, the poet declares, is what the weaver would have

if justice were done.199 We may therefore conclude that, in the

generation which preceded the Revolution, a workman employed in

the great staple manufacture of England thought himself fairly

paid if he gained six shillings a week.


It may here be noticed that the practice of setting children

prematurely to work, a practice which the state, the legitimate

protector of those who cannot protect themselves, has, in our

time, wisely and humanely interdicted, prevailed in the

seventeenth century to an extent which, when compared with the

extent of the manufacturing system, seems almost incredible. At

Norwich, the chief seat of the clothing trade, a little creature

of six years old was thought fit for labour. Several writers of

that time, and among them some who were considered as eminently

benevolent, mention, with exultation, the fact that, in that

single city, boys and girls of very tender age created wealth

exceeding what was necessary for their own subsistence by twelve

thousand pounds a year.200 The more carefully we examine the

history of the past, the more reason shall we find to dissent

from those who imagine that our age has been fruitful of new

social evils. The truth is that the evils are, with scarcely an

exception, old. That which is new is the intelligence which

discerns and the humanity which remedies them.


When we pass from the weavers of cloth to a different class of

artisans, our enquiries will still lead us to nearly the same

conclusions. During several generations, the Commissioners of

Greenwich Hospital have kept a register of the wages paid to

different classes of workmen who have been employed in the

repairs of the building. From this valuable record it appears

that, in the course of a hundred and twenty years, the daily

earnings of the bricklayer have risen from half a crown to four

and tenpence, those of the mason from half a crown to five and

threepence, those of the carpenter from half a crown to five and

fivepence, and those of the plumber from three shillings to five

and sixpence.


It seems clear, therefore, that the wages of labour, estimated in

money, were, in 1685, not more than half of what they now are;

and there were few articles important to the working man of which

the price was not, in 1685, more than half of what it now is.

Beer was undoubtedly much cheaper in that age than at present.

Meat was also cheaper, but was still so dear that hundreds of

thousands of families scarcely knew the taste of it.201 In the

cost of wheat there has been very little change. The average

price of the quarter, during the last twelve years of Charles the

Second, was fifty shillings. Bread, therefore, such as is now

given to the inmates of a workhouse, was then seldom seen, even

on the trencher of a yeoman or of a shopkeeper. The great

majority of the nation lived almost entirely on rye, barley, and

oats.


The produce of tropical countries, the produce of the mines, the

produce of machinery, was positively dearer than at present.

Among the commodities for which the labourer would have had to

pay higher in 1685 than his posterity now pay were sugar, salt,

coals, candles, soap, shoes, stockings, and generally all

articles of clothing and all articles of bedding. It may be

added, that the old coats and blankets would have been, not only

more costly, but less serviceable than the modern fabrics.


It must be remembered that those labourers who were able to

maintain themselves and their families by means of wages were not

the most necessitous members of the community. Beneath them lay a

large class which could not subsist without some aid from the

parish. There can hardly be a more important test of the

condition of the common people than the ratio which this class

bears to the whole society. At present, the men, women, and

children who receive relief appear from the official returns to

be, in bad years, one tenth of the inhabitants of England, and,

in good years, one thirteenth. Gregory King estimated them in his

time at about a fourth; and this estimate, which all our respect

for his authority will scarcely prevent us from calling

extravagant, was pronounced by Davenant eminently judicious.


We are not quite without the means of forming an estimate for

ourselves. The poor rate was undoubtedly the heaviest tax borne

by our ancestors in those days. It was computed, in the reign of

Charles the Second, at near seven hundred thousand pounds a year,

much more than the produce either of the excise or of the

customs, and little less than half the entire revenue of the

crown. The poor rate went on increasing rapidly, and appears to

have risen in a short time to between eight and nine hundred

thousand a year, that is to say, to one sixth of what it now is.

The population was then less than a third of what it now is. The

minimum of wages, estimated in money, was half of what it now is;

and we can therefore hardly suppose that the average allowance

made to a pauper can have been more than half of what it now is.

It seems to follow that the proportion of the English people

which received parochial relief then must have been larger than

the proportion which receives relief now. It is good to speak on

such questions with diffidence: but it has certainly never yet

been proved that pauperism was a less heavy burden or a less

serious social evil during the last quarter of the seventeenth

century than it is in our own time.202


In one respect it must be admitted that the progress of

civilization has diminished the physical comforts of a portion of

the poorest class. It has already been mentioned that, before the

Revolution, many thousands of square miles, now enclosed and

cultivated, were marsh, forest, and heath. Of this wild land much

was, by law, common, and much of what was not common by law was

worth so little that the proprietors suffered it to be common in

fact. In such a tract, squatters and trespassers were tolerated

to an extent now unknown. The peasant who dwelt there could, at

little or no charge, procure occasionally some palatable addition

to his hard fare, and provide himself with fuel for the winter.

He kept a flock of geese on what is now an orchard rich with

apple blossoms. He snared wild fowl on the fell which has long

since been drained and divided into corn-fields and turnip

fields. He cut turf among the furze bushes on the moor which is

now a meadow bright with clover and renowned for butter and

cheese. The progress of agriculture and the increase of

population necessarily deprived him of these privileges. But

against this disadvantage a long list of advantages is to be set

off. Of the blessings which civilisation and philosophy bring

with them a large proportion is common to all ranks, and would,

if withdrawn, be missed as painfully by the labourer as by the

peer. The market-place which the rustic can now reach with his

cart in an hour was, a hundred and sixty years ago, a day's

journey from him. The street which now affords to the artisan,

during the whole night, a secure, a convenient, and a brilliantly

lighted walk was, a hundred and sixty years ago, so dark after

sunset that he would not have been able to see his hand, so ill

paved that he would have run constant risk of breaking his neck,

and so ill watched that he would have been in imminent danger of

being knocked down and plundered of his small earnings. Every

bricklayer who falls from a scaffold, every sweeper of a crossing

who is run over by a carriage, may now have his wounds dressed

and his limbs set with a skill such as, a hundred and sixty years

ago, all the wealth of a great lord like Ormond, or of a merchant

prince like Clayton, could not have purchased. Some frightful

diseases have been extirpated by science; and some have been

banished by police. The term of human life has been lengthened

over the whole kingdom, and especially in the towns. The year

1685 was not accounted sickly; yet in the year 1685 more than one

in twenty-three of the inhabitants of the capital died.203 At

present only one inhabitant of the capital in forty dies

annually. The difference in salubrity between the London of the

nineteenth century and the London of the seventeenth century is

very far greater than the