approval. It received that genuine form of flattery which consists in general imitation. It was

shortly afterwards indorsed by Parliament. A 1796 certain amount of pauperism, it must be allowed, was caused by the agricultural and manufacturing changes of the times. The peasantry were injured by inclosures, and by the decay of the domestic system. Workmen, accustomed to manufacture by hand, were, for the time at least, thrown out of employment by machines, or by the cheaper and more dependent labour of women and children, who were competent to perform the less laborious and skilful work required. But none the less the volume of pauperism was increased by the administration of the Poor Law; and the evils finally became so serious and manifest that reform was urgently required.

21. A crisis was reached when, in 1834, the Poor Law Amendment Act was passed.

The Commission, to whose Report the Amendment Act of 1834 was due, found cases not unusual, where the condition of a pauper was preferred 1834 to that of an independent labourer; and it was

possible that those, who received relief from the rates, might be more prosperous than those who bore the burden of their payment. The expenditure on poorrelief increased from some two millions of pounds in 1783 to twice that figure in 1803, and by 1818 it amounted to nearly eight millions of pounds for 1818 a population of eleven millions of people. During the period of strict administration, it had diminished from £819,000 in 1698 to £619,000 in 1750. Wages sank, for the gaps in them were filled by allowances. Population grew by legitimate or illegitimate means;

for relief was given in proportion to the numbers of a family. Independence was at a discount. The nominally dependent were in practice insolent, and even dictatorial. A witness before the Commission summed up the situation by remarking: "Poor is the diet of the pauper; poorer is the diet of the small ratepayer; poorest is the diet of the independent labourer." If the whole nation, or the vast majority, were not to become paupers, a complete change was necessary; and, accordingly, the Commission recommended, and the Legislature adopted,

those principles of stricter administration, which 1834 were embodied in the Act of 1834. The work

house test was re-imposed. Gilbert's Act had forbidden the guardians to send to the "house any but the "impotent." By the Act of 1796 refusal to enter it was not to be made a cause for withholding poor-relief. But the Act of 1834 distinctly forbade relief to able-bodied persons except in well-regulated workhouses. A Central Board was to be appointed to control the local authorities, to frame rules for their guidance, and to insist on their observance. The vigorous action of the three Commissioners, first selected for this purpose, roused reaction; and they incurred the penalty of unpopularity. But they altered the whole condition of affairs. They arrested the growth of what were justly called "enormous" evils. They averted a great calamity.

D.-INDUSTRIAL MOVEMENTS: TRADE UNIONS.

22. The Factory System stimulated, but did not create, Trade Unionism.

The rise of the factory, with its new and strange

developments, and the sudden, overwhelming flood of young labour, caused bewilderment and alarm to men accustomed to the old conditions. They tried to stop the torrent of apprentices. They attempted to resist the inroads made upon traditional rates of wages. They sometimes offered opposition to the new machinery. They often sought protection by combining in Trade Unions. In their "History of Trade Unionism,"* Mr. and Mrs. Webb find its "fundamental condition " not so much in the "introduction of machinery and the factory system" itself as in the accompanying, and preceding, "economic revolution." At that particular time indeed the economic change was felt more widely and more completely wrought; but at an earlier date it had been accomplished in some places and some trades. The essence of the change was this. "In all cases, Mr. and Mrs. Webb write, "in which Trade Unions arose, the great bulk of the workers had ceased to be independent producers, themselves controlling the processes, and owning the materials and the product of their labour, and had passed into the condition of lifelong wage-earners, possessing neither the instruments of production, nor the commodity in its finished state." The building of factories, and the use of costly, elaborate, machinery, hastened the process and extended its range; but "permanent combinations" of wage-earners, or trade unions, had arisen previously. In the West of England, for example, the "wealthy clothiers" supplied, and owned, the material, and employed at different stages of the manufacture different sets of workers, who had the implements, but not the capital or knowledge, necessary to conduct the industry. In Yorkshire, on

* P. 24.

the other hand, the small master-craftsman continued to buy his raw material and sell his finished goods; and in this district Unions did not arise until the factory came. But in the West of England they prevailed throughout the eighteenth century. In the same way, when the framework knitter, in the hosiery trade, and the Sheffield operative, in the cutlery manufacture, lost, as a class, the ownership of their frames and wheels, combinations made their appearance, and remained. Unionism, in fact, first arose, not in the distress of the end of the century, among unhappy workmen, suffering "intolerable oppression," but amid the comparative prosperity of its first fifty years with "journeymen, whose skill and Standard of Life had been for centuries encouraged, and protected, by legal and customary regulations," and by the "limitation of their numbers."

23. The Unions first appealed, in vain, to the old law.

In the early history of the movement an appeal was made to the law and not against it. The skilled craftsman, threatened by the flood of young pauper labour, sought protection in the Act of Elizabeth, which limited the quantity, and fixed the conditions, of apprenticeship. The worker in those textile trades, which had grown up since, and were exempt from such provisions, tried to secure that legal ordering of wages, which, taken from clauses of the Statute of Apprentices, had been extended to a wider area. Petitions with these objects were sent to Parliament, and until the middle of the eighteenth century met with treatment which was not unfavourable. The attitude of the House of Commons changed, less in consequence of any deliberate adoption of a fresh

political or economic theory, than under the resistless influence of the new facts brought forward by the new employers. The medieval customs were impossible, they urged, if the growing export trade of the country was to be maintained; for the unrestricted use of the improved machinery, and the free employment of cheap, abundant labour, were conditions essential to the progress of those rising manufactures, by which the export trade was swelled. New legislation on the matter was accordingly refused; and the attempt of the workmen to enforce, by law, statutes disused, but not annulled, was met by their repeal. In 1813 the power

of the justices to fix the rates of wages dis- 1813 appeared, and, a little later, the apprenticeship clauses of the Elizabethan Statute shared the same fate.

24. The law was not hostile to them until a general Combination Act was passed.

Trade Unions, then, were not at the outset hostile to the law; but, on the contrary, sought, unavailingly, its aid. Nor was the law at first avowedly hostile to them. Some combinations were permitted; others met with rare interference. If they sought merely to enforce the existing law-to secure a regulation of wages by authority, or to bring to account masters, who violated the Statute of Apprentices-they were not, it seems, treated as illegal. If, on the other hand, they tried to settle for themselves the conditions of employment, they came into conflict, not only with the common law forbidding "restraint of trade," as it was soon to be interpreted, but also with express provisions of the statute law. But it was not until the close

1799, 1800

of the century, in 1799 and 1800, that a general Combination Act declared that all combinations.